Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Sat 04 Jul 2009 11:50 AM PDT
Towards a Postcolonial Modernity: AsiaSource Interview with Partha Chatterjee conducted by Nermeen Shaikh
Partha Chatterjee, founding member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective, is director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and visiting professor of anthropology at Columbia University.
Professor Chatterjee's books include The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (Columbia UP, 2004); A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (Princeton UP, 2002); Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (Oxford UP, 1999); A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (Oxford UP, 1997); The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton UP, 1993) and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Zed Books, 1986).
Partha Chatterjee's books are available for sale here.
Intellectual Trajectory
Could you tell us a little about your intellectual and academic trajectory? What impact did growing up in the immediate, post-independent period in India have on you? What relationship does this have to the fact that much of your work has focused on nationalism?
I did not actually begin my academic career studying nationalism. I completed my PhD at the University of Rochester in political science where I studied international relations and nuclear war strategies. The political science department at Rochester was one of the earliest departments that focused on rational choice theory. I used to do game theoretic models of arms races and things like that. That is how I actually began, believe it or not…! I suppose I did that kind of work because I was in a political science department at an American university and this was the kind of work being done there. Although even as I was doing it, I was quite certain that I was going to go back to India after I got my PhD.
Immediately after I finished my dissertation, I returned to Calcutta, where I was born and brought up. It was obvious that there was no way I could pursue the same kind of work in India because there was no one else doing it; nothing in the intellectual atmosphere would have made that kind of work meaningful. When I returned it was early 1972, in the immediate aftermath of the Maoist uprising which took place from about 1969-71. That was the period I was away. Many of my friends in college were involved in the movement and by the time I went back, some of them were still in jail and a few had been killed. So what I did was basically set a part of my training aside and retrained myself in areas in which other people were doing work.
In the early 1970s, a great deal of research was concerned with agrarian structures and peasant movements. The whole atmosphere was charged with questions regarding the nature of the Indian state. Even before the Emergency in India (1975-1977), as far as Calcutta and West Bengal were concerned, the face of the authoritarian state had become very, very clear in the period of the Maoist uprising and immediately afterwards. So people were preoccupied with questions about the violence of the state and the possibilities of political movements based on the peasantry. Those were really the major questions posed by the Maoist movement.
So that is what I began to think about. The way of proceeding to answer those questions, given the methods then popular, was to examine the historical context. In other words, how had the independent Indian state emerged? The whole story of the movement against colonialism, and the question of how the Indian peasantry was involved with that movement and with the formation of that state, these became the central questions. So that is how I entered into the field. It was not nationalism that was my immediate concern; it was much more the specific history of the emergence of the Congress Party and the way in which Congress had included the peasantry within the national movement. This was the issue I ultimately took up: the emergence of, broadly speaking, yes, movements of nationalism, but specifically, the kind of nationalism adopted by the Congress that found a base in rural areas by trying to organize peasants into the anti-colonial struggle.
For the next three or four years, I lived in Calcutta, but for about 15-20 days of the month, I would go into various districts and just talk to people. There are now much better organized sources on the subject (that archive got organized precisely in that period, the '70s), but at the time when I began work, there was no organized archive for this. Something like the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi which now has a very good collection of local literature from all parts of India in all Indian languages - nothing like that existed at the time. The only way one could do this work then was to go into different rural districts and talk to people. At the time, there were still people around who were important leaders as well as middle-ranking, local leaders of these movements in the 1920s and 1930s. So that is what I did; I just talked to people like that. And this was when my interest in the larger subject of nationalism developed. As you will notice, in a sense, even there, my early work was really concerned with the relationship between the national movement and the agrarian question.
You were trained in American political science, a rather narrow field as you have just suggested, and you have explained your intellectual trajectory upon your return to India, but you managed to develop a highly unusual and expansive range of interests. You are often characterized as a Renaissance man for this reason, given your work in theater, music, cultural studies, history, politics, international relations. What made that possible?
I do not think this happened consciously at all. It is just that I became engaged in the activities and interests that were part of urban life in Calcutta. Theater, for instance, was not only part of academic and political life, but very much a part of urban life in Calcutta at the time. One of my interests - which many people in the academic world are not aware of - is sports. I was an avid soccer fan, which was, again, very much part of the urban life I am describing. Maybe someday I will write about football in Calcutta, a sport which I think is really a major part of urban India.
In the 1970s, there was the film society movement which was very much part of what people did in the city: watching classic European films which were never shown in regular theatres. There were about 15-20 major film clubs in Calcutta which acquired these films from various foreign embassies and consulates. Theater, in some ways, was part of the same kind of search: to become acquainted with modern European culture. Unlike the cinema which was actually available - if you looked for them, you could find prints of Italian neo-realist films, French films and so on - there was no way you could actually see European productions of Brecht, Ibsen, Pirandello, or anything of the kind. The classics of 20th century European theater were produced sometimes as adaptations, sometimes as straightforward translations, for the urban theater enthusiast in India. Brecht was the greatest favorite. In the '70s there were something like 300-400 theater groups in Calcutta (this is probably still true today). There were only about ten theatres. Nothing could run continuously for 2-3 weeks; auditoriums were booked per night. You could just walk into any of these theatres on any night and one or the other of these groups would be doing a production of some European classic. This again was a very major part of the urban life I have been talking about.
It is rather curious now, thinking back on this period, that the same people who were concerned with political questions also seemed to look for certain forms of politics and certain forms of the state that were not simply copies of Western political formations. The differences seemed quite striking: the fact that India was very largely an agrarian-based, peasant-based country, so different indeed from the modern West - by which I mean the contemporary West. Yet, at the same time, there was such an urge to know about the modern West and, in a sense, to imbibe what seemed to be the best of modernity. The two went together. So I was, in a sense, completely a part of this. One did not think of this as consciously cultivating a Renaissance spirit or anything of the kind!
Subaltern Studies
Could you tell us about your work with the Subaltern Studies collective? What do you believe is the significance of the kind of history writing inaugurated by this school?
In some ways, I think that too has its source in precisely the sort of intellectual atmosphere that I was talking about. In a sense, the central question being posed by the Subaltern Studies group is the following: What is the relationship between peasants as the major demographic formation in India and the emergence of the modern state?
The background to that was partially, of course, the political failure of the answers that had been offered up to that point. The Emergency that Indira Gandhi declared from 1975-1977 was in effect seen as a symptom of a virtually terminal illness afflicting the Indian state. At that point, it seemed that all the liberal, constitutional foundations of the state had clearly failed to hold up. Even after 1977, when the Emergency regime came to an end, I don't think we seriously believed that Indian democracy in that particular form would last for very long. The signs of an essentially authoritarian core of the state had been revealed then and was very powerful.
So that was one failure. The other failure had to do with the peasant uprising attempted through the Maoist and other communist-led movements which had been beaten back by this time. It is in that context that the historical question once again was raised by Subaltern Studies. It tried to offer an answer to the question I mentioned earlier, namely: What was the relationship between the peasantry and the Indian state? The answer effectively was that when the peasants joined the elite-led national movement, it was not, as the nationalists believed, that the peasantry was pre-political, was somehow completely unconscious of these sorts of political questions before and was roused into political consciousness by the nationalist leadership. That was not the answer. The Subaltern Studies answer was that peasants always had their own reasons for joining or not joining this sort of politics. When they joined, they did not join for the same reasons as the elite nationalists who were launching the movement. Very often, they joined the movement on their own terms and, on many occasions, they left the movement. On many other occasions, they refused to join at all. Those became the instances that Subaltern Studies actually looked for.
In terms of the methods, I think those were in some ways innovative. As I said, there was no ready archive for this sort of work. What we tried to do was use the official archive in such a way that you could actually read peasant consciousness, that is, read the official reports and the official archive against the grain in order to try and find the voice of the subaltern, as it were.
Of course, we looked for other kinds of records, too. In fact, it was in the course of this work that we came across other evidence, the kinds of sources that conventional history would never have recognized as sources. We would look for things like rumors; we found, for instance, collections of rumors that were narrated in local newspapers at the time. Now, conventional history would dismiss this, saying it is a rumor and cannot be read as a real source. We tried to use this sort of evidence as a record of a different kind of consciousness. At that time, there was also a much greater appreciation for things like popular culture, religion in particular, and how these ideas and practices were important in trying to understand what it was that peasants were doing when they joined movements or made certain demands from movements, what it is they were looking for. These were some of the methodological innovations made by Subaltern Studies.
One of the most productive formulations of the founding father, as it were, of the Subaltern Studies collective, Ranajit Guha, vis-Ã -vis the specificity of the modern colonial state is that it is characterized by "dominance without hegemony". Could you explain what that phrase means and what it signifies? Also, in your book, The Nation and its Fragments, you employ this term, calling it "the rule of colonial difference". Could you elaborate on your understanding of the nature of the colonial state and the consequences that follow from it for the nature of the modern experience of the colonies?
One of the things that we tried to argue was the quite fundamental similarity between the colonial and the postcolonial states. The similarity was not so much in the actual bases of support for the two formations, because the sections of the Indian population on which the colonial state relied for support were not necessarily the same as those that supported the new nation-state. But many of the techniques of rule, the governing practices on which these regimes were based, were very similar. This was one of the strongest political arguments we were trying to make. Specifically, we would look again at the way in which state organs (courts of law, administrative agencies, etc.) would go about dealing with the large mass of the people, especially peasants. Our argument very often was that in a sense those techniques of rule had not fundamentally changed. The Indian armed forces were inherited fully intact from the British Indian army. The body of civil and criminal law as well as the structure of the courts were inherited without any major change. The structure of the bureaucracy too, especially the famous district administration of British India, was adopted wholesale, only expanded several times after independence.
It was this state of affairs that we characterized essentially, as you just said, as dominance without hegemony. We defined hegemony as a form of rule where there is an active consent on the part of those being ruled. This active consent had to be produced through all sorts of institutions and practices in society. The contrast being made was with that of a fully developed, liberal, capitalist society where there was class rule - there is no question that some classes had greater power in society - and yet there was an overall structure of governance where you could say that even those classes which were not directly in power still consented to the way in which society was ruled. There was an active consent that was produced - it was not just based on sheer force. Whereas the phenomenon we were always concerned with was the fundamentally authoritarian character of the postcolonial state. Why did it have to be authoritarian in this way, if in fact the national movement was what it claimed to be, which was a movement of the people against an authoritarian, colonial state?
The argument was that, in effect, the postcolonial national state was not based on this sort of structure of consent, which again went back to the question of the relationship between the peasants and the new state. Clearly, there was a new state that was created and this new state claimed to speak on behalf of the people as a whole and even granted formal rights of citizenship to people within its borders. This formal citizenship, however, did not mean real citizenship. So, for instance, in the classic case of Indian peasants, although they had been brought into the national movement and made members of a supposedly new national community, they actually did not have real rights of citizenship. The district administration still dealt with the rural population on the lines of the old colonial administration. Rural landlords claimed a privileged access to the local bureaucracy and the police because they were the real wielders of power in rural society. All sorts of progressive laws were made by parliament that could not be implemented because the old power groups in the countryside would not allow the agencies of government to subvert their power. Peasants now had the formal right to vote, but they could be coerced to vote as their landlords told them to vote, or even not allowed to vote at all. The necessity of force or coercion to keep peasants under control was always central, even in the new state.
I think I should add that a lot of this actually began to change - in terms of the fundamental understanding of the Indian state - through the 1980s. The '80s were quite crucial in terms of a new understanding of how the different sections of the Indian peasantry actually learned to use the room for maneuver that was opened up through the process of electoral democracy. All of the things that we now associate with the day-to-day processes of Indian democracy were not clear to us at all in the 1970s, for instance that one could pressurize elite representatives and so on. In fact, that is the most dramatic change that has taken place and I think it has to do with what many people see as a change between the early Subaltern Studies and late Subaltern Studies. The background to this is essentially that the very real perception we had of the nature of the Indian state in the 1970s - and we saw it quite categorically as a fundamentally authoritarian state - changed quite drastically through the 1980s.
It is in the same period that many new kinds of social movements emerged in India, and these social movements tried to use a whole range of completely new forms of mobilization, using the power of the vote, using the kinds of new opportunities made available through the framework of broadly liberal rights. That is something that quite fundamentally changed our understanding of what the Indian state was like. We had to admit that the process of politics was far more complicated than what we had earlier thought it to be. But, as I said, that is a change that only began to be registered through the 1990s. So it is only in the last 10-15 years that these new kinds of social movements emerged, creating, in a sense, a new ethnography of politics in India. The emergence of the caste movement especially is a good example, alongside of course a whole range of movements of relatively marginalized groups, all of which are extremely vocal, quite organized and which employ a combination of both legal, constitutional methods as well as some extralegal strategies - some degree of violence, for instance. All these movements, however, represent a kind of assertion of, broadly speaking, democratic rights of different kinds. So in trying to understand what Indian political life is all about, this has changed the picture. This was not the case in the '70s largely because, I think, the processes of governance have changed quite fundamentally.
Anti-Colonial Nationalism
In Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, you suggest that nationalist thought operates "within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power it seeks to repudiate." In other words, nationalism may succeed in liberating the nation from colonialism but not from the knowledge system of the post-Enlightenment West, which may continue to dominate maybe even more powerfully. Could you elaborate that argument?
One of the things that is now quite widely recognized is how many of the postcolonial state forms - not just India - that emerged after decolonization in the 1940s and '50s replicated quite consciously the forms of the modern state in the West. This prompted the obvious question: what, then, was the opposition to colonial rule all about? There were very strong strands within the anti-colonial movement which in fact suggested that the real task of the anti-colonial movement was not simply to replace the European ruler with local rulers but to think of completely different forms of rule. Gandhi, for instance, often used to say that the point of the movement was not to have English rule without the Englishman. But this almost never happened. In most cases, the nationalist movement really sought to create a European style or Western style modern state, based on very similar constitutional principles, very similar technologies of administration, and simply to replace the personnel.
The question then was: why was this so? One of the most general answers to this question, which is the one I offered in that book, is that the framework of ideas within which non-Western nationalism tried to answer the questions - of why these countries were subjected to European rule, why this rule was considered illegitimate, what would be a more legitimate form of rule - was completely derived from the whole body of modern, Western political thought and social theory. Within that framework, the question was, effectively, who was it that ruled? What is the structure within which people ought to be ruled? What were the most desirable forms of the state? I think all of those questions were effectively taken to have been answered already within the body of modern, Western political thought. In the case of many of these postcolonial debates within nationalism, there were liberals, Marxists, and socialists, but really all the debates were in effect the same debates that had taken place in the West. The interesting question then was: Were there possibilities that had been repressed in the course of these movements? That is where many of the new possibilities opened up: Were there alternative ways of thinking about a modern state?
In the Indian case, the whole Gandhian way of thinking was clearly very interesting. My answer, after having looked at what the body of Gandhian thought and practice meant, was: Yes, this was clearly an attempt to think of the state and forms of rule in very different terms. But it was effectively a failure. Having raised the question and having produced completely new conditions through which people could be mobilized for the anti-colonial movement, the Gandhian intervention in effect completely failed to reach the sorts of objectives that it had placed before the nation. If you ask me why, I would say it was because of the way in which it tried to deal with the fundamental problem of violence in society. The original and distinctive contribution of Gandhian politics was to evolve amazingly effective techniques of non-violent resistance by an unarmed people against the institutions of state violence. But it never managed to propose a theory, or even a set of techniques, by which a state could legitimately employ violence against wrongdoers. In the absence of such a theory, Gandhian thinking could only present itself as a non-modern form of resistance, never as an alternative form of the modern state.
I think similar questions have been asked, for instance, about the place of religion in modern society, attempting to reformulate the question of religion in the light of modern conditions. Obviously, Islam is a very major field here in the Indian subcontinent and other parts of the non-Western world as well, and many things have been said about it. These discussions and debates continue even today. The range of questions that gets opened up are essentially about whether a different modernity is possible.
My answer in Nationalist Thought book was largely pessimistic. At the time, I would have said that, of course, there were many of these other possibilities that had been raised and because they were raised I think they allowed for many new forms of mobilization, which had never been seen in national movements or democratic movements in the West. These were completely new ways of mobilizing people. But if you think of the end results, they were largely imitations of the modern state in the West, which, I would have said then, would explain in some ways why many of these postcolonial states seemed to be deficient, like poor copies, second-rate modern states.
From the Fragments book onwards, I have been more concerned with looking at practices rather than the big frame. In other words, I became aware that rather than asking the big questions - looking at the overall frame of modern politics and the modern state - if one were more sensitive to the local practices and the more localized innovations that have taken place, I think one would become more aware of where the differences lie. In terms of the overall frame (the constitution, the basic institutional structure), one could say that they are often quite good copies of the liberal constitutional state (India is a good example of this, I think). It is in the actual working practices, I think, that many of the innovations emerge. If one looks at the sources of these innovations and what these innovations actually try to achieve, in the local sense, one becomes far more appreciative of how even the so-called "corruptions" of the original are actually doing things which many of these constitutional or democratic forms of government in the West could never have achieved. These become much more interesting and important questions.
You have, for instance, rules of formal equality: the law applies equally to everyone. Everyone is aware that this is a major principle of the modern state in the West. If you move to the Indian context, it is a principle that is upheld by the courts and the constitution. Yet, if you look at the localized context, you will find that even state authorities make exceptions to that rule. The law does not apply equally to everybody. And the exceptions are often very interesting: why exceptions are made, how and why they are justified, and what the exceptions actually achieve. Very often, one would find that if the exception had not been made, large sections of the people would probably have never been brought under this system of modern governance. They would have been excluded in ways that would have completely jeopardized the overall structure itself.
Some examples are common and actually quite obvious. For instance, in most Third World cities there are large populations which can only survive by breaking the law. They live on land that does not belong to them, they squat on public property, they travel on public transport without buying tickets, and very often they use electricity and water without paying for it. If the law applied equally for everybody, then those who were buying tickets to travel on trains should have refused to allow those who were not buying tickets to make the same journey.
But in actual administrative practice, that rarely happens. Administrators will tell you that they know that people are squatting on illegally occupied land, but it is best to let them stay. This is so because, for many reasons, this same population often has a very important role to play in the urban economy; in their absence, these urban economies might simply collapse. One could see this from another perspective as well: if these people had no livelihood at all, they would be even more of a threat to property, to the law, and to order. This is a way in which these people are actually controlled and governed, by precisely making them an exceptional case.
So if one looks at the local application of the principles of modern government, I think one will find extremely interesting innovations. Not all of them necessarily appear desirable and many of them involve some degree of routine violence. Those are the more interesting areas in which one can actually see borrowed or copied models of the modern state actually being domesticated, often in very new and innovative ways. They are actually producing different results and having different effects which they do not have in Western contexts.
In the same book, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World, you say, "to the extent that nationalism opposed colonial rule it administered a check on a specific political form of metropolitan capitalist dominance. In the process it dealt a deathblow (or so at least one hopes) to such blatantly ethnic slogans of dominance as the civilizing mission of the West, the white man's burden, etc. That must be counted as one of the major achievements in world history of nationalist movements in colonial countries." Your parenthetical qualification (one hopes) in this quote already indicates a doubt with regard to the historical finality of the postcolonial victory over Western racism. What was behind this apprehension?
Well, you see it right now! Even today, I would put it in that slightly ambivalent way. I think, overall, the lessons of decolonization and what it means for world history are irreversible. I do not really believe that this call for a new empire, in spite of recent claims about how empire is actually good for everybody, carries any real conviction anywhere in the world . But it is true that in many, many ways, some of the slogans of the civilizing mission have returned, even if employing other phraseology.
I suppose even then, there was some lurking suspicion that these things might come back. I really think it is impossible to return to any framework of colonial empires because unlike in the 18th or 19th centuries when you could make a kind of moral argument about bringing modernity and civilization to uncivilized parts of the world, you cannot make the same claim today precisely because the main claims of European or Western modernity have actually become completely universal. You cannot claim that democracy is the exclusive preserve of the West, although in popular political discourse in the West these claims are often made, about democracy somehow just being part of Western culture. It is simply not true; whether they have it or not, the idea of democracy is actually available everywhere in the world. I think the same goes for many of the other claims on behalf of modernity, including the claims about science and technology and modern medicine and everything else. It is simply no longer credible to make the claim that modern medicine is somehow a "gift" of the West. People all over the world know that these are things that are available. There may be arguments and debates about whether they want them, at what cost, on what terms, etc. but everyone is aware of their existence. Many of these may well be real questions, but it is no longer a question of a Western "gift" to the rest of the world.
In that sense, what is generally described as the period of decolonization after the Second World War did deliver a complete deathblow to any kind of traditional colonial structure in the world. I do not think that form is ever going to return.
How do you explain the resurgence now of precisely the same kind of rhetoric?
There are a lot of people who are trying to make sense of the structure of dominance in the world, what it means and how it is to be exercised - and of course we are talking now of the dominance of the US. They are making sense of it in terms of an older rhetoric, an older language, which is why there is suddenly a spate of books about the British Empire of the 19th century and how that historical lesson might be relevant for American rulers today. The reason why this rhetoric has become so fashionable is simply because that historical moment offers a certain justification for worldwide dominance by one power. It offers a set of rhetorical languages by which that power can be justified.
I do not believe that the effective structure of dominance of the US today is anything like the British dominance of the world in the 19th century. US dominance is not simply a dominance over the so-called "less developed" parts of the world; it is dominance over Europe, over Japan, over China. These formations over which the US is seeking dominance are completely within the structure of a global modernity, in the standard conception of what "modernity" entails. This is a new kind of dominance. I do not think there is a good language to describe it. For this reason, there is so much apprehension over what this form of dominance might mean for the rest of the world. The real apprehension is that those that wield this power do not actually understand what this power is all about and how they are going to use it. After all, this power is almost entirely the power to use violence; it is fundamentally military power. There is such an enormous concentration of the means of violence in one country and so little ethical justification for using that absolute military power. We are living today in a very dangerous situation. But for the reasons I have given, I do not think this is the same as the 19th century British Empire.
Also in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World you indicate that the emergence of both separatist movements and the fundamentalist cultural revival in the third or postcolonial world has to be seen in terms of the structural tensions in the history of nationalist thought in the colonial world. What do you mean by that?
Well, we should return to some of the things we were talking about earlier. The innovations in nationalist thinking and nationalist mobilizations which have occurred in the postcolonial world have tended to get repressed by the emergence of fairly standardized forms of governance. Many of these innovations were actually repressed because they were not seen to be consistent with the known forms of the modern state. For instance, if you had movements or parties which were largely based on religion, this was seen to be somehow inconsistent with the idea of a modern constitutional state. Therefore, there was always this problem of what to do with such movements. Yet, those movements have been very influential and powerful in terms of mobilizing people against colonial rule.
So, once the objective of decolonization and transfer of power to a new nationalist elite had been met, the question was how to contain or manage these forces that had been released in the course of the national movement. That is where many of these tensions remained unresolved. If you look at the case of post-independence India, this whole debate about the "secular" state and what the secular state must do and what it means, in a sense, reflected this unresolved tension. In the historical process of the emergence of that state, a great deal of the mobilization had used religion, had depended on extremely powerful religious reform movements, of actually shaping what were seen to be religious beliefs and religious practices but changing them, reformulating them, in order to conform to what were seen to be the new challenges of the modern world.
So these religious reform movements were often completely part of the broader set of social changes that brought about nationalism, that brought about the new state, that brought about new political formations. They were integrally tied with many of those movements and yet the requirements of the secular state presumably forbade religion in public places or public life, or forbade political parties based on religion, because these were somehow inconsistent with a modern nation-state. Very often, there were all kinds of shortcuts or repressive ways of keeping those things under cover, as it were. Many of the tensions around secularism, for instance, and the kinds of challenges that emerged later on, in the case of India's Hindu right-wing in the 1980s for instance, were very much part of these unresolved questions from within the national movement. What the Hindu right then appealed to was not to say that nationalism was all wrong; they said, in fact, that they were the "true" nationalists. The reason why that could be said persuasively was because of a great deal of religious-based rhetoric and the presence, as I said, of these powerful religious reform movements, which were always part and parcel of nationalism.
So these remained unresolved problems. The overall frames remained derivative, almost imitations of forms of the state as developed in the West, but in actual practice what had to be done was to find completely innovative practices at the localized level. The real problem occurred when many of these local adaptations and innovations required a new translation into the larger frame. If you look back on the many kinds of tensions that were brought out later on, such as complaints about minorities being given all sorts of privileges - one standard complaint against the secular state - you will find that many of these so-called "concessions" or privileges were completely justified but entirely localized arrangements. There were certain locally acceptable forms of public display, for instance, which clearly reflected a certain majoritarian understanding of what a public ceremony meant. But these required certain local adjustments. Through the post-independence period, for instance, there have been public celebrations of religion where state functionaries and officials have participated because they were seen to be local festivals which large numbers of people attended. Many of these forms also meant that at the local level there were celebrations by minority communities which also had their place. So people knew that on a particular day, during a particular celebration, there would be music on the streets and so on, but on another day, because it is the local minority community which is celebrating something, this will not be done. It is a local understanding, a local consensual arrangement. In many of these cases, these local understandings evolved and the arrangements often varied from one place to another. But once you had these local arrangements being compared and translated in terms of the overall framework of the character of the state, then it posed problems. Is it truly a secular state? If it is a secular state, then why is the minority community treated one way in this place and another way in the other place? It is then that the autonomy of the local arrangement is called into question. The criticism would always be that if India is a secular, democratic state, then these local arrangements cannot hold because all citizens are supposed to be equal, and supposed to be treated equally, so there can be no such special concessions made to minority communities. This became the new problem because many of the issues that appeared to have been resolved were resolved purely in the local context. But once the autonomy of the local is called into question, what begins to appear is the inadequacy of the overall arrangement. This is when the whole thing became exposed and began to unravel, as it were.
Postcolonial Modernity
You have also written a lot about how modernity ought to be understood in the postcolonial context. You say, for instance, "Ours is the modernity of the once colonized. The same historical process that has taught us the value of modernity has also made us the victims of modernity." Could you explain what the term modernity encompasses in this view and what it means in the context of the postcolonial world?
In some ways, it means precisely the sorts of difficulties encountered in actually resolving the different demands of the overall framework. The way I put this in Nationalist Thought is the distinction between what I call the "thematic" and the "problematic". The thematic was the overall frame, and I think we failed in finding a thematic for our modernity. In other words, we did not succeed in formulating a different thematic. The thematic description of modernity was exactly the same as in the West, we always wanted to be exactly the same kind of moderns. In terms of more specific answers, especially in terms of actual practices, I have always emphasized that many of these practices, in terms of their innovations and elaborations of so-called "modern" ideas, are applied only locally. Those local elaborations of the modern - and an incredibly large number of innovations have been made - allowed for the great themes of modernity to become domesticated. These specific situations, however, remained very different from the situations of Western modernity.
The number of different things that non-Western modernity has produced in terms of actual practices in localized situations never really managed to find a larger language which could give them the identity or the character of a different modernity. That is what I meant when I said that we also became the victims of modernity. The overall constraints of a given framework have always bound us to merely innovating at a localized level but without ever succeeding in claiming that this is in fact a more general framework of modernity which can be universally used by others.
So, in terms of intellectual claims, we still remain victims of Western modernity, despite the fact that places like China might well become the real powerhouses of modernity in the 21st century. China is in fact the perfect example: in spite of all this amazing transformation, intellectually there are almost no claims that emerge from there that suggest that they are changing faster than any other part of the world. The language in which this change is being described is the old language of modernization, growth, technology and so on. It is exactly the same language. That is why, even for places like China, in this respect, they still remain victims of modernity.
Here in the West, as I am sure you're aware, it is often thought that postcolonial studies represent a tendency in the Third World to disavow responsibility for the problems that are endemic to that world. Why, it is argued, do they keep on talking about colonialism when colonialism ended half a century ago? How do you respond to such allegations?
It is not to disavow responsibility at all, it is actually to claim a certain responsibility which has been denied. In a sense, what is often seen as the inability of postcolonial states to resolve many of these new problems of modernity is not because the people have not often managed to find innovative solutions; the problem lies with the larger formation of ideas invented in the West. I think that is where the colonial legacy is so strong. That China can grow at such a pace, and grow in forms that can only be described as 'modern', and yet have no larger frame of political discourse within which this experience can be described as anything other than simply a replication, indeed a poor replication, of what had happened in the West, I think, summarizes the problem. That is clearly a mis-description of what is happening in China; yet, there is no other language to describe it. That, I think, is the colonial legacy. The only way one can assume authority over what one is doing, the only way one could claim responsibility for what one is doing, would be, in a sense, to finally get rid of that colonial legacy.
This is to declare that Western modernity is, in fact, an incomplete and probably imperfect modernity; there are better ways of doing things. Those better ways can emerge in other parts of the world that are becoming modern. That is the claim that needs to be made. As I keep saying, there are numerous examples of actual localized practices where this kind of innovative thinking and innovative functioning has actually taken place. It is a question of finding a larger discursive frame, which is different and new and innovative. That is where I think the colonial legacy is the constraint; it actually has not allowed for that larger representation to be made.
My answer is that perhaps postcolonial studies has not actually managed to provide that discursive frame. It is not that it tried to disavow responsibility or said that all the travails of the postcolonial world are because of what colonialism did to those places. That is not true at all. The origin of Subaltern Studies, as a specific postcolonial project, was in fact to understand the failures of the Indian nationalist elite. No argument was ever made that, for instance, what Indira Gandhi did was because of British colonialism. Not at all. The problem is actually very often misrepresented by those who feel uncomfortable with the findings of postcolonial studies. They say: "Let bygones be bygones; forget about colonialism because that's history - let's get on with the present." Well, people in the postcolonial world are all trying to get on with their present. What is happening is that people all over the world are desperately trying to forget the legacies of colonialism and trying to get ahead with the project in hand. Effectively, in terms of actual practices, that is what people have been trying to do, successfully or unsuccessfully. The real constraint, however, has been of trying to develop a larger or universal language within which those efforts can be understood and described. The weight of the claim that Western modernity is a complete and finished project keeps imposing these enormous shackles on other attempts elsewhere in the world.
You conclude the article "Beyond the Nation? Or Within?" by suggesting that the framework of global modernity will "inevitably structure the world according to a pattern that is profoundly colonial". What did you mean by this?
Again, I think I probably meant more or less the same thing as I said before. By the framework of global modernity, I meant this overall discursive frame which claims to be universal and complete. But it is not actually universal, nor is it complete. All of the things that have been described as globalization in the last decade or so are good examples of this. Globalization is often claimed as a new thing that has emerged. Yet a lot of what has happened with globalization has happened for the last 100-150 years.
This is the weight of a language which can claim a certain universality, an applicability to almost everything that happens anywhere in the world. That is really the discursive power of Western modernity, which can encompass and bring under its wings almost anything that happens anywhere in the world. So that a lot of the local innovations simply never get recognized for the specific differences that they represent; the differences are simply erased. The only place where the differences get recognized is when they are seen or argued to be inconsistent with the larger pattern. That is the profoundly colonial pattern of the structure of theoretical discourse; what is recognized as different is necessarily excluded, whereas everything else that can be made consistent is not recognized as different. If you go back to what I said earlier on about the rule of colonial difference, it is exactly that.
Political Society
At a time where civil society is almost universally thought to be the panacea for the Third World and its ills, you have been criticizing the concept for a while and have instead developed the concept of "political society". Could you tell us what you see as the problems with the concept of civil society and the meaning of "political society" that you have been developing in The Politics of the Governed?
It is interesting that even though there is an old 18th century genealogy of the concept "civil society", it had been completely forgotten. It was only revived in the last 20 years or so, largely in the context of the collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. It was revived largely to make the practices of modernity, in this case largely political practices of modernity, understandable and effective precisely in these localized, everyday situations.
The idea of civil society and the way it has been used in the last 20 years is not simply to describe the overall, large constitutional structures of the state; it is used largely to try and understand how politics operates on the ground, at the community and local levels. It is really at the localized level, if one is to use the concept of civil society meaningfully, as I've been saying in answer to your previous questions, where most of the innovations have been done. In fact, even if the overall structures of the state and the overall governing principles remain the same, the real differences are at the level of localized practices. It is fundamentally misleading to claim that the same concept of civil society can describe the everyday, localized practices of governance in Western democracies and what happens in non-Western situations today. Localized practice is where the differences lie, which is why I have tried to show numerous examples of how communities actually cope with questions of illegality, of violence, of different people not being treated equally. These are the contexts which demonstrate the inapplicability of the large structures of modern forms of governance. The reason these large structures fail is because they are made effective precisely by not following the same idea of civil society.
Civil society is typically about a kind of free associative, modern bourgeois life. It is quintessentially bourgeois politics. The challenge that the modern state faces in most of the non-Western world is that most people are not bourgeois. What sense does it make to use the forms of modern law and modern administrative procedures on populations that cannot survive if you simply insist on protection of private property, equality of law, freedom of contract and these kinds of things? Most of these people would simply die or they would rise in revolt and break down the whole structure.
The reason why many of the forms of modern government actually manage to work is because they make adjustments and negotiate with many of these contrary forms. They do so at the localized level, very often by recognizing themselves as merely exceptional cases. But, of course, exceptions pile up on exceptions and very often there are localized norms which are often quite contrary to what the larger principles would dictate. Very often, at the local level, people have an understanding that the norm is actually quite different. It is only by recognizing that norm at the local level that in fact the larger structure will survive.
I have deliberately called this political society to suggest that the civil does not necessarily translate easily into the political; there is in fact a rift there. Yes, there is a zone of civil society in many of these countries. Yes, there is a zone where people rely on a modern contractual system, where there is free association, and I think many of those ideas - of free association, of modern, bourgeois life - actually have very powerful, often pedagogical, uses. Certainly many people lay great store by these ideas, which still continue to be effective as a way of thinking about what society ought to be like. It is recognized, however, that all of society is not like this and will not become like this overnight.
On the one hand, there is the modernizing project, which insists that at its completion, everybody will be properly respectful of the law and so on. But, in the meantime, how does society operate? There is a clear recognition that you have to make exceptions and that you have to negotiate very different claims. And these negotiations, I think, are fundamentally political.
Governmentalities
Also in the Politics of the Governed, you argue that the increasing proliferation of what you call "governmental technologies" has made liberalism irrelevant. Could you tell us a little bit about the nature of these technologies and what they reflect about liberalism?
These technologies have emerged largely through the 20th century and are now available all over the world. Even in the West, it is in the last century that mass democracies emerged; prior to that, everybody did not have the vote at all. In the US, for instance, universal adult franchise was only granted as recently as the 1960s, after the civil rights movement.
The emergence of these mass democracies produced new challenges, new problems of governance. A crucial development through the 20th century was the emergence of an idea of governance where it was understood that you could not have one or two very simple straightforward policies which would apply equally to all citizens. There was an increasing differentiation of sections of the population. It was understood that different sections of the population required different things, that different policies needed to be targeted at specific population groups. For instance, you could say at a very simple level that men and women required different kinds of benefits from the government; even among women, different age groups would have different requirements. All of this was elaborated in Western countries in terms of what was called the "welfare state". Even in that welfare state, it was understood that in order to be properly responsive to the needs of different groups of people, the state must be flexible in its policies; you could not have one simple blanket policy for everybody.
These techniques were then transferred and adapted to postcolonial countries, where for these policies to be effective - in health and education, in the basic needs sector, for instance - you needed similarly flexible policies. Even in terms of delivering food, it was understood that urban populations and rural populations would have to be treated differently. Among rural populations, children must be treated differently from adults, and so on. There are numerous ways in which specific policies began to be formulated for very specific groups of people.
So these are the new governmental technologies that I say were developed and made available. The idea behind this, which I think is a late 20th century development, was that no matter what the form of government, all governments needed to perform certain basic services and provide certain basic goods. At the global level, for instance, the UN is an international institution which provides certain services to anyone if the local government fails. If there is a famine in Ethiopia, one cannot simply say that the government in Ethiopia has failed, therefore nothing can be done. The idea is that certain basic services have to be provided to the people of Ethiopia and if the local government cannot do it, then other people must. And how does one provide these services? That is where I am suggesting that certain technologies have now been developed to ensure that particular services and resources are allocated to particular populations groups, no matter where they are.
What this means is that there are certain expectations which are now more or less universal; everybody, everywhere in the world, expects that a government ought to provide certain kinds of services at the very minimum. The interesting question now is how this technology of governance and the forms through which these services are provided will be combined with or related to political mobilization and ideology. This is where some interesting and perhaps quite basic changes have in fact emerged, starting with different forms of political mobilization. Specifically, I mean the ways in which population groups get classified and divided in the context of precisely these governmental services. Governmental classification could take numerous forms, for instance rural-urban, or could employ cultural or religious or ethnic categories, or some combination of all of the above. The point is that there is a whole range of ways in which populations might be classified for purposes of providing these services.
Very often, one would see that mobilizations would then occur around those governmental classifications. In other words, mobilization would take place precisely to make demands of the government on the basis of the category of which one was a part. The argument is roughly that the government has categorized people in this way and has guaranteed the provision of certain services to those belonging to that category. What you then get is a form of organization of political groups around classifications which are determined by the government. This can easily result in forms of mobilization which have nothing to do with the older ways in which people conceived of their identities. A lot of the identity politics that seems to have exploded in the last 20 years or so is probably conditioned by the ways in which people expect governments to provide them with certain kinds of basic services - welfare of different kinds, particular claims on things like education or employment, and so on.
The interesting question is how many of these categories - which have no moral foundation or any kind of ethical claim at all but are completely empirical descriptions of particular population groups - have actually managed to acquire a certain moral content through these political mobilizations. The claim is made that a group formed by a government classification is actually a community, there is a kind of solidarity, there is some moral identity of these people. This is the really interesting aspect of many of these political mobilizations: how do they manage to give themselves the form of a community when in fact there is no necessarily primordial or any other basis for this?
There are very interesting examples: in India, for instance, there is a category called 'BPL' which means "Below the Poverty Line." This is obviously an administrative demarcation. But there are policies of the government which say that if you belong to the BPL category, you are entitled to certain things and you actually carry a card which is called a BPL card. In many places, there are organizations or associations of BPL people. People below the poverty line could be from many different communities, many different caste groups, but suddenly the fact that all these people are classified as a group, as the target of a particular kind of policy, produces the ground on which these people can mobilize as a community. I think the interesting question would be: what is the moral character of this group? How is this local contextual community invented?
This is how the question of governmental technologies is connected with new forms of political mobilization, much of which is simply described as identity politics or sometimes as ethnic politics. Unlike the old anthropological understanding that most of this ethnic or identity politics has some kind of basis in primordial loyalties, a lot of it is probably simply a product of the way in which the new governmental technologies actually categorize people for purposes of administering policy.
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