The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India 9780195668018, 0195668014

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

Th^JPolitics of Cultural Mobilization in India

Edited by John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt, and Vernon Hewitt

OXPORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

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ï &o. y $ OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

YMCA Library Building, Ja i Singh Road, New D elhi 11 0 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University o f Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Säo Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark o f Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India By Oxford University Press. New Delhi © Oxford University Press 2004 The moral rights o f the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing o f Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law. or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope o f the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquiror ISBN 0 19 566801 4 Typeset by Innovative Processors Printed in India at Sai Printopack Pvt. Ltd.. New Delhi 1100 20 Published by Manzar Khan. Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building. Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 1 10 001

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Contents Contributors De-constructing the Nation: Politics and Cultural Mobilization in India John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt, and Vernon Hewitt PART ONE W a ys o f L o o k in g : P o l it ic s , C u l t u r e , a n d M o b il iz a t io n in I n d ia

1.

Politics as Permanent Performance: The Production o f Political Authority in the Locality Thomas Blom Hansen

2.

Fire in the Belly: The Mobilization o f the Ganapati Festival in Maharashtra Ram inder Kaur

3.

Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability: From Party Organization to Local Practices o f Politics Glyn Williams

PART TWO T h e M ec h a n ic s o f C u ltu ra l M o b il iz a t io n

4 . The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s 'Tradition o f Selfless Service’ Gwilym Beckerlegge 5. ‘Hindutva’ as a Rural Planning Paradigm in Post-Earthquake Gujarat Edward Simpson

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6. Heroes for our Times: Assam’s Lachit, India’s Missile Man Jayeeta Sharma

^PART

166

TH REE

T h e S t a t e ( s ) a n d C u l t u r a l M o b iliz a t io n

195

7. From Indian Territory to Hindu Bhoomi: The Ethnicization of Nation-State Mapping in India Christophe Jaffrelot

197

8. The Continuing Struggle for India’s Jharkhand: Democracy, Decentralization, and the Politics of Names and Numbers Stuart Corbridge

216

9. The Turn Away from Cultural Mobilization in Contemporary Tamil Nadu Andrew Wyatt

234

Index

257

Contributors Gwilym Beckerlegge is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies and currendy Head o f the Department o f Religious Studies at The Open University, UK. Recent publications include The Ramakrishna Math an d Mission: The Making o f a Modern Hindu Movement (2000), and he has a monograph forthcoming on seva in the Ramakrishna Math and Mission.

Stuart Corbridge has worked in eastern India for about twenty five years. With Sanjay Kumar and Sarah Jewitt, he has recently published Jharkhand: Environment, Development, Ethnicity (2004). Seeing the State: Governance and Govemmentality in Rural India is forthcoming, and is being written with Manoj Srivastava, Rene Veron, and Glyn Williams.

Thomas B. Hansen is a Professor o f Political Anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology, University o f Edinburgh. He has published two books on Hindu nationalism, violence and identities in Bombay and western India: The Saffron Wave (1999), and Wages o f Violence (2001). He is currendy doing research on religion, politics, and ideas o f race among Indians in South Africa.

Vernon Hewitt is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of BristoL He has published widely on the topic o f Kashmir and he is also the author o f The New International Politics o f South Asia (1997). He has a longstanding interest in the idea o f empire. C hristophe Jaffrelot is Director o f CERI in Paris and a senior research fellow at the French National Centre o f Scientific Research fCNRSj. He teaches South Asian Politics at Sciences Po. His most recent publications are India’s Silent Revolution. The Rise o f the low er Castes

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Contributors

in North Indian Politics (2003) and, as editor, A History o f Pakistan and its Origins (2002). Raminder Kaur is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University o f Sussex. She is author o f Performative Politics and Cultures o f Hinduism: Public Uses o f Religion in Western India (2003), co-editor o f Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics (1999), and co-author o f the forthcoming Liquid Notions: Critical Reflections on Diaspora and Hybridity. Jayeeta Sharma is a historian o f South Asia and the British Empire who took her first degrees from Guwahati and Delhi. Subsequently she completed her Ph.D., ‘The Making o f ‘Modern’ Assam: 1826-1935* from the University of Cambridge. She is now an Assistant Professor in Social and Cultural History at Carnegie Mellon University and is working on a book about the connections between commodity capitalism, print culture, and local identity discourses. Edw ard Sim pson holds a Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at the London School o f Economics and Political Science. His current research explores the political and social aspects o f reconstruction following the ‘Gujarat Earthquake’ of 2001. His previous research in the same region focused on seafaring, migration, and politics among Muslims. Glyn Williams is a Lecturer in Geography at King’s College London. His research has focused on issues o f rural politics and development in eastern India, and he is currently completing a book (with Stuart Corbridge, Rene Veron, and Manoj Srivastava), Seeing the State: how poor people experience government and democracy in India. Andrew Wyatt is a Lecturer in Politics at the University o f Bristol. He has written a number of articles and book chapters on electoral politics and democracy in India. He is currently working on party system change in Tamil Nadu. John Zavos is a Lecturer in South Asian Studies at the University of Manchester. His research interests include religion and politics in South Asia and the South Asian disapora, with a particular emphasis on Hindu nationalism in its variant forms. He is the author of Emergence o f Hindu Nationalism in India (2000).

De-constructing the Nation: Politics and Cultural Mobilization in India 1 John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt, and Vernon Hewitt

I d e n t if y in g T

r e n d s in

I n d ia

In the post-Independence period, issues o f culture and identity have always presented themselves as salient features o f Indian politics, however narrowly defined. This is demonstrated by the presence of chronic problems such as tensions over regional languages, and by a persistent political emphasis on multiculturalism, the meaning of secularism, and the use of social identities by the state as a basis for affirmative action. During the last two decades o f the twentieth century, however, this feature o f Indian politics has intensified. India has witnessed a dramatic increase in political action and debate around issues o f culture and identity, exemplified— but not monopolized— by the rise o f Hindu nationalism. Dramatic and often violent images stemming from this interaction o f culture and politics have attracted international attention, while intellectually they have stimulated a wide and free-ranging debate about what India is, and who Indians are or ought to be. Such debates reflect not just the rise o f the Himhtparties and their ability to mobilize people around issues of culture, but also the attempts by their opponents to co-opt their use o f cultural symbolism in order to defeat them 1 The papers in this volume were presented as part o f a seminar series held at the universities o f Bristol and Manchester. The seminars were generously supported by the Society for South Asian Studies, the University o f Manchester, the University of Bristol Alumni Foundation and the Benjamin Meaker Endowment.

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

politically. Such assertions— and contestations— have becom e prevalent throughout the various levels o f the Indian political system. Coinciding with this dynamic, national politics in India has been marked by the rise of coalition politics and the decline of single parties’ ability to sustain majority government. In India, the once dominant Congress party has not won a majority at a general election since 1984. In retrospect, this has less to do with the decline o f the party organization than with a fundamental realignment o f the Indian electorate towards regional parties (Hewitt, 1989). During the 1990s there were four general elections, with only one government completing its full term. Regionalized electoral alliances have now become a critical factor in shaping national coalition politics in India. Even parties committed to a centralizing cultural agenda, such as the BJP, have had actively to seek out electoral accommodation with political and social forces hostile to their ideological agenda. These coalitions and electoral alliances have obvious consequences for national politics in India. No one party is able to gain a national mandate to rule. Government is thus more plural and uncertain, since a consensus does not necessarily emerge, even among electoral allies after power is obtained. In electoral terms, at least, the collapse of oneparty dominance in India has fragmented the nation and brought regionalized and localized political formations to New Delhi itself. While such generalizations must be undertaken with care, it is clear that the national political arena has become subject to both cultural incursions— the political mobilization o f people around cultural symbolism and language— as well as the incursions o f local and regional politics in the narrower sense o f elections and coalitions. Is it legitimate to associate these trends with one another, the cultural incursion being in part the cause o f the rise to electoral prominence of regional and local political movements, and/or vice versa? Such movements do after all challenge long-held images of what constitutes the culture of the ‘nation’ as articulated by a former, nationalist elite. The papers in this volume investigate this association, and the possibilities it creates for rethinking the relationship between politics and culture. To analyse this complex relationship adequately, we need to avoid the assumption that culture is confined to what used to be termed ‘low’ politics, or is indeed situated for most o f the time ‘outside’ the political sphere. The state and the national forum of political activity has always been instrumental in defining what constitutes culture, and what is the most appropriate way for it to be expressed. At the same

De-co nstructing the Nation

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time, it is apparent that culture cannot be reduced to a narrow political framework, as understood in terms o f institutions and electoral activity. Many o f the contributors to this volume, coming from outside the traditions o f political science, demonstrate the risk o f seeing culture explicitly through the lens o f preconceived ideas of political activity. A further issue to be taken into account is the on-going processes of globalization of the late twentieth century. The period 1991-2001 was one o f econom ic liberalization in India. Should cultural mobilization and political fragmentation be seen as indicative o f the multiple ‘de-nationalizing’ forces associated with globalization? Whilst acknowledging the significance o f this factor, it is necessary to take into account the historical processes within the region, especially the legacies o f colonialism and the processes associated with nation- and state-building. Writers in the Subaltern Studies school have clearly shown that fragmentation was a process that was evident during the colonial period and as such significantly predates the contemporary infatuation with globalization. We will return to this theme shortly. L o c a t in g ‘ p o l it ic s ’ In seeking to investigate the current ferment across India through the conceptual lens o f cultural mobilization and political action we have brought together a broad range o f scholars from diverse academic backgrounds. Such diversity has provided methodological ecclecticism and some healthy debate over the basic definition o f terms. Nonetheless, some broad areas o f consensus have emerged. One such is that politics must be understood in the broadest sense. This means going beyond a view o f politics as an activity bound up with access to, and the running of, institutions o f government or the state (Crick, 1982). Crick sees politics as inextricably tied to the use o f state institutions to regulate conflict between different sections o f and interests within society. These interests have often been defined as predominantly material— competition and disputes over access to resources and wealth— whereas we argue that the definition o f competition must be understood more broadly. Increasingly, the politics o f India has involved competition over sym bolism and the strategic location o f cultural signifiers— a competition over style and performance— even over what constitutes a public space— as much as over jobs. Crick’s definition suffers from another limitation— the implication that conflicts and disagreement outside the state arena do not count— and cannot count— as being

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‘political’. Since the 1980s, one way around such a limiting institutional view has been to argue that politics is concerned with the use o f power, and that power is manifest throughout society, encoded in a bewildering array of differing institutions and practices. Critics have argued that there are significant cases o f conflict and the exercise of power within civil society, within caste and class groupings, and within the family, that can be labelled political. Indeed, in this regard feminist political theorists have argued for a view of politics in terms o f‘power relations which cut across state, civil society and familial realms’ (Squires, 1999, p. 32). Viewing politics in terms of power relations has enabled us to open up new insights into the relationship between society, the state, and the reproduction and contestation o f cultural concepts. Here the use and extension of Foucault’s methodologies can be useful. Foucault argues that power does not simply flow down from national political institutions. Rather, power is exercised ‘through net-like organizations’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 98). Individuals retain at least a residual amount of power. They exercise power as well as feel the effect upon themselves. Similarly, local practices have power embodied in them with a logic that may be independent of a central sovereign body, and often compel that body to act in specific ways towards them. The great advantage of Foucault’s approach is that it enables scholars to locate the state within social formations without reducing all meaningful political action to bland institutional transactions. These dispersed locations o f power have become, since the late 1970s, the key motif in specialised writings on South Asia, and in particular on India. A sophisticated scholarship has established how they (re)produce and maintain local forms o f domination and subordination, and how they interact with, constrain, and in turn are constrained by institutional practices. What is clear— if still often neglected in the analysis o f contemporary politics— is how practitioners of high institutional forms of politics have a vital interest in the way that power is used locally. The various methodologies that emerge in this volume reiterate the need to employ an ‘ascending analysis’ that considers how these ‘infinitesimal mechanisms’ have been co-opted by central institutions o f government, and how such institutions seek to alter local hierarchies (Foucault, 1980, p. 99). It is this dynamic, this particular interface, that emerges as central to our investigation. One useful way of applying this understanding of power (and thus widening the conception of the political) is obtained through an investigation into discursive structures, the production and dissemination of

De-constmcting the Nation

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knowledge and legitimating values and symbols used to make and justify political action (see, for example, the chapters by Hansen and Williams). This point can be extended further by approaches to politics that emphasise the ways in which language and other symbolic meanings are issues o f political significance in themselves (see especially the chapters by Kaur and Sharma). They become vital to the process of writing hegemonic relations into societal structures and provide the ways in which political action is comprehended and advanced, even challenged. Here we arrive at what is perhaps one o f the most important areas of discussion and controversy in current Indian politics: the rise o f Hindu nationalism and its significance. Since 1998, and the onset o f the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, there has been an important debate as to the extent to which the BJP has, under the compulsions o f Indian politics, abandoned its Hindu nationalist agenda, or merely modified its extremism as part o f a short-term strategy to gain electoral access to state power (see Hansen and Jaffrelot, 1998; Noorani, 2000). What is significant about this debate is that it separates the BJP’s electoral and political strategies from the culturally transformative agendas o f the Sangh Parivar, situated outside the formal political arena. Using a broader conception o f the political, several chapters in this volum e seek to dem onstrate ways in which Hindu nationalist organizations have sought to co-opt, alter, and/or undermine the basic political discourses o f the Indian state since Independence (see Hansen, Beckerlegge, Simpson and Jaffrelot). Such an extended view o f politics provides space for analysis o f the interaction between local and national, not just within the various levels o f state institutions, but more meaningfully, at the fringes o f such institutions. More profoundly, it prevents the sleight o f hand that locates culture and cultural mobilization as something external to the political process, beyond the pale o f the legitimate concern o f political study. Certainly an examination o f politics in South Asia in terms o f power relations should allow us to capture something o f the complexity o f recent developments in the region. A key part o f our argument is that national politics is increasingly being shaped by local politics, and more significantly, is often described by its protagonists as lying in the realm o f culture. Such cultural mobilization has been associated with challenges to local forms o f dominance or attempts to reinforce such patterns o f dominance (see the chapters by Sharma and Wyatt). In addition, such mobilizations seek to change the meanings and symbols attached to state action that, in turn, affect the ways in which such

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

action is perceived and understood (see especially the chapters by Williams and Corbridge). It is necessary to reiterate that an emphasis upon culture does not in any way seek to negate the importance o f national institutions— or marginalize the study o f formal political processes. Rather, ‘bringing back culture* is a necessary requirement to correct an earlier bias within the more orthodox political science approaches and to help analyse the complex dynamics of Indian politics (see particularly Williams and Hansen on this). The focus o f this book is, then, to insist on a re­ examination o f the relationships between politics and culture, and between the national and the local, through the prism of cultural mobilization and social transformation. Such a call is not in itself a radical departure from current trends within South Asian studies, nor does it buck recent trends in South Asian historiography. In 1998, looking back over almost a decade o f subaltern, post-structural and post-modernist advances, Jalal and Bose noted that the years had witnessed ‘a significant shift in historiographical fashion from politics to discourse, materiality towards culture, class towards community* (1998, p. 8). Such a shift has not, however, always taken place with regard to the sensitivities of definition— or an adequate eye to detail. There has been a tendency to ‘add in’ culture without exploring the ways in which culture itself contributes to the deconstruction and re­ examination o f what constitutes the political. Nowhere is this reductionism more telling than on the subject o f cultural mobilization. If politics needs to be understood in a broader framework o f power relations, how then and in what exact form do these power relations manifest themselves in terms o f culture? How, and at exactly what point does a cultural movement ‘take on’ an overt political agenda aimed explicitly at local, regional or national institutions? Does it at this stage cease to be cultural? These are the central questions that are, in a variety o f ways, taken up by the chapters in this volume. By way o f an introduction, we want to take a closer look at the dislocation o f Congress-sponsored ideas o f cultural diversity articulated at the national level from local arenas of cultural mobilization, and the impact o f this on post-colonial politics. We do this to orient the papers in this volume to each other and to wider academic debates that resonate beyond the study of South Asia. C

u ltu re,

I d e n t it y ,

and

P o l it ic a l M

o b il iz a t io n

In current debates the idea of culture or identity as the basis for political mobilization must almost inevitably be framed by ideas o f p ost­

De-constructing the Nation

7

modernism. In particular, the idea o f ‘fragmenting* or ‘de-centring* national identity may be perceived as a thoroughly post-modern activity. It has been argued that this kind o f de-centring occurs as a result o f processes o f globalization which have pushed nation-states towards supranational integration, and so to the erosion, from above and below, of universalist, 'centred* national identities. This erosion has in its turn led, on the one hand, to the emergence of fragmented forms o f identity politics, and on the other, to what might be called the ‘acculturation* o f national identities, a reactionary attempt at cultural homogenization in defence against these assertive fragmentary forms (see Hall, 1993, pp. 354-55). Such an approach would suggest that cultural mobilizations emerge as part o f a new world order, a new pattern o f development, driven by the collapse o f the modernist certainty over universally valid and objectively identified political and social processes. Cultural m obilizations in South Asia, accom panied as they are by the fragmentation o f the old political system— the ‘decentring* o f the Indian nation— are indicative o f these global trends. As we suggested in section 1, such an analysis may appear plausible but it needs to be subjected to critical scrutiny. As ever, a theoretical framework emanating from and basing itself upon the experiences o f the (erstwhile) European corporate nation-states needs to be held at arm’s length when it is applied to the experiences of the post-colonial world. An examination o f two concepts at the heart o f the post­ modernist approach— nation and culture— in the South Asian context may help to explain this caution. The nation in South Asia is a concept inextricably linked with the process o f decolonization. As such, it is certainly a concept which has a key role in the emergence o f post-modern fragmentation: first, decolonization constitutes a critical process in the deconstruction of western n ation-states; and secondly, anti-colonial nationalism contributes much to what Hall calls the opening up of ‘ambivalences and fissures within the discourse o f the nation-state’ (1993, p. 355). At the same tim e, if we acknowledge anti-colonial nationalism as a legitimate form o f nationalism— as we surely must— then the idea of fragmentation as a post-modern phenomenon is called into question. The reason for this is that, as we come to understand the character of anti-colonialism more fully, we can see that it was always already fragmented. The idea o f a national culture emanating from a corporate nation-state is not one with any particular resonance, for example, in the context o f India. As the Subaltern Studies series and many other

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recent works have demonstrated (for example, Chatterjee, 1993; Pandey, 1991), Indian politics during the colonial period developed into a highly variegated array o f positions and aspirations, which referred to and envisioned national culture in very different ways. In order to recognize this, we do not have to go any further than the debates that resulted in the partition o f colonial India. The point is that this ‘multicultural’ approach is integral to the articulation o f nationalist discourse in South Asia. Identity politics, in this sense, has always been a feature of nationalism in the region. The emergence of particularly virulent forms over the past twenty years cannot be attributed so directly to processes o f globalization; it must be located within the framework of a variegated, de-centred nationalist history. A strong argument has recently been constructed by Sunil Khilnani to suggest that the state in India was self-consciously developed in the aftermath o f Partition and Independence to reflect this strain o f multiculturalism in the formation o f national identity (1997, pp. 16679). Nehru in particular is presented as a political figure with the capacity to envisage the singularity o f the South Asian predicament. He avoided both ‘the liberal presumption that individuals could transcend their cultural inheritance and remake themselves however they— or their state— happened to see fit’, and the tendency of so-called ethnic nationalists to perceive ‘cultures as self-enclosed wholes, hermetic communities of language or belief* (Khilnani, 1997, p. 171). This carefully preserved insight into the experience o f Indian identities enabled Nehru to work towards engineering a state which was able to accommodate a multiplicity o f identities whilst maintaining a unity of purpose. In this way, the political significance o f (most) cultural identities was not denied, but at the same time the political integrity of the nation was not (very often) challenged. Whilst this argument is very persuasive in its presentation o f the ‘remarkable achievement’ (Khilnani, 1997, p. 173) o f Nehruvian democracy, there is a feature o f the state’s approach to cultural diversity that is significantly overlooked. As Khilnani explains it, the integrity of the nation is preserved partly by key ‘centrepetal forces’— the army, the bureaucracy, and the centralized plans for economic unification— and partly by the refusal to use these forces to propagate ‘a single or uniform “Indian” identity’ to replace or override existing identities (ibid., 173). One implication here is that these identities are given, they exist and should be able to continue to exist; the state’s role is to ensure the political accommodation o f these identities, as they stand.

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The suggestion o f given identities leads us towards an examination of our second critical concept in relation to the process o f fragmen­ tation: culture. This is o f course a complex and contested term, and it is not our intention to spend a great deal o f time trying to define it (see the chapter by Kaur for further discussion on this). In order to accommodate the contributors from a variety o f academic disciplines we offer a very broad definition: culture as the collection o f meanings, values, morals, ways o f thinking, patterns o f behaviour or speech that a group o f people share. This sharing is often based on historical experience and knowledge, and it is clearly related to ideology, in the sense that ideological positions may have a great deal o f influence over what meanings, values, patterns o f behaviour and so on are shared by what groups o f people. The influence o f ideology also means that cultures are dynamic and contested; what is perceived as culture is often dependent on the dominance of particular ideologies, and the way ideologies relate to one another (Zavos, 2000, p. 8). The reference to ideology is particularly significant in our context, because o f the intensely dynamic way in which ideologies operated as a facet o f colonialism. Indeed, Terry Eagletons recent work has been useful in demonstrating how the term ‘culture’ assumed a new meaning as nineteenth-century colonialism unfolded. Under the influence of colonial knowledge, he says, culture became ‘other people. ... One’s own way o f life is simply human; it is other people who are ethnic, idiosyncratic, culturally peculiar’ (Eagleton, 2000, p. 26). It is a meaning that may be particularly associated with the identification o f the Orientalist other. This is clearly evident in British India, where diversity was unerringly categorized and given cultural value as a feature of the colonial project (Metcalf, 1995). The idea o f culture here is as an identifiable characteristic o f certain fixed divisions within society, such as it was. At its broadest level, this meant assigning particular fixed or given cultural values as the ‘essence’ o f Hinduism and Indian Islam. There was no room for dynamism in the attribution o f these cultural values. The colonial state, classically, set itself apart from these forms of identity (as for example in Mill’s division o f Indian history into the Hindu, the Muslim and the British periods). It would act as arbiter in disputes between different cultural groups, but its self-image was as a neutral structure, a framework of modernity that sought to rationalize social relations between these groups (for evidence of this approach and its ramifications, see Prior, 1993). To return to Khilnani’s argument for the multicultural accom­ modations o f Nehruvian democracy, there is an unmistakable echo

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

here in terms o f perceptions of culture (right down to the character of the class who deployed state authority: an elite o f ‘functionary Indians*, to use Khilnani’s evocative phrase (ibid., 173), who were based precisely on the model of the colonial bureaucracy). Nehru’s view o f India’s cultural make-up was of course much more subtle and represented a considerable advance on the rather mechanical view adopted by the colonial regime. Yet despite the recognition of difference, there is a sense in which the state in independent India is withdrawn from an active participation in the propagation o f that difference. Cultural diversity was there, it was part o f the reality of modem India; the state accommodated it because it was there, but it was not minded to consciously pursue its development. What we are saying is that the recognition of diversity and difference is itself a cultural project; the Nehruvian state perceived it only as a political project, in the narrow sense o f institutional and electoral activity. Why should this be? Why should the post-Independence state be able to recognize the need to accommodate difference at a political level, but unable to propagate the idea o f difference at a cultural level? The answer lies in the development o f what Khilnani calls ‘the only authentically Indian organization that reached across the country*: the Indian National Congress (ibid., 172). This organization had developed within the singular conditions o f British colonialism. It was indeed fuelled by a sophisticated discourse of cultural resistance, yet at the same time the early Congress had a material existence that conformed to the strict rules of political discourse articulated by the colonial state (Chatterjee, 1993). This colonial discourse naturally denied the movement’s claim to represent ‘the Indian people’ and articulate their aspirations. Any moves towards the establishment o f mechanisms o f democratic representation were consistently suppressed or discredited as seditious, beyond the realm o f acceptable politics. O f course, nationalist politicians challenged these discursive limits almost from the outset, but it was not until the 1920s that the discourse was decisively breached, as the Congress organization expanded rapidly under the direction o f M.K. Gandhi, and confidently laid claim to a broad constituency o f supporters. During this critical period o f preIndependence politics, the Congress came increasingly into contact with subaltern political formations, and ideas of resistance articulated outside the world of elite-led politics. Perhaps not surprisingly, given its rather sheltered organizational history, the Congress was unable to accommodate these forces; it drew back during these years from a

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strategy o f mass mobilization, and used it only sparingly, and with a degree o f caution in the years leading up to Independence (with the exception o f the Quit India movement, which, it could be argued, was not really a Congress-led movement in any case). As Ranajit Guha has argued, the Congress ‘failed to assimilate the class interests o f peasants and workers effectively into a bourgeois hegemony’ based on a particular vision of Indian nationalism (1993, p. 102). This development led to the emergence of a new discursive arena in which to practise legitimate politics; an arena which was not defined by the state and the aspiration to control it, but by more localized political concerns (see Zavos, 2000, pp. 128 -4 2 ). The resulting unevenness between high nationalist discourse and symbolism, and more localised, socio-cultural identities has arguably developed into the main fault line o f modern Indian politics. Politics may be understood in terms o f the interaction and operation o f these two discursive arenas, the one directed towards the institutions of the state, and the other towards the localized concerns of communities, classes and individuals. Using this m odel, the Nehruvian project to accommodate diversity at the level o f the state comes into focus: it occurred very much in the institutional arena. Because of the failure of the Congress in the non-institutional arena, it could not accompany this by a concomitant project to propagate diversity as culture. It had neither the language nor the mechanisms to effect such a project. This point is reflected in the mode of operation o f the party machine in the post-Independence period. The party relied upon a process o f aggregation, accumulating sufficient vote banks based upon the influence o f local notables, or dominant caste groups, to ensure electoral majorities. With this party-controlled form o f political action, cultural identity was largely ‘pre-packaged’ and actively depoliticised. The articulation of the cultural signifiers o f language, caste, religion, were controlled by electoral ‘gate-keepers’, capable of restricting state action in critical areas that might undermine their wider authority. Institutional politics was thus, to some degree, sealed off from the lo calities and com m unities in which cultural m obilizations/ transformations were actually taking place, often in more violent, or unmediated forms of social activity. However— and this is critical to our area o f investigation—these two discursive arenas were never entirely separate. While the history o f the Congress may demonstrate the tensions between institutional and non-institutional politics, the history o f post-Independence politics more generally reveals continual interaction and transformation. Not

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

surprisingly, culture lies at the heart o f this interaction and transfor­ mation. As the Congress system collapsed throughout the 1970s, cultural mobilization ceased to be contained in local pockets and the politics of identity entered into an unmediated relationship with the state itself. This process was associated with the collapse of the politics o f aggregation, and the decline o f the old nationalist elite that had cut their p olitical teeth inside the Congress party. The political management o f cultural difference became much more problematic for the post-colonial state. As the political process deepened and broadened out, new culturally nuanced discourses gained prominence. A struggle then ensued over the content and vocabulary of the larger, legitimating discourse. The contested issues included the rule o f law itself, citizenship, the status of personal law and national identity. The idea of who or what an Indian was became violently contested. While it is necessary to acknowledge the centrality o f the Sangh Parivar and Hindutva to these processes, it is also important to avoid reducing the entire approach to the current concerns associated with Hindu nationalism and a specific form o f Hindu cultural mobilization. It became apparent in the preparation o f this volume that cultural mobilization involved a series o f discrete challenges not just to a modernist definition of the political’, but also to other cultural forces and forms. Women, Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis were among many groups who were involved in mobilizing not just against political and social inequalities, but also against the cultural definitions employed by the post-colonial state itself. The chapters in this book will explore just how this form o f politics has emerged at the national and regional levels in India. It is divided into three parts. Part One presents papers which focus particularly on different ways o f looking at and understanding political processes, as indicated in section 2 o f this introduction. Hansen challenges understandings of Indian politics which foreground analyses of election data on the basis o f the ‘aggregationist’ model. He seeks instead to interpret politics in localized contexts on the basis of the development of ‘public moods and sentiments’. In order to produce authority in this context, political parties must engage in performative acts and spectacles which actively represent the locality. Hansen shows how the Shiv Sena have been able to operate with this performative strategy to dominate politics in Mumbai over the last ten years. Kaur also focuses on politics in Mumbai. She begins by developing a concept o f cultural mobilization as a process with layered meanings in political arenas,

De-constructing the Nation

13

consonant with the dynamic, contested character o f culture itself. Her analysis o f the Ganapati festival in Mumbai is geared towards demonstrating the way in which aspects o f the festival have been used to ‘ethicise’ political positions— in contemporary politics this has been effectively achieved by the Shiv Sena. Williams shifts our attention eastwards. He notes the apparent stability o f the Left Front government in West Bengal from the 1970s onwards— a case which surely challenges our claims in this introduction about the fragmentation o f party politics from precisely this period. Drawing on observations o f political activism in Birbhum district of West Bengal, however, Williams argues that behind the apparent stability o f the Left Front’s electoral majorities, there are hard-fought struggles for power in which violence and communal politics play an important role. From these observations, Williams goes on to question Atul Kohli’s treatment o f political institutions as organizations in a narrow sense, arguing instead that more attention should be given to institutional culture, political discourses and the agency of local politicians. In Part Two, three authors offer case studies which provide indications o f the variety o f ways in which cultural mobilization operates— on local levels in different parts of India, or in social arenas which again challenge our understandings o f what constitutes politics. Beckerlegge examines the work of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the organization at the heart o f the Sangh Parivar, in the arena of social welfare. He explains this commitment as an expression o f the Hindu concept o f seva , or social service, which has been central to the work o f another modern Hindu movement, the Ramakrishna Mission. The chapter examines the historical developm ent o f the RSS commitment to seva> and considers its implications in terms o f the perceived construction of an organic society based on a unified national tradition— a key ideological objective underpinning the political activism o f Hindu nationalism. The chapters by Simpson and Sharma provide us with some rich, regionally-focused material on the mechanics o f cultural mobilization. Like Beckerlegge, Simpson focuses on the way in which Hindu nationalism operates in an ostensibly non­ political context. His chapter examines the ‘village adoption’ scheme operating in Gujarat in the wake o f the massive earthquake which struck the region in 2001. This scheme provided the opportunity for a variety o f Hindu nationalist and associated organizations to construct literally their visions o f an ideal Hindu society in microcosm. In this context, we see spatial planning emerging as a way of expressing cultural

14

The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

values which had a profound effect on the development of politics in the region. Sharma’s chapter is based on a historical approach to the development o f myths. Through a reading o f the development o f key nationalist myths during the colonial and post-colonial periods in Assam, she demonstrates how popular myths can become contested territory in political arenas, in a manner which again indicates how culture has become established as a dynamic, contested territory, as explained by Kaur. The final part o f the book reflects on the impact o f cultural mobilization on the institutions o f the state in India, and on the status and political development of particular states. Jaffrelot provides a broad overview o f competing concepts o f territory and the relationship between territory, culture and the state in post-Independence India. This account covers the development o f movements for the creation of new states, from the linguistic reorganization o f the 1950s through to the agitation for states based on tribal identity such as Jharkhand. These tendencies and the state’s response to them can, he says, be contrasted to the conception o f territory and culture developed by Hindu nationalism, and emerging as increasingly significant in the late twentieth century. Corbridge picks up the theme of the creation o f new states based on tribal identity— a response from the centre, as it were, to cultural mobilization at the periphery. Contrary to the general acceptance o f this development as confirm ation o f the ‘multicultural’ flexibility o f the Indian state (see Jaffrelot), Corbridge questions the success o f this reorganization in understanding the objectives o f the protagonists who mobilized in the name o f a particular (tribal) identity. In a similar fashion, the final paper reflects on the problems o f the state’s accom m odationist response to cultural mobilization in Tamil Nadu. Wyatt seeks to explain why mobilization based on caste, Dalit identity and religious nationalism have under­ mined the transcending appeal o f a broader Tamil nationalism advocated by the Dravidian movement. The cultural mobilization which at an early stage challenged the dominance of the Congress in Tamil Nadu has itself been challenged by a proliferation of further forms o f cultural mobilization. Will this pattern be repeated in Jharkhand? This question serves to explain, in a sense, the need for a greater understanding of how cultural mobilization relates to the institutions o f politics in India, and, in even broader terms, how it affects our perceptions o f the meaning o f politics in a postcolonial world. The essays in this volume aim to contribute to debates which may enable such understandings to emerge.

De-constructing the Nation

15

B ib l io g r a p h y S. Bose and A* Jalal (1998), Modem South Asia, London: Routledge. P. Chatterjee (1993), The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press. B. Crick (1982), In Defence o f Politics, Harmondsworth: Penguin. T. Eagleton (2000), The Idea o f Culture, Oxford: Blackwell M. Foucault (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. R- Guha (1993),‘Discipline and Mobilise’, in P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies VII, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 69-120. S. Hall (1993), ‘Culture, Community, Nation*, Cultural Studies, 7(3), pp. 34963. T. Hansen (1999), The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modem India, Princeton: Princeton University Press. T. Hansen and C. Jaffrelot (eds.) (1998), The BJP and the Compulsions o f Politics in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. D. Held and A. Leftwich (1984), ‘A Discipline of Politics?’, in A. Leftwich (ed.), What is Politics? The activity and its study, Oxford: Blackwell V. Hewitt (1989), ‘The Congress System is Dead— Long Live the Party System and Democratic India', Journal o f Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 27(2), pp. 157-71. A. Jalal (1995), Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. S. Kaviraj (1991), ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’, in J. Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics, London: Longman. S. Khilnani (1997), The Idea o f India, London: Penguin. T. Metcalf (1995), Ideologies o f the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A.G. Noorani (2000), The RSS and the BJP: A Division o f Labour, Delhi: Left Word Books. G. Pandey (1991), ‘In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India today’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Annual No., pp. 559-72. K. Prior (1993),‘Making History: the State’s Intervention in Urban Religious Disputes in the North Western Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Modem Asian Studies, 27( 1), pp. 179-204. J. Squires (1999), Gender in Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity. N. Subramanian (1999), Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. A. Wyatt (2001),‘Political Parties and the Development of Indian Democracy’, in J. Haynes (ed.), Democracy and Political Change in the Third World, London: Routledge. J, Zavos (2000), Emergence o f Hindu Nationalism in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Part One

Ways o f Looking: Politics, Culture, and M obilization in India

1 Politics as Permanent Performance: The Production o f Political Authority in the Locality Thomas Blom Hansen

Let me start with a recollection from a seminar I attended some years back in India. The seminar was devoted to the interpretation o f recent election results. For two days I was listening to people speaking with a great deal o f confidence about caste politics, caste alliances, and interpreting the electoral results as emerging alliances between various caste communities. It was as if communities were imputed collective wills, intelligence, and rationalities. As my turn came I asked the rather naive question: why is it that we, as analysts, use the same conceptual language and the same mapping o f Indian society— according to imputed caste and community identities— as political activists and those who devise electoral strategies? If they were right in their assumptions about people’s propensity to vote along caste lines, why is it that they don’t win elections all the time? How can we deal with the fact that our mapping of society coincides with the mapping used by those who in fact lose elections— which is what most political parties do most o f the time! I then proceeded to offer a rather vague analysis of the election data from Maharashtra, basically admitting that this could be read in several ways. I admitted that I could not know what had determined why people had voted for one rather than another candidate at the local level. As an interpretation o f election results my presentation turned out to be less than convincing.

20

The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

The question I want to raise concerns how we can interpret election results. Can we use them as an index o f what happens in the broader social world? As a reflection of how class formations are changing and how caste identities are developing? Can we talk about stable constituencies organized around caste communities, or along linguistic lines? The longer I have studied Indian politics and public culture, the less convinced I become about the indexical value o f electoral politics. Much work done by political scientists begins from a registration of various apparent misfits between the social and the political world. For instance, why so many lower caste voters, apparently, vote for parties that do not seem to serve their interests, or why so many Xs who used to vote for party A, now, apparently, have moved their loyalties to party B. What if the assumption that there is a tendential fit between people’s social condition and sedimented, or imputed, identities and their political choices is a wrong one in the first place? It is obvious that technologies o f electoral systems and layered forms of representation inevitably structure or even ‘distort’ election results and give false impressions o f ‘political strongholds’ etc. My proposition is different, however. It is to take seriously that political choice and preference probably is guided by much more ephemeral and transient collective moods, as well as by considerations o f the worthiness or personal qualities of the candidates standing for election. In order to understand the choices made by the evermore discerning, impatient voters in India— possessing a high level o f what Sudipta Kaviraj has called ‘p olitical literacy’— I will suggest that wc should fucus m u ch m ure un

the role o f ideology, o f the creation of public moods and sentiments, of the production of authority— i.e. all those subjective and floating energies that animate politics and shape what people like and dislike. If we do not understand the force o f these factors we will inevitably fail to come to terms with the many transformations taking place in Indian politics over the last decades. Let me turn to the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra to illustrate my point. M

a n a g in g t h e

M

oods of

M

u m bai

There is something profoundly excessive about the Shiv Sena. Visual, theatrical, urban, violent, masculine performances are at the heart of the party; all done in a distinctly— and wilfully and self-consciously— non-respectable style. Why this almost ‘filmi’ excess? The deeper I got into the worlds o f Mumbai and Maharashtra as I was doing research there in the 1990s, the more I realized how many parallels and

Politics as Permanent Performance

21

continuities there were between the so-called ‘mainstream’ Congress and the Shiv Sena— in terms o f worldview, major ideological complexes and views on core policies, and also in terms o f social environments of their supporters, and the way of doing local and everyday politics in these two formations. I came to the conclusion that the difference is one o f style, not one o f sociology.1 The similarities o f the constituencies of the Congress and that o f the Sena was noticed by early writers on the movement (Gupta, 1982, Katzenstein, 1981). In some of my studies o f the Sena in the rural areas o f Maharashtra I came to the conclusion that the growth o f the Shiv Sena in parts o f the state was driven by a youth rebellion within the wider political culture created by the Congress. This was something I could substantiate sociologically; I could see it played out ~ven within single families (Hansen, 1996a). Yet, such a predominandy sociological perspective foils to grasp what is the essential feature o f the Sena: its public style, or more precisely the way in which it has utilized the possibilities and space opened in the public culture of Bombay— the relative incoherence o f government and policing in the city; the fact that the authority o f the legal system by no means was self-evident, etc.— to create a new form o f ‘politics of presence’. My argument here is that the most distinctive feature of the Shiv Sena is the way in which it relies almost exclusively on the possibilities of a politics of the spectacle— from the local street comer to mass meeting to the staging o f policies through the state government. Democracy in India has produced a culture o f politics that is incredibly fluid, situational and dynamic— where stable constituencies, alliances, equations and ideological principles are in constant flux and redefinition. In such a culture it is those who can create a collective mood, or the illusion o f a collectivity driven by a mood— both highly ephemeral phenomena that can set political agendas at least for some time. They can generate demands and the illusions o f their own ' ‘power’— an equally ephemeral phenomenon. To perform this type of politics depends, therefore, on the ability to stage public performances, to use and employ a range o f registers that can generate authority, and put the power o f rumours, myth and other cultural registers to effective’use.

1

This point is developed in more detail in the first chapters in my book (2001) Wages o f Violence. Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

22

The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

Since Hobbes theorized the absolutist state, European notions of p olitical power and the state have undoubtedly been starkly reductionist. To paraphrase Hobbes: ‘Covenants without the sword are but words,’ and at the basis o f the state, o f power, o f legitimacy, we find— purely and simply— violence. In this view royal pomp, state rituals as well as modern ideological formations essentially serve to efface and occlude this foundational violence, which is the origin o f a state. Geertz has called this ‘the great simple that remains through all sophistications ... politics, finally, is about mastery: “Women and Horses, Power and War” (Geertz, 1980,134). This has, argues Geertz, led to an unfortunate blindness towards the importance o f symbols and ideas in their own right to statecraft and state power. Geertz retrieves the importance o f this in his study of the classical Balinese ‘theatre state’, the negara, a polity whose basis of sovereignty was its status as ‘an exemplary center—a microcosm o f the supernatural order’. Pomp, ritual and spectacle were not devices to represent the state or occlude its violent nature— they constituted the core o f the state that was based on the ‘( ...) controlling idea that by providing a model (...) a faultless image o f civilized existence, the court shapes the world around i t ...’ (ibid., 13). The dramas o f that polity were neither lies nor illusions, concludes Geertz, ‘They were what there was’ (ibid., 136). I am not suggesting that India is about to return to ancient precolonial rituals o f politics, but the model o f the negara should remind us that the rationality of intent, purpose and pursuit o f interests that often are imputed to states and political groupings tend to occlude the mythical and performative dimensions o f modem politics. We should not forget that the notion o f ‘interest’ is a culturally specific invention o f a tamed and ‘rational passion’ (for money) that was foregrounded by early modern thinkers as a way to limit religious bigotry and strife, as Albert Hirschman pointed out (Hirschman, 1977). Anyone who has studied local politics and formation o f local leadership in India (and beyond) will know that visibility means everything— that a cause may be enunciated, a protest be staged, and an action performed in order to provide a stage whereupon an emerging leader or ambitious man can make himself available as a focus o f attention, trust or affection. He seeks to become a tangible embodiment o f the ‘community’ or the locality he seeks to represent— or better still, he tries to express and create community and locality through the very act o f representation. W hen I use the term perform ance, I use it som ew hat m ore broadly

than for instance Schechner’s emphasis on performance as actions

Politics as Permanent Performance

23

pertaining to ritual, the theatrical and the staged (Schechner, 1988, pp. 251-88), although these dimensions are crucial to the world o f modem competitive and media borne politics, as Edelman has been pointing out for decades (see, for example, Edelman, 1988). Political performances are indeed about constructing spectacles and media events, but it is also very much about a certain styling o f the self, the movement or the cause— by the use o f a certain linguistic style or conceptual vocabulary, a certain way of dressing and acting in public, etc. I suggest that we regard political performances as a certain magnified and specialized subspecies o f Erving Goffman’s notion that everyday life is framed as a series o f not always conscious performances and improvizations o f speech and repertoires o f bodily actions (Goffm an, 1959, pp. 7 3 -4 ). To be in politics, in a movement or prom oting a certain cause, implies engaging a certain genre o f propositional speech and action designed to convince, persuade and make things happen in the world (what Austin called ‘illocutionary speech’, Austin, 1962), and to make things exist as ‘facts’ or possibilities by constant reiteration and repetition, which is Butler’s idea o f the performative (Buder, 1993, p. 2). Political performativity comprises, in other words, the construction of images and spectacles, forms o f speech, dress and public behaviour that promotes the identity o f a movement or party, defines its members, and promotes its cause or worldview. I will argue that the Shiv Sena has perfected these techniques, that performance is what the Sena really is. It never had any elaborated programme or coherent ideology, only this unprecedented capacity to generate moods. I will go further and argue that by perfecting these possibilities o f the culture o f politics in India, the Shiv Sena may teach us something broader about India’s political modernity. We should not be surprised by the foregrounding o f the visible and of the centrality o f representation in the broadest sense that we see in Indian politics. Modern societies are in a sense founded upon such collective representations of ‘the state’ in action, or by the multiple mappings o f society one finds in policy papers or political rhetoric that seek to convince us about how our complex societies can be read and understood. If we look at democracy as a historical and cultural form, we can see that one o f its most radical breaks with previous forms of politics is that it instituted the idea that a society can be understood and shaped in its own terms, without any reference to a pre-given or transcendental form or force— be it a divine force, the polis, or perhaps even the nation.

24

The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

The problem in this new ontology that grew out o f democracy was, as Claude Lefort has pointed out, that not only did political power become something abstract that could be held by no-one— as it belonged to ‘the people’ and only could be re-presented temporarily— but that society as such became unrepresentable because ‘all markers of certainty were disappearing.’ This is because democracy creates a ‘configuration o f social relations in which diversity and opposition are made visible,... political activity has the effect o f erecting a stage on which conflict is acted out for all to see, and is represented as necessary, irreducible and legitimate,... the being of the social presents itself in the shape of an endless series o f questions, ... modem democracy is inaugurating an experience in which society is constantly in search of its own foundation’ (Lefort, 1988, pp. 228-29). The central paradox o f all modem democracies is, in other words, that inasmuch as representation is their key foundational principle, it is at the same time impossible to create representations that are generally accepted and endorsed. Hence the need for other and ever new forms o f representation— in elections, in texts, in speech and images. The implication o f my argument is that performances and spectacles in public spaces— from the central squares to the street corner in the slum, from speeches to images— must move to the centre o f our attention. These are the generative political moments par excellence, the heart of political society, and the site where historical imageries, the state and notions o f community and ‘society’ become visible and effective. We must, in other words, chart and understand how political identities and notions of rights and citizenship are formed and given life through acts o f representation. Although integral to political modernity all over the world, the political spectacle in public space has an extraordinarily rich and varied history in India. Informed by, and drawing on the anti-colonial legacy of civil disobedience designed to mobilize millions of illiterate people, a vast repertoire o f spectacular representations and styles o f mobilization have been sustained by an ever more inclusive, but also intensely competitive democracy and public culture. In Maharashtra, the regional ethno-historical imagery organized around the eighteenth century warrior king Shivaji provided a wide repertoire o f public performances that the Sena and other political actors have drawn on and further developed. There has also been a certain ‘banalization’ of public rituals and gestures originating in the nationalist movement,

Politics as Permanent Performance

25

and a proliferation o f political performances at all levels o f public life— from pupils in provincial schools staging a protest in Gandhian style, to farmers blocking roads in remote districts» to local councillors going on hunger strikes in their chambers in the municipality. There is often an almost travestic quality in these citational practices drawing on a vast reservoir o f popularized national history and religious myths and imagery. Sometimes there is a tongue-in-cheek reversal o f meanings o f well-established symbols and often a very creative mixture o f religious, historical and contemporary references in speech and images used for political and other public manifestations, as Raminder Kaur’s work on the Ganapati festival demonstrates so clearly (Kaur, 2002 and this volume). But let me return to the Shiv Sena. In order to understand the emergence and trajectory o f a movement like the Shiv Sena one needs, therefore, to look into the movement’s ability to sustain a high-profile performative presence in the public culture o f the city since 1966. This performative capacity has got at least four dimensions: first, the Shiv Sena’s successful use o f the ethnohistorical imagery and at times xenophobic discourse o f regional pride— inherited from the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and later authorized by the state government and the Congress party in the 1960s. Thackeray’s aggressive, xenophobic and popular-satirical discursive style twisted and renewed this register into a street-smart and nononsensical mode o f being Maharashtrian that over a few years made the Shiv Sena widely popular among Marathi speakers in Mumbai. The second dimension is the organizational and spatial grid o f local units assisting local citizens, networks of self-help and organizations established by the movement since the 1960s in most parts of Mumbai, and elsewhere in Maharashtra in the 1980s. Often regarded as the backbone o f the Shiv Sena, the efficiency and vibrancy o f these local networks are often overestimated by Sainiks and observers alike. However, their real significance seems to lie in their rumoured strength and the spectacular coordinated actions and campaigns they occasionally make possible when replying to a call from Thackeray, the Senapati (army commander). The Sena networks are interwoven with families, male peer groups, business connections and other informal connections, that have made them integral parts o f what Appadurai calls the ‘nervous system* o f the city (Appadurai, 2000). Thirdly, violence is central to the Shiv Sena, both as a rhetorical style and promise o f strength, as well as actual practice at the local and everyday level, and in public confrontations since the 1960s. The Sena’s

26

The Politics o f Cultural Mobilization in India

determination to use violence in most situations, its celebration o f youth, masculinity and ‘the ordinary*, and the cynicism o f its leadership, have since the 1960s created an unusually large space o f de facto legal impunity for Sainiks and their leaders when acting in public, and a concomitant fear o f the Sena among its adversaries and victims. Finally, the Shiv Sena has a complex and ambiguous relationship with the world o f electoral politics and political institutions. It has been aligned with a number o f political formations but grew for years in the protective shadow of the Congress party. Since the 1980s the Shiv Sena has established close affiliations with the BJP, the major rightwing formation in Indian politics. It has also extended and consolidated its own web o f alliances, and has engaged in ruthless institutional manipulation and corruption during its time in power in the Bombay Municipal Corporation, and later the state government in the 1990s. The simultaneity o f formal, institutionalized politics, violent streetlevel agitation, and informal networking and local brokerage is a key feature o f the Shiv Sena’s political practices. Let me examine in more detail what appears to be the organizational backbone o f the movement. T

he

S hakha G

r id

After the initial success in 1966, Thackeray and his closest friends began to create a regular organization. Borrowing the RSS idea o f daily meetings, the shakha , a wide network of local shakhas were set up very fast in the middle class as well as the low-income areas in Mumbai and its northern extension, Thane. The shakhas were small buildings with one or two simple rooms with chairs and often a picture or statue o f Shivaji. There was always a saffron flag, bhagwa dwaj, outside the shakha, which provided a daily meeting place for the activists and their friends in the locality. The shakha was led by a shakha pramukh , and a lieutenant, the gata-pramukhy whose responsibilities were to enforce discipline among the young activists, arrange local religious festivals and celebrations o f the important Ganapati festival and of course the Shivaji Jayanti, which remains a major occasion in the annual cycle o f activities in the organization (see Jasper, 2002). The conspicuous public celebration of these festivals is, it must be noted, not confined to the Shiv Sena; they have a long history in Mumbai and other cities in western India from the 1890s onwards. They are organized by a range o f local mandals (committees) collecting

Politics as Permanent Performance

27

money from local traders and are often patronized by local politicians and businessmen. The p u blic celebrations o f festivals with increasing pomp, expenditure, and grandeur in many localities in Mumbai is closely connected to the wider politics o f representation o f the locality, o f the production o f the neighbourhood, as Eckert puts it (Eckert, 2000, p. 39). To produce a neighbourhood is in some ways an extension of the identificatory effects o f naming: to claim a certain identity, a belonging and thus by implication a set o f entitlements for a particular area and the people living there. The festivals provide a site and a stage whereupon local organizations, upcom ing politicians, parvenu businessmen, local brokers and strongmen flaunt and represent their power and status, or attempt to acquire respectability through visibility and patronage. The festivals, with their competing mandals, are in many ways rather precise representations o f just how precarious and unstable both the meaning o f the neighbourhood and its local configurations of power and prestige are. To be someone, to enjoy respect and authority is not a given fact, but needs to be reproduced through reiterative performances o f various kinds. Festivals provide one such screen for projection o f prestige and visibility o f parties, organizations, and individuals and an occasion for confirmation o f the identity o f the neighbourhood.2 The Shiv Sena’s unquestionable performative skills, ruthlessness in raising fluids, and the determination o f local Sainiks to remain the primary representative o f the neighbourhood, have over the years made these festivals larger and more central sites o f representation. The Shiv Sena has also transformed the symbolic importance and style o f these celebrations in many areas o f Mumbai into more aggressive celebrations 2 In the early phase o f the Shiv Sena’s existence the organization especially promoted the Ganapati festival, as a quintessential Maharashtrian festival. Promoting Ganesh was a way to make Mumbai more Maharashtrian in complexion. In her recent analysis o f the historical development o f the iconographies of martdap tableaux displayed during the Ganapatiutsav, Raminder Kaur demonstrates convincingly how these tableaux, having been de-politicized and ‘culturalized’ after Independence, since the 1980s have taken an ever more direct political form in its themes as well as direct messages displayed. The Shiv Sena-sponsored mandaps have been crucial in this return to the political and nationalist dimensions of the Ganapatiutsav (Kaur, 1998, pp. 256-78, and this volume).

28

The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

of Maharashtrian community. In the 1980s the Sena incorporated other festivals, such as the Dussehra, and the Navratri festival originating in Gujarat, as part o f its attempt to appeal to the wider Hindu community. The shakhas have also been quite effective in projecting themselves as a representation of, if not the heart of, the neighbourhood, and, by implication, the Sena as a representative o f ordinary and local people. The shakhas have been projected as the place to go for assistance and various forms o f patronage. They receive local complaints over lack of civic amenities, corrupt officials, harassment o f tenants by landlords, complaints over employers, quarrels in neighbourhoods and families, etc. The pramukh and the activists are expected to take care o f these problems, either by solving them directly or by going to local officials, through the trade unions, or to the local members of the municipal corporation and other elected representatives o f the area. They are also expected to be brokers (dalal) and ‘social workers’ of their areas, to put pressure on administration and politicians to improve roads, sewage, housing, water, etc. The support and sympathy the Shiv Sena has enjoyed in many neighbourhoods in between its spectacular political successes— and in particular its survival during almost ten years in the political wilderness between 1975 and 1984— was in many ways based on this network o f such local welfare strategies. However, as in the case o f the festivals, the Sainiks are far from alone in these endeavours to project themselves through these types o f services and brokerage that have a long history in Mumbai, as well as elsewhere in India. The popularity of Sainiks as brokers and protectors owes a lot to their reputation o f violent ruthlessness and aggressiveness, and of being the protectors o f the common man, employing the strength of the common man— numerical strength— and the language o f the common man— his fists and muscles— to assert his rights vis-à-vis the establishment. ‘Being a Shiv Sainik means that half the job is done’ is one o f the most popular one-liners circulating in the organization, emphasizing the commitment to action and affirming the idea o f the Shiv Sena as resolute and effective. The aggressiveness o f the Shiv Sainik as a means to achieve self-respect is an integral and crucial part o f the Sainik identity, nurtured by the leadership and repeated in numerous stories and parables. Modhav Joshi, MLA in Thane City (West), brought out a crucial element in the Shiv Sena ethos— to gain respect through power, and if necessary violence, when he told me:

Politics as Permanent Performance

29

Thackeray has told us that you should be polite and talk to the person, but if he does not talk and shows you the law, there is also nature’s law and I can use it— that is to hammer the person. I do not want goondaism (criminal methods, TBH) in the Shiv Sena and I want hundred per cent gentlemen. But if you do not allow me to speak, then how am I to express myself? ... I am not a beggar, no doubt I am needy and I too have some respect. If you simply throw me out I will not tolerate that! (Interview with Modhav Joshi, November 1992.)

The themes of respect, revenge and natural law were repeated by another veteran Shiv Sena leader. Pradhan asserted: The principle o f natural justice is also accepted by us, and this is the principle of natural justice— that whatever is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours. ... It is just like playing with fire. If you sit beside it, it will give you warmth, but if you play with it, it burns your house. Shiv Sena is that way. (Interview with Pradhan, February 1993.)

Observers o f the Shiv Sena from Katzenstein to V.S. Naipaul (;n his admiring portrait o f Shiv Sainiks in India: A Million Mutinies Now) and journalists generally assume that the shakha grid is the heart of the Sena i.e. that which explains the staying power o f the movement. Many left wing activists look at this grid as the innermost secret o f the Sena which achieves a density o f id en tificatio n , loyalty, and communication that the leftist parties never achieved. My contention is, however, that the efficacy of the shakhas in terms of service provision is rather exaggerated. First, most localities in Mumbai have always harboured a number o f competing centres o f brokerage and influence, and the superiority of the Sena in this regard has been neither consistently self-evident nor stable. Second, Shakhas are by no means fully functional around the year. They are often dormant and closed, and they often work only before and during the festival season in August to October. The functioning o f local shakhas is often impeded by quarrels and rivalry between Sainiks over leadership and authority. These are often only overcome when a strong command from Thackeray, or the local district chief, impels Sainiks to embark on campaigns or protest actions of various sorts. The Shiv Sena is an open, informal organization at the local level without formal membership and devoid of effective social control. It exists mainly as a movement when it is engaged in various high-profile, and often violent actions. The ‘actionist’ ideology of the Shiv Sena is also reflected in its organization which in practice is often very far removed from the daily displays of effervescent devotion that Sena leaders like to claim.

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Third, the dysfunction o f the shakha does not necessarily mean that the Shiv Sena is absent from an area. It can be represented by known Sainiks o f varying ranks, or people who are known to be associated with the Shiv Sena, in whose homes or offices ordinary people come to ask for help and favours. Or it can exist as a ‘public mood’, as traces o f memory o f past actions or incidents in the locality, as reputations o f people associated with the Sena, and as rumours o f the violence and deeds of the Shiv Sena as such, far away from the locality. I have met many people who declare themselves as Sainiks, but do not vote for the local Sena candidate, or who go to a Congress politician for help because his local reputation was better. I have also met people who ask a local Sena man for help, even vote for him because o f his local reputation but who oppose the Shiv Sena at the general elections. Similar observations could be made about other political formations and movements in India. This merely suggests that the entire idea o f relatively stable ‘support bases’ and ‘constituencies’ o f parties or movements is highly unstable and dependent on strategic performances as well as local configurations o f power in different localities. Even a fairly organized movement like the Shiv Sena is vitally dependent on this continuous representation of itself in public spaces through signs, signatures, discourse, and rumours. The actual ‘secret’ o f the Sena lies, in other words, in its incessant production o f statements, one-liners and rumours, and in its capacity and will to stage violent high-profile actions, rather than in its effective physical presence in every neighbourhood in the city. ‘N o r m a l P o l it ic s ’

and th e

L o g ic

of

E n tro py

The following example illustrates the fragility o f the Sena’s power, even in an old so-called stronghold like Thane city— a big industrial city in the northern outskirts o f the Greater Mumbai region where the Shiv Sena has had a sustained political presence since 1967. For more than twenty years, a populous low-income slum area in Thane known as Chandanwadi had been a Sena stronghold. The area, which has around 20,000 people, comprises a number o f older chawk> some upgraded hutment areas and newer slums. The Shiv Sena shakha, painted in brilliant colours (in itself part of the performance), is placed next to the main road going through the area. This shakha had for years been famous for its spectacular mandap tableaux in the Ganapatiutsav and its many active Sainiks are always to be seen around the shakha at night. Two brothers, rising businessmen, had been the leading Sena men in the area for a long time and they had the characteristics that are

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31

quite typical o f local Sena leaders and central to the Sena’s profile: both of them had a reputation for violence and a history of being involved in various illegal activities. They were also seen as self-made, fearless, and courageous men who had been scarred by life and who, therefore, had a capacity for making the right choices and to protect the neighbourhood and get things done. The brothers belonged to the Maratha caste which further consolidated their reputation for action and violence. But this was not mentioned to me by the people unless I asked them specifically. During this time Chandanwadi was seen as a Sena territory and the local residents benefited regularly from the Sena’s various high-profile actions— distributing free foodgrains, oil, school books, ambulance services, etc. The brothers also helped protect residents against police raids, especially in the southern end o f the area, known for prostitution and illegal liquor breweries, and they helped local people who were harassed by money lenders. The Sena’s popularity in the area began to decline in 1989 after Thackeray forced all the Sena councillors in the Thane city to resign. Their fault lay in their inability to prevent the defection o f four councillors to the Congress— an event that cost the Shiv Sena its dominance in the Thane Municipal Corporation. The two brothers began to quarrel and the local Sena district chief, Anand Dighe— whose life and reputation is larger than life and an ongoing spectacle (see Hansen, 2001, pp. 104-12)— decided to support one o f the brothers against the other. The quarrelling led to a certain inactivity and decline in the life o f the shakha and in the Sena’s credibility as protectors and suppliers o f various services to the area. The shakha was more or less dormant for several years. As a result, a young man, Pawar— also a Maratha with a ‘reputation’ of violence and links to the underworld— emerged from the southern end of the area as an aspiring dada with considerable success. In the northern end o f Chandanwadi, dominated by bhaiyas (nickname for north Indians), a north Indian Brahmin, owner o f most o f the land, and an aspiring builder, Bula Sheth, emerged as the new strongman. According to what he told me, his main interest in local politics was to get permission to clear the slums and build highrises. The respect given to Bula Sheth had to do with the fact that he was a Brahmin, an educated man who knew the ways o f the bureaucracy, could write letters, lent money to his tenants, and was known for being helpful and gentle. He ran a small dairy with about twenty cows around his house, and always sat outside on the porch o f his house

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

demonstrating how approachable he was. Although I heard stories about how some o f his men would evict tenants quite brutally, he retained this mild mannered, rural air about him— something many o f the bhaiyas considered very endearing. He was quite realistic about politics: I could never win a seat here, I am a bhaiya and the people in this ward would not vote for me. They are Maharashtrians and they like strong men like the More brothers. This is why I have decided to support Pawar. I was sure he could win the seat.

Supported by a rich maverick builder family in Thane— running hotels and bars all over the district, and a major financier of the local Congress party— Pawar soon emerged as a serious contender for power in Chandanwadi. He started his own Mitra Mandal (friends association)— a ubiquitous form o f social institution and youth club found all over the larger metropolitan area— which soon began to organize religious festivals on a grand scale. Rumours o f parties thrown by Pawar that served lots of meat and alcohol spread and he soon had a cohort o f young men in Chandanwadi following him and working with him. Pawar now adopted the style and gestures o f the proverbial ifcufa-politician— dressed in white and wearing heavy golden chains and rings. He also acquired an impressive patron— the builder whose son drove Pawar all over the city in his shiny new Tata jeep and sat in his office as a permanent advisor to the only semi-literate Pawar. In the municipal elections in 1992 Pawar linked up with Sheth and managed to win the seat as councillor in the ward. As a reward for this important victory, Pawar was given the post o f member o f the Standing Committee in the Municipal Corporation for a year which enabled him to pay back his debt. Pawar readily admitted this logic: I was given this post in return for my victory in Chandanwadi. Since then I have issued many ‘No Objection Certificates’ to shopkeepers and builders in the area. They have also donated substantial amounts o f money to the social work we carry out in our Mitra Mandal. (Interview in Thane city, October 1992.)

This and many similar processes in other parts of Thane indicated how much the image o f the local Sainiks depended on the larger public image o f the Sena as well as the capacity for sustained local actionism and service delivery. It also demonstrated that the performative capacity of the Sena in both these respects was rather more dependent on the access to resource flows in political institutions than its public image and self-projections would admit. The mode of functioning and the

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33

logic o f patronage governing the Sena at this level resembled rather closely that o f any political party in India. Without spectacular action and violence performed in public, however, the Sena was reduced to a normal political mechanism and became bedeviled by the logic o f entropy that seem to govern local politics in most Indian cities except in times of large political campaigning or sharpening o f political or communal antagonisms. Let me give a last twist to the story about how the Congress in turn took up Sena methods to retain a ‘presence’ as Pawar was losing his profile and ability to sustain his maverick image. While Anand Dighe in 1997 campaigned in the name o f party discipline, Congress candidates in Chandanwadi, among them N. Pawar, embarked on a protest against the alleged demolition by the authorities o f a small Ganesh temple in the neighbourhood. Employing the techniques that the Sena had honed and made common, Pawar declared a bandh (closure o f shops) in the area, stopped traffic on the main road, and declared that he and other candidates would fast indefinitely until the city administration issued an official apology. Interestingly, neither the Shiv Sena nor the BJP even commented on the issue which did not seem to have any major impact on the election result. The Shiv Sena’s candidate won a convincing victory not least due to a very effective campaign run and controlled by Anand Dighe, who up until the last minute allowed rumours o f his own possible candidature for the post o f mayor to dominate the better part of the campaign. The winning candidate in Chandanwadi was a young man from an OBC community who was a loyal Sena activist but was relatively unknown in the neighborhood in his own right as a worker or strongman. So in this case, the Sena’s ability to manage the mood once again overshadowed the range of local concerns— drainage, water connections, jobs, stable electricity supply— that many people in the area were complaining about. C

o n c l u s io n

The image o f the Sainik as a defiant, violent plebeian male is obviously not always sociologically correct, as the above example indicates. The dada style of politics is also practised by other political formations just as the Sena also engages in rather ‘normal’ inconspicuous forms o f politics. Yet the Sainiks who Thackeray addresses and seeks to create through speeches and other gestures, are nonetheless conceptualised as an abstract and generalized ‘plebeiaji male’ (see Hansen, 1996b).

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Many, including regular middle class boys, find the Sena’s call for a no-nonsense and violent masculinity both appealing and sensuous. This kind of ‘ordinary guy5image has come evermore to the fore in Indian public culture over the past decades— including in the Hindi cinema and not unlike the way in which Hollywood has transformed the ‘regular guy into a lonely, often slightly deviant avenger type. The rhetorical prominence of the plebeian is, one could say, one o f democracy’s cultural consequences. But it is a figure that is truly symbolic in the sense that the ‘plebeian male’ cannot be determined sociologically, even less can a ‘plebeian’ constituency— it simply fragments into localities, class, and caste segments as in Chandanwadi. The plebeian is a symbol whose invocation refers to something more intangible and yet more effective, namely what Foucault in one o f his flashes of insight called ‘plebness’— by which he meant a sentiment, a defiant collective mood that in some ways is the very limit of politics and governance (Foucault 1966, p. 52). In my understanding, plebness is a kind o f register o f resistance and reaction that inevitably is engendered by policies, governance, policing, in public cultures that celebrate courage, rights and freedom but are also marked by large ‘grey’ zones of partly unintelligible, unknown or unknowable social worlds— the zopadpattis, the slum worlds and its popular practices. Many contributions to the Subaltern Studies series have been trying to capture this residue, and the entire series was always driven by a fascination for the opacity of the social worlds o f ordinary people— often seen as relatively uncolonized, or as ungovemed forms o f sociality. The Shiv Sena’s invocation o f ‘plebness’ demonstrates, I think, how problematic such an understanding can be and how ambivalent, violent and profoundly unheroic the plebeian register can be. Yet ‘plebness’ and plebeian styles of acting, appearing and speaking in public are undoubtedly very real and existing sentiments— with equally real and deeply ambivalent effects in the world— such as public violence, logics o f ‘reputations’ and protection, and subsequent voting behaviour that seems to defy many o f the assumptions in political sociology. I think we should take seriously Chatterjee’s suggestion that the actually existing political forms in Indian society may represent new and hitherto unseen forms o f democratic politics (Chatterjee 2000). We must therefore plunge ourselves into the universes o f discourse, action, and sentiment in these spaces that according to my own and many other people’s experiences indeed are complex and chaotic but also imminently accessible and welcoming and by no means as opaque

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as they may appear from a distance. Only thus may we begin to understand the complexities o f these social worlds and come to grips with ‘popular* or ‘plebeian* identities as transient, if momentarily highly effective, performative registers.

B ib l io g r a p h y Arjun Appadurai (2000), ‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai’, Public Culture 12 (3). J.L Austin (1962), How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Judith Butler (1993), Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits o f “Sex”. New York and London: Roudedge. Partha Chatterjee (2000), ‘Modernity and the Negotiation o f Death’, South Asia Research, Vol. 20. Julia M. Eckert (2000),‘Participation and the Politics o f Violence. Towards the Sociology o f an Anti-democratic Movement.’ Berlin: Dissertation zur Verlage am Fachbereich Politik und Sozialwissenschaften an der Freien Universität Berlin. Murray Edelman (1988), Constructing the Political Spectacle, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Michel Foucault (1967), ‘Powers and Strategies’ in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, Sydney: Feral Publications. Clifford Geertz (1980), Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Erving Goffman (1959), The Presentation o f Self in Everyday Life, Garden City: Doubleday Anchor. Dipankar Gupta (1982), Nativism in a Metropolis, Delhi: Manohar. Thom as B. Hansen (2 0 0 1 ), Wages o f Violence. Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton: Princeton University Press. _________(1996a), ‘The Vernacularisation o f Hindutva: BJP and Shiv Sena in Rural Maharashtra’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 2: 177214. _________(1996b), ‘Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu nationalism, Violence And the Exorcism o f the Muslim “Other”’, Critique o f Anthropology, 16 (2): 137-72. Albert O. Hirschman (1977), The Passions and the Interest. Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Daniel Jasper (2002), ‘The Shivaji Legacy in Maharashtra’, Ph.D. thesis, New York: New School University.

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Mary F. Katzenstein (1981), Equality and Ethnicity—Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Policies in Bombay, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Raminder Kaur (1998), ‘Performative Politics: Artworks, Festival Praxis and Nationalism with special reference to the Ganpati Utsava in Western India.’ Ph.D. Dissertation, Department o f Anthropology, School o f Oriental and African Studies, London. _________(forthcoming), A Trunk Full o f Tales: Performative Politics in Western India, Delhi: Permanent Black. Claude Lefort (1988), Democracy and Political TheoryyCambridge: Polity Press. V.S. Naipaul (1991), India: A Million Mutinies Now, London: Minerva. Richard Schechner (1988), Performance Theory. New York and London: Routledge.

2 Fire in the Belly: The Mobilization o f the Ganapati Festival in Maharashtra Raminder Kaur

4Hatiche dakhvayche dat ek, khaiche dat dusre’ An elephant shows one set of teeth (tusks), and eats with another set. (A Marathi proverb.) Since the recent Hindutva resurgence in Indian public culture, much attention has turned towards the political mobilization of religion.1 This has centred on transmutations o f religious practices (Nandy, 1988, Barucha, 1993), intercommunal tensions (Pandey, 1993, van der Veer, 1996), and their implications for gender (Hansen, 1999), a focus on rath yatra — that is, chariot processions across the country (Assayag, 1996, Davis, 1996), changes in iconography (Kapur, 1993), the reception o f epics on television (Mankekar, 1999, Rajagopal, 2001 ) and the Hindutva use of media in general (Farmer, 1996). In this chapter, I consider the arena o f religio-cultural festivals, turning also to historical precedents as a comparison for latter day examples of what might be termed cultural mobilization. The subject at issue is a comparative study o f the mobilization o f the festival dedicated to the elephant­ headed god, Ganapati, principally in the 1890s and 1990s. Hence, the 1 Hindutva literally means ‘Hindu-ness’.

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‘fire in the bell/ — a reference not just to the conceptualization o f the deity as vighnahartOy ‘the remover o f obstacles’, but also the significance o f his rotund belly, lambodara, to eat away the ‘sins o f the world’. When transposed onto a political plane, such associations o f the deity endow the festival with even more imaginative potency (and indeed has been done so to these ends). This broad trans-historical focus then enables me to consider the question of political fragmentation and alliances in the context o f western India, now since 1960 the linguistic province o f Maharashtra. Before doing this, I first assess what we might mean by cultural mobilization, enquiring into concepts o f religion, culture and mobilization respectively. T

erm s o f th e

D

eba te

Clifford Geertz has argued that religion, rather than being an other­ worldly phenomena, is compatible with concepts o f culture. His working definition applies as much to religion as it does to culture. He defines religion as: (1) a system o f symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order o f existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura o f factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic (1969, p. 4). The stress on symbols mitigates the drawing o f boundaries between a supposedly ‘mystical* religious domain and the mundane praxis o f culture. Such a demarcation is implicit in, for instance, Maurice Bloch’s suggestions for ‘a minimum irreducible structure’ that is seen to be common to ritual and other religious phenomena (1992, p. 3). However, even if we were to accept that there is a minimum irreducible feature to religious experience, this aspect is o f marginal relevance to an analysis o f religion as a constitutive part o f the mundane world in the form o f political campaigns— the focus o f this chapter. Returning then to Geertz* formulations, there are two main problems of note. First, there are serious limitations in the ‘trans-cultural’ application o f * his insights— that is, for example, in contexts where religion might be conceptualized as discrete and culture becomes the mediating territory between various social constituencies perhaps living in the same area. This observation could also apply for the reverse scenario, where we might find the global spread o f a particular religion across markedly very different cultures. Second, Geertz’ use o f ‘symbol’ assumes that they are identifiable and systematic, rather than normalized as part o f

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39

lived worlds from the outset (Sperber, 1975). Nonetheless, for the purposes o f this study on the Ganapati festival, there is much scope for the framing o f the issue thus where religion and culture become interchangeable. With the invocation o f religious or cultural politics, the ambit o f Geertz> approach is further widened. In cases where religion is recruited for political purposes, it is deliberately applied as a distinct ethical rationale for quotidian life, enveloping politics in powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods, m otivations, and orientations (see also Caplan, 1987). Due to a legacy o f quasi-scientific frameworks in political science, culture has, up until recently, either been overlooked as tangential or has been seen as a residual force outside the realm o f realpolitik. When the primordiality o f culture is instanced in the political sphere, it is, according to theorists o f this ilk, equated with the primitivism o f the subjects involved. This is the implication o f Terry Eagletons (2000) understanding o f the term as it is the assumption o f political scientists o f a 'rationalist* persuasion (e.g. Chandra, 1979; Engineer, 1989). The dichotomous logics o f rationality and the compartmentalization o f the life-world are themes that underpin much o f the debates on modem governance and the arena o f realpolitik. As a way o f developing the argument, it is instructive to consider Raymond Williams’ work on culture (1981,1983). Williams identifies three main ways in which culture is understood. First, culture as civilization, with its implications o f superiority, and the enlightened and moral individual, described as ‘a general process o f intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’. Second, culture as repertoire— that is, alluding to ‘the works and practices o f intellectual and especially artistic activity9. And third, culture as a set o f customs, associations, as a distinct way o f life (1983, p. 91). For the latter, culture might appear bounded so as it is represented as if it belongs to someone/some group, it could be commoditized through the workings o f market forces, or it could be seen as a reified entity as the outcome o f regional/national governance and surveillance strategies. To these three broad understandings, a fourth culture concept could be added by way o f the writings o f Antonio Gramsci (1971, 1995). A Gramscian view proposes that culture be construed as dynamic, contested, and sometimes contradictory as part o f the nuances o f lived praxis. This is a notion that has been hugely influential on the writings of the Subaltern Studies group, the Birmingham School o f Cultural Studies (e.g. Hall, 1996) and latterday applications o f culture in

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

anthropology (e.g. Appadurai, 1996). Nonetheless despite Gramsci’s insights on hegemony and civil society, they have been variously applied, and often overlooked as in the likes o f Eagleton’s work. Unhelpful dualisms— o f culture against politics, religion against rationality and so forth— reign supreme in a very reified and essentialist understanding o f (religio) culture. I am not suggesting that these four traits o f culture are not interconnected nor am I saying that these are the only ways o f conceptualizing culture. But the addition o f the perspectives on culture permits me to engage fruitfully in the discussion on cultural mobilization, which, below, I refer to as culture concepts 1-4 accordingly. Mobilization implies, first, that there is a movement from one signifying praxis/context to another often related one; and, second, that the links between ideas, lived praxis, and action are compressed such that the relationship between a notion of culture and that o f politics is intensified. This then forms the basis for pursuing various collective agendas and interests for change. This movement is primarily one o f channelling various signifiers into another signifying field such that they are invigorated, recharged, and often altered. However, as Ernesto Laclau (1990) argues for movements, this can only ever be a partial channelling for to act over the ‘social’ is never ever complete and total. Furthermore, I note that there is a time factor built into the notion o f mobilization. Perceived as spontaneous and insistent on change in the immediate future, the movement’s fate is either to be eventually institutionalized or bureaucratized so that its political efficacy is domesticated and contained; or it fizzles out perhaps to be revitalized at a later date. Thus, bearing the inherent uncontainability and temporal contingencies o f cultural complexes in mind, the processes o f cultural mobilization might be argued to affect the following changes: (a) The processes o f cultural mobilization could be possibly reductive. I emphasize ‘possibly’ in order to diverge from the general consensus in the literature on political uses o f culture and identity. For example, Arjun Appadurai argues: ‘Culture 1, constituting a virtually open-ended archive of differences is consciously shaped into Culture 2, that subset o f these differences that constitutes the diacritics o f group identity’ (1997, p. 14). Whilst conceivably true, this process is however not the only way concepts o f culture mutate, as we will see below. Nonetheless, this dynamic applies

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for situations where organic and diverse practices are managed for m ore instrum ental ends, possibly implying a series o f mutations and reifications (as with culture concept 4 above to culture concept 3). Consonant with this, is a re-mapping o f social inclusivity and exclusivity— that is, a re-envisaging o f who is (potentially) involved or excluded, as the case may be, in the designated cultural group. (b) The processes o f cultural mobilization could be catalyzing if they involve the mobilization of culture as repertoire or a set o f customs into a more invigorating and turbulent field. For instance, the use o f reified icons could take on other lives and meanings, occasionally unforeseen as influenced by the unpredictability o f receptive audiences (e.g. Davis, 1997). This is a case o f culture concept 2 opening up to culture concept 4. An example might be the emblem o f Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior king, in later political campaigns. This icon might have been mobilized to promote Maharashtrian identity but ends up being a very pliable or contested signifier between Marathas, Brahmins and Dalits and even utilized by colonial government as a means of recruiting soldiers for World War II (O’Hanlon, 1985). (c) The processes o f cultural mobilization could energize em otional affectivity to a repertoire o f signifiers. The corporeal sense o f association with various iconic figures could well overtake its ‘objective’ nature where dichotomies o f mind-body, reasonemotion etc. could collapse. This perspective applies to the range of manoeuvrability between all the culture concepts. Whether in terms o f (1) an evaluative morality, (2) cultural repertoires, (3) customs, and (4) lived contradictions, a corporeal sense o f dis/ association between the cultures in question is paramount. (d) Finally, th e processes o f cu ltu ral m obilization could be ethicizing — that is, they could provide an ethical framework for instrumental or political conduct,2 This perspective invokes culture concept 1 to provide an ethical and humane rationale for political conduct. Actions are in a sense ‘baptized’ in a moralizing discourse about ethical or cultural supremacy over contestants

2 I favour ethicizing rather than ethics or ethical as it implies a dynamic, processual and contingent process rather than its noun or adjectival forms.

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or those not designated as part o f the ‘in-group*.3 But this too could be contested by others claiming higher moral grounds, or by those who have a differential sense o f ethics borne out o f a combination of several factors contingent on the fractures o f class/ caste complexes, gender, regional affiliations, educational history and other attainments, and political orientations. Thus, ethicizing, whilst purporting to be a totalizing process, is also one that differentiates: for instance, contrast the masculinist actionorientated ethics premised upon the gangster-orientated dadaism o f the Shiv Sena as opposed to the paternalist, Brahm indominated ethics of the BJP (Hansen, 1996b) even though both share an ethic essentially based on Hindu nationalism. Even though all o f the examples have been taken from the South Asian context, this is not to argue that they are exclusive to this area. The features noted o f cultural mobilization could apply elsewhere, processes that, perhaps, are inflected by other registers. For the sake o f clarity, it is the latter theme— culture as ethicizing— that I want to concentrate on in this chapter, where culture becomes a privileged reference for the citational practice o f politics. It is this quality of culture that aids realpolitik as an empowering force (as is also implied by Geertz* formulation o f culture), rather than seeing culture as a debilitating force as is implied by political realists. The other perspectives on culture will be implicit if not explicit throughout the discussion. The perspective on ethicizing recalls Gramsci’s definition o f ethicopolitical history as ‘an arbitrary and mechanical hypostasis o f the movement o f hegemony, o f political leadership, o f consent in the life and development in the activity o f the state and civil society* (1971, 1995, pp. 343-44). Ethicizing entails processes o f legitimation, where political movements attain consent and therefore hegemony. The consent need not traverse both state and civil society, but can be splintered along the lines o f class, caste, gender, race, region and nation.

3 Rather than invoking Michel Foucault’s totalizing notions of discourse, 1 find Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s formulation more useful. Laclau and Mouffe refer to the differential terrain of hegemony but also point out the ‘impossibility of any given discourse to implement a final suture’— describing it as the ‘field of discursivity’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 111). This proposition enables an identification of sets of discursive fields articulate in society as well as an exploration of the power differentials between them.

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Space precludes me the consideration o f all these fractured yet overlapping constituencies, but I do allude to the tensions as well as collusion between nation (as populace) and state machinations. C u l t u r e a n d C o l o n ia l is m

The encounter with colonialism forged an incipient grammar to do with the ethicizing role o f culture. The purported superiority of Indian culture came to a head with the nationalist struggle from the late nineteenth century onwards. This sense of superior culture emerged in the effort to distinguish themselves from the British. Partha Chatterjee describes it as the: fam iliar nationalistic problematic o f the material and the spiritual, the identification o f an incompleteness in the claims o f the modem West to a superior culture and asserting the sovereignty o f the nation over the domain o f spirituality (1994, p. 48).

Premised upon an essential difference between East and West, the fruits o f western superiority in political economy, technology and science were not however to be renounced. Instead a sense o f distinctive and spiritualized culture provided ‘ideological justification for the selective appropriation o f western modernity* (Chatterjee, 1994, p. 120). Dichotomies such as inner and outer, ghar and baharythe home and the world were widely prevalent. Chatterjee continues: The world was where the European power had challenged the non-European peoples and, by virtue o f its superior material culture, had subjugated them. But, the nationalists asserted, it had failed to colonize the inner, essential, identity o f the East, which lay in its distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture (1994, p. 121).

Although writing mainly about literature in Bengal, Chatterjee’s framework also applies to the performative spaces of western India. We need to envisage ‘home’ as not just an ‘inner’ space, but also what can be designated as ‘indigenous’— that is, prior to British rule, which could encompass temple and larger com m unal categories and residences. The ethicizing invocation of culture, with its sense o f the collective rather than individual self-interest, enabled the pursuit o f various political paths. Religio-culture became a legitimate resource for revivalist and political movements. Even though material prowess resided in the infrastructure o f modern governance, their representa­ tives were believed to have little cultural superiority. The corridors of power were also the breeding ground o f all kinds o f perceived

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intolerable excesses. Modern governance contained within it the seeds for selfish and self-interested political pursuits. The image of the powergreedy politician fighting for the kursi, the seat of power, was a perpetual bugbear: gone unchecked it could lead to severities, such as corruption, callousness and criminalization. Underlying these associations is the danger of de-culturization and unethical practices. Movements being placed outside the formal framework o f politics ironically enable a discourse o f superiority, one that can be put to the altar o f ethics in the name of the ‘people’. This is a strategy which as we shall see with the example of the Shiv Sena leader, Bal Thackeray, below persists with a vengeance to this day. The mobilization of the Ganapati festival in the 1890s was one way culture was mobilized for a political purpose— both to broaden the political base o f supporters and to legitimize political struggle (Cashman, 1975). The festival, which after the times o f Peshwa rule in 1818 was confined primarily to the temple and the house, began to be openly celebrated in neighbourhoods in public spaces. On the last day, a procession modelled on the ones held for the Shi’ite occasion of Muharram accompanied the models of the deity (murti) to the waters. Religio-culture was manifestly reworked for a public occasion. The event enabled a circumvention o f colonial rules against public demonstrations. Its significance as a socio-political vehicle was particularly apposite for the illiterate and/or the lower classes. As one o f its main publicists, Bal Gangadhar Tilak aspired to raise socio­ political awareness on the use o f vernacular culture rather than the debating chambers preferred by Congress moderate politicians.4 4 It need be slated that despite Tilak’s outstanding work and the thorough expositions of his role in the festival by Richard Cashman (1975), Tilak did not start the sarvajanik (public) festival. Tilak reported it, lectured on it, played a part in setting up several mandate (organization), and thus propagated it. The festival quickly captured various community leaders’ imagination, and the organic, cellular growth of the festival became bigger than any one associated person or party. A cobweb of mandals all with their own situated motivations and agendas proliferated in the region. By the 1920s, concerted attempts were made by the Satya Shodak Samaj and other non-Brahman groups, to co-opt the local festivities in tune to their own agendas (Omvedt 1976, p. 228). However, by the 1930s, largely due to the influence of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his left-leaning politics, the Congress was successful in representing mass indigenous economic and cultural aspirations, and absorbed the larger part of the non-Brahman movement, at least up until Independence (see Kaur 2002, and 2003, Chapter 3).

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Divergent views on the political use o f culture were already discernible in the nineteenth century— as exemplified by fissures emerging on the basis o f religion, particularly as to the question o f Muslim participation, caste and the disagreements between so-called Extrem ists and Moderates represented by Tilak and G okhale.5 Around 1896, disagreements between the Moderates or reformers such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Extremists or neo-traditionalists represented by Tilak were made manifest (Courtright, 1985: pp. 229-30). Thus, anti­ colonial campaign did not present a dichotomous set o f relationships, but a field o f consent and contestation involving a nexus of relation­ ships, alliances, and antagonisms. Similarly, the festival was not managed as a whole by any one organization for one specific agenda, but by several mandals throughout the western Indian region for a variety o f causes. An intriguing example o f the political usage o f religio-culture is the Bhau Rangari Ganapati Mandal. Rather than accrediting Tilak as the pioneer o f the public politicized festival, evidence from Pune suggests that it was Bhau Rangari, alias Bhausaheb Lakshman Javale, a Maratha ayurvedic doctor and cloth-dyer. Along with his revolutionary coterie associated with the Natu brothers, Bhau Rangari was instrumental in setting up the first sarvajanik mandal in 1892-93 (Kaur 2002 and 2003). The associated Ganapati murti exists to this day due to the practice o f immersing a second and smaller murti into the Pune rivers, Mula and Mutha. The deity is shown in the act o f killing a rakshasa (demon) ‘as a personification o f action and even violence’ (M aharashtra Herald, 17 December, 1990, see Fig. 2 .1).7 This murti representation

5 It is not that the festival was anathema to all low-caste participants. Only some of the more politically conscientious objected to its Brahmanic hegemony, and thus either sought to co-opt it for themselves, or later those aligned with Ambedkar, chose to boycott it altogether. 6 The terms Extremists and Moderates represent relational positions, the latter veering more toward social reform. In his speech in Calcutta on 2 January 1907, Tilak critiques these terms stating that they are relative to time: “The Extremists of today will be Moderates tomorrow, just as the Moderates of today were Extremists yesterday’ (cited in Ghose 1922, p. 55-67). 7 Even though these viewpoints are taken from the newspaper article, they were also corroborated by the present-day mandal members and other informants. The account elaborated here is not, however, intended as a picture of constancy,

Continued on the next page

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

Fig. 2.1 inspired several other mandals to adopt a martial m urti as well in the act of killing a demonic figure.8 The imagery o f activist Ganapati recalls Tilak’s advocations for ‘action in the world’ as well as invoking martial, Kshatriya ideals (Wakanknar, 1995). The representations o f Ganapati m urti present overwhelming evidence o f the use o f icons for conveying a veiled political message. M. M. Underhill notes: The growing interest o f students in politics, and the adoption o f Ganesa as their patron god, have united to connect him closely with the national m ovem ent.. . The legend o f slaying the elephant-headed demon, Gajasura, is interpreted to his worshippers, who are coming to his temple in increasing numbers, as being the deliverance o f the people from the national oppressor (1921, p. 50).

for wc cannot assume that, however compelling the evidence, the analysis applies for all periods, locations and people that engage with the festival and its displays. What it does indicate is the emergence of a vocabulary for cultural politics that persists in its various mutations to this day. 8 It is clear then that the martialization of Ram in the 1990s is not an exceptional case (Kapur, 1993). Earlier cases of martializcd deities do exist, but they do not appear to have direct influences on each other.

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Although I have not come across any representations o f elephant­ headed demons in the historical murti designs, there are a number of demon stories associated with Ganapati (Courtright, 1985, pp. 12936). The figure demonstrates an abstract distillation o f demonic forces as opposed to a reference to a particular allegory. Valentine Chirol unreservedly sees the demonic associated with the ‘foreigner’: ‘[Tilak] taught them ... that India and especially Maharashtra ... had been happier and better and more prosperous under a Hindu raj than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule o f alien “demons’” (1910, p. 54). He also noted the ferment such views bred during the Ganapati festival: These festivals gave occasion for theatrical performances and religious songs in which the legends o f Hindu mythology were skilfully exploited to stir up hatred o f the ‘foreigner’— and mlenccha, the term employed for ‘foreigner’, applied equally to Europeans and Mahomedans ... (1910, p. 44).

The foreigner here is one that is foreign to native soils, but also the ‘foreigner within* the ascribed body politic.9 On a parallel note, rakshasas are not just the evil spirits in other worlds, but their malignant incarnations in this (Moor, 1810, p. 94). In contemporary Pune, the favoured view espoused by informants emphasizes the anti-colonial perspective: ‘To many the rakshasa Ganesh shown killing is a personification o f the country’s erstwhile British rulers’ (Maharashtra Herald, 17 December 1990). As is the levelling effect o f retrospective nationalist narratives, the whole composition in times o f political agitation makes allegorical allusions to the overthrow o f colonial powers. But it is quite feasible to not define the ‘demon’, and instead imagine it as an ‘empty signifier’ to be filled in by the concerns and anxieties of the individual. The signifier o f Ganapati, in this context, is less ambiguous. As the remover o f obstacles ( vighna ) in the way o f national justice and self-determination, he is vividly recruited for the world o f performative politics. The nature o f religious allegory precluded straightforward incrim ination or accusation o f seditious m aterial by colonial authorities. This was not simply due to their official policy o f non­ interference in religious matters, but also due to the nature o f prosecution, which, however biased in the colonial context, was required to meet some mandatory stipulations. As Tilak put it in his defence in the Kesari prosecution trial o f 1908: 9 See Thomas Blom Hansen’s article (1996b) for a discussion of the Muslim imagery in contemporary India.

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A case o f sedition divides itself into three points, first there is the publication o f the article [representation], secondly, there are certain insinuations and innuendoes and lastly the question o f intentionality ( The Kesari Prosecution, 1908).

Whilst representations could be suspected as seditious, and insinuations and innuendoes could be sensed, the question o f intentionality remained intransigent.10 Furthermore, suitable evidence against immanently seditious religious iconography could not easily be gathered to be presented for the procedural rationality o f the colonial courts. Evidently, the murti vividly served as a visual and conceptual vehicle o f‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott, 1989,1990). A hidden transcript is, as James Scott elaborates, ‘typically expressed openly— albeit in disguised form ... [and] ... insinuates a critique o f power while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings o f their conduct’ (Scott, 1990, p. xiii). Applying a Foucauldian paradigm o f pluri-centred power, hidden transcripts can also be articulated by those that professedly rule: ‘The powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of their rules that cannot be openly avowed’ (Scott, 1990, p. xii). This is a subject outside the purview of this study.11 Admittedly, the proclivity for ‘hidden tran scrip ts’ is m ore p ertinent to non-despotic periods or in circumstances where at least the protocol o f liberal democracy is seen to be upheld.12 10 On the distaste felt for the allegorical politics of a drama, Kichak Vadh, Chirol elaborates: ‘It may be said that this is mere fooling. But no Englishman who has seen the play acted would agree. All his life, he will remember the tense, scowling feces of the men as they watch Kichaka’s outrageous acts, the glistening eyes o f the Brahmin ladies as they listen to Draupadi’s entreaties, their scorn of Yudhisthira’s tameness, their admiration of Bhima’s passionate protests, and the deep hum of satisfaction which approves the slaughter of the tyrant’ (Chirol, 1910, p. 339). Disturbing as it might be to the authorities, it was constitutionally difficult to impound all those involved or indeed those who hummed with satisfaction at the denouement. 11 It is, however, explored by Bernard Cohn (1983) for the case of colonial rituals of state and becomes relevant to my focus in later chapters on spectacles of the post-independent nation. 12 ‘Hidden transcript’ recalls E. P. Thompson’s argument about ‘theatre’: ‘an essential component both o f political control and of protest or even rebellion. The rulers act out the theatre of majesty, superstition, power, wealth, sublime justice; the poor cnact their counter-theatre, occupying the stages of the streets for markets and employing the symbolism of ridicule or protest’ (1979: 10).

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Thus, hidden transcript is not intended to convey the idea o f it being evident to some exclusive few, and hidden to others. The point is that it was not so explicitly obvious, and the messages disseminated were adaptable to suit the occasion. Scott asks: ‘Are they playing or are they in earnest? It is in their interest to exploit this opportune ambiguity to the fullest’ (Scott, 1990, p. 182). Sandria Freitag states: The very ambiguity of the visual mode of communication— the very ability of the viewer to bring his or her gaze, individual interpretations and contextualization—provides much room fo manoeuvre and negotiate in the relationship to the state within the public sphere (1995, p. 31). Written, and to a lesser extent, spoken words were much easier to regulate and thus mete out appropriate responses than the many‘words’ residing in imagery, or the many stories conveyed by pictures. But it was not visual modes o f communication alone that made representa­ tions ambiguous. Some visual representations were in fact banned (G an achari, 1994). These proscribed images were invariably characterized by unmistakable figures and provocative labels or slogans. But when visual manouevrability is combined with the uncontainable power of allegory, it makes for very slippery terrain. The religious trope had the advantage of being at once devotional and intimate, yet it could also impart a political message. Combined with colonial hesitation over interfering in matters to do with indigenous religions, the unstable and provisional nature o f the religio-political composition made incriminating evidence difficult to gather for colonial prohibition under laws against sedition. Despite the continuing prevalence o f more orthodox representations of Ganapati, the murti has evidently acted as a site o f innovation and activation of socio-political concerns. This case study serves various points with which to move on to the contemporary scenario. First (religio-)culture, albeit subject to communal tensions, has been advantageous in broadening particular forms o f political struggle for the larger populace. Second, culture as an arena for politics, whilst accessible to some» could be denied to others, namely to colonial authorities, and in communally charged circumstances, to non-Hindus as well. Third, culture as providing the base for hidden transcripts o f nationalism is partially made redundant in the post-Independence case where the nation is presented as a discrete package o f culture (culture concept 3) that is unreservedly venerated. Such events over a period o f anti-colonial struggle led not just to the sacralization of culture, but also to the ‘nation’. Instead, in

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contemporary times culture can become the basis for providing a number o f other hidden transcripts largely to do with individual political or communalist instrumentalities, the latter proscribed by constitutional stipulations. It is this aspect o f the debate that we next move on to with a focus on the Shiv Sena’s use of the contemporary festival. L a tt er d a y R u m b l in g s The situation in contem porary India is such that religion and nationalism have come to be conceptualized on an orthogonal plane to that of self-serving political instrumentality ( rajnaitik ). Nationalism (rashtriya) is the ideal ethos, whereas the invocation of religion in the political arena is ambivalent— it can be either a legitimate practice in that it provides an ethical rationale or it can be deemed illegitimate, in that it provokes communal ire. Rajnaitik activities, whilst seemingly upholding democratic principles, are subject to criticism of being selfserving, criminal and corrupt.13 Rajnaitik alludes to non-transparent principles premised on hierarchy and self-interest. In Indian public culture, it is a combination o f tradition and modernity, the conjunction o f selfless conduct and egalitarianism that is most venerated. In the wake o f a history o f dedicating work for India’s independence, to advocate religion or nationalism is to imbue the body politic with ideals o f selfless morality. This is in contradistinction to the material, expansionist self-interests of the west, one historical by-product of which was the subjugation o f the subcontinent. As is made clear by terms such as desh sevak (servant o f the nation) or desh bhakta (devotee o f the nation), self-sacrifice for the sake o f the just nation is upheld. But here lies the very attraction for those consider£d to be in the rajnaitik realm which in contemporary times, desh bhakti has come to be defined against (Hansen, 1999). The history of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra since 1966 has been peppered not just by violence and aggressive action, but also by its recourse to the ethicizing tropes o f culture. Culture for the Sena in its early days was defined principally by regionalism and language. This was particularly potent in the wake o f the Samyukta Maharashtra

13 The Gandhian veteran, Usha Mehta, describes them as part of a latter-day ‘corruptocracy’ and ‘monstrocracy’.

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movement for statehood up until 1960 (Phadke, 1979).14 Narratives that traversed Maharashtrian with national history were also upheld. Critical here was the figurehead of Shivaji. The seventeenth-century Maratha warrior-king evokes the ‘golden age o f Maharashtra’, and is celebrated as the founder o f the Maratha polity, an exemplar o f just and uncorrupted rule, and the victor against Mughal challenge which today translates into victory over ‘anti-national’ Muslims. The rule o f Shivaji, Shivshahi, is deemed as a just and principled rule compared to the tyranny o f the Mughals, and as an extension, British colonialism. It has also been set up as an ideal in contrast to corruption in government which prior to their State Assembly success in 1995 was largely considered a Congress disease. Shivshahi becomes a means o f providing an ethical alternative to modem governance. Along with other features of Maharashtrian heritage, for which the icon o f Ganapati was also exemplary, the ‘Sena established a kind o f “hegemony” in the Gramscian sense. The party tapped popular beliefs and values, glorified the little cultures o f Maharashtra, and permeated a wide vista o f social relationships’ (Gupta, 1982, p. 60). Maharashtrian culture and history was an ‘exemplary order* (Gupta, 1982) to be utilized for politics. However, the economic lot o f Maharashtrians in the years after the status o f a linguistic province was attained was not so exemplary. It is largely due to these disparities that the politics of indigeneity was mobilized as a means with which to alleviate grievances in the political economy. A combination o f direct action tactics, ideological malleability, residential mobilization, and a strong network structure have led to the rising success and dominance of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai over the years. Many, sometimes even contradictory alliances, have been made as part o f its efforts to exploit electoral politics in order to secure its support base (Katzenstein et al. 1997, p. 382). This kind o f strategy is not new to the Shiv Sena which from the very outset when it was formed in 1966 was a chameleon party that changed alliances to suit the demands o f electoral politics. Even its ideology o f regionalism, patriotism, communism and anti-Muslim stances was malleable to * suit opportunistic alliances between, for instance, the Muslim League 14 Despite their parochialism, vacillations on category o f ‘local persons’ was prevalent in Shiv Sena rhetoric. This oscillated between (i) those who lived in Maharashtra; (ii) those who identified with ‘the joys and sorrows’ o f Maharashtra; and (iii) those whose mother tongue was Marathi, most importantly ‘true Maharashtrians’ (Katzenstein and Weiner, 1981, p. 45).

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and socialists. In brief, we could see the party’s life in terms of four main discontinuous phases: (i) the early days from 1966 characterized by a strong sense of nativism; (ii) the 1970s which could be described as the ‘wilderness years’ where the Sena made a bid for power-making alliances even with the Muslim League in 1979; (iii) the mid-1980s, after the Bhiwandi riots when the Sena won 77 seats in municipal elections, and joined the Hindutva brigade; and (iv) the fragmentation of the Shiv Sena with the departure of one of its key leaders, Chhagan Bhujbal and others to the Congress in 1991, and other offshoots o f the Sena with charismatic personalities who have developed a following such as Arun Gawli’s outfits: ‘In a sense,’ notes Sardesai, ‘the Sena resembles a cracked mirror today, having splintered into numerous small mafias’ (Sardesai, 1995, p. 133). In its early days, Hindutva as a distinct ideology was not as clearly articulated in the political arena by the Shiv Sena unless it was implicit in accusations o f Muslims being anti-national, or invoked to cclebrate regional festivals such as those to do with Shivaji and Ganapati. As already noted, this scenario changed in the mid-1980s when the platform o f Hindu nationalism became a means o f vehemently renegotiating Sainik nativism, a paradigm that was sometimes a stranglehold on their political ambitions.15 Since the 1980s, the Shiv Sena has taken on a more national perspective by stressing a Hindu identity consonant with the use o f Hindi in political sloganeering. This represents a shift in the politics o f parochialism for the Shiv Sena, allowing them to capitalize upon their local organizational standing as well as ride on the backs o f the national Hindutva brigade 15 Mary Katzenstein (1979) describes this as a case of new ethnicity as opposed to old ethnicity which is not necessarily territorial. These new forms of ethnic politics or what might be described as sons-of-the-soil movements are not secessionist or seeking greater autonomy but want greater social and economic equality for their ethnic group where there is frequent use of the outsider as implied in the slogan, ‘Maharashtra for Maharashtrians’. This is what enables a joining together with larger national Hindutva brigades whilst also guaranteeing themselves more moral authority in Maharashtra especially with the leadership of Bal Thackeray. I refer to Shiv Sena politics as parochial as opposed to regionalist, due to the fact that regionalism implies an element of desire for autonomy from the central state, which could grow into a sub-nationalist or ‘separatist’ cause as happened with the Khalistani movement for a Punjabi homeland. The Shiv Sena prioritize regional interests, culture and histories, but do not campaign for a separate state; rather they have striven to adopt a national agenda.

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(Katzenstein et al. 1997, p. 371-72). As the Sainik phrase goes, ‘First Rashtrdy then Maharashtra’. It is apparent that, as with the region of Maharashtra, religion has provided a vehicle with which to raise primordial emotions without needing to justify a particular political agenda. With the strategic alliance o f the BJP-Shiv Sena, the national-local spectrums o f powerbrokering were further facilitated. The alliance also provided a convenient combination of two tactical approaches: one o f law and democracy as represented by the BJP; the other o f authoritarianism and aggression as with the Shiv Sena, the VHP and Bajrang Dal (Basu et al. 1993, p. vii).16 Whilst the BJP-Sena alliance won the elections for the Maharashtra State Legislative Assembly from 1995-99, the party tended to promote a ‘softer’, more moderate and consensus-based side to its Hindu chauvinist image. The alliance had, to some extent, managed to woo some o f the Muslim vote bank (however precariously) due to their disaffection with the Congress party, and is eager to publicize its Muslim membership, which is still a minute percentage, however much critics consider this self-presentation as the politics o f tokenism.17 It becomes evident that culture (very close to the understanding of the ‘national’) as an ethicizing trope only has efficacy in the political arena once an other/opposition can be defined as unethical and by extension uncultured or uncivilized. Once ethical legitimacy is developed to further political work, it becomes easy to accuse others who are considered out o f the fold as unethical, spiritually bankrupt, self-interested and so forth. Those who have been dehumanized in the Sena firing line included the political opposition and Muslims in general. In their early days, it was communists that were in their firing line; and south Indians due to their predominance in white collar work which lower middle class educated Maharashtrians coveted. By the time of the 1995 State Assembly elections, the Sena’s (and BJP’s) role 16 Even though an alliance between the regionally-oriented Sena and the nationally-oriented BJP, it was the Sena that, as it were, wore the pants in this marriage of convenience. ‘The deal struck was that the BJP would be the major partners in the Lok Sabha elections, while the Sena would be given pride o f place in the Assembly elections that were to follow shortly after’ (Sardesai, 1995, p. 137). 17 Shabir Sheikh (MLA) is often publicized as proof o f the Shiv Sena’s rhetoric of broad-mindedness (Hansen, 1995, p. 22).

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in upholding culture (brokered on overlapping regional-national axes) was counterposed against other notorious C’s— namely corruption, callousness [against the treatment o f Muslim communities in riot situations] and criminalization (Guru, 1995). Mid-1990s Maharashtra was a time when factionalism within Congress ranks, a volatile time in Hindu-Muslim relations, fears about state security in the aftermath of the demolition o f the Babri Masjid in December 1992, and the Mumbai bomb blasts in March 1993 led to an upheaval of Congress rule in Maharashtra, as it did at central level.18 This strategy o f demonizing others whilst presenting oneself as saviours, although efficacious, was extremely tenuous. It could easily backfire, and in fact did. Consider, for instance, the loss of credibility of the Sena politicians once in power and accused of corruption. This was clearly the case with their resuming negotiations with the now defunct multinational company, Enron, even though only a year prior to their renegotiations, this issue was used to accuse the Congress o f selling out to foreign companies. Once in power, much criticism was levelled at the fact that the Sena nullified and then renegotiated the power project. In addition, Bal Thackeray’s nephew, Raj Thackeray, was accused o f murdering Ramesh Kini over property issues ( Outlook, 25 September 1996). Despite their street bases and municipal posts, the Shiv Sena had fully entered the state parliament. The party had, like the Congress, become tainted. They were not just representatives o f grassroots organized interests, but, in a sense, ‘contaminated’ by the seduction of political power. Effectively, they were constrained from being as immediate and effective within the confines of democratic bureaucracy. As Gerard Heuze notes, when commenting on the pre-1995 period: Today, the Shiv Sena has become ‘fat’ as many cadres and activists observe. It is now ritualized, bureaucratized, and structured. It has a working machinery that does not depend upon the people’s initiative ... It seems that many expressions o f violence, tension and provocation are related to the fear that the party is becoming institutionalized, ceasing to be a social movement, and the most dreaded fate, ‘beginning to look like the Congress Party’ (Heuze, 1995, p. 218).

18 Official Congress power in Maharashtra continued until 1995, when it was voted out o f power to be taken over by the BJP-Sena alliance (Guru 1995). Nonetheless, as Suhas Palshikar (1996) and Hansen (1996a) show, Congress strength persisted in places like Pune.

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Interestingly, here the ‘fat* of the mortal belly is not so much about removing the sins o f the world, but a product o f the sinful nature o f the world. Whilst many former supporters criticised the party, Bal Thackeray remained out o f the firing line. With the loss o f his son in a car accident and the sudden death of his wife in 1995, Thackeray became even more the self-sacrificing politician styled as a mendicant. Thackeray held no formal office whilst the Sena-BJP was in majority in the Assembly. After March 1995, the BJP candidate, Manohar Joshi, became Chief Minister while Thackeray acted as the overall political mentor, the supreme leader or his self-described role as ‘Remote-Control Chief Minister’ (see Kaur, 1998 and forthcoming). A strong personality cult developed around the figure o f Thackeray— a cult that saw him as a kind o f penumbra to the Sena machinery. He remained a powerful luminary that was not, however, been perceived to be contaminated by realpolitik.19 Shivaji’s portraits and busts are ubiquitous in Sainik quarters. It is notable that since 1995, when there was a change in the government in Maharashtra, there had been a greater demand for Ganapati murti and tableaux relating to the life and works of Shivaji. The coronation of Shivaji was repeatedly invoked after the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance came into state power. It was estimated by a murtikar that in 1995 around sixty per cent o f his orders were for Shivaji as a background theme to the Ganapati murti. Many mandaps (shrine displays) depicted Shivaji’s coronation, whereas many others related his birth, his development, and his rule, protecting the weak and punishing criminals.20 Fort reconstructions were numerous. They were based on the model o f 19 See Dipankar Gupta (1982, p. 74-5) and Gerard Heuze (1995, p. 214) for an account on the organizational structure o f the Sena. The Shiv Sena shakha are informal meeting places, as opposed to the orthodox and disciplined organizations of the RSS shakhas which advance brands of Hindu religious education and physical training (Wakankar, 1995, p. 56-7). Training is made available to Sainiks in the use of cudgel and sword, and firearms in the countryside (Heuze, 1992, p. 2193). These differences in the organizations are despite the fact that Thackeray had trained with the RSS cadres before setting up the Shiv Sena. 20 As another example of Shivaji’s significance to the Shiv Sena, the Maharashtra State Government represented a replica o f Chatrapati Shivaji’s naval force in the Republic Day Parade in Delhi in January 19%. The float depicted Shivaji’s naval chief, Kanhoji Angre, commanding a battleship with models wearing the traditional uniform worn by Shivaji’s soldiers in the seventeenth century.

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Shivaji’s forts in the seventeenth century in an extravagant display of pageantry and power (Fig. 2.2). The Shivaji Jayanti (anniversary) which coincided with Maharashtra’s Independence Day in May 1995 shortly after their electoral victory was also celebrated with great aplomb. It was the first time competitions were inaugurated by the Samna newspaper for the Shivaji Jayanti, but after the initial enthusiasm and extravagance, they did not endure for succeeding Shivaji festivals.21 Most political parties have now recognised the potentials to be gained in participating and even organizing events during festivals such as the Ganapati festival. To associate oneself with such festivals is to

Fig. 2.2 21 It might also be recalled that Tilak closely followed the calls to publicize and politicize the Ganapati utsava with attempts to start Shivaji Jayanti in the 1890s. Tilak too informs the Shiv Sena’s ideology, although to a lesser extent than more militant Hindu nationalists such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Vasudev Balvant Phadke, the Chaphekar brothers and so forth. The majority of these selected heroes are Maharashtrians,‘sons of the soil’, and regarded as selflessly and conscientiously working for the nation.

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get close to the public, and show devotion to a common g o d 22 But in Mumbai they seem to be fighting a losing battle against the Shiv Sena which has the upper hand with Ganeshotsava mandals. Despite the apparent all-inclusiveness o f public festivals, religious occasions such as the Ganapatiutsav have tended to be hijacked for contemporary political causes, playing into the hands o f militant Hindu parties. Such hegemonic strategies are efficacious because they work from local grassroots levels, and utilize the already familiar and powerful strategies based upon heritage, religious ideas and praxis. Kumaresh Chakravarty asserts:23 The success o f the ideology lies in the fact that it appears to have explanatory value, and consent for it draws upon religion. At the same time it offers political clout and street power to those who are disenchanted and perceive themselves to be deprived (Chakravarty, 1994, p. 112-13).

Cultural m obilization o f this sort enables the hegemony o f commonsensical politics— that is, a state o f circumstances where agendas and issues do not even have to be conspicuously articulated in order for them to be understood. On the subject o f the Hindutva brigade’s role in the destruction o f the Babri Masjid in December 1992, Chakravarty notes how Hindutva worked by premising itself on patri­ otism and anti-corruption drives, and thus ‘no direct interest is neces­ sary to provide consent for December 6’ (Chakravarty, 1994, p. 11213). Some things need not be said, as identified commonalities provide a means by which interest can be shared, but need not be expressed.

22 In the festival of Navratri in November 1994, the Shiv Sena, despite their ‘Maharashtra for Maharashtrians’ rhetoric, were holding mass organized garbah (traditionally, a Gujarati dance) in anticipation of the coming State Legislative Assembly elections. The Congress Party felt that they too had to comply, otherwise they might stand the chance o f losing favour and visibility amongst the populace. Ostentatious political participation was also evident with the Ganapatiutsav in that year. In the 19% Ganapatiutsav in Mumbai, there were numerous tableaux, banners and political participation to do with the upcoming Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections. 23 Despite the workings o f such hegemonies, it must be remembered that they are not always uncritically received. The phenomena that Chakravarty accounts for also confronts pockets o f criticism and resistance even from Hindu citizens in Mumbai where the Shiv Sena’s strength is substantial.

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S a in ik S pec ta c les Nowadays, most Ganeshotsava mandals have charity status and consist o f members from the locality, some o f whom have formal positions as President, Secretary, Treasurer and so forth, whereas others have more of an informal part to play in the organization in terms o f running social and cultural events such as educational facilities, blood donation camps, song and art competitions, drama shows and other events for the neighbourhood. The formal posts are renewable from year to year by mini-elections, such that most powerful or upstanding people in the locality have a chance to run the committee.24 The mandals are not generally overtly political outfits— their devotion to the religiosity o f the occasion is stated to be more important. However, m andal members in Mumbai may be affiliated with political parties, such as the Shiv Sena, but also to a lesser degree, the BJP, and others including the ‘secular’ Congress. It is generally the case that local ‘bigwigs’ or community leaders are given positions o f responsibility within the mandals, who also tend to have political sympathies and alliances, if not active affiliations. Another means by which the Shiv Sena, in particular, rules the roost in terms o f its influence on Mumbai’s popular culture is through Mitra Mandals (Friends’ Associations) which provide centres o f recreation, and organize festivals in die locality. In Mumbai, they are heavily influenced by the Shiv Sena (Hansen, 1996a, p. 159). Hereon, I will refer to mandals which organize festivities under the Sena’s influence as Sainik mandals. Ganeshotsava mandal members create mini-shows with the use of plaster o f Paris or painted hardboard models o f people and objects surrounding the main murti o f Ganapati. With the use o f taped narration, music, lighting effects, and occasionally moving models or props, the shows relate a string of events, issues, stories lasting anywhere between five and twenty minutes. A compendium of events in different time-spaces are merged, interpreted through the local-minded, youthoriented, male framework o f the m andal and suffused with other ideologies such as a glorious Shivshahi and Hindutva propositions as the ideals for society. These themes have the potential to produce a sense o f affinity with the spectators, which can then be channelled 24 Pune mandals do not tend to show such changes in membership.

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into an expression o f party propaganda and allegiance.25 Several o f the incidents that are chosen in politically partial displays are those that could be used to portray the opposition in a bad light, as were the implications o f Congress corruption in their negotiations with the American multi-national company, Enron, to build a power plant in Maharashtra, and Congress politicians* part in the criminal-politician nexus involved in the Jalgaon rape scandal, in 1994. Others reflect morally charged indictments o f India’s present predicament. In 1994, com m on topical concerns represented included anti-corruption drives associated with the Municipal Officer, G. R. Khaimair, riots in Mumbai, TADA abuses, slum development, and so forth.26 In 1995, other proposed themes which materialised in displays included the Naina Sahni tandoor murder in which the leader o f the Delhi-based Congress Youth Committee murdered his wife and tried to dispose of her body by grilling her in a tandoor oven, and the coming into State Legislative Assembly power o f the BJP-Sena alliance. Such topical events were combined with those o f a religious or historical nature. An example o f one o f these displays may suffice. In 1996, the Gam dev and J.K. Building Sarvajanik Ganeshotsava Mandal (established in 1931) put up a display entitled Shivshahiche Pahat (The Dawn o f Shivaji’s Rule).27 The president o f the mandal was a Shiv Sena m em ber o f the Brihanmumbai Municipal Council. The display consisted o f a drawbridge over a pool o f water that led into the heart 25 This is not to say that the reception of such tableaux is always acquiescent. Politically partial mandals do not consider it problematic to use religion and art for the purpose o f promoting a political agenda. They see the benefits o f converging various agendas. However, it is precisely due to the instrumentality of aesthetic considerations, and religious opportunism for political ambitions that several Gimar-Loksatta Ganeshotsava competition judges consider such blatant uses of mandap tableaux as not befitting the occasion. In contradistinction, Samna newspaper competition judges do not exemplify a troubled liberal consciousness, not least as this is the paper which acts as the Sena’s mouthpiece. See below for more on the discrepancy and convergence between the intention and reception of artworks. 26 TADA is an acronym for the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Act which was put into force in 1984 to deal primarily with the volatile situation in Punjab. Controversially, the act permitted the police to intern people for up to a year without proper trial and conviction. 27 Even though mandal members are closely involved in the construction of the displays, professional help is also taken. In this case, the murtikar was Prakash More and the Art Director, Sanjay Baghar.

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of the m andap where an elaborate scene of several vignettes surrounded the Ganapati murti. These included painted images of Lai Qila (the Red Fort in Delhi), Mumbai’s Gateway of India, and hardboard cut­ outs o f Bal Thackeray with his hand held aloft, Shiv Sena ambulances, a map o f Maharashtra, the Mantralaya State Government House, farmers, workers, water supplies, aeroplanes, the Konkan railway and traditional Kumbi people— autochthonous to Mumbai (Fig. 2.3). These vignettes were brought to life by the audio-taped narrative which went as follows: ‘Oh, Ganapati!

The god o f Maharashtra is Ganapati. With your help and blessings, let Maharashtra reign supreme. ISong] ‘I f Maharashtra dies, the whole nation dies, Without Marathi people, the vehicle o f the nation will not go forward, The Maratha is the real brave fighter o f the battle, And Mahirashtra is the backbone o f the nation* [A figure ofShivaji is lit up and lavni folk music follows/ ‘Maharashtra is renowned for producing brave fighters o f freedom, And worthy o f much praise, For the conscientious individuals who worked and created Maharashtra and democracy, The brave hard-working individuals who made the nation,

Fig. 2.3

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To begin attaining this democratic nation, Shivaji fought for freedom .* Shivaji established the Maratha nation. IA map o f Maharashtra with the words, *Jai Maharashtra*is lit up.]’ Mumbai is in Maharashtra, but what is there o f Maharashtra in Mumbai? Mumbai is a great place. It is a place which provides a chance to work or set up business. Anyone can earn money here. It is a place that accepts all outsiders. Yet, in my own father's house, if you speak out against some o f the injustices, it is considered as if it was like committing a crime. It's bizarre. The Shiv Sena emerged from this Maharashtra with its leader, Balasaheb Thackeray. As different people from different parts o f India come here and end up exploiting Mumbai, all Maharashtrian brothers and youth became united under oneflag. Balasaheb has raised consciousness o f thefact that we are not only Indians, but also Maharashtrians. ISongI ‘The mind is satisfied when the heart sings, *Shiv Sena jhindabad (Long live the Shiv Sena) Shiv Sena jhindabad' The Shiv Sena was formed to help those in difficulties 'It pleased Ganapati as well as the people. Shiv Sena jhindabadV The Shiv Sena network was spread throughout Mumbai. *Whoever works hard gets results * They gave employment in businesses to youth which enhanced their status in social life. ‘It will be a blessing for Maharashtrian youth who are apathetic.* Our Maharashtrian god taught Maharashtra a lesson. ‘People have overcome enormous difficulties. Shiv Sena jhindabad!’ There is no limit to the work that they have achieved, not even the sky is a limit. The rule o f Balasaheb was predestined to end up at the Vidhan Sabha Assembly. He upheld Hinduism, and called out to the people to ask for their support. They prayed to Bhavani Mata. ‘The saffron flag flew at the Vidhan Sabha - a flag that stood testament to the hard work o f supporters. Since the answering o f our prayers to Bhavani Mata, we can now celebrate loudly. Rise mother! Arise!* Mother Bhavani was pleased. As she was pleased by seeing all those that had sacrificed their lives, we now have the united government o f the Shiv Sena and BfP. To make the Shiv Sena rule a reality, Balasaheb Thackeray did many things. He didn't even care for his own health. With his powerful voice and thoughts, he spread his magical powers in the Mantralaya. By achieving power on behalf o f Maharashtrians, it was like seeing a mountain o f sorrow crumble. Death (Time) took his wife, Meenatai, and son, Bindhu Mahadev, away from him. Balasaheb Thackeray was shattered and upset. The entire Shiv Sena was in deep sorrow. No

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one could think straight. People became silent, and looked at each other helplessly. In this time o f sorrow, Balasaheb thought that if he didn't tend to the people, the poor migh t lose out. Like the god, Shiva, accepting defeat, Balasaheb also accepted the sorrow. He developed programmes fo r the upliftment o f the poor. He started programmes to distribute cheap food (junka bakhar). ‘People have a different sense o f attachment to Bal Thackeray. You should taste his sweetness.' He started the Shiv Programme for the unemployed ‘As they understood unemployment, they buried unemployment. In search of work, people used to move from door to door searching for work. They moved towards democracy.' A programme o f forty lakh [400,000/ free houses for slum development was started. ‘Tear down the slums! Tear down the slums! Bring light to the darkness! Now we’re going to get clean free houses’ From village to village, he made drinking water available. !A programme o f water availability has reached every village. Just like Ganga water. Since water has reached all parts, forests o f trees have been planted. My leader, my villager, let’s walk fast and move ahead.' He gave support to the Konkan Railway project to help upliftment o f backward areas calling the project Maharashtra Airways. ‘Now the Queen o f the Konkan will zoom through the hills' The Shiv Sena started projectsfor the upliftmen t ofpeople, which should benefit many people. Due to this, the common man feels included The common man feels that knowledge o f the Maharashtrian way o f life should influence the National Defence Academy, the Indian Administrative Services, and the Indian Police Services. Along with the forty lakh houses, people in old chawls should get new houses. With the co-operation o f Shiv Sena shakha, entrepreneurs and the government, the prestige o f Maharashtrian language and culture should be promoted. Thus, the social and political fields will be combined The Shiv Sena are progressing towards the Red Fort with great alacrity. Can anyone have the guts to conquer India now? Oh Ganesh, the worship food we have offered, we do to ask that we continue to do the work o f the nation. Give our party a long life.' In sum, the tableau celebrated the rule o f the Shiv Sena, and the great good it will do for the people, particularly those in Maharashtra, but also for Indians in general. Bal Thackeray is presented as if he was a saintly figure, sacrificing so much for the sake of his people. He has helped combine politics with the (religio-)cultural, thus helping people in an ethical way. Reviewing the narrative, the glories o f Shivshahi are

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described as the epitome o f Maratha masculinity. This era contrasts with the current situation o f mass unemployment, greedy and corrupt politicians, and the neglect o f the needs o f the ‘common man*. The Shiv Sena offer their own solutions by way o f working for the establishment o f a Shivshahi in contemporary times, with the provision of food, clothing, shelter, and jobs. The propositions are offered to Ganapati for his blessings. This enables a sacralization o f the requests and propositions. Political ambitions seem to be justified by religious sanction geared to serve the majority community o f Hindus. The mandap narratives are a stylized interpretation o f contemporaneous politico-econom ic issues which are designed to create maximum impact as well as a consolidation o f Hindutva views. The joys and sorrows of Maharashtra are not only reflected in the audio-taped display, but also (re-)produced in their active reception. The Shiv Sena’s name and reputation as protector and just rulers is further heralded. An A rt

of

S tag e- c r a ft

or

State- c r a ft ?

It appears that the art of stage-craft is elided with the art of state-craft as Sainik mandals chart their version of the history and character of the region/nation through such politically partial mandap displays. The performative and toxic excess of the religious festival and mandap narratives diffuse party propositionality such that the lines between a Hindu moral universe, Shivshahi precedents and realpolitik are further blurred in a theatrical idiom. The entertaining aspects o f the festive context further diffuse political party m otivations, as well as disseminating the party’s agenda across the festival participants. Politicians’ involvement in the festival show their apparently selfless patronage, and demonstrate attempts to form an affinity with people due to the devotion to a common god. However, mandap display and narrative content can, nonetheless, be equated with political motivations. Evidently, events and issues are chosen that favour the public presentation o f the Shiv Sena and justify their political agendas. This provides the justification o f militant, aggressive or ‘masculine’ strategies for avenging the constructed wrongs o f history, society and politics, and furthering the interests o f a Maharashtrian Hindu majority population. They identify themes close to people’s lives which would enlist further support. Personal survival is thus equated with the survival o f the party. Such crises are thrown out to be addressed by the solution of a modern-day Shivshahi (courtesy o f the Shiv Sena) and aided by the wishes of Ganapati. It is implied that the future of the

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nation is part o f everyone’s destiny, and Shivshahi is the only beneficial rule for the region and its populace. The presentation o f the information need not demonstrate total consistency, but use any variety of images and narratives to make its point. Simple, yet eclectic images, are juxtaposed with one another to create emotional connections. Manichean polarities, generally between Hindus and Muslims, are implicit, if not explicit (see Kaur, 1998 and forthcoming for examples o f such tableaux). Authoritative narration and strong language with emotional associations is widespread. Anti­ intellectual tendencies are apparent both in narrative and Shiv Sena activities (Heuze, 1992, p. 2194). Tentativeness and uncertainty is not permitted in such narratives (Pandey, 1994, p. 1525). Slogans about Maharashtra or India, and their sacralization by invoking verses to Ganapati, are used time and again. Song adds to the mnemonic function of simple narration. The whole, alongside people’s visits to other similarly structured mandaps, leads to a cumulative effect in their audience reception. Ganapati is invariably invoked as a moral arbiter, implying veracity and approval o f the narrative’s content, as well as a means to which to address the desires o f the devoted. The phenomena bears parallels with the invocation o f Ram by Hindutva forces. Gyan Pandey notes how histories o f Ayodhya said to begin in the ‘age o f Ram’ are ‘marked by an easy ... intervention of the divine— or to put it in other terms, a realisation of the ineffable that lies behind the illusion o f this fleeting world’ (Pandey, 1994, p. 1526). The intervention o f the divine in the Ganeshotsava mandap tableaux effectively draws the narrative back into the moral universe paved out by the public celebration of a Hindu religious festival. The effects of such politically partial mandap displays are manifold. As political hegemonies are transposed through the use of cultural, religious or historical ideals for the expressed purpose o f the community, they do not appear to harbour singularly political ambitions. They serve the additional purpose o f entertaining with spectacles that draw attention from both media and visitors alike. It is quite apparent that as well as trying to inform and enlist support, the mandals also try to impress the populace with their illustrative displays, targe quantities of financial resources facilitate political desires, as more and more wonderful scenes are created for public consumption. If we were to ret'irn to the opening argument about culture, one can see all four senses being invoked with regard to the political

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mobilization o f the Ganapati festival. The ethicizing trope is quite obvious with its invocation o f not just religious discourse but also regional/national cultural superiority (more often than not, spoken or sung in Marathi as distinct from Hindi). Culture as repertoire is less ostensible as, even though mandals might claim ownership on tableaux designs, individual artistes are not so forthcoming (unless it applies to the creation o f the murti) in this essentially communal activity. Nonetheless, prizes are sought and media recognition is always welcome as successive mandap tableaux add to the fame and reputation of the respective m andal Culture as a set o f customs or a distinct way of life is reinforced by the Sena’s co-option o f the festival as a flagship for Maharashtrian, if not all Hindu, people. The use o f culture here also redraws the map o f social inclusivity so that anti-national and selfish personnel (more often than not in oppositional parties) are dearly demonised. Culture as dynamic, diverse, lived praxis, is what I have least concentrated on due to the limits o f space. Suffice to say that the Sena does not exercise a monopoly o f the festival. There is always contestation during the festival period as there is an inherent uncontainability o f this public occasion, not only through open contestation by other politically co-opted m andals , but also the character o f the occasion itself as fundamentally defined by a degree of religiosity, festive excess and ludism which in the end, can never be fully contained (see Kaur Kahlon, 1998 and 2003 for details o f spectators’ reception). C o n c l u s io n In this chapter, I have highlighted some dynamics between the nebulous area o f culture and politics through the lens of the annual Ganapati festival. Significantly, whilst in the 1890s, culture was allied with religion and what could be described as a ‘surreptitious’ nationalism, by the 1990s, culture was unreservedly fused not just with the religious, but also a flagrant nationalism. In both case studies, politics— that is, rajnaitik practices as practised by colonial authorities or contemporary politicians— is overwhelmingly decreed as a dirty word. It is culture in the form o f a religio-national matrix that provides the ethicizing rationale for political agenda. One o f the questions that is perhaps worth asking is what does cultural mobilization do or achieve that political mobilization per se does not (political in the narrow sense of being based on a series of

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formal, constitutional or instrumental practices)? We can perhaps begin to explore this in one o f at least two ways. One is to consider the way that culture as a nebulous and dynamic terrain is primarily an ambivalent space principally open to all but in actuality hierarchical such th at it favours o n e definable group over another. Thus, cultu re

enables a range of associations based on emotional or familial embodied affections that lend it unwavering momentum. Dipankar Gupta, for instance, queries why the Left in Maharashtra pales in significance next to that in Bengal. One of the reasons cited is that political parties had not rooted themselves in indigenous vernacular cultures: unlike Bengal, where communism had taken deep roots amongst the literate population with the establishment of the Progressive Writers Workshop and the Indian People’s Theatre Association, communist values and ethics had not been able to attract Maharashtrian intellectuals. Whereas in Bengal, Marxism and Com m unism had left their im print on art, literature, theatre and scholarship, and continued even after Independence to play a major political role, these elements were noticeably missing in Maharashtra and in Bombay (1982: 59-60).

Gerard Heuze reinforces the point: ‘Samant, unlike Sena leaders, had little ‘cultural* connection with the workers. His language was economic* (1995, pp. 222-23).28 Another observation is to consider how culture presents a whole manner o f legitimation strategies not based on ideals o f democracy and liberal governance per se, but primarily in terms o f ethics: ethics that are at once totalizing and differentiating, that can be reified, seen as unique, as one’s own and then placed outside the strict purview of realpolitik, such that culture attains an almost transcendent role. The qualities o f this vocabulary were formulated in the time o f anti-colonial nationalist struggle. Due to its legacy, nationalism ( rashtriya) is not so much a constituent part of modern-day politics. Rather, it is infused by cultural and ethical dynamics deemed sacred, and even amongst oppositional factions and alliances, exercises an almost resilient hegemony in the contemporary Indian context. It is for this reason that playing the cultural card has taken on such significance after decades o f its denial under Nehruvian logics o f modernity. To play this card well in the contemporary era is to facilitate enlisting the support of the many, not the few. 28 D atta Samant was a I^ft-w ing trade unionist. The political wing o f his movement, Kamgar Agadhi, was founded in 1983.

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Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability: From Party Organization to Local Practices o f Politics' Glyn Williams

I n t r o d u c t io n : P o l it ic a l P a r t ie s , S t a b il it y and

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r d e r in t h e w o r k o f

A t u l K o h li

Political stability appears to be a commodity currently in short supply in India. The close o f the last decade saw four rounds o f national elections in as many years, and many changes to the country’s political landscape. Support for the Congress Party, once the unquestioned party of government, collapsed dramatically over the 1990s, a situation that the ‘charismatic’ presence o f Sonia Gandhi was unable to reverse. In the 1999 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made much of Atal Behari Vajpayee’s ability to deliver stability, but the coalition government he formed contained no less than 23 political parties. Floor-crossing, factional rivalries, and the associated stories o f personal aggrandizement and corruption of those in office appear to be the order 1 I would like to thank all those who participated in the interviews for this research for their time, openness and frankness. Special thanks go to Sri Ranjit Datta and Dr Debdas Banerjee for their help and advice, and to Samiran Banerjee for his tireless work as a research assistant and translator. This research was conducted whilst I was an affiliated researcher at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and funded by a British Academy grant

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

o f the day. Even before this most recent period o f political turmoil, political scientists were reflecting on the destabilizing effect of unbridled popularism,‘demand groups’ (Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987), the spread o f communalist politics (Vanaik, 1990; Vanaik, 1997), and the resultant ‘crisis of govemability’ (Kohli, 1990) in India. In contrast to this turmoil at the national level, the political landscape o f West Bengal has been remarkably stable.2 Since 1977, politics in the State has been dominated by the Communist Party o f India, Marxist (CPI(M )]. The CPI(M ) is the leading partner of the Left Front, who have now been re-elected to the West Bengal State Assembly four times, and the party has been consistendy successful in rural local government elections for over two decades. In this paper I use observations o f the electoral competition for panchayats (local councils) to examine whether West Bengal’s politics is, in any sense, ‘exceptional’. The empirical study is guided by a critical evaluation o f the work o f a leading political scientist working on South Asia, Atul Kohli. Atul Kohli’s work has been highlighted here for two reasons. First, he has been important in suggesting that West Bengal has managed to reverse the ‘crisis o f governability’ that is plaguing other parts of India. As will be seen below, his reading of Bengali politics shares points in common with that o f the CPI(M), which stresses the (relatively) peaceful nature o f the State, the absence o f caste and communal conflict, and the orderly functioning o f political life. Although Kohli offers a far from uncritical account of the CPI(M )’s rule, these elements of ‘success’ perhaps demand closer scrutiny. The second reason for examining Kohli’s work reflects a concern with the way in which Kohli approaches the study o f politics. Kohli’s approach focuses on the analysis of political variables, in which the actions o f political leaders, parties and social forces play an important role. This ‘scientific’ mode o f research contrasts with recent attempts to take a more ethnographic approach to the study of politics and political cultures. This alternative approach is representative o f a growing body o f work on South Asia in which political discourses are placed much more in the foreground (see, inter alia , Chatterjee, 1997;

2 One major exception would be the Gorkhaland agitations of the mid-1980s, an ethno-regional conflict in Darjeeling that the CPI(M) managed to effectively contain and resolve by granting partial autonomy to the district. A second exception is the widespread political violence that has engulfed several districts of the State in the run-up to the 2001 Legislative Assembly elections.

Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability

73

Gupta, 1995; Harriss, 1998). My argument here is that this latter style of work can offer important insights missed by more ‘traditional’ political science, especially when proper attention is paid to the different geographies that political discourses inhabit and create. Kohli’s thesis in Democracy and Discontent (Kohli, 1990: reiterated in Kohli, 1994) is that political parties are essential institutions to address the decay of India’s political culture. Since the m id-1960s, Kohli claims that there has been a decline in the state’s capacity to govern, accom panied by the erosion o f order and authority, a surface manifestation o f which has been ‘widespread activism outside o f the established political channels that often leads to political violence’ (Kohli, 1990, p. 5). The research on which Kohli draws— a comparative study o f politics in five districts, three States and in New Delhi— attempts to find the variables responsible for this political breakdown. Although competition between social groups, and the mobilization o f previously marginalized groups are mentioned here, his analysis centres on the role o f political elites and the decay o f political organizations. In particular, Kohli claims that the organizational decline o f the Congress party has caused the erosion o f established authority patterns in the countryside that ensured political order during the 1950s and 1960s. As the spread o f democracy encouraged more widespread political mobilization, the Congress (and others) failed to incorporate newly emergent social groups within the party’s structure: instead, India’s leaders have increasingly resorted to popularist rhetoric and personality cults to gain electoral mandates, and neglected the important task o f party-building. With the decline o f the Congress, there is thus ‘a growing organizational vacuum at the core o f India’s political space’ (Kohli, 1990, p. 6), where ‘personalistic and centralizing leaders’ (Kohli, 1994, p. 105) have replaced institutionalized power and mediation with cronyism and weak, reactive government. In this analysis, politically-inspired violence is the net result o f party decay: political parties ally with criminal forces in the capture o f ballot boxes (Kohli, 1990, p. 214), are responsible for the partisan use o f the state repressive apparatus to punish their opponents (ibid., 283-84), or even (in the case o f central Bihar) are complicit in the partial replacement of the state by private caste-based armies (ibid., 224-25). Kohli argues that the absence o f effective political institutions leads to the violent politicization o f social conflict, rather than its peaceful mediation, an argument that has much in common with earlier accounts o f India’s ‘weak-strong state’ (Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987).

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

For Kohli, the only chance to arrest this process o f decay lies in the rebuilding o f political parties to ‘both represent interests and concentrate them at the top, enabling party leaders ... to pursue development democratically* (Kohli, 1994, p. 106). In a process implicitly informed by the experiences of the West, Kohli hopes that alternative growth- and redistribution-based social coalitions can be incorporated within a competitive party system, thus replacing violence with political debate.3 West Bengal is something o f a special case within Kohli’s work, reversing these national trends o f breakdown and growing disorder. His earlier work on poverty and the developmental state (Kohli, 1987) saw the CPI(M) as leading a highly effective government that was able to implement pro-poor policies whilst curbing the political violence that had plagued the State through the 1960s and 1970s. The revitalization o f local government through politicized panchayats (local councils) in 1978 and the implementation o f a tenancy reform campaign through a controlled programme o f mass mobilization (1978-9 to c. 1983) were key elements o f this success, the results of which were deemed by Kohli to be both dramatic and exceptional: The CPM has thus achieved what no other Indian political force has been able to achieve as yet, namely, comprehensive penetration o f the countryside without depending on large landowners. From this perspective, it may not be an exaggeration to argue that the politics o f West Bengal are undergoing a fundamental structural change. While the class structure remains intact, not only has institutional penetration been achieved but also institutional power has been transferred from the hands o f the dominant propertied groups to a politicized lower strata (Kohli, 1987, p. 113).

Here, and in his subsequent work, it is the CPI(M) itself that Kohli sees as the crucial factor in explaining West Bengal’s success. As a ‘disciplined, left-of-centre party* the CPI(M) is deemed to have the capacity and the political will to drive through (mildly) redistributive reforms, producing a stable coalition o f lower-class supporters. Furthermore, and of key importance within this reading, the CPIiM J’s leadership has successfully developed the party as a state-wide

3 Kohli is not unaware o f the difficulty of this task, which is compounded by the fact that the Indian state, unlike its western counterparts, has acquired a massive interventionist role prior to the development of the stable two-party system he recommends.

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75

institution. The party built up a nr*work o f disciplined cadres throughout the Bengali countryside from the late 1960s, activists who were loyal to the CPI(M) as a whole rather than any individual, and attuned to and supportive o f the party’s social democratic values. Kohli argues that this network has not merely filled the ‘organizational vacuum’ left by the collapse o f the Congress party post-Nehru, but has replaced it with a truly modern political institution. In sharp contrast to the vicious circle o f decaying political organization elsewhere in India, he thus sees in West Bengal a virtuous circle of party discipline, delivery o f development programmes, and regime legitimation through the ballot box (Fig. 3.1). India's Democracy post-Nehru Erosion of party organizations, lack of dear ideology

West Bengal under tha CPI(M)

Political Organizations

^active government: personalization of power and crass populism

Government goals

Non-delivery of policies, poor government performance

Government performance

CPI(M ): pro-poor ideology and organizational coherence

Pro-active government propoor agenda, realistic goals

(A

Delivery of anti­ poverty programmes

i ▲

Erosion of support base, dissent expressed as violence

Fig. 3.1

Social outcomes

Creation of a pro­ poor support base, containment of violence

Kohli’s Thesis— Party Organization Contains Violence

Kohli’s account o f the Left Front in West Bengal is not an uncritical one, but it primarily draws upon field research completed in the early years o f the CPI(M )’s rule when the panchayats were new, and the

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

tenancy reform movement recently completed.4 Given the Left Front’s longevity, and continued academic and official perceptions o f the regime as an example o f ‘good governance’ within the Indian context5, there are good reasons to re-examine this narrative o f success and to discuss the CPI(M )’s role in Bengal’s ‘exceptional’ polity today. The main body of this paper takes up these tasks, but before doing so I will raise some criticisms o f Kohli’s wider intellectual project that will guide this process. The broader thrust of Kohli’s work is to recapture the importance o f ‘independent political variables’ and a ‘political sphere’ within academic work on the state in developing countries. This is a valid and important project, and Kohli rightly argues that structural functionalist or Marxist accounts that see politics and the state as fundamentally determined by socio-economic forces are in danger of eclipsing the agency of political institutions (Kohli, 1990, p. 28). As such, Kohli is one o f a number o f scholars who subscribe to a ‘state-in-society’ perspective, a brand of political anthropology that treats both states and societies as complex and multi-dimensional categories that must be understood through careful fieldwork and ‘middle-level’ theory building (Migdal, 1994). The balance and style o f Kohli’s own work on political institutions, however, is open to criticism on three points: he overemphasizes the role o f parties in producing ‘coherent’ rule, ‘society’ is in danger of becoming a residual category in his analysis, and within his ‘political sphere’, the discourse and language o f politics are marginalized. All three points are not only of importance in their own right, but also— as I argue below— mean that Kohli has picked up on elements o f the CPI(M )’s rule o f West Bengal that show the party in a particularly favourable light. In common with others subscribing to the ‘state-in-society’ perspective, the question o f coherence of rule is very important for 4 Kohli notes in The State and Poverty that landless labourers had benefited little from the CPI(M)’s early reform programmes. In Democracy and Discontent he asks of the Left Front’s growing inertia over the 1980s: ‘Was the price that the CPM paid to restore order too high, that price being political stalemate and the related problem of economic sluggishness?’ (Kohli, 1990, p. 292). 5 A recent example would be the UK’s Department For International Development decision to include West Bengal in a group o f four States within which DFID-India will focus its activities. West Bengal had been chosen because o f its record o f good governance and poverty reduction (discussion with DFID West Bengal State Team members, Calcutta, August 2000).

Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability

77

Kohli. Joel Migdal’s description o f the ‘state-in-society’ perspective carefully stresses that states comprise various arenas and interest groups, and that the nature and effectiveness of a political regime cannot be read off from the actions o f those at the ‘commanding heights’ o f its institutions (Migdal, 1994, pp. 11-18). Having done this, he immediately goes on to argue that a key question for political anthropologists is whether a state can weld these various parts o f its institutions back together, working with and against a diverse array of social forces, to achieve ‘integrated domination*.6 This issue is important, not only because it is almost inevitably a key objective o f those who wish to control the state, but also because it draws our attention to the fact that this very joining together o f interest groups is a key source of the state’s power. Throughout Kohli’s work the issue o f coherent rule is stressed, but here political parties are put forward as one o f the only forms o f ‘glue’ that will hold integrated domination together.7 Thus for Kohli, the arrows in figure one represent the direction o f causality: parties as organizations determine policy delivery, and policy delivery in turn determines social legitimation. The ordered nature o f the CPI(M) in West Bengal is therefore key to his account: Four political characteristics are important for understanding the C PM ’s reformist capacities. First, the rule is coherent. A unified leadership allows not 6 Migdal’s definition of ‘integrated domination’ is as follows: ‘[T]he state, whether as an authoritative legal system or a coercive mechanism of the ruling dass, is at the centre of the process of creating and maintaining social control. Its various components are integrated and coordinated enough to play the central role at all levels in the existing hegemonic domination. That domination includes those areas of life regulated directly by the state, as well as the organizations and activities of society that are authorized by the state within given limits’ (Migdal, 1994, p. 27). 7 The normative dimension to Kohli’s argument is strong: ‘Within developing country democracies, where political communities are not well established, and where the state must perform important economic functions, the need for well-organized parties of competing orientations becomes that much greater. Well-organized parties are one of the few available political instruments that can both represent interests and concentrate them at the top, enabling party leaders, if they win majority support, to pursue development democratically. Crafting well-organized parties thus remains an important long-term goal o f political engineering in the Third World’ (Kohli, 1994, p. 106). Bob Jessop’s strategic-theoretical approach to the state (Jessop, 1990, Chapter 9) provides an alternative reading of how the various interest groups competing for state power can be welded together, and one in which discourse has an important role alongside political organizations.

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

only dear policy thinking, but also sustained political attention to developmental tasks. Second, the ideological goals as well as the disciplined organizational arrangements of the CPM do not allow direct access to the upper classes . . . . Third, the CPM’s organizational airangement is both centralized and decentralized. While the decision-making power is concentrated, local initiative and knowledge can be combined within the framework of central directives. And fourth, the CPM’s ideology is flexible enough to ... [make] the prospect of reformism tolerable for the socially powerful (Kohli, 1987, p. 143). The organizational coherence o f the CPI(M) thus enables it to act as an efficient mechanism for the dissemination o f political ideas and the implementation o f policy, both o f which are predominantly transmitted ‘downwards’ through its hierarchical structure. I will argue below that although the CPI(M) is in many ways a unique political organization, various acts o f translation are involved in this transmission, and as a result incoherence is an important part of the CPI(M )’s operation ‘on the ground*. My second criticism o f Kohli’s work, itself a consequence of this over-emphasis on the role of political parties as organizations, is that societal forces become compartmentalized within his analysis. As noted above, Kohli is consciously working against the reductive tendencies o f structural functionalism and Marxism, but as a result social forces are downplayed in his stress on ‘the “autonomous” significance of political structures and processes’ (Kohli, 1990, p. 19). ‘Society* is not written off altogether, but rather social changes pose problems that political systems then have to deal with. The role o f violence is a case in point: where ‘social pressures’ are expressed through parties, society is peaceful, where they are hot, violence is the outcome (Kohli, 1990, pp. 14-15). An important difficulty with this approach is that it posits a rather-too-neat reparation o f ‘political institutions’ from ‘society’: parties aggregate and accommodate a set o f pre-defined forces and interests ‘out there’ in society. Amongst other problems, this approach downplays the role political parties have in creating interest groups, and, as I will argue below, violence is a constitutive part of this process, not a mere ‘outcome’ o f party failure. The final criticism o f Kohli’s approach is that whilst highlighting the importance o f political organization, Kohli says rather less about political discourse or political culture. His criticism of India’s political decay and his alternative vision o f Indian parties representing alternative growth- and redistribution-centred coalitions o f social

Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability

79

forces (Kohli, 1994, p. 106) suggest that he subscribes to a vision o f ‘proper* political discourse where ‘right versus left* debates are appropriate, but the ‘populism* o f appealing to alternative bases o f identity, such as caste, is not. There are numerous scholars who would dispute the relevance o f such ‘western* terms o f reference in a post­ colonial context, or indeed within the heartlands o f liberal democracy, and there are certainly good historical reasons why a discourse o f ‘modem* politics is not all-pervasive within India today (Kaviraj, 1991). Without pursuing these arguments further at an abstract level, it is worth noting that within West Bengal, the CPI(M)*s public presentation of itself as a class-based party would also accord with Kohli*s vision of what ‘proper* politics involves. Such a reading o f the CPI(M)*s electoral success could also reinforce the perception of West Bengal as a ‘modem* society where political parties can organize on class lines» and the ‘primordial loyalties* o f caste, ethnicity and religion are residual categories, properly excluded from the political sphere. Comforting though such a vision may be (for urbane Bengalis as much as for Westem(ized) academics), I will argue that it is a highly selective one. West Bengal’s political discourse is, inevitably, inseparable from its wider culture: ideas o f class are important here, but in no way crowd out ‘primordial loyalties’, and ‘good governance’ takes on local meanings drawing on a variety o f sources. Taken together* these criticisms o f Kohli’s work suggest that an alternative assessment o f the nature o f West Bengal’s political stability is necessary, an assessment in which due attention is given to practices and discourses o f politics, alongside the State’s political institutions. The rest o f this paper attempts to achieve this task in the following way. After a brief description o f the field materials on which it is based, I turn to the C PI(M )’s own ‘official’ position on its role— past and present— in the Bengali countryside. I then look at the party’s practices of gaining and maintaining political support, before turning to the actions of its political opponents. In this way, the paper addresses the three criticisms of Kohli’s work I noted in turn. First, looking at the C P I(M ) itself allows us to investigate Kohli’s ideas about the organizational coherence o f the party. The CPI(M) emerges as a rather exceptional political institution, but does not simply deliver the party line (in terms o f ideas, policies and strategies for action) to the ‘grassroots’ unchanged. Second, examining the mobilization of political support questions the distinction between politics and the social sphere made by Kohli. Interest groups are not simply ‘out there’ waiting to be

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

incorporated within parties, but are to some degree created by the process o f political competition itself. Finally, by examining how the CPI(M) and its opponents talk about politics, we can gain a fuller picture of what constitutes valid political discourse in West Bengal. This discourse extends far beyond ‘right’ versus ‘left’ debates: looking at how and when opposition emerges and it successfully allows us to see some of the alternative spaces for political action that exist within the CPI(M )’s rule. T

he

Study

My discussion of Kohli’s work is based around political activity in, and competition for, West Bengal’s panchayats or local councils. In 1978, West Bengal held its first elections for the local government system that the CPI(M) had re-vitalised on gaining power in Calcutta the year before. Every district, development block and anchal8 directly elected its own council, with councillors standing on party-political tickets. Over the following two decades, the panchayat system has been further refined and developed, and rem ains one o f the most comprehensive attempts at devolved government within the Indian federation (for details, see Webster, 1992; Mathew, 1994). The councils are now important political prizes, for they play a major role in rural life, including the im plem entation o f a range o f development programmes. In the analysis that follows, I use interview materials gathered in Birbhum district to look at the process of political competition from the points o f view of the protagonists o f the main parties involved; the CPM, the Congress and the BJP. Two rural locations were chosen for the study. The first, lying to the south-west o f the district town o f Siuri (see figure 3.2), was an area where the CPI(M) was strong, and the party controlled all gram panchayats bar one. The second, an area along the banks o f the Mayurakshi river east of the small market town of Sainthia, was an area o f weaker CPI(M) control. The CPI(M)’s rivals (both Congress and the BJP) controlled a number of gram panchayatsy 8 There are 17 districts in West Bengal, each with a population of a few million. Districts are subdivided into development blocks, which are then further divided into anchahy which are ‘village clusters’ of a dozen or so villages and smaller hamlets. An anchal’s council is called a gram panchayat (lit. ‘village council’): for simplicity I have avoided other Bengali terms.

Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability

Fig. 3.2

81

Location Map: West Bengal, Birbhum and Study Localities

although the party still commanded a majority o f seats in the local Block council. Within each location, I interviewed pradhans (chairpersons) and ordinary members of CPI(M )- and opposition-led gram panchayats, party activists, the chairpersons o f the block councils, the Block Development Officers and other administrative staff.9 These interviews 9 Interviews were conducted in Bengali and English, in November and December 1997. Individual respondents have not been named due to the sensitive nature o f much of the material presented.

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

were supplemented by discussions at the district level with leading representatives o f the Congress and CPI(M), with senior figures within the district bureaucracy, and my own direct observations o f panchayat elections during earlier fieldwork conducted in these locations in 1992-93. Although this study cannot claim to be representative o f West Bengal in a statistical sense, the range of interviewees allowed a detailed view o f the political culture o f an area that should show the CPI(M) in a reasonably favourable light. The fieldwork was conducted before recent increases in political violence associated with the rise o f the Trinamul Congress10, and thus reflects a period when the CPI(M)*s rule was solid across much o f rural Bengal. Within Birbhum district, CPI(M) control o f the panchayats was if anything stronger than elsewhere in the State at this time (Table 3.1). It is important to stress that the materials presented here aim to show how CPI(M) rule operates and was contested under conditions ‘typical* o f the late 1990s, rather than deliberately attempting to highlight party weakness or political instability. M

a in t a in in g

F ir e

in t h e

C

CPI(M ) lass

W

D

o m in a n c e :

S m a ll A r m s

a r 11

West Bengal’s political history as presented by the CPI(M ), both in official documents and in the recollections of party activists, is a story of class struggle. Although this struggle is presented as having deep historical roots, two key moments within it are the installation of the communist-led United Front governments in 1966-67 and 1968-69 (the first periods o f non-Congress rule o f West Bengal), and the implementation of pro-poor policies that followed the inauguration of the Left Front government in 1977. During the United Front governments, the CPI(M) and others supported a mass campaign to 10 The increase in incidents o f party-political related violence has been particularly dramatic since June 2000, and led to calls for emergency powers to be extended to five districts of West Bengal in the 2001 State Assembly elections. These districts include Birbhum and Bardhaman— the latter in particular considered a bastion of CPI(M) support. 11A tide ‘borrowed’ from the first chapter of Weapons of the Weak (Scott, 1985). Unlike the spontaneous verbal skirmishes between rich and poor Scott observed in Sedaka, Malaysia, the incidents in West Bengal were organized, closely tied to electoral competition and explicitly presented as part of a wider class struggle by the CPM.

Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability 83

Table 3.1 A: West Bengal

Percentage of Gram Panchayat Seats Won, by Party

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

CPI(M) Other LF Total LF Congress (I) BJP1 Trinamul2

61 9 70 29

54 7 61 33 0

65 8 72 23 0

60 6 64 27 4

—

—

—

—

50 6 56 12 8 20

Others

0

6

4

5

4

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

CPI(M) Other LF Total LF Congress (I) BJP Trinamul

74 14 87 7

52 8 60 32 0

65 6 71 23 0

63 7 70 18 8

54 7 63 10 12 14

Others

5

—

B: Birbhum District

—

—

—

—

—

9

6

4

3

Notes: Alongside the CPI(M)’s solid control of the panchayats, it should be noted that in Birbhum, as with elsewhere in West Bengal, the party’s strength primarily lies in rural areas: the district’s few municipal councils have largely been dominated by the Congress party. 1The BJP first won seats in the 1983 panchayat elections, where it gained a mere 34 of the 44,709 gram panchayat seats contested. 2 The West Bengal Trinamul Congress was formed by Mamata Banerjee (former West Bengal Youth Congress leader) as a break-away party in the run­ up to the 1998 elections. seize land held by landlords in excess of legal limits, a campaign that led to widespread rural unrest. The CPI(M) claim that they were able to challenge the power o f rural elites through this action: they removed the support landholders had enjoyed from the repressive apparatus of the state, atad unleashed the power of the rural proletariat. Although this ‘revolutionary’ moment was not sustainable, it did demonstrate to the rural poor that the power o f the rural elites was not insurmountable. The elements o f pro-poor policy stressed by the CPI(M) in the Left Front period have been the implementation o f land

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

reforms, and panchayati raj, the revitalization o f local government. Both programmes were important subjects in Kohli’s evaluation of the regime (Kohli, 1987) and are seen by the CPI(M) leadership as building blocks for subsequent reform that constitute an alternative approach to rural development (see, for example, Mishra, 1991, pp. 8 10). In the party’s public statements, reformist policies are presented as part of a broader strategy o f building socialism from a situation of partial political power within India. Although not revolutionary in themselves, their policies are intended to protect the poor in the immediate term whilst raising class-consciousness in preparation for the transition to socialism. The policy decisions and electoral battles of the last two decades are therefore located within a wider discourse of politics in which class is the most important term.12 Within the Birbhum localities, many elements o f the party line were reiterated by party members both in their public statements and in their private assessments of the political history of the area. In the latter, the C PI(M )’s victory in the first panchayat elections emerged as a watershed: In the 1978 elections there was a turnaround . . . . There was an overall change o f leadership: not only the panchayat leaders but also the village leadership had changed. The village leadership, that means all the decisions— about the development o f the village, about incidents in the village, all the confrontations between the people— after that election, people did not go to the landlord, but the people came to u s ___This change o f leadership did not come easily. It came from the land struggle, the land movement. It showed the people who were th e ir friends and who were n o t (C P I-M activ ist M ayurakshi, 19/11/97). 12 There are, unsurprisingly, some important absences in this account. Arild Ruud argues that the mass mobilization o f the peasantry in the 1960s was as much the result of the CPI(M)’s tactical engagement with factional disputes amongst traditional village elites than it was to do with the raising of a ‘revolutionary class consciousness’ (Ruud, 1994). Also, the economic growth and moderate reductions in poverty witnessed in rural areas since the Left Front’s accession coincided with the proliferation of national anti-poverty programmes and a period of irrigationled agricultural growth within the State. The party’s record on the provision of health and education services is also far from impressive. For a thorough review of the Left Front’s record in office see Gazdar and Sen Gupta (1997) and the collection by Rogaly et al. (1999). These caveats aside, most commentators agree that the CPI(M )’s actions helped to achieve significant shifts in village power relations between the 1960s and the early 1980s, although there is also general consensus that land and tenancy reforms were running out of steam by the end o f this period

Rethinking West Bengal’s Political Stability

85

CPI(M) members’ accounts o f the events leading up to the 1978 victory did not attempt to hide the violence of the land struggle, but rather this was contrasted with the domination o f village life by the old village elite, where public beatings, rape o f lower caste women, usury and theft were reported as being common events. By contrast, the period since 1978 is presented as one o f relative peace and prosperity. Here, some party members privately admitted that the strength o f the mass movement that brought them to power 20 years ago had dissipated, but in their public statements they stressed the range o f development works that had occurred in both localities (the provision o f all-weather roads, electricity, and irrigation), attributing all the benefits to the CPI(M) government. In the local presentation o f the CPI(M )’s history, the party therefore emerged as a successful revolutionary force that had become the provider o f peaceful, good government. Unlike the official party line, talk o f long-term transition to socialism was largely absent from their comments during interviews, and instead party members focused on the difficulties of maintaining a pro-poor support base.13 In a candid set o f comments, the district leader o f the Kisan Sabha (the CPMaffiliated peasant union) described how a relatively small shift in the ‘middle peasant’ (i.e. owner-cultivator) vote would be sufficient to oust the CPM from power (interview, 26/11/97). Party members were thus acutely aware o f the need to maintain and develop their support networks, and used both agitational methods and the power associated with their political office to achieve this. Although the era of land reform as a mass movement has ended, local struggles over land rights still provided an arena in which the CPI(M) could pursue agitational politics to bolster its support. Given the complexity o f land holding and inheritance, there are many plots of land where ownership or tenancy rights are contested, or are currently tied up in court cases. In such cases, the party used the Kisan Sabha to enforce tenants’ rights and to recover land held in excess of ceiling laws. The party deliberately and publicly presented itself as the champion o f the (numerically dominant) small peasants, tenants and 13 Some well-educated members reiterated the official distinction between the ‘tactical’ provision of good government and the ‘strategic’ development of classconsciousness, but this appeared to be an abstract statement of belief that did not immediately inform their political practice (interviews, Mayurakshi locality, 14/ 11/97, 18/11/97; Siuri locality, 26/11/97, 27/11/97).

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

agricultural labourers in these conflicts, making sure their ‘class interests* were protected on the ground well before the legal cases were settled: There are many cases [involving tenancy registration] still on-going—say 1000 cases in the Calcutta courts. But in some cases there are troubles. The role of th e H igh C o u rt is first to give an injunction to the D istrict M agistrate o r DLLRO

and police, that landlords should be given police protection. So, we tell the Superintendant of Police: ‘Very good, you give two or three officers to provide police protection for the landlord: we will gather together 500 or 1000 persons to cultivate the land. You cannot shoot us. So, if you obey the High Court order, we will be forced to do our work* (District Chair, West Bengal Kisan Sabha, interview, 26/11/97). In practice, such disputes were often less heroic than this vision of unarmed tenants valiantly facing armed police would suggest: the ‘class struggle* was far from spontaneous, and there were inevitably instances where the party did not press the interests of poorer villagers in order to maintain the support o f ‘middle peasants’ (c.f. Webster, 1999). Nevertheless, party and opposition activists alike acknowledged the political success of repeated CPI(M) involvement in land disputes, which provided important public reconfirmation o f the post-1977 ‘change in leadership’ noted above. * Alongside this continued use o f agitational politics, the CPI(M) could also reinforce its electoral support through the massive institutional power o f the panchayats. Through its overall control o f the panchayat boards, the CPI(M) had a solid grip on local government spending in Birbhum, which was backed up with a degree of influence over the police and development bureaucracy.14 This power could be put to ‘positive’ use (the effective implementation o f policy decisions as per Kohli), or used more ‘negatively’ by bolstering networks o f political support through patronage relationships, or stalling and disrupting the activities o f lower-tier panchayats belonging to its political opponents. O f course, any attempt to use this institutional power in a partisan manner would leave the party open to accusations of corruption and nepotism, so the party constantly needed to balance the con trastin g demands o f support-building and the wider legitimation of its power. 14 The CPI(M) did not use its strength over state personnel in as partisan a manner as the politicians in Uttar Pradesh described by Brass (1997). Nevertheless, powers o f promotion and transfer effectively lie with the CPI(M), and many police and administrative officers were all too painfully aware of this fact

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Where the CPI(M )’s rule was solid, these tensions were relatively easy to accommodate. In Nagari, a ‘model’ gram panchayat within the Siuri locality, mass participation in grassroots development planning was actively encouraged by the party, public meetings ran well, and opposition members o f the panchayat board were encouraged to voice their opinions at council meetings. The party gained support through its efficient running o f the council, and could combine this with public shows o f ‘fairness’ to its opponents. By comparison, council chairs in the Mayurakshi locality faced more open and active criticism o f their power, including demonstrations against corruption. One common strategy to counter such accusations, whether or not they were grounded in ‘truth’, was to make a dear distinction between ‘party work* and the role o f an elected representative. The following statement, from a CPI(M ) head o f a gram panchayat, was repeated almost verbatim by a variety o f other party members who had gained office: If I am to be a good pradhan (chairperson), I have to mix with all the people, and the people must be free to com e to me. There should be no party feeling ___When I am with the party, then I am a party member, but when I am in the chair o f the pradhan , I must forget my party and I should do the work o f the people (CPM Pradhan, Mayurakshi locality, 19/11/97).

These comments received general approval from all present, including opposition party members, as being representative o f ‘proper’ political conduct On the positive side, this support suggests that local leaders were aiming to link their actions to a discourse of ‘good government’ in which equality and fair play were important ideals. At another level, however, this distinction between ‘party work’ which is partisan and government action that is ‘apolitical’ is quite debilitating. Politicians’ attempts to demonstrate their ‘impartiality’ focus the attention o f public debate on corruption, nepotism and the correct implementation of government rules, whilst drawing it away from questions of what rule should be used fo r , and how this relates to real and healthy differences between parties’ political projects. Given that panchayat activities were commonly described as ‘help’ by all concerned, this assessment o f correct political behaviour suggests that rather than consciousness-raising at the grassroots, the CPI(M) are content to play a role in government as fair patrons.15 15 We were able to observe the same pradhan in a public meeting later in our research. His speech to the meeting— which was ostensibly held to publidy debate

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In manoeuvring between agitational politics, the use o f institutional power and the presentation o f ‘good government*, the actions of individual leaders were supported by an impressive party organization. The CPI(M) has a hierarchical structure o f party committees, and although the quality o f the party cadres in Birbhum was less controlled than Kohli suggests, there were at least sporadic ‘rectification campaigns’ to weed out corrupt members.16 Beyond the core members are the party’s associated ‘mass fronts’ and unions, the largest o f which was the Kisan Sabha which had a membership o f 580,000 in Birbhum in 1997. The effects of this mass organization were visible throughout the study areas in large rallies that were held in the run-up to the 1993 pan ch ay at elections (see also Chatterjee [1997] on the C PM ’s campaigning strategy), and in the occasional symbolic act o f class struggle. In addition to the land disputes mentioned above, these included strikes for increased agricultural wage rates which were sometimes no more than routinized pieces o f political theatre (c.f. Bhattacharyya, 1999). A more subtle but equally important demonstration o f the party’s organizational capacity was its ability to co-ordinate the activities of this membership effectively. At the zonal level17 leaders of the party and its fronts formed a steering committee that then ‘advised’ the chairpersons o f the block and gram panchayats within its jurisdiction about a range o f issues from the implementation o f development work to setting wage rates and settling land disputes. Such behind-the-scenes fixing o f pan chayat decisions may run counter to the spirit of government reform, but there is no doubt that it enabled the party to

local development plans— focused on how much economic conditions had improved for all under the CPI(M )’s rule, before getting down to the serious business of drawing up lists of beneficiaries for government support The irony here is that the pradhan in his efficient distribution of government resources was actively contributing to the spread of a depoliticised democratic practice that the World Bank would surely approve of. 16 CPI(M) members freely admitted that there was corruption among the 11,000 members of the party’s district unit, but claimed that this was inevitable for a party that had been in power for so long: unlike the committed social revolutionaries of the past, many new recruits saw party membership as a meal ticket. 17 The area covered by a ‘zone’ varies, but is often contiguous with a development block. In the Mayurakshi locality, the zone covered two development blocks as the density of party members was lower.

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marshal their resources effectively, directing development programmes, public demonstrations and ‘class struggles’ in such a way that they could enhance their support base (c.f. Rogaly, 1998). An Indian Administrative Service officer noted that the CPI(M )’s ability to use the panchayat system in this way far exceeded that of other parties due to its superior organizational structure (interview, 2/12/97). It is important to note, however, that this did not simply result in the efficient local execution o f central party directives. Zonal committees had the scope to re-interpret these directives in the light o f the ‘local constellation o f class forces’, balancing ideological commitments and electoral calculations with a considerable degree of autonomy. The combination o f the organizational strength o f the party, the control o f the panchayats and their resources, and a history o f effective pro-poor action— what Partha Chatterjee (1997) has described as a linking o f ‘discipline and development’— have made the CPI(M ) a powerful force in Birbhum. Despite the initial parallels with Kohli’s account o f the CPI(M )’s role, some important differences begin to emerge. First, although the party acts as an efficient conduit of ideas and actio n s, im portant acts o f translation occur w ithin this organization when the ‘official’ narrative o f class struggle and progression towards socialism travels from the central party offices to the everyday actions of the panchayats and grassroots party workers. Most party workers would recognize the broader contours o f the narrative, and there are undoubtedly a significant number o f full CPI(M ) members— often school teachers—-who can and do place their own experiences o f party struggle within an intellectual context informed by their own readings of party documents and the works of Marx and Lenin (interviews, 14/11/97, 19/11/97, 26/11/97). When addressing ‘the public’, however, party members and elected panchayat representatives tend to downplay the broader and more transformative elements o f this story: the CPI(M ) presents itself as being primarily concerned with providing good government. These differences can be read in various ways: as a shift from a radicalism to a bureaucratization, as a failure to recognize the importance o f mass consciousness-raising, or (most generously) o f a tactical decision to delay class struggle. Whichever reading one prefers, the CPI(M )’s political programme has meaning to a subset of party members and supporters, but is not a message that is openly and actively discussed by ‘the people’. These translations would in turn suggest that the relationship between political parties and interest groups is somewhat more

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complicated than Kohli’s work suggests. The CPI(M) was acting as a careful mediator o f ‘class struggle’, stoking it up through agitation (however stylized) in some places, containing it in others. Different forms o f operation were appropriate in different places— debate and discussion emerge as possibilities where the party is in a position of solid control, displays o f physical strength through ‘class struggle’ appear to play a greater part where the political opposition is stronger. Kohli notes that within the CPI(M )’s centralized structure there is room for local party members to respond to different local conditions, but what I am suggesting here is slightly more pro-active. The act of portraying small peasants, tenant farmers and labourers variously as citizens within a deliberative democracy (in Nagari panchayat), as the beneficiaries o f a top-down gift o f ‘good governm ent’ (in the Mayurakshi locality), or even as a ‘class force’ opposing acts of landlord/ employer injustice is significant in itself. These different representations help to set these groups’ terms o f engagement with the party, the local government system and indeed their fellow villagers: the CPI(M) thus has an active role in producing interest groups. This serves as an important reminder that when political parties ‘represent interests and concentrate them’ (Kohli, 1994, p. 106) this is not a simple process of the addition of pre-formed social entities. A final comment relates to political discourse. As noted above, alongside a ‘higher’ discourse of class struggle and transformation, the CPI(M) also plays to more ‘vernacular’ readings of good government and displays o f power. The local ideological terrain over which CPI(M) rule is contested is inevitably broader and messier than a series of debates about economic growth versus redistribution, or revolution versus reform . In th e section that follows, by looking at the mobilizational strategies o f the opposition parties, I aim to show how much room there is for politicians to gain support through other, often less palatable, political discourses within contemporary West Bengal. O

p p o s in g

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Here I present two vignettes o f opposition to the CPI(M )’s dominance o f panchayats in Birbhum, both drawn from the Mayurakshi locality where electoral competition was more fiercely contested. The first is fairly typical o f the processes whereby opposition politicians create reputations for themselves. The second is a more unusual case o f a ‘communal riot’, and is used to illustrate the potential that exists for

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politicians to profit from linkages between collective violence, and political discourse. It is important at the outset to note that both political parties do not have the organizational presence in Birbhum that the CPI(M) has. Although the dominant party in the district until the 1970s, the Congress has neither the density o f party offices nor the breadth o f membership o f the CPI(M ). The BJP in West Bengal appears to be taking its organizational role much more seriously, but is a relative newcomer to the state and is building its support from particular pockets. BB was a lower-caste farm er and Congress organizer in the Mayurakshi locality: depending on who one interviewed, he was either described as a selfless social worker or a thug. He was well known in the local area for campaigning actively for the Congress party, which in practice meant that he involved himself in situations where the local communists were behaving in an ‘unjust’ manner. Sometimes this was through low-key acts, such as advising people on how to press a claim for social security benefits, and other such help with accessing local government. Often, however, BB deliberately chose to give himself a higher profile through acts such as publicly backing Congress supporters in village disputes. A certain degree o f almost farcical performance was present in these acts, as when BB— not known for his adherence to non-violence— staged a one-man ‘Gandhian protest against corruption in the block council. He chose to stage a sit-in outside the block development office, a convenient symbol o f CPI(M) ‘misrule’: the office was located next to a market and road junction and thereby ensured BB’s actions gained maximum publicity. Behind such symbolic acts o f protest, physical strength and violence had an important role to play in building political support. BB had a number o f court charges against him for disturbing the peace, organizing armed gangs and violent assault, often associated with defending ‘wronged’ Congress supporters in conflicts over land. In return, his protest outside the block office resulted in him being imprisoned without trial in the local police station for a number o f weeks, where he received beatings that put him in hospital, and in 19%, a gang (probably CPI(M)-led) tried to bum him and his family alive in their house. When I asked him why he thought the CPI(M) was persecuting him in this manner, he said that the Communists knew that if he could be bullied into submission— or supporting the CPI(M)— the Congress party in the local area would be eliminated in

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the coming panchayat elections. It is the one part of his story that noone contested.18 Actions such as BB’s are, I suggest, typical of those aiming to become important opposition politicians. Here, the demonstration o f strength is important: BB was described locally as possessing the ‘courage* to challenge the C PI(M ) and to publicly ‘give voice* against them (interviews, 14/11/97). He was known throughout the panchayat area, and in adjoining panchayats , due to the public nature o f his actions. It was through the open performance of resistance to ‘CPI(M) misrule’ that BB’s political status was raised, that stories circulated about him and he became a ‘big man* in the locality. This status was confirmed by the fact that the C PI(M ) did not dare to enter ‘his* village to campaign for the elections. Violence, or at least the threat o f violence, clearly underpinned much o f this performance. The stories told in the locality about ND, the District Congress president, suggested that a similar process of political performance and use o f force to bolster one’s reputation was equally important further up the political hierarchy: In retaliation for an attack on a Congress member in a village near Sainthia, ND ordered 15 huts to be set on fire. Whilst the arson was going on, the police and the block development officer came to investigate, but they were stopped by ND on the road. He held up a lathi [bamboo cudgel] and told them not to go to the village. They turned back (Field notes, 14/11/97). A CPI(M ) MLA [member o f the State parliament] had been badly beaten by Congress youths, who had broken his leg. The MLA filed a case against them, and this went to court. The youths were acquitted. To celebrate, ND hired two lorries, which he then packed with supporters and drove them around Sainthia, throwing flowers in the road (Field notes, 1/12/97).

The objective truth o f these stories— both were recounted by Congress supporters, and therefore are open to doubt— is not the issue here, but rather the effect that recounting the events is supposed to achieve. ND was portrayed as a man o f action, a dispenser o f rough justice, and his reputation was maintained through active performances o f the control he enjoyed over his ‘turf’. BB clearly aimed to build up a similar reputation, and without other resources (such as demonstrating his ability to rule through control o f a panchayat board), physical 18 Although local CPI(M) members described BB as a hooligan, his support was sufficiendy large to feature in their predictions o f voting patterns for the 1998 panchayat elections (interviews, 19/11/97, 4/12/97).

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strength and courage was a quick way o f achieving this end. The Congress was thus attempting to use the same techniques, albeit without the same ideological justification, to oust the CPI(M) that the Communists had used to ‘change the village leadership’ in the 1970s. R e p r e s e n t in g

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R e s o l v in g ‘C o m m u n a l T

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The second example o f resistance to CPI(M ) rule is an instance of ‘communal rioting’ that occurred in the Mayurakshi locality in 1991, and its political aftermath. Here, as with Paul Brass’ account o f riots in U ttar Pradesh (Brass, 1997), my prim ary focus is on people’s interpretations of the events; their own attempts to fit this instance of collective violence into an understanding o f local politics. In April 1991, a ‘Hindu-Muslim riot’ broke out in a large, mixedcommunity village o f the Mayurakshi locality. This village houses the gram panchayat office, and at the time the council’s chairman was a Muslim o f the village, standing on a CPI(M) ticket. Before the riots broke out, there had been widespread complaints of corruption in the panchayat, and the chairman’s name was linked to criminal activities undertaken by a (Muslim) gang. DKM, a BJP activist, had organized local Hindus to go to the police station to protest about the activities of this gang, but the officer in charge ‘had no courage to help the Hindu people for fear o f the Muslim people’s reaction’ (DKM, interview, 21/11/97). ‘Communal tensions’ were thus running high in the area when, following a dispute,19 a number of houses belonging to Hindus in the village were set on fire. Widespread rioting resulted, and BJP activists were a clearly visible presence in their aftermath, giving food and shelter to the Hindus who had lost their houses. In the run-up to the panchayat elections two years later, inter­ community relations were still strained, and this was exacerbated by the fact that party support was to some degree polarized along religious lines. BJP activists were circulating widely in the area, campaigning against the Left Front but in a distinctively religious tone,20 and most 19 The particular ‘trigger event’ that started the riot is unclear. DKM made the (rather unlikely) claim that a local mullah had used the mosque’s public address system to ‘tell the Muslims to rise up and bum the Hindu houses’ during a festival. A local CPI(M) leader made the equally improbable claim that the BJP themselves had started the fires in order to start the rioting. 20 Whilst conducting interviews near the riot village immediately before the 1993 panchayat elections, I met a BJP candidate campaigning at a tea-stall— a

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o f those openly campaigning for the CPI(M) were Muslims. There was further tension during the elections themselves (the BJP allegedly barred the CPI(M) election agents from entering the booths on polling day) and the BJP swept to power with 14 from 22 of the council seats. After this, ‘communal tensions’ dissipated and the BJP became something of a presence throughout the Mayurakshi locality, putting up candidates in all neighbouring gram panchayats for the 1998 elections. DKM’s interpretation of the return to harmony in the area is that he runs a corruption-free panchayat and helps all people equally. The reasons he gives for his electoral success are that the people o f the area had had enough of corruption, and that they had faith in the BJP after they had seen them giving support to the victims of the riots. The CPI(M) interpretation o f events was, unsurprisingly, somewhat different, and can be summarized as follows. The BJP knew that they would not get the votes o f the Muslim community, who were solidly behind the CPI(M), and so they were looking for issues that would win the support of the (majority) Hindu community. When the trouble first arose, the CPI(M) leaders should have gone in force to the locality with Hindu and Muslim supporters to protest against communal tension. Because they didn’t, and the only vocal members of the party in the area were Muslims, it was easy for the BJP to make this a communal issue. The CPI(M) block council chairman said that there would not be trouble in the forthcom ing elections because ‘the agricultural labourers and poorer sections of the Hindus are now going to the CPI(M )’— this cross-community support and the fact that ‘the people had gradually come to understand that the politics of the BJP

typical location for informal hustings. His speech centred on the moral decay of the times, o f which the following is an extract ‘I don’t know what the world is coming to— sue o f my tenants have gone and registered themselves as sharecroppers behind my back, stealing my land from me. When I asked on whose authority they thought they were acting, they had the effrontery to say, “We are only acting as we are told to by the law- Jyoti Basu [the CPI(M) Chief Minister of West Bengal] is our Babu”. “Jyoti Basu?” I replied. “Ram is my Babu”. I blame the school teachers... they are all sons o f pigs, spending their time stirring up trouble leaving my daughters to fail their education.’ (Field diary, 11/5/93) Politicised school teachers and ‘uppity’ sharecroppers are common enough caricatures of Left Front supporters within West Bengal, but to invoke Ram— a god central to the BJP’s rhetoric— as a symbol of Hindu moral order is unusual in the State, where Kali and Durga are far more important deities.

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is religious’ would ensure that communal tensions were not raised again (interviews, 21/11/97, 4/12/97). These differences o f interpretation hide some important and worrying underlying assumptions that are held in common by both parties. No one involved denied that the riots were directly bound up with local electoral calculations where religious identities played an important part. Also, no one was surprised at the important shift that occurred from anger at particular ‘corrupt politicians’ and ‘known criminals’, to aggression directed at the Muslim community as a whole. If anything, the interpretations placed on events by the CPI(M ) naturalized this shift: because o f their political miscalculation, it was always likely that ‘communal’ problems would result. I don’t want to suggest that events such as those that occurred in this Mayurakshi village are ‘typical’ of West Bengal. The fact that even six years later the riot was still a talking point throughout the area suggests that such incidents are relatively rare. They are not, however, unique and suggest that the discourse o f Hindu-Muslim tension could be tactically deployed as a means of attacking ‘corrupt rule’ and enjoy a significant degree o f local support.21 Through the actions o f both DKM and BB, we can begin to see the breadth o f what constitutes ‘legitim ate’ political action within contemporary Birbhum. For both activists, the underlying patterns of their political action— public shows o f physical strength when in opposition, attempts to demonstrate‘good rule’ when in power— were not entirely dissimilar to those o f the CPI(M) described earlier. As such, their actions raise important questions both about the portrayal of West Bengal as a ‘politically stable’ State, and of Kohli’s understanding of political action. Beginning with the activities of BB, his attempts to create a support base were, at some level, similar to the process by which the CPI(M) had replaced the village leadership in the 1970s. In building a reputation 21 Congress politicians in the Siuri locality complained about ‘Mokhim’, a Muslim ‘known criminal’ and CPI(M) council chairman who was allegedly terrorizing villagers in the neighbouring block. Again, the failure of the CPI(M) and the police to act against him had raised ‘communal tensions’ in the area, and rioting was deemed to be likely (interview, 25/11/97). I did not follow this story up, as ‘Mokhim’ operated outside the Siuri locality, but both this and the Mayurakshi events emerged spontaneously from my research, not from a deliberate strategy to search out ‘communal’ incidents.

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as a leader, both frustration with those in power and the ability to provide a demonstrably effective challenge to them on the ground are important. The images portrayed by BB— of Gandhian self-sacrifice, mixed with physical courage and the means to control acts of violence— may thus appear internally inconsistent, but are effective engagements with local concepts o f good leadership and just political struggle. It is also, I suggest, typical o f a day-to-day practice of competition within the panchayat system that is often hidden by West Bengal’s macro-scale political stability. The separation noted above of the C PI(M )’s ‘political’ activities from its provision o f ‘good rule’ ironically gives activists like BB greater scope to challenge the party. The CPI(M ), by playing down the transformative elements o f its programme, fails to demonstrate through its everyday practice the ‘ideological coh eren ce’ deemed so im p ortan t by Kohli, and undoubtedly so lacking within the Congress.22 Turning to the activities of DKM, one is forced to accept that the differences in ‘acceptable’ political discourse between West Bengal and other areas of India are not as great as many would hope. The absence of a dominant cultivating caste across the State may have meant that a discourse o f casteism never enjoyed political salience within rural West Bengal (Chatterjee, 1982), but prejudices and tensions between Hindus and the sizeable Muslim community (24% in West Bengal, 33% in Birbhum District) are a fertile ground for those wanting to create a support base. Communal discourse is not only effective as a means of generating a political ‘wave’ in opposition, the CPI(M) in Mayurakshi also appears less certain o f its ground when attacking this. Local party members were able to reflect on their tactical blunders in letting the BJP get to power, but again an understanding o f how the CPI(M) might play a broader role in the de-communalization of political discourse was absent. In both instances, the discursive space within which opposition parties operate is a space of the CPI(M )’s own making, or at least a space that the party has failed to adequately close down. Generously, it could be suggested that com m unalism and building political 22 Despite repeated attempts in interviews to get opposition politicians to talk about alternative political programmes or policies, very few ideas emerged. All were opposed to ‘CPI(M) injustice’, but beyopd the single-point programme of defeating the Communists, no alternative vision of West Bengal’s political future was proposed.

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reputations through violence are a hangover o f ‘feudal politics’, and destined for eventual decline in the state. Following Chatterjee however, I would argue that both play a more complicated role within the political discourse of the left: Leftism in Bengal is parasitic upon a whole cultural heritage among the Bengali intelligentsia in which patriotism has been intimately tied with a distinctly religious (and needless to add, upper-caste Hindu) expression o f the signs o f power, in which the celebration o f the power o f the masses has been accompanied by an unquestioned assumption o f the natural right o f the intelligentsia to represent the whole people, in which utopian dreams o f liberation have found expression in a barely concealed admiration for the politics o f terrorism (Chatterjee, 19% , pp. 3 -4 ).

Chatterjee’s case is somewhat baldly stated, but his observation suggests that the political violence in the Mayurakshi locally described above is not merely indicative o f the crass opportunism o f the opposition, and of the local CPI(M) unit’s difficulties in handling this. Rather, the violence illustrates latent tensions lying at the heart of a specifically Bengali version o f communism.23 In the final section, I discuss the implications o f this argument for Kohli’s assessment of the CPI(M) and his wider intellectual project. R e t h in k in g ‘S t a b il it y ’

th rough

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If these areas of Birbhum are in any way representative of broader processes operating within West Bengal, as I would suggest they are, then the remarkable longevity of the CPI(M) and the State’s macro­ political stability does not appear to be based around an exceptional form of grassroots political culture. There has been no ‘great leap forward’ towards either popular socialism or revolutionary class consciousness, even if (as elsewhere in India) rural lower classes are undoubtedly more vocal than a generation ago. Rather, the CPI(M)’s electoral success is due to a combination of its past record o f effective pro-poor action, its current control (and relatively efficient running) of government, and its careful maintenance of vote banks through a well-organized party. The fact that this combination has been successful 23 It is important to state here that I am not arguing that the CPI(M) is ‘communal’, but rather that there are elements of the party’s cultural and political inheritance that have not been worked through and openly discussed, making it more difficult for the party to oppose communalism in practice.

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for so long is at least in part a result o f the weakness of its political opponents: its long-term future is, however, less certain.24 To some extent, this description o f the current state o f Bengali politics appears to vindicate Kohli’s thesis. Strong, well disciplined parties clearly do have an effect, and it is precisely the lack o f organization of the Congress that has led the CPI(M) to be repeatedly re-elected. Activists such as BB and DKM carve out political spaces for themselves where the CPI(M ) can be defeated, but without the backing o f a well-organized party machine these local successes are not integrated into a coherent pattern o f rule. However, the discussion above has also indicated aspects o f Bengal’s political (in)stability not anticipated within Kohli’s account. Here I discuss these findings by returning to the three criticisms of Kohli’s broader intellectual project I raised earlier. The first criticism was the over-emphasis o f political parties’ ideological and organizational coherence in Kohli’s work. Such coherence was deemed to be a key way in which West Bengal under the CPI(M) differentiated itself from the political decline experienced elsewhere in India. Certainly, the CPI(M) is able to present a picture of ‘coherent rule’ to scholars and outsiders, and consciously places itself and Bengali society within a narrative o f class struggle that accurately describes important elements of social change that have affected West Bengal since 1977. But whilst the party is able to display coherence to a far greater degree than its political opponents within the State, to take this narrative as reflecting the party’s entire political practice would be an error. As noted above, the CPI(M )’s selection and mixing of different messages and forms of action for particular contexts was essential to party success. Party organization has been im p ortant to the C P I(M )’s success, but this exists alongside inconsistency in action, as shown by the disjunction between the party approach towards winning power and demonstrating good rule.

24 District CPI(M) leaders claimed that panchayati raj has resulted in spiralling popular expectations from local government that far outstripped the resources available to meet these (interviews, 13/11/97,20/11/97). These demands, combined with the gradual replacement o f CPI(M ) politicians associated with the party’s successes of the 1960s and 1970s by a generation o f more self-interested activists, are undoubtedly posing problems for the party today. Despite these difficulties, the CPI(M) remains better than the political alternatives currently on offer within the State.

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The second criticism of Kohli’s work was the role he attributes to social forces. Within his account parties should aim to represent interest groups that exist in a clearly demarcated ‘social sphere’, and when they do not political violence is deemed to be the result. The evidence suggested here would suggest instead that violence plays an integral role in creating political support, and forms a blunt but effective way of demarcating the boundaries of who is included and excluded from particular ‘social forces’. The land struggles launched selectively by the CPI(M) are thus important local reminders o f differing economic interests which the party uses to build into class-based identity. Equally, the provocation o f Hindu-Muslim tension by politicians is important in the re-stating o f group identity and difference. The relationship between political parties and social forces is thus far more reflexive than Kohli appears to acknowledge, and as a result his core task of ‘crafting well organized parties’ emerges as a potentially disruptive activity rather than necessarily contributing to political stability. The BJP’s use o f communal sentiments was ‘anti-democratic’ in that it resulted in the violent expression of majority viewpoints, but this violence was itself an important part o f the development of the party as a significant political organization within the locality. Underlying both of these points is the importance o f political discourse in the creation o f political (in)stability. My final criticism of Kohli’s work was his neglect o f political discourse, a neglect he combines with an implicit link between ‘rational’ political objectives and idealized western norms. Again, at first sight the CPI(M) does very well by Kohli’s criteria: the regime’s leaders are able to present a coherent political programme intelligible as ‘progressive’ within western terms, its political rivals seem more ‘populist’ or ‘reactionary’ by comparison. To focus on this apparent contrast would, however, ignore the breadth of what constitutes valid political discourse in West Bengal. Local understandings o f the operation of political power draw on religious identity, physical strength and fear of violence as much as they do on ideas o f ‘good governm ent’, dem ocratization and participatory politics. The fact that the CPI(M) openly opposes the communalization of politics in the public spheres served by state- and nation-wide media is much to the party’s credit, as is the fact that it has built up the institutional structure o f the panchayats across the State. At the level of local politics, however, the CPI(M) has not been able to close down

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the discursive power of communalism, and through its own action continues to glorify socially ‘just’ violence as part o f valid political practice. The links Kohli suggests between ‘rational’ political discourse and regime legitimation (figure one) are thus not a full representation of the state’s political landscape, nor is the dominance of a pro-poor ideology in any way inevitable. Rather, West Bengal has been fortunate that the only efficient political ‘machine’ to emerge in the state over recent decades has been, in relative terms, socially inclusive and committed to an idea o f social justice. The important wider point here is that approaching the study of the politics o f developing countries in the way that Kohli does— emphasizing political organizations to the detriment of discourse and local political practice— risks severe and important omissions. To the extent that there is a strong normative line running through Kohli’s work, any resulting omissions become all the more important. If one of the great ‘success’ stories of democratic political stability in India appears to be more fragile and complex in practice than at first thought, the fault certainly cannot be found with a lack of political institutions. Instead, the West Bengal example serves as an important reminder that concepts of democracy and political citizenship are constantly re­ interpreted for and by electorates. The alternative approach attempted here— paying greater attention to political culture and practice through ethnographic investigation— does reveal important insights missed by more ‘scientific’ accounts. Given that there is increasing international pressure for developing nations to conform to westernized models of competitive democracy, such an alternative approach to the study o f politics becomes more rather than less important. The fact that political violence emerges as an integral part o f inter-party competition in this ‘stable’ state serves as a useful counterpoint to the current fervour for decentralization and democratization sweeping India. However worthy the ideals embodied in such reforms, they are unlikely to lead to a practice of politics that is ‘democratic’ in its idealized, western sense unless serious efforts are made to engage with the local public spheres that electorates inhabit. A shift towards a more culturally sensitive and localized study o f political discourse and practice is an essential part o f this engagement.

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B ib l io g r a p h y D. Bhattacharyya (1999), “Politics of Middleness: the changing character of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in rural West Bengal (1977-1990)” in B. Rogaly, B. Harriss-White and S. Bose (eds), Sonar Bangla? Agricultural change in West Bengal and Bangladesh, Delhi: Sage. P. Brass (1994), The Politics o f India since Independence (2nd edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ________ (1997), Theft o f an Idol, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Partha Chatterjee (1997), “Discipline and development” in The Present History o f West Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press (pp. 137-82). H. Gazdar and S. Sen Gupta (1997), in ). Drfcze, and A. Sen (eds), Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, Clarendon: Oxford. A. Gupta (1995), “Blurred Boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics and the imagined state”, American Ethnologist 22 (2), pp. 375402. John Harriss (1998), “For an anthropology of the Indian state”. Unpublished. S. Kaviraj (1991), “On State, Society and Discourse in India”, in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics, Harlow: Longman. A. Kohli (1987), The State and Poverty in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______ (1990), Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis o f Govemability, N ew York: C am bridge University Press. _______ (1994), “Centralization and Powerlessness: India’s democracy in a comparative perspective” in J.S. Migdal, A. Kohli, V. Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. G. Mathew (1994), The Status o f Panchayati Raj in the States o f India, New Delhi: Institute of Social Sciences. S. Mishra (1991), An Alternative Approach to Development. Land Reforms and Panchayats, Calcutta, Government of West Bengal (Information and Cultural Affairs Department). B. Rogaly (1998), “Containing conflict and reaping votes: the management of rural labour relations in communist West Bengal”. Economic and Political Weekly, 23(42-3), pp. 2729-2739. L. Rudolph and S. Rudolph (1987), In Pursuit o f Lakshmi: The Political Economy o f the Indian State, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. A. Ruud (1994), “Land and Power: The Marxist Conquest of Rural Bengal”, Modem Asian Studies, 28(2), 357-86. J. Scott (1985), Weapons o f the Weak: Everyday Forms o f Peasant Resistance> New Haven: Yale University Press. A. Vanaik (1990), The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India, L o n d on : Verso.

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A. Vanaik (1997), The Furies o f Indian Communalism, London: Verso. N. Webster (1992), Panchayati Raj and the Decentralisation o f Development Planning in West Bengal, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi. ________ (1999), “Institutions, actors and strategies in West Bengal’s rural development— a study in irrigation” in B. Rogaly, B. Harriss-White and S. Bose (eds), Sonar Bangla? Agricultural change in West Bengal and Bangladesh, Delhi: Sage. G. Williams (1997), “State, discourse and development in India: the case of West Bengal’s Panchayati Raj'\ Environment and Planning A. 29(12), pp. 2099-2112.

Part Two

The Mechanics o f Cultural M obilization

4 The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s ‘Tradition of Selfless Service’ 1 Gwilym Beckerlegge

I n t r o d u c t io n The Bharatiya Janata Party (B JP) has occupied an increasingly prominent position in mainstream Indian politics in recent years. As the BJP is the political standard-bearer o f the Sangh Parivar (‘sangh fam ily’) , which has developed from and around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the political goals o f the Sangh Parivar as a whole have attracted close scrutiny. Many o f the organizations that make up the Sangh Parivar have been extensively involved during this same period in projects devoted to seva. Often translated as ‘service to humanity’, in the RSS the performance o f seva has been directed towards achieving the wider political and cultural ends o f the parivar.2 It is this extensive and now thoroughly institutionalized practice o f seva that will be the subject o f this chapter. There has been much debate 1 The title o f this chapter and its sub-headings are taken, with some modifications, from the judgement passed on commitment to seva within the RSS by Mishra (1980: 80), a sympathiser. Mishra’s judgement is given in full later in this chapter. 2 For an account of the Sangh Parivar’s political aspirations and its place in the Hindutva movement, see, for example, contributions by Embree and van der Veer to Marty and Appleby (1994), Jaffrelot (19% ), Madan (1998).

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about the extent to which welfare projects have furthered the political aims of the Sangh Parivar. This discussion will examine instead the development o f seva within the RSS and its affiliates with reference to the way in which the origins and growth o f this activity have been understood within the Sangh Parivar. Particular attention will be paid to the gradual elaboration o f a theory to underpin the expanding commitment to the practice o f seva, or more accurately ‘organized seva\ which ideologues within the RSS have attempted to root in the religious traditions of Hinduism.3 Finally, the chapter will offer some tentative reflections on what the promotion of seva reveals about the nature of a movement whose status in relationship to other forms of organized Hinduism has been so much discussed.4

S ev a ‘i n i t i a t e d ’ by D

r

H edgew ar

Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, was bom into a Brahmin family in the city o f Nagpur in 1889. He is said to have possessed an ‘instinctive national fervour* even when a young child, possibly as a result o f the death of his parents during an epidemic, which Hedgewar attributed to the ‘callousness of the alien officialdom’ (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 4). At the age o f eight, he reportedly refused to participate in the celebration o f Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (Anon., n.d. (b): 1). Hedgewar worked as a student for the nationalist cause, greatly influenced by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981:6). The closure o f local educational institutions because of political activity by students led Hedgewar in 1910 to pursue his higher studies in Bengal, ‘the birthplace of “Vande M ataram ’” (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 13). Hedgewar’s medical studies became a cover for the revolutionary training he received in Kolkata (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 15), as had been intended by his mentor, Balkrishna Shivram Moonje, a former aide o f Tilak and then leader of the Hindu Sabha in Nagpur. Hedgewar’s outlook during his formative years was thus profoundly shaped by the convergence o f influences that flowed from the Arya Samaj, through the Hindu Sabha, which members o f the Arya Samaj had created, and so ultimately into the Hindu Mahasabha, formed in 1915. Later sources within the RSS constantly emphasize Hedgewar’s involvement in acts of service before he founded the organization (for 3 The designation ‘organized seva* is explained in Beckerlegge (1995: 396f.). 4 See, for example, Joshi (n.d.); Jaffrdot (19% : 33ff.); Zavos (2000: 188ff.).

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example, Anon., 1997, ‘Seva Vibhag’, p. 1). Once in Kolkata, Hedgewar is said to have shaped up as an intensely patriotic and self-disciplined young man for whom ‘public service was a consuming passion’ (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 20). He formed a ‘service unit’ to help and to care for Hindus who were victims of atrocities attributed to Muslims, and his heart was ‘pierced’ by the apathy o f Hindus facing such assaults (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981: 20). Above all, Hedgewar’s involvement in the operation to combat severe flooding in the Burdwan (Bardhaman) district to the northwest o f Kolkata in August o f 1913 has taken on heroic proportions within the RSS, and is cited as a precedent or model to encourage others. On this occasion, Hedgewar was involved as a volunteer in a relief-party organized by the Ramakrishna Mission. He also joined other volunteers during the six years he spent in Kolkata to offer service to the crowds attending the Gangasagar Mela, again probably organized by the Ramakrishna Mission, where he was moved by the ‘poverty, ignorance and illhealth [that] had utterly emasculated the villagers’ (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 22). Dattopant Thengadi, a prominent leader and thinker within the RSS and founder of its affiliate, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, recalls Hedgewar’s self-sacrifice in this way: ‘Whenever and wherever natural calamities occur the swayamsevaks are always in the vanguard to rush to the rescue of the affected people, be it floods, earthquakes, drought or other disasters. The swayamsevaks are only following in the footsteps of Doctorji [Hedgewar] who carried bags of baked food to the affected people during the Damodar deluge, often carrying a bag on his own back across the raging river.’ Thengadi goes on to list other acts o f philanthropy performed by Hedgewar. For Thengadi (n.d.), therefore, ‘Today’s service organizations have their roots in that bag o f food on Doctorji’s broad back being carried across the flooded Damodar’. He also claims that ‘in its rudimentary form Dr Hedgewar had conceived of the specialized bodies for special functions like Seva Bharati. Today’s multifarious growth o f the Sangh in its several avatars is the vindication of the truth that Doctorji was a great seer’. In accord with this under­ standing o f Hedgewar’s role and writing from within the ranks o f the organization then led by Balasaheb Deoras, Mishra (1980, p. 80) offers the following judgement on the development o f seva within the RSS under the leadership o f its successive sarsanghchalaks (supreme leaders): ‘The tradition o f selfless service and the capacity for organization which was initiated by Dr Hedgewar and brought to

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maturity by Golwalkar, has been further strengthened by Deoras .... ‘It would be consistent with Mishra’s viewpoint to suggest that, if he had written this statement today, he would have included Rajendra Singh, Deoras* successor as sarsanghchalak , under whose leadership the Seva Vibhag (Service Division) came into being. It is too soon as yet to judge the contribution o f the fifth sarsangchalak, K.S. Sudarshan (193 1 ), to the promotion o f seva. His immediate passage from student to pracharak (full-time organizer o f RSS activities) prior to eventually holding senior national offices in the RSS, however, suggests that commitment to seva is unlikely to diminish under his leadership. The phases that Mishra identifies in the development o f seva within the RSS are treated as propositions to be tested in this chapter and its sections are structured accordingly. As will become apparent, contrary to the popular representation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s history by members like Mishra, the development o f its collective practice o f seva was far from being, as stated in Mishra’s account, an internally consistent development from ‘initiation* through ‘maturity* to ‘strength’ under the guidance of three successive sarsanghchalaks. We shall begin by showing that Hedgewar’s conception of specialist bodies dedicated to seva is problematic in the sense that there is little evidence to suggest that Hedgewar gave priority to translating any such conceptions into practical service initiatives, as distinct from developing a policing role, within the RSS. That fell to his successors and, it will be argued, for reasons that had little to do with Hedgewar’s early, personal involvement in organized seva. Rather, as we shall see, changes within the political and social context of post-Independence India and the strategic response of the RSS to these new challenges provide the fram ew ork within which to explain the increasing scope and prominence o f seva activity within the RSS. Having completed his medical training in 1915, Hedgewar returned to Nagpur early in 1916 to resume his nationalist activities without distraction. As the earlier revolutionary movement gave way to the Indian National Congress in the 1920s, Hedgewar joined the Rashtriya Mandal, an affiliate much influenced by Tilak. In 1920, Hedgewar was responsible for organizing young men into a uniformed volunteer unit that kept order at the annual Congress meeting in Nagpur. After Tilak*s death, Hedgewar participated briefly in the non-violence campaign orchestrated by Gandhi. The suspension o f this campaign in 1922 following escalating violence and an outburst o f communal violence in 1923 caused Hedgewar to rethink the causes o f India’s current -

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predicament. The fundamental causes of so many of India’s current problems, Hedgewar came to believe, could be attributed to India’s past inability to defend herself from foreign aggression and occupation. He put this failure down to a lack o f both coherent social organization and a sense of national consciousness, and he believed that their absence impeded the effectiveness o f the nationalist movement. The training programme he would found was designed specifically to promote both these qualities. The direct antecedent o f the RSS was the Nagpur Hindu Sabha, which was created in the face o f British administrative and Muslim com m unal opposition to Hindus celebrating festivals in public processions. Hedgewar was its secretary. The Nagpur Hindu Sabha won a compromise through its demonstrations, and in the process united Hindus against two ‘enemies’— the British and the Muslims. One o f Hedgewar’s key assumptions, by now under the influence of V.D. Savarkar, was that Hindus were a nation ( rashtra) and that their national identity needed to be defined, protected, and positively nurtured. Deshpande and Ramaswamy (1981, p. 79) state that it was Hedgewar’s analysis of the ‘two-pronged attack’ of British domination and the prospect o f Muslim separatism facing the Hindu majority, and his realization that the majority must be galvanised into an ‘intense spirit o f nationalism’ that formed the ‘ideological base’ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It would be ‘a work o f national resurrection’ (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 81). Hedgewar established the RSS to provide the training necessary for ‘character building’ in order to combat the ‘apathy’ and ‘emasculation’ that he believed were undermining Hindus. Beginning in Nagpur in 1925, the embryonic RSS required its members to attend a traditional gymnasium (akhara ) where exercise, instruction and worship took place. The first shakha (branch), the basic unit o f the RSS, was inaugurated in Nagpur in 1926, and it was on this model that the RSS began to expand during the following decade.*’ Members o f the RSS took an oath before the bhagva dhwaj (the saffron flag o f Shivaji) and in the presence o f Maruti. In the developed RSS, these training disciplines have been referred to as samskaras> the dharmik rites that mark the stages of life, and, in particular, upanayanaythrough which the twice-born male passes out of childhood and into the first o f the 5 For an account o f one individual’s involvement in the routine of the shakha, see Sirsikar, 1988: 191-96.

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four stages o f adult life. Similarly, the term samskara is used in its sense o f ‘impression or ‘character trait* to refer to the impact of the training discipline upon the personality o f the individual. ‘The thrust o f all samskars ... is for imbibing the noblest qualities o f head and heart’ (Anon., n.d.(a), ‘Sangh’s March: Some Thrust-Areas’, p. 1). Accepting * the discipline o f the sh a k h a , the individual in tim e becom es ‘... broadminded and service-oriented’ (Anon.,n.d. (a),‘Sangh’s March: Some Thrust-Areas’, p. 1). Through interaction with members o f the shakha the individual’s ‘angularities become rounded off’ and ‘... in place o f self-aggrandisement, the dedication for the service o f the society becomes his fervent preoccupation’ (Anon., n.d.(a), ‘Sangh’s March: Some Thrust-Areas’, p. 1). It is in the shakha that samskaras become ‘rooted deep in his [the swayamsevak] mind’ or ‘imbibed’ (Anon., n.d.(a), ‘Sangh’s March: Some Thrust-Areas’, p. 1). From the days of Hedgewar’s stress upon character building, the RSS has constantly emphasized its role as a cultural organization rather than as a political party and has claimed to have held itself apart from direct political activity.6 Its critics have argued that it has been able to do this precisely because of the activities of the other wings o f the parivar and the closeness of its relationship to these wings (for example, Joshi, n.d.). The Sangh, on the other hand, argues that it is committed to ‘Saravatigeena Unnati (the all-round development o f Bharat). The cleansing and re-orientating o f India’s political life upon Hindu values is ‘... just one among the many facets of social life’, and the Sangh argues that to represent its goals as political is to misunderstand this concept o f all-round development (Anon., n.d.(a), ‘Sangh’s March: Some Thrust-Areas’, p. 1). While the avowed apolitical stance o f the RSS remains contentious, the organization’s public commitment to this principle helps to explain the uneasy relationship that developed between the RSS and its slightly senior counterpart on the Hindu right, the Hindu Mahasabha (see, for example, Andersen and Damle, 1987, pp. 36-40). For, in spite of Hedgewar’s close association with Savarkar and an early expectation that Hedgewar’s organization might form a youth wing o f the Hindu Mahasabha, Hedgewar refused to support the Hindu Mahasabha’s civil 6 See, for example, ‘RSS: The Mission’, the statement of mission attributed to Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder o f RSS, on the organization’s website (RSS, n.d :l). This statement is repeated in other RSS publications, for example, Anon.(n.d., b: 35ff.).

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disobedience campaign o f 1938-39. The gulf between the two movements subsequendy widened, although individuals continued to support both and move between the two. Andersen and Damle (1987, p. 40) suggest that this was due to the desire of the RSS leadership not to ally itself with a group that was openly in opposition to the Congress, and also to Savarkar’s dislike o f Hedgewar’s successor, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. In view o f the contemporary closeness between the RSS and the self-declared political wing of the Sangh Parivar and the RSS’s historical associations with the Hindu Mahasabha, it is important to be clear as to the kinds o f seva activities that were encouraged under Hedgewar and in turn by its later leaders. The first example o f an organized act o f ‘service’ carried out by members o f the RSS (the sw ayam sevaks or volunteers) under Hedgewar’s leadership was reminiscent of that performed by the unit of young men formed by Hedgewar in 1920 to supervise Indian Congress meetings. In 1926, his latest band of volunteers policed a rowdy local celebration o f Ram -N avm i, establishing queues, distributing water to devotees and protecting them from those who would batten upon the innocent. For this occasion, Hedgewar chose both the name and a uniform for the new organization. His purpose, according to Andersen and Damle (1987, p. 35) was ‘ ... to demonstrate the value o f discipline both to the volunteers and to the general public ... ’. The style of uniform, which Hedgewar had employed previously in 1920, it has been suggested, was taken from the British police, and represented a ‘strategic emulation’ intentionally designed to induce a sense o f cohesion and strength (Jaffrelot, 1996, p. 34). One member of the RSS has spoken of the broad influence o f the style of the University Training Corps (cited in Jaffrelot, 1996, p. 37). (It is also worth noting that the Boy Scout movement had been present in India since 1909, admitting Indian youths as well as Europeans and Anglo-Indians from 1916.) After this excursion, training with the lathi was introduced, together with other aspects o f military training and ceremony, as well as communal prayers. In 1927, RSS squads were used to protect Hindu districts of Nagpur during an outbreak of communal violence, but in the next few years several senior members o f the RSS left the organization in frustration over Hedgewar’s insistence that the RSS restrict itself to a character-building role. By the end o f the 1930s, there were about 500 shakhas and a women’s affiliate, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti. The growth o f the RSS already alarmed certain provincial governments sufficiently to ban their employees from taking part in RSS activities (for example, Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 137).

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For, in spite o f its defined role o f ‘character building’, the paramilitary appearance o f the RSS, its Hindu membership and evident links with the Hindu right made Hedgewar’s RSS appear little different from a militant, communal organization. The style of seva fostered by Hedgewar through shakha training and rituals during the early days of the RSS appeared to owe little to those movements that had influenced him and had a history of involvement in seva. Within the Arya Samaj, seva had been typically expressed in educational activities, the care of orphans and faminerelief, although a distinction needs to be drawn between the kinds of educational activities associated with the two wings of the Arya Samaj (Jones, 1989: 97ff.). The activities o f the Ramakrishna Math and Mission fell within similar categories at that time. Indeed, although Hedgewar was involved with the Ramakrishna Mission in Kolkata, it has been suggested in one critical study o f the RSS that this was merely instrumental to his desire *... to enter the charmed circle o f the revolutionary or political elite whose names were a source of inspiration for people ...* (Goyal, 1979, p. 56). It is significant, however, that Hedgewar clearly associated the conditions o f poverty, ignorance, disease and oppression that afflicted Hindus as much with an interior condition as with external structural factors relating to British rule and its response to the Hindu and Muslim dimensions o f the independence movement. In this respect, Hedgewar’s judgement was somewhat reminiscent of that o f Swami Vivekananda, although the form er defined this interior condition in terms o f apathy or ‘emasculation’ rather than spiritual impoverishment.

S eva ‘b r o u g h t t o m a t u r i t y ’ by G o l w a l k a r After Hedgewar’s death in 1940 it was announced that he had chosen Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1 9 0 6 -1 9 7 3 ) to succeed him as sarsanghchalak. This choice was initially regarded as surprising within the RSS on account o f Golwalkar’s relative youthfulness and perceived inexperience, and because Golwalkar had a reputation for strong spiritual inclinations rather than the intense patriotism associated with Hedgewar.7 Unlike Hedgewar, Golwalkar had an untroubled childhood

7 Andersen and Damle (1987:63f., n. 85) note that some believe that Hedgewar’s nomination of Golwalkar may have been fabricated by those who attended Hedgewar just prior to his death, including Golwalkar himself.

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and as a student has been described as ‘remarkably apolitical’ (Andersen and Damle, 1987, p. 41). Another resident o f Nagpur, having studied biology at Benares Hindu University, Golwalkar was given a lectureship at the same university. It was there that Golwalkar first met Hedgewar during a visit by the latter in 1931. It seems that Golwalkar displayed little interest in the RSS meetings held at the University at that time, and it was Hedgewar who began to groom Golwalkar, possibly as a result o f an attraction to young intellectuals that he had exhibited previously (Andersen and Damle, 1987:64, n. 88). Shortly afterwards, Golwalkar returned to Nagpur to take up the duties of a householder and also to read law. In 1934, Hedgewar appointed Golwalkar the secretary o f the Nagpur branch of the RSS, and in 1935 entrusted the management o f the RSS Officers’ Training Camp to him. In October 1936, however, Golwalkar turned his back on both his legal studies and the RSS, and left Nagpur for Bengal where he became a disciple o f Swami Akhandananda. This swami Was not only one o f Sri Ramakristfna’s direct disciples and Swami Vivekananda’s gurubhai (brother-disciple) but also the most active of all Ramakrishna’s earliest followers in the cause o f offering service to humanity.8 Swami Akhandananda died a few months after Golwalkar’s arrival, in February of 1937, and so the distraught Golwalkar returned to Nagpur where he was persuaded by Hedgewar that he could fulfil his vocation through the RSS (Goyal, 1979, p. 78). Nevertheless, Golwalkar maintained contact with the Ramakrishna movement up until his death (Mishra, 1980, p. 79)?

8 For a full account of the life of Swami Akhandananda, see Swami Annadananda (1993). For a critical evaluation o f Swami Akhandananda s contribution to the development o f service to humanity in the Ramakrishna movement, see Beckerlegge (2000a). Golwalkar’s relationship with Swami Akhandananda has been explored by Beckerlegge (2003) in a study devoted more narrowly to the appropriation of Vivekananda by the RSS. 9 According to Swami Prabhananda, a senior member and historian o f the Ramakrishna Math, Golwalkar stayed briefly at the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission in Mumbai towards the end of his life when suffering from illness. The head of the Mumbai centre at that time was Swami Hiranmayananda who later became General Secretary of the Math and Mission. This information was relayed in an email of 20 April 1999, in response to the author’s questions about Golwalkar’s relationship to the Ramakrishna movement.

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In spite o f Golwalkar’s close relationship with the Ramakrishna movement and with one of the pioneers o f its characteristic sadhana (‘spiritual discipline’) o f serving humanity, it is evident that Golwalkar did not immediately embrace an activist philosophy of service to others, any more than Hedgewar had given priority to institutionalizing the offering of service within the newly formed RSS, in spite o f having worked with the Ramakrishna movement as a volunteer during his time in Kolkata and prior to his founding o f the RSS. In fact, there is no evidence that Golwalkar became involved in seva during the period o f his closest association with the Ramakrishna movement, even though briefly under the guidance o f Swami Akhandananda. The range o f activities embraced within the RSS under the heading o f seva , moreover, remained sufficiently narrow until the 1950s to justify drawing a distinction between this first phase and later phases characterised by the performance o f a far wider range of humanitarian initiatives, although still largely communal in scope. The RSS now highlights recent occasions when it has offered service to Muslims afflicted by disasters (Anon., n.d. (b): 16f.) and instances when Muslims and Christians have supported its causes (Anon., n.d. (b): 23). Thus, while it is broadly accurate to describe ‘the mixing o f organizational work with a kind o f social service’ as an ‘enduring feature o f Sangh activity’ (Zavos, 2000, p. 185), it is significant that the balance within this ‘mix’ swung towards ‘social service’ from the 1950s. With this shift, came an increasing reliance upon justifications for seva that appeared to be modelled on those found particularly in the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. The humanitarian impulse did become more pronounced under Golwalkar’s leadership. It grew in strength, however, in circumstances that favoured the strategic interests o f the RSS when the need arose to rehabilitate the movement in the eyes of the Indian people and their leaders and to consolidate the advance o f the RSS as an effective force. The RSS inherited by Golwalkar in 1940 consisted o f some 500 shakhas, one affiliate, and a structure centred upon the figure of the sarsan ghchalak with absolute decision-m aking powers and the authority to appoint all office-bearers. Golwalkar modified this structure, and in so doing strengthened his own position and that of future sarsanghchalaks still further, by creating the position o f pracharak , or ‘organizer’. Pracharaks were to be directly responsible to the sarsanghchalak and not the regional sanghchalak. Golwalkar’s major preoccupation during W^WII was to reduce the risk o f the British

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banning the RSS, and to this end he was prepared to sacrifice the more overtly militaristic aspects o f the dress and ceremonial o f the RSS. This cautious defensiveness, coupled with Golwalkar’s temperament, and the widening gulf between the RSS and political action led to more defections, although overall membership continued to grow. The RSS expanded even more in the immediate post-war period during the period o f intense communal antagonism that accompanied Partition. It developed a reputation for the protection and assistance it gave to Hindu refugees crossing the new borders into northern India and for guarding the homes o f Hindu minorities. The reputation of the RSS at this time was that o f an efficient, Hindu paramilitary organization, sometimes armed. The ‘service’ offered by swayamsevaks remained communal in nature, being restricted to the aid and defence of Hindus, Sikhs being included under this heading. It is thus more aptly described as ‘policing’, or ‘organizational work’ (Zavos) than humanitarian service, as this latter phrase is normally understood.10 By the beginning of 1948, there were some 7000 shakhas and many swayamsevaks had significantly broadened their experience o f ‘service’ through working in the vast refugee camps established to care for Hindus crossing into India. Golwalkar himself had a major role in organizing relief for refugees fleeing West Pakistan (Kohli, 1993: 5). Many Hindus cared for by the RSS in those difficult days would dedicate the rest of their lives to it out of gratitude. Andersen and Damle (1987, p. 50) make the point that such was the level o f goodwill built up by the RSS in 1948 that the'government could not contemplate taking action against it, even when the organization was accused o f involvement in communal violence in Delhi and Punjab. Following the assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, a member o f the RSS between 1930 and 1934 and then a member o f the Hindu Mahasabha, both organizations were banned and their leaders imprisoned. In spite of this ban and Golwalkar’s instruction that the RSS suspend its activities while he was in gaol, many swayamsevaks continued to meet illicitly under the guise of sports

10 Although the RSS had protected both Hindu and Muslim pilgrims in 1926 when it policed the Ram-Navmi celebration, the general pattern of its activities has been consistently directed against Muslims. For an insider’s account of the service offered to Hindu and Sikh communities at the time of Partition, see Seshadri (1988: 203ff).

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dubs. Golwalkar was released after approximately six months and the ban on the RSS was rescinded in July 1949 after vigorous campaigning and negotiation. The RSS immediately set about reshaping itself in a diminished India and recovering the ground that it had lost during the period when it was banned. Seva took on a new and greater prominence in the post-Independence era. In the years after the lifting o f the ban in 1949, Golwalkar reoriented the RSS by playing down its paramilitary past but licensing a new and different kind o f activism. The pracharaks , largely young graduates and all unmarried, were to be central to this strategy. In 1949, Golwalkar sent pracharaks to work under Vinoba Bhave. In 1950, Eknath Ranade, a pracharak and member of the central RSS executive and its General Secretary from 1956 until 1962, was given the job of organizing relief for Hindu refugees from East Pakistan, much as Golwalkar had done for those leaving West Pakistan on Partition. In 1954, Golwalkar outlined to an audience o f pracharaks the tenets o f‘positive Hinduism* in order to provide a philosophical rationale for their work. He argued that ‘... a person worships God through service to society and he advised his audience to carry out its work in this spirit’ (Andersen and Damle, 1987, p. 111). The injunction to worship God by serving society has become deeply embedded in the rhetoric o f the RSS since Golwalkar’s time. For example, this philosophy is expressed in the following way in a recent RSS source: The swayamsevak considers the Hindu society itself as ‘Janata Janardana’— god incarnate. [Janardana, ‘the giver o f rewards’, is one o f the twenty-four avataras o f Vishnu.] Any service rendered to this society, accepting nothing in return, is for him the worship o f his god, the ‘Samaja-rooppee Parameshwar’ (the god in the form o f society). To him, who feels intensely for the good of the society, it provides any number o f opportunities of service. The abject poverty, illiteracy, caste barriers, false sense o f high and low, untouchability, exploitation, lack o f medical facilities, etc., are, to name just a few, the social maladies which call for immediate corrective steps. The prime concern o f the swayamsevaks all over the country is now for such service activities (Anon., n.d.(a), ‘Sangh’s March: Some Thrust-Areas’, p. 2).

Yet, tracing the origins and development o f this now commonly made identification o f ‘God’ and ‘society’ by members of the RSS is far from straightforward. To an extent Golwalkar was consolidating Hedgewar’s emphasis upon service, yet the scope o f service projects initiated under

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Golwalkar’s leadership and subsequently, went for beyond anything associated with the Hedgewar era. Hedgewar’s commitment to service was linked to his understanding o f Hindu nationalism and did not fall back upon a constant and explicidy elaborated identification o f the people and ‘god incarnate’. He did insist, however, that such service be selfless and that it was a sacred duty. Speaking in Pune in 1938, Hedgewar declared, ‘A real servant o f the nation is one who identifies himself totally with the nation. There are some who take pride in proclaiming their “sacrifices for the sake o f the nation”. Such an expression only betrays their feeling of being something distinct from the nation ... any service offered to our broader national family does not amount to a sacrifice. It is just a sacred duty to be performed by us’ (Deshpande and Ramaswamy, 1981, p. 163). Golwalkar has long held the reputation o f having been the RSS’s most influential thinker and this was founded upon his publication in 1938 o f We or Our Nation Defined . Much has been made o f critics’ denials o f the originality o f this work and its dependence upon the writings o f both V.D. and Babarao Savarkar (for example, Goyal, 1979, p. 8 0 ), although this was som ething that Golw alkar h im self acknowledged (Andersen and Damle, 1987, p. 43). More telling from the perspective of this current inquiry is the absence of any signs of preoccupation with seva in We or Our Nation Defined , even as a strategy for nation building. Described by Bhatt and Mukta (2000, p. 417) as ‘forbiddingly Nazi-like’, We or Our Nation Defined declares that ‘It seems as if we [Hindus] never were uncivilized’ (Golwalkar, 1945, p. 8) and, having identified ‘Hindu’ with ‘Aryan’ (p. 10), asserts that ‘... we Hindus came into this land from nowhere, but are the indigenous people of the soil always . . . ’ (Golwalkar, 1945, p. 12). Thus, having dismissed reconstructions of India’s ancient past in which the Aryans entered as foreigners and only then mingled with the indigenous population, Golwalkar (1945, p. 16) proceeds to narrate a version o f India’s history in which an ancient, indigenous, civilized people (the Hindus/Aryans) only relatively recently had to contend with foreign invasions, which they had resisted heroically, *... fighting for their mother, the Hindu race and nation . . . ’.A benumbing sense of security, carelessness and political fragmentation are put forward as the causes of India’s lack of success in finally repelling, rather than merely resisting, foreign invasion (Golwalkar, 1945, p. 13). It is the underlying, never finally extinguished consciousness o f ‘nationhood’ that Golwalkar (1945, p. 22) sets out to define, in terms of the five ‘Unities’ (geographical, racial, religious,

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cultural, and linguistic), and to revive. As we shall see, the manner in which he did that profoundly affected the development of seva within the RSS.11 Golwalkar’s public espousal in 1954 o f the doctrine o f ‘worshipping God through service to society’ came 16 years after the publication of his We or Our Nation Defined and almost two decades after his contacts with the Ramakrishna Math and Mission and Swami Akhandananda, who was arguably the most sympathetic o f Ramakrishna’s direct disciples to Vivekananda’s commitment to service to humanity. It is beyond question that Golwalkar was influenced to varying degrees by a number o f personalities associated with the Ramakrishna movement. The pattern of his life, however, suggests that he put these influences to work in the strategic interests o f developing the RSS, rather than evidently moulding the RSS as a matter of priority to ensure that it would incorporate characteristic emphases o f the Ramakrishna movement, which he seemingly so admired. The elements that make up Golwalkar’s philosophy of serving society as a form o f worship of God are to be found in Bunch o f Thoughtsyan extensive volume pulled together in 1966 from Golwalkar’s talks over the previous 25 years. The time span represented in this volume, therefore, includes the decade prior to his seminal 1954 speech. Golwalkar (1966, p. 25) attributed the encouragement of the ‘service of man’ to ‘our forefathers’, including Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. In this way, he was able to ground the Sangh’s commitment to seva in the age-old tradition o f Hinduism and thus distance it from the social service provision of western Europe and the United States.12 Golwalkar, however, proposed a refinement of his forefathers’ teaching, wishing 11 For discussion of affinities between the ideology developed by Savarkar and Golwalkar and German National Socialism and Italian Fascism, see Bhatt and Mukta (2000: 413-419) and related references. These early sympathies stand in ironic contrast to the links made to Zionist websites in websites maintained by the contemporary Hindu right, noted by Rajagopal (2000: 485). Now, Zionist Jews are viewed as sturdily resisting attempts by a surrounding oppressor to rob them of their homeland and culture. Thus, they are presented as a model of an entirely different kind from that cited by Golwalkar (1945: 40f.) when he advised Hindustan to heed the ‘good lesson’ provided by Germany’s attempt to purge itself o f Jews in order to *... keep up the purity of the race and its culturc 12 Golwalkar’s debt to the Ramakrishna movement is discussed more fully in Beckerlegge (2003).

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to substitute ‘our people’ for ‘man’, when he argued that serving humanity was too wide an aim and one that in the past had encouraged inaction among Hindus (c.f., Golwalkar, 1966: 386f.). The ‘living God’ in Golwalker’s system, therefore, does not refer merely to the divine within the individual but more accurately to the divine within ‘Our People* or the nation.13 According to Golwalkar (1966, p. 25), ‘This supreme vision o f Godhead in society is the very core o f our concept of “nation” and has permeated our thinking and given rise to various unique concepts o f our cultural heritage*. Golwalkar’s focus upon ‘Our People* is predictably consistent with the way in which the term ‘Hindu* is defined within the RSS. Golwalkar (n.d.: 1), for example, referred to the Hindus as the group that had expressed the ‘unified current* o f the ‘national life o f Bharat*. Considerable emphasis is placed in the literature o f the RSS upon divisions within what it terms ‘Hindu’ society— for example, divisions of caste (for example, Deoras, 1989, p. 124). Following Golwalkar, the understanding o f India’s past, perpetuated within the RSS, insists that theories o f an Aryan invasion, and the distinction that this implies between Aryans and India’s Dravidian and tribal populations, were promoted by the British who also artificially created a separate Sikh identity. Hedgewar had bemoaned India’s lack of cohesion, and later writers have similarly argued that it was this persistent fragmentation that led to the successive foreign occupations of India and made the vulnerable and weak fall prey to the blandishments of other‘alien’ faiths. This social fragmentation, it has been suggested, also led groups within society to oppress and exploit each other (for example, Seshadri, 1988, p. 12). Devotion to nation and national interests, consequendy, requires identification with what is presented as a unified cultural tradition that has been artificially and only superficially fragmented. Within the rhetoric o f the RSS, therefore, the term ‘Hindu’ ‘... connotes the national entity of Bharat and not merely a religious faith’ (Seshadri, 1988, p. 11). The RSS claims to have room for those of all castes and all faiths, including Muslims and Christians, as long as they are able to identify with this understanding of their national tradition and to shed notions o f being religious minorities (Golwalkar, n.d.: 2). As Indian Christians, Muslims and Sikhs share the same ‘blood’ and ‘land’ as India’s Hindus, they have merely to reclaim their national heritage, according to the ideology o f the RSS. Within this framework o f 13 On the ‘Nation God’, see Golwalkar (1966) Chapters 7 and 8.

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assumptions, ‘swayamsevaks are trained to look upon the society as one single, vast, country-wide family* (Seshadri, 1988, p. 12). Service to ‘our people* thus becomes a means by which not only to address the needs o f the poor and oppressed in the interests of social justice but, no less importantly, to rebuild and unify a fragmented society. It must be said, however, that this appearance o f inclusiveness has been undermined by constant assertions within RSS sources that, ‘blood’ and ‘land’ notwithstanding, India’s Muslims have been aggressively anti-national. Once ‘man’ (the individual) has been replaced by ‘Our People’ (the Hindu nation), the tone o f Golwalkar’s argument is reminiscent of Vivekananda’s urgings to serve the poor and oppressed. Every individual (o f ‘our people’), Golwalkar (1966, p. 25f; c.f., 50) maintained, is ‘sacred and worthy o f our service’ as a part o f that Divine Whole’ It is verily God who has taken those forms o f the poor, the destitute and the suffering’ and ‘He comes in those forms to give us an opportunity to serve Him’ (Golwalkar, 1966, p. 26). Material possessions become the means by which the individual can help the less fortunate. There is a strongly ascetic tinge to Golwalkar’s demand that ‘only a minimum should be used for our sake’, and he developed this point to argue that to take more would be ‘an act of theft against society’, of which the individual is but a ‘trustee’ (Golwalkar, 1966, p. 26f.).14 On a distinctive note, Golwalkar (1966, p. 27) concluded that ‘It is only when we become true trustees that we can serve society best. Such a pure attitude of service will leave no scope for ego or selfadulation.’ Individual sw ayam sevaks have taken pride in their convention o f financing themselves when embarked upon seva activities, rather than drawing upon the charitable donations of others for subsistence (for example, Anon., n.d. (b): 7f.). When Golwalkar was attempting to rebuild and re-align the RSS in 1954, as we noted earlier, he spoke in terms o f ‘positive Hinduism’. In Bunch o f Thoughts, his editors have arranged Golwalkar’s teachings on this subject around the injunction ‘Live Positive Dynamic Hinduism’, which again is close to one o f Vivekananda’s well-known formulations, ‘Dynamic Religion’ (Vivekananda, 1989: VIII: 407). It is also evident that, like Vivekananda, Golwalkar grounded his ethical teaching in a 14 For a fuller discussion of iconographic representations of asceticism and activism in the RSS, see Beckerlegge (forthcoming).

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form o f non-dualism. For a Hindu, the aim in life is "... the realisation of his true nature— the innate Spark o f Divinity, the Reality in him ...* or the realization o f our oneness with that Ultimate Reality* (G olw alkar, 1966, p. 4 8 f.). Golwalkar*s sym pathies with the Ramakrishna movement may provide a sufficient explanation o f his adoption o f a non-dualist ethic, but the effectiveness o f a broadly Vedantic monistic philosophy as a source o f social solidarity should not be overlooked (see Rothermund, 1970, p. 58f.). The way to the goal o f oneness with the Ultimate Reality is through the performance o f‘duty in a selfless spirit* and by offering worship and service to ‘man*, the objective manifestation o f Reality, for ‘... every man is a spark o f the same Reality* (Golwalkar, 1966, pp. 49-50). Im m ediate outcom es o f Golw alkar’s encouragem ent to his pracharaks to intensify their commitment to social activism were evident in the creation o f two o f the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh*s largest and most influential affiliates. Datta Devidas Didolkar and Dattopant Bapurao Thengadi, among others, immediately set to work to develop RSS-related organizations among students and labour respectively. Both these pracharaks had experience o f working in these sectors beyond their roles within the RSS. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad grew out o f student groups that operated clandestinely during 1948 and 1949 and a meeting o f the student organizers called in 1948. Its purpose has been defined more recently as to ‘... save all educational set-ups from all types of polluting factors and maintain the sanctity o f educational institutions* (Anon., 1997, ‘Akhil Bharateeya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)*, p. 1). Between 1955 and 1958, Thengadi drew upon his previous experience w ithin the Congress-affiliated labour movement to create the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh— a labour organi­ zation founded upon an ‘Indian* approach to labour relations rather than upon either capitalism or communism. Like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh was committed to offering its members an alternative to communism. In the early 1970s, a parallel organization to the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh was created for farmers in an attempt to strengthen the appeal o f the RSS in rural areas. By 1979, this had been transformed into the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, a movement that has proved less successful in terms o f its appeal than the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh. The policy o f permitting the growth o f affiliates brought with it the major problem that Golwalkar had to face, which was that o f defining the relationship between the RSS and its affiliates. The tension between

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‘character building* and direct political action had divided members of the RSS since its formation. It had been intensified by the freedom enjoyed during the period o f the ban by local branches and local leaders. This opportunity for more autonomous, local initiatives had not been welcomed by the central leadership who feared it might erode common ideals. Golwalkar’s desire to promote service to society as the worship of God did little to satisfy those members who felt that the RSS should take a more robust line with the Muslim minority within India and India’s enemies on her newly created borders. In fact, the term ‘activism’ when applied to the RSS by its critics usually implies direct, political action, rather than social activism expressed through philanthropy. Involvement at an institutional level in overt political activity has proved continually contentious within the RSS, dividing the ‘activists’ from the ‘character builders’. For the latter, attempting to steer clear of organized political activity was seen as one way to safeguard the cultural mission of the RSS and, indeed, to remain true to Hedgewar’s policy that had frustrated ‘activists’ two decades earlier. Andersen and Damle (1987, p. 251), however, make the additional point that RSS leaders have tended to adopt a position o f ‘ethical absolutism’. Their suspicion o f swayamsevaks who work through the affiliates has rested on the conviction that ‘working in the world* inevitably requires compromise and thus a degree of moral relativism. Clearly, such challenges could be said to confront those responsible for even the most modest humanitarian project, let alone those involved in politics at the macro-level. Where success depends upon the participation o f necessary sponsors and negotiation with other interested agencies, compromises may have to be made for the benefit of those in need, if the project is not to founder. Such risks may explain why the RSS, as this chapter has emphasized, only slowly broadened its base from offering character-building training in its shakhas to the systematic provision of an extensive network o f educational, economic and medical services. By the early 1950s, however, even the confirmed ‘ethical absolutist*, Golwalkar, had had to bend to the pressure exerted by the ‘activist* camp in a bid to restore the fortunes o f the RSS. In order to meet the demands o f the ‘activists* while preserving the original role of the RSS, Golwalkar permitted RSS pracharaks to serve within the Jana Sangh political party, established in 1951 by individual members o f the RSS under the leadership of Shyama Prasad Mookerji and a forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Prominent among these pracharaks was Deendayal Upadhyaya who was responsible for

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shaping the party’s political doctrine o f ‘Integral Humanism’. 15 Upadhyaya’s selective,‘idiomatic’ incorporation of Gandhian principles of sw adeshi and sarvodaya , but devoid o f their ‘more radical’ implications for the organization o f political and economic system (Hansen, 1999, p. 85), may be compared with the selective use made of Vivekananda by Golwalkar and Eknath Ranade in their promotion of seva within the RSS. The question of the extent to which the pracharaks, the elite cadre of the RSS, could be used to provide leadership in the affiliates would be one to which the leadership o f the RSS would return on future occasions. Their use not only raised questions about the degree to which the human resources o f the leadership o f the RSS could be stretched but also about the real nature o f the relationship between the members of the Sangh Parivar— the avowedly non-political RSS and formal political parties like the Jana Sangh and later the BJR By the mid-1950s, in spite of the growth in its affiliates, the RSS had still not recovered its membership or financial position. In 1956, Ranade, then the General Secretary, ruled that the RSS could not afford to loan its key leaders to its affiliates. By this time, however, political and social activism had bitten deeply into the membership of the RSS. Several prom inent prach araks , including Balasaheb (Madhukar Dattatraya) Deoras who would succeed Golwalkar as sarsanghchalaky withdrew from RSS activities in protest over the weakening of affiliates like the Jana Sangh. In 1962, Golwalkar reversed this ruling in the aftermath o f effective lobbying by pracharaks. Ranade was transferred from the post o f General Secretary to concentrate on a project intended to promote the ‘revivalist message’ o f Swami Vivekananda (Andersen and Damle, 1987, p. 113) and was replaced as General Secretary by Prabhakar Balwant Dani, who had previously held the post between 1946-56 and was more sympathetic to the activist position.16 Balasaheb Deoras was made Assistant General Secretary. This move may have been necessitated by Golwalkar’s need to bring activist pracharaks like Balasaheb Deoras back into the fold, but its timing also coincided with 15 See, for example, Deendayal Upadhyaya’s arguments under the heading ‘Our Country: Our Problems’, which clearly aspires to prepare the ground for ‘our solutions’, i.e., those rooted in the ‘integrated viewpoint’ o f ‘Bharatiya culture’; Upadhyaya et al. (1979: 15, 18). 16 Ranade’s promotion of Vivekananda is discussed at length in Beckerlegge (2003).

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the centenary o f Vivekananda’s b irth . One result o f Ranade’s secondment to the Vivekananda ‘project* was the creation o f the Vivekananda Kendra, one o f the fifteen ‘im portant RSS front organizations’ (M itra and Baweja, 1998, p. 16). In addition to promoting Vivekananda’s teaching, the Kendra also supports numerous service projects particularly in tribal areas.17 The consolidation of the RSS during the 1960s placed a range of activist activities more firmly on the agenda of the organization and its affiliates. This trend was increased with the formation o f the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) in 1964 after a meeting called by Golwalkar of the leaders o f a range of Hindu groups. His aim was to create a forum to exert a unifying pressure on Hindu society and its different religious groups. The VHP was the outcome o f this initiative and Shivram Shankar Apte, an RSS pracharak , was its first General Secretary. One consequence of this move was an increased level o f participation in social welfare projects as a number o f groups and initiatives already created by swayamsevaks were brought under the umbrella o f the VHP. Thus, by the end of the 1960s, the RSS was involved directly or indirectly in a larger number o f service projects than at any time in its previous history and in projects o f a far wider range than the ‘policing’/ ‘organizational’ activities that had characterized the early years under Hedgewar. Although several of the largest RSS affiliates were created during Golwalkar’s leadership to appeal to particular interest groups, for example, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad on behalf of students, the Akhil Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh on behalf o f labour, and the Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sangh on behalf of peasants, sections within all these organizations are also engaged in seva.

S eva ‘f u r t h e r s t r e n g t h e n e d ’ by D e o r a s a n d t h e R e c e n t L e a d e r s h ip Balasaheb Deoras joined the RSS in 1926 and was one of those thought likely to succeed Hedgewar. In fact, he did not become sarsanghchalak until after the death o f Golwalkar. Deoras is said to have declared that he based his confidence in the future of the RSS not so much on its ‘Sanatan philosophy’ (by implication, unlike Golwalkar) but on ‘the army o f workers which would be the envy of gods’ (quoted in Goyal,

17 The Vivekananda Kendra is described in Beckerlegge (2003).

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1979, p. 112). His eventual appointment as sarsanghchalak was seen by many to mark a return to the style o f Hedgewar. Always close to the centre o f power at Nagpur, Deoras came from the wing o f the RSS that had consistently favoured greater political involvement. He conse­ quently placed a premium on the network o f organizations through which the RSS could exert its influence. This was a policy he had pursued from his time as acting and then substantive General Secretary from 1964. A growing assertiveness, a more populist orientation, and an increasing resort to agitation are said to have characterized the affiliates during this period under Deoras’ influence (Andersen and Damle, 1987: 114). This was illustrated by the conduct o f the RSS during the period o f the Emergency (1975-77). RSS affiliates, particularly the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Jana Sangh, became active in the protests against the Congress government o f Indira Gandhi. Although once again banned, RSS leaders and affiliates made common cause with Jayaprakash Narayan and campaigned for the Janata alliance in 1977. After a weak showing by the Jana Sangh in elections during the early 1970s, praise from Jayaprakash Narayan and its high profile in resistance against the Congress government went some way to rebuild the positive image that the Sangh Parivar had begun to acquire but then had lost with the assassination o f Mahatma Gandhi. Its membership saw a significant increase as a result. This level o f activism is said to have set the stage for a more dynamic organization in the post-1977 period’ (Andersen and Damle, 1987, p. 212). While the Jana Sangh sought to have its voice heard in the Janata party, where some viewed it with great suspicion, the RSS looked to the new government for co-operation in promoting its expanding service provision. The ethical absolutism’ o f the RSS, represented by Golwalkar and Ranade, thus gave way to a greater degree o f ‘ethical relativism’ under Deoras’ leadership as the line between the RSS and its affiliates became increasingly blurred. This shift ultimately produced calls by L.K. Advani and others for a closer relationship between the RSS and the BJP. The nature o f the VHP also changed when Deoras succeeded Golwalkar as a trustee. Conceived originally by Golwalkar as a religious forum to foster greater Hindu unity, in the 1970s the VHP increasingly absorbed numerous, existing seva projects. This had the effect o f accelerating the momentum o f the Sangh Parivai’ s involvement in organized seva and lent prestige to the work and those involved in it. The VHP currently claims to run over 5000 different social service

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projects (Anon., n.d. [c], p. 1). Its formal status as a religious organization, however, enables those still inclined towards ‘ethical absolutism’ within the RSS to play a part in it more freely. Many o f the activities the VHP subsumes under seva have an immediate and explicit religious significance and are reminiscent of traditional notions o f seva that underlie the service offered by a devotee to a deity or guru. Thus, securing blessings o f dharmacharyas, the upkeep o f temples and cow protection are emphasized alongside more modem readings o f‘service’ expressed through health care and technical education. Such activity, however, remains instrumental to the realization o f the goals sought by the VHP, which go beyond merely protecting and unifying Hindu values to include actively encouraging the “home coming” back into Hindu fold of all those who happen to be separated from it on account o f various reasons’ (Anon., 1997, ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad [V.H.P.]’, p. 1). A comparable, indicative change also took place during the 1970s after Golwalkar’s death in the remit o f the Deendayal Research Institute (DRI), originally founded in 1972 to assist in the development o f RSS ideology. Its enhanced role, under the leadership o f the pracharak , Nana Deshmukh, became evident in 1977 as it took over direction o f the relief offered by the RSS in the aftermath o f devastation wrought by a hurricane in southeastern India. RSS sources echo with pride the comment passed by the Sarvodaya leader, Prabhakar Rao, who is commended for discerning the real purpose o f the RSS in an ‘unbiased’ and ‘discerning’ manner. After witnessing the service offered by swayamsevaks to the victims o f the storm in Andhra Pradesh in 1977, this observer claimed that ‘RSS’ stood for ‘Ready for Selfless Service’ (Anon., n.d.(a), ‘Sangh’s March: Some Thrust-Areas’, p. 1; c.f., Anon., n.d. (b), p. 16). After experimenting with a model village in Andhra Pradesh, the DRI undertook an integrated rural development project in Uttar Pradesh, which was then replicated in other states. Other new affiliates were created to serve the needs o f distinct social groups. In 1977, the Akhil Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram was established as a distinct body to co-ordinate work with tribals. It assimilated earlier smaller organizations that had been taken into the VHP, together with initiatives launched as early as the 1950s. The Akhil Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram prides itself on recruiting a large proportion o f its leaders from tribal areas. Its work is concentrated in health-care, education, and social organization. The underlying Sangh Parivar agenda is evident in the Akhil Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan

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Ashram’s aim o f ‘... re-establishing and strengthening the blurred cultural links and weaning the vanavasi away from the evil influence of foreign missionaries, anti-social, and anti-national forces etc.’ (Anon., 1997, ‘Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (V.K.A.)’, p. 1). Seva Bharati was given a similar co-ordinating role when it was set up in 1979 to prom ote educational initiatives among Scheduled Castes. In the previous year, Vidya Bharati had been given oversight of private schools run within the RSS in which yoga, Indian music and Sanskrit are taught from primary level. The centenary o f Hedgewar’s birth in 1989 was marked by a special effort to extend the performance o f seva through the creation o f Seva Vibhag (Service Division). It is claimed that swayamsevaks contacted 1,48,70,682 families in 2,16,284 villages as part of that celebration in order to ‘... carry the life saving message and mission bequeathed by Dr Hedgewar’ (A non., n.d. (b ), p. 26). Deoras was the first sarsanghchalak to stand down before his death and in 1994 was succeeded by Professor Rajendra Singh. By this time, such was the importance of the extensive offering of seva within the contemporary RSS that in 1994 it was decided by senior workers to establish a data­ bank, Seva Dishay to record all the seva activities carried out within the Sangh Parivar. This was overseen by Rajendra Singh. According to Seva D isha , in 1997 there were 22,866 recorded sevakarya (units o f seva activity) operating across the range o f Sawg/i-inspired organizations and reaching 7 per cent o f India’s population (Anon., 1997: ‘Sevakarya Data’).18 RSS seva activities are listed under the broad headings o f health care, education, social training, social development, and occasional (i.e., on an ad hoc basis according to need). The organization is confident that the number o f seva projects will continue to increase sharply because o f the number o f branches already established within its affiliates. The goal of developing at least one unit of service in every branch provided a more than realistic goal for the Service Division on its formation. The target of 5,000 units o f service set by Deoras as a way of marking the centenary o f Hedgewar’s birth was passed within three years ‘... on account of the wide-spread network of RSS branches (SHAKHAS) all over the country ...’ (Anon., 1997, ‘Seva Vibhag— Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh', p. 1). Subsequently, the Service Division announced the establishment o f ‘Sewa International’ to oversee on a global level the seva activities undertaken by affiliates 18

Parivar.

Seshadri (1988:175ff.) also provides an overview o f seva activity in the Sangh

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within the Sangh P arivar.19 The banner at the top o f the Sewa International website proclaims ‘Serving Humanity is Serving God’ and this is reinforced with an apposite quotation from Swami Vivekananda. In the summary o f its philosophy, Sewa International (n.d: 1) is insistent, as had been Vivekananda, that ‘Seva is not mere compassion or charity towards another; it is no less than the worship o f the Lord’. For some at least within the RSS today, it would seem that the offering o f seva may function on a personal level as a fully-fledged ‘sadhana of service’ (Thengadi, n.d: 2). For others, this sadhana appears to represent a means to combat external social ills, although inspired by the realization that ‘service to man is service to God’ (Anon., n.d. (b): 14). At a collective level, however, it is the social benefit o f the practice of seva, measured in terms o f social cohesion, that is continually emphasised and celebrated: ‘Every Prant [organizational province] has reported that in the places where they operate Sevakarya they have been experiencing this agreeable change. The hitherto isolated groups are now mixing freely with other groups, without inhibitions, social barriers and the like. In other words “Samajik Samarasata”— feeling of “social oneness” is being achieved through sevakarya leading to social harmony’ (Anon., 1997, ‘Impact o f Sevakarya’, p. 1). C o n c l u s io n It is possible to trace a progressive and deepening involvement in social welfare projects within the RSS. This chapter has shown grounds for questioning the impression frequently given in the literature o f the movement that its extensive, contemporary seva activities are simply the natural development of the initial impetus provided by Hedgewar and Golwalkar. As we saw, although both Hedgewar and Golwalkar were personally acquainted with the work o f the Ramakrishna Math

19 Patterns of migration, beginning in east Africa in 1946, have carried both the RSS and its affiliates throughout the Hindu diaspora, together with some seva activities. As Mathew and Prashad (2000: 529f.) show, however, such charity work goes ‘... towards the creation of Hindutva hegemony ...* through the influence gained by pouring money into underfunded sectors of Indian society. On the United Kingdom, see Mukta (2000) and Bhatt (2000). On the United States, see Rajagopal (2000) and Mathew and Prashad (2000).

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and Mission, neither appears to have made the promotion of a broader expression o f organized seva an immediate priority. Nor did Hedgewar choose to replicate forms of seva already well established in the Arya Samaj. The scope and nature o f the seva performed by swayamsevaks before and after 1949, moreover, were significantly different. When Golwalkar took the step o f encouraging the promotion of more broadly-based expressions o f seva as part o f his concept of ‘Dynamic Hinduism’, he was already wresding with the problem of restoring the image and vitality o f the RSS in the 1950s. Seva was taken up in the cause o f re-uniting and ‘Hinduizing’ India’s disparate communities and bringing about the ‘home-coming’ o f those held to have been lost from Hinduism. The later expansion of seva under the leadership o f Deoras was no less instrumental to his strategy of strengthening the influence, social and political, of the Sangh Parivar through the activist affiliates of the RSS. As Jaffrelot (1996, p. 530) has observed, since the 1970s, in pursuit o f its goal o f the ideological penetration of Indian society, the RSS ‘. .. has adjusted to social change in India by developing its tactic o f social welfare, by improving its position in the media and by expanding its network of schools.’ Again, at this point, it is fruitful to draw a parallel between the expansion of seva within the RSS and the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. Jaffrelot (1996, p. 530) points to the weakness o f publicly funded welfare provision and increasing reliance by the state upon voluntary organizations to supplement this provision from the 1970s to the present day. Seva Bharati has received both government commendation and modest support in recognition o f its efforts, and the RSS more generally has been able to exploit this social need in its penetration of Indian society via its welfare provision (see, for example, Ghimire, 1992, p. 27). In his account o f the history o f the Ramakrishna movement, Swami Buddhananda (1980, p. 52) recalls the ‘massive patronage’ that descended upon the Ramakrishna Math and Mission from both central and state governments in the period immediately following Independence as part o f a concerted effort to augment existing educational and welfare provision through reliance upon a trusted provider in the voluntary sector. The parallel to be drawn is between the impact upon two voluntary organizations that found themselves in a context in which social and political factors came together to make the enhancement o f their welfare provision the most effective strategy in reaching out to the mass o f the people and winning government approbation. The provision of seva had been a basis for the organization

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o f the Ram akrishna Math and M ission since its institutional beginnings, although the degree to which individuals should commit themselves to this activity, if at all, has been debated throughout the history of that movement and has been regarded with considerable ambivalence by even some of its most prominent personalities. There are grounds for questioning whether even Vivekananda, its founder, could have foreseen the degree to which the energies o f this organization would become dedicated to this activity, whether he would have welcomed this, and whether this could have happened without government and other sources o f external support in the postIndependence era. Although hardly regarded over its history by government as ‘trusted’ to the same degree as the Ramakrishna movement, we see that the pattern of provision o f seva within the RSS has also been transformed in a social context in which welfare provision not only provided a means by which to rehabilitate itself, but, in so doing, also to reach large numbers o f people and win official approbation. In the case of the RSS, however, it was not merely the extent and range o f welfare provision that was transformed postIndependence. As this chapter has shown, a more comprehensive justification for this provision was elaborated on the basis of symbols and concepts that would be meaningful to those already familiar with neo-Hindu philosophies of service; for example, the identification of the needy with God, the use of ascetics as the deliverers of service, and the value placed upon the offering o f seva as a means to achieve an ultimate goal (whether o f spiritual fulfilment or nation building).20 The RSS asserts that ‘... the Sangh is not a mere reaction to one or another social or political aberration. It represents a corpus of thought and action firmly rooted in genuine nationalism and in the age old tradition o f this country’ (A non., n .d .(a), ‘Sangh: Unique and Evergreen’, p. 1). Yet, there has been considerable scholarly debate about whether a commitment to selfless philanthropic action had any place within Hinduism prior to the increasing impact of western, and more particularly Christian, influences during the nineteenth century. The promotion o f seva within a Hindu movement that has consistently and at times stridently trumpeted the ‘Indian-ness’, more accurately, ‘Hindu-ness’ of its approach, consequently, is particularly striking. In his explanation o f the principles underlying the practice o f organized 20 The philosophies of service within the RSS and the Ramakrishna Math and Mission are discussed in greater detail in Beckerlegge (2003).

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seva, Golwalkar attributed these broadly to his ‘forefathers’ but did acknowledge Ramakrishna and Vivekananda explicitly. The debate about the sources o f Vivekananda’s own commitment to service to humanity and the question o f whether Ramakrishna favoured such activity has, if anything, intensified since Golwalkar’s death. Ultimately, therefore, any judgement offered on the claim from within the RSS that its commitment to selfless philanthropic action rests upon ‘the age old tradition o f this country’ will depend upon how one resolves the underlying problem o f the sources o f the com m itm ent to philanthropic activity within modern Hinduism more generally, and the sources of the particular commitment o f Vivekananda, one o f its major architects.21 This question liés beyond the scope of this current discussion, but the apparent connection between organized seva and ‘revivalism’ is o f immediate relevance. The RSS has frequently been labelled ‘revivalist’, as indeed has Vivekananda. There are clearly problems in using this term to define the character of a whole movement or even the concerns of a single individual, as distinct from characterising particular tendencies they may exhibit (for example, Beckerlegge, 2000b: Ch. 3; Sen, 1995, p. 12f.). Its use, however, does serve to denote a commitment to recovering and reviving traditional belief and practice in the interests of present needs. It also usefully hints at the process o f selection and thus redefinition taking place, something that those involved in the process might be unaware o f or deny. Golwalkar’s claim that his notions of service to humanity have been taken from his ‘forefathers’, coupled with his insistence that the ideal o f ‘serving man’ needs to be narrowed down to serving the nation, is a good example o f this process at work. In fact, the promotion o f service to humanity and the search for a unifying tradition within the RSS is a cardinal example o f traditionalism put to work to foster a sense o f social solidarity. Rothermund (1970, p. 59) has defined ‘traditionalism ’ as *... a conscious attempt at streamlining tradition ...* typically by those in search o f a national identity and a common denominator. Rothermund argues that, as this common denominator is usually found in ‘... a reconstructed tradition of social, cultural and religious solidarity’, national identity is seen as the ‘essence o f tradition as defined in these terms’. In the RSS, the 21 This debate is examined with particular reference to the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in Beckerlegge (1995) and (1998).

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designation ‘Hindu’ denotes the unifying tradition. The RSS has increasingly promoted solidarity by bringing together all those who are willing to serve the nation, defined as a Hindu rashtra, as well as those who serve with those in need of service. As this chapter has noted, the adoption o f a non-dualist ethic powerfully reinforces awareness of an underlying social unity, whatever its philosophical validity. Whether the RSS would have developed its notions of seva in the same way and to the same degree in the absence of the contextual constraints it faced in the late 1940s and the resulting need to reconstitute itself must remain a moot point. It is clear, however, that its attempt to construct an organic society centred upon a unified national tradition, the activist sympathies of many of those who made up its natural constituency, and the growth o f its affiliates were factors that exercised a profound influence upon the policy its leaders adopted. Arguably, these strategic considerations appear to have played a greater part in determining the course taken by the RSS than any ideological commitment to notions o f selfless service to humanity on the part of either Hedgewar or Golwalkar. The need to support the expansion o f seva activity beyond policing and organizational work led Golwalkar and other RSS theorists to formulate an underlying philosophy, derived from ‘our forefathers’ and rooted in ‘the age old tradition o f this country’. They turned selectively to the more specifically religious dimensions of neo-Hinduism, and to the use made by neo-Hindu thinkers such as Vivekananda of earlier Hindu personalities as exemplars o f seva. The choice o f Vivekananda was particularly congenial because o f his standing as a precursor of the nationalist movement for whom seva had a vital role to play in a process o f national regeneration. In so doing, the RSS added a further layer o f Hindu religious sym bolism to that which had been incorporated since the early days of the shakhas, with antecedents in the traditions o f the akhara. This further assimilation was in one sense little different from its adoption o f the religious overtones o f early nationalist societies in Bengal, commented upon by Jaffrelot (1996, p. 35). Both instances represent examples of the incorporation of powerful organizational and symbolic forms already well-known within that particular socio-historical context. The modifications made to this philosophy o f service and the use to which seva has been put within the RSS, however, illustrate the gulf between the RSS and neo-Hindu movements like the Ramakrishna Math and Mission to which it is

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partially indebted, just as its ideological content from the very outset distinguished it from the traditional akhara.22

B ib l io g r a p h y W.K. Andersen and S.D. Damle (1987), The Brotherhood in Saffron—The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism. Boulder and London: Westview Press. (Swami) Annadananda (1993), Swami Akhandananda (tm s. from Bengali by N.C. Bhattacharya). Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Anon. (1 997), Seva Disha-Building an Integrated and Self Reliant Society [on lin e]. Available from http://hindunet.org/hssworld/seva/sevadisha/ [Accessed 27 April 1999]. _________(n.d.) (a) RSS: Widening Horizons [online]. Available from http:// hindunet.org/rss/www/library/books/WideningHorizons/ [Accessed 17 February 1999]. ________ (n.d.) (b) The Story o f The Sangh by A Swayamsevak [online]. Available from http://www.rss.org/rssstor.htm [Accessed 14 February 2003]. ________ (n.d.) (c) In the Service o f the Poor [online]. Available from http:/// www.vhp.org/ [Accessed 19 February 2003]. T. Basu et al. (1993), Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags-A Critique o f the Hindu Right (Tracts for the Times / l ) . New Delhi: Orient Longman. G. Beckerlegge (1995), A Study o f Continuity within the Ramakrishna Math and Mission with Reference to the Practice o f Seva, Service to Humanity, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University o f Lancaster. ________ (1998), ‘Swami Vivekananda and Seva: Taking “Social Service” Seriously’ in W. Radice (ed.), Swami Vivekananda and the Modernization o f Hinduism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ________ (2000a), ‘Swami Akhandananda’s sevavrata (vow o f service) and the earliest expressions o f service to humanity in the Ramakrishna Math and Mission* in A. Copley (ed.), Gurus and their Followers. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

221 am grateful to members o f the ‘Religious Reform Movements’ panel at the 16th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, September 2000, for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and also to the Spalding Trust for funding my attendance at this conference. A subsequent version of this paper was further refined in the light o f comments received at the De-centring the Nation Seminar, University o f Manchester, January 2001.

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G. Beckerlegge (2000b), The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making o f a Modem Hindu Movement. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. _________(2003), ‘Saffron and Seva: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s Appropriation o f Swami Vivekananda’ in A Copley (ed.), Hinduism in Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, Sampradaya. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. _________(forthcoming), ‘Iconographic representations o f renunciation and activism in the Ram akrishna M ath and M ission and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’ in Journal o f Contemporary Religion. C. Bhatt (2000), ‘ Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah: Hindutva Movements in the UK’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(3), pp. 559-93. (Swami) Buddhananda (1980), The Ramakrishna Movement, Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. B. Deoras (1989), ‘Spirit o f Social Equality’ in Bharatiya Swayamsevak Sangh (1989), Amar Bharati Souvenir 1989. Nairobi: Bharatiya Swayamsevak Sangh East Africa, pp. 123-27. B.V. Deshpande and S.R. Ramaswamy (1981), Dr Hedgewar the Epoch-Maker: A Biography. Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu. Y. Ghimire (1992), ‘Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: Altmistic Expansion’ in India Today, 31 July, pp. 27-8. M.S. Golwalkar (1945), We or Our Nation Defined (3rd ed.). Nagpur: Bharat Prakashan. ________ (1 9 6 6 ), Bunch o f Thoughts, (2nd im p.). Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan. ________ (n.d.), Our Nationalism [online]. Available from http://www.rss.org/ our-natnlsm.htm [Accessed 14 February 2003]. D.R. Goyal (1979), Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. New Delhi: Radha Krishna Prakashan. T.B. Hansen (1999), The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Nationalism in Modem India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. C. Jaffrelot (1996), The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics 1925 to the 1990s. London: Hurst & Company. K.W. Jones (1989), The New Cambridge History o f India: Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. S. Joshi (n.d.) RSS: Is it a Cultural Organisation? New Delhi: Sampradayika Virodhi Committee. T.N . M adan (1 9 9 8 ), Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India. Delhi: Oxford. M.E. Marty and R.S. Appleby (eds) (1994), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character o f Movements. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. B. Mathew and V. Prashad (2000), ‘The Protean Forms o f Yankee Hindutva’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(3), pp. 516-34.

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S. M itra and H. Baweja (1 9 9 8 ), ‘RSS on ... the rampage*, India Today International, September 28, pp. 12-17. R Mukta (2000), ‘The Public Face o f Hindu Nationalism’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(3), pp. 442-66. A. Rajagopal (2000),‘Hindu Nationalism in the US: Changing Configurations o f Political Practice’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(3), pp. 467-96. E. Ranade (1963), Swami Vivekananda’s Rousing Call to the Hindu Nation. Kolkata: Swastik Prakashan. RSS (n.d.) R.S.S.: The Mission [online]. Available from http://www.rss.org/www/ mission.htm [Accessed 17 February 1999]. D. Rotherm und (1970), ‘Traditionalism and Socialism in Vivekananda’s Thought’ in Rothermund, The Phases o f Indian Nationalism and Other

Essays. Bombay: Nachiketa Publications. H.V. Seshadri (1988), R.S.S.: A Vision in Action (December reprint). Bangalore: Jagarana Prakashana. (Also available in part [online] from http:// hindunet.org/rss/www/library/books/Vision). Sewa International (n.d.) ‘Our Philosophy’ [online]. Available from http:// sewaintemationalorg/philo.html [Accessed 8 January 2001). V.M. Sirsikar (1988), ‘My Years in the R.S.S.’ in E. Zelliot and M. Berntsen (eds), The Experience o f Hinduism. Albany: State University o f New York. D.B. Thengadi (n.d.) ‘What sustains Sangh?’ [online]. Available from http:// hindubooks.org/dbthengadi/ [Accessed 17 May 1999]. D. Upadhyaya et al. (1979), The Integral Approach. New Delhi: Deendayal Research Institute. (Swami) Vivekananda (1989), The Complete Works o f Swami Vivekananda. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. J. Zavos (2000), The Emergence o f Hindu Nationalism in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

5 ‘Hindutva’ as a Rural Planning Paradigm in Post-Earthquake Gujarat1 Edward Sim pson

I n t r o d u c t io n

In recent decades, a vast literature has emerged on the ‘politics of Hindutva’. Primarily taking the speeches o f its politicians, media coverage o f spectacular events, the publications o f its proponents, and election strategies as its focus, these works have generally succeeded in giving a critical context and history to the rise o f this political force. The bias o f this work has been urban, if not solely metropolitan. It could also be said that such literature has fooled us into thinking that we know what Hindutva is, by reifying and homogenizing it, and to some extent by using the same encompassing framework as its proponents (but see Jaffirelot this volume); Hindutva has become a category and a concept, we might not be comfortable with what it represents but we do not seem to object to the idea o f the idea. The earthquake that struck Gujarat in January o f 2001 destroyed infrastructure, towns and villages. The ensuing scramble for the rights

1 Research on which this chapter is based was funded by a Nuffield Foundation New Career Fellowship in the Social Sciences. I wish to thank Vernon Eichhom, Farhana Ibrahim, Lucia Michelutti, Harriet Sterenborg, Andrew Wyatt and John Zavos for commenting in various ways on this material.

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to give, distribute and receive short and long-term aid has been intimately connected to changes within the political climate of the region. The tragedy o f communal violence during the first part o f 2002 and the triumph o f the BJP over the Congress in the recent state elections, points towards a general hardening o f political boundaries along community lines. Reflected in the post-earthquake redesign of many rural villages, the ‘Hindutva agenda’, as variously understood by representatives o f the BJP, their sympathisers and others, now finds expression in new settlem ent names, segregated housing and, importantly, in the growth o f support for particular kinds of Hinduism. The need to imagine a future for stricken towns, villages and people, as well as the types of philanthropy spawned by the earthquake, illustrate practical aspects o f new forms o f political consciousness that have until now been largely treated as rhetorical assertions. This chapter describes how the human and mythological landscapes o f Kachchh district are being inscribed with meanings derived from the narratives of Hindu nationalism and classicism, and points to conflict between moral idealism and political pragmatism, especially in relation to the ‘low caste question’. By focusing on ‘Hindutva in action’, as it were, I wish to edge the discussion away from the political stage, although I start there, and towards the ways in which some aspects o f the Hindutva agenda have become social principles rather than mere rhetorical devices. It has become commonplace to suggest that there are contradictions in the social and moral philosophies o f Hindutva proponents— as if this somehow confirmed the intellectual inadequacy of its ideologues. Alternatively, I suggest that, while the ideas that comprise the Hindutva platform often run into difficulty with the complexities of history and hierarchical society, this is not necessarily because they are riddled with internal contradictions but because there is a series of similar but different philosophies that are in competition with one another. I am not suggesting that there is a spectrum of political Hindutva as there is a ‘left’ and a ‘right’ in British politics (although there may be); rather that there is a series o f ideologies built from the same fundamental elements: an image of the nation, an ideal relationship between different castes, temple worship o f various kinds, ritualized social practices, veneration o f a deity or an ideologue and so on. The comparison of these elements in different strands o f thought suggests that Hindutva is in fact a series of similar but different philosophies. In a sense, various understandings o f Hindutva have offered a straightforward (from the perspective o f its proponents) paradigm for

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some planners, social workers and charitable institutions working in the region. Using the ideals given by the political vision it became possible to build villages with particular kinds o f schools and social services, just as it became possible to determine who would populate the settlement and how different kinds o f people would be distributed throughout its carefully designed streets. R u ra l R eh a b il it a t io n

in

P o s t - E arthquake G

u ja ra t

The earthquake left around 20,000 people dead and tens o f thousands injured. Vast swathes o f Bhuj, Anjar, Bhachau and Rapar, Kachchh district’s principal towns, were reduced to rubble. Hundreds of villages totally collapsed or suffered severe damage. Temples, mosques, schools, marriage halls and other communal buildings suffered the same plight. In Anjar, around 200 school children were crushed by falling masonry as they were taking part in a Republic Day march. The social impact of the earthquake was enormous and will continue to be so for years to come. Given the level o f destruction that rocked the foundations of human sociality and normality then how individuals and organizations go about reassembling that sociality is revealing of the principles on which it is based, or should be based. In the weeks after the disaster, journalists and domestic and international relief aid poured into the region. As the months passed the state government, NGOs and the United Nations Development Programme put together a series o f rehabilitation packages for the reconstruction of homes and livelihoods. O f these packages, the one that interests me here is the scheme that presented suitably qualified organizations with the opportunity to ‘adopt’ particular villages for the purposes o f reconstruction. In the initial rehabilitation plan, severely affected villages were to be relocated to new sites.2 This met with strong opposition and demonstrations by people unwilling to leave their ancestral lands. In a later package, a ‘village adoption scheme’ was proposed to be managed in the form of government partnership with private interest groups. Under this scheme, the private partner 2 Initial schemes were announced in ‘Package 1’ Revenue Department resolution No. XLS-162001-207-(4)-S.3 and General Administration Department resolution No. EST-102001 -830- KH, dated 8.02.2001. ‘Package 2’ announced under Revenue Department resolution No. XLS-162001-201-(4)-S.3 and General Administration Department resolution No. EST-102001-830-KH, dated 8.02.2001.

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would take responsibility for reconstructing villages, with some of the cost (around half) being met by the government. This scheme was implemented with various modifications as particular problems were encountered. The scheme was conceived to operate as follows: a private agency suggests to the government that it wants to adopt a particular village, the agency then has to take consent from that village, and this relationship is then officially confirmed by the government. This arrangement looks fine on paper as the private agency gets to spread its beneficence to a needy population, the village is reconstructed, the government does not foot all o f the cost, and aid organizations appear to funding agencies as if they are using innovative and people-focused development techniques. The scheme, however, ran into unforeseen problems and there was frequent confusion over the difference between the ‘statement o f interest’ and the ‘official confirmation’ of the relationship. The result was that it often appeared as if a village had been adopted when in fact the relationship had not been confirmed and, consequently, no work could be undertaken and the way for the intervention o f other private agencies was barred by bureaucracy. In a number o f cases, private interest groups expressed interest to the government when they were not certain whether they had the resources to undertake the work and, inevitably, some organizations eventually pulled out o f the scheme causing significant delays in the reconstruction process. While this scheme may appear as if it revolved around the relationship between the private interest group and the village in question the final decision rested in the hands of the government. A vast number o f Indian and overseas aid organizations, religious groups, political factions, social campaign movements, construction contractors and others stepped into this mêlée. In total, nearly 50,000 houses had to be built anew in over 600 locations.3 Some basic infrastructural and safety considerations were specified by the government, but in practice these were often ignored. The scheme opened the way for a whole range o f interest groups to reconstruct villages as they saw fit. It also produced complex layers of competition on a number of fronts. There was competition between private interest groups to secure the right to reconstruct particular villages. Assuming

3 Figures derived from Appendix II, Coming Together (4th Edition^ Kugusx 2002. Abhiyan, GSDMA and UNDP.

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that many o f those private agencies had some other motivation aside from assisting a beleaguered population, competition emerged for particular high-profile villages: the epicentre, villages along the highway, villages o f interest to tourists, settlements close to airports and so on. Similarly, villages with particular social, caste and religious configurations were more appealing to some private agencies than they were to others. Conversely, villagers quickly learned that if they supported an initial expression o f interest from a private organization to the government they were not bound to their commitment. If they could see that a neighbouring village was benefiting from a greater endowment than their own, they could approach that generous organization and request them to come and reconstruct their village, and a kind of philanthropic gazumping game started. Both kinds of competition ultimately relied, however, on final approval being given by the government and this fact has had clear consequences for the distribution of certain kinds o f patronage. In short, agencies with clear links to the current BJP government received permission to adopt the most prestigious sites around the epicentre and along the main highway into Kachchh. They have also been the most successful at securing land, utilities and other kinds of infrastructure for the settlements they have reconstructed. Both development practitioners and local p olitician s have questioned whether‘foreign’ aid organizations have ‘appropriate’ kinds of knowledge to redevelop rural villages in Gujarat. This, I suspect, is as much to do with the current political climate and the emphasis on ideas of cultural invasion and fear o f Christian proselytizers than it is to do with technical or cultural competence. However, such organizations have proven to be at least if not more sensitive to social dynamics than many of their Indian counterparts. It also seems fair to say that many private agencies o f Indian origin have redeveloped villages with the express intention o f creating exclusive and socially fragmented settlements, the details of which depend largely on their political or religious agenda. The adoption scheme inevitably polarised interest groups in a great many villages and, in some cases, villages have been divided into predominantly caste-based sub-settlements. In other villages, wealthier sections of the population spurned offers of reconstruction— viewing the offer as paltry and the style, size and quality of the houses and services being offered as inadequate. In such cases, some have opted for a financial rather than a reconstruction package. In yet other cases, some groups have opted for an entirely

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private package that is unfettered by the budget restrictions of the government. V

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in d u

N a t io n a l ist s

Hinduism has often been described as a related assortment of many faiths, doctrines and sects, rather than an integrated religion (for example, Miller 1991: 786). This diversity is disputed by the leaders of the new nationalism who present Hinduism as a unified religion that is naturally fitting to the country (van der Veer, 1994: 28) with which it has evolved since time immemorial. The new Hindu political groups that have come to the fore in Gujarat are attempting to redraw the country’s history through the divine landscape of the continent. India has become the Hindu motherland, progressively weakened by past waves o f Muslim infiltration that culminated in the partition o f the subcontinent at the hands o f the British. Part o f this process is to bring tales from Hindu religious traditions to the foreground as a form of history, o f morality and to invoke a sense o f loss. The two principal texts used for this purpose are the M ahabharata and the Ram ayana. The former is a bloody tale o f encyclopaedic scope and includes the Gita, the tales of Krishna. The latter is a shorter tale of loyalty, adventure, morality and idealism. O f these two texts, it is the Ramayana that has come to play a central role in the political imagination o f Hindu Gujarat. The primary character is Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu who embodies the ideal characteristics of a king. In the epic, Ram is sent to restore the order of the world after it is threatened by Ravana, a demon of nearly invincible qualities. The intensity o f public representations of morality loosely based on the Ramayana has grown considerably in recent decades (see Miller, 1991) as an important public political tool that reinforces the twin themes of xenophobia and ‘rulership’. Unique imaginative instruments are offered by the text, whereby, on the one hand, a divine political order can be conceptualized, narrated, and historically grounded, and, on the other, a fully demonized ‘other’ can be categorized, counter-posed and condemned (Pollock, 1993: 264). Life is being given to these texts as rivers, mountains and whole regions are being inscribed with the sacred past. Lying behind the gaudy colours o f the new cartography are battles and defeats at the hands o f the ‘invading’ Muslims. The achievements and grandeur of Hindu civilization are viewed as having fallen into foreign hands. The ruins and archaeological traces in the deserts of Kachchh and the agricultural plains to the east are being reinvented as

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sites o f wrongdoing and injustice. As the landscape is reanimated with temples dedicated to the heroes o f these texts, and symbolism invested with new meanings, the history o f religious contest and dispute is also being redrawn in order to reclaim the past and the land. Nearly half a century ago, Robert Redfield wrote that village history in India is an expression of the history o f the Indian civilization (1955: 14). While this might seem an old-fashioned departure for a discussion o f nationalism and landscape, Redfield’s theorizing about the relationship between great and little traditions was a rather telling precursor for debates that were to take new turns in subsequent decades, in which the mythology o f ancient Hindu texts was transcribed, after a fashion, onto the political landscape o f India to find expression at the level o f the national political party and at the local village level. In Kachchh, ‘village India’ was literally reduced to rubble by the earthquake and the reconstruction o f the region has provided a new set o f opportunities for those interested in re-expressing the history of Indian civilization, most obviously the organizations that make up the Sangh Parivar and those closely allied with them. The extended ‘kinship’ o f the Sangh Parivar is typically described through an account o f the creation o f a primogenitor, the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS), that begot the rebellious Vishva Hindu Parish ad (VHP) and together they gave birth to a kinder progeny in the form o f the modern Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); below this triumvirate there are tiers of lesser cousins who voice regional or more specific concerns (for example, Jaffrelot, 1996; Lochtefeld, 1996; Smith, 2003:181-98). This genealogical model is compelling, as is the division of labour it implies: the RSS, formed in 1925, instil moral value in the population and produce suitable leaders for renascent Hindu India; the VHP, founded in 1964, campaign for the revival o f the ancient signs o f Hindu might and amity; and the BJP, bom in 1980 from the Janata Party and its forbearer, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, represent the interests o f the Hindu fold on the political platform. India is a federal country and state-wise the relationship between these organizations varies depending on the political and constitutional context. In theory, however, they are all separate organizations, but in practice, in Gujarat, their interests and personnel coincide and to some extent the VHP and RSS supply the BJP with a stream o f suitably qualified leaders: around 20 Members o f the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in the current BJP government are also active members o f the VHP. There is an obvious limit to this ‘family’ model as these

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organizations have members, followers, supporters, detractors, rivals and, in the case o f the BJP, voters— who, unlike members of a ‘family*, can disavow their leaders. There are two further, but related, elements to consider in the composition o f the ‘family* in Gujarat that I outline here and elaborate in the pages that follow. The first is caste. As Ghanshyam Shah has written for Gujarat: ‘In spite o f various ideological efforts towards rejuvenating Hinduism, stressing Hindu unity and the erad ication o f caste-based hierarchical social divisions ... the significance of caste distinctions and caste loyalties among Hindus has not receded. Caste still remains the first and primary symbol of identity for most Hindus’ (1998: 265). The importance of caste as a social marker, and the levels of endogamy implied by its divisions, clearly question the ‘family’ metaphor but also raise the issue o f how those promoting the idea o f Hindu unity deal with caste. Assuming that caste continues to be a reflection o f day-to-day material interests, the question for the Sangh Parivar is whether the Hindu unity they strive for is based on equality o f membership or on caste hierarchy. If it is the former, the question arises as to how they maintain support of the high castes and if it is the latter, then how can they ensure the support o f the low castes? These are political questions that have long histories. The second elem ent, surprisingly under-investigated, is the relationship between the Sangh Parivar and the host o f religious organizations that carry out work in its shadow. The constituencies of organized religious groups are smaller and more exclusive than those seeking a political majority. Consequently, ‘selective’ rather than ‘elective affinity’ means that such groups do not need to be loyal to the necessarily more pragmatic approach adopted by the BJP as they attempt to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the electorate. In Kachchh, after the earthquake, there appears to have been a groundswell o f support for Vaishnava sects whose fundamental religious principles strongly resemble the basis o f the Hindutva agenda. It is at this level, especially where caste and sect correspond, that one really starts to get a sense that Hindutva, at the level o f the voter rather than the political party, is not a fixed set o f notions and that there is considerable ambiguity as well as severe competition to determine what it might mean. The

BJP

in G u ja r a t

As o f April 2003, Gujarat is the only state in the country where the BJP has a majority in the Legislative Assembly, and as such it is considered

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a testing ground for their policy and for their politicians. In the election of December 2002, the BJP returned to power, defeating the Congress, its only rival for power, by winning 126 out of the 181 seats in the Assembly (nine seats more than their 1998 victory).4 Narendra Modi was sworn in as Chief Minister (CM) during a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, his deputy, Lai Krishna Advani, other members o f the cabinet, and a number o f sadhus from the VHP. Speaking at the occasion, president o f the party, M. Venkaiah Naidu, stressed: ‘the victory was a mandate for the ideology that has always held the nation’s interest as its core strength . . . . If anybody asks us whether we would repeat the Gujarat experiment elsewhere, our answer should be: Yes, we shall replicate our Gujarat experience everywhere, because in Gujarat we have again proved to ourselves that collective work is the key to success.* He also stressed: ‘The voters reposed their faith in the BJP because the choice before them was between the forces of nationalism and pseudo-secularism. Gujarat was not a mere political victory; it was a mandate for the ideology.* Modi also came in for praise for having electrified the atmosphere in the country and for energizing the rank and file by: ‘fighting like a lion in the face of unprecedented calumny against him and our party.’5 The euphoria created by the victory brushed aside, at least temporarily, the factionalism that has resulted in splits in the party. At the beginning o f the 1990s, there were two serious contenders for the office of Chief Minister in the BJP-led Government, Keshubhai Patel and Shankarsinh Vaghela. The RSS and the VHP lobbied hard for Patel’s candidacy and in 1995 he eventually became Chief Minister. During his reign he expanded the cabinet as a way o f winning favour and successfully sidelined his rival, Vaghela. It is widely acknowledged that the mastermind behind these strategies was Modi, at this time an RSS man. The candidates in the race for the top jo b in Gujarat represented a broad caste division in the State: Patel representing the Patidars (Patels) and Vaghela the Kshatriyas and the large Other Backward Classes (OBCs) population. With Modi’s influence so clearly seen in the Government, a split opened up in the party between RSS and non-RSS factions, again broadly corresponding to the division

4 Results published by the Election Commission o f India at: http:// www.eci.gov.in/Decse2002/index_st.htm. 5 Extracts of the speech were posted on rediff.com on 23 December 2002 at 15: 24 1ST (from PTI) under the title ‘BJP to replicate Gujarat experience: Venkaiah.’

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between Patidar and Kshatriya-OBC. Vaghela, himself a Kshatriya from Saurashtra, contended that the party was illegitimately run by Patidars and had been hijacked by the RSS. In the events that followed, Vaghela and 47 MLAs dramatically departed by plane to Madhya Pradesh. Patel was forced to step down, Vaghela managed to maintain his position in the party and Suresh Mehta, a BJP moderate from Kachchh, was appointed as Chief Minister, but his reign did not last long. In the mid-1990s Vaghela lost his constituency seat in Godhra, and was expelled from the party a few months later. But Vaghela did not pass quietly into obscurity, he organized a series of rallies aimed at expressing the identities and traditions of local leaders, again designed to bring attention to the fact that politics in the State had been hijacked by caste (the wrong caste) and by the RSS. In August o f 1996, he announced the founding o f a new political party, the Rashtriya Janata Party (RJP), and, in another rebellion in the Assembly, Vaghela gained power through a coalition with the Congress. In the following election, he came face to face with his adversary, Modi, in a battle for the seat of Palanpur in northern Gujarat. The battle for this seat was ‘in many ways a battle between Hinduism and castes’ (Shah, 1998: 264), this time the BJP lost. Although the coalition formed between the BJP and the Congress, with Vaghela as Chief Minister, did not last long. In 2002, Vaghela surprised many people by joining the Congress Party. Modi inevitably complained that it was for ‘convenience and not out of conviction.’ This may have been the case but what benefit could he have seen in making such a move? As I have already mentioned, politics in Gujarat are underpinned by caste factionalism. Vaghela attempted to split the BJP vote by playing on the traditional rivalry between Kshatriyas and Patels, the dominant castes in Gujarat. Patels, who generally support the BJP, form 20 per cent of Gujarat’s population. Many Patels, although there is considerable caste and religious factionalism among them, are loyal to the former Chief Minister, Keshubhai Patel, who, at the time, was at loggerheads with Modi and reluctant to campaign with him; he later succumbed to Modi’s pressure. Kshatriyas (5 per cent o f the population) aligned themselves with the Kolis (a significant number of the State’s 20 per cent OBC population) in order to counter the rise o f Patels. When Vaghela was with the BJP, he mobilized Kshatriya support for the party through the Kshatriya Mahasabha. In the election o f2002, the Congress appeared to be attempting to reuse its KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) formula. Vaghela was supposed to bring to the

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Congress his Kshatriya and OBC following. Although this strategy proved very successful for the Congress during earlier elections, especially those o f 1980 and 1985, it proved not to be a winning formula this time around because, since the 1980s, the BJP has managed to gain significant ground in Adivasi areas and amongst urban Dalits. R e c o n s t r u c t io n

a n d it s

P a r a d ig m s

Under the BJP government the reconstruction packages for Kachchh have been implemented. As I have mentioned, organizations with a ‘selective affinity’ to Modi’s government tended to be allocated the most prestigious sites for their reconstruction activities. There are a number o f other trends worthy o f note in the reconstruction process generally. The traditional village form, a nucleus with clusters o f houses reflecting caste, religious and material distinctions, has largely (especially along the main highway) been replaced by uniform rows of houses built on a grid pattern. Many villages have been renamed and new colonies and sub-settlements in older villages have been given distinguishing names and entrance gates to separate them from the settlement of which they were previously a part. Sharp divisions along the lines o f religion and caste have been designed into villages, in one instance an Indian relief organization labelled each house: the auspicious terms ‘lab’ and ‘sub’ for Hindus and the number ‘786’ for Muslims, a numerological representation of the first sura of the Quran. Other villages have been built by caste organizations for the dedicated use o f all its members or for the use o f all but its members— who have invariably built bigger and better houses for themselves elsewhere. In a village reconstructed by Jain philanthropists from Mumbai, Mahavir, the central deity of Jainism, was installed in a new temple above the head of the villagers’ traditional Hindu deity. These interventions are worthy of discussion in their own right; however, in the remaining sections o f this chapter, I want to focus on three case studies to illustrate how various refractions o f the nationalist agenda have been grafted onto the rural landscape. The first example draws heavily on a speech made at the inauguration of a new village; it does not focus on the ethnography of this settlement because some six months after the inauguration ceremony, the village remained incomplete and uninhabited. The second and third examples are of completed villages. In these instances, I am concerned primarily with the overall design and demography of the village and the ideology underlying it. Taken as a whole, however, the three studies point to

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different ways of expressing the nationalist agenda, which as shorthand I am going to call ‘populist*, ‘elitist* and ‘charismatic*. These three nationalisms have a lot in common with the BJP’s vision of the glorious past, the troublesome present and the ideal future. However, when compared to one another important differences emerge. The first instance is Gujarat-specific, it is an extreme and exclusive vision, bolder than a politician seeking election would care to announce; the second is a metropolitan and intellectual vision from northern India; the third, a Vaishnava movement, puts its religious character before its nationalist and political agenda. Populist N ationalism : Vishva H indu Parishad and (K eshav Nagar) Lodai

On a hot October day in 2002, Pravin Togadia, the international secretary o f the VHP, addressed an audience o f a few thousand people in northern Kachchh. The occasion marked the inauguration of a newly constructed settlem ent, called Keshav Nagar (K rishna’s City). Constructed with money collected through a caste organization and a number o f temple committees run by Gujaratis in the United States, the new village was a particularly symbolic site: the supposed epicentre of the earthquake that also offered a commanding view onto the vast salt flats that lead to the border with neighbouring Pakistan. Togadia shared the stage with a number o f prominent ministers in the BJP Government and they too took the opportunity to launch their campaigns. But it was as a VHP man that Togadia was speaking and, as has become the trend in Gujarat, he used religious issues as political platforms and a political platform to discuss religious issues. Other than a passing mention to those fortunate enough to have received new houses from the VHP, he used the opportunity to make a hard-hitting electioneering speech. The events of the last two years in Gujarat, and India more generally, gave him much material: the heightened tensions along the border with Pakistan, the burning o f a train in Godhra and the death o f its Hindu passengers returning from the disputed city of Ayodhya, the religious violence in cities in the east of the State, the ensuing dissolution o f Modi’s government, the terrorist attack on the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar and the forthcoming state elections. Togadia expressed his concern that ‘browbeating in Gujarat’ would delay forthcoming elections and encourage divisions along caste lines as each community jostled to position their own candidate. He urged the assembled to vote on the basis o f religion and

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not caste so that the ‘offspring o f Musharraf’, the President o f Pakistan, would not come to power. Referring to the reaction to large-scale religious violence in the state in March o f 2002 he said: ‘First, the puppies o f Gujarat made noises and started barking. When it was felt that this noise would not do, dogs from all over the country started coming here . . . . Then we heard that a dog from Italy also made the rounds here.’6 The final insulting and disrespectful canine reference was to Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress, who had toured the area apparently to gain an understanding o f the tragedies that had been played out in the State. Togadia’s speech was angry, passionate and calculated. He upped the political ante by referring to the ‘Italian dog’ and seamlessly combined political aspiration and earthquake reconstruction. His comments, received with cries o f ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, ensured that he and his organization had a great deal o f press coverage; however, there was much more to this speech than mere political invective. In it he revealed a political vision premised on the existence o f rivals and evils, but he did not stop there as he detailed the antidote to the village’s and consequendy Gujarat’s and India’s problems. He identified three evils threatening the assembled: Muslims, secularists and rival political parties. This is a routine list in the VHP’s canon o f thought, but how he described them was couched in a particular way of understanding Indian civilization, the past and more explicitly the future. Each one o f the evils he termed as a form of ‘Ghazni’. Mohammed of Ghazni was one of the first so-called ‘Turkish’ conquerors of western India; he is reputed to have destroyed the famous Hindu Shiv temple at Somnath in the eleventh century. Somnath is a striking reminder of Hindu-Muslim antipathy in India because BJP politicians (not only spokesmen of the VHP) have characterized its reconstruction as the first stage in a campaign to reinstate the ancient symbols o f unity and amity in India— the liberation of Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya was to be the second (see Basu, 1996). Thus the name of Ghazni has become synonymous with foreign invasion and the destruction and erosion o f Hindu culture. Pravin Togadia was deeply 6 Extracts from this speech were reproduced in The Indian Express (Ahmedabad City Edition and the Saurashtra Newsline), ‘Vote on the basis of religion: Togadia’ (19 October 2002); ‘Alter Godhra, dogs barked, including an Italian dog: Togadia (19 October 2002); and ‘Togadia said it, and he’s proud of it’ (22 October 2002).

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disturbed by three modem ‘Ghaznis’: *jehadi Ghaznis’, ‘secular Ghaznis’, and ‘political Ghaznis’. Togadia’s ‘Jehadi Ghaznis’ are Muslims: converts from Hinduism, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden and those who are said to have destroyed the temple at Somnath. Part of the nationalist mythology, o f which the Ramayana and its central themes has become an integral part, is that Islam spread into Asia from Arabia through conquest and holy war. It is not widely known that Islam was brought to India largely as the religion of trade and through the activities o f mendicants (Bayly, 1992). The contribution Islam has made to Indian civilization is decried and the unique contributions Muslims in India have made to Islamic thought are overlooked. Grievances against Muslims stem from their perceived vandalism in the past. In particular, the destruction o f Hindu temples, their role in the partitioning o f the country and their obstinate presence in India. It is also commonly held that Muslims in India are loyal to the politics of rival nation states, especially Pakistan. Then there is the contentious issue o f Muslim personal law that allows Muslim men to practise polygamy which leads to the fear o f rapid Muslim population growth, and the consequent minoritization of Hindus. This is a fairly standard list of complaints commonly given in the literature on Hindu-Muslim relations in India. However, in Gujarat in the past few years, such rhetoric has grown noticeably m ore sophisticated and elaborate. To give a few examples, Muslims are now commonly blamed for the historical fragmentation o f Hinduism into Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, which apparently formed, or at least gained popularity, as defence strategies against Muslim incursions and predations. To anyone with a slight knowledge o f religious history in India this will appear to be ludicrous in the terms in which it is stated but plausible at least in as far as these religious movements gained credence during particular political epochs. The second example is the increasingly common claim that Muslims are a drain on the social and economic resources of the country and consequently retard the nation’s progress— a detriment to all it is claimed. It is true that Muslims in India have lower incomes than the Hindu average, have a higher birth rate o f 39 per 1000 as opposed to the Hindu rate o f 32. According to the 1991 Census they form 12.12 per cent o f the country’s population yet represent only 4 per cent of those completing 12 years’ schooling and occupy only 4 per cent of all government posts. The reasons given for this seemingly poor performance among Muslims by Hindus relate to Muslim personal

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law or, more precisely, to Muslims’ legal entitlement to more than one wife and the ease through which divorce occurs, the pronouncement o f the word talaq three times. Muslims are thus, it is said, trapped in a vicious circle o f large families, poverty, little education and poor employment opportunities. In other words, it is not their minority status that holds them back but the fact that they are Muslims. They tend to live in the most congested, polluted parts of towns that lack basic amenities and infrastructure not because they are discriminated against but because they are Muslims and, on the whole, the reconstruction packages offered after the earthquake have done little to improve their lot. Indeed, in many villages they have been sidelined completely and in other cases have been given separate plots o f land away from the main village. A final example is the claim that Muslims are united and organized by bonds that transcend national identities. Mandvi is a town on the southern shores o f Kachchh. It was not badly damaged in the earthquake but has been transformed as a consequence. The population of the town has expanded rapidly as people from Bhuj and elsewhere have moved to find what they consider seismically safe ground on which to construct houses. The most obvious, but not the only, way in which this expansion has occurred is the rapid growth of new middle-class housing colonies on the outskirts of the town. In October 2002, there was already much talk o f the American invasion of Iraq. Many Hindus were clearly enthusiastic about this impending attack on a Muslim country, despite the fact that much of India’s oil comes from Iraq. It was stressed to me a number o f times that this really was going to be ‘one in the eye for Muslims’ and that America had finally realized, as ‘India’ had been saying all along, that it was Muslims who were the real problem. The bombs exploding on Iraqi soil were going to somehow diminish the problems that Hindus faced in India (‘hit one, hit all’). One of the proponents of this logic was the proud owner of a grand new house on the outskirts o f Mandvi. As he explained to me, the colony had everything: good water, a healthy breeze, electricity supply and roads. There was, however, one problem: the Muslims. Adjacent to the housing society is a ramshackle Muslim settlement built on encroached government land. The fact that they moved to this site many years ago when it was considered to be waste ground was irrelevant to my storyteller. He said (and shouted): ... it is th e sam e process, th e te rro rism o f Septem ber 11th, th e h o stility o f Muslims to the United States, and the encroachment o f this land. They are all

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the same thing. These people want to expand to own everything; they live here like animals, with pigs, dirty with rubbish and our Government protects them! We tried to get them removed but the Government said they were entitled to the land. Even our own Hindu politicians protect these Muslims! There will be nothing left for us! . . . . At least now America is with us and we will crush them.

I have known this man for about six years; he is influential, and, as a local journalist, is highly informed about the political wrangling that has occurred in Kachchh in recent years. Like many middle-class Hindus in the town, his political ideas have hardened considerably in the last few years and his frustration and fascination with politics has clearly grown as has his loyalty to the BJP. He is not considered to be a political extremist or an agitator and his writing as a journalist is seen as reflecting the opinions o f the middle-of-the-road Hindu majority who read the newspaper he writes for. Returning to Togadia’s speech, in setting up a triad of evils he was reiterating, albeit in his own unique style, a set o f beliefs long held among sections of the Hindu population in India and commonly seen in the writing o f M.S. Golwalkar and others. Togadia’s ‘political Ghaznis’ are the BJP’s rivals for power, those for whom the concepts Hindu and nation are distinct and should be kept separate: the Congress and its retrograde policies. The leader of the Congress is an Italian, a foreigner and representative of the ideas that Togadia feels have retarded the Hindu nation. He suggested: ‘Our sister Sonia is imported from abroad. But Muslims o f India are not imported. Indian Muslims are converted Muslims. Therefore, Sonia is a foreigner to us but Muslims are not’. He then suggested that Indian Muslims should go for blood tests to prove that it was not the blood o f the Prophet Mohammed that sustained them but the blood of Lord Ram and Lord Krishna. There is obviously something of a paradox here, for Togadia Muslims are at the root o f most o f the evil and decadence in Gujarat, yet he also claims they too are innately Indian. The boundary between Togadia’s ‘political Ghazni’ and his secular ones is not very clear. The Congress is his political opposition and its supporters are by and large secular, although some politicians ousted from the BJP carrying with them none-too secular credentials, stood for the Congress at the last election. It should be remembered that secularism in India has a history very different to that of Europe. It grew out o f the freedom movement, from the opposition to British rule. Pre-Independence secularism was a stance, a political option; it was not the ‘poor things platform’ for minority protection that the

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BJP now describes. The Hindutva underlying Togadia’s claims explicitly rejects the ‘composite culture’ idea that grew out o f the freedom struggle, the protection o f m inority rights and the desire for a government working on secular protectionist principles. Mukul Kesavan (2001) has suggested that secularism has simply gone out of fashion in urban India and has been replaced with consumerism and other lifestyle choices. The liberal ideas and consumption habits of the city are denounced in part by the Sangh Parivar but it happens that such things have thrived more under the BJP’s policies o f economic liberalism and privatization than they ever did under Congress (Hansen, 1998). For each o f the evil Ghaznis, Togadia had a strong remedy. The jehadis were to be hanged; the secular Hindus were to be ostracised and the political Ghaznis were to be unseated. Strong words indeed! Before the earthquake, the village of Lodai had a mixed population of Hindu pastoralists, OBCs, a number of other castes, and significant Harijan and Muslim populations. Keshav Nagar, built on the top of a hill overlooking the old village, has been constructed exclusively for caste Hindus and the Muslims and others remaining in the old village have had to make do with the evidendy inferior houses provided by a Catholic relief organization that stepped in once it was obvious that the VHP plans ignored certain sections of the population. The design of the new village around a temple dedicated to Ram and Krishna, and its carefully selected inhabitants, in this case really does reflect Indian civilization as he envisages it: exclusive, disciplined, strong and Hindu. The BJP’s electioneering strategy is designed around a strong leader, in this case Modi, who gives a relatively free hand to the Sangh Parivar to raise the emotional pitch. The strong words of Togadia’s speech clearly reflect this strategy. His exploitation o f popular images and dich&i characterizations o f historical events were designed to have a wide appeal. His is a politically driven version o f nationalism premised on the existence o f evil, Muslims and foreigners; he is anti-caste and pro-Hindu but was silent on the non-caste Hindus excluded from both Lodai and his political vision. I return to this issue in the final sections of the chapter. E lite N ationalism : Rashtriya Sw abhim an and (Ind rap rasth a) New D udai

The second example of village reconstruction I wish to describe is the case o f Dudai in eastern Kachchh. Severely damaged in the earthquake,

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a new site, Indraprastha, was developed by Sahib Singh Verma, a staunch BJP man and former Chief Minister of Delhi. He has attempted to build a model village, a unique social vision for the future, to be equipped with schools, college, technical education centre, community centre, handicraft park, agriculture centre, old age home, and orphanage. The village immediately reflects the generosity of the donors and ambitious plans for a new kind of settlement in which the comforts and mores o f urban life are brought to the countryside. The village was built by an organization called Rashtriya Swabhiman (RS, self­ esteem or pride in the nation) that is concerned with promoting Hindu might and self-determinism. Retaining some autonomy from other sections of the Sangh Parivar, it projects Verma as something of a saint. His portrait hangs on the walls of the organization’s offices at the village entrance. It is flanked by the portraits o f other national heroes painted in the blood of the movement’s devotees. In the same compound is a ‘Special Study Centre’, a library o f nationalist and Vedic literature mostly written in Hindi and English. The new name given to the village, Indraprastha, is taken from the Mahabharata, the magnificent capital of the Pandavas; the name means ‘city of the god Indra’ and was the ancient name for Delhi. The village is adjacent to the main highway into Kachchh and its presence is marked by huge signboards, more fitting for a major city than for a small village. Behind the leafy gardens of the ‘Special Study Centre’ are temples dedicated to Ram and Krishna and, as a local concession, to Swaminarayan and Omkareswar Mahadev. Along the highway are the setdement’s other prestigious projects: the schools and other social institutions. The development o f this village, as with many others, is led by its social infrastructure and the housing stock in comparison is of a rather low quality. Unlike Keshav Nagar, where the centre o f the village was built around a temple and a small row of shops (no ‘Special Education Centre’), the main residential areas in Indraprastha are further away from the highway and more modest in their design. If Keshav Nagar was designed as a political stage aimed at winning local votes, then Indraprastha was designed with a broader aim in mind. The ten sections of the village, formed by a grid o f roads, carry the names o f national heroes both historic and mythological. More farcical, however, is the fact that streets and squares carry the names o f places in Delhi, the capital’s Chandni Chowk, Sadar Bazaar and so on. The residential colonies nearer the road were intended for the high castes, Jains and Patels, those in the middle for low-caste

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Hindus and Harijans and the two farthest to the north for Muslims. Unlike Keshav Nagar, Muslims and Harijans have been allowed to settle in Indraprastha, but their houses are out o f sight, farthest from the improbably huge bazaar that runs along the western flank o f the village. Moving from the entrance to the wilderness to the north one passes the education complexes, the temples, housing arranged on the basis of caste, and eventually the Muslim areas. A reflection of the ideology underlying the plan, the layout gives a hierarchically ordered value and priority to each area. The Muslims, although promised a mosque, have been left to their own devices to construct one on a plot on the northern fringe, a refraction of the idea that they are a problematic adjunct to national and local planning paradigms. The admission of Hindus and Muslims into the village, the fact that the houses were uniform in shape and quality and the fact that it was constructed by the intellectualist and Sanskritic RS have meant that Jains and Patels have not come to the village. The Patels opted to stay in the old settlement and to privately rebuild their own enclave around a temple, and this reflects a much more wide-spread tendency in Kachchh to form exclusive residential colonies and enclaves structured around community inspired buildings of religious denomination. Scattered around Indraprastha are a number o f slogans in Hindi: ‘True love alone generates the sentiment o f sacrifice’; ‘everything is possible with self-confidence, true labour, and strong will; and, most confident o f all, but strangely in English, ‘Purity is power’. The ‘purity’ o f this last slogan is to be found in devotion (to Hinduism), in scholarship (of the appropriate traditions) and in discipline. The elite nationalism of the metropolis is knowledge-led, Sanskrit-based, and premised on the idea o f the traditional and harmonious Indian village. The benefactors see the village as they see India: diverse, hierarchical, with the social engineering dividing hierarchically ordered castes through space clustered around the ritual complexes o f Ram and Krishna. C h arism atic N ationalism : Bochasanw asi A kshar P u ru sh ottam and its villages

O f the religiously inspired organizations working in Kachchh the most prom inent have been the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS). A movement tracing its roots to the seventeenth century reformist saint, Sahjanand, it believes that spiritual and social activities go hand in hand. Mounting well-planned social

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campaigns, they are attempting the mass transformation o f society and ‘freeing tribal villages from addictions, superstitions and poverty*. They moved rapidly after the earthquake to bring the beleaguered population relief materials. Led by the charismatic Pramukh Swami, the organization is ingeniously managed by a large number o f welleducated ascetics. The movement is wealthy and has large numbers of followers in Europe and the United States. O f the various subsections of the Swaminarayan movement in Kachchh they were the least represented in Bhuj before the earthquake. They capitalised on the disaster and have attracted new devotees and lured followers from other sects. Their relief efforts after the earthquake have rightly received considerable praise; however, some of the longer-term strategies they have used are less praiseworthy. In attempting to consolidate their position in the region, especially in Bhuj, they have used rather crude methods. The movement is known for its social reforms and for charitable work in equal measure to its reputation for puritanism, moral rectitude and focus on ritual purity. The movement’s history is related to that of caste politics (the ‘rise* o f the Patels over the Kshatriyas) and the inevitable divisions arising from succession disputes. And, while part of the popularity o f BAPS over the other Swaminarayan sects lies in its openness to recruiting from all castes, including Harijans, the majority o f the movement’s support in Kachchh remains caste-based, with Patels, that is landholders, farm ers, construction workers and international migrants forming the m ajority o f the movement’s support. The various sections of the Patel community are also politically strong, are well represented in the Government o f Gujarat and hold many other seats of office. Many post-earthquake caste disputes have been initiated by them as they have taken the opportunity to exclude both Muslims and Harijans from the new settlements. Each new village they have constructed carries a new name o f one of the order’s saints, deities or foundational philosophical principles. This process is not so much about Sanskritization of tradition as in Indraprastha, but about recreating the countryside in their own image; an image which is centred on Gujarat, the Gita and the teaching of Swaminarayan as found in the Shikshapatri. One of the villages they constructed became known as Gunatitpur (‘transcending the qualities that comprise the universe’). Similarly, Ukhadmora became Yoginagar (‘the city o f saints’). The selection o f certain villages for reconstruction was in part, as I have said, mediated by coordinating government and NGOs. However, in all cases the movement consolidated its position

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in particular villages where it already had some support prior to the earthquake. In the case o f Nani Mau, for example, now renamed Shrijinagar, one family occasionally visited the temple in Bhuj and, after the earthquake, petitioned the sect for assistance. The new village is built around the sect's temple and the representatives o f the movement are frequently present in the settlement to ensure that those families who received new houses attend daily prayers. This had been a traditional Kshatriya village in which people would greet each other by invoking the names of the deity Ram or o f the mother goddess, holding up one hand as they did so. W hile their em brace o f Swaminarayan has not vanquished these gods completely, they have been instructed to invoke the name of the Swami and bring both hands together before them as greeting. Many proselytes were not too proficient at this and some were clearly uncomfortable about doing so, although all were careful to greet any stranger who came to the village in this fashion lest they be a representative o f the sect. But let us turn to look at one further example in more detail. The village of Jiyapur to the west of Bhuj is now called Narayannagar (‘city of the deity Narayan’). Luckily, nationalistic sentiments saved the villagers’ lives as, it is said, that on the day o f the earthquake the entire population had gathered on the school playground to celebrate Republic Day. This village is dominated by Patels, who, as I have already mentioned, are the main supporters o f the various strands o f the Swaminarayan movement, there are also some Muslim and Harijan families and smaller numbers of other castes. The new houses have been given to all o f the population but the ‘others’ have been separated from the Patels by a road. In this case, unlike Indraprastha, houses of three types were constructed. The larger ones, on the south side o f the road around the temple, were given to Patels and the smaller ones, on the north side of the road, for other castes, Harijans and Muslims. The features I describe in Narayannagar are common to all the villages reconstructed by BAPS. The first thing is the impressive entrance gates with details given in English and Gujarati o f ‘the Inspirer’, the sponsors and the names o f the BJP politicians who presided over the inauguration. These gates might testify to the generosity of the sponsors but traditionally they mark the edge o f the village, the boundary between pure, domestic and civil space on the one hand and impure, savage wilderness on the other. These gates continue to attest to this division only now they mark the fact that the villagers have a new patron who has created and elaborated their village space.

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Each village also has a community hall, a phenomenon unknown in Kachchh before the earthquake; a panchayatghar> an administrative house where public, community and governmental affairs are carried out; a primary health centre; and buildings for farmers’ cooperatives. BAPS has also provided water and sanitation; a school; roads; electricity and street lights and an extensive garden area for the recreation and contemplation of the villagers. And, at the centre o f the village, is a ‘Socio-Spiritual Cultural Centre’: a temple with a library attached. This library contains around 10,000 books and is intended, and I quote, to ‘be the beacon of spreading good reading habits’. Forty-seven per cent of people in Kachchh are illiterate and the good reading habits they are anticipated to acquire will allow them to firmly master the finer points o f this kind o f devotional and congregational Hinduism. It has become something o f an ironic joke in Kachchh to describe the village you live in as being o f such and such a private agency style: a Catholic Relief Services village, a World Vision village and so on. Each agency constructed a distinct style of house and attempted to imbue certain social values through particular kinds o f schools, community centres, and so on. There is also a clear sense that some organizations did better work than others and those who ended up in a village constructed by a Taiwanese Buddhist organization clearly did not benefit as much as those whose village was built by BAPS or any other of the large Vaishnava movements. It is too simple to say that competitive reconstruction was all about publicity or for that matter simply to proselytize among the benefactors, because many other villages are clearly envious of those that received BAPS support. Unlike other organizations, BAPS did not ‘adopt’ a cluster of closely related villages. They chose to reconstruct particular villages evenly scattered the length and breadth of the affected area. Each one visited for the initial worship and purification o f the land, for the stone-laying ceremony, for the consecration o f the sect’s temple, and for the inauguration and key-handing-over ceremonies by a series of high profile religious and political leaders from the BJP government. They received copious press coverage and Pramukh Swami himself sped through Kachchh in his British registered Mercedes on many occasions. They have constructed villages that make those living nearby covetous of the wealth and patronage o f the movement. They have attracted huge numbers of new followers and, as I have mentioned, they have also drawn followers away from other Swaminarayan sects. They have painted the countryside with the distinctive pinks, blues and yellows o f their temples and the saffron o f their order’s robes.

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Despite the temptation to see what they are doing as proselytizing through infrastructure, the sect's ascetics appear genuinely convinced that what they are doing is for the good of humanity and the region. They apparently are convinced that they are freeing people from ignorance, addiction, bad habits and the control of perverted pandits. It also happens that the message and lifestyle they advocate fits pretty neatly with the aspirations of the majoritarian Hindu political right in Gujarat. Their construction works have been more lavish than in the other examples given and largely funded by private donations. Their activities have been conducted in the name of their leader, Pramukh Swami, considered to be Lord Krishna incarnate. In Narayannagar, at least, they have favoured the Patels over other groups, reinforcing caste inequality and confirm ing the centrality o f the Patels to their movement. They may have invidious reasons for doing so as the Patels, the major land-holders in Kachchh, are in other villages devotees of other Swaminarayan sects. They are apparently attempting to lure them away from these other orders. The social segregation in Narayannagar reflects a problem in this strategy because, on the whole, the Patels act predominantly in their own interests and generally seem to prefer their own exclusive settlements to those with mixed-caste populations. The other orders do not admit Harijans and as purity is so central to their ritual practices, in many villages the Swaminarayan temple is in reality a Patel temple for the exclusive use o f that caste. The older branches of the movement view Pramukh Swami s sect as something of a populist upstart and, if they do not recognise his legitimacy, they are forced at some level to notice his charismatic success and admire his influence with powerful politicians. The Patel communities are strong politically; the division opening up amongst them appears to be a result o f a strategic difference rather than a difference in vision, although it does broadly correspond with which Vaishnava movement they claim allegiance to. Put simply, they need the sizable Harijan vote to be sure of attaining political power but many o f them are strongly opposed to the idea that Harijans should be allowed to live the good life within their gated communities. T he B JP w it h t h e

in

H

K achchh: W

h at t o d o

a r ija n s ?

The tension between Vaghela and Modi that has characterized the recent history of the BJP in Gujarat is popularly described as a conflict

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o f electioneering techniques: Vaghela seeking power by mobilizing votes on the basis o f caste and Modi attempting to unify the electorate under th e banner o f Hinduism . In M odi’s case, this is ideologically underpinned by the rhetoric and ideals of the Hinduvta platform. But is it really as clear-cut as that? Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot have observed a tension in the policies o f the BJP between ‘ideological purity and pragmatism’ (1998:2). Such tension stems from th e historical antecedents of the current nationalist movement, notably Brahminical in its bias, and the need to mobilize support, notably among the low castes. At the level of policy this has led to conflicting treatment o f these castes: on one hand, they are to be integrated into the fold by gradual Sanskritization (so ultimately there would be no low castes) and on the other, they are to remain low caste, but in a socially harmonic and Hindu world this would not be particularly detrimental to them (for discussion see Jaffrelot, 1998). Both policies have been experimented with more or less successfully in the state as well as in the exam ples o f reconstruction given above. This contradiction remains at the level of policy but at the level o f the voter ‘casteism’ is perhaps an altogether different affair. As the BJP attempts to allure more low-caste followers (OBCs and the casteless), a significant block of the party’s support in Gujarat is attempting to marginalize and exclude low-caste people from civic life. Although practices o f untouchability are outlawed, it remains common. Such practices do not exist in the same forms as in the past, when Harijans were formerly barred from entering temples and the shadow o f a Harijan was considered ritually polluting for caste Hindus. The fact remains, however, that many o f the most successful and powerful religious movements in the State will not permit Harijans into their fold and, implicitly, into their temples. Consequently, the followers of some of these movements consider Harijans as defiling and, therefore, as undesirable neighbours. Atypical of trends in the State, the BJP lost four of the six seats in Kachchh in the election of December 2002. In the 1998 election, the party polled just under half o f the votes cast and won five o f the six seats, narrowly losing the border constituency o f Abdasa to the Congress. In 2002, they won Abdasa and retained Mundra, but lost in Mandvi, Bhuj, Anjar and Rapar (by very small margins from 500 in the case o f Mandvi, to 9,800 in Abdasa). A number of newspapers carried the story diat Suresh Mehta had retained the Mandvi seat; small retractions were printed some days later when it became apparent that

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he had in fact lost it. Initially it was thought that delays in post­ earthquake reconstruction were the cause o f their loss. The actual reasons for their defeat vary from constituency to constituency; however, from the data published by the Election Commission o f India and from talking to officials and journalists presiding over the election there appears to have been another kind o f shift in voting behaviour that was unconnected with the reconstruction process. The first thing to note is that in the 1998 election the turnout was 59.3 per cent, in 2002 it was higher at 62.3 per cent. The BJP actually polled more votes this time around than it did four years previously. In the Bhuj constituency, however, they lost the seat by polling 45.32 per cent of the vote against 47.71 per cent to the Congress. There are three key factors in explaining the defeat o f the BJP candidate. First, most Muslims (upwards of 30 per cent o f the electorate in this constituency) voted for the Congress, they had not always done so and many had previously supported the ousted BJP candidate. In this election, unable to further tolerate the actions o f the BJP government, they voted en masse against the ruling party rather than fo r the Congress. The victory of the Congress has paradoxically compounded the problems faced by some Muslims in the district and points to some o f the subtleties and consequences o f elections that percentage point analysis does not reveal. While many may applaud the Muslims for finally voting for the Congress and taking a stand against the BJP, the price many o f them have had to pay appears to be rather high. The ousted candidate had undoubtedly worked very hard, some say selflessly, to assist those living in the dry and remote lands in the north of his constituency. He has repeatedly used his MLA funds to artificially support animal husbandry in the region, bringing in large quantities of cattle fodder by truck to assist beleaguered farmers. The new MLA seems to have little interest in this marginal area, the convoys o f trucks have stopped, and farmers’ livelihoods have suffered dramatically as a consequence. The affected communities are predominantly Muslim. The second factor behind the BJP’s loss o f the Bhuj seat is that the victorious candidate was an Ahir and could rely on the sizable vote of his own caste members. These factors tipped the scales in favour of the Congress and away from the predominantly urban (and rural Patel) support base of the BJP. There is very little political strategists could do about these two factors but the third factor, the Harijan vote, appears to have been thought attainable; perhaps it was, but it was not enough. The silent battle for Harijan support reflects one o f the more mysterious trends in the post-earthquake period. The northern parts

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o f Kachchh, towards the Rann and the international border, are known as B a n n i and Pachim. These areas were, prior to the earthquake, inhabited predominantly by Harijans and Muslims. Following the earthquake there has been a tremendous migration of Harijans from the region. Numbers are hard to come by but it appears that hundreds o f fam ilies have left these areas, which were very sparsely populated anyway, and have resettled on or near major roads at a distance of around 10 km from Bhuj. A number of reasons have been provided for th is remarkable shift o f people. First, Muslims in these regions have been harassing the Harijan population for years and they have taken the opportunity to escape this persecution. Second, because o f the proxim ity of these areas to the border with Pakistan, Harijans live their lives in fear of terrorism and other kinds of subversive activity. Third, in the religious traditions of Harijans they are compelled to leave land that has either been hit by an earthquake or has witnessed premature deaths. Fourth, the northern regions are poor, the land is infertile and the transport facilities are inadequate so the Harijans left their lands to settle near the city to be close to the market for their handicraft products. While all of these reasons undoubtedly contain some element o f truth, none o f them really explain why so many Harijans have apparently abandoned their ancestral lands and temples, why they were able to acquire Government land close to highways, why Muslims did not take the opportunity to move closer to the bright lights of the city or why there has been so much infrastructural support for their new settlements from the government and from some NGOs. It appears that at some indeterminable level o f government and local administration a decision has been taken to initiate Harijan migration towards the urban centre, but not for them to come so close that they infringe on the town and offend the high-caste BJP stalwarts who dominate there. This is an obvious compromise that allows government officials to appear as if they are taking Harijan interests seriously without being so generous to them that they cause offence to others. The invisible ‘party line’ is thus attempting to gain the support o f the Harijans, bringing them closer to the urban settlement and away from what were by all accounts congenial relations with Muslims in their ancestral villages. The three village case studies outlined in this paper all in various ways display different approaches to the Harijan question. In the first case, Keshav Nagar, the village is divided into sub-settlements on the basis of caste hierarchy and relative political strength but Harijans have not been allotted plots within the gates constructed by the VHP.

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Togadia’s exclusive populism is thus somewhat out o f kilter with invisible policies of the Government. In case o f Indraprastha, Verma’s intellectualist vision, with its political ideas of integrated and inclusive social hierarchy, has failed to attract the support of the high castes. The obvious reasons, as I have discussed, are that the housing stock is uniform and o f low quality and Harijans and Muslims have been encouraged to settle there. The inclusive nature of BAPS ideological blueprints conforms after a fashion to the invisible policies o f the Government in that Harijans are incorporated into their villages but kept at a distance from the dominant caste and the ritual centres. However, the rank and file caste-based support for BAPS and the other Vaishnava sects is strongly opposed to integration o f the Harijans in any form. At the beginning o f this chapter, I suggested that Hindutva was not a uniform set of principles but a series of ideologies built from the same fundamental elements, veneration o f a deity or an ideologue, temple worship, ritualized social practices, an intellectual or social history and so on. With the possible exception o f BAPS, efforts to construct a Hindu identity with a political logic are the antithesis of the doctrinal exclusivity characterising the other Vaishnava movements in the region. The religious doctrines that have taken root in the countryside, until recently, have not been attempting to include as many people as possible; rather they have attained positions of power within clusters of castes and have deliberately run the risk o f alienating others in order to maintain and consolidate their support. The BJP has managed to unify a diverse range o f movements that are not formally political in the sense that they compete for office but are in the sense that the ideologies they espouse have social and religious implications which then in turn are expressed as political actions and indeed votes. Competition and hostility between such organizations, say for example between the RS and BAPS, are avoided when they are all looking towards Modi as a political leader. At these moments it is simplest to assume that they all support Modi’s ‘Gujarat experiment’ in equal measure. However, when situations arise when they come into competition with one another, or they are vying for the same piece of patronage or one organization attempts to lure the followers of another, then the situation is different. Profound schisms emerge between such groups, differences in ideology and social practice and aspiration that have the potential to open just as much ground between them as the BJP has managed to open between Hindus and Muslims in Kachchh.

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It m ight be suggested that it is not possible to compare the RS and BAPS because they are different organizations working towards different goals. But they are led by ideologues, have a particular vision o f w hat India is and how it should be populated, have national aspirations, have their own versions o f how goals should be achieved and com bine social welfare activities with a particular version of H in d u ism . However, it is precisely because they are different organizations with different methods that they can be compared as they all serve in various ways to further Hindutva as a way o f life and as a m ethod o f designing earthquake-affected villages. These organizations have attempted to provide for all aspects of human life, to provide an encompassing set of codes, morals and priorities for the villagers they have assisted. How successful they are at achieving these goals is a question of time; however, the fragile impression of unity fostered by the BJP is easily shattered during a local dispute o f the sort that sits very close to the surface of the examples I have provided. Leva Patels from America financed the construction of Keshav Nagar although no local Patels have settled there; the Patels o f Dudhai refused to settle in Indraprastha and instead have started to reconstruct an impressive new settlement on the old site; and Patels in Narayanagar were the chief beneficiaries of BAPS support. These observations point to the factionalism as well as the centrality o f Patels in rural Kachchh but a similar picture could also be drawn for Jains, the other powerful land-holding group in rural Kachchh. The point I want to make is that the Patels did not really refuse to settle in Indraprastha because of the low quality o f the houses but because it was constructed by the RS, a rival organization for their, to paraphrase David Pocock (1973), minds, bodies and perhaps their wealth. The difference is not just that the library constructed in Indraprastha contained nationalistic literature and the one in Narayannagar contained literature in Gujarati on the life and teachings of Swaminarayan and his successors. The social priorities in each settlement, the form o f Krishna or Ram, their worship and the style of temple, and ideas about social inclusion and exclusion reflect different and incompatible ways of organizing lives. In many ways, the village adoption scheme has allowed patrons to construct fiefdoms under the patronage of the State. While all eyes are on Modi the boundaries of the fiefdom remain inviolate and peace prevails. If there are changes to the status quo or if Hindutva is taken up as a rallying cry by non-BJP politicians in Gujarat then there will be scope for radical shifts in boundaries and allegiances.

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C o n c l u s io n New religious movements commonly flourish after large-scale national disasters. For example, the Muslim brotherhood and Islamic Front for Salvation (FIS) gained a groundswell o f support following earthquakes in Egypt and Algeria respectively. However, post-earthquake reconstruction is in some ways a minor detail in the recent political economy o f Gujarat, overshadowed by religious violence, systematic and organized attacks on minority communities, disruption o f civil life in the cities, and high profile attacks on trains and temples by Muslims. These events have determined the political atmosphere in which much o f the reconstruction work has taken place. Recendy, Thomas Blom Hansen has written that: ‘Political society is an expansive realm o f public protest . . . . But political society has also enabled competing forms o f sovereignty— political parties, movements, and gangsters— to grow and diversify to the extent that they have encroached on the sovereignty of the state’ (2002: 229). Together, the examples I have given show that a new religious economy, managed primarily by non-elected (populist, intellectual and charismatic) individuals, has been central to the reconstruction of Kachchh. New names, village layouts and social institutions speak of aspects o f the latest political revolution to have taken place in the countryside. Social engineering of various kinds reflects a general schism in the popular following of the BJP, caught as they are (in various ways) between ideological purity and pragmatism. But the BJP depends on voters for power and these voters are enmeshed in a myriad o f other kinds of social activities and organizations that reflect in very different ways the ideology that has become known as Hindutva. I hope to have shown that the caste-ridden family o f the Sangh Parivar is in fact a series of competing visions that are frequendy incompatible with one another and that, for now at least, Muslims have been sidelined from the BJP’s politics of electioneering. The real question has become: What to do with the Harijans? B

ib l io g r a p h y

A. Basu (1996), ‘Mass Movement or Elite Conspiracy’, in D. Ludden (ed.), Contesting the Nation. Religion, Continuity and the Politics o f Democracy in India. Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press. S. Bayly (1992),‘Hijacking History: Fundamentalism in the Third World Today’, in A.W. Van den Hoek, D.H.A. Kolff & M.S. Oort (eds), Ritual, State and History in South Asia. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

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T.B. H ansen (1998), ‘The Ethics o f Hindutva and the Spirit o f Capitalism’, in T.B. Hansen and C. Jaffrelot (eds), The BJP and the Compulsions o f Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. _________ (2002), Wages o f Violence. Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bom bay , New Delhi and Oxford: Princeton University Press. C. Jaffrelot (1996), The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s. London: Hurst. C. Jaffrelot and T.B. Hansen (1998), ‘Introduction’, in T.B. Hansen and C. Jaffrelot (eds), The BJP and the Compulsions o f Politics in India. New Delhi: O xford University Press. M. Kesavan (2001), Secular Common Sense. New Delhi: Penguin. J.G . Lochtefeld (1996), ‘New Wine, Old Skins: The Sangh Parivar and the Transformation o f Hinduism’, Religion, 26: pp. 101-18. B.S. Miller (1991),‘Presidential Address: Contending Narratives— the Political Life o f the Indian Epics’, Journal o f Asian Studies, 50(4), pp. 783-92. D.F. Pocock (1973), Mind, Body and Wealth. A study o f Belief and Practice in an Indian Village. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. S. Pollock (1993), ‘Ramayana and Political Imagination in India’, Journal o f Asian Studies, 52.2: pp. 261-97. R. Redfield (1955), ‘The Social Organization o f Tradition’, The Far Eastern Quarterly, 15.1: pp. 13-21. G. Shah (1998),‘The BJP’s Riddle in Gujarat: Caste, Factionalism and Hindutva’, in T.B. Hansen and C. Jaffrelot (eds), The BJP and the Compulsions o f Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. D. Smith (2003), Hinduism and Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. B.S. Turner (1974), Weber and Islam. A Critical Study. London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul. P. van der Veer (1994), Religious Nationalism. Hindus and Muslims in India, Berkeley 8c Los Angeles: University o f California Press.

6 Heroes for our Times: Assam’s Lachit, India’s Missile M an 1 Jayeeta Sharma

P r o lo g u e: A aj fr o m

ka

B h a ra t : S n a p sh o t s

C o n t e m p o r a r y I n d ia

6 December 1992: Members o f various Hindu nationalist groups demolished a 600-year-old mosque at Ayodhya, claiming that it was a relic o f Muslim tyranny over Hindus, as it had allegedly been constructed by the Mughal ruler, Babur, over an ancient Hindu holy site. In an editorial the next day, the Statesman observed: Tf the Father of the Nation were alive today he would ask that the Masjid be rebuilt, preferably by the Hindus who destroyed it and suggest that the temple of Lord Ram be built nearby and urge Muslims to help with it.’ 1 I would like to thank the Department of Cultural Affairs, Government of Assam, the Jyotiban Chitrabon Studio and the Agarwala family for allowing me access to film stills and other materials on the film Jaymati and its director, Jyotiprasad Agarwala. Thanks are also due to Tarun Bhartiya, The Assam Tribune and to Seagull Theatre for the other photographs used here. The paper itself is a revised version of a draft presented at the annual conference of the Political Studies Association of the UK in 2001.1would like to thank the convenors and participants at the “Nationalism in Comparative Perspective” panel of the PSA, as well as the various people who commented on my draft including C.A. Bayly, Sanjib Baruah, Rajatkanta Ray, Subhash Chakravarty, Riho Isaka, Christina Granroth and Tarun Bhartiya.

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27 May 1998: The Prime Minister o f India and the leader o f India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist party announced» after underground nuclear tests at Pokhran in Rajasthan, ‘India is today a nuclear weapons state. This is a reality that cannot be denied.’ (http://www.rediff.com/ news/1998/may/27bomb 1.htm) 13 Novem ber 2000: ‘A programme was organised at the National Defence Academy to honour the memory o f Assam’s legendary hero, Lachit Barphukan. Lieutenant General (Retd.) S.K. Sinha, the Governor of Assam ... delivered an hour’s lecture on Lachit Barphukan to 2000 cadets at the academy auditorium. He stated that honouring the memory o f Lachit Barphukan not only underscores our common national spirit but will also promote national integration. Our great military leaders of the medieval period— Rana Pratap, Shivaji and Lachit Barphukan— had fought for independence against Mughal imperialism’ (The Assam Tribune, 16 November 2000). 3 M arch 2002: Mandir Ka Nirmaann Karo, Babur Ki Aulad Ko Baahar Karo. (‘Start building the Mandir and throw the sons of Babur out of the country’). This was the kind of abuse shouted by Vishva Hindu Parishad activists at 7.15 am, at Godhra railway station, against a Muslim tea-shop owner. A little while later, at a short distance from the station, their train compartment was set on fire and 58 o f those Hindus died. In retaliation, mobs of enraged Hindus descended on Muslim communities across the state of Gujarat, igniting riots that killed more than 500 people, India’s worst religious violence in a decade. Thousands more Muslims were driven from their homes (Gujarat Samachary3 March 2002).2 25 July 2002: Professor A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is the first Indian scientist to head the world’s largest democracy. The 71-year-old Muslim from the South, widely known as ‘Missile Man’, is acknowledged as the driving force behind India’s quest for cutting-edge defence technologies ... . Although the post o f the President is largely ceremonial, analysts say with Professor Kalam’s nomination, the Hindu-nationalist BJPled government is sending a ‘positive signal’ to India’s politically significant Muslim m inority (http://news.bbc.co.Uk/l/hi/world/ south_asia/2043527.stm). 2 This figure is much less than that provided by other newspapers and organizations, which put the number of Muslims murdered at at least 2000.

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7 November 2002: General S.K. Sinha... raised certain vital questions about the evil design of Bangladesh to send out more people to Assam and the Northeast so that this region could one day be annexed to Bangladesh and a bigger Islamic country created in the subcontinent (http://www.northeastfrontier.com/nov02/Controversy.htm). A gor D as

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Benedict Anderson, in his classic work on nationalism, has aptly pointed out that ‘if nations are widely considered to be “new” and “historical”, the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and ... glide into a limitless future’ (Anderson, 1983, p. 19). Following up on that insight, I explore a nation’s ideas of ‘history’, situating these in such a context where its citizens engage in a constant process of reinventing themselves, their pasts and their aspirations. Through its consideration of how and why nations acquire heroes, the paper examines ‘the comprehension of configurations and motifs— o f representations o f the social sphere— that give unconscious expression to the positions and the interests o f social agents as they interact’ (Barthes, 1972, p. 155-6). The majority o f the sources it uses are late-colonial vernacular narratives crafted by those ‘idea-bearers of a society’— the ideal representations that serve to describe society as those social agents thought it was or wished it to be. I juxtapose that material with some o f the cultural symbols and media representations prevalent in contemporary India, to examine how local political trends, in this case, in the region o f Assam, simultaneously use both affiliations and contestations in their connections with a larger narrative o f nation. By taking culture as ‘the signifying system through which necessarily ... a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored’, it should be possible to examine region and nation as sites for cultural elaboration, production and diffusion (W iliams, 1981, p. 13). However, it is necessary to keep in mind the fluctuating nature of such processes, whereby, ‘meanings may be partial because they are in 3 Literally, from the Assamese, 'Those days, these days': the title o f the historical series written by the publicist, Gunabhiram Barua, in his periodical Assam Bandhuy published from Kolkata in 1885-86.

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median res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the act o f cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act o f “composing” its powerful image* (Bhabha, 1990, p. 3). Since the apogee o f romantic nationalism in a theoretical lineage that reaches back to Herder, such movements have tended to identify value and authenticity with difference, with what was supposedly distinctive and unique to a particular language, culture or history. This often accompanied a more or less deliberate elision o f class hierarchies and inequities within a general rubric of politics of identity (Sarkar, 1997, p. 21). It is here that it might be pertinent, in a South Asian context, to draw attention to what Sudipta Kaviraj calls a ‘new sound ... in the diverse and noisy discourse o f the nineteenth century ... the sound o f history* (Kaviraj, 1989, p. 227). Kaviraj goes on to elaborate upon the duality of this concept, as far as indigenous intellectuals were concerned. The word history, as they well knew, meant two entirely different things: first, it meant the course o f happenings in time, the seamless web o f experiences o f a people; but its great promise lay in its second meaning, stories in which what had happened are recovered and explained . . . . Slowly, history becomes the great terrain o f politics. Because history is a way o f talking about the collective self and bringing it into existence (ibid.).

It bears keeping in mind that this centrality of history in the latenineteenth century bore a close relationship to attempts by the colonial state to appropriate it for its own purposes. In that quest for power by the Raj, history became a key device. Initially, as the work o f Bernard Cohn and others has shown, the pasts o f its predecessors were elaborated upon as the foundation for a suitable future for the British. The East India Company placed itself very much in the line of descent from the imperial Mughals, a successor state in similar mode to other eighteenth-century military fiscal regimes (see Cohn, 1987, esp. Section II). At another level, the writing o f history was also a way for colonialism to break out o f what it perceived as a circle of deception by native intermediaries. To arrive at its goal o f a reliable body o f knowledge, it sought to order the varied narratives o f annals, chronicles, folklore, anecdotes which came its way, into models o f contemporary Whig historiography (Guha, 1997, pp. 1 5 6 -6 1 ). Ironically, given its preoccupation with the mendacity of Indian informants, it was almost totally dependent upon them to obtain such materials on India’s past.

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Significantly, it was through this process, the mythologizing of indigenous History, that a key elem ent was distilled in to the construction of a distinctive regional identity in the province of Assam. For the dominant Assamese-speaking public of the Brahmaputra valley, a project o f writing history began to appear as their most significant contribution to a larger goal o f jatiya unnati (‘national progress’). The notion o f unnati was an inchoate one, variously wafting through discussions o f agricultural enterprise to those of linguistic reform, but what remained a constant was its embedding in the intelligentsia’s desire to attain a modem society and nation (see Sharma, 2003). In a context of perceived ‘backwardness’, where the intelligentsia brooded over their late engagement with modernity as a handicap vis-à-vis ‘advanced’ regions such as Bengal, a claim to distinction was sought out in the essential site o f colonial power/knowledge— history. W hile they acknowledged the mastery o f their British rulers over this practice of modernity, these indigenous elites felt that they too had expertise to offer in this area. This claim by the Assamese intelligentsia was premised upon their portrayal of themselves as inheritors of a distinctive regional chronicling tradition—the Ahom buranji— deemed a close relative o f the Western model of ‘objective’, state-centred historical prose. The Ahoms, who ruled Assam until the British takeover in 1826, had originated among a succession of Tai peoples who, over the centuries, had moved into Assam through the mountain ranges linking it to Southeast Asia. Their prose chronicles, called Buranji (‘a store that teaches the ignorant’— Gait, 1905, Introduction), initially written in the Tai language, dated their arrival from the thirteenth century, with superior iron technology to aid in establishing rule over large tracts o f the Assam plains. From the seventeenth century onwards, state formation proper can be discerned. Now the Ahoms were adapting a Brahminical political vocabulary to the needs o f an administrative apparatus that combined Southeast Asian modes o f labour mobilization with Indo-Persian bureaucratic influences. While the Tai Ahom language continued in use, it was increasingly relegated to an arcane space o f divination and ritual, in the hands o f the Ahom religious specialists, the Bailungs. As the state became more bureaucratized, a greater role was played by ‘Sanskritized’ cultural intermediaries. The most prominent role for such a ‘scribal elite’ o f Brahmin, Daivagna and Kalita castes was in the generation of a wide range o f records and chronicles, largely composed

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in the ujaniya Assamese vernacular o f the Sibsagar region.4 These were the groups that managed to obtain a near monopoly of scribal and bureaucratic skills over the last centuries o f the Ahom rule in Assam— the skills largely responsible for their successful transition into the colonial structures o f the mid-nineteenth century. That Ahom textual knowledge formed the most important part of the information that the colonial regime would seek to acquire through its interactions with the latter-day descendants o f the region’s service gentry. In turn, this knowledge was reified by the new publicists into the status o f a unique resource o f Assam’s past— a signifier o f the immense potential that Assamese language and culture possessed, in its bid to create a modem nation. An early statement o f this variety appeared as early as 1855, as the first ‘native’ magistrate, Anandaram Dhekial Phukan, sought to show his superiors that Assamese was a distinct and in some ways, richer language than the Bengali that had supplanted it in the British administrative system. In no department o f literature do the Assamese appear to have been more successful than in history___The chain o f historical events, since the last 600 years, has been carefully preserved, and their authenticity can be relied upon. It would be difficult to name all the historical works, or as they are styled by the Assamese, Buranjis. They are numerous and voluminous. According to the custom o f the country, a knowledge o f the Buranjis was an indispensable qualification in an Assamese gentleman, and every family o f distinction, and especially the government and public officers, kept the most minute records o f historical events, prepared by the learned Pundits o f the country (Phukan, 1855).

In a similar vein were the administrator Edward Gait’s remarks in his H istory o f Assam which would be quoted over and again by subsequent votaries of an Assamese nation. Prior to the advent o f the Muhammadans the inhabitants o f other parts of India had no idea o f history ... on the other hand, the Ahom conquerors of Assam had a keen historical sense and they have given us a full and detailed account o f their rule (Gait, 1905, Introduction). 4 Suniti Kumar Chatteiji notes that the Bengali group of dialects early came to be united by a common literary language. The common dialect current in North Bengal and Assam continued as one speech, as a member of the Bengali-Assamese group o f dialects. In the fifteenth century it split up into two sections, Assamese and North Bengali, when Assamese started on a literary career and an independent existence o f its own by not acknowledging the domination of literary Bengali, already established in East Bengal (Chatterji, 1926, pp. 91-98).

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As we shall see, the emphasis on ‘historical sense’, as an essential and particularist element o f an Assamese ‘national character’ was one that Gait seems to have absorbed from the many members o f the Assamese elite who were helping him to acquire the sources for his magnum opus. And, o f course, the political and administrative focus of the pre-colonial knowledge that Ahom scribal culture had left behind meant that it fitted well into the state-centred narrative mode that served the most influential model for history-writing for Gait and his contemporaries. It is noteworthy that a substantial number o f the Assamese works by the new colonial intelligentsia chose to filiate themselves to this narrative tradition— by their appropriation o f the name ‘Assam Buranji’.5 Technically, the buranji genre had met its demise by the mid-nineteenth century, in tandem with the regime whose details it had recorded. But this death was already being overridden by a rebirth. Dhekial Phukan and Gait’s statements are indicative of the complex ways in which ‘Buranji’ was acquiring the status o f a local ancestor for modem History. Now, works by Harakanta Barua, Gunabhiram Barua, Padmadhar Gohain Barua and others could be viewed through a doubled vision— of buranji conjoined with the western field o f history. With encouragement from British officials and American missionaries, these Assamese elites would initiate a quest that would re/form the buranji— from manuscript to print, and from state chronicle to an ‘authentic’ narrative o f Assam’s past.6 Simultaneously, buranji, while retaining its pre-modem genealogy, would be exalted as the repository for all those attributes essential to bestowing upon a modem Assamese identity a unique and progressive character. Such a history project can be viewed, to borrow Sanjib Baruah’s words, in the light o f ‘a poetics about a homeland and its peoples ... that transforms the geography o f an area into primal, homelike or sacred space and transforms a people into a collectivity with imagined 5 The best-known examples are Gunabhiram Barua, Assam Buranji (Calcutta, 1875); Padmadhar Gohain Barua, Assamor Buranji (Tezpur, 1916) and Hari Narayan Dutta Baruah, Assam Buranji (Guwahati, 1924). Each of these went into a number of editions. 6 For instance, Kasinath Tamuli Phukan, Assam Buranji-Sar (Sibsagar, Baptist Mission Press, 1844) and Harakanta Barua Sadar Amin, Assam Buranji (Guwahati, 1930) were essentially printed adaptations o f old (untitled) manuscripts. Also, other extracts from buranji manuscripts were reprinted in the Orunodoi periodical, published from the same missionary press.

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ties o f shared origins and kinship’ (Baruah, 1999, p. 8). And, as we shall see, the multiplicity o f such narratives often allowed them to accommodate ‘dual but complementary political identities’ (ibid.). A telling instance o f this was how within the emergent Assamese public, the term ‘buranji’ began to monopolize references to the discipline of history, rather than ‘itihas’, the term used in most Indie vernaculars. The rationale for this was certainly the intelligentsia’s contention that the particular ‘authentic’ element o f Assam’s past stemmed from the buranji’s roots in Southeast Asian notions of chronicle writing. At the same time, we have to take care not to underestimate this elite’s desire to emphasize connections with pan-Indic textual traditions. This was propelled by their need to legitimize the land and people o f Assam as having a long association with the ritually elevated culture o f‘Aryavarta’. They acknowledged the limitations of the Puranic and Epic traditions, as there was no single text that could give you the history o f Bharatvarsha, but at the same time, declared that sifting through a number of such works did offer information about every part o f India, including Assam (Barua, 1875, p. 11). Such attempts at affiliating to larger Indie traditions were an integral part o f fitting in with the power realities of the British-ruled sub­ continent, within which Assam was being formally incorporated for the first time. One o f the prominent officials who successfully shifted from Ahom to British service, Haliram Dhekial Phukan, wrote a work called Assam Desher Itihas yani (‘or’) Assam Buranji in 1829. As the first printed history o f the region, it received favourable notice from its contemporaries, in journals such as the Samachar Chandrika and the India Gazette7 However, Haliram’s work, written as it was in Bengali, to receive greater prominence in Kolkata circles, still represents a moment when the appropriation o f the buranji genre into regional identity discourses had not quite come about. Over subsequent decades, as an indigenous reading public developed for Assamese, there was an equivalence plotted between a language and a literature of one’s own— a feature that was as important as the possession o f a history. Fittingly, it was Haliram’s son, Anandaram, who penned a momentous statement to prove, in 1855, that the Assamese language had a long literary and historical lineage, distinct from Bengali (Phukan, 1855). Every major history of Assam would now be necessarily written in 7 1830.

Reproduced in Asiatic Journal or Monthly Register, Vol. 2 [205], May-August

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Assamese, in order to carry through this lineage, for language, and for nation.8 The role such neo-buranjis were able to play within the structures of colonial rule was inseparably linked with the fixity as well as the dissemination opportunities acquired as a result o f their insertion into print culture. The educational and administrative requirements o f the colonial state meant the emergence o f a new ‘information order* and a new culture of patronage, with the Commissioner and the Textbook Committee being its arbiters (Bayly, 19%, p. 215). The demand for suitable knowledge o f the land and its people encouraged the production of such texts and built up a variety o f ‘common sense’— about the importance o f history. As Riho Isaka points out for another regional intelligentsia, History is seen overwhelmingly as a social and collective enterprise, something that the historian is doing as a representative o f his community . . . . This is indelibly marked in the rhetoric o f this historical discourse: for nearly always the subject o f this history is written as ‘we’ (Isaka, 1999, p. 263).

Examining the autobiographies o f the period, we find that almost a rite o f passage for the young male students dominating this public sphere was to be the act o f writing, in their mother-tongue.9 And, more often than not, the themes were taken from the Ahom past and the protagonists based on heroic motifs from it. The popularity of Bengali plays inspired Assamese equivalents to be produced, and most of the initial attempts took up themes unearthed from a ‘glorious’ past for the region. The usual way to legitimize these fictionalized narratives was to claim that they were based upon buranjis. Thus, a circular, selfreinforcing process was at work. It is instructive to compare Dhekial Phukan’s statement about Buranji with the famous words o f Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. ‘Bengal must have her own history. Otherwise there is no hope for Bengal. Who is to write it? ... Anyone who is a Bengali has to write it’ 8 This is, of course, not true of the works by the first professional ‘historians’, such as Surya Kumar Bhuyan, from the 1930s, whose scholarship necessarily had to engage with the world of Indo-British academia, and of many of their successors in post-colonial India, where English has almost entirely displaced the vernaculars in terms of political and economic access. However, considerable kudos, at the local level, attaches to scholarship in Assamese, unlike say, North India. 9 See Padmadhar Gohain Baruah, Mor Jtvon Sowororti (Guwahati, 1963) for a typical account of this process.

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(cited in Guha, 1988, p. 1). Recent works on regional history have made important advances in our understanding o f how history was becoming the great symbol o f a new age for colonial intellectuals, from Bengal to Maharashtra to Gujarat (see Guha, 1997; Kaviraj, 1995; Gordon, 1993; Chandra, 1992, amongst others). But a significant characteristic that does seem to set apart the Assamese discourse o f the period, is the belief among its constituent publicists that it was an unbroken tradition of recording the past in which they were participating, and one that was uniquely theirs. This perception was all the more important for a people who were acutely conscious o f being on the periphery as far as Indie civilization was concerned. Hence, with the constant reiteration that the educationally and culturally‘advanced’ Bengalis did not possess this resource from the past, the Assamese intelligentsia was able to reassure themselves that they alone shared in the Western mode o f objective history. And this possession o f an ‘authentic* heritage would allow them to mine it for ‘improving’ exemplars to redress the less than satisfactory present. F r u it s an

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Give me the buranjis o f Assam and I will say what the people o f Assam are. The buranjis are our strengthening tie to bind us with the past, and maintain the solidarity o f the Assamese people, and protect us from any threatened erosion o f our nationalism (Bhuyan, 1924).

With these sentiments in mind, Surya Kumar Bhuyan, Professor of English at Cotton College (recipient o f a doctorate in history from London University), offered to the Assamese public two different versions o f heroic history— an English ‘biography* called Lachit Barphukan and His Times (1947) and an old-style epic poem, Jaym ati Upakhyan (1920). These two works were the seal o f approbation by Assam’s first ‘professional* historian upon a long line o f narratives based around these images o f the Ahom past. Bhuyan*s efforts gave academic respectability to these two gendered myths— one o f a gallant warrior, Lachit, and the other of a selfless wife, Jaymati— which previous waves of literary enterprise had constructed as exemplars for Assamese men and women, citizens o f a new age and a new nation. It is useful to take a brief look at the outiine, and the genesis of these myths. Lachit was the son o f a man, Momai Tamuli, eulogized in

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certain seventeenth-century chronicles as an exemplary individual who, from humble origins as a bondsman, rose by virtue o f hard work to royal notice, which elevated him to the rank o f Barbarua— a prestigious official post. Lachit himself reached the rank o f Barphukan, with charge of the Ahom territories in Lower Assam, near modem Guwahati. That area had been the scene o f a number o f clashes o f the Ahoms with Mughal attackers from their base in the neighbouring province of Bengal. Despite the vastiy superior resources and technology o f the Mughals, the Ahoms ultimately managed to hold them off. That event subsequently served as basis for the proud claim by modem Assamese nationalism that Assam was one of the few regions to stave off ‘alien’ rule by ‘Bangals’ or ‘Yavanas’, as the buranjis classified these would-be conquerors from the Indian heartland. In their accounts o f the AhomBangal encounters, some o f these chronicles made brief allusions to a victory narrowly won over the Mughal commander, Ram Singh, in a naval conflict by his Ahom counterpart, Lachit Barphukan. And, as Bhuyan narrated (alluding to the parallel case o f the British national hero, Horatio Nelson) Lachit did not live to savour his victory, dying shortly after his defeat o f the Mughal forces at Saraighat. But not before setting an example for posterity by cutting off his uncle’s head for negligence o f his work with the apocryphal words— ‘M oom ai (‘mother’s brother’) is not greater than motherland.’ For Bhuyan, seeking more historical parallels for Lachit and Assam, such a victory over the Mughals was the occasion to christen him an Assamese Shivaji, following the direction set by his contemporaries who were discovering Maratha history to be synonymous with military heroism (Sardesai, 1926). Unlike the Lachit narrative, which appeared in the form o f an English-language historical biography, complete with footnotes, Bhuyan portrayed his idealized Ahom woman, Jaymati, in the mocktraditional form o f an Assamese verse ballad (Bhuyan, 1920). The historical period o f Jaymati’s existence was plotted a few decades hence— which was once again a period of uncertainty for the Ahoms. While Lachit’s valour had staved off external threats, the regime was now debilitated by weak rulers and domineering ministers. After a succession of brief-lived figureheads, a youthful prince, usually called the Lora Raja (‘Boy King’) ascended the throne. Incited by his ministers, he began hunting down all the princes belonging to rival clans who could challenge his throne. One o f the most dangerous, from their point o f view, was the valiant prince o f the Tungkhungia clan,

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Gadapani. Warned o f this danger, he was forced to go into hiding by his farsighted and virtuous wife, Jaymati. Although her infant sons also reached safety, she herself fell into the hands o f the tyrannical king. B u t she proved her unparalleled courage and wifely loyalty by refusing to reveal her husband’s whereabouts, even under cruel torture. Gadapani, who had fled from place to place until he reached the Naga hills, heard o f his wife’s plight, and returned, disguised as a Naga and asking her to give him up. But Jaymati bade him depart, and soon afterwards, died at the hands o f the king’s men. Her two sons, who had been sent into safety, survived and the elder one succeeded his father on the throne and ruled over the Ahom state at the zenith of its glory. Bhuyan’s accounts of Jaymati and Lachit were only the latest in a series o f writings on these heroic themes by the Assamese intelligentsia, part o f the literature that they were creating along with the nation. Another part o f that national oeuvre was the various works by the nam e o f ‘Assam Buranji’, to which Bhuyan added his edited print versions o f old Ahom manuscripts. Significantly, all these works were brought into the embrace o f history, by emphasizing their association with buranji. Thus, the fictive speeches in Lachit Barphukan, the minute details o f Jaymati’s tortures in Jaym ati Upakhyant Gunabhiram Barua’s gazetteer-inspired Assam B uranji, and Bhuyan’s edition o f the Tungkhungia Buranji— their annexation to the protean outlines of b u ra n ji enabled these works, in turn, to be all valourized as contributions to the ‘authentic’ record that was available for Assam’s past. ‘Buranji’ and its mythification now served as a device, for this intelligentsia to elide the boundary between the actual chronicles and the contemporary productions which claimed that status. Again, a parallel can be found in Kaviraj’s analysis o f the Bengali intellectuals of the same period. They began to write an enormous amount o f history, much o f which was respectable in modern academic terms, but much besides that was ‘fraudulent’. This generation wrote histories o f what happened, and also of what never happened, and the interesting part is that they saw the latter as being part o f the enterprise o f putting together an historical narrative (Kaviraj, 1989, p. 235).

However, it should be kept in mind that for the most part, this narrative mode of history adopted by Bengali intellectuals required its readers to identify with a history that was external to their own homeland— with examples of Rajput and Maratha heroism. Assamese

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writers had clearly learnt from their Bengali counterparts, but were able to use similar narrative devices to buttress their claim to their own region’s history. However, it was not enough to merely place the new mythology within the space o f the motherland— its reliable status as knowledge also required bolstering. A good instance comes from the manner in which the Jaymati narratives were legitimized by constant reiterations of the protagonist’s historicity. In reality, there had been only a few scanty references in the Ahom buranjis to such a figure. While some chronicles did describe the travails of Gadapani in his struggle for the throne, Jaymati appeared in them only as a nameless wife— ‘Gadapani’s woman’ who was tortured by the enemy faction. Other twentiethcentury embellishments were even more dubious, historically speaking, most notably, the figure of a Naga girl, a true child o f the jungle, who fell in love with the exiled Ahom prince.10 It is interesting to speculate that the constant references by these writers to their chronicle sources were also meant to obscure the fact that the entire Jaymati story had been derived from the folk songs prevalent among the women of Upper Assam. From the late-nineteenth century, the region’s male intellectuals had appropriated such songs and legends, harnessing them, in suitably emended guise, to the project o f creating a national heroine. However, this fact was usually glossed over, in the prefaces to these works. Instead, they typically stressed how their sources o f inform ation were o f im peccable textual provenance, namely written history/buranjis. In addition, there was near unanimity that the main purpose o f their writings was to disseminate knowledge about Jaymati among ‘ignorant sections such as women and rural folk’, among whom her name and fame, they felt, was not as well known as it should be (Barthakur, 1918). As we shall see, perhaps this also stemmed from their awareness that the didactic model o f feminine virtue that informed their Jaymati was not the same as the Jaymati o f popular memory. These two myths, o f Jaymati and Lachit, were generated at roughly the same time, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Indeed, they seem to complement each other in terms o f the gender roles they validate. However, their subsequent trajectories have been quite dissimilar. The Jaymati myth had much greater resonance in the 10 See, for example, Padmadhar Gohain Baruah, Jaymati Kunwari (Calcutta, 1900) and Lakshminath Bezbaruah, Jaymati Kunwari (Calcutta, 1915).

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early twentieth century, while Lachit has undergone a highly visible renaissance within the very different circumstances o f post-colonial India. Jaymati has become all but invisible in contemporary Assam, but the myth o f a martial Lachit has enjoyed startling success. It is my contention that seeing which heroes are successfully mythologized by nationalisms at different times can tell us a great deal about community identities and their (re)definitions. T

he

E m ergen ce

of

S a ti J a ym a ti

T h e Jaymati and Lachit myths received initial delineation in the last years of the nineteenth century, by intellectuals who saw their role as being that of social reformers and literary innovators. Thereby, texts such as the plays Lachit Barphukan and Jaymati Kunwari were a selfconscious attempt to create not just a morally uplifting literature, but also a literary oeuvre to buttress the Assamese linguistic and cultural claims. Interestingly, the Lachit figure did not go through too many changes in narrative— the basic theme remained more or less the same, and Bir (‘Warrior*) Lachit did not actually receive as much attention as his feminine counterpart, in the first decades o f the twentieth century. The focus on Jaymati was accentuated by the application o f a new technology to her story—when in 1935, the first Assamese film was made, called Jaymati. But even before that, Jaymati had made a significant journey, from persecuted Ahom princess to a pan-Indian figure o f Sati (in this context, a chaste wife). The Sati framework was most explicitly enunciated in a corpus of didactic writings which reached their apogee in the 1920s and 1930s. Many o f them were produced for an annual commemoration, Jaymati Utsav, which had been started by reforming nationalists at the site of her supposed martyrdom in Sibsagar and gradually spread all over Assam. In a parallel development, Lachit was commemorated in similar manner through annual melas on a date declared as Lachit Diwas. However, judging from the press coverage of these ‘national fetes’, it was the image o f Jaymati that fitted much more easily into the dom inant Gandhian nationalist m obilization o f the tim e. The Assamiya, one o f the first weekly newspapers, not only described the Jaymati Utsav celebrations at great length but also carried appeals for greater participation by women, speeches, editorials as well as letters.11 11 Assamiya (Dibrugarh). See issues through the 1920s.

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The Lachit Diwas celebrations, in contrast, were much more localized, failing to spread much further than their epicentre at Charing Gaon, even within Upper Assam. It has already been suggested that well known male intellectuals such as Ratnesw ar M ahanta, Padmadhar G ohain Barua and Lakshminath Bezbarua had appropriated and elaborated the folk theme o f Jaymati in their print productions, from the 1890s onwards. But in an interesting twist, another variety o f Jaymati text would soon supersede that first wave, at least in terms o f numbers, if not in terms o f literary stature. This second wave memorialized a Sati Jaymati, rather than Jaymati Kunwari (‘princess’), and numbered a large number of women among its producers. By the 1920s, Sati Jaymati had become the most com m on theme for women w riting in the Assamese language— almost the first generation which received some modem education and possessed the necessary ‘cultural and social capital’ to venture into the public domain of print. The disparities between these two waves o f literary production, despite their grounding in a common theme are quite considerable— and reveal significant dissonances in mental horizon, among these ‘new men’ and ‘new women’, as they perceived themselves to be. How the process of writing itself is structured by gender and class is apparent in these works. Even their basic form differs— the female products, most o f them from authors who had received very little formal education, seem conspicuously innocent of the narrative devices and embellish­ ments that intellectuals such as Bezbarua, feted as they were for their literary innovations, could display. The male creators of Jaymati, all the way from the 1890s down to the 1930s, were to employ diverse genres— plays, epic verse, lengthy essays and finally, a film, to convey the social and political implications o f the Jaymati tale. But usually, in these imaginations, the figure of Jaymati had virtually nothing to say— the main rhetoric centred around the male characters fleshing out authorial opinions on the nature of the state and sovereignty.12 In contrast, the female texts were, for the most part, brief essays o f perhaps a page or so, with hardly a fictional foray among them.13 Both the narrative structure and writing style 12 For instance, the piece by Lakhidhar Sarma, Sati Jaymati Kunwari, in Abahon (1935). 13 Some of these essayists, as listed by the Ghar Jeuti magazine in 1928, were Jagyadalata Duara, Shantiprabha Gohain Bamah, Punyaprabha Gohain Baruah, Kamalaloya Kakoti.

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served to enshrine the virtues and tribulations o f Jaymati as a straightforward statement of fact, a lesson earnesdy recited without recourse to any kind o f subdety. Many o f these pieces appeared as en tries for the essay competitions run by the pioneering woman’s periodical, Ghar Jeuti, to commemorate Jaymati Utsav.14 That fact itself co u ld have imposed lim itations o f style and length which the com m ercial ventures by the male writers did not have to face. Clearly, the b u lk o f these Sati narratives were first ventures o f paper to pen and n eed ed to show their adherence to socially approved models o f w om anly action. Writing on such a theme could be an act o f veneration, as well as o f appropriation— the most suitable arena for young women who had to display both their education and their virtue. While male intellectuals such as Gohain Barua and Bezbarua produced heroic narratives about Lachit and other quasi-historical figures, the women writers usually relied upon the gender-specific theme o f Jaymati as a vehicle for expression. It is as well to remember, in this regard, that despite the obsession o f nationalists throughout India with the ‘woman's question* in one form or another, there was little formal role for these women in the predominandy masculine world o f political discourse. Even though Gandhian mobilization brought many out o f their homes for the first tim e, their language and participation were firmly shaped by domestic and nurturing concerns. The feminist theorist, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, points out that In those societies where domestic and public spheres are firmly differentiated, women may win power and value by stressing their differences from men. By accepting and elaborating upon the symbols and expectations associated with their cultural definition, they may goad men into compliance, or establish a society unto themselves (1976, p. 37).

These Assamese women, despite their elite class location, did not yet possess a sufficient access to ‘authentic’ sources nor the necessary control over information production to construct alternative role models. However, even within these limited parameters, female appropriations o f such a myth could open up polysemic meanings for this narrative o f womanly moral courage (Chowdury, 1999). A telling

14 N ikunjalata Chaliha and Kamalaya Kakoti (eds.)» Ghar Jeutix (Sibsagar, 1928-32).

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indication o f this comes from the life and career o f one o f the most prominent nationalists o f the time, Chandraprabha Saikiani. Her speeches at the annual sessions o f the Jaymati Utsav celebrations, and the Congress-affiliated Mahila Samitis seemed much within the parameters o f familial virtue that Gandhian rhetoric was establishing as the norm for the women o f the new India. Yet, it is clear that actual political practice could, and did open up the possibility o f radical departures from the chaste passive model that was being publicly avowed. Saikiani was to have a child out o f wedlock, and to openly bring him up, all through her subsequent careers— schoolteacher, writer, Quit India activist and Left-wing feminist.15 The invocations o f Jaymati by such a woman allowed a model o f womanly strength and resistance to injustice to be rescued from the weight o f social prescription. Yet, at the same time, as we shall see, less radical uses of Jaymati were in full sway, and Saikiani remained an exceptional, uncomfortable rebel for her peers. The most enduring direction taken by the Jaymati myth was in 1935 through its transition into yet another modern medium, celluloid. Jaymati was chosen as the theme o f the first Assamese film, by Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Assam’s famous ‘man o f many parts— poet, dramatist, musician, socialist tea-planter, and Gandhian nationalist.16 In a region where linguistic and ethnic differences have often been viewed as contesting the very notion o f an Assamese nationality, Agarwala, the descendant o f Rajasthani migrants who assimilated very successfully into local society, has become a cultural icon and is invariably cited as an ideal to follow by today’s advocates o f ‘regional integration’. After being released from prison after the non-cooperation movement, Agarwala had a brief stint at the UFA studios in Germany, working alongside Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai, among others. This 15Saikiani had a ‘Gandharva’ marriage with a fellow writer, who later repudiated the union under family pressure, partly due to her low-caste background. In my interview with Meena Agarwala, a younger associate of Chandraprabha Saikiani in the Assam women’s movement, she recollected how the latter would bring the baby to meetings. Her son, too, became a noted political activist of the Left in Assam. 16 The film’s script was based upon the play, Jaymati Kunwari, written by Lakshminath Bezbaruah and published in Kolkata in 1915. The film was premiered in 1935 at Calcutta, and since Assam did not yet have any film theatres, the Agarwala family showed it in a number of towns using a mobile screen.

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experience enthused him about the possibilities o f film-making as a didactic medium. For this project, he saw Jaymati as a theme to unify his twin set o f concerns— allowing him to depict the distinctive aspects of Assamese culture, and to portray a heroine exemplifying the political ideal o f ahim sa being propagated by the nationalist movement. As an ardent follower of Gandhian ideas, he saw the narrative as a way to allegorize the power of passive resistance to a ruler’s tyranny. Jaymati, in this reading, was the perfect Satyagrahi. Agarwala’s choice o f Jaymati rather than Lachit can be read as the greater suitability of the former as an icon o f dominant, Congress-style nationalism. However, Agarwala was equally committed to the project o f documenting the ‘authentic’ Assamese cultural milieu in which that narrative occurred, taking great pains to depict the sets and costumes to define his ideas o f that past.17 The filmic Jaymati was therefore a pre-modem Satyagrahi— playing out an allegory o f power and sacrifice drawn from Assam’s buranjidrenched literature. Already, her literary counterparts had traversed the path from the persecuted Kunwari o f folk memory to veneration as a Sati, evoking ‘an image of the Indian woman who ... voluntarily chose the path o f suffering and death in order to save her people’ (Tharu, 1989, p. 258). The historical background of this process needs to be kept in mind, to appreciate the full im plications o f this transformation. Unlike neighbouring Bengal, Assam did not experience Sati burnings and such norms as seclusion o f women and a ban on widow rem arriage applied only to the m inuscule upper-caste population. (As late as 1881, the census data had found that the region’s hill people and around half o f its indigenous valley people were mostly ‘non-Hindu’, preliterate populations.) However, given the obsession with Sati in early patriotic literature across India, most prominently in the influential writings of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, it is not very surprising that the upper-caste elite chose to domesticate Assamese history, and womanhood, by use of this trope. From the late-nineteenth century, this elite, which had a virtual monopoly over the emergent public sphere of Assamese, was at the forefront o f texts depicting Jaymati as the archetypal local embodiment of chastity. The renaming o f Jaymati as a Sati fitted well with panIndian concerns of the period— other prescriptive myths such as Savitri 17 Agarwala Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and interviews with Agarwala family members, Tezpur and Delhi, 2000.

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also enjoyed a huge renaissance in nationalist literatures of the period (see Chowdhury, 1999, pp. 68-75). In Tanika Sarkar’s words, ‘an implicit continuum is postulated between the hidden, innermost space, chastity, almost the sanctity o f the vagina, to political independence at state level’ (Sarkar, 2001, p. 265). It is noteworthy that the Sati Jaymati essays by young women of the Ghar Jeuti circle had all along co-existed with writings by male ideologues who too were making the switch in heroic image— ‘Kunwari’ to ‘Sati’. Given these connections with a larger discourse o f a ‘Hindu wife’, the narration o f Jaymati was now being accompanied by an overtly Hinduizing rhetoric.18 Although some discomfort was sometimes felt at the anachronism o f the celebration of a heroine whose husband’s legendary prowess enabled him to eat a whole roasted ca lf at one sitting! T hus, we have one author acknowledging that his readers might be surprised at being asked to revere ‘a non-Hindu woman who was ritually impure’ even though she exemplified all the virtues o f Hindu icons such as Sita!19 But this was a rare case, most o f the texts (including Agarwala’s film), for all their protestations o f historicity were quite happy to push back contemporary upper-caste Hindu norms into the beef-eating Ahom society from which they claimed ancestry. But the real power of the Jaymati image lay in its unique ability to tap into the Assamese quest for ‘local particularity’, an authentic model o f self-assertion within the territorial and mythological space o f the motherland. In 1934-35, Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s search for authenticity was most apparent in the casting of the Jaymati role for his film. Previous stage versions o f Jaymati, as was usual in Assamese theatre of the time, had men playing the female roles. But for the celluloid Jaymati, not only was a woman required, but also one who had the right lineage and virtues for this quasi-sacred creation! From his family tea-estate of Tamulbari in the Darrang district, Agarwala scoured the countryside looking for a young girl with the high lineage and the regal presence that he felt to be a prerequisite for the role. 0 The Jaymati o f choice, 18 The disciplinary regime that normative standards o f Hindu conjugality imposed upon women is very well discussed in the essays by Sarkar in the above mentioned collection. 19 Kumudeswar Barthakur’s Jaymati Kahini was written while he was a Kolkata college student. Decades later, he capped his literary career with a work on another nationalist hero, the Rani o f Jhansi. 20 Personal communication from Agarwala’s younger brothers, Vivekanand

and Hridayanand (Tezpur, August, 2000).

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Aideo Sandikai, was finally brought in from a remote Ahom village, Panidihing, near Golaghat. The teenaged Ahom girl had not even been informed about her destination, let alone the work that awaited her there. A male relative took her out, purportedly to see a big ship on the Brahmaputra river, and delivered her to the film-set on the Tamulbari estate. Aideo’s family belonged to a junior branch o f a well known aristocratic clan and permission had been taken from the head o f the erstwhile royal family for the unprecedented step of having a young girl acting on screen. This authorization was managed pardy due to Agarwala’s social stature in Assam, and partly as she was to depict a character adding lustre to the Ahom name! In all events, Aideo’s own village did not see it that way, scandalized by her addressing the actor who played Gadapani as ‘Bongohordeo’— ‘lord of my heart and body*. For many years, she was ostracized and could not get married. Ironically, she, the real-life Jaymati, was never even shown the film until she was in her eighties!21 It is a useful exercise to contrast the attention paid to the casting o f Jaymati with that o f the other female figure in the film, Dalimi, whom the screenplay writer, Bezbarua, had imagined as a Naga ‘noble savage’ in love with Jaymati’s fugitive husband. Apparently, not much thought was expended for this role— any attractive young girl would do.22 One of the well known images from the film is a nubile, scantily-clad Dalimi cavorting in the forest in what purported to be Naga attire, in sharp contrast to the sober visage o f Jaymati at worship, covered from head to toe. In an ironic twist, given the premium on ‘authenticity’ everywhere else, the role o f that Naga girl was played by a young Assamese actress from the nearby town. While not a professional, she would go on to act in a couple more films, and given a non-elite background, this ‘Dalimi’ did not face the ostracism that the social expectations o f the Ahom community forced upon Aideo Sandikai. At another level, this portrayal o f an imaginary Naga tribal in Jaymati can be regarded as an anticipation o f the ways in which the rapid assimilation of Ahom and Assamese into the mainstream cultural politics o f India necessitated the ‘othering’ o f the tribal and the non Hindu.

21 Interview with Aideo Sandikai by Sabita Goswami for The Assam Tribune (December 2000). 22 Interview with Vivekanand Agarwala.

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R esu rg en c e

of

L a c h it

After 1947, historical heroes such as Jaymati and Lachit, at first sight, seemed displaced by the less-distant, temporally speaking, icons o f the Freedom Struggle. In post-colonial India, statues, busts, speeches, biographies, school books and public holidays were state-sponsored vehicles o f commemoration for the Gandhis and Nehrus— the newly enshrined figures ‘making’ the nation. These modern pan-Indian heroes certainly seemed to have eclipsed the local variety. Although, it could be argued that the very success o f the (hi)stories o f Lachit and Jaymati lay in their having achieved the desire o f their creators— to strengthen the ‘unity in diversity’ mode of Indian nationalism. They had paved the way for newer local heroes— real-life luminaries o f anti­ colonial resistance, such as Maniram Dewan, Piyali Phukan and Kanaklata, whose statues and biographies were spreading through Assam. Or for memorializing cultural icons such as Bishnu Prasad Rabha and Jyotiprasad Agarwala whose stirring socialist songs were inserted into the canonical genre o f‘Geet’— All India Radio, Guwahati’s very own answer to Rabindra Sangeet— and emptied o f most o f their radical content, in the bargain. Jaymati Utsav and Lachit Divas were still being commemorated, but only within the Upper Assam localities claiming organic links with those heroes. On the other hand, it could be said that through the proliferation of place-names such as Sati Jaymati Road, Lachit Nagar, or through the annual commemoration o f Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s birthday as Silpi Divas (‘Artists’ D a /), the various manifestations of Lachit and Jaymati had become a part o f the collective memory of the Assamese. Buranji itself had found a successful location within the official dom ain, with the state government in charge o f the organizations that S.K. Bhuyan’s generation had established— the Kamrup Anushilan Samiti and later, the Department o f Antiquities and Historical Research. The buranji manuscripts that Bhuyan, as the Department’s first Director, had issued, were being regularly reprinted by its press. With Assamese history accompanying Indian History on the curriculum of the region’s schools and colleges, Jaymati and Lachit seemed to have made a dignified retirement into the domain of knowledge, away from activism. Yet, it is one o f the peculiarities of culture and its symbolic interface with society and politics, that it is never possible to arrive at a final, complacent decision as to the manner o f its operation, and existence.

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After decades o f placid everyday existence, the heroic history pioneered by late-colonial Assamese intellectuals has returned to the centre o f public discourse. And, unlike its previous existences, in this round, it is the figure o f the ideal man, Lachit, which has received most attention. In the run-up to the twenty-first century, the Lachit myth has suddenly metamorphosed into ostentatious celebrations o f ‘the most important figure* in the narrative o f Assamese identity. Just as Jaymati had earlier encapsulated a host of regional and pan-Indian yearnings, the latest incarnations of Lachit need to be located against a complex background o f Assamese identity and ‘nationality movements*, gendered shifts in political rhetoric, official propaganda and the syndicated versions o f an aggressive, muscular Hinduism that see Northeast India as a final, challenging frontier to conquer. When the well known ‘freedom-fighter’ and bibliophile, Benudhar Sarma’s autobiographical writings were published in the 1970s, his reminiscences about the celebrations o f Lachit Diwas, and of a Lachit Sena, that he and others had organized at his birthplace, Charing village in Sibsagar, became available to a new generation that knew Lachit in very different terms, as an Assamese ‘name-symbol’ (Sarma, 1960). For most people in Assam, the most public manifestation o f Lachit’s continued existence was to be the Saraighat bridge erected over the Brahmaputra valley in 1965— an enduring ‘flag’ to the nation’s collective memory. Situated at the pivotal entrance to the main urban centre of Guwahati, a few hours’ journey from North Bengal, this was the legendary scene for Lachit’s victory over the Mughals, as well as his ruthless execution o f his corrupt relative. In the 1990s, the government commissioned a striking public memorial to Lachit and the victory— presumably to jog those ‘historical’ memories which a mention of Saraighat alone could not manage. These were the years when political events in Assam finally thrust * the region into national, and even international headlines, with the Assam ‘anti-foreigners’ agitation, initially modelling itself on Gandhian tactics o f satyagraha and boycott, but taking on m ore sinister dimensions— with their crescendo at the massacres o f suspected ‘foreign nationals’ at Gohpur and Nellie in 1983. The student leaders who had led this movement moved into the seat of official authority under the label of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in 1985, but their anti-establishment rhetoric was extended further by a number o f groups, from the Bodo Liberation Front to the United Assam Liberation Front. At the same time, successive central governments tried a series

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o f palliatives to address the perceived ‘alienation’ o f the people o f the region, where various militant groups had established virtually parallel regimes, most notably in the neighbouring state o f Nagaland. It is against such a wider background that it is instructive to read some o f die more recent, and more publicized appropriations o f Lachit Barphukan that have been mounted. For instance, the celebration of Lachit Diwas in 2000 underwent a dramatic departure, with representa­ tives o f officialdom ranging all the way from the Governor, Lt General Sinha, to the BJP Union Minister from Assam, Bijoya Chakravarty, as well as the AGP state ministers seeking to commemorate the legacy of Bir Lachit with ceremonial oaths to carry on his legacy (The Sentinel, 24 November 2000). Even further afield, in Pune, a few days earlier, a statue o f Lachit and a gold medal for the best cadet had been inaugurated at the National Defence Academy (The Assam Tribune, 13 November 2000). At Mussoorie, at the IAS (Indian Administrative Services) Academy, to promote ‘national integration’, probationers were being required to enact a scene from the history of the states to which they were assigned— for Assam, the figure o f choice was Lachit, with an enactment o f his victory over the Mughals.23 Lacking such high-profile institutional notice, Jaymati has not reached newspaper headlines in quite the same manner. The AGP governm ent was succeeded by the Congress in 2002, but the momentum received by Lachit has stayed on, albeit with a lot of assistance from the man who has continued as the National Democratic Front’s Governor-of-choice, General S.K. Sinha. But that is not to attribute this official patronage as the sole cause for the resurgence of Bir Lachit in the post-colonial politics o f Assam. By casting the net more widely, it can be discerned that the Lachit myth had been gradually overtaking Jaymati in popular usage in the post* Independence years— through children reciting Lachit poems at com petitions, in the plays staged about him , in the names o f neighbourhoods and streets and as a name for Assamese sons. Indeed, the most telling indicator of difference could be that girls called Jaymati are few and far between. On the whole, Jaymati does not appear to have made the transition from prescriptive model to contemporary relevance, and that itself raises an interesting set o f issues. Definite answers are obviously difficult to locate. However, exploring them in the light o f Assam’s political trajectory over the past few decades might 23 Personal communication from a probationer o f the 1998 IAS batch.

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provide some pointers. In the last analysis, myths need to be unravelled and the possibility faced that they often are appropriated, and reappropriated by diverse, and sometimes even contradictory political trajectories. The cultural nationalisms that arose in the course of the nineteenth century in different regions o f India accommodated themselves, albeit with variable degrees o f unease, to the logic o f the nation-states that were born out o f the events o f 1947. Measures such as the linguistic reorganization o f states or the piecemeal changes in nomenclatures and boundaries that subsequently came about can be seen as part o f this continued process of accommodation to the pan-Indian project. However, it is noteworthy that the contestations o f this grand narrative were much sharper in the last part o f the twentieth century, than at any previous moment. Whether in the form o f violence by separatist groups or the challenges by activist organizations to the policies of both state and national governments, it does appear that it is the fifty years o f independence that have produced such dissonances, rather than any inherent weaknesses o f the national narrative at the moment of its inception. To take the case of Assam, it is remarkable that almost all streams o f political opinion in the 1940s (excluding the Naga Hills, a very different case) had accepted their position within an Indian Union-to-be. It was only in the 1980s that a new generation o f‘freedom-fighters’, the United Liberation Front o f Assam, began to question the legitimacy of the Treaty o f Yandaboo, the 1826 measure by which the previously Ahomruled state o f Assam was incorporated into British India (see the Ulfa website at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/7434/). Similarly, while the notion o f a greater Bodo race had appeared in discussions by ethnographers, missionaries and local publicists in the early-twentieth century, it was in the last decades o f the century that this would be used as a strategic lever by Bodo insurgent groups to buttress their demands for a territory o f their own, to be carved out o f the existing state o f Assam. While there has been a considerable amount of internecine hostility, the many insurgent groups or nationality movements, depending upon the onlooker’s perspective, have managed to come together on certain issues to express opposition to the Indian state and its apparatus o f military, bureaucratic and business interests operating in the Northeast. Regarding these p olitical m obilizations, a set o f com m on denominators catch the eye. The main one is the nativist anti-outsider

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rhetoric by which an ti-state m ovem ents have largely defined themselves. Baruah has characterized the anti-foreigner/outsider rhetoric and the sporadic violence it has spawned as part o f the ‘all too familiar tension between a sedentary common sense that shapes the cultural grammar o f nationhood everywhere and the reality of movements o f people that characterize much o f human history (Baruah, 1999, p. 124). This is, however, only part o f a much larger crisis involving the local and the national. While Assamese and other local nationalisms managed to accommodate themselves fairly well to pan-Indian nationalism in the first instance, once the nation-state came into being, there seems to have been a basic dissonance in the way in which Indian governing structures went on to deal with popular aspirations at the level o f the locality and the region. It is telling that the Saraighat Bridge itself, the first road-rail link for both banks of Assam’s mighty Brahmaputra river, was commissioned after decades o f independence, and that its successors took even longer to come up. It is within such a vacuum of governance that various groups o f ‘our boys’ have received considerable support, overt and covert, in taking on New Delhi, whether through a picket o f pipelines transporting oil to refineries outside the Northeast or in vigilante-style initiatives against contractors and businessmen. The most telling feature lies in the self­ portrayal by most of these organizations o f their activities as ‘non­ political’. By itself, this might not mean all that much— after all, the votaries of Hindutva, the RSS and its affiliates also describe themselves as non-political. But it is the resonance attached to ‘our boys’ that gives such a characterization o f its force— in a region where the political sphere and its standard-bearers have virtually lost their legitimacy in the face o f what people perceive as ‘neglect’ by the central government and ‘ineptitude’ by local state governments. It is both as the icon of these ‘boys’ and strangely enough, o f the state apparatus attempting to contain them, that Bir Lachit has marched out of historical liminality into the clamour o f a fin-de-siecle public sphere. Within the plains o f Assam, specifically its Brahmaputra valley, the post-Independence years have been constructed as a narrative of continuing loss o f hegemony for its middle class. In a world where the Assameseness o f Assam was not contested, the ethnic Assamese as a separate group could portray themselves as culturally invisible, despite the actual fissures o f class/caste/gender. Paradoxically, it was the Assam agitation o f the 1980s that ethnicized the Assamese into an ever-narrower grouping as the state’s ‘immigrant’ organizations and

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the ‘tribal* groups began challenging their right to speak for them (Baruah, 1999, p. 124). The splitting up of the erstwhile territory of Assam into five different states, the perception o f ‘stepmotherly treatment* by New Delhi, the lack o f industry and communication infrastructure— all these factors reinforced a sense o f Assamese victimhood— lending urgency to a heroic model representing an active dynamic force. In contrast to the mood of modernist optimism prevailing among Agarwala and his peers, the darker, besieged sentiments at the end o f the century were what now brought Lachit, rather than Jaymati to the fore. Jaymati’s acceptance of an unjust fate now only served to reinforce what the Assamese felt to be their inherent weakness and passivity. That episode also acted as an unwelcome reminder o f a deeply divisive period within the Ahom past, again reminiscent o f the fissiparous tendencies in the present, with Bodo, Ahom, Mishing, Karbi— all earlier part o f the larger Assamese organism— now demanding varying degrees o f autonomy from both Dispur and New Delhi. The Assam Accord o f 1985 seemed to have opened up an era of people’s government— thousands of people attended the swearing-in of the first AGP government, thronging the stadium where ‘our boys’ were taking over the reins of power. Within a few years, this mandate has been frittered away in a cascade of incompetence, arrogance, and dishonesty. By then, a fresh set o f ‘boys’ had appeared, this time with guns and slogans o f independence. In yet another harkening back to history, the legitimacy o f Assam’s inception into India was contested as having sold Assam into slavery, at the hands o f the British and then, of Indians. All the ailments that afflicted the region seemed traceable to the nexus o f exploitation that New Delhi and its lackeys at Dispur had fostered. Lachit’s glorious deeds, which prevented Mughal ascendancy over Assam, held strong appeal in a society where xenophobic fears of economic domination by ‘outsiders' were gathering force. Yet, paradoxically, it is not the ULFA but the representatives of the establishment who have been seeking to raise Lachit to prominence, within a general agenda o f right-wing militaristic jingoism. As has been discussed earlier, older versions of Jaymati and Lachit did have a strong tendency for slippage into a revivalist, socially conservative project, which fed into the Assamese elite’s desire to affiliate themselves with Indic/Hindu society. But, at the same time, many o f those intellectuals believed as strongly in a pluralistic vision of the Assamese past— the Assamese Sufi music of Ajan Fakir was extensively discussed in the

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Abahon magazine, along with the Bhakti teachings o f Sankardeb, and the glorious legacy left by Jaymati and her son, the Ahom monarch, Rudra Singha. Historian S.K. Bhuyan’s contribution had been more ambiguous— with his equivalence o f Lachit with Shivaji as Aurangzeb’s bete noire, given the communalized reading o f Medieval/Muslim/ bigoted ruler that Jadunath Sarkar and others were creating at the time. Yet, it is important to remember that the dangerous possibilities inherent in this ‘history’ lay dormant until very recently. It is in the political milieu o f present-day Northeast India, where ‘Generals are Governors’,24 that Lachit has re-appeared— a device to bring together the frustrations and alienation o f Assamese youth under the banner o f unthinking, sectarian patriotism. The Kargil War o f 1999 had laid the foundation for this, with the Indian media eagerly enumerating the ‘integration’ of Assam and the other Northeastern states in terms o f the body-bags and widows they had provided. In terms of electoral politics, the region’s dynamics are too volatile, in terms of its ethnic and religious mix— for the politics of Temple to make much headway. But it is the other, longer-term programmes which are being steadily pushed forward, which have as their ultimate objective the establishment o f a consensus around an undemocratic, gender-biased, warmongering vision o f Akhand Bharat. Yet, to achieve this, the dissonances and divergences within the political establishment itself, as well as its constituencies have to be borne in mind. It is in this manner that the elevation o f India’s Missile Man to the office of President is not only the ultimate tokenist gesture by a regime with blood-drenched hands, but also a portent o f the militaristic beliefs that underlie the democratic façade put up by right-wing politics in India. Furthermore, in a region where the corpses o f Nellie and Gohpur have not received adequate acknowledgement, the resident General’s calls for Assam’s youth to revive Lachit’s battle against outsiders, and to foil the ‘designs o f Islamic terrorists in Assam’ has dangerous implications, especially in the wake o f Godhra.25 In such a scenario, Jaymati as Satyagrahi is certainly misplaced, although the possibility of her reappearance as M ahasati and an ideal wife/mother does not seem all that distant. 24 Sanjib Baruah uses this phrase in his piece, ‘Generals as Governors: The Parallel Political Systems o f Northeast India,* reproduced in http://www. indowindow.com/ 25 The extent of the Right-wing’s attempts at appropriating Lachit into their long-term vision for Assam is apparent in the rants by VHP ideologues such as

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E p il o g u e Despite the plethora o f websites and printed matter produced over the last five years which has sought to fix Lachit as a ‘Hindu* crusader, other images o f this hero are still being created. The historical memory o f Lachit Barphukan uniting various groups o f Assam’s inhabitants against a common danger was recently recast in the form o f a play by a young theatre director, Baharul Islam.26 Interestingly, Islam himself is one o f the new breed o f ‘organic intellectuals’. Descended from the Mymensinghia migrants of the early-twentieth century whose adoption o f the Assamese language served to maintain its status as the language spoken by the largest number o f people in Assam, Islam’s play, Saraighat took the innovative path o f depicting Lachit and his soldiers as indigenous tribals resisting centralizing forces which had come against them.27 I would choose to read this, and other initiatives as a belated attem pt by some latter-day Assamese intellectuals and cultural procedures to redress the deeply fissured caste/tribe divisions of the region by bringing out elements so far ‘hidden from history.’

B

ib l io g r a p h y

Benedict Anderson (1983), Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism, London: Verso. Kumudeswar Barthakur (1918), Jaymati Kahini, Calcutta: Unknown Press. Roland Barthes [tr. Annette Lavers) (1972), Mythologies, London: Cape. Gunabhiram Barua (1875), Assam Buranji (reprint Guwahati: D.H.A.S., 1960). Sanjib Baruah (1999), India Against Itself. Assam and the Politics o f Nationality, Delhi: Oxford University Press. C. A Bayly (1996), Empire and Information, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Homi Bhabha, (ed.) (1990), Nations and Narration, London: Roudedge. S.K. Bhuyan (1920), Jaymati Upakhyan, Guwahati. Praveen Togadia on seemingly innocuous websites for India-specific information where in January 2003, he advises ‘terrorist groups in Assam’ to sink their differences and devote their energies, in the manner o f Lachit, to driving Bangladeshis out of Assam. It is remarkable, indeed, that the website o f the Sangh Parivar for Hindu students in the UK should have assembled even such a little known localized figure into its iconography o f ‘Hindu warriors’. Saraighat, by the Seagull Theatre (Guwahati and New Delhi, 2000). 27 Interview with Baharul Islam (Guwahati, November 2002).

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S.K. Bhuyan (1924), ‘Sources o f Assam History*, in Bulletin II o f the D.HA.S., Guwahati: Department o f Historical and Antiquarian Studies. _________(1947), Lachit Barphukan and His Times, Guwahati: Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies. Sudhir Chandra (1 9 9 2 ), The Oppressive Present. Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1926), The Origin and Development o f the Bengali Language, Vol. 1, Kolkata: Calcutta University Press. Indira Chowdhury (1999), The Frail Hero and Virile History, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bernard S. Cohn (1987), An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Edward Gait (1905), A History o f Assam, Calcutta: Govt. Printing Press. Stewart Gordon (1993), The Marathas:1600-1818y Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranajit Guha (1988), An Indian Historiography o f India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and Its Implications, Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. ________ (1997), Dominance without Hegemony. History and Power in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Riho Isaka (1 9 9 9 ),‘The Gujarati Literati and the Construction o f a Regional Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century/ unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Cambridge. Sudipta Kaviraj (1989), ‘Imaginary History: Narrativising o f the Nation in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay,’ in P.C. Chatterjee, (ed.), Self-Images, Identity and Nationality, Shimla: Indian Institute o f Advanced Study. Sudipta Kaviraj (1 9 9 5 ), The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation o f Nationalist Discourse in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan (1855), A Few Remarks on the Assamese Language (reprint Guwahati, D.H.A.S., 1977). M ichelle Z im balist Rosaldo (1 9 7 6 ), ‘W om an, Culture and Society : A Theoretical Overview’, in Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press. G.S. Sardesai (1926), The Main Currents o f Maratha History, Patna: Patna University Readership Lectures. Sumit Sarkar (1997), Writing Social History, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tanika Sarkar (2001), Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, New Delhi: Permanent Black. Benudhar Sarm a (1 9 6 0 ), Congressor Kasiyali Rodot, Guwahati: Manish Prakasan. Jayeeta Sharm a (2 0 0 3 ), ‘The M aking o f “M odern” Assam: 1 8 2 6 -1 9 3 5 ’, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Cambridge. Susie Tharu (1989),‘Tracing Savitri’s Pedigree: Victorian Racism and the Image o f Women in Indo-Anglian Literature,’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women, Delhi: Orient Longman. Raymond Williams (1981), Culture, London: Fontana.

Part Three

The State(s) and Cultural Mobilization

7 From Indian Territory to Hindu Bhoomi: The Ethnicization o f Nation-State Mapping in India Christophe Jaffrelot

The Indian political tradition as it is expressed, for example, in the Arthashastra (the treatise o f Artha, meaning, the sphere of politics and economy) gives an ambiguous and subordinate place to the notion o f territory: th e king rules over the ja n a p a d a , that is to say ‘a country* meaning by it, population and territory. In this conception, territory and human beings are not differentiated: power holds sway over the territory endowed with humans for allowing the ruler to preserve order (seen as social and cosmic). By implication ‘a perfect king is by definition a universal ruler* (Biardeau, 1982, p. 33). Madeleine Biardeau emphasizes, moreover, that the ritual o f royal consecration is preceded by ‘a conquest of cardinal points’ and that ‘the king acquires prestigious titles as if he ruled over the universe. As a result, the Hindu kingdoms were perceived as M as many cosmos”’ (ibid.). These ancient characteristics were subsequently blurred by the setting up of state machineries: in the 16th century, the Mughal Empire initiated a process ofadministrative controlling of the subcontinent in which many o f the Hindu kingdoms were gradually absorbed. The British went one step further. Even though their philosophy of indirect rule led them to grant some autonom y to the princely states, they changed territorial management in the direction of even more

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pronounced cen tralizatio n . This process was perfected after Independence, with the formation o f the Indian Union, certainly federal, but all the same controlled by a strong centre which came to head a whole cascade o f administrative entities. The view of the territory underlying the Constitution o f 1950 reflected Weberian conceptions of a uniform rational-legal state. The organization did not meet historical or cultural criteria but those of administrative efficacy. However, under the pressure o f regionalist movements the territory of India was gradually differentiated in the 1950s according to a particularist criteria: language. Subsequently, the rational-legal conception o f territory was put into question by Hindu nationalists, who, in a way, drew some o f their inspiration from the Hindu classical patterns mentioned above. T

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After Independence, the provinces o f India were divided into three categories: Class A grouped together all those regions which belonged to British India; Class B regions were those born out o f the fusion of princely states; and Class C were those directly administered by New Delhi. This administrative division reflected rational-legal conceptions from two points o f view. First, none o f these regional entities met any cultural or ethnic criteria (such as that of language, religion, caste, or tribe). The British provinces were very often multi-cültural and the states o f the Indian Union that were born in 1950 remained as such. Second, these states were subdivided according to the same non-ethnic administrative rationale: they were constituted of several divisions ( vibhag ) which themselves got split into districts ( zilas), and these got further sub-divided into smaller units called tehsils or talukasy which contained many villages directed by their own council (panchayat). This panchayat did not rule over one village only but over the grouping of several villages. At all levels situated on top o f the village an officer o f the central government or the state government represented the administration. The most important local unit was the district where the District Magistrate (DM ), trained by the Indian Administrative Service (the elite o f the Indian ad m in istratio n ), played a key role in the centralization of the state machinery. The DM is like a préfet. The Indian district has obvious affinities with the French départem ent because

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frontiers do not meet any criterion other than that o f administrative efficacy: they represent the essential network o f an impersonal grid system.1 The administrative design installed by the Indian Constitution o f 1950, then, relies a lot for its essentials on bureaucratic principles— which accounted for the cultural heterogeneity o f the Indian provinces. But these principles were increasingly questioned, especially by movements which wanted a redrawing o f regional frontiers based on linguistic criteria. N eh ru and the Linguistic States Issue The Congress Party was from an early stage affected by internal tensions regarding the administrative map o f India. In 1920, during the Nagpur session where Mahatma Gandhi asserted his dominance over the party, regional branches o f the Congress were restructured according to linguistic criteria: the Provincial Congress Committees thereafter corresponded to linguistic regions and so sent Marathi, Tamil or Gujarati delegates to the annual session o f the Congress Party. This organization reflected in part the Gandhian conception of the Indian nation, defined as a collection o f cultural and linguistic as well as religious communities. In April 1920, Gandhi, sketching out the profile o f a future independent India, wrote in his journal, Young India , that ‘the actual division o f the provinces is a factor that equally goes on to do a lot of harm to the cause of indigenous languages. A new division o f the provinces based on the language criterion will be followed by a reorganisation o f the Universities [after the attainment o f Swaraj]’ (Gandhi, 1948, p. 52). Inside the Constituent Assembly, elected in 1946, the partisans of a reshaping o f the Indian map according to linguistic criteria were to protest in a sporadic fashion. The majority amongst them was enlisted from the Telugu speaking elected members who wanted to separate 1 However, the notion of historical territory—what we would call ‘terroir’ in French— is not entirely absent in the Indian context The frontiers of a district are, for example, very often inherited from those of a Princely State or those defined by the colonial state, which were themselves derived from the mould of administrative design of the Mughal empire. Now the provinces of British India were not entirely devoid of all particularist connotations: Bihar— which was first associated with Bengal until 1912 and later with Orissa— was largely bom of separatist movements based on linguistic differences— Sindh was also separated from the Bombay Presidency in 1934 because the local Muslims wanted their own administrative unit

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their region from the Presidency o f Madras, dominated by Tamil speakers (see, for example, the plea made by N.G. Ranga in Constituent Assembly Debates [henceforth, CAD], 1989, V ol VII, p. 351). Nehru opposed this type o f agitation for three reasons: first, in contrast to Gandhi, he wanted the Indian nation to be built on the aggregation of individual allegiances and feared that a recognition o f linguistic particularisms would weaken the country. Second, he combined this universalism with a profound attachment to the idea o f cultural synthesis. In his view, the ‘genius* of India lay in its capacity to practise unity in diversity. The structuring of states according to linguistic criteria risked breaking this achievement by hom ogenizing the fundamental administrative entities. In his well known biography of Nehru, S. Gopal underlined this fact: The British might have established composite provinces for their own reasons but such provinces had other virtues too. A province like Hyderabad, with people speaking various languages, including Urdu, appealed to Nehru as a potential centre o f composite culture in south India, while Bombay had built up a rich cosmopolitan tradition which it would be vandalistic to throw away (Gopal, 1979, p. 262).

Nehru was lastly anxious to preserve the map o f India as it existed because he considered that other problems had to be treated in priority. In his Constituent Assembly speech o f 8 November 1948 he called upon the supporters favouring the redrawing o f the Indian map according to linguistic criteria to suspend their mobilization until a more favourable moment (CADt 1989, Vol. VII, pp. 320-21. Many o f the elected members were to side with the arguments o f Nehru and contented themselves with announcing that they would suspend their agitation for the time being (ibid., p. 326). A crisis was above all averted, however, because o f the nomination on 17 June 1948 o f a Parliamentary Commission, the Dhar Committee, charged with examining the question o f revising the administrative map. Many o f the parliamentarians decided to await the report o f the Commission before joining the debate in earnest. The Commission pronounced itself against the formation o f states on the basis o f linguistic criteria but admitted to the idea o f the creation o f the province o f Andhra— the Telugu speaking zone o f the presidency of Madras— that had numerous solid supporters (Parthasarathi, 1987, p. 27).

The notion of linguistic states nevertheless gained support inside the branches of the Congress Party. In several regions opinion was mobilized around cultural identities of which language was often a crucial element. In many o f the cases, language also concealed a sense of belonging based on caste.

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Caste and Territory In India the frontiers of linguistic zones correspond very often to the area o f spread o f a dominant caste— that is, the caste which is the most numerous and which owns most of the land locally (for a more detailed definition o f ‘dominant caste’, see Srinivas, 1972)— because the matrimonial relations required by the endogamous caste alignments imply the usage of the same language: one has to marry in one’s own caste and speak the same language so as to conclude a marriage. Maharashtra is a good example o f this phenomenon because the Marathas— a caste of cultivators o f intermediate status, like most o f the dominant castes— represented approximately one-third o f the population. But most o f the other linguistic regions have their dominant castes: the Reddys in the Telugu-speaking area, the Lingayats in the Kannada-speaking zone and so on. While caste had progressively lost its legitimacy (since the penetration o f western ideas o f equality and liberty endorsed in the Constitution) as the relevant unit for making any territorial claim2, the linguistic criteria has not suffered from the same type o f opprobrium. Therefore it was instrumentalized by certain caste groups for extracting a restructuring of administrative frontiers: the agitation for a linguistic state concealed, then, the will o f a dominant caste to have the political frontiers coinciding with their area o f influence, in order to better control the levers of power at the state level. This strategy o f the dominant caste was denounced by Ambedkar before the Dhar Committee. Chairman of the Drafting Committee o f the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar was primarily a leader o f the Dalits of the Bombay Presidency. He had very early warned his caste— the Mahars— against the division of Bombay into two linguistic states, Maharashtra (where the Marathas would constitute a relative majority) and Gujarat, o f which Gujarati would be the language and where the Anavil Brahmins and the Patidars— a dominant caste of this province— could then ‘reduce all other communities to a subordinate status’ (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 123). The presidency o f Madras offered a comparable case. The Teluguspeaking Brahm ins had more and m ore difficulty in accepting an inferior rank to the Tamil-speaking Brahmins, notably in the administration whose head offices were located in Madras, in the Tamil 2 Just after Partition, the Jats had tried to carve out a “Jat land” in the Jatdominated areas o f Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan, but they failed

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country. The Telugu Brahmins were, therefore, in the front rank of the agitation in favour o f a linguistic state and they received very soon the support o f the two dominant castes o f the ‘Telugu country*, the Reddys and the Kammas who aspired to enhance their influence in an administrative entity where their demographic weight would be much more important (Harrison, 1968, p. 110-11). The caste logic underlying the agitation for a linguistic state is also very evident from the case of the Princely States. In Mysore (the heart of todays Karnataka), the Lingayats— the principal dominant caste— had struggled since 1927 in favour o f a regrouping o f the Kannadaspeaking districts, which belonged to the states o f Mysore and Hyderabad and to Bombay Presidency, The movement in favour of a new Kannada-speaking state, Karnataka, would actually allow the Lingayats to spread their influence (ibid., p. 112). Obviously, the regional mobilization in favour o f linguistic states reflected caste interests. This is an additional reason— besides the vindication o f ethno-linguistic identities— for considering that the redrawing o f the Indian map according to linguistic criteria fundamentally put into question the rational-legal conception of territory. Moreover, some Indian leaders explicitly opposed these particularist movements in the name o f universal values. Ambedkar in his deposition before the Dhar Committee declared thus: The linguistic provinces would come back to create as many nations as there are groups which would be proud o f their race, their language and their literature.... No one could have envisaged such a situation with equipoise. It could lead to the disintegration o f India (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 102).

A com m ission consisting o f Nehru (th e Prim e M in ister), Vallabhbhai Patel (the vice-Prime Minister) and Pattabhi Sitaramayya (a Telugu Brahmin, then president of the Congress was constituted to defuse tensions and reconsider the issue. Its report, drafted by Nehru, was made public in April 1949. It recommended that this debate be shelved for ten years, while admitting that the case of Andhra Pradesh— demanded by the Telugu-speaking population— could be examined if all the parties would come to an accord. T h e C reation o f the Linguistic States On 19 October 1952, Potti Srisamallu, a Gandhian who was agitating for the formation o f the province o f Andhra, undertook a fast unto death and died on 15 December in Madras, provoking a large number

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of angry demonstrations by the Telugu-speaking population. Nehru resigned himself to announcing the formation, on 19 December 1952, of Andhra Pradesh. On 18 January 1953, giving in to the pressure of the Congress delegates, he was obliged to accept a resolution favourable to the establishment o f linguistic states during the annual session of the Congress party. He decided, therefore, on 22 December 1953, on the formation o f a commission responsible for establishing ‘the broad guidelines follow ing which the states should be reorganised’ (Parthasarathi, 1987, p. 373). Nehru received the report o f the States Reorganisation Commission on 30 September 1955. It recommended the replacement o f the 27 states by three territories o f the Union directly administered by New Delhi and 16 states of which three were created on the basis o f linguistic criteria (the other state entities were a response to a socio-economic logic and took into account the means of communication as much as language): Kerala (where Malayalam is spoken by a large majority), Karnataka (where Kannnada is the dominant language) and Vidharba (which should have been constituted from the Marathi-speaking districts o f Madhya Pradesh but which never came into existence). Assam, the Punjab, and the Province o f Bombay were not to be affected by this type o f reorganization, the Commission said, considering that the economic prosperity o f these regions required that their frontiers o f 1947 should be maintained. This decision provoked violent protests. In the Punjab, the Sikhs o f the Akali Dal (the party which posed itself as the representative o f this community since the 1920s) agitated for the formation o f a Punjabi-speaking state— Punjab being their language— while the States Reorganization C om m ission had recommended the formation o f a greater Punjab including the Punjab o f 1947, the Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU) and Himachal Pradesh, a project that was bound to enable the Hindi­ speaking populations o f these regions to be in an overwhelming majority. In Maharashtra, where the Marathi-speaking population wanted to emancipate itself from the domination of the Gujaratis (especially in Bombay), a similar movement emerged. In 1955-56, Nehru was repulsed by these agitations in which he saw very well the role of other factors— such as caste— as well as language: Whether it is caste or provincialism, we still live in a tribal age. Religion was exploited to break up our unity [alluding hereto Partition] and now language, which should be a binding and ennobling factor, works in the same way. Meanwhile, caste remains to separate us and to encourage narrow groupings (ibid., p. 367, letter dated 10 May 1956).

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Finally, the reorganization of the large majority o f the states on a linguistic basis was achieved in 1956. This reform put into question the rational-legal arrangement to a certain extent: at a sub-regional level, the bureaucratic system remained the same (with the District Magistrate and the panchayats playing the same key roles) but the provinces acquired an ethnic identity based on language and even caste. However, since the 1960s, not only caste but also tribes and religious communities have been the root cause o f a new drive for linguistic states. Beyond Linguistic Groups: Tribes, Religious C om m unities and Castes In 1956, Assam was ‘amputated’ from the North East Frontier Agency which was placed under the direct administration of New Delhi. Many local tribes agitated at the same time for a state which would be their own. In 1963, the Nagas, a collection o f largely Christianized tribes, obtained a Nagaland. In 1966, it was the turn o f the Mizos (aborigines of Tibetan-Burmese origin) to obtain an autonomous Union Territory which became Mizoram in 1972. In the same year Meghalaya became a state separated from Assam. These new administrative entities conform ed a p riori to the criteria applied in 1956 because the movements which had agitated for them— and which sometimes had gone as far as to demand independence but without success— had argued on the basis of their linguistic specificity. In fact, the linguistic unity o f these regions was much less clearcut than o f those states founded in 1956, so much so that English had to be designated as the official language o f Nagaland and Meghalaya; in addition these regions often have one or many subsidiary official languages. Language served again as an alibi for less legitimate movements founded on a complex ethnic identity, o f which language was only one component. In the 1980s, the demand for Gorkhaland, a little further west in the region o f Darjeeling, followed the same logic: the Gorkhas argued that their language— Nepali— was the basis for agitating for separate status, but they constituted an ethnic group on another basis too, most notably because they had been considered a ‘martial race’ by the British. They finally obtained some autonomy inside the state of West Bengal in the late 1980s.

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A similar scenario took place in Jharkhand over a much longer period: founded in the 1940s, the 'Jharkhand movement’, named after a territory including different tribes in South Bihar, in North Orissa and in East Madhya Pradesh, agitated for a separate state for many decades. Here the linguistic alibi could not be advanced. Therefore the supporters for autonomy openly justified their claim by their attachment to the territory and the cultural specificity of the local tribals. In 2000, after decades of more or less intense struggle, the state of Jharkhand was finally realized (see Corbridge in this volume). At the same time, another tribals-dominated region, Chhattisgarh, was also granted the status of a state. The states or autonomous zones that tribal populations have obtained in the course o f the last fifty years, therefore, have been very loosely based on linguistic criteria and relied more than before o n the ethnic basis— in fact many of these movements could not even hide behind the issue of language. A parallel process was observed in the case of the territorial demand of some religious communities and castes. Sikh nationalism is a good example. Punjab was very early established as a model state because of its agricultural dynamism, and the Sikhs have benefited from these economic achievements. On the other hand, Punjabis— and in particular the Sikhs— came increasingly to resent the fact that their agricultural produce should be ‘exported’ in its raw form, because New Delhi hesitated to industrialize a border zone which would serve as a target, in case o f war, for Pakistan. The rich Sikh peasantry— very often of Jat caste— were discontented about the level of agricultural prices at which the government bought their grain for feeding the other states’ and also the constant reduction of the funds that New Delhi allocated to Punjab because the state was becoming richer and hence self-sufficient. Certain leaders of the Akali Dal— a party dominated by the Sikh Jats— came to think that greater independence would allow them to manage economic growth in the province more effectively. For this reason a section of the Sikhs came to agitate for a state o f their own under the guise o f linguistic particularism. In 1966, the Sikhs of the Akali Dal started an agitation for having the frontiers of Punjab correspond to that of the Punjabi-speaking zone. The Punjabi language (whose script is Gurumukhi) was the language of the Sikhs and this agitation clearly aimed at giving a state to the Sikhs. Language, here, served as a screen for a communal demand par excellence. This Punjabi Suba movement resulted in 1966 in the division

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of Punjab into two parts: a Hindi-speaking Haryana and a Punjab where the Sikhs represented 71 per cent o f the population in 1971.3 In addition to tribes and religious communities, castes got their state too in the post-Nehruvian period, without having to resort to the linguistic alibi. Indeed, the creation o f Uttaranchal in 2000— along with that o f Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh— was mainly due to castebased demands. In this hilly region o f Uttar Pradesh, in the 1990s, upper castes have always been a majority whereas Other Backward Classes (OBC) represented 2 per cent of the population only. In 1993 the OBC-dominated government o f Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh decided to implement the recommendations o f the Mandal Commission report and reserve 27 per cent o f the posts in the local administration for the 2 per cent of OBCs. Upper castes, inhabitants of Uttaranchal, mobilized, demonstrated and clashed with the police. Politicization of caste cleavages led then to demands for a separate state. The Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) endorsed this claim. It took over power in Uttar Pradesh in 1997 and at the Centre in 1998 and decided to create a separate state o f Uttaranchal in 2000. For the first time, a new state was created in favour o f caste groups without the alibi o f language. To sum up, the Nehruvian ideal o f a rational-legal state, so for as the territory issue is concerned, was put into question as early as the 1950s by agitations with ethnic connotations— either linguistic movements or movements having a tribal, religious or caste basis and language as an alibi. This early ethnicization o f the territory reflected itself in the naming o f certain new states such as Tamil Nadu (Tamil country) or Andhra Pradesh (the province of Andhras). This ethnicization process did not put into question the bureaucratic arrangement so far as the district units and its subdivisions were concerned. It was not as negative as Nehru feared either. It did not lead to the disintegration of the country. On the contrary, it enabled the Centre to accommodate regional identities with the required flexibility. The federal structure o f the Indian Union turned out to be 3 See Singh, 1984, p. 44. In the next census o f 1981, however, their share of the population had fallen to 52 per cent while that of the Hindus increased from 40 per cent to 48 per cent, mainly because of the migration of agricultural labourers. This erosion of the demographic weight o f the Sikhs was one factor in the revival and radicalization o f the autonomy movement, but the Indian state was not prepared to make any new concessions to explicidy communal movements.

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most resourceful. In a way, the redrawing o f the administrative map reflected India’s ability to maintain unity in diversity. However, this trend acquired a new dimension in 2000 when states were created for tribal groups (Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh) and caste groups (Uttaranchal) without taking the trouble o f invoking the linguistic argument. More important, at the same time, the old rational-legal framework has been exposed to a new threat which puts this multiculturalism into question: the rise o f Hiridu nationalism which defends an ethnic conception o f territory but in opposition to all particularisms, linguistic as well as religious. T

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The Hindu nationalist ideology, as it crystallized between the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, carries a conception o f space in part inherited from the classical views of ancient India mentioned in the introduction. In the Dharmashastra, Bharat (India) is described as ‘the land of dharma and as such, she has a unique ritual, religious and magical status’ (Halbfass, 1990, p. 177). This ‘country’ is said to spread out between the Himalayas and the sea. Its core is made of Aryavarta, the land of the Aryas, enclosing in itself the section o f the territory that is found between the Himalayas and the Vindhya mountains. The Aryas are the twice bom, that is to say the members o f the three superior social orders: Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas. Hence, the caste system, in a way, defines the territory. The Arya Samaj, a proto-nationalist Hindu movement founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati, was the first Hindu proto­ nationalist movement to reinterpret this conception and to emphasize the entrenchment o f the Aryan sovereignty in the sacred land. It presented the so-called ancestors o f the Hindus, the Aryas of the Vedic epoch, as an elected people: descended from Tibet into Aryavarta— a so-called virgin zone— sometime after the Creation, they allegedly used this base for becoming ‘the sovereign masters o f the earth’ (Dayananda, 1940, p. 288). For Dayananda, the Aryavarta was both the cradle o f a civilization, o f which the Hindus were the caretakers, and the primordial place from where humanity originated.4 4 The second aspect has shaped the Hindu nationalists’ worldview. Jackie Assayag underlines that the first video cassette produced by the Vishva Hindu

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H indu N ationalism and the Cult o f Bhoom i (Land) The ideology o f Hindu nationalism was really codified by V.D. Savarkar in the 1920s. In 1923, in his book, H indutva : Who is a Hindu, he defined Hinduness ( h in d u tv a) as the sense o f belonging to an ethnic community possessing a territory and presenting the same racial characteristics. So far as territory is concerned, Savarkar proceeds to a subtle reinterpretation of the word Hindu, or Sindhu (the H and S are interchangeable in Sanskrit): Sindhu, in Sanskrit, does not signify only Indus but also the sea— which surrounds the southern peninsula— so much so that this word alone, Sindhu, designates, almost in one go all the frontiers o f the country. Therefore, writes Savarkar, ‘Hindustan has come to mean the whole continental country from the Shindu to Shindu from the Indus to the sea* (Savarkar, 1969, p. 32). For Savarkar, a Hindu is first of all one who lives in the zone between the rivers, the seas and the Himalayas, ‘so strongly entrenched that no other country in the world is so perfectly designed by the fingers o f nature as a geographical unit’ (ibid., p. 82). It is because o f the way they were entrenched in this land that the first Aryas, as early as the Vedic period, ‘developed a sense of nationality’ (ibid., p. 5). For Savarkar, this land is sacred: Hindustan is the Hindus’ holy land. This conception of territory was further developed by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS— Association o f national volunteers) that came into existence in 1925. This movement was very much inspired by V. D. Savarkar, as is evident from the prayer which its members recite during its sessions for ideological and physical training which are daily held by its local branches: I bow before you for all times, Oh mother earth ( matribhoomi) my beloved ! That my life be offered for thy cause, Oh great pure earth (punyabhoomi) that I worship. I bow before you again and again.

Parishad (Hindu Universal Association), an offshoot of the RSS, showed‘the cosmic big bang turning into a saffron-coloured map, that o f Akhand Bharat; then Ayodhya— the navel of Hinduism— progressively appears bathed in light. India is conceived of, in this way, less as a geographical entity than as a cosmological and theological product born at the same time as Rama. . . . ’ (Assayag, 1998, p. 130). Not only does Hindu nationalism present India as a spiritual guide o f Humanity; it also considers the Hindu diaspora as the living proof of the ubiquitous character of the Hindu presence. The Vishva Hindu Parishad is committed to implanting itself in foreign countries by using ‘diasporic’ bridgeheads.

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This mystique o f the motherland was further exacerbated after the Partition o f India in 1947 when the Congress was accused of having presided over ‘the vivisection o f Mother India’. Nathuram Godse, the murderer o f Gandhi, who had belonged to the RSS and was a disciple of Savarkar, explained his act as a punishment that one must inflict on the Mahatma for this trauma. « Still today, the Hindu nationalists are more interested in the earth— perceived in an organicist perspective— than in territory in the sense o f an anonymous space defined by an administrative grid. This option is well in tune with their devalorization o f the state vis-à-vis the nation: for them, the form o f power and its administrative incarnation has lesser importance than the nation, a spiritual principle, which reflects the soul of the people in their eternity. The frontiers of the state are not, moreover, those that they respect the most. For instance, they regard the Nepalese as members o f the Hindu nation, because their ruler belongs to their faith. An RSS publication gives a good illustration of this worldview: In the majority o f the nations o f the world, the state is the first,... the nation is circumscribed by the territorial jurisdiction o f the state.... In this viewpoint, Bharat is in a particular situation because the foundation o f this ancient nation has always been culture and not politics. On our land, numerous states have come into existence and gone by, some times many states, from republics to monarchies, have co-existed .... The pillars o f national unity o f Bharat are found in a big way in its history, its geography, its religion, its philosophy and its culture. The sight and the meeting o f the rivers on the banks on which our ancestors have created a literature which has become the standard o f the human civilization. The caves o f the mountains which have been honoured by the retreat o f the sages and the lakes, which testify to their spiritual realization, washing the spirit and the body o f all sin and suffering. One visit to these places o f pilgrimage, allows one to have a general survey o f the remote places in four corners o f the country, and also allows one to become conscious that every part o f the country is sacred. Similarly such a visit allows one to share the sentiment o f closeness with one’s compatriots and partake o f the observation o f the existence o f the same cultural attitude across the country, such as, found in the assembly o f people from all over India in big religious gatherings o f the Kumbh Mela. The spiritual awakening prompted by the saints and preachers who tour all over the country and the common values followed by all across the country— all this makes our country an immortal nation. For making every one conscious o f this reality, it is necessary that each citizen o f Bharat familiarizes with its rivers and its mountains which are the

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boon of nature and also with the places of pilgrimage and with the great memorials of the ancestors (Sharma, 1993, pp. 3-4). This text opposes territorial nationalism to an ethnic conception of the nation where the definition of the ‘Indian earth* reposes exclusively on the Hindu culture. Ritual places are credited with a national value. The Hindu nationalists exploit here a conception of Indian territory that is very wide-spread in their community because of the key rôle of pilgrimages in Hinduism. The Hindu pilgrims sketch in fact a sacred geography in which the participants see the ‘true India*. Diana Eck, on the basis o f field enquiries in the Himalayan border regions, even points out that, ‘all the Indian earth constitutes, in the eyes o f the Hindu pilgrims, a sacred geography* (Eck, 1985).5 In the text o f the RSS cited above, Purtya-bhoomi Bharat (Bharat, the sacred land), the rivers figure as the first markers o f identity o f the Indian space, probably because water has a particular purificatory value in Hinduism and many of the water courses are regular objects o f pilgrimage. Next comes, for similar reasons, the lakes, which according to the author ‘have inspired all the people of Bharat to rise above the differences o f caste and o f region and create a strong nation*. Then it is the turn o f the mountains which concludes the ‘natural* set. The set o f ‘cultural* signs opens with the four Dhams (lit. the places of residence, in this case o f the Hindu gods) situated in Badrinath in the Himalaya, Rameshwaram in the extreme south, Dwarka in the west, and Puri in the east, that correspond expediently to the cardinal points. On this account, the places of pilgrimage are presented as the anchoring points o f the unity o f Bharat since time immemorial. The author illustrates the same principle based on the seven sacred cities of Hinduism that are traditionally perceived as the privileged places for reaching eternal peace, moksha : Ayodhya, Mathura, Hardwar, Kashi (Benaras), Kanchipuram, Avantika (Ujjain) and Dwarka are the seven cities which are reputed to confer Moksha. These seven cities were situated in different directions and in different regions acting 5 The Hindu imagination of space has given birth to certain metaphors which could have helped in the crystallization o f Hindu nationalist constructs. For instance, a monk of southern India wrote that ‘the land o f the fatherland is to the nation as the physical body is to a yogi’ because the seven sacred cities of Hinduism seemed to be laid out as the sensitive centers (chakras) of the kundilini, that one must untie by yoga as to attain a spiritual awJcening (Chidbhavananda, 1985, p. 136).

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as the links in a chain which unites the nation. Each citizen o f Bharat, whatever h is caste, his sect or his province, always feels the desire to pay a visit to these cities as a devotee (Sharma, 1993, p. 29).

The twelve jyotirlingas — stalagmites worshipped as the phallic symbol o f the god Shiva— which are places o f important pilgrimages in Hinduism are described in the same fashion: ‘As they are distributed across the country, they symbolize the unity o f the nation*. The map of India that these descriptions sketch reposes on the sacred geography o f traditional India. But the entire process constitutes, o f course, an invented tradition. The Hindu nationalist ideologues want to establish a fallacious continuity between their view o f India and a mythic past. Counteracting Centrifugal Forces on Behalf o f the H indu Earth As early as 1952, Organiser, the official organ o f the RSS, opposed federalism and the making o f the provinces as an intermediary government structure: ‘In our ideal, we would wish to abolish the provinces and wish to establish a unique and a unified administration in our country* ( Organiser, 29 December 1952, p. 3). As the demand for a linguistic state intensified in Tamil Nadu, the Jan Sangh— founded in 1951 and dominated by the RSS— began to act against this sign o f separatism o f ‘Dravidistan’ ( Organiser, 10 October 1955, p. 7). Then it denounced the linguistic states as soon as they took shape in 1956 because o f ‘their regionalist connotations and their dangerous tendency towards separatism’ ( Organiser, 26 January 1956, p. 5). Subsequently, the multiplication of the linguistic states and the development of separatist movements in Punjab and Kashmir led to a reassertion by the Hindu nationalists o f their conception o f the ‘Hindu earth’. They rejected the notion o f territory because it implied a division of this primordial earth according to administrative schema— which prepared the ground for separatist movements. At the beginning o f the 1980s, the promotion o f a Hindu nationalist conception o f India took a more militant turn. The notion o f earth then was used to displace that o f a segmented, administrative territory. The Ekatm ata yatra (pilgrimage o f unity) launched by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) in 1983 sought, for example, to manipulate the symbols o f the ‘Hindu earth’ with the aim o f popular mobilization. Three caravans rallied from Kathmandu to Rameshwaram (Tamil Nadu), Gangasagar (Bengal) to Somnath (Gujarat) and Hardwar (Uttar Pradesh) to Kanyakumari (Tamil Nadu), on which converged 69 other

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caravans starting from the interior, distributing the waters of the Ganga (50 centilitres for 10 rupees) and provisioning the holy waters from the local temples or the other sacred rivers that they met on their way. This show o f mixing of the waters was aimed at symbolizing the Hindu unity; all the caravans converged moreover on to Nagpur, the headquarters o f the RSS and the geographical centre o f India, before separating once again (for the map o f the route followed by the Ekatm ata yatra, see Assayag, 1998, p. 147). The modus operandi o f the Ekatm ata yatra played clearly on the perceptions that Hindus have of their territory across the rivers and other places of pilgrimage. Formally, the Ekatm ata yatra reproduced the modus operandi of a pilgrimage. For instance, its main halts were sacred places. The religious geography of the Indian space was therefore harnessed for the ends of an ideological mobilization. The same phenomenon was observed in 1989 in the course o f the movement for the construction of the Ram Temple. This divinity was born, according to the legend, at Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh). His birthplace was said to have been occupied by a temple until it was replaced by a mosque, in the sixteenth century on the orders of the first Mughal emperor, Babur. From 1984, the VHP demanded a restitution o f this site to the Hindus. In 1989, it organized during the summer, with the logistical support of the RSS, the Ram Shila Pujany that consisted o f honouring in a devotional manner bricks (shila) inscribed with the name o f Ram. These consecrated bricks were to be used for the construction o f the new temple dedicated to Ram. Consecration took place across India. In the second stage, all these bricks were dispatched to Ayodhya where they were exhibited with the markings of their place o f origin. Some amongst these came from foreign countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States, but the operation was aimed above all at mobilizing the Hindu population in India. This was reiterated in the ceremony of the placing o f the first stone (shilanayas) on 9 November 1989: at the exact time o f shilanayas, all Hindus were called upon to turn towards Ayodhya and make an offering of flowers. The Hindu nationalists searched in this way to exalt Ayodhya as a sacred place at the centre o f Hinduism, by endowing this religion with a centre comparable to that of the ‘Semitic religions’— an expression often used by Hindu nationalists with derogatory overtones. The ceremony of 9 November calling upon all the Hindus to turn towards Ayodhya, for example, seemed inspired more or less consciously by the Muslim prayers facing Mecca.

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In 1990, the VHP launched a Ram Jyoti Yatra (pilgrimage o f the light of Ram). At Ayodhya, the fire o f a Vedic sacrifice gave birth to a torch that served to light up two others in Benaras and in Mathura (the birthplace of Krishna), the two cities where mosques were also supposed to have been constructed in place of temples. These flames were lit and spread all over the country to light the small lamps that every Hindu family has in its home for the feast o f Diwali (the festival of lights), with which this operation very judiciously coincided. In 1992, a comparable manifestation, the Ram Paduka Yatra (the pilgrimage of the sandals o f Ram), consisted o f touring the sandals o f Ram that, according to the legend, his brother— to whom the kingdom was given— had installed on the throne during the exile of Ram in the forest. Thus, since 1983, the VHP has endeavoured to mobilize ‘the Hindu nation’ by utilizing forms of mass mobilization derived from a religious style of procession or pilgrimage. This formula was appropriated and adapted after 1990 by the BJP. In 1990, the president of the BJP, L.K. Advani, travelled nearly 10,000 kilometres from Gujarat to Ayodhya (passing through Andhra Pradesh) on a Toyota on which was placed an epic chariot. This mobilization was to continue till the start of the construction o f the temple, but Advani was arrested in Bihar before he could enter Uttar Pradesh. The popular success met by the agitation around the Ayodhya site is revealing of the new form of ethnicization o f the Indian territory: an increasing number o f Hindus came to recognize each other in the cultural version o f the territory that was proposed to them, even accepting Ayodhya as the centre o f the nation. Jackie Assayag emphasizes that the first video cassette produced by the VHP ‘showed the sacred land whose capital is Ayodhya’ (1998, p. 130). After linguistic states questioned the rational-legal model of the nation, another form of ethnic movement is experiencing considerable success. C o n c l u s io n The conception of territory that Nehru, Ambedkar and other Indian leaders sought to promote after Independence drew its inspiration from the same values as that of the Weberian rational-legal state. This ideal was questioned as early as the 1950s with the demand for linguistic states which often reflected caste demands. The creation of the first linguistic states in the 1950s was followed by other changes o f the administrative map o f India that responded to the same logic— language serving more and more as a pretext for the creation o f new

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territorial entities that were in fact wanted by tribes or religious communities. Gradually, the ‘alibi* o f language was not even utilized by groups agitating for autonomy. The history o f post-Independence Indian territory is then above all a success o f ethnic forces over the rational-legal framework o f the state. However, this ethnicization process had some very positive connotations: it showed the capacity of the Indian federal system to accommodate centrifugal forces. In a way, this respect for regional entities was the territorial counterpart to secularism in the realm of communal relations. Both contributed to a form o f multiculturalism. The ethnicization process due to the rise o f Hindu nationalism is supported by a very different logic, as this movement tries to project the culture o f the majority community as the embodiment o f Indian identity. In their view, the minorities can only stay in India if they give up the public dimension o f their faith (that has to be confined to the private sphere) and if they pay allegiance to Hindu symbols as national symbols. The Hindu nationalist view of India as land exemplifies this: India is not a territory defined by an administrative map. It is a bhoom i, earth, defined by Hindu ritual places: rivers, lakes, lingamsy mountains. As a result, its borders do not coincide with those o f the Indian state but with the spread of such ritual places. While in most ethnic brands o f nationalism, land is a secondary factor, here it plays a major role. Not as the anonymous space o f the classical territorial nationalisms d la Congress6 ; but as the sacred bhoom i of the Hindus. This view partly derives from the old notion o f Aryavarta, the land on which the Aryas had settled and established their ritual norms. However, this tradition has been substantially reinterpreted in the framework o f Hindu nationalist ideology and, therefore, it carries contrad ictions due to the ideological attem pts at reconciling 6 The relations between the conception of territory by the Hindu nationalists and the Congress is quite interesting. Since the 1920s, Hindu nationalists have criticized the Congress and call their nationalism artificial because it is territorial. All communities in the frontiers of British India, then of the Indian Union, must not to their viewpoint be considered as Indian on an equal footing. They defend an ethnic nationalism by considering that the Hindus alone embody the Indian nation and Hindu culture sums up the essence of Indian culture. But, at the same time, the Hindu nationalists defend a vision of the nation where space is greatly valued. Simply, the frontiers which they call for are not those—arbitrary from their viewpoint—of the British Raj but the natural limits defined by a version of Hindu geography.

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perceptions which are poles apart. Hindu nationalists have aspired since 1947 to reunify India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and reestablish Akhand Bharat (a united India). This project reflects an extreme valorization of land, but it contradicts the definition o f the nation as based on Hindu culture.

B

ib l io g r a p h y

B.R. Ambedkar ( 1979 [ 1948] ), ‘Maharashtra as a linguistic province. Statement submitted to the Linguistic Provinces Commission’, in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speechesy Vol. 1, Bombay: Government of Maharashtra. J. Assayag (1998), ‘Ritual Action or Political Reaction?—-The Invention of Nationalist Processions in India During the 1980s’, South Asia Research, 18 (2).

M. Biardeau (1982), ‘Dharma et frontières politiques en Inde’, in J.P. Chamay et al. (cds), Le bonheur par Vempire ou le rêve d'Alexandre, Paris: Anthropos. Swami Chidbhavananda (1985), Facets o f Brahman or the Hindu Gods, Tiruchirapalli: Sri Ramakrishna Tapovanam. Constituent Assembly Debates (1989), New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat. Swami Dayananda (1940), Satyarth Prakash—Le livre de VArya Samaj, Paris: Maisonneuve. D. Eck (1985), Darsan: seeing the divine image in India, Chambersburg: Anima. M.K. Gandhi (1948), ‘La cause des langues indigènes’ (21 Avril 1920), in Gandhi, La Jeune Inde, Paris: Stock. S. Gopal (1979), Jawaharlal Nehru. A Biography, Vol. 2 (1947-56), London: Jonathan Cape. W. Halbfass (1990 (1981]), India and Europe. An Essay in Philosophical Understandingy Delhi: Motilal Banersidass. S. Harrison (1968 [I960]), India: the most dangerous decadesyDelhi: Oxford University Press. G. Parthasarathi (ed.) ( 1987), Jawaharlal Nehru. Letters to ChiefMinistersy 194764y Vol. 3 (1952-54), New Delhi: Oxford University Press. V.D. Savarkar ( 1969 [ 1923] ), Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, Bombay: S.S. Savarkar, 1969. J.K. Sharma (1993), Punya-bhoomi Bharat (Introduction to map o f the sacred land Bharat), New Delhi: Keshav Kunj. Gopal Singh (1984), ‘Socio-economic bases of the Punjab crisis’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 January. M.N. Srinivas (1972), Social Change in Modern lndiat New Delhi: Orient Longman.

8 The Continuing Struggle for India’s Jharkhand: Democracy, Decentralization, and the Politics o f Names and Numbers Stuart Corbridge

I n t r o d u c t io n At first blush, the formation o f the states o f Jharkhand, Uttaranchal and Chhattisgarh in November 2000 would seem to signal the ‘success of India’s democracy’ (to borrow a recent phrase from Atul Kohli: 2001). And in key respects this is the case. The ability o f the central state in India to manage centre-state relations has consistently upset the views o f those observers, like Selig Harrison at the cusp of the 1960s, who believed that the formation o f language states would pave the way for a future o f feuding regional ministries, and even anarchy or fascism (Harrison 1960: 249). As James Manor has pointed out, Prime Minister Nehru was pleasantly surprised by the way in which tensions in South India were relieved by an agreement to form the state o f Andhra Pradesh in 1953 (Manor 2001:85-6), and the later creation of the states o f Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, and the division o f ‘greater Punjab’ in 1966, has surely strengthened— not weakened— dem ocracy in India. Atul Kohli has suggested that: ‘W ithin the framework of a centralized but accommodating state, democracy has enabled regional forces to successfully press their demands. These

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successes were manifest early in the area o f identity politics, namely, in the reorganization of India along linguistic lines, and over the last three decades in the struggle to share economic resources between the national and state governments’ (Kohli 2001a: 11.) And James Manor, too, echoing this argument, has suggested that the decentring of the nation in India has paved the way for ‘political regeneration’ (Manor 2001: 80.) More so than Kohli, perhaps, he accepts that the Centre has been able to manage the states because of the fluidity o f identities and demands within the states, but he also pays homage to the skills of those political activists and fixers who ‘remain capable of making the politics o f bargaining work’ (ibid.: 82). In his view, it is the very plurality of contests for power within India, and not least since the revamping of panchayati raj institutions, which ensures that ‘parties and politicians ... remain engaged with the politics of elections and bargaining, even when they suffer defeats in some contests’ (ibid.). As the old saw has it, diversity ensures unity. But is this really the case, and what are the costs o f these engagements? One of the weaknesses o f the pluralist account of the successes of India’s polity is that it is focused more on the institutionali­ zation of democracy than on its substantial accomplishments (a point that is acknowledged by Kohli [2001: 3]). It is true that secessionist movements have been thin on the ground in India, and have been notably unsuccessful, but the continuing struggles in the North-East (which are properly recognized by M anor), and the often brutal containment o f the struggles for an independent Kashmir or even Khalistan, are hardly testimony to the institutional strength of India’s democracy. They are evidence rather o f the military strength of what remains a strongly centralized power. And while it can be argued that the formation of three new states in 2000 was a victory for common sense in Uttaranchal (the state of Uttar Pradesh being too large and too populous to govern effectively: Mawdsley, 2002), and for economic justice in the case o f Jharkhand (the new state for too long serving as an internal colony for Bihar), it cannot be denied that the formation of these states had more to do with political bargains between a restricted number of elite actors than with the pressures from below that were acknowledged in official statements at the time. I want to suggest here, indeed, that while the formation of a state of Jharkhand is to be welcomed, and while there are some early signs that the incoming government will enjoy some success in attracting foreign capital (including increased loans from the World Bank), the state has been formed with little regard for the adivasi communities

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that were for long in the vanguard o f the Jharkhand movement. The story I wish to tell is intended not as a rebuttal o f the pluralist thesis but as a corrective. By focusing first on the formation o f the demand for a Jharkhand state, and then on the changing economic geography o f the region, I show how difficult it is to make an argument for a specifically tribal state, a point that is not lost on the ruling BJP government. At the same time, I show how New Delhi and Patna have been active in the production of Jharkhand as a detribalizing territory, and how they have ignored the more pressing demands that have been voiced by poorer households in Jharkhand for improved land rights. It is thus no coincidence that the successful decentring o f the nation that was engineered in 2000 has been accompanied by a rising tide o f Naxalism in Jharkhand, and by a turn to non-parliamentary popular movements. From the point of view of many adivasi (and non -adivasi) households, the substantial accomplishments of India’s democracy have been hard to discern. T

he

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o v em en t fo r a

J h a r k h a n d S tate

When Chief Minister Babulal Marandi assumed power in Ranchi city, the capital o f the new state o f Jharkhand, he did so at the behest o f his masters in the Bharatiya Janata Party (B JP ) and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in New Delhi. Marandi came back to Jharkhand from his position as Union Minister o f State for Forests and Environment. Perhaps more importantly, he was a tribal ( adivasi) politician who enjoyed the support of leading figures in the BJP in Patna, the capital city of the state (Bihar) from which Jharkhand was being cleaved. Unlike Shibu Soren (the long-time leader o f the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and key figure in the Jharkhand Area Autonomous Council set up in 1993), or even Karia Munda (another BJP MP, and long-time member for Khunti Constituency in Ranchi D istrict), Marandi had not been known for his activism in the Jharkhand movement. M arandi, indeed, was one o f a group o f politicians who had pressed the BJP in the 1990s to set up a separate state o f Vananchal (‘land of forests’ in Hindi) rather than a state o f Jharkhand. The BJP ran with this idea for several years, in contented recognition o f the fact that Jharkhand, or at least those Districts o f Jharkhand that were inside Bihar, was no longer an area dominated by adivasis, either numerically or economically. Although the BJP did come to win the votes o f adivasis loyal to politicians who moved over to the party— including Marandi and Karia Munda— its support base

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was rooted in those communities which the adivisis have traditionally styled as dikus (rapacious outsiders) or Sadans (long-settled and mainly agricultural communities o f non-tribal origin). And when the BJP did finally embrace the call for a state o f Jharkhand, it did so with the blessing of the region’s manufacturing and trading classes (and, we can presume, the Tata group, on which more below), and with the intention of weakening Laloo Yadav and the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar. As the BJP rightly calculated, the separation of Jharkhand from Bihar would deprive the latter not just of substantial sales and excise revenues, but also of subsidized electricity provision. The break-up o f Bihar, o f course, is hardly a matter o f concern for activists within the Jharkhand movement, and it is a reasonable bet that some of them will have been encouraged by the crackdown on corruption that Marandi initiated early in 2002. It might also be the case that some adivasi communities will benefit from the significant expansion o f World Bank funding that is planned for the forestry sector, or from an increase in jobs in manufacturing as and when foreign capital is attracted to the state. It is a disservice to these communities to maintain they cannot benefit from improved governance or from sustained economic growth, as some in the cultural wing o f the Jharkhand movement continue to maintain. Nevertheless, for long­ standing observers o f the region, it was ominous, to say the least, that eight adivasis were shot dead by the police in Tapkara village in the Koel-Karo region on 2 February 2001, less than three months after the formation o f the new state. The adivasis were killed when a large number o f them protested a police action that had, on the previous day, torn down a barricade that had been erected near Derang village as part of a campaign to keep contractors away from the site o f a proposed dam on the Koel-Karo river system. The violent suppression o f supporters of the Koel-Karo Jan Sanghatan brought to mind the notorious police firing on a demonstration called by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha at Gua township in western Singhbhum district in September 1980 to protest ‘police terror and state employment policies’ in the iron ore mining heartland o f Jharkhand. The killing on that occasion o f eight adivasis was followed by a police reign of terror in surrounding villages, and must be seen in the context of a wider struggle around the region’s mineral and timber resources. More generally, this firing and the one at Tapkara need to be understood against the backdrop o f a longstanding struggle not just for the territory o f Jharkhand, but also for the integrity o f the cultural and ethnic identities that have been mobilized as part o f that battle (Devalle, 1992).

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For proponents o f a greater Jharkhand state— a state that would combine the Chhotanagpur and Santhal Parganas regions from erstwhile Bihar with tribal-dominated districts in neighbouring Orissa, Madhya Pradesh (as was) and West Bengal, much as was proposed to the States Reorganisation Commission in the 1950s — the struggle goes back to ‘heroes of the Jharkhand movement like Konta Munda (1820); Singrai-Bindrai Manki (1831); Tilka Majhi, Sidhu, Kanu, Chand, Bhairav (1856); Biswanath, Sahdev, Ganpat Rai, Sheik Bhikari, Kurban Ali, Nilambar, Pitanbar (1857); Birsa Munda, Bharmi Munda (1900); [and] Jatra Bhagat (1915)’ (from a M emorandum o f the Jharkhand Coordination Committee presented to the President o f India on behalf o f the Oppressed Jharkhandi People, 10th D ecem ber 1987). Its modern institutional history begins with the founding o f the Chhotanagpur Adivasi Mahasabha in 1930 and the Jharkhand Party in 1950. Under the leadership of Jaipal Singh, the Jharkhand Party was to establish itself as the principal opposition to the Congress in Bihar in the general elections of 1952 and 1957, and it was encouraged to press its demand for a separate Jharkhand state to the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC). The bases o f this demand are worth recalling, for they show both the strengths and limitations of a discourse that has been centred upon ideas of culture and ethnicity, and more recently o f environment. The submission to the SRC stated that the tribal communities o f greater Jharkhand had long been in a majority in the region, and had been dealt with by the British on that basis. The British, indeed, had ruled most of the region, or those parts o f it that did not fall under the sway of Native Princes, on the assumption (or pretext) that the ‘indigenous communities’ (those described as Aboriginal and Semi-Aboriginal Tribes in the Census o f 1872) should be dealt with directly by an officer o f the colonial state. This person enjoyed discretionary powers under the provisions that set up Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas, and he was required to keep the peace by dealing with the leaders o f various tribal communities— the Mankis and Mundas. Failure to do so, the British supposed, would be akin to handing these communities over to the self-interested (and, later, ‘politically motivated’) big men o f the Hindu communities that supposedly preyed upon their less welleducated countrymen. In time, of course, as we shall see, the willingness o f some Jharkhandi activists to define their communities as victims o f Hindu outsiders, or as noble lords o f the forest, would limit the possibilities for building a less ethnically-restricted movement. But in the mid-1950s it seemingly

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made sense to present an argument for a specifically tribal Jharkhand, and to ally this to a revanchist politics that would seek to reclaim lost territory in the name o f the true ‘sons [and daughters] of the soil’ (Weiner, 1978). The submission to the SRC made the further argument, then (again using government constructions o f what it was to be ‘tribal’), that the integrity of the adivasi cultures o f Gondwanaland would be lost if the tribal-dominated areas were administered from Patna or Kolkata, and if scant regard was paid to the distinctiveness of their music, religions, literatures and languages. (Twenty years after the SRC rejected the claim that there was a single link language for Jharkhand, the cultural wing of the Jharkhand movement, led by Ram Dayal Munda at Ranchi University, began a sustained and imaginative attempt to promote Nagpuri [or sadri] as a tribal lingua franca. His group also remains active in promoting tribal songs and dances, and in insisting that the streets o f Ranchi and other urban centres are given over to tribal festivals on appropriate days). Finally, the Jharkhand Party made the claim, which has long been at the centre of tribal politics in the region, that adivasi livelihoods were under threat from outside interests and dikus. A way o f life that was in tune with nature was being undermined by timber contractors and mining capital, and by those recent immigrants who refused entry to adivasis in the shops and hotels of Ranchi city. J harkhand U

n d e r m in e d

To write in these terms, of course, is to oversimplify some key moments in the construction of Jharkhandi sub-nationalism. The discourse that was developed by the Jharkhand Party involved a delicate and sometimes unstable compromise between a primordiali&t account of the rights of India’s “original people”, and references both to the wit and wisdom o f these people (and their ability to deal with non-tribal populations) and to the need for special protective measures on their behalf (including job reservations and the continuation o f the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act of 1908). These tensions came to the fore during the Debates o f the Constituent Assembly, when Jaipal Singh refused to join the Muslim and Christian communities in giving up a claim upon reserved seats in the legislature— ‘Adivasis are not giving up anything because they have never had anything’ (CAD 9: 651)— even as he sought to remind Members that: ‘Adibasi society is the most democratic element in this country. ... In Adibasi society all are equal, rich or poor. Everyone has equal opportunity and I do not wish that people

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should get away with the idea that by writing this constitution and operating it we are trying to put a new idea into the Adibasi society. What we are actually doing is you are learning and taking something ... (CAD 9 :6 5 3 -5 4 ). The demand for a separate Jharkhand state was also prosecuted, at least until the emergence of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in the 1970s, by educated members of an emerging tribal elite (itself heavily urbanized: Lai, 1983), and particularly by those who had been to mission schools and enjoyed support from the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches. Its leadership came disproportionately from the Munda and Santhal communities, although a stinging Memorandum on ‘the adivasi problems in the central tribal belt of India’ was circulated in 1968 by the prominent Oraon leader (later Bishop), Nirmal Minz (Minz, 1968). For our purposes, however, the history of the Jharkhand movement matters rather less than developments within the historical geography o f the region itself, and the ways in which key actors in the post-colonial state came to seize on these developments— and actively to produce others— in order to discount the claims of Jaipal Singh and his coworkers and successors. Some of these developments formed part o f the case that was developed against the demand for a Jharkhand state in the Report of the States Reorganisation Commission (that tribals were no longer in a majority in Jharkhand, and lacked a link language), while other developments, including shifts in the economic geography o f the region, had the effect o f undermining the “unity” o f tribal society that Jaipal Singh and others took for granted. T h e Ideology o f T ribal E co n o m y and Society

At the heart o f tribal policy and politics in India for the past one hundred years has been an ideology o f tribal economy and society (Corbridge, 1988). Roughly summarized, this is the view that tribal societies are different: that they are organized according to a principle o f equality not hierarchy (in gender as well as in class terms), that they are geared to the production of use values in remote and often forested areas o f central or north-eastern India, that they maintain animistic forms o f religion, and that they are not equipped to deal with communities which are better versed in the law or the use o f money. The noted Indian commentator, B.D. Sharma, suggested in the late1970s that: ‘There is no functional differentiation in the tribal community as yet even in relation to such basic aspects like the religious, social, economic and political. The tribal is not yet used to

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the sectoralized approach which is the distinguishing characteristic of modem advanced communities. For example, he cannot distinguish between a loan for consumption or for production purposes’ (Sharma 1978: 531). And in the Report o f the [Dhebar] Commission on Scheduled Castes and Tribes we are told that: ‘It is difficult in the dry pages o f an official report to convey to the reader the zest for life expressed in tribal poetry and dancing, the instinct for colour and pattern... [nevertheless] above all things, the tribal people are intensely lovable and have fascinated most of those who have had anything to do with them’ (Government of India, 1962: 20). This perspective has the effect o f constituting the ad iv asi communities as radically Other to mainstream (caste) society, and of concentrating debate on the pros and cons of this alterity. For some members o f the Constituent Assembly the production o f tribal identities was itself a function of British rule, and o f the colonial power’s attempts to rule India by enforced divisions. According to G.S. Ghurye (1980), one o f India’s leading sociologists, the ‘so-called Scheduled Tribes’ were ‘degraded Hindus’ who needed to be assimilated back into the mainstream o f Indian life— a view, incidentally, which informs some of the activities of the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Jharkhand today. For others, including Jawaharlal Nehru, the Otherness o f the tribes had to be protected in much the same manner, and by roughly the same means, as the British had claimed to protect these com m unities— at least until they were able to look after themselves. This view also informed the politics o f the Jharkhand Party, which celebrated not only a long line o f tribal freedom fighters (including Birsa Munda) but also the republican traditions of adivasi society. The problem that would come to haunt the Jharkhand Party was that these descriptions of tribal society were increasingly at odds with the lived realities of many Jharkhandis. In the first thirty years o f the twentieth century the economy o f Chhotanagpur and Santhal Parganas was based on a single rain-fed crop of paddy, and many tribal (and non-tribal) families had to make use of the forests that surrounded their villages to make ends meet. A large number o f families also had to migrate to the tea gardens of Assam on a permanent or a circular basis. (The Census o f 1921 recorded 307,000 migrants coming to Santhal Parganas and Chhotanagpur, and 947,000 leaving the region: after Singh, 1978:69). By the 1940s, however, there were developments in place that would change the economic geography o f Jharkhand.

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Unlike in some parts o f the North-East, or even the interior areas of modern-day Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, many tribal communities in Jharkhand found increased opportunities for work in the mines and factories that were growing up in India’s resource triangle. This was very obviously the case in Hazaribagh and Manbhum (later Dhanbad) districts, which had been developed from the 1870s as major centres of coal and mica mining, and into which came large numbers o f diku families from greater Bengal and the United Provinces (Simmons, 1976). Significantly, the Interim Report of the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas (other than Assam) Sub-Committee of the Constituent Assembly concluded in 1947 that these two districts, along with Palamau, should be Descheduled. Unsurprisingly, the recommendation drew a minute o f dissent from Jaipal Singh which protested the ‘demolition o f the economic, geographical and ethnic unity of the Chota Nagpur Division, (quoted in Prakash, 1999: 478), a point to which we will return. More important in the longer run was the induction o f large numbers o f tribal labourers into the coal mines o f Dhanbad and Hazaribagh, and into the iron ore and copper mines o f Singhbhum district. Some o f these labourers were pushed into the mines following the loss of their lands under the terms of the Land Acquisition Act o f 1894. Between 1915 and 1925 close to 100,000 acres o f land in south­ west Singhbhum passed into the public domain for the quarries of the Tata Iron and Steel Company and the Bengal Iron and Steel Company, and for the housing compounds, roads, and railway lines that supplied them (Corbridge, 1982). But many more were persuaded to work in the mines by the relatively high wages that were paid there. By the late-1940s some 7,600 miners were employed in the Singhbhum iron quarries (including 3,200 females), the vast majority of whom would have been adivasis. And when real wage rates (including dearness allowances, sick pay, and leave allowances) increased significantly in the 1950s, some of these tribals, and many more in the coal mining areas to the north, were able to use their savings to purchase land from other tribal families, as they were permitted to do under the terms of the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act. It was through means such as this, as well as through the acquisition of government jobs reserved for Scheduled Tribes (Corbridge, 2000), that a growing number of tribal families were able to forge lifestyles that can be described as “middle class’*. Members of these families are well able to distinguish between loans for production and loans for consumption, and not a few o f them have placed siblings in the

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administrative, forest or police services, just as middle-class families have done across India. Recent research has also confirmed that significant levels of inequality in the ownership and use of land are common in “tribal” villages that are removed from the centres of mining capitalism (Kumar, 2002; Kumar and Corbridge, 2002), and that not all communities in Ranchi district that are listed as Scheduled Tribes are recognized as adivasi by members of the Munda and Oraon communities. (Some members o f these communities— for example, the Oraon Bhagats— have also been pursuing a strategy of sanskritization that involves the foreswearing of meat and alcohol, and the rejection of certain forms of ancestor worship.) In short, there are good reasons to believe that the republican and communitarian ‘traditions’ which have long been celebrated by (tribal) Jharkhandi politicians, as well as in the official statements of the colonial and post-colonial state, are, if not quite invented traditions (as Bates has suggested: Bates, 1994), traditions that are under attack. Notwithstanding the efforts o f cultural revivalists within the Jharkhand movement, the assumed unity of “tribal Jharkhand” has been eroding at a pace that has only slowly been acknowledged by a political campaign that is reluctant to concede the changing and multiform nature of tribal identities. T h e Politics o f N am es and N um bers

It is important to pause at this point. To suggest that tribal identities in Jharkhand are becoming more fluid is not to suggest that what Pramod Parajuli has called an ‘adivasi cosmovision’ is unimportant in eastern India (Parajuli, 1996). Nor is it to deny that large numbers of adivasi people have been marginalized by the processes o f econom ic development I have described, or have not been its major victims in terms o f loss of lands. Nor must we suppose that a more imaginative Jharkhandi politics cannot be conjured up, in which a sensitivity to the changing ways of being of tribal people might be combined with some recognition of the rights of those who have settled in the region more recently. (The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Jharkhand Coordination Committee have moved in this direction, as I explain below.) In any case, the point I now wish to develop is the more straightforward one that inconsistencies in the demands and characterizations o f the Jharkhand movement have been seized upon by generations of politicians who have not wished to see the creation of a tribal state. Some o f these politicians, moreover, have emerged from within a tribal community that has found it difficult to speak with one voice.

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We see this well enough when we return to the deliberations o f the States Reorganisation Commission. On the face o f it, one o f the more straightforward claims made by the Jharkhand Party to the SRC was the suggestion that Jharkhand was a region in which tribal people were in a majority. It was reported to members of the Simon Commission in 1930 that ‘the primitive tribes’ made up 58 per cent of the population of the Chhotanagpur plateau (see Prakash, 1999:469), and proponents of a greater Jharkhand state were able to raise this figure to 70 per cent when they added in the populations of the Princely states o f what became northern Orissa. How, then, could the SRC deny that the adivasis made up a majority of the proposed Jharkhand state? The answer is to be found in the ways in which the post-colonial state chose to recognize “tribalness”, or the designation o f certain communities as Scheduled tribes. In the Census o f 1872 the British authorities provided a list o f the Aboriginal and Semi-Hinduised Aboriginal Tribes o f Chhotanagpur and Santhal Parganas, Bihar. Under the Aboriginal Tribes were listed such communities as the Asur and the Agaria, as well as the Bhuiher, Bhumij, Gond, Kol (Ho), Mai, Munda, Naik, Uraon, Sonthal and Tharu. Included under the list o f Semi-Hinduised Aboriginal Tribes were the Bagdi, Bathudi, Bhar, Chamar, Dom, Ghatwal, Hari, Kadar, Mahali, Musahar, Pasi and Rajwar. In all, 31 communities were listed as Aboriginal Tribes in Chhotanagpur, with a further 31 being listed as Semi-Hinduised Aboriginal Tribes (the corresponding figures for Santhal Parganas were 14 and 25). In the list of Scheduled Tribes that was presented by the state of Bihar following Independence just 30 communities were recorded. Following the conventions that would apply in north and central Bihar, communities such as the Chamars and Musahars were now listed as Scheduled Castes, while other communities joined the ranks of what became the Other Backward Classes. Particularly in Hazaribagh and Manbhum Districts (or Dhanbad district, after part o f Manbhum district was given to West Bengal as Purulia district), the very tact that some “aboriginals" had gained employment in the mining or industrial sectors was taken as evidence o f their détribalisation. This form of reasoning, which drew upon contemporary work on ‘tribes in transition’ (Majumdar, 1937), and which won considerable backing from non-tribal members of the Legislative Assembly, was not easily countered by members o f the Jharkhand Party. However much Jaipal Singh sought to emphasize that tribal folk had come out of their forest fastnesses, the rhetoric o f his party was overwhelmingly Edenic

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and republican. Meanwhile, in the Constituent Assembly Debates, the ‘dominant nationalist discourse ... undermined any suggestion o f a separate tribal identity* (Prakash, 1999: 484). In response to Jaipal Singh’s suggestion that ‘Adibasis collectively form a single community’, K.M. Munshi charged that: ‘There is nothing common between one tribe and another.... To call them Adibasis and group them together as one community will not only be an untruth in itself but would be absolutely ruinous for the tribes themselves’ (quoted in Prakash: ibid.). In any case, under the new definition of ‘tribalness’ the quest for an adivasi majority in Jharkhand, and certainly in the Bihar Jharkhand, was bound to grow more elusive. According to the data and definitions used in the Census o f 1951, just 31.15 per cent of the population o f Chhotanagpur, and 44.67 per cent o f that of Santhal Parganas was made up of Scheduled Tribals. (Had the Census-takers adopted the definitions used by the British in 1872, the percentage figures would have been 45.79 per cent and 55.21 per cent respectively.) By the time o f the Census o f 1971, only Ranchi District was recorded as a tribal majority district (53.50 per cent), and the Scheduled Tribes made up just 30.94 per cent of the total population in Chhotanagpur and 36.22 per cent of that o f Santhal Parganas. By this time, too, even the 1872 definitions would not have worked significandy to the advantage of the cause o f a tribal Jharkhand: the corresponding figures would have been 61.92 per cent for Ranchi district, 39.24 per cent for Chhotanagpur and 50.60 per cent for Santhal Parganas (see Corbridge, 1988, Table 6). It would be unwise to argue that the adivasis o f Jharkhand were cheated out o f their birthright by the simple manipulation o f names and numbers. The construction o f ‘tribalness’ is always a matter of convention, and, as I suggested earlier, it would have been a conceit for Jharkhand Party leaders to claim that members o f the dominant Munda, Santhal, Oraon and Ho communities treated Naiks or Mahlis on an equal basis. In any case, the greater damage was done by the mass migration o f non-tribals to the region after Independence, and in the wake o f Nehru’s plans for the industrial transformation of Jharkhand. But it would be naive to m aintain that the highly circumscribed list o f Scheduled Tribes that was produced by the Government of Bihar was not self-serving. The Government of Bihar brought pressure to bear on the States Reorganisation Commission to dismiss the demand for a separate Jharkhand state. Fearing the loss of revenues that would later transpire, and being mindful o f rumours that the Tatas were major financiers o f the Jharkhand movement, the

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authorities in Bihar were at pains to rebuff claims o f a tribal majority in Jharkhand, or o f the integrity o f a supposed tribal culture. As we have seen, their efforts paid off. The SRC rejected the case for a Jharkhand state on the grounds that the tribes were in a minority in the Jharkhand region; that there was no specific link language in Jharkhand; and, significantly, that the economic balance o f the neighbouring states would be disturbed by the formation of a Jharkhand state. C o o p tatio n and V iolence

The Report of the States Reorganisation Commission hastened the end of the Jharkhand Party as a credible force. The party did well in the Parliamentary elections of 1957, but it lost ground to the Congress Party in 1962, and in 1963 Jaipal Singh defected to the Congress in return for a senior position in the Government of Bihar. The 1960s were a grim decade for the Jharkhand movement. As defections continued apace, new parties emerged to fill the vacuum, but the fact that N.E. Horo (a noted Christian tribal leader) won a Lok Sabha seat as an Independent, and that the All-India Jharkhand Party in Chhotanagpur was countered by the Bihar Prant Hul Jharkhand in Santhal Parganas, indicated the underlying tensions between Christian and non-Christian tribals on the one hand, and Santhals and Mundas on the other. More serious, though, was the continued immigration of non-tribals into Jharkhand, and the enormous loss o f adivasi lands that was evident around the Heavy Engineering Complex at Hatia (Ranchi), or close to Jamshedpur, Dhanbad, Bokaro, or even Patratu. For all Nehru’s rhetoric about the need to ‘protect the genius o f the tribal people’ (Nehru, 1955), it was his governments, and those o f Lai Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi in later years, that ensured that the ways of being of tribal men and women would be sacrificed to construct the new temples o f India (the dams along the Damodar valley) or its major centres of heavy industry. Sadly, too, it was from this time, at least in the iron ore mining areas o f western Singhbhum with which I am most familiar, that tribal employees lost ground to non-tribals as skilled labour came to substitute unskilled labour. When I toured the giant Tata mines at Noamundi in 1979, the number of tribal employees was down to little more than 100, and then in low paid jobs. It was only in the squalid open cast quarries of the Rungtas that one could see Hos working as miners. It was pardy in response to the continuing dispossession o f tribal lands— and o f struggles over the use of Protected Forests— that the

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Jharkhand movement was revitalized in the 1970s by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). Led by the Santhali tribal, Shibu Soren, the JMM developed a programme of direct actions that reached out to the industrial working class (led by A.K. Roy in Dhanbad) and the now substantial community of Sadans (those who had settled in Jharkhand and ‘contributed to its prosperity>, as the JMM put it). In both its Red and Green wings, the JMM developed a discourse that was rooted in a populist mixture o f Marxism and ecology (resistance to the exploitation of the working class, resistance to the loss o f land and trees, resistance to Dikus and Bihar) and an appeal to ‘Our land, our policy, our identity, our culture”, where the latter was understood in terms o f adivasi practices and festivals (Sengupta, 1982). The Morcha met with limited success in the Parliamentary arena, but it was an irritant to Patna and New Delhi when it organized— sometimes with Jharkhandi student movements and/or the Jharkhand Coordination Committee (JCC)— a series o f blockades that brought the region to a halt in the late-1980s and early-1990s. In the 1970s and 1980s, too, the Morcha had won a good deal o f popular support when it helped to organize a forest andolan [struggle] in Singhbhum district (an andolan that led direcdy to the Gua firings in 1980), and when it organized a number of landgrab movements. The high point o f the Morcha was probably achieved in the early1990s, at the time o f the minority Congress government of Narasimha Rao, The JMM was then able to use its position in the Lok Sabha to make a number o f demands o f the Government o f India in return for its continuing support. In 1992 and 1993 it looked as if the Home Ministry might agree to the formation of a Jharkhand state, rather than an Area Autonomous Council (in which Soren would figure strongly), if only to secure the votes o f the JMM and to damage the position of Laloo Yadav and the Janata Dal in Bihar. When push came to shove, however, as is well known, the government o f Narasimha Rao allegedly chose to buy off the JMM leadership with substantial bank transfers, in the process continuing a strategy of cooptation that the Centre had developed over many years. (The JMM was not helped, either, by the non-financial scandals that continued to dog Shibu Soren, including a murder charge, and Suraj Mandal).' At the same time, and in response to the growing violence that marked the struggle in Ranchi and Singhbhum districts, the government of Bihar, with support from New Delhi, began a harsh crackdown on activists in the Jharkhand movement, causing many of

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them to go underground. By the time the BJP announced the formation of a Jharkhand state, popular support for a tribal homeland was finding expression in other arenas: in the anti-dam struggles in the Koel-Karo river system, in the struggle against army firing ranges in the Netarhat plateau, and in the wave o f Naxalism that was sweeping southwards from Bhojpur and Palamau and which, by November 2000, had reached the western fringes o f Ranchi district. Significantly, the luminous green graffiti that had proclaimed support for the JMM or the JCC in 1993— and which covered those parts o f Ranchi close to the airport, Ranchi College, and the Maidan— was notable by its absence in 2000. The walls o f Ranchi City were more or less devoid o f graffiti when the new state came into being, a sign, for sure, o f the passivity or even scepticism o f ordinary Jharkhandis. C o n c l u s io n The formation of a separate Jharkhand state admits of many tales. One tale would draw attention to the success of India’s democracy, and rightly so. Despite the curfews that were imposed in Ranchi city shortly after the founding o f the new state (in response to longstanding communal tensions), the transfer of power was accomplished without the bloodshed that Laloo Yadav had threatened, and with a commend­ able level of administrative competence. Officers in the All-India Services were asked to choose whether they wished to continue to serve in Bihar, or whether they would prefer their tenure in Jharkhand, and most of their preferences were accommodated, albeit with the usual transfer o f funds to politicians and senior civil servants. Negotiations also started on the distribution of assets between the two states, and the High Court of Jharkhand began to distinguish itself by a campaign o f judicial activism that challenged the tardiness o f government in providing clean drinking water and wider roads. New companies began to move into the state, along with several NGOs that closed their offices in Patna in favour of new ones in Ranchi or Jamshedpur. Perhaps for the first time, the idea that Jharkhand might become a major centre of h i-tech industry— putting behind it the legacies o f a Freight Equalisation Act that had discouraged value-added activities— was taken seriously by the local press. This story needs to be told, for its lessons are important ones. Democracy in India does work in very many respects, and to the extent that Jharkhandis are rewarded with better governance and high rates of economic growth they will haVe reason to be thankful for its success.

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There remain doubts, nevertheless, that all Jharkhandis will be fairly rewarded in the new state. The firings at Tapkara suggest that the protection o f tribal land rights will not feature prominently in the agendas o f the new government, and it is unlikely that rural dwellers will be compensated for the ecological services— including better quality air and water— that they provide to the cities by virtue o f their agro-forestry practices (Kumar, 2001). The simple transfer of powers from Bihar to Jharkhand also promises very little in terms of the dayto-day behaviour o f state officials. Far too many men and women will continue to experience the State (sarkar ) as a distant body that is best approached by intermediaries ( dalaals ), or avoided for fear of abuse, intimidation or even arrest. For such people opposition to the State is becoming a more reasonable choice. This much is evident not just in the growing Naxalite movement, but in popular campaigns to keep the State “out” o f community forests or river systems. These campaigns in turn speak to a third story that might be told of the continuing struggle for Jharkhand— one that relates to memory and a sense o f betrayal, particularly among the adivasi populations. This story circulates among the cadres of the JMM and the JCC, and others who have been active in perhaps the longest subnationalist struggle in India, including many tribal villagers. At the heart o f the story, o f course, is a tale o f the 1950s and of the sabotaging o f the “legitimate” demand o f the Jharkhand Party for a tribal state. But there is also a searching critique o f the nature o f democracy in India, and a questioning o f its apparent success. What looks like success from one vantage point looks like hypocrisy from another— a hypocrisy which extended in this case to the forced industrialization o f a region in which “the tribals” were meant to enjoy state protection, and to a redefinition o f tribalness itse lf when that becam e convenient. For all the contradictions and silences in this story, and for all that it fails to address the situation that now pertains, it stands as a powerful corrective to a narrative o f ‘success’ that is likewise reluctant to acknowledge its own silences.

B ib l io g r a p h y C. Bates (1994), ‘“Lost innocents and the loss of innocence”: Interpreting adivasi movements in South Asia’ in R. Barnes, A. Gray and B. Kingsbury (eds.), Indigenous Peoples o f AsiayAnn Arbor, Michigan: Association for Asian Studies.

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S. Corbridge (1982), ‘Industrial Development in Tribal India: The Case of the Iron Ore Mining Industry in Singhbhum District, Bihar, 1900-1960’ in N. Sengupta (ed.), Fourth World Dynamics: Jharkhand, Delhi: Authors Guild pp. 40-64. _______ (1988), ‘The Ideology of Tribal Economy and Society: Politics in Jharkhand, 1950-80’, Modem Asian Studies, 22(1): pp. 1-41. _______ (2000), ‘Competing Inequalities: The Scheduled Tribes and the Reservations System in India’s Jharkhand’, Journal o f Asian Studies, 59(1): pp. 62-85. S. Devalle (1992), Discourses o f Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand, Delhi: Sage. G.S. Ghurye (1980), The Scheduled Tribes, New Brunswick: Transaction. Government of India (1946-^9), Debates o f the Constituent Assembly o f India, Volume 9, New Delhi: Government of India Press. _______ (1962), Report o f the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Commission, New Delhi: Government of India. S. Harrison (1960), India: The Most Dangerous Decades, Princeton: Princeton University Press. A. Kohli (2001), ‘Introduction’ in A. Kohli (ed.) The Success o f India's Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-19. S. Kumar (2001), ‘Indigenous communities’ knowledge of local ecological services’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXXVI: 2859-69. _______ (2002), Social Capital Local Politics and Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Case-Study o f the Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Cambridge. S. Kumar and S. Corbridge (2002), ‘Programmed to Fail? Development Projects and the Politics of Participation’, Journal o f Development Studies, 39(2): pp. 73-103. M. Lai (1983), The Munda Elite, New Delhi: Harnam. D.N. Majumdar (1937), A Tribe in Transition, Calcutta: Longmans, Green and Company. J. Manor (2001), ‘Centre-State relations’ in A. Kohli (ed.) The Success o f India's Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 78-102. E. Mawdsley (2002), ‘Regionalism, Decentralization and Politics: State Reorganization in Contemporary India’ in R. Bradnock and G. Williams (eds), South Asia in a Globalising World, Harlow: Pearson Education, pp. 122-43. N. Minz (1968), A Memorandum on the Adivasi Problems in the Central Tribal Belt o f India and Their Permanent Solutions, Ranchi: Mimeo. J. Nehru (1955), ‘The Tribal Folk’ in The Adivasis, New Delhi: Government of India. P. Parajuli (1996), ‘Ecological Ethnicity in the Making: Developmentalist Hegemonies and Emergent Identities in India’, Identities, 3: 15-59.

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A. Prakash (1999), ‘Contested Discourses: Politics of Ethnic Identity and Autonomy in the Jharkhand Region of India’, Alternatives, 24: 461-96. N. Sengupta (ed.) (1982), Fourth World Dynamics: Jharkhand, Delhi: Authors Guild. B.D. Sharma (1978), ‘Administration for Tribal Development’, The Indian Journal o f Public Administration, 23: 515-39. K.S. Singh (1978), Tribal Ethnicity in a Multi-Ethnic Society, NewDelhi: Mimeo. M. Weiner (1978), Sons o f the Soil, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

9 The Turn Away from Cultural Mobilization in Contemporary Tamil Nadu1 Andrew Wyatt

Tamil Nadu is a striking case that illustrates many o f the themes outlined in the introduction to this volume. It was an early example o f the process of mobilization based on issues of culture and identity. The electoral dominance o f the Congress party in the state was rudely disrupted by the successful cultural mobilization o f the Dravidian movement and its electoral avatar, the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK). Counter-posed against the Congress version o f the Indian nation was an evolving Tamil nationalism. The Dravidian leader, Periar, symbolized this with his announcement that 15 August 1947 should be observed as a day of mourning (Barnett, 1976, p. 68). The concept o f the nation (Indian or Tamil?) and the definition o f the boundaries o f the political community were strongly contested by the Dravidian movement. The process o f decentring the Indian nation was well under 11have been fortunate to receive generous travel support from the Department of Politics and the Society for South Asian Studies that enabled me to gather material for this chapter during visits to Tamil Nadu in 2000 and 2001.1 am also grateful for detailed comments on drafts of this paper from participants at the 2001 UK Political Studies Association annual conference and a seminar at St Anthony’s College, Oxford in spring 2002.

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way in southern India by the time of Independence. My concern here is to establish the links between patterns o f mobilization and the development o f party politics in the state o f Tamil Nadu. The paper begins with a discussion of the concept o f mobilization and then gives a brief account o f the Dravidian mobilization that undermined the electorally dominant Congress Party. I then consider attempts to contest the dominance o f the DMK and the ADMK from within the Dravidian family. This is followed by accounts o f recent Dalit and Hindu nationalist mobilizations in Tamil Nadu. I conclude with an outline explanation o f the turn away from cultural mobilization. M

o b il iz a t io n

In what follows I have used a working definition of mobilization as the assembling and demonstration o f mass support in order to achieve a political objective. Deutsch offers a typology of political participation that could be used for analysing the impact of, and response to, mobilizing strategies. He suggests that the political consequences o f social mobilization will be seen in the following ways: increasing voter turnout, a growing audience for political rhetoric, increased activity on the streets, and the growth o f membership organizations (Deutsch, 1961, pp. 499-500).2 Guha’s essay, ‘Discipline and Mobilize’, serves as a useful reminder that mobilization is not simply something that elites do to the masses (1997).3 It is more helpful to think o f mobilization as a two-way process. Elite actors may evolve strategies of mobilization but the reception of these strategies is another matter. Voter turnout in elections in Tamil Nadu is on a declining trend and according to some observers the audience for political communication is also shrinking.4 Mobilization may take on a spontaneous form rising from the streets. Finally it is also worth noting that strategies employed by political leaders to mobilize support may take complex forms and use a variety of methods to engage the different audiences. The Rudolphs argued

2 Patterns of voting and levels of turnout offer the most readily available data by which to assess changing patterns of mobilization though I will draw on other evidence to support my argument. 3 Rather than explicitly defining ‘mobilization’ as a process, Guha prefers to discuss the purpose assigned to mobilization. 4 For example, the cable television channels run by the DMK and the ADMK are eclipsed in terms of audience share by other commercial channels.

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that parties would opt for this ‘differentiated* mobilization wherever they needed to mobilize a broad constituency (1967, pp. 26-7). In his essay Guha argued that the Congress objective was to establish the illegitimacy o f the British colonial regime by demonstrating that only the Congress movement could assemble mass support for its objective. Thus Gandhi and the Congress leadership sought to mitigate ‘the divisive effects o f caste, class, gender, and regional interests in its drive to forge the unity o f the nation’ (Guha, 1997, p. 102). Likewise it could be argued that the Dravidian movement o f the 1950s wished to assert the unity o f the Tamil nation through a process o f mass mobilization that would undermine Congress hegemony. Guha argued that a recurring problem for the Congress was the potential for radical mobilizations carried out by peasants and workers to press for structural reform and undermine the hegemonic objectives o f the Congress leadership.5 The objective o f the Dravidian mobilization shifted over time. If we accept Barnett's interpretation then the purpose o f the DMK was to mobilize electoral support in order that it could implement its programme of social reform. In the 1950s it was argued that this could best be achieved in the context of a separate Tamil nation. This objective was modified and the focus by the early 1960s was on winning office. It was felt by the DMK leadership that secession was an impractical aim and that the reform agenda could be achieved within the constraints of the Indian federal system. I will simply note here that later scholars have disputed the purposes o f this m obilization. Subramanian argues that members of the Dravidian movement, including Periar, were profoundly ambivalent about their objectives (1999, pp. 101-103). While there was a discernible emancipatory thrust to Dravidian thinking, Subramanian argues that a careful reading

5 Guha noted that the Congress leadership faced a dilemma. They wanted to mobilize the masses to demonstrate their leadership of the Indian people. However the nationalist movement did not wish the masses to get out of control and begin the restructuring of Indian society that would threaten the class interests of the Congress leadership. The Dravidian movement was to face a similar problem of mobilizing support while not threatening the coherence of the movement Barnett cites the example of student protests against the Hindi amendment in 1968. The DMK was keen to prevent protests from getting out of hand and demonstrating that the state government was no longer in control of the Dravidian mobilization (Barnett, 1976, pp. 241-45).

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reveals a counter-hegemonic project designed to secure the interests of elite Dravidianists in the face o f the dominance of the old Congress elite. Thus ‘an appreciation of the hegemonic aspects o f Periar’s politics makes resort to vaguely specified notions o f deradicalization unnecessary to explain why the Dravidian parties stopped short of fundam entally changing the distribution o f power in society’ (Subramanian, 1999, p. 103).6 T

he

R is e

of th e

D

r a v id ia n

P a r t ie s

The recent political history o f Tamil Nadu can be characterized as being marked by three waves o f m obilization: the Congress electoral mobilization, the Dravidian populist mobilization and the more recent fragmentary mobilizations. Chronologically, it is difficult to separate the first two waves but the characterization helps draw attention towards the contemporary period that is the focus of this paper. Of the three waves of mobilizing activity, the second and to a lesser extent the third resemble most closely a form o f cultural mobilization. The Congress Party dominated electoral politics in the Madras Presidency from 1936 onwards. The limited electorates prior to 1947 suited a party that was dominated by its upper caste members. The pre-eminence of the Congress was challenged at a number of points and by a number of parties and individuals before and after 1947. In spite of this the party was able to win election victories in 1946 and emerge as the largest party in 1952 (the Congress was able to gain a majority by co-opting two small Vanniar parties: the Tamil Nad Toilers and the Commonweal Party). The party went on to win the 1957 and 1962 elections decisively. A quick glance over the electoral history of Madras state in the 1950s shows that opposition to the Congress Party was fragm ented am ong a num ber o f caste-based parties, the Communists, independent candidates and the DMK. The Congress benefited from this fragmentation. In retrospect the political hold of the party on state politics was far from sure. Myron Weiner, writing in the early 1960s, having spent a period of time studying the Congress Party in Madurai, concluded that the party could not mobilize on the

6 This debate was not solely of academic interest. Weiner observed that the Communists in Madurai were unable to decide whether to collaborate with the emerging DMK (1967, p. 414). Some were suspicious of the separatist inclinations of the party while others saw in it progressive possibilities.

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basis o f ideological conviction and that its ability to mobilize voters by dispensing patronage was weak (1967). The state Congress Party under the leadership o f Kamaraj was in a relatively stronger position, having access to development funds from a friendly government at the centre, but the party had no effective strategy to counter the mobilizational efforts of its Dravidian opponents. The dominance o f the Congress Party in the immediate postIndependence period was strongly challenged by the Dravidian movement that mobilized support by promoting a distinctive and progressive Tamil nationalism. The DMK was formed as a political party in 1949 under the resourceful leadership of Annadurai to take the Dravidian ambitions into the formal political arena. Initially demands were made for secession from India though by the early 1960s these demands were softened by a politically astute party leadership. As well as promoting the Tamil language and literature, the cause o f social reform was taken up by the leaders o f this movement. The proposal to make Hindi the national language was delayed for 15 years by the wording of the 1950 Constitution. When the language formula came up for debate again in the early 1960s it was a political boon to the DMK. The party was able to play on concerns over the fate o f Tamil. Though the Madras State Congress Party attempted to mitigate the political fallout and had introduced important policies to extend the use o f Tamil, the DMK was still able to use the Hindi question (Subramanian, 1999, pp. 165-168). More generally, the DMK devoted considerable effort to mobilizing a following. Films featured heavily in this process and the DMK drew upon the cinematic talents o f a number of individuals including the leading actor-tumed-politician, M.G. Ramachandran (MGR). Barnett observed that Such political communication was intensive, creative and highly effective. The DMK used films for propaganda when cinema houses were just being extended to the rural areas of Madras. It was common for people to walk as much as five miles to see a film, and films were (and still are) seen repeatedly. ... DMK ideas therefore reached every area of life in Madras either through films, books, pamphlets, speeches, dramas, poems, songs, or newspapers (1976, pp. 83). This political communication was also extremely successful. Barnett noted that the entry of the DMK into electoral politics increased the level of participation such that electoral turnout rose significantly in the 1960s. The DMK was especially strong in Madras, other cities, and the northern half of the state. The Congress Party was defeated in the

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1967 assembly elections and has never returned to office in the state. The Congress won 41.4 per cent o f the vote but the DMK was able to win a m ajority in alliance with a number o f smaller parties and independent candidates. Subramanian has described the distinctive method o f mobilization employed by the DMK as ‘assertive populism’ (1999, pp. 74-75). This brand o f populism addressed issues of status that were o f particular concern to the middle and lower middle strata of Tamil society and thus the DMK was inclined towards policies of reverse discrimination. In terms of policy it took a cultural turn with, for example, the ultimately unsuccessful legislation to open up the priestly profession to members of the other backward classes (OBCs). Madras State was renamed Tamil Nadu shortly after the DMK came to power. The DM K also expanded the existing O BC quota (Subramanian, 1999, pp. 207-210). More recently the DMK threat to impose education in Tamil for all at the primary level reflected this brand o f populism. MGR challenged Karunanidhi’s leadership in 1972. MGR was expelled from the party and went on to form the All India Annadurai DMK (ADMK). The new party went on to win the 1977, 1980 and 1984 state assembly elections under the leadership o f MGR. The party cut into the social support base of the Congress Party and was especially successful in mobilizing the southern part of the state. The approach adopted by the ADMK has been termed ‘paternalist populism’ by Subramanian (1999, pp. 75-76). This populism was directed at the lower socio-economic strata and emphasized the role of a benevolent leader taking action to protect the poor.7 This variant of populism emphasized the distribution o f welfare benefits on a broader but narrower scale. Once again the issue o f structural reform was avoided and the generosity of the state was not based on redistributive taxation. In terms of policy, paternalist populism involved the brief imposition of dry laws and the popular Chief Minister’s Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme (Subramanian, 1999, pp. 283-85). MGR’s policies and persona enhanced the appeal o f the ADMK among women (Swamy, 1998, p. 121). Jayalalitha has continued to exploit the gender gap between the two parties. When campaigning she draws attention to her gender. Jayalalitha plays up this theme in symbolic policy moves such as the orphan cradle scheme for female babies and the provision of bicycles 7 For a critical view of Tamil populism see Harriss, 2000.

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to help Dalit girls attend school (The Times o f India, 23 June 2001; The Hindu, 29 July 2001). Popularity with the public has been taken as the vital test of an ADMK leader’s suitability (Widlund, 2000). C h a n ges

in t h e

P a ttern

of

D

r a v id ia n

M

o b il iz a t io n

The populist policies and rhetoric adopted by the two main Dravidian parties form the link between current political practice and the cultural mobilization of an earlier generation. However, there are reasons for believing that the capacity o f both parties for mobilization has diminished. The falling rate o f participation in elections and the emergence o f new parties and movements provide the strongest evidence that the political oligopoly o f the two Dravidian parties is weakening. The performance o f both parties, in and out of government, since the late 1980s also raises questions about their ability to mobilize a following. Table 9.1

Voter Turnout in Lok Sabha and Assembly Elections, Tamil Nadu, 1957-2001

Year

Lok Sabha (%)

Assembly (%)

1957 1962 1967 1971 1977 1980 1984 1989 1991 1996 1998 1999 2001

64.4 68.8 76.6 71.8 67.1 66.8 73.0 75.6 63.9 66.8 57.9 58.0

67.7 70.6 76.6 71.8 61.6 64.8 73.4 69.4 63.8 63.9

59.1

Sources: Election Commission of India < http://www.eci. gov.in>, (Government of Tamil Nadu; 1993, 1996, n.d. (a), n.d. (b)). Declining rates o f participation in elections suggests that the mobilizing capacity of the leading political parties is under pressure. One aspect o f the original cultural mobilization launched by the DMK

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in the 1960s was the increasing level o f public participation in politics epitomized by higher levels o f voting. The proportion voting peaked in 1967 at 76.6 per cent. This level of participation dipped in the 1970s but in the elections held between 1984 and 1989 turnout was not substantially lower than 1967. In the 1990s levels o f participation fell away such that little over 59 per cent o f the electorate voted in the 2001 assembly elections. Writing of the 1967 election in Tamil Nadu, Barnett argued that The decline in independent candidates and in voter support for independent candidates reflects the decreased political viability of some of the modes of protest, opposition, or mobilization represented by the independents. It also reflects the impact of the DMK and DMK-Congress competition in establishing the‘rules of the game’ (that is, defining legitimacy), setting ideological priorities, mobilizing widespread support, and aggregating a wide variety of interests and groups with the two parties (1976, pp. 152-53). We could rephrase this and argue that the recent trend reflects the increasing viability of modes of protest, opposition and mobilization used by smaller parties and movements in Tamil Nadu. The electoral accommodation o f these parties and movements demonstrates the weakening ability of the two leading Dravidian parties to set ideological priorities, mobilize support and aggregate a variety o f groups and interests. The new political parties have their own logic that will be discussed later in the chaptcr, however, there arc palpable signs of weakening on the part of the two leading parties. The DMK returned to power in 1989 after 12 years in opposition. Considerable attention was paid to policy implementation in the hope of regaining some of the ground captured by MGR’s welfarism (Suresh, 1992). This found little favour with the voters when the DMK faced early elections in 1991. The ADMK, led by layalalitha, won a massive landslide victory that kept the party in power until 1996. However, the M GR magic was lost as the ADMK adm inistration acquired a reputation for personalism and corruption. The ADMK has still not recovered its popularity following the excesses o f this period in government. The party leadership is now strongly aware o f the im portance o f alliance partners (K. Malaisamy, MP (ADM K), interview, 1 September 2001). The ADMK has never been organ­ izationally robust and this is a source of weakness in terms of mobilizing a following. It has always relied heavily on a charismatic leader figure to attract voters. The party managed to pull off a win in the 2001

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assembly election but for an extended period after 1996 a question mark was placed over the viability of Jayalalitha as party leader. The DMK in the 1990s stands in contrast to the vibrant organization that pushed the Congress out o f its path in the 1960s. After a successful period in government between 1996 and 2001 the party now has a rather staid image. Observers have argued that the DMK has been unable to adapt to the recent trend towards identity politics in the state (Panneerselvan, 1997). The senior leadership appears rather aloof while the cadres are reluctant to engage in the street politics so familiar in the 1960s. The DMK was widely considered to have provided the state with effective government after 1996 but this was not enough to persuade voters to vote for the ruling party. As one well-placed observer commented to me in 2001 after the DMK defeat, ‘Karunanidhi tried to rule like Kamaraj’. The clear inference being that electoral imperatives were sacrificed in the pursuit o f sound administration. The new parties that have emerged since 1989 have developed strong partisan relation­ ships with voters and this makes politics based on electoral alliances inevitable. The Dravidian response to the growth o f Hindu nationalism in the state provides further evidence o f change. Many assumed that the ideas popularized by the Dravidian movement had helped to limit the achievements o f the BJP in the state. It is certainly the case that the BJP is still a minor electoral player but the organizations o f the Sangh Parivar have engaged in significant mobilizational activities in the last two decades. The ADMK had traditionally been more accommodating towards Hindu nationalist ideas. Jayalalitha expressed sympathy for Hindu nationalist causes during her first term as Chief Minister, causing some critics to observe that the ‘deliberate wooing o f Brahmins and other upper caste Hindus, even while holding out largely rhetorical carrots to the backward and scheduled castes, have come to characterize “AIADMK” ideology. Jayalalitha has successfully projected herself as a devout Hindu leader who is, at the same time, not too ashamed o f the legacy of Periyar, Annadurai and the Dravidian movement* (V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, 1992, p. 1185). This surprise was somewhat overstated as Jayalalitha was only making more explicit the sympathies felt by her late political mentor, MGR. This inclination puts the ADMKBJP electoral alliance in 1998 into context. As long as Jayalalitha was out of power in the state the ADMK never settled into the alliance with the BJP and the arrangement was abruptly terminated in April 1999. Many observers were taken aback when the apparently rationalist

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DMK leadership followed the cold logic o f federalized alliance politics and allied with the BJP (Wyatt, 2002b). Joining the NDA at the centre meant that the DMK would lose the worry of being expelled from office as a result of intrigue in New Delhi. It also offered the DMK the opportunity to scoop up the ADMK’s former electoral alliance partners. Notwithstanding these political benefits, the alliance with the BJP was the source o f some discomfort among those who assumed that the DMK was still the legatee o f the rationalist tradition of the Dravidian movement.8 The DMK is the more strongly institutionalized o f the two Dravidian parties yet there has been evidence of a drift towards personalization at the highest level. Karunanidhi has promoted the political career o f his son, M.K. Stalin, who was Mayor o f Chennai and an MLA. It was widely anticipated that Stalin was being groomed to succeed his father as party leader. Shortly before the 2001 Assembly elections Karunanidhi suggested that he would not fight another election campaign and that Stalin would be the next party leader. The issue o f leadership is a sensitive one for the DMK. While it would appear that Stalin is generally popular in the party, there are those with reservations not least because the party would expect to participate in the appointment o f a new leader. The apparent dynastic turn has already caused turmoil in the party with a major split over the issue in 1993. Part of the reason for the weakening ability o f the two main parties is the fragmentation caused by other parties that claim to be part o f the Dravidian tradition. O t h e r ‘D

r a v id ia n ’

M

o b il iz a t io n s

In late 1993 V. Gopalsamy, a senior DMK leader popularly known as ‘Vaiko’, was expelled from the DMK. Shortly afterwards Vaiko, supported by a significant num ber o f m iddle-ranking DMK party officials, launched a new party called the ‘renaissance’ DMK (MDMK) (Vaiko, MP (MDMK), interview, 25 August 2001). Vaiko was expelled because he expressed his discontent with the dominant position of Karunanidhi’s family within the DMK. The MDMK claims to represent the true spirit o f the DMK and appeals to voters sympathetic to the ideology o f the DMK but unhappy with its personalization. Vaiko and the MDMK have campaigned for greater state autonomy and further recognition for Tamil (MDMK, 1998). 8 This became clear in a range of interviews I conducted in Tamil Nadu during August and September 2001.

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

More controversially, Vaiko has been vocal on the issue of providing a homeland for the Sri Lankan Tamils. The party has only enjoyed limited electoral success, winning the support o f about 5 per cent o f the electorate on its best outings. However, the party has improved its profile as a consequence o f its participation in electoral alliances and the NDA coalition government at the centre. The significance o f the party for this discussion is that it has cut into the support o f the DMK and its very existence is a challenge to the legitimacy o f the parent party. The stature of its leader is a key asset in terms o f mobilizing voters (Widlund, 2000). Vaiko is projected as a leader with energy and integrity. An earlier challenge to the DMK came from the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) (the toiling people’s party). The origins of the party lie in protests in 1987 by members of the Vanniar caste community against the system o f reservation in operation in the state (Suresh, 1992). The Vanniars alleged that members of the most backward castes, such as themselves, were being overlooked in the allocation of jobs and political offices. The numerical size of the community, and its concentration in key constituencies, has worked to the advantage o f the Vanniar leaders. Caste-based mobilization gave the group prominence in the 1950s before it was coopted first by Congress and then by the DMK (Rudolph and Rudolph, 1967). The PMK was formed in 1989 with the intention of assembling a broad coalition of disadvantaged lower caste groups including Dalits. Since then the party has incresingly focused on issues of interest to the Vanniar community. The PMK has successfully mobilized the majority of the Vanniars. This group is able to swing electoral outcomes in a significant number of constituencies and this has placed the PMK at the fulcrum of Tamil Nadus alliance politics. The party leader, Dr Ramadoss, is an outspoken and mercurial figure who has taken full advantage o f his privileged position. The political trajectory o f the Vanniars is significant for a number of reasons. For two decades it represented the success of the DMK in submerging particular caste identities in a broader populist coalition. The reversal of this position reflects the growing salience o f caste identity in state politics and the failure of the DMK to mobilize the Vanniars. For his part, Ramadoss locates his rhetoric within the ideology of the Dravidian movement. In addition to his campaign for ‘social justice’ on behalf of the Vanniars, he continues to argue the case for the Tamil language. He also gives vocal support to the cause o f Tamil Eelam. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the engagement o f the two main Dravidian parties with coalitions at the centre have had the combined

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effect of making Eelam a non-issue for the political establishment. The smaller parties have a rather different relationship with the BJP and the state government, enabling them to discuss the issue. Thus the PMK, and the MDMK, have the opportunity to outflank their Dravidian rivals by speaking in favour o f the larger Tamil nation. Since the 1998 Lok Sabha election, the PMK and the MDMK have become important participants in electoral alliances in the state. The two main parties are unable to mobilize sufficient numbers of voters to win elections by themselves. The Dravidian political following is shrinking and it is divided among an increasing number of parties. The traditional pattern of alliance politics was that the DMK and the ADMK dictated terms to their junior partners. This culture is slowly beginning to change as the two main parties recognize the limits of their mobilizing capacity. D a l it M

o b il iz a t io n

As implied in earlier sections caste has a long and intricate involvement with politics in Tamil Nadu. The populist mobilization engineered by the Dravidian parties concealed the impact o f particular caste interests on politics in the state. In terms of more general caste identities it could be argued that the rise o f the Dravidian parties represented the political coming of age o f certain backward caste groups in the state. In contrast the large Dalit minority in the state did not find itself adequately represented in either the ideology or the practice o f the governing parties in the state. One consequence o f this alienation has been a trend towards independent mobilization on the part of Dalits in Tamil Nadu. The profile o f the Maharashtrian leader, Ambedkar, has been raised significantly in the state. An example o f this development is provided by Moses who gives a detailed account of the suppression of a local m obilization to reclaim usurped pan cham a land, set aside for Untouchables in the 1930s, in Chengalpattu district. As in other parts of India the installation o f a statue o f Ambedkar provided the catalyst for the repression of the Dalit protesters (Moses, 1995, pp. 247-248). A process o f Ambedkarization is under way in the state with the image of the legendary Dalit leader becoming a familiar sight as he is depicted in wall paintings, political posters and statues. In recent years this broader mobilization has begun to have electoral consequences. Thus far, the mobilization has had most impact on two of the three largest Dalit castes in Tamil Nadu. In southern Tamil Nadu, the Pudhiya Thamizhagam (PT), led by Dr K. Krishnaswamy, claims to represent the pallars or devendrakulla

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

vellars. Krishnaswamy resigned from the DMK to promote the Pallar interests using the vehicle o f the Devendrakulla Vellar Sangam. Krishnaswamy, standing as an independent, won the Ottapidaram assembly seat in the 1996 state assembly elections. He then formed a political party, the Pudhiya Thamizhagam (PT), just before the 1998 election. Krishnaswamy explained his motivation to me in the following terms: We saw that there were many parliamentary parties, regional and national, but none of them was giving any representation to the Dalits and weaker sections such as the Muslims and Christians. Dalits are 50-60 per cent of this group. But they do not hold any vital portfolios in the existing political parties. They were merely treated as a votebank. The big parties were for the rich and high caste people. That is why we were forced to start a party. The situation arose because the m iddle o rd er an d backw ard classes cap tu red pow er through

the Dravidian parties, the DMK and the AIADMK (interview, 28 February 2000).

The PT contested 15 seats in the south in the 1998 Lok Sabha election and won 1.7 per cent of the statewide vote. The party did not win any seats but it was reckoned to have deprived three TM C-D M K parliamentary candidates of sufficient votes to ensure their defeat (rediff.com, 27 October 1998). The PT put down a marker and it was quickly drawn into alliance negotiations before the 1999 and 2001 elections. So far it has failed to win any further seats in the legislative assembly but the emergence o f the party has been associated with intercaste violence involving Dalits in the southern districts. Leaders o f the dominant Thevar castes have responded to the Dalit assertion with a counter-mobilization o f their own and reassured the ADMK of their continuing support. In the northern part o f the state the Viduthalai Siruthaigal or the Dalit Panthers o f India (DPI) have mobilized a following among the paraiyars. In many ways the DPI is more of a social movement than a political party. However, in 1999 the DPI entered the Lok Sabha elections. This strategy recognized that significant resources flow from winning seats and election campaigns are also a hook on which to hang other forms o f social mobilization. The DPI has frequently been in contestation with the dominant Vanniar caste group that is also concentrated in northern Tamil Nadu. The DPI has adopted an assertive, controversial and confrontational style of politics reminiscent of the BSP in north India. For example, DPI leader Thirumavalavan called for a ban on the PMK’s participation in the 2001 state assembly

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elections (The Hindu , 18 December 2000). Thirumavalavan claimed that the DPI entered politics because for decades the Dravidian parties had exploited the Dalits ‘as their votebanks and “palanquin bearers”’ (The Hindu , 5 August 1999). It is important not to overstate the extent o f this mobilization. The division of the Dalit constituency is painfully clear. The PT and the DPI are moving on parallel tracks. The other significant group o f Dalits, the Arunthathiyars, remain beyond the scope o f the m obilization organized by the PT and the D PI. Nevertheless, the Dalit mobilization that has occurred to date in Tamil Nadu is important. There is a clear rejection o f the transcending Tamil nation that was central to the Dravidian movement and as such it contributes to the fragmentation of the political common sense that emerged following the Congress defeat in 1967. H

in d u

of

N

a t io n a l ism a n d

C u ltu ra l M

A lt e r n a t iv e F o r m s

o b il iz a t io n

It is ironic that at the very time that the effects o f the Dravidian cultural mobilization are beginning to wear off, the cultural efforts o f the Hindu nationalist movement are beginning to gather momentum. The Sangh Parivar has long been active in the state o f Tamil Nadu though for a variety o f reasons its mobilization did not translate into an electoral breakthrough in the state until 1998 when it benefited from an alliance with the ADMK. The strategy o f the BJP and its allied organizations has been to mobilize support in a variety of ways. In many cases this has taken the form of ‘non-political’ cultural mobilization that has supported the Hindu nationalist ideological agenda. As one would expect, a leading objective o f the Sangh has been to counter the ideological thrust of the Dravidian parties. One means of doing this has been to gloss over the existence o f Tamil national identity and emphasize the importance o f the greater Indian nation. The standard answer to the question ‘what is distinctive about the BJP in Tamil Nadu?’ is routinely met with a variant o f the answer ‘nothing, we are a national party’ (various interviews, February-March 2000). The answer implies that the BJP needs no special programme or strategy for the state because by catering for the national interest these issues will be resolved. The nation as a whole has a unity and the party stands for that. Special pleading for state interests is associated with regional parties and is implicitly rejected as running contrary to the national interest. In spite of the official denial the Hindu nationalist mobilization has been adapted to local conditions with the paradoxical

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

objective o f promoting the larger national agenda. As elsewhere there has been a division o f labour among different Hindu nationalist organizations. The mobilization has taken a number of forms. The most obvious is the electoral mobilization of the BJP in order that state power can be used as a means of furthering the aims of nationalist transformation. However, the nationalist mobilization also works at other levels. The members of the Sangh mobilize support in the areas o f education, religion and social service. These can be accurately described as various forms of cultural mobilization. These different methods of mobilization are mutually supportive and overlapping. The educational and religious activities contribute to a direct transformation of society in their own way. Attitudes and patterns o f behaviour are shaped in ways consistent with a nationalist ethos. These activities create an ambience receptive to the political rhetoric of the BJP and mobilize voters by indirect (and sometimes direct) means. The objective of nationalist transformation has been pursued in a variety o f ways in Tamil Nadu. In what follows I will provide a number o f examples of this broad-based mobilization. The Hindu Munnani is the organization with the highest public profile. It has especially come to public attention through its promotion of the Vinayaka Chaturthi festival (Fuller, 2001). These processions have drawn in the participation o f a wide range o f people such that the festival now has a momentum o f its own. The Munnani has also campaigned on a number o f other issues in defence o f the ‘Hindu interest*. A recurring issue has been the status o f temple trusts with the Hindu Munnani seeking complete freedom from state government control (The Hindu, 23 March 2001). The Sangh Parivar has attempted to build on the association of Swami Vivekananda with the region. The Vivekananda Kendra has been charged with the responsibility o f linking Vivekananda’s legacy with the ambitions of the Hindu nationalist movement. Hindu nationalists gave enthusiastic support to the drive to construct the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanyakumari. The location of Kanyakumari at the tip o f India has been incorporated into an account o f India’s spiritual geography that binds the Tamil south into a larger national whole. Swami Ranganathananda eloquently expressed this view on 15 September 1970, at the inauguration o f the Vivekananda Rock Memorial: The mighty Himalayas to the far north have been the symbol of India and her focus of national inspiration during all these millennia of our history; and the

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Himalayas represent the spirit of meditation, the spirit of inwardness.... Today we have another symbol and centre of inspiration for India in this Kanyakumari in the far south, impressively situated at the confluence of the three oceans. Kanyakumari represents the expression of that innate divinity of man and of the consequent universality in his vision and sympathy, in the practical field of individual and collective life and endeavour: it represents what Vivekananda calls Practical Vedanta (Vivekananda Kendra, 1994, p. 43). The activities o f the Vivekananda Kendra exemplify the Hindu nationalist concern for cultural mobilization. In a booklet titled ‘Indian Culture’ the work o f Swami Vivekananda is linked to the objectives of Hindu nationalism: Our aims and objects are mainly man-making and nation-building by awakening and intensifying a spiritual urge among the people and channelizing it into various activities of national reconstruction—economic, social, cultural, as well as spiritual. When we think of the reconstruction of a Nation, we must identify the foundations upon which we are going to build the Nation. If the foundation is strong, the building will be strong. Hence we must build our nation on the impregnable foundation of our culture (ibid, p. 1). It is argued that this cultural foundation needs to be shared by all communities that live in India and it is stated that a common culture does not imply a shared religion (ibid., p. 7). Nevertheless it is made clear that Indian culture is rooted in Hinduism though the claim is made that ‘our culture is universal as it is based on Vedanta which is a universal religion’ (ibid., p. 39). As well as pursuing an ideological agenda the Vivekananda Kendra runs a number o f educational and development progammes in Tamil Nadu. The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) has attempted to influence religious practice in the state through the activities o f the Gramak Kovil Poojarigal Peravai (S. Vedantam [VHP], interview, 3 March 2000). A scheme has been established to train village priests and improve their livelihoods. The VHP has also campaigned to get the state government to provide pensions for these poojaris. It is hoped that in addition to the cultural impact of these activities the BJP will also have access to key opinion-formers at election time. T

o w a r d s an

E x p la n a tio n

Providing a comprehensive explanation o f the turn away from Dravidian m obilization towards the m ore recent fragm entary mobilizations is more than can be achieved here. However, it is possible

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The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

to present the outline o f an explanation. An important exogenous variable that I have discussed in more detail elsewhere could be described as the larger political consequences o f the decline o f the Congress Party as a national force (Wyatt, 2002b). The relationship o f the political parties in Tamil Nadu to national politics has altered significantly since 1991. These parties are no longer simply regional parties. While their support is clearly regionally bounded they are frequendy participants in national politics. The national decline o f the Congress has its local correlates. Following the DMK victory in 1967 and the subsequent rise of the ADMK the Congress Party became an important balancing third party that contributed stability to the state party system. The fragmentation o f the party system means that the Congress no longer performs that function. One party can no longer bridge the gap between the DMK and the ADMK. This opens up opportunities for small parties that might benefit in electoral alliance negotiations and potentially participate in the formation of a coalition government in the state or at the centre (Wyatt, 2002b). Given this context I would advance a twofold explanation. The first part concentrates on the contribution made by elite actors to the changing pattern of mobilization in the state. However I take a modified critical realist position in which actions are seen to take place in the context o f social structure. Thus the second part o f my explanation concentrates on the structural changes that influence patterns of mobilization in Tamil Nadu.9 The discussion o f elite agency can be inserted into the discussion of the two leading Dravidian parties outlined above. The enervation o f the ruling elite has had an impact on party fortunes. The dominant position o f the leaders, and their importance during campaigns, mean that their actions have important consequences. This introduces an element o f contingency and we can identify key turning points at which decisions have a critical impact. For example, the decision made by Prime Minister Rao to ally with the ruling ADMK in 1996 accelerated the fragmentation of the party system as the Congress Party split and lost credibility. Likewise the capricious decisions made by Dr Ramadoss have introduced instability into the process o f alliance formation. The activities of the smaller parties also reflect the impact o f agency. The mobilizations carried out by the MDMK, the PT, the DPI and the BJP 9 Katharine Adeney and I have developed this argument further in an analysis of democratization in South Asia (Adeney and Wyatt, 2004).

The Turn Away from Cultural Mobilization

251

have achieved impressive results given that the parties usually have meagre resources when compared to the establishment parties. These elite actions need to be situated in a structural context. The developments described in the preceding paragraph have not occurred in a social vacuum and we need to account for the structural advantages and inhibitions that have shaped developments in the state. Lewis explains this clearly: Pre-existing social structures, bequeathed to the current generation of actors by actions undertaken in the past, constitute the conditions in which current action takes place and so shape (without determining) the latter. In turn, the (reproduced or transformed) set of structures which are the product of current behaviour form the context for the next round of action (2002, p. 21). I have defined structures as constraints on political actors. They are relatively durable. However, they are subject to change in the face o f determined collective action. In other words we have to account for agency: the ability o f political actors to determine outcomes. This agency may be constrained to a greater or lesser degree by structural factors. I have assumed that the degree o f structural constraint (or enablement) will vary over time and according to the situation of the actor. As Jessop argues one actor may benefit from structural arrangements that disdvantage another actor (1990). Five structural factors can be seen to have made an important contribution to the pattern o f mobilization: institutions, ideology, culture, caste, and the economy. The political actors discussed above have to work within political and governing institutions that are not o f their own making. As discussed above the all-India political framework has been an important factor. Similarly the Tamil Nadu party system is structured by the single member simple plurality system that has important implications for the relationships between small and large parties. This is not to argue that political actors are trapped inside these structures but it is to suggest that we need to appreciate the impact of institutions on political behaviour. The influence of Dravidian ideology has been extensive and it seems to me that some o f the assumptions generated by the early Dravidian movement now have a life o f their own and are relatively resistant to the actions of individual politicians. These ideas contribute to the shared meanings and understandings that have frequently worked to the advantage of the Dravidian parties (Rajadurai and Geetha, 19%). The PMK, for example, has emphasized the cause of Tamil Eelam and the language issue. The pervading presence o f

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Dravidian ideology has inhibited some political projects. It was frequently assumed that Hindu nationalism would struggle against the rationalist common sense generated by the Dravidian movement. This has unravelled at the elite level in recent years but it is far from clear that Hindu nationalist ideas have gained widespread popular acceptance. Culture is also part of the structural context. While not arguing for a primordialist interpretation I assume that there are broadly accepted social practices that are not easy to change rapidly. In the context of mobilization the extent o f popular religiosity in the state has given the Hindu nationalist movement an opening to exploit. We can discern changes, such as the Vinayaka Chaturthi festival, though it is important not to overstate their significance (Rajadurai and Geetha, 2002, p. 123). The political culture of the state also conditions agent’s actions, for example it is widely accepted that a strong party leader is an important political asset though, as Widlund (2000) has documented, leadership contributes to mobilization in different ways according to party. With the exception of the BJP, the tendency to exalt the leader has been a feature o f all o f the mobilizations discussed above. Economic developments also contribute to the context o f politics in the state. It has been observed that the economic prosperity o f some Dalits has encouraged a previously subordinate group to assert themselves as they become resentful o f the disjuncture between their economic and social status. At the same time those social groups marginally higher than the Dalits in the caste hierarchy are keen that their relative status is not eroded. These background conditions have assisted the political leaders o f the PT and the DPI seeking to mobilize an electoral following. Washbrook (1989) argues that the agricultural system o f the state, with many small landowners, produced a stunted class structure without a fully developed hierarchy. However, it is difficult to characterize politics in Tamil Nadu as having a class character. There is a degree of socio-economic differentiation between the supporters o f the ADMK and the DMK (Swamy, 1998). However this differentiation is far from absolute.10 Furthermore the fragmentary mobilizations of the contemporary period are based on identities other

10 The ADMK tends to be favoured by poorer voters but the DMK does not lag that far behind. The gap between the parties makes the crucial difference at election time. However, the overlapping constituencies attest to the success of the populist strategies in drawing together socially diverse coalitions.

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253

than class. Economic issues do not feature strongly in the mobilizational strategy adopted by either party (Kennedy, 2002). In the 2001 assembly elections economic conditions did not have a discernible impact on the outcome. This is not to claim that important economic changes have not taken place in the state since the 1991 reforms but rather that the political effect is not yet clear. This may be about to change. As Washbrook pointed out, in the 1980s the fiscal basis of the populist welfarism o f the ADMK was unstable and was a potential source o f political instability (1989). The austerity measures introduced by the ADMK government in late 2001 may be the augury of profound changes in the political economy of the state but it is too early to make a categorical judgement on these developments. Caste, as is the case with religion, does not form an immutable structure, but neither is it ephemeral. There has been important change but caste regains a potent form of social stratification. Political elites have worked with this form o f identity such that we can talk o f ‘the strange career o f Tamil caste’ (Dirks, 1996, p. 293) Washbrook also argued that ‘while, then, caste remains utterly fundamental to Tamil society, Tamil politics has progressed by ceasing to deliberate on any of the issues of principle which it raises’ (1989, p. 208). The Dravidian movement helped to diminish the importance o f particular caste identities with its broad populist mobilization that dealt with caste on its own terms. In retrospect it can be seen that this pattern o f mobilization did not marginalize caste identity as it drew attention to caste-based reservations. This, combined with the failure to deal adequately with the issue o f untouchability, meant that the Dravidian parties sowed the seeds for the resumption o f identity politics. The outcome o f the 2001 assembly elections was a coup for the ADMK. It was able to put together an unbeatable electoral alliance and won a clear majority on its own negating the possibility that the political fragmentation in the state might translate into the formation of a coalition government. The voting system militates against smaller parties and encourages electoral alliances. The ADMK, under the skillful leadership o f Jayalalitha, was able to run against the current of broader changes in Tamil politics and society. It remains to be seen if such an audacious outcome can be achieved again. The Dravidian mobilization has in many ways run its course and there will be more challenges to the electoral hegemony of the two main parties in the future. There is an irony here that chimes with Guha’s account of mobilization discussed at the beginning of the chapter. The Dravidian

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movement was able to mobilize a movement around an alternative conception o f the nation and make an early contribution to the decentring o f the Indian nation. However the embodiment of Tamil identity in the populist politics o f the DMK and the ADMK has not been sufficiently robust to resist the decentring activity o f those who wish to mobilize more around more exclusive identities. It is ironic that the most energetic cultural mobilization currently taking place in Tamil Nadu has the objective of recentring the nation around a vision of a transcending Indian and Hindu nation.

B ib lio g r a p h y Press So u rces

‘Caste-based politics to the fore in Tamil Nadu’, Rediff on the Net, 27 October • 1998 < http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/oct/27tn.htm> ‘A Watershed for Dalits’, The Hindu, 5 August 1999 ‘Disqualify PMK from contesting polls: DPI*, The Hindu, 18 December 2000

'Hindu Munnani s condition for support to the DMK Front’, The Hindu, 23 March 2001 ‘Jaya the saviour for baby girls’, The Times o f India, 23 June 2001 < http://news.indiatimes.com/news/230601toi/23mche2.htm> ‘TMK will continue in AJLADMK front’, The Hindu, 29 July 2001 < http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/0429223r.htm> A rticles, B o o k s and O fficial P u blication s

K. Adeney and A. Wyatt (2003), ‘Democracy in South Asia: Getting Beyond the Structure-Agency Dichotomy’, forthcoming in Political Studies. M.R. Barnett (1976), 77ie Politics o f Cultural Nationalism in South India, Princeton: Princeton University Press. K.W. Deutsch (1961), ‘Social Mobilization and Political Development*, American Political Science Review, 55(3). N.B. Dirks (1996), ‘Recasting Tamil Society: The Politics of Caste and Race in Contemporary Tamil Nadu’, in C.J. Fuller (ed), Caste Today, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Election Commission of India C.J. Fuller (2001), ‘The “Vinayaka Chaturthi” Festival and Hindutva in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(19), pp. 1607-16.

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V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai (1992), ‘Off With Their Heads—Suppression of Dissent in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27(23). Government of Tamil Nadu (1993), General Elections to the Lok Sabha, 19521991, Madras: Public (Elections) Department _______ (1996), Results and Statistical Data of General Elections to Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly, 1991, Madras: Public (Elections) Department. _______ (n.d. (a)), Report on General Elections, 1996, Chennai: Public (Elections) Department. _______ (n.d. (b)), Report on General Elections to Lok Sabha, 1998, Chennai: Public (Elections) Department. R. Guha (1997), Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. J. Harriss (2000), ‘Populism, Tamil Style: Is It Really a Success?*, Review o f Development and Change, 5(2). B. Jessop (1990), ‘State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place’, Cambridge: Polity Press. L. Kennedy (2002), ‘Contrasting Responses to Economic Liberalization in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu’, Delhi: Mimeo. P.A. Lewis (2002), ‘Agency, Structure and Causality in Political Science: A Comment on Sibeon’, Politics, 22(1). A.R. Panneerselvan (1997),‘On the Violence Threshold’, Outlook, 21 May 1997. MDMK (1998), A Profile: Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Chennai, MDMK. S.V. Rajadurai and V. Geetha (1996), ‘DMK Hegemony: The Cultural Limits to Political Consensus’, in T.V. Sathyamurthy (ed), Region, Religion, Caste, Gender and Culture in Contemporary India>Delhi: Oxford University Press. _______ (2002), ‘A Response to John Harriss’, Journal o f Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 40(3). LI. Rudolph and S.H. Rudolph (1967), The Modernity o f Tradition: Political Development in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. N. Subramanian (1999), Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. V. Suresh (1992), ‘The DMK Debacle: Causes and Portents’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27(42), pp. 2316-17. A.R. Swamy (1998), ‘Parties, Political Identities and the Absence of Mass Political Violence in South India’, in A. Kohli and A. Basu (eds), Community Conflicts and the State in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. D. Washbrook (1989), ‘Caste, Class and Dominance in Modern Tamil Nadu: Non-Brahmanism, Dravidianism and Tamil Nationalism’ in F. Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds.), Dominance and State Power in Modern India, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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M. Weiner (1967), Party Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I. Widlund (2000), Paths to Power and Patterns o f Influence: The Dravidian Parties in South Indian Politics, Ph.D dissertation published by Uppsala University Library. A. Wyatt (2002a),‘NewAlignments in South Indian Politics: The 2001 Assembly Elections in Tamil Nadu’, Asian Survey, 42(5). _______ (2002b), ‘The Federal Dimension of Party Politics in Tamil Nadu*, The Indian Journal o f Federal Studies, 3(2).

Index Abahon, 192 Aboriginal and Semi-Aboriginal Tribes, 220, 226 absolutism, 22, 122, 125,126 acculturation, 7 actionist ideology, 29 activism, 52, 125,186 adivasi communities, 12,217-9,2212, 225, 227, 231 administrative design, 199 Advani, L.K., 125, 144, 231 affinity, sense of, 58, 143, 146 Agarwala, Jyotiprasad, 186 aggregation model, 12 aggregation process, 11 aggressiveness, 28 Ahimsa, 183 Ahoms, 170-2, 175-6, 189, 191 women, 176, 185 Ajan Fakir, 191 Akali Dal, 203, 205 Akhandananda, Swami, 113-14, 118 Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, 126-7 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), 121, 124, 125 All India Annadurai Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (ADMK), 239-42, 245, 247, 250, 253-4 allegiance, 59 alliances, 21, 66 Ambedkar, B.R. 45n, 201, 213, 245

ambiguity, 49, 143 anachronism, 184 Anavil Brahmins, 201 Andhra Pradesh, 224 ethnicization, 206 formation of, 202-3, 216 Annadananda, Swami, 113 anonymity, 48 anti-colonial campaign, 45, 59, 66 anti-corruption, 57 anti-Muslim stance, 51 ‘apathy’, 109 Appadurai, Arjun, 25 Apte, Shivaram Shankar, 124 Arthashastra 197 Arunthathiyars, 247 Arya Samaj, 106,112,129 Aryans, 119 Aryavrata, 173, 207, 214 Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), 187-8, 191 Assam Accord 1985,191 Assam Buranji> by Haliram Dhekial Phukan, 173, 177 Assam Desher Itihas Yani, by Haliram Dhekial Phukan, 173 Assam, Assamese British rule, 173 culture, 183 history, 168-79 identity, 187 integration, 192

258

Index

intelligentsia, 170, 174, 187, 193 language, linguistic criteria, 1704, 203 nationality, 182 political mobilizations, 187-92 struggle for separate state, 204 women, 181-5 assertiveness, 125 • authoritarianism, authority, 20-1,53, 77 n autonomy, 204-5, 214 Babri Masjid demolition, 54,57,1667 Babur, 166, 212 backwardness, 170 Bailungs, 170 Bajrang Dal, 53 ‘Banalization’ of public rituals, 24 Bangaldesh, 168, 215 Barphukan, Lachit, 167, 175-9, 18692, 193 Barua, Gunabhiram, 168n, 172, 177 Barua, Harakanta, 172 Barua, Padmadhar Gohain, 172,1801 Basu, Jyoti, 94 Bengal, 66 separatist movements on linguistic bases, 199 Bezbaruah, Lakshminath, 180-1, 182« Bharatiya Jana Sangh, 122-3,125,142 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 2,5,26, 33,42,55,61,71,105,122-3,125, 137, 139, 142, 151-2, 164,213 in Gujarat 143-6;— Kachchh, 158-63 in Jharkhand, 218-9, 223 Shiv Sena alliance, 53, 55, 59 in Tamil Nadu, 242, 247-8, 250 in West Bengal, 71, 80,90-94

Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, 121 Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, 107, 121 Bhau Rangari Ganapati Mandal, 45 Bhave, Vinoba, 116 Bhiwandi riots, 52 Bhujbal, Chaggan, 52 Bhuyan, Surya Kumar, 174n, 175-9, 186, 19 Bihar separatist movements on linguistic bases, 199 see abo Jharkhand Birbhum, West Bengal panchayats, 82-90 political activism, 13 stability through political discourse, 97-100 Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, 39 Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam (BAPS), 154-8, 162-3 Bodo Liberation Front, 187 Bodo race, 189, 191 bourgeois hegemony, 11 Brahmins, 41,45n, 201, 207 Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, 57n, 59 Bunch o f Thoughts, by M.S. Golwalkar, 118-20 buranji, 170-6, 186 bureaucracy, bureaucratic system, 10, 54, 86, 139, 171, 189, 199, 204 callousness, 54 caste, casteism, 19-20,34,42,73,116, 144, 164, 203, 204-7, 251 hierarchy, 143, 154, 161 mobilizations, 244 and rehabilitation in post­ earthquake Kachchh, Gujarat, 137, 140, 146-8, 153-9 and territory, 201-2

Index

causality, 77 centralization, 197, 198 centre-state relations, 216 centrifugal forces, 211-3 Chakravarty, Bijoya, 188 Chandanwadi, Mumbai: political activities, 31-3 character building, 110-12 and political action, 122 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 174, 183 chauvinism, 53 Chhotanagpur, 220, 223, 226 Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act, 224 Christians, 114, 119, 130 civil society, 4,40,42 clans rivalry, 176 class, 20, 34, 42, 86,99, 180 consciousness, hierarchies, 84,97, 169 struggle, 82-90, 98 coalition system, 2 coherence, 76, 77, 79, 96, 98 collective will, collectivity, 19, 21,43 colonialism, colonial, 9,11,43-50,51, 169, 174 commitment, 130, 140 ‘common sense’, 174 communalism, 72,90,93-7,100,111, 115, 137, 164,214 communalization, 99 communication, 29, 49 communism, communist, 51, 66, 82, 97 Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), 82-90 communists, 237 communitarian, 225 community, embodiment 22 compartmentalization, 39 competition, 3, 73, 80, 139—40, 143, 162

259

conflicts, 3-4 Congress see Indian National Congress consciousness, 59n, 87, 117 consensus, 3 Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD), 200 Constitution of India, 197, 201 consumerism, 152 contradictions, 41 cooptation and violence, 228-30 corruption and manipulation, 26,28, 54, 57, 59, 63, 71, 87, 94 criminal-politician nexus, 59 culture, cultural, 9,38-41,64,65,66, 118, 251 and colonialism, 43-50 diversity, 6, 10 heterogeneity, 199 identity, 1-3, 6-14, 219, 234 inheritance, 8 linguistic religious communities, 199 mobilization, 3,5,11,13,40-2,57, 247-9 perception 10 political use, 45,185 sacralization, 49 symbols and media representa­ tions see symbolism cynicism, 26 Daivanga caste, 170 Dalit Panther of India (DPI) (Viduthalai Siruthaigal), 246-7, 250 dalits, 12, 41, 146, 201, 244; identity 14; mobilization, 245-7 Dani, Prabhakar Balwant, 123 decentralization, 100 de-communalization, % Deendayal Research Institute (DRI), 126

260

Index

democracy, 8-10, 21, 24, 34, 48, 53, 73,99, 100,216, 230 Democracy and Discontentment, by Atul Kohli, 73 de-nationalization, 3 Deoras, Balasaheb, 107-8, 123, 124— 8 desk bhakti, 50 Deshmukh, Nana, 126 DevendrakullaVellar Sangam, 246 devotion, 63 Dewan, Maniram, 186 Dhar Committee, 200-2 Dhebhar Commission on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, 223 Didolkar, Datta Devidas, 121 Dighe, Anand 31, 33 dikus, 219, 224 discipline, 75, 89,111 discrimination, 239 divination, 170 divinity, 121 dominance, local forms, 5 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), 234-45 Dravidian mobilization/ separatism, 14, 119,211,235-7, 240-54 Dravidian parties, rise, 237-40 dualism, 40 Dudai, Kachchh, Gujarat see Indraprastha resettlement, Kachchh, Gujarat duty, 121 dynamism, 9 East India Company, 169 efficacy, 53 egalitarianism, 50 Ekatmata yatra, 211-2 ‘emasculation’, 109, 112 Emergency (1975-77), 125 emotional affectrvity, 41

endogamy, 143 Enron, 54 entropy, logic of, 30-3 equality, 201 ethical relativism, 125 ethicizing, 41, 42,43, 53, 65 ethics, 42, 66 ethnicity, ethnic, 79 differences, 182 identity, 219 European, notion of political power, 22,43 factionalism, 54, 66,144-5, 163 family model of Hindu political organizations, 141-3 festivals, political celebrations, 27-28, 32, 56-7 foreign aggression and occupation, defence from, 109 foreigners, as demons, 47 Foucault, Michel, 4, 34, 42n, 48 fragmentation, 3, 7, 9, 52, 237, 250 freedom struggle, 186 Gadapani, 177-8 Gait, Edward, 171-2 Gamdev and J.K. Building Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav Mandal, 1931 59 Ganapati, 52 Ganapati festival (Ganapatiutsav) political mobilization, 25,26,27n, 30,44-7, 56-7, 58-65 Gandhi, Indira, 125, 228 Gandhi, M.K., 10, 25, 44n, 96, 108, 115, 123, 125, 181, 186, 199, 200, 209, 236 Gandhi, Rajiv, 244 Gandhi, Sonia, 71,148, 151 Gandhian, 181-3 Gangasagar Mela, 107 gender, 42,180-1

Index

implications of political mobil­ ization of religion, 37 geographical unity, 117 Gharjeuti, 181,184 globalization, 3, 7 Godhra, Gujarat, train incident, 147, 168, 192 Godse, Nathuram, 115, 209 Gokhale, Gopalkrishna, 45 Golwalkar, Madhav Sadashiv, 108, 111,125-6, 128-9, 131-2, 151 seva brought to maturity’, 112-24 Gondwanaland, 221 goondaismy29 Gopalsamy, V. 243—4 Gorkhaland, demand for, 204 Gorkhas, 204 govemability, crisis, 72 governance, 34, 43-4, 51 gram panchayatsy80-1, 87-8, 93-4 Gujarat earthquake, 136-7 rural rehabilitation after, 138-41 Gujaratis, 201 Harijans in Kachchh, Gujarat, 154-6, 158-64 harmony, 94 Haryana, 206 Hedgewar, Keshav Bahrain, 127,1289 sevay initiated by, 106-12, 114, 116-7, 124-5 hegemony, 5, 40,42, 64,66 hierarchy, hierarchies, 4, 50, 88 Himachal Pradesh linguistic criteria, 203 Hindu Earth, concept of, 211-3 Hindu, Hindus, 57, 93-4, 107, 121, 146, 168, 197, 223 Muslim relations/tension, 54, 93, 95, 99, 148-9 mythology, 47, 142

261

nationalism/nationalists, 1, 5, 13, 42, 52, 117, 137, 141-3, 166, 207,211,242, 247-9 and the cult of Bhoomi (land), 208-11 refugees, 115 religious symbolism, see symbolism society, 191 women, 184 Hindu Mahasabha, 106, 110-1, 115 Hindu Sabha, 106 Hinduism, 9, 61, 105, 116, 118, 120, 129, 130-2, 137, 159, 163,187 and caste, conflict, 145 diversity, 137, 141 Hindutva, 37,63, 105, 162, 190 a distinct ideology, 52 politics, 136-7 propositions of ideal society, 58 Hindutva: Who is a Hindu, by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, 208 Hiranmayananda, Swami, 113n History o f Assam, by Edward Gait, 171 history, 175-9 writing as nation-building, 168— 75 Horo, N.E., 228 hostility, 162, 189 humanism, 123 humanity, 158, 207 icons, iconography, 2 7ny 41, 46, 48, 184, 186 idealism, 141 identity politics, identities, 6-14, 20, 23, 27, 40, 99, 143, 169, 217, 234, 242 ideology, ideological, 20-1, 23, 251 malleability, 51 purity and pragmatism, 159, 164 and social practice, difference, 162 imagery, 49

262

Index

‘impartiality’, 87 India Gazette, 173 Indian National Congress (INC), 2, 6, 10-2, 14, 21, 25, 26, 30, 44, 514,57«, 59,108, 121,137, 144,146, 148,151,159-60,182-3, 199,202, 203, 209, 214, 234-5, 236-9, 250 and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 90-3 in West Bengal, 71, 75, 80, 90-93 organizational decline, 73 Indian-ness, 130 Indo-Persian bureaucratic influences, 170 Indraprastha resettlement, Kachchh, Gujarat, 152-4, 162-3 inequities, 169 infinitesimal mechanisms, 4 in-group’, 42 inheritance, 85,97 injustice, 142 innovation, 49 intelligence, 19 intentionality, 48 inter-communal tensions, 37 interest groups and political parties, relationship, 89 Islam, 9 Islam, Baharul, 193 Islamic Front for Salvation (FIS), 164 Jainism, 146, 149 Jalgaon rape scandal, 59 janapada, 197 Janata Dal, 229 Janata Party (JP), 125, 142 Javale, Bhausaheb Lakshman, 45 Jayalalitha 239,242, 253 Jaymati, 176-85, 188, 191-2 Jaymati Kunwari, 179 Jaymati Upakhyan, by Surya Kumar Bhuyan, 175-9

Jharkhand economy and society, 222-5 formation of state, 216 movement, 206, 218-21 politics of names and numbers, 225-8 undermined, 221-2 Jharkhand Area Autonomous Council (JAAC), 218 Jharkhand Coordination Committee (JCC), 229 Jharkhand Mukti Moicha (JMM), 218,219, 222, 225, 229 Jharkhand Party, 220, 221, 226, 228, 231 jingoism, 191 Joshi, Madhav, 28 Joshi, Manohar, 55 justice, 47, 48n Kachchh, Gujarat earthquake and after, 137, 138-41, 143, 145 Bharatiya Janata Party’s recons­ truction and its paradigms, 146-7, 150-58 Harijans, 158-63 Kalam, A.P.J. Abdul, 167 Kalita caste, 170 Kammas, 202 Kamraj, K., 242 Kamrup Anushilan Samiti, 186 Kanaklata, 186 Kannada, 202 Karnataka: linguistic criteria, 202, 203; state formation, 216 Karunanidhi, M., 239, 242, 243 Katzenstein, Mary F., 29 Kerala: linguistic criteria, 203 Kesari, 47-8 Keshav Nagar Resettlement Colony, Katchch, Gujarat, 147-52, 153, 161, 164

Index

Khairnar, G.R. 59 Khalistan, 217 KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslims), 145 Kichak Vadhy 48n kinship, 142, 169, 173 Kisan Sabha, 88 knowledge dissemination, 5 Koel-Karo Jan Sanghatan, 219 Kohli, Atul, 13,71-82 Krishnaswamy, K., 245-6 Kshatriya Mahasabha, 145 Kshatriyas, 46, 144-6, 155, 207 labour division, 142 mobilization, 170 relations, 121 Lachit Barphukan and His Times, by Surya Kumar Bhuyan, 175-9 Laden, Osama Bin, 149 land rights struggle, 85-6 language issue see linguistic Left Front, 66, 72, 75-76, 82-3, 84n, 93, 97 legitimacy, 22, 24, 53 legitimization, 75, 100 liberalism, 3, 152 liberty, 201 lineage see kinship and lineage Lingayats, 201, 202 linguistic issue, 1-2, 50, 118, 182, 204-7, 214 particularism, 198-207 states, 199-200, 202-4, 211 local politics, formation, 22, 26-30 Lodai village, Kachchh, Gujarat see Keshav Nagar Resettlement Colony loyalty, 29, 141, 177 Madhya Pradesh: linguistic criteria, 203

263

Madras Presidency, 200 Mahabharatay 141 Mahanta, Ratneswar, 180 Maharashtra Congress rule, 54 culture and history, 50-1 political activity, 66 state formation, 203, 216 State Legislative Assembly, 53, 59 Mahlis, 227 mandap displays, 58-65 Mankis, 220 Marandi, Babulal, 218-9 Marathas, 31,41, 177, 201 Marathi, 25 Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), 243, 245, 250 Marxism, Marxist, 66, 76, 229 materialism, 43 Mayurakshi, Birbhum, West Bengal communal rioting, 93-7 politics, 80, 84-7, 90-1 Meghalaya: struggle for separate state, 204 Mehta, Suresh, 145, 159 mind-body dichotomy, 41 Mitra Mandal (friends association), 32, 58 Mizoram: struggle for separate state, 204 modernity, 23, 43, 50, 66 Modhav Joshi, 28 Modi, Narendra, 144, 145, 146, 147, 152, 158-9, 162, 163 Momai Tamuli, 175 Mookerji, Shyamaprasad, 122 Moonje, Balkrishna Shivram, 106 moral idealism, 137 moral relativism, 122 . moral values, 142 morality, 41, 50, 141

264

Index

motifs» 168, 174 motivation, 38-9, 63 Mughal Empire, Mughals, 51, 176, 197, 199n imperialism, 167, 169 Muhammadans see Muslims multiculturalism, 1, 8, 9, 14 Mumbai bomb blasts, 1993 54 public moods and sentiments, 206 Munda, Birsa, 220 Munda, Karia, 218 Munda, Konta, 220 Munda, Ram Dayal, 221 Mundas, 220, 222 murti representation, 45-9, 55, 58 Musahars, 226 Musharraf, Pervez, 148 Muslim League, 52 Muslims, 12, 53, 94, 107, 119, 14856, 160-U 164, 166, 171 infiltration, 141 poverty, 150 separatism, 109 see also Hindus, Hindutva, Hinduism Mymensinghia migrants, 193 myths and imagery, 14, 25 Nagaland: struggle for separate state, 204 Nagas, 204 Nagpur Hindu Sabha, 109 Naiks, 227 Naipaul, V.S., 29 Narasimha Rao, P.V., 229 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 125 national consciousness/ identity, 7,8, • 109,119 National Democratic Alliance (NDA), 5, 218, 245-4

nationalism, nationalistic, 7,42-3,50, 65-66, 142, 168-9, 175, 183, 186, 189-90, 214 charismatic, 154-8 elite, 152-4 populist, 147-52 nativism, 52 Natu brothers, 45 Naxalite movement, 230-1 negaray22 Nehru, Jawaharlal, Nehruvian, 8-10, 66,75,186,202,203,206,213,216 linguistic state issue, 199-200 nepotism, 86 non-dualism, 121 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 138, 155, 161, 230 North-East, 217 North East Frontier Agency, 204 oligopoly, 240 one-party dominance, collapse, 2 opportunism, opportunistic alliances, 51,97 order and authority, 73 Organizer, 211 Orientalist theory, 9 Orissa, 205, 224, 226; separatist movements on linguistic bases, 199 ostracism, 185 Other Backward Classes (OBCs), 144-6, 206 Pakistan, 215 panchayati raj institutions, 72,74,8090, 93-4, 99,217 parivary110 parochialism, 5In, 52 participatory politics, 99 partition, 8, 115, 201 Patel, Keshubhai, 144-5

Index

Patel, Vallabhbhai, 202 Patels, 155-6, 158, 164 Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU), 203 Patidars, 144-5, 201 patriotism, 51, 57, 97,192 patronage, 27-8, 33, 86, 174 Pattali Makkal (PMK), 244, 246 Pawar, N., 31-3 performance, 22-3, 91 personality cult, 55 Phadke, Vasudev Balvant, 56 n Phukan, Anandaram Dhekial, 171-2, 173 Phukan, Haliram Dhekial, 173-4 Phukan, Piyali, 186 ‘plebeian male’, 33-5 Pokhran test, 167 policing, 34 political activity, activism, 2,5,13,24, 87, 95, 122 political bargains, 217 political economy, 43, 51 political formations, 2 30 political literacy, 20 political mobilization, 6-14, 73 political organization, 78 political orientations, 42; parties 7182 political performativity, 23 political power, 24 political pragmatism, 137 political processes, 6 political support, 86 politics/ politicians, 3-6,12,30-3,51, 99, 122, 151, 186, 192,217, 222 and culture, relationship, 6 in Gujarat, 143-6 non-institutional, 11 post-independence, 11 and social sphere, distinction, 79 state formation, 216

265

polity, 22, 76 popularism, 72 populism, 147-52, 162, 239, 240 poverty, 107, 116, 155 power, power relations, 4, 21-2, 28, 44, 43, 48, 86, 88, 97-8, 173, 197 Prabhananda, Swami, 113« Pracharak, 108, 114, 116, 121-3, 126 Praxis, 40 primordial loyalties, 39, 79 Princely States, 202 private interest, 139-40 privatization, 152 proclivity, 48 protagonist, 80 Provincial Congress Committees, 199 public moods and sentiments, 20 Pudhiya Thamizhagam (PT), 245-7, 250 Punjab, 20In, 205 state formation, 203, 216 Punjabi Suba movement, 205-6 puritanism, 155 Quit India movement, 11 Rabha, Bishnu Prasad, 186 race, racial, 42, 117 radicalism, 123 Rajnaitik, 50, 65 Rajputs, 177 Ram invocation by Hindutva forces, 64 martialization, 46n Ram Jyoti Yatra, 213 Ramachandran, M.G. (MGR), 238, 239 Ramadoss, 244, 250 Ramakrishna Math and Mission, 13, 107,112-14,118,121,128-31,132 Ramayana, 141,149 Ranade, Eknath, 116, 123, 124, 125

266

Index

Ranga, N.G., 200 Ranganathanandan, 248 Rao, Prabhakar, 126 Rashtra Sevika Samiti, 111 Rashtriya Janata Party (RJP), 145 Rashtriya Mandai, 108 Rashtriya Swabhiman see self-esteem Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 13, 26, 105, 113, 142, 144-5, 190, 208-10, 211,212, 223 rath yatra, 37 rationalities, rationality, 19, 22, 3940,99 realpolitik, 39, 42, 55, 63,66 reason-emotion dichotomy, 41 Reddys, 201, 202 regional, regionalism, 2, 50, 51 • affiliations, 42 configurations, 140 electoral alliances, 2 integration, 182 legal state, 197 religion, religious, religiosity, 65 communities, 204-7 consideration in post earthquake Kachchh, Gujarat, 146-63 and culture, 38-40,43, 44,49 identity, 99 and nationalism, 14, 50 political mobilization, 37-66, 79, 117 violence see communalism representation, politics of, 22-4, 2728, 48-9 see also symbolism Right vs Left debate in West Bengal, 79-80 Roy, A.K., 229 royal consecration, 197 rumours, 21, 32 Sahajanand, saint, 154 Sahni, Naina, murder case, 59

Saikiani, Chandraprabha, 182 salience, 96 Samachar Chandrika, 173 Samna (daily), 56, 59« samskarasy 109-10 Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, 25 Samyukta Maharashtra movement, 50-1 Sandikai, Aideo, 185 Sangh Parivar, 5, 105-*, 110-1, 123, 125, 126, 127-8, 129, 142, 143, 152-3, 164, 193«, 247-8 Sankardeb, 192 Sanskritization, 159, 225 and cultural intermediaries, 170 Santhal Parganas, 220, 223, 226-7, 228 Saraswati, Swami Dayanand, 207 Sarkar, Jadunath, 192 Sarma, Benudhar, 187 sarsangchalaks (supreme leaders), 107-08, 114, 123, 124-5, 127 sarvodaya, 123 Satya Shodak Samaj, 44« satyagrahat 187 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar, 56«, 109-11,117,208 sectarianism, 192 secularism, 1, 151-2 self-assertion, 184 self-confidence, 154 self-determinism, 47, 153 self-esteem, 152-4, 162 self-in, 53 self-interest, 43-4, 50 self-sacrifice, 50, 55,96 Seva Bharati, 107, 127, 129 Seva Dishay 127 Seva International, 128 shakha grid, 26-30, 109-11,114 Shastri, Lai Bahadur, 228 Sheth, Bula, 31-2

Index

Shiv Sena, Shiv Sainik, 12-3, 20-1, 23-34, 42, 44, 50, 51-7, 58-63 Shivaji, Shivshahit 23, 24, 41, 51, 52, 55-6, 58, 63-4 Shivaji Jayanti, 26,56 Shivshahiche Pahat (The Dawn o f Shivaji's Rule), 59 Sikhs, Sikhism, 118, 149, 203, 205 Simon Commission, 226 Sindh: separatist movements on linguistic bases, 199 Singh, Jaipal, 222, 224, 226-8 Singh, Rajendra, 108, 127 Singh, Ram, 176 Sinha, S.K., 167,168, 188 Sitaramayya, Pattabhi, 202 social, 40-1 social activism, 122-3 social agents, 168 social changes, 78,98 social coalitions, 74 social configurations, 140 social conflict, 73 social forces 2, 77,99 social formations, 4 social fragmentation, 119-20 social groups, 73 social hierarchy, 162 social inequalities, 12 social institutions, 164 social justice, 100, 120 social oneness, 128 social order, 168 social organization, 109 social practices, 137 social processes, 7 social relationships, 24, 51 social transformation, 6 social unity, 132 social welfare, 124,128, 163 socialism, 84, 85,97 societal structures, 5

267

society, 76, 186 socio-cultural identities, 11 socio-economic forces, 76 socio-economic logic, 203 socio-political concerns, 49 solidarity, 121, 131-2, 175 Soren, Shibu, 218, 229 South Asia cultural mobilizations, 7 historiography, 6 identity politics, 5, 8 Southeast Asia, 170 spiritual impoverishment, 112 Sri Ramakrishna, 113 Sriraamallu, Potti, 202 stability, 71-82 rethinking through political discourse, 97-100 stage-craft and state-craft, 63-5 Stalin, M.K., 243 state(s), 2,4,9,22,23,42,73,97,198 linguistic reorganization, 217 state-in-society, 76-7 States Reorganisation Commission (SRC), 203, 220-2, 226-8 subaltern studies, 7,39 subjugation, 50 submission, 91 Sudarshan, K.S., 108 supernatural order, 22 superstitions, 48n, 155 swadeshi, 123 Swaminarayan movement in post­ earthquake Kachchh, Gujarat, 155-8, 163 Swaraj, 199 swayamsevaksy 115,120, 122, 126 symbolism, symbols, 1-2, 5, 25, 38, 130, 132, 142-3, 148, 168 Tai people, 170 Tamil, 201 Tamil Nadu

268

Index

cultural mobilization, 234-54 ethnicization, 206 nationalism, 14, 234 party system, 251 Tandoor muder case see Sahni, Naina, murder case Telugu, 201, 202-3 tenancy rights, 85-6 territory, ethnicization, 206 notion of, 199, 201-2 Thackeray, Bal, 25, 29, 33, 44, 54-5, 60, 61-2 Thackeray, Bindu Madhav, 61 Thackeray, Raj, 54 Thengadi, Dattopant Bapurao, 107, 121

Thirumavalavan, 246-7 Tilak, Balgangadhar, 44-7, 56n, 106, 108 Togadia, PTaveen, 147-9,151-2,162, 193« tokenism, 53 totalizing, 42, 66 tradition and modernity, 50 traditionalism, 131-2 transformation, 11-2 tribal economy and society, ideology of, 222-5 tribes, tribal identity, 14, 204-7 Trinamool Congress, 82 Tungkhungia Buranji, 177 Tungkhungia clan, 176 Ultimate Reality, 121 unemployment, 62, 63 United Front, 82 United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), 187, 189, 191 United Nations Development Project (UNDP), 138 unity, 117, 148 unity in diversity, 186, 200 universalism, 200

untouchability, 116, 245 Upadhyaya, Dindayal, 122 Uttaranchal, 206, 217 Vaghela, Shankarsinh, 144-6, 158-9 Vaiko see Gopalsamy, V. Vaishnava movement in post­ earthquake Kachchh, Gujarat, 143, 157-8, 162 Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 71,144 Vanniar caste community, 244 Venkaiah Naidu, M., 144 Verma, Sahib Singh, 153 Vidharbha: linguistic criteria, 203 Vidya Bharati, 127 village adoption scheme, 13, 138-40 villages of India, 141-3 violence, 25-6, 31, 50, 73, 78, 91, 93, 99, 189-90, 228-30 Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), 53, 124,125-6,142,144,147-52,161, 192-3n, 207-8n, 211, 212„ 249 visual manouevrability, 49 Vivekananda Kendra, 124, 249 Vivekananda, Swami, 113, 118, 120, 123-4, 128, 130-1, 248-9 vote bank, 11,97

Wages o f Violence. Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, 21 We or Our Nation Defined, by M.S. Golwalkar, 117-18 Weberian conceptions, 197 women, 12, 181-5 World War II, 41, 114 xenophobia, 141 Yadav, Laloo, 219, 229 Yadav, Mulayam Singh, 206 Yandaboo Treaty, 189 Yavanas, 176 Young India, 199