STUDIES IN

HUMANITIES AND
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Journal of the Inter-University Centre
for Humanities and Social Sciences

Editor

MANAS RAY

INTER-UNIVERSITY CENTRE FOR HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY
RASHTRAPATI NIVAS, SHIMLA

STUDIES IN
HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Editor
MANAS RAY
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Zakir Hussain Institute of Islamic Studies
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SASHEEJ HEGDE
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RAVINDRA K. JAIN
Roots and Routes: notes towards a personal anthropology of Rabindranath
Tagore
F. G. ASENJO
The Whole in the Part
PRAVU MAZUMDAR
Machiavelli and the Art of Government: on Michel Foucaults non-reading
of Machiavelli
SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY
Counting and Trembling during the French Revolution: Elements of a
Historical Multiplicity
SASHEEJ HEGDE
Seeking after Traditions: Analytical Forays
ANJALI GERA-ROY
The Dehumanizing Mission of Imperial Reason and Humanizing
Blackness
MOHINDER SINGH
Conceptualization of the Social in the 19th Century North India:
Reflections on the concept of samaj in Hindi
JOYA CHATTERJI
Migration myths and the mechanics of assimilation: Two Community
Histories from Bengal
UDAYA KUMAR
The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech and the Dalit
Present in C. Ayyappans Stories
SUSAN VISVANATHAN
Summer Hill: the Building of Viceregal Lodge
PRACHI DESHPANDE
Pasts in the Plural: A review of Bhalchandra Nemades Hindu: Jaganyaachi
Samruddha Adagal
ANIRBAN DAS
Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?
Language, Politics, Belonging
DEBJANI SENGUPTA
Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India: Bengal and India,
1947-1967
ISSN: 0972-1401

CONTENTS

Editorial

1
ARTICLES

Roots and Routes: notes towards a personal

anthropology of Rabindranath Tagore
RAVINDRA K. JAIN

00

The Whole in the Part

F. G. ASENJO

00

Machiavelli and the Art of Government:

on Michel Foucaults non-reading of Machiavelli
PRAVU MAZUMDAR

00

Counting and Trembling during the French Revolution:

Elements of a Historical Multiplicity
SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

00

Seeking after Traditions: Analytical Forays

SASHEEJ HEGDE

00

The Dehumanizing Mission of Imperial Reason

and Humanizing Blackness
ANJALI GERA-ROY

00

Conceptualization of the Social in 19th Century North India:

Reflections on the concept of samaj in Hindi
MOHINDER SINGH

00

Migration myths and the mechanics of assimilation:

Two Community Histories from Bengal
JOYA CHATTERJI

00

The Strange Homeliness of the Night:

Spectral Speech and the Dalit Present in C. Ayyappans Stories
UDAYA KUMAR

00

SHSS MANAS RAY

SPECIAL ESSAY

Summer Hill: The Building of Viceregal Lodge

SUSAN VISVANATHAN

00

REVIEW ESSAY

Pasts in the Plural: A review of Bhalchandra Nemades Hindu:

Jaganyaachi Samruddha Adagal
PRACHI DESHPANDE

00

BOOK REVIEWS

Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings

the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging
ANIRBAN DAS

00

Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India:

Bengal and India, 1947-1967
DEBJANI SENGUPTA

00

EDITORIAL
As part of the long celebrations of Rabindranath Tagores 150th anniversary,
we begin this issue of Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences with an essay
reflecting on what it means to grow up in the manifold presences of the
poet. To be accurate, what we have is not an essay as such but the text of a
lecture that the noted anthropologist Ravindra Jain delivered at a
conference of the Indian Anthropology Association in Kolkata last
November. In course of these 150 years, Tagore, I think it is safe to say, has
become part of the habitus of modern India, irrespective of language or
location. Appropriately, Jain calls his enterprise a personal anthropology,
evocatively blending scenes from his own boyhood with those from
Tagores reminiscences. As a lecture-text, the paper is not expected to be
meticulously choreographed, but this in a way works to its advantage: A
bit like a kaleidoscope, it gives a new picture at every turn as one issue is
put aside and another introduced.
Ravindra Jain has raised a number of important questions in his
deliberations, of which I shall discuss just one: that of gender. He could
not be more correct in suggesting that in Tagores novels, the women
characters not only move out of the physical confines of home but do so
without having to stake or jeopardize their femininity. The novels are
truly celebrations of sexual identity. In more ways than one, this coming
out without having to be either denigrated or, for that matter, placed on a
high pedestal perhaps heralds the real beginnings of Indian modernity.
Nonetheless, while this is eminently true, Tagores women also do not
sever their links with the earlier trope of the dutiful, chaste wife and the
loving, all-giving mother that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had imagined
as the ethical, affective fulcrum of the future nation. There is a distinct
sense of the maternal in Tagores female characters. Take, for example,
Charulata in Nastonir. Her affection, warmth, care and patience for Amals
careless ways as well as for her husband Bhupati with whom she otherwise
had very little going not only not diminish but are actually very much part
of her sensitive, writerly, imaginative persona.
True as this is, we may need to remind ourselves that this wife/mother/
nation trope is not as neat as we might think it is even in Bankim; the
fractures within the paradigm are quite apparent in any close reading of
the novels. As an adroit novelist, Bankim does not make his female
characters merely represent the political-ethical positions of the novelist
but portrays them as living beings caught in the currents and crosscurrents
of life. If we consider a novel like Krishnakanter Will (Krishnakantas Will,
1878), we will find how Bankim in his bid to keep the efficacy of the

EDITORIAL

ideal of the pure chaste woman beyond all doubts, disciplines, almost
stifles, himself in depicting the aberrant and extremely complex Rohini.
Her ambiguities are also Bankims ambiguities.
In the course of the novel what is ultimately vindicated is of course
the ethical yardstick that Bankim champions but there are moments when
this seems quite vulnerable, and the tensions between the psychological
and the ethical registers are palpable. I am thinking of that particular point
in the novel when driven by desire, Gabindalal leaves his virtuous,
committed wife, Bhramar, and starts living with the beautiful Rohini, a
widow. Bankim describes a certain day when Rohini looking particularly
gorgeous on that occasion is playing the sitar for the enthralled
Gabindalal. At that moment Bankim addresses the reader directly and
says something to the effect that one has to remain content seeing only till
here, and not try to know the amorous, ugly underside of this beautiful
moment. He seems to be suggesting that to allow the reader knowledge
beyond the merely functional in an erotic, transgressive relationship is a
sin for the novelist, tantamount to being party to titillation. In other words,
it is morally wrong to either describe or read about unethical lovelocks.
This mode of almost elementary self-censoring in an otherwise rich and
complex plot structure as well as modes of enunciation shows the extent
of the novelists own vulnerability to desire. The issue of familial and
personal ethics in the novel escapes being didactic since Rohini is not a
seductress as such but in many respects a tragic character, stalled by the
genuine adversities of life and caught between a keen longing for marriage
and family on the one side and an active interest in men on the other.
As in Bankim, Tagores novels too, much more than being mere
conduits for certain discourses, functioned as a kind of a platter for the
readers to produce a near ceaseless discursive elongation. To return to the
novella, Nastonir, once again, it is fascinating to see how through the
imaginative ambiguity of the word, Tagore makes the formal-political and
the erotic co-constitutive. After locating Bhupati in the big issues of public
life the big events, the big writings, the big language (English) the
story moves to the interiors, to the other drama of life, one that has largely
escaped our editor-husband, engrossed as he is with the larger business
of politics and the language of its official transaction. This is the drama that
has been taking place quietly in the inner quarters of the house, a private
drama of love, desire and emptiness as Bhupatis bride Charulata slowly
blooms into her youth. What should have been a very significant news
does not reach the editor-husband, who has been preoccupied with Indian
governments boundary policies, the swelling ambitions of which, he
thought, were searing away traces of any restraint. Consequently, he remains
oblivious to a territorial geography of another kind: Within the cloisters

EDITORIAL

of the wealthy household, the young wife spends her days and nights
empty, blossoming with no one to appreciate her.
In this world of Charus solitude and deprived passion enters the
word not the word as the vehicle of formal politics but the word of
literary vocation, of imagined transgression. Charulata has a natural
inclination for reading and learning. Living in the same household under
Bhupatis care is his cousin, Amal, a third-year student in college. Charu
gets him to help her with her studies, something Amal will not do without
being profusely rewarded. She grants his demands numerous and
capricious even though they are, and to fulfill some of which she has to
indeed work very hard. She grudges him but only mockingly; at least
someone is making demands on her. The early, rudimentary pedagogy
inaugurates a literary theatre where the word comes flying on the wings
of Eros, inaugurating a space for intimate bonding between the two souls.
A piece of land lying mostly unkempt formally a garden with nothing
much beyond an English hog plum at a corner of Bhupatis estate becomes
the site of enormous investment of imagination for the two. It is no idle
daydreaming but a serious affair of land development which warrants
that a committee be formed between Amal and Charu. The budget,
however, will not permit the scale and quality of things planned. But
compromise is a taboo for Charu. The garden project might have failed to
take off, but cant the impossible be realized through other means? Yes, of
course, and through words only, written words in the realm of which
imagination attains its full life, life at the limits of the possible. The idea of
writing about the garden as it has shaped in their imaginations appeals to
Charu since no one else will get the import of the piece a patch of
simmering privacy in the transactional world of the literary public. She
encourages Amal to take the ever-postponed garden as his first writing
assignment. Amal agrees but demands that she embroider leaves and
creepers on the roof of his mosquito net. That exceeds all limits of
indulgence, thinks Charu. Amal gives a long lecture against keeping the
mosquito net in an unaesthetic state, much like a jail cell. By making an
embroidered mosquito net the centre for discursive investment and a
condition for writing, Tagore once again implicates the act of writing in
the scenario of the erotic. The evocations are deepened as Amal starts
reading out from an essay already written and kept hidden from Charu:
My Notebook, a hymn to the pristine white pages, as yet untouched by
the authors imagination and the ink stain of written words. From this
point, the intoxicant that literature is will start working in their lives, taking
its own course beyond what the two of them can possibly control. It
brings in their midst almost inevitably the anonymous reader, thus jolting
their world of privacy as Amals writings will start getting printed. Initially

EDITORIAL

hurt, Charu will soon follow suit. She draws more applause than Amal
from the critics. Their world of privacy becomes fissured as is the texture
of affect.
***

We believe we know what we are thinking about whole and part when
we employ such categories. Then we subconsciously consider a whole as
a simple collection of parts, each part being either an individual or a subcollection of individuals belonging or contained in the collection. This is
also the case with mathematical wholescalled sets or classesmade up
of clearly distinct elements or subclasses. This is eminently useful in
mathematics as well as in daily life. Yet it is an abstract conception. The
concrete fact is, argues Florencio Asenjo in the article The Whole in the
Part, that wholes are often part of their parts.This is true of the physiology
of a living organism where the whole organism is actively present in its
totality in each of its functioning organs. It is also true of a physical field of
forces, where the whole dynamic structure of the field functions from
within any partial region of the field, the field being replicated inside
each of its portions. Yet we are content to think of a living organism as a
mere collection of organs a set or of a field of forces as divisible when
one of its most essential properties is to have a location in toto in each of
its parts, that is, multiple location.
To make these facts clear in general, this work is divided into four
sections: Parts, Wholes, The Part in the Whole, and then a final
summing up, The Whole in the Part. The first section describes how
some significant fragments, physical or linguistic, spill beyond their
apparent confines in different concrete directions. They are pregnant with
meanings that go beyond their first impressions. Following this is a discussion
dealing with the dictum: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Often coextensive with its parts, a whole has distinct properties of its own
that we overlook when we see the whole as being merely the sum of its
parts. On the tracks of this line of interpretation, the final section extends
the investigation of the notion that a part influences another by a detour
through the whole to see the whole influencing itself by a detour through
the part as it goes beyond itself.
Saumabrata Chaudhurys essay, Counting and Trembling during the
French Revolution Elements of a Historical Multiplicity has two main
contentions. The first is that sovereignty, in its general structure, has a
numerical logic. The second states that in specific historical conjunctures
and sites, this logic is played out with a special intensity such that we are
confronted not with the simple confirmation or refutation of the logic

EDITORIAL

but with its contestation and division. The French Revolution names one
such conjuncture and site. In four parts, the paper tries to formalize certain
key moments and processes of division during the Revolution and in its
subsequent historiography. For the archive of the revolutionary material
(between 1789 and 1794), the author consults some declarations of the
leading pamphleteer of that time, Abbe Sieyes. For inaugurating the great
tradition of history-writing with the French Revolution as its vital subject
and infinite object Chaudhury reads Jules Michelet. For counterrevolutionary logic and polemic, he goes to Michelets near contemporary
in the 19th century, Joseph de Maistre.
The method of this paper is to excavate certain numerical operations
that run through the sources. It is a veritable archeology of the
mathematical unconscious of historico-political discourse during the
Revolution. The stakes and motivation for this effort lie in the imperative
that we must inquire anew whether the paradigmatic will to a modern,
secular and popular sovereignty that is often imagined to have begun with
the French Revolution (as opposed to the theological and monarchical
sovereignty of the Old Regime) is sustainable as to its axiomatic logic: This
is the logic that declares - whether in the field of mathematics or politics
that the One exists and is that with which we subsequently count the
sovereign(s) whether the one king or the many people. Then the
question to ask is: what are the ontological and political implications of
this prescribed existence? And what happens, what strange trembling is
induced, if one wagers another prescription, an errant one, that the One
is not.?
Pravu Mazumdars essay, Machiavelli and the art of government: on
Michel Foucaults non-reading of Machiavelli, as the titles indicates,
explores Foucaults strange non-reading of Machiavelli but does so that
in a way that throws light on the larger issue of Foucaults method as such.
Even though for Foucault Machiavelli plays a central role in the
genealogical processes leading to the birth of governmentality in Europe
and even though he never denied Machiavelli a position of importance in
conceptualizing his own analytics of power, it was not part of Foucaults
enterprise to give a well-rounded account of Machiavellis works. Instead,
he concentrated on the historical reduction of the philosopher to the one
posthumous text alone i.e., The Prince - by the commentators of the 16th
and 17th centuries. Foucault viewed this historical reduction as a positivity
of discourse that allowed the framing of the discourse of the reason of the
state. As Mazumdar puts it succinctly: His (Foucaults) main interest is in
how this positivity helped to carve out a new discourse that will lay itself
in contrast to the Machiavellian emphasis on sovereign and territory.
If Machiavellis central problem was the security of the Prince and his

EDITORIAL

territories, the new discourse emphasised the government of populations.

Machiavelli stands at the threshold of political thought, as the last and
most important frontier of the old. His priority was not the state as such
but to save the principality as a power relation between the prince and his
territory. Mazumdar elaborates how locating Machiavelli as a negative
constituency for the framing of an upcoming discourse (in this case, the
reason of the state and, subsequently, governmentality) ties up with an
important component of Foucaults genealogical method namely,
problematization which he reads in the light of the process of becoming
unknown and subsequently dangerous for the known and the familiar. In
an innovative motive, he reads the consolidated attack on Machiavelli by
political commentators of early modernity in conjunction with the
emergence of the dispositif of madness as part of the way reason
consolidated itself. Just as The Prince came under critical scrutiny to make
room for the new political rationality, the problematisation of madness
was the background which produced the surface effect the historical
constitution of psychiatric reason the whole notion of inclusion and
betterment of madness, supported by the clinical and psychiatric dispositifs
of modern power. It is only after the French Revolution when the typically
Machiavellian problems of sovereignty, territoriality and force relations
became relevant again that there was a kind of Machiavellian renaissance.
Sasheej Hegdes paper, Seeking after Traditions: Analytical Forays
lends a distinct analytical twist to the academic engagement with traditions.
While avoiding an excessive historical self-consciousness about the
problem, the attempt is to get a measure of the contemporaneity attaching
to the question of tradition and to place it along a normative-analytical
grid implicating, among others, the work of Wittgenstein and Bernard
Williams. The author adduces to a level of normativity that goes beyond
an internal and external norm in operation and held to underlie the study
of traditions generally. (Here by internal is meant, broadly, understandings
in which traditions are made intelligible by being revealed to be, or to
approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be; correspondingly,
external refers to a style of understanding in which one makes traditions
intelligible by representing their coming into being as a particular instance
of how things generally tend to happen.) Indeed, the East-West matrix of
genealogy implicating the study of traditions simplifies what is really a
complex matter about judgment, about the translatability of traditions
and the kinds of necessity that bind previous or parallel instances of a
tradition (or practice) with a new one while also failing to reflect upon
the ontological status of discourses directed at creating a normativity out
of themselves. Accordingly, then, the near-programmatic outlines attaching

EDITORIAL

to the paper should not be lost sight of in responding to my formal grounds

of appraisal herein.
Calling attention to the civilizing mission as an effective strategy of
imperial control, postcolonial writers and scholars have sought to unpack
the complex process through which the larger part of the worlds
population was denied human status by the nineteenth century
ethnosciences in British and other imperialisms. For this reason, black
writers and intellectuals have implicated European religion, history and
philosophy in the dehumanizing project of imperialism through which
imperial reason staked its moral claims to rule the colonies. The Nigerian
novelist Chinua Achebes oft quoted characterization of Conrad as a
bloody racist, for instance, was endorsed by fellow Nigerian Wole Soyinka
in his Nobel Address when he made a similar charge against some of the
greatest Western thinkers and philosophers just as African-American
writing bears witness to the dehumanization of black slaves. Through an
examination of imperial and postcolonial texts, Anjali Gera-Roys paper,
The Dehumanizing Mission of Imperial Reason, focuses on the nexus
between reason, writing and the imperial text in writing black people
out of history, culture, and humanity and their reinscription into the human
race through the technology of writing.
In his paper Concepts of Society and Community in the 19th
Century North India: Reflections of the word samaj in Hindi,
Mohinder Singh argues that the process of conceptualization of the social
in 19th century India in different regions is related alright but there are at
the same time crucial differences because of the differing nature of political
and social transformations they undergo during this period. The author
analyzes the conceptualization of the social in the nationalist discourse in
Hindi inaugurated by the Banaras-Allahabad centred Hindi literati of
colonial times. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the linguistic,
reformist, and nationalist issues became intertwined. In the second part
of the essay, the discourse of the social is analyzed along two axes: the
religious and the political. Here Singh takes up journalistic writings,
pamphlets, and public speeches of the prominent Hindi public intellectuals
of this period: Bhartendu Harishchandra, Balkrishan Bhatt, Pratapnarayan
Mishra, and Chaudhary Badrinarain Upadhyay Premghan. Though this
literati is opposed to the programme as prescribed by social reform
movements like the Arya Samaj, they dont defend the existing status quo
and try to devise their own strategy of reform. They do so by trying to
separate the question of social reform from that of religious reform. The
question of social reform is instead linked to the question of the progress
of the nation. The paper tries to contextualize the meaning to the term

EDITORIAL

samaj against the background of these debates. Conceptual historical

considerations are taken up in the last section where the paper focuses on
the contextual meaning of the words samaj and samajik. In modern
vernaculars like Bengali, Hindi and Gujarati, the Sanskrit terms samaj and
samajik come to acquire new meanings in order to express the new
conceptualization of the social during this period. The contextual meaning
of the term samaj is then related to other important concepts of vernacular
political thought during this period such as jati, desh, unnati, etc..
Joya Chatterjis Migration myths and the mechanics of assimilation:
two community histories from Bengal offers a sustained engagement
with two community histories Yousuf Choudhurys The roots and
tales of Bangladeshi settlers and Ahmed Ilyas Biharis: The Indian emigres
to Bangladesh the first produced by a Bengali-speaking working class
Sylheti Bangladeshi in London and the second by a representative of the
literati of Bihari Muslim settlers in Bangladesh. It makes the important
point that migrant histories are not about becoming a melting pot but
about ethnicities assimilating without giving up their cultural specificities
in other words, assimilation involves a degree of choice and agency.
Following a comparative method, Chatterji privileges the shared
narrative conventions of the histories of these two migrant communities
while registering some of the differences between them. There are three
areas in which the two texts are found to have overlapping concerns and
conventions.The first is that of origins which is mythicised into an amalgam
of earthly fruitfulness and sacrosanct plenitude. Within this the difference
lies in the emphasis given by Ilyas to the traditions of syncretism and
learning in Bihar, while in Choudhurys account it takes a more explicitly
originary mode as he describes, dreamily, how the central lowlands of
Sylhet, a swan-shaped gulf, rose out of the sea in the misty past and nestled
among low hills covered with lush monsoonal forest. The second overlap
pertains to the ways in which they narrate their stories of dramatic arrival
to their present host countries, escaping the tumultuous happenings on
the way - of hazardous seamanship in Chaudhurys account (which happily
denies historical time its share of accuracy) and the bloody riots of Bihar
back in 1946 in the case of Ilyas. Finally, the stories commonly record a
service of past loyalties to the host nation even as Ilyas complicates this
narrative by a sustained auto-critique of his communitys standoffish-ness
vis--vis the Bangladeshis and, more challengingly for his narrative, the
communitys pugnacious role during the Bangladesh War. Chatterji
proceeds to show how these accounts be it of British Bangladeshis or
Urdu speaking Bangladeshis work towards seeking assimilation with a
measure of self-respect and cultural difference, taking recourse to the
host countrys civil society organisations, the law, political activists and so

EDITORIAL

on. The essay, thoroughly empirical even as it is, makes two significant
theoretical gains. One, along with recognising the migrant communities
in their ethnographic particularities, it views them as operating within the
ambit of legality. And second, instead of chanting hybridity as a mantra
every time one discusses a migrant community, it locates the textured
quality of hybrid subjectivities in the complex reality of community
rights.
C. Ayyappan (1949-2011) is among the most significant Dalit writers
from Kerala. The majority of his stories are told by the unquiet ghosts of
Dalit men and women who took their own lives or were murdered. Udaya
Kumars paper, The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech
and the Dalit present in C. Ayyappans Stories offers an analysis of the
complex figuration of the subject in these stories and argues that Ayyappans
work, through an innovative use of elements from Dalit traditions of
remembrance and narration, advances distinctively new idioms for
presenting a contemporary experience of disinhabitation.
The Dalit issue has traditionally been seen as part of the lower-caste
reform movement, comfortably placed in the larger phenomenon of the
socially disadvantaged. There was no recognition of an autonomous Dalit
social articulation. Only recently as the progressivist narratives of Kerala
modernity are losing in credibility has Ayyappans concern with the
metaphorics of fractured vision given him an unseasonal legibility. The
stripped body writes Udaya Kumar, cowers, making the gesture of
wanting to disappear into itself, to erase itself from the field of visibility.
The twisted, skewed world of the social belies the transparency of daylight
and can only have spectral expression. He is a writer who chooses to
work in the dark room of social time. His art, as the author observes, is
more like nocturnal photography, a spectrography of the night. The
stretch of time between the midnight siren of factories and the early
morning call of the rooster is the time of his stories; this is the time when
the thanatographic lives of the characters flash out in the spectral darkness
of night.
Ayyappans characters are possessed, each character a site of double
existence and as such are at once both over-filled and hollow. The spectral
becomes the sign of a social alchemy that transforms the promises of
inclusion into entrenched disavowals. The authors lonely childhood with
his grandmother in central Kerala as part the Pulaya community sets the
ambience of the stories. The sound of sirens and shrieks of birds is the
soundscape of a world where the execution of untouchable lovers of caste
Hindus or Christians are a normalized practice. If atheism and rationalism
enabled him to acquire the minimal courage for survival in this world of
dark frightening spirits, by the same measure they prevented him from

10

EDITORIAL

engaging with that world, from delving into their midst. As part of his
childhood inheritance one might say, Ayyappan carries a streak of allegiance
to rationalism all through his literary life only to find it being disavowed
every time. The ghostly characters are busy giving rational explanations of
their actions a narrative technique that almost inevitably leads to greater
disorientation, the fulcrum of an excess of unsocial, searing energies.
There is another strand of stories where Dalits are not victims, but
successful, Dalits who have done well in life, managed to marry higher
than their own, have secured well-paid salaried jobs. But even they are
caught in strange behaviour and are busy explaining the rational of such
strangeness. Did the familiar rituals of the farewell function conceal
suppressed upper-caste sarcasm, wonders one such successful Dalit. His
way of getting back was to write a novel to humiliate a fellow Dalit, exposing
his inferior caste status. In one such story, the protagonist clarifies that
when a protest march demanding a hike in salary was in progress, a group
of beggars and lepers and prostitutes onlookers from the street joined
them in support and started shouting the same slogans. In contrast to Joya
Chatterjis article, Udaya Kumars essay explores how assimilation into
middle class life can often turn into a nightmare of anxiety and deception.
Like the last issue of Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, this issue
too includes what can be called a special essay: Susan Visvanathans Summer
Hill: the building of Viceregal Lodge, a fascinating tale of the coming
into being of Simla as the summer capital of the British Raj that blends
freely techniques borrowed from history, sociology and literature.
Visvanathans particular focus is on the process of the construction of
Viceregal Lodge (or, Summer Hill, as it is known). She uses primary and
secondary material to highlight two aspects of the making of this grand
palace: one, electrification of the building and two, the management and
cost of labour. In her account, they also serve as two indexes for analyzing
power and control in British India. The summer capital moved in and out
of the hills every year on the backs of coolies till the railways tracks were
laid up to Simla in 1903. Part of the essay is also about the cartographic
adventure of the empire, the coming in of Simla into the visual register of
the empire sighting Simla in course of mapping the terrain as it itself
opens out to a vast, unspoilt vista.
Along with the sinewy history of labour that the roads and the palaces
contain labour which quite often went unpaid was the other history
of pomp and mirth of the summer capital. The essay in a way is a tribute
paid to the immense labour involved in transforming Simla from a sleepy
sanatorium in the lap of the Himalayas into an imperial habitat This
dear Simla! in the exilic exhortation of Emily Eden. Dalhousie: Balls
here, balls there, balls by the society; amateur plays, concerts, fancy fairs,

EDITORIAL

11

investitures of the Bath and co and co. I quite sigh for the quiet of Calcutta.
In the last quarter of the essay,Visvanathan changes register and moves
to fiction to tell the same story but from a very different perspective,
bringing in the paranoid reveries of Lord and Lady Dufferin over unpaid
labour. Much like Calvinos account in Invisible Cities of Marco Polos
narration of the cities he visited during his expedition, Visvanathans
fictional patch attributes a third, invisible dimension to the palace, one
between the planned and the executed, with the ghostly shadows of the
unpaid workers haunting the Dufferin domestics, like the sea in an
endless ebbing, a threat of return, a lost country. At one point, it seemed
to Lady Dufferin that they were prisoners of their own invention,
prisoners of a grandeur which was so hollow it left them enchanted and
removed from real things. Is this the ultimate story of all empires? Here
is Calvino:Only in Marco Polos accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern,
through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern
so subtle it should escape the termites gnawing.
MANAS RAY

ROOTS AND ROUTES: NOTES TOWARDS A

PERSONAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Ravindra K. Jain1

ROOTS

Nature
My initial image of Tagore is as a boy in Jorasanko House, Kolkata, who
writes about his home tutor to come (or rather not to come) on a rainy
day. The following is a paraphrase of what I remember from my own
school days of Rabindranaths writing:
It rained all morning and all day.There was water everywhere; all drains, ponds and
even roads were overflowing with rain water. I sat looking out of the window, almost
certain that the teacher will not come today, praying that the rain would not stop.
The rain did not stop but, alas, nor did the teacher (from coming to teach)!

The evocation here is of external atmosphere and an internal milieu.

Knowing Bengal, and the fury of its monsoon, and empathizing with the
inner feelings of a young boysensitive and poetic to the coreone
visualizes Tagore in the high ceiling room of urban Kolkata at Jorasanko
ardently wishing for a reprieve from the tutor to let his mind wander
freely with the rain clouds. It is the same poet who wrote in his mature
years those memorable lines: mono mor megher songi, ure chole dig digantero
pane, nissim sunye, sravana barsan sangeete, rimi jhim rimi jhim rimi jhim. As I
was rummaging through my mothers Hindi translations of Rabindra Sangeet,
set to the same tunes as originally by the Poet, there were at least two
more songs celebrating rains in the months of Asarh and Sawan. First,
eshechhe asarh, that goes like this: abar eshechhe asarh akash chheye, ashe brishtir
subash batash beye. Second, rimjhim ghan barse, that goes: rimjhim ghano ghanore
barse, gagane ghan ghata sihare tarulata, mayur mayuri nachichhe harshe.
Tagore writes on page 1 of volume 1 of Rabindra Rachanabali,A country
is not territorial (mrinmaya); it is ideational (chinmaya). Clouds, rain water,
waves of the ocean (as we shall see) are the symbolic vehicles through
which Tagores celebration of nature transcends the mere territorial and
the geographical. Tagore is, in his own way intensely Bengali (in language

14

RAVINDRA K. JAIN

and culture) minus a territorial fixation. That is the reason why in Tagores
conception diverse peoples and cultures, irrespective of territorial and
geographical boundaries, constitute the domain of a country like India
the Indic civilization rather than a nation. Allow me to quote Partha Chatterjee:
(Tagore) denied the centrality of the state in the life of the nation and instead
pointed to the many institutions and practices in the everyday lives of the people
through which they had evolved a way of living with their differences.The argument
here is (apropos nationalism) that the true history of India lay not in the battles of
kings and the rise and fall of empires but in this everyday world of popular life
whose innate flexibility, untouched by conflicts in the domain of the state, allowed
for the coexistence of all religious beliefs....2

Here we have Tagore, a Bengali without a geographical fixation and an

Indian without a Nationalist fixation.
Novels and the Gender question
In his novels, as contrasted with his songs in the middle and the paintings
at the other end, that of abstraction, Tagore emerges in the concrete of
landscapes villages, footpaths, rivers, and, yes, people especially women
as complementary to men. Not for Tagore the stable and constant
valorization of woman as goddess (devi); she is more a sahachari, a
companion, as in Nastanira (Charulata) among the long stories or in his
correspondence with women aboard ship during foreign journeys. As I
shall illustrate more in his aspect of routes or voyages, Tagore shatters the
hubris so well depicted by Partha Chatterjee of woman standing as a
sign for nation, namely the spiritual qualities of self-sacrifice, benevolence,
devotion, religiosity, and so on. Even in explicitly insider-outsider discourse
about women in Ghare Baire Tagores reflexive anticipation of womans
will and wish (as also in Chokher Bali) militates against the standard
depiction, viz., woman moving out of the physical confines of the home ,
making it possible for her to go into the world, under conditions that
would not threaten her femininity. Finally, as Partha Chatterjee has put it,
... the image of woman as goddess or mother served to erase her sexuality
in the world outside the home.3 The heroines of Nastanir and Chokher
Bali, on the other hand, are in the boldest relief celebrations of female
sexuality irrespective of whether in the home (ghare) or in the world
outside (baire). It is not for nothing that Bankim Chandras Vande Mataram
(nation = mother = goddess) is contrasted with Rabindranaths Jana Gana
Mana where the centrality of People, inclusive of men and women,
resounds as the national anthem for the country India.

ROOTS AND ROUTES

15

Gora and the Experiential

In some ways Tagores Gora is the most typical anthropological turning of
the inside-out limitsa novel where the author strikingly jumps out of
the skin of his ascribed identity, that of an upper middle class bhadralok
Bengali gentleman, and is able to view Indias teeming humanity as if
from the widest lens of a detached yet involved film director. This attached
detachment is the core of Goras identity revelation of being White in the
Black container (something we write about in Indian riddles as the
coconut complex). Gora is a consistent and detailed process of infusing
his universal humanismbeyond East and West and outside racial
stereotypeswith a strong sense of Indian reality. Tagores depiction of
Goras encounters with the realities of village life and with the villagers
struggles adds chapter and verse to what has been a constant subtext, a
haunting resonance, in Tagores poetry, viz., the visage of the folktribal
and ruralsuffused in art and performance. Shantiniketan and Shriniketan
were not dreamt of by Tagore in a day. They were the realized vision
combining the cosmopolitan (China and Japan for example) and the
indigenous (the Santal of Birbhum for instance) of his experience,
cognition and creativity. The resonance of the smell of the earth is so well
captured in the Rabindra Sangeet sung by the Baul: ranga matir path.
ROUTES

The Poetics of Manhood

In delineating Rabindranath Tagores routes and translating these into my
personal anthropology of the Poet I am primarily indebted to two sources:
one, Sugata Boses article, Rabindranath Tagore and Asian Universalism4
and two, the volume Victoria Ocampo: An Exercise in Indo-Argentine
Relationship edited by Susnigdha Dey (1992). As is well known, while
Tagores initial encounter with a foreign land, as with the majority of
Bengali middle class travelers of his generation was with England (and
subsequently with other European countries), his travels in Asiato Japan,
China, Southeast Asia and the Middle Eastand further on to the southern
hemisphere, to Argentina, mark a distinct trajectory in the life of a
nineteenth/early twentieth century Indian intellectual. Rabindranath as a
traveler, I should note, is not in the same genre as Marco Polo or Ibn
Batuta. It is in tune with what I would call (with apologies to Michael
Herzfeld for his original usage of this trope in contrapuntal depiction of
male machismo in rural Greece) Tagores poetics of manhood. There are
intimations of this in many vignettes of Tagores letters to his intimate
friend and admirer, the Argentinian Victoria Ocampo, statements by the

16

RAVINDRA K. JAIN

Poet suffused with what I would only call an unbearable softness of being
(a male), something which we moderns nowadays call as being completely
laid back. Two examples will suffice.
It will be difficult for you to fully realize what an immense burden of loneliness I
carry about me, the burden that has specially been imposed upon me by my sudden
and extraordinary fame. I am like an unfortunate country where on an inauspicious
day a coal mine has been discovered with the result that its flowers are neglected, its
fruits cut down and it is laid bare to the pitiless gaze of a host of treasure-seekers. My
market price has been high and my personal value has been obscured. This value I
seek to realize with an aching desire which constantly pursues me. This can be had
only from a womans love and I have been hoping for a long time that I do deserve
it.
I feel today that this precious gift has come to me from you and that you are able to
prize me for what I am and not for what I contain5

Another letter to Victoria Ocampo written on board ship on 5 January

1925 shortly after leaving Argentina:
I am completely surrounded by a deep atmosphere of laziness as befits a human
male in an ideal condition of life. In these two days I have been able to understand
why Chinamen must smoke opium in order to realize for a few moments the
profound dignity of the male, his natural birthright of intutile passiveness of which
he is forcibly deprived the rest of his waking hours.. The Spanish philosopher was
right when he said that it was women who civilized us, and thus they have made our
life burdensome, have imposed upon us missions that are not ours. We have taken
our revenge, made them more decorative than useful, turned them into hothouse
where forced sentiments are cultivated, prized for their ravishing colours and perfume
of sickly passion
I have been advised never to joke with a woman but I am afraid some of the
observations in this letter show signs of frivolity.You will excuse me when you know
that a man who is not a prophet and yet who is treated as a prophet must give vent
to his fit of laughter even at the risk of misunderstanding.6

Asian Universalism
During his Asian sea voyages, the muse in Tagore haunted him like a
passion and transmuted through the rich mythopoetics of an imagination
of Asia as an abstract entity transcending the imperial and national frontiers
being erected by colonial powers on to the physical and mental maps of
the colonized, thereby serving as a prism to refract the light of universal
humanity. And yet, as Sugata Bose remarks, The swadeshi (own country)
cultural milieu of early twentieth-century India, despite its interest in
rejuvenating indigenous traditions, was not wholly inward-looking; its

ROOTS AND ROUTES

17

protagonists were curious about innovations in other parts of the globe

and felt comfortable with ever widening concentric circles of Bengali
patriotism, Indian nationalism, and Asian universalism.7 Thus, as part of
Asian universalism Sister Nivedita introduced Okakura Kakuzo to the
Tagore clan and a formidable bridge was established between East and
South Asia. Japanese artists Taikan Yekoyama and Shunso Hishida soon
followed Okakuras trail to Calcutta. Tagores direct encounter with the
power and scale of art in Japan during his 1916 visit to that country led
him to urge Indian artists to look east in order to pioneer a fresh departure
from the swadeshi corpus of ideals. He was as impressed by Japanese
visual arts as he was unimpressed by Japans tendency to imitate the worst
elements of European nationalistic imperialism. Let me add in parenthesis
Tagores fascination also with China. The story of the founding of the
Hall of Chinese Studies or Cheena Bhavan in Shantiniketan in 1937 has
recently been told in the volume, Tagore and China, edited by Tan Chung,
Amiya Dev and others (2011). The impact of China on Tagores artistic
imagination was made early; he was an admirer of the precise pictorial
images of traditional Chinese poetry and its sober universal appeal. He
preferred the subdued undertones of Chinese poetry as expressions of
true modernity to the modish and bathetic manner of Anglo=American
modernism. (Swapan Majumdar: Looking East: China in Tagores
Cosmology of Thoughts, in the Tan Chung et. al. ed. Volume).
Mythopoetics
In this personal anthropology of Tagore, I can only offer glimpses of what
the mythopoetic imagination of the Poet created en route various
destinations in Asia. My task has been rendered easier by Sugata Boses
transcreations from Tagores original writing in Bengali, I presume
of the experiences of that journey. To illustrate, Tagore set off on a global
oceanic voyage from Calcutta on May 3, 1916 aboard the Japanese ship
Tasamaru. Traveling on this easterly route for the first time in his life, Tagore
encountered a mighty storm in the Bay of Bengal that left no dividing
line between the clouds and the waves. Someone seemed to have opened
the blue lid of the ocean and countless demons had emerged from below
wrapped in grey clouds of smoke as in the Arabian nights, and were
shooting up to the sky. After four days at sea the appearance of birds in the
sky signaled that land was near. If the ocean was the domain of dance, its
shores heralded a realm of music. As the ship moved up the Irrawady
towards Rangoon, Tagore observed the row of kerosene-oil factories with
tall chimneys along its banks as if Burma was lying on its back and smoking
a cigar.8

18

RAVINDRA K. JAIN

It was in the midst of another frightening storm in the South China

Sea on May 21, 1916 that Tagore composed his songBhuban Jora
Ashankhaniasking the Almighty to spread his seat of universality in the
individuals heart:
Your universe-encompassing prayer mat
Spread it out in the core of my heart.
The nights stars, the days sun, all the shades of
darkness and light.
All your messages that fill the skyLet them find their abode in my heart.
May the lute of the universe
Fill the depths of my soul with all its tunes.
All the intensity of grief and joy, the flowers touch,
the storms touchLet your compassionate, auspicious, generous hands
Bring into the core of my heart.9

IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: GENDER AND NATION IN TAGORE

Based on my potted and largely second-hand reading of Tagore let me

state in conclusion what I have been trying to drive at. Ever since Ashis
Nandy wrote his Illegitimacy of Nationalism, the English-knowing readers
of Tagore have come to realize that the Poet was not privy to the widely
prevalent mood of political and intellectual Indian nationalism of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What was his positive counterpart
to that negation? It has been pointed out that, if anything, Tagore was a
believer in civilizational unity (though contra state and imperial power)
and values of mankind strongly inflected by his socialization as a Bengali,
as a literary figure and, as it happened in his adult life, through his
encounters with a diversity of cultures out of India. What attitude does
Tagores corpus reveal in relation to Indian culture, civilization and
contemporary polity? The gist of my argument above is that this was a
variety of patriotism contra nationalism. Significantly enough the gender
equation in Tagores life and letters has a bearing on how he conceived
and emoted in his creative writing the encounter with gender in relation
to what I have called his brand of patriotism. There is a special piquancy
in this relationship in that it stands in stark contrast to an influential angloBengali reading of early nationalism in India, viz., Partha Chatterjees
depiction sui generis of derivative Indian nationalism where the derivative

ROOTS AND ROUTES

19

element, obviously from the West, is put into high relief by the imaging of
the internal/spiritual Indian ethos in a feminine mould. In this context
are recalled the equation between nation, mother and goddess on the
one hand and the sequestering of female sexuality within home (never
outside), on the other hand. My contention is that Tagores life work
upsets the entire configuration of that particular hubris.
WORKS CITED

Bose, Sugata. 2010. At Home in the World, Indian Express, 19 May.

Bose, Sugata. 2010. Rabindranath Tagore and Asian Universalism, text
of a lecture given in Singapore, http://nsc.iseas.edu.sg/documents/
conferences/.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dev, Amiya, Tan Chung, Wang Bangwei, Wei Liming. 2011. Tagore and
China. New Delhi: Sage India.
Dey, Susnigdha. 1992. Victoria Ocampo, an exercise in Indo-Argentine relationship
(New world literature series). Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation.
Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. 1997. Selected Letters of Rabindranath
Tagore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
NOTES
1. By a personal anthropology I mean that anthropology is a reflexive enterprise in
which the two subjects (rather than a subject and an object) interact on a
consistent and sustained basis in terms of their experiential and cognitive bearings.
Thus in this case, what I am able to reconstruct of Tagores reflexive trajectory is
sought to be matched with my own and is expressed as an interpretation.
2. Partha Chatterjee: The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 112.
3. Ibid. p. 131.
4. Sugata Bose,At Home in the World, Indian Express, 19 May, 2010.
5. Mony Chadha,Victoria Ocampo and Rabindranath Tagore:A Tribute toVictoria,
in Susnigdha Dey in collaboration with embassy of Argentina (compiled and
edited), Victoria Ocampo: An Exercise in India- Argentina Relationship, Delhi, B.R.
Publishing Corp., 1992, p.6
6. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson: Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, p.
314.
7. Bose, op cit.
8. Bose, Sugata:Rabindranath Tagore and Asian Universalism.
9. Quoted in Bose, op. cit.

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

F. G.Asenjo

SECTION I: PARTS

1. Background
Concepts change, some more rapidly than others. Facts, historical events,
discoveries determine the current meaning of concepts, the implicit as
well as the explicit ones. Some are defined in terms of more basic
undefined notions which we call categories or primitive ideas. These
categories also change, some spectacularly so, as the concepts of space and
time, others do so so slowly that seem to be unchanging eternal entities.
Here we want to deal with the basic categories of whole and part which
in our daily life we make use of without thinking about their precise
possible meanings. We do so of course with most categories: we believe
we know what we are thinking about when we employ them until the
facts call for a rectification big or small of prior subconscious interpretations.
But to interpret we do, including when we accept standard semantic
practices. This is true even in mathematics, where defined concepts are a
function of how we set up our primitive ideas, that is, how we determine
the semantic initial domain of interpretation in which such ideas acquire
specific meaning, and in which proofs take residence and acquire a
particular life. The notion that mathematics is incurably abstract is an
exaggeration.
To take parts as individual elements of an expediently simple
collection of individuals that performs the role of whole somewhat
indifferently is the abstract approach with which we feel comfortable when
we do not give to such conception another thought. We want to show
though that there are other ways of thinking which place us closer to
what reality, both physical and psychological, is like in its concreteness.
Not that we want concreteness to be embraced fully once and for all
within a better mental frame, which is impossible, rather to take a few
steps forward in the never-ending task of apprehending reality as it truly
is in its entirety, or better said, in a less incomplete manner.
2. Fragments

22

F.G. ASENJO

How is the word fragment officially defined? As a part broken off,

as a small detached portion, as an imperfect or incomplete part, or as
something that is small and usually insignificant. The verb to fragment
is defined as to break into fragments, as to break or divide into
disorganized or not unified pieces, or as to destroy by such breaking or
dividing up.1 This is the inherited wisdom for an uncomplicated meaning
of the noun and the verb.
There is, however, another way to construe the meaning of fragment,
even in the case in which a fragment is the outcome of breaking up a
larger whole. The construction we are referring to makes the fragment a
source of originally undetermined or previously unnoticed meanings, a
site teeming with promising interpretations, with new enhancing
subsumptions. This way of construing the meaning of fragment gives
the word what we can call a positive semantic ambiguity, an ambiguity
that gathers a spectrum of wholes into each of which the fragment is a
broken portion, or originally created full of pregnant meanings. These
pregnant meanings may point in different concrete directions, and thus
invite us to choose from a wealth of avenues to follow, that is, to engage in
specific applications. In this alternative construction, the fragment possesses
an intense life of its own.
A preeminent example of such kind of pregnant fragment is the
collection of broken writings from the Presocratic thinkers that have
randomly survived. This fascinating assortment of the most suggestive
fragments in existence has preoccupied Western thought for centuries;
indeed, volumes have been written as to how each statement in the remains
should be interpreted. Such reconstructions often let to opposite
understandings, but this is only a testimony to the fertility of the thoughts.
They are not mere flotsams but gravid living creatures all. Thales,
Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles,
Anaxagoras, these are awe-inspiring names that keep resonating through
the ages, their writings generating each its own universe of interpretations.
Of course, should we be in possession of the entire corpus of what each
of these figures wrote, it is possible that some of the most outlandish
extrapolations would automatically become superfluous or then again,
perhaps not. At any rate, despite the misfortune of having lost so much
wisdom from these thinkers, what has reached us is so str ikingly
productive, that it is a consolation to realize how much intellectual energy
there is still in what we do have, how many ways there are in which each
sentence can be read and developed. This is particularly true of the most
cryptic and mysterious of such fragments. In fact, the more opaque they
seem to be at first sight, the more suggestive they become with repeated

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

23

approaches. Indeed, they are even today the triggers of the most creative
inspirations.
Another example of pregnant fragments is the aphorisms. A good
aphorism is not only a valuable condensation of general wisdom, but it is
also capable of an unlimited number of relevant instantiations. Their pithy
content hits us from the start: we recognize their potentiality for valuable
developments. This potentiality makes the aphorism be seen as a brief
treatise that stretches beyond itself. Some authors are especially good at
this kind of genre; they know how to fit the world into a capsule. Excerpts
from a diary or a notebook may fall into this category as well.
Of course, in a deep sense, every writing, no matter how accomplished,
is ultimately a fragment crying for large accounts into which to be
embedded. The Iliad is incomplete without The Odyssey and The Oresteia,
etc. But even any work without a sequel can be seen as part of a larger
whole, a whole which may not exist at the present, and which may never
be brought into actuality. There is an essential incompleteness in any work,
as well as in any act of life, something which far from being a defect, is a
positive, regular introduction to the future.
Now, depending on the strength of the given whole, to segregate one
of its details as a surrogate of the whole and be considered as a whole by
itself may sometimes create an altogether new entity, contrasting and intense
relative to the nature of its origin. Think of how the reproduction of a
segment of a master painting an expressive hand, a grimacing face, a
whimsical particular can became all by itself a veritable new painting,
one with a new overall conception and with a distinctive quality not
necessarily in harmony with the quality and atmosphere of the original.
This is true of music as well, and of literature. A musical fragment
overshadowed by its surrounding developments may turn into a minipiece of its own by itself. The single saying of a character in a play may
grow into an all-encompassing aphorism. In other words, to sever a part
from the whole in which it was inserted can produce the most creative
and unexpected connotations. This is true not only of aesthetic contexts
but also in general. To give an example, the quality of our own life is
fundamentally affected by the temporal context in which we mentally
place our existence. To live in the present or to live in terms of long spans
of time worrying perhaps about how the far-away future will turn out,
or encumbered by the weight of a lingering past produce very different
ways of living our life now precisely because of the different attitudes that
each scale or our conscious way of living generates. Specifically, the scale
in which we live our life leads to very different kinds of understanding, in
fact, to the origination of very different selves with which we find ourselves
existing.

24

F.G. ASENJO

SECTION II:WHOLES

3. The Example of Gestalt Psychology

It was the Gestalt psychologists Christian von Ehrenfels, Max
Wertheirmer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Khler, Kurt Lewin, and others
who conveyed systematically the notion that a whole is sometimes more
than the sum of its parts, that then the whole sets relations between the
parts which do not exist when all the parts are separated from that whole.
A simple example is the well-known Mller-Lyer phenomenon in which
the same assemblage of forms is perceived as a vase, or alternatively as
two persons facing one another according to the way intuition reverses
the figure-ground psychological interpretation. In either perception, the
whole of forms is clearly more than the sum of its parts, generating two
different sets of relations, two different roles for each of the parts involved.
Critics of the expression the whole is more than the sum of the
parts proceed in suitable atomistic fashion to analyze the terms whole,
part, and sum each by itself ending up with a cadaver of the expression.
The fact remains that whatever words we use the circumstance that
sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts is directly perceived
just as we see it in the Mller-Lyer case, an experience for which there is
no room within an atomistic mental frame.
Physicists on their part have been some sympathetic, some hostile to
using the world whole. For the latter, the word is more of a mystery
than that of a scientifically productive term. This despite the fact that James
Clerk Maxwell readily accepted in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
of 1873 Michael Faradays view that one actually begins with a given
whole and then arrives at the parts by analysis. Max Planck, as quoted by
Khler, said even most explicitly: We think of the wholes before us as
the sums of their parts. But this presupposes that the splitting of a whole
does not affect the character of this whole. Now, when we deal with
irreversible processes in this fashion, the irreversibility is simply lost. One
cannot understand such processes on the assumption that all properties of
a whole may be approached by a study of its parts.2 But where wholes
have acquired a most significant place in the productive role they now
play in physics is described in the immediately following section.
4. Reductionism and Emergence
Reductionism is still prevalent in the natural sciences, the idea that to
understand and manage a natural phenomenon one must analyze it into
its last components, reduce it to an association of its ultimate parts, atoms
or elements of some kind, thus creating what can be called a systematic

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

25

material atomism. This is why it is so remarkable to find the following

statement in the now classic paper by the Nobel Physics Price Philip
Warren Anderson More is Different: Scale change causes fundamental
change.3 This has to be understood not in the sense that previous laws
are to be totally superseded by new fundamental laws, but in the sense
that when known parts gather into a whole, there is a physical emergence
that cannot be explained by the nature of the parts alone but eminently
by the nature of the new whole. Not either that now reductionism has to
be abandoned but that room has to be made for the new emergence
which must be taken as an established physical factor, an increasing
complication because at each level of complexity entirely new properties
appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research
which I think is as fundamental as any other.4
But the most exceptional evidence of the categorical state of affairs
just mentioned has come from another Physics Nobel, Robert Betts
Laughlin, who explained the curious and important phenomenon of
superconductivity as an emergent one. Superconductivity consists in that,
under some circumstances, electrons move without encountering any
resistance through determined materials. This phenomenon is not
reducible to the consideration of how each of its components behave: it is
an emergent occurrence. Laughlin gives credit to Anderson but goes
beyond by saying I am increasingly persuaded that all physical law we
know about has collective origins, not just some of it,5 that is, the
organization of the whole is what engenders the essential aspects of the
law, the organization can acquire meaning and life of its own and begin
to transcend the parts from which it is made.6
This is the ascending emergence, but there is also a descending
emergence that Laughlin does not consider; in fact, we can also say that
less is different. Nanophysics, the study of materials of the order of a
meter reduced a billion times, shows that matter changes its properties
and acquires characteristics not present at a macroscopic level. Both types
of emergence have each also its psychological counterpart. Such is the
case, for example, when we put our present actions within the perspective
of a long-standing objective, an objective which projects its meaning to
each action. And such is the case also when we are caught by a critical
instantaneous event that for a moment captures all of our thoughts and
energies even if in ways contrary to our usual manner of being. We have
then both a regular physical ascending emergence and a regular physical
descending emergence. And then we have both a regular psychological
ascending emergence and a regular psychological descending emergence.
In all these cases, no part is immune to the surge of the emergent whole
which makes radical changes follow necessarily.

26

F.G. ASENJO

5. Lexical Fields
Whenever the concept of field is used wholes have a most significant
role. Fields are intricately related wholes, a field of forces in physics, a
field of meaning in any lexical composition for example. Many
lexicographers reject field analyses because, so they say, field is a mere
metaphor. Yet, it is a matter of direct perception that the semantic whole
of a complete sentence pervades the meaning of each of the sentences
words. The meaning of a sentence is a field, our intuition tells us so
constantly, and as with any field, any change in any of the sentences parts
changes the sentence altogether, which in turn changes the meanings of
all other parts. Fields, being the dynamic semantic form that lexical wholes
take, are real, effective, and universal. Knowing it or not, we use them as
concrete instruments with which we enhance or just grasp the
understanding of a text.
Sentences, of course, can become part of larger wholes, a paragraph
or a sequence of paragraphs. In all cases, here is how linguistics list some
of the essential properties of a lexical field: A principle of totality, a
principle of ordering, a principle of reciprocal determination, a principle
of integrity, a principle of differentiation, a principle of absence of gaps.7
6. Other Examples
What we just said is also eminently true of the arts. The paintings of Paul
Klee, for instance, acquire an entirely new perspective when we notice
the title of the picture after having only looked at its details. An emergent
new work is then displayed to our attention. And so it is with the isolated
notes of a striking musical theme, inexpressive each on its own, but which
we see taking an irreplaceable function when heard as part of the theme,
the emergent new musical reality. Music is, of course, pervaded by fieldtheoretic relationships, tonality if such is the case, dynamic progressions,
timbre, color, all contribute to a red of attractions and rejections which
lead to the pleasure of music listening.
Similar considerations apply to the relations between biological organs,
and that of each organ with the whole functioning living organism.
Physiology is closer to concreteness than an anatomy that deals with totally
circumscribed dead organs. Life is an emergent phenomenon, with each
biological specimen immersed into the species of which it is a part.
Conscious of this state of affairs, Kurt Goldstein accurately defined the
path each organ follows to influence another organ in a living being as a
detour through the whole, a classic and profoundly insightful statement
to describe the way physiology functions.8
Anthropologists also use the notion of whole as a matter of course.

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

27

For Clyde Kluckhohn each human culture constitute a whole, but no

culture can be isolated or characterized by even the most exhaustively
correct enumeration of its parts.9
We should emphasize that there is a common trait in all the examples
adduced: the categories of whole and part are not defined. Being primitive
ideas one uses them generally as undefined concepts, in principle open
to different interpretations, although in the examples just given the
atomistic interpretation is set aside in favor of what we can call synthetic
ones. This situation is very clear in mathematics, where one defines parallel
lines in geometry but, from the days of Euclid, points and lines are
undefined and can be interpreted in many ways, making room for NonEuclidean geometries for instance. The ideas of element and set are also
undefined, which in turn leaves open the way to a variety of nonclassical
set theories. Once the interpretation is established, all these categories
wholes and parts in particular are intellectually grasped and identified
in the specific context in which they are used. We understand clearly and
directly what we mean; it is therefore out of place to expect categories to
ever be defined. This is patently true in abstract disciplines, it is also true
in concrete ones, where it is not intelligent to demand definition when
observation is the only possible tool. Important as definitions are, one
should not forget their ambiguous beginnings. Much as we can love
exactness, it still depends on preliminary choices based on unmediated
intuition.
Many other examples could be added to the characterizations given
here of how a whole can have it in its nature to relate intimately to its
parts and bring to the parts the emergent relations and properties it
generates. By now it should be clear that the nexus between whole and
parts can be an active one, both creative and dynamic. However, these
examples do not imply that one must necessarily abandon the neutral
conception of a part as an element or a subclass of a passive class. After all,
Newtons gravitational principles are still useful even if we know now
that they are not entirely correct. In our daily life, we still gather items
into a box without worrying about what the box could do to each item.
What we really should be conscious of regardless of practical
considerations is the fact that the way we think about wholes affects our
intellectual make up and eventually also our plans and actions. Each
conception of what a whole is determines its own particular mental frame
within which we carry out our rational life. So far, we have introduced
through our descriptions three types of mental frames induced by three
ways of comprehending the notion of whole; each of these ways is limited,
each has its domain of validity, all are waiting for the next conceptual
broadening. They are listed here in the ascending order of inclusiveness.

28

F.G. ASENJO

(i) The whole as an inert collection of parts, an assemblage of individuals

relatively independent of one another and void of any dynamic connections
between them and with the whole. (ii) The whole as a Gestalt,
psychological, physical, lexicographical, etc., a whole that imparts a new
significance to each of its parts by being an overall configuration which is
more than the sum of its parts. (iii) The whole as an emergent entity that
radically alters the very dynamic nature of the parts and the processes
themselves in which the parts are involved.
SECTION III:THE PART IN THE WHOLE

7. Ontological Implications of Semantics

It should be clear by now that categories, just as mathematical primitive
ideas, are open to interpretation before any use is made of them. When
we use them in daily life, we always have already a more or less vague
idea of what we mean; as long as we use categories without much reflection,
they seem to have an obvious significance inherited from the past. In any
case, semantics precedes syntax, and determines from the beginnings of
any discourse the parameters of such discourse. Thus, if the parts of a
whole are interpreted as elements of a set, as individuals complete in
themselves, and, accordingly, if the whole is interpreted as an inert
collection of such individuals, the mental frame that these interpretations
creates whether we are conscious of it or not leads to a very specific
ontological conception of the real world and of our own mind: both
world and mind are then made up of real ultimate components, respectively,
quarks, sensations, etc. But now, if we take the parts intrinsically related to
each other and to the whole which as a Gestalt defines the role of the
parts, we have a mental frame which conduces to a different view of what
the real world and the mind are in effect: wholes are not only real, they
are coextensive with each part. In this universe, parts are unthinkable
without some specific whole. But more still, if the gathering of the parts
ends in an emergent whole, then we have the ontological picture of real
new processes being generated by such gathering, real processes with
different real laws. We should add that the difference between any Gestalt
and any emergent whole is not razor sharp: they intersect. Gestalt theory
is predominantly psychological, although also physical, biological, and
social; the theory of emergent wholes is predominantly physical, although
examples from other disciplines and the arts can be found in the cited
works of Anderson and Laughlin.
The linguistic situations in particular should be clear by now as well.
If I say Now is why, the expression is meaningless until it is placed into
a context, but this context must have the character of a field of crisscrossed

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

29

significations to truly make sense. Although everything lexical is a matter

of the mind thinking, the sentence shares the nature of a real Gestalt. If
we reflect on this, it is linguistic common sense to give to any context the
nature of a whole which depends on its parts but injects on its parts
something which did not exist outside the whole.
8. The Relativization of the Individual
Models in mathematics are usually built on a domain of interpretation
that is a set, that is, a collection of selected, detached individuals. In real
life, however, the individuals are taken as disengagements from the relations
in which they originally existed. This is true even in the case of human
beings. This does not signify that we as selves do not have creativity and
spontaneity, merely that we cling for life to the essential relations in which
we grew and from which we continuously emerge. Think only of how
much our self is shaped by our parents, by the ties with the persons we
love, and by the traits of persons, perhaps not even alive, which are for us
models of behavior and thought.
9. The Relativization of the Whole
We have been giving the whole a prominent role vis--vis its parts in
both the Gestalt and the emergent cases. This should not in any measure
give the idea that the parts are relatively passive members of the whole. A
single part can bring with itself relations and properties of its own which
in one degree or another change the nature and configuration of the
whole, and by rebound that of all the parts. A simple personal story should
illustrate the case. Hanging on the wall, I had for a long time a reproduction
of a painting by Joan Mir. One day its frame fell to the ground and
broke irreparably. Wanting to keep the picture in view I turned to a slightly
smaller frame which unfortunately required to clip the reproduction on
one side. The painting was typical of Mirs style, with isolated dots of
different colors and strong foreground forms. To fit the picture in the new
frame it seemed that the least damaging way to do it was to eliminate one
small red circle very near one of the edges. I thoughtlessly concluded that
such a sacrifice of an apparently insignificant dot would not essentially
alter the impact of the whole. I was wrong. In fact, I was never able to get
over the loss of such a minimal component. The change in the balance of
forms and colors kept bothering me: something important for the fieldtheoretic equilibrium of the original work had been severed. I finally had
to hang another picture in the same place. That omitted part in the whole
had a good reason to be where it was placed.

30

F.G. ASENJO

This aesthetic experience was of course a subjective one, but so are

often the interpretations of primitive ideas, and more importantly, their
being subjective acts does not mean that they were unreal. In effect, there
is nothing that is merely subjective, not only because our subjectivity is
our most immediate reality, but also because we see it as a continuation of
the real world and of the equally real views of our fellow beings. Through
the interpretation of our categories our subjective self is in a continual
process of adjustment, a process that sometimes moves very gradually,
almost imperceptibly, sometimes very suddenly in the realization of the
existence of previously ignored developments in the real world.
10. The Expansion of the Whole Beyond its Locus
It is not difficult to realize that a part can expand beyond what at first sight
seems to be its rightful locus. It may not be so easy to see some parts
irradiate their presence beyond the confines of the whole of which there
were originally members, and then to have such parts impact their whole
from the outside so to speak. Let us make this state of affairs more
explicit. We have no problem in thinking that every whole divides the
environ in which it is placed into two regions, the inside and the outside,
but then we are already implicitly framing our thoughts by some geometric,
visual interpretation. This interpretation is usually the one of sharply
dividing the space of what is in the whole from that that contains what is
not. Now, in the case of a Gestalt, its surroundings are greatly changed by
the Gestalts sudden appearance from what it was the mere sum of its
parts. The characteristics of the Gestalt spill beyond its apparent boundaries,
which inevitably changes the nature and meaning of the Gestalts
surroundings. The same can be said of an emergent whole. In both cases,
the distinction between inside and outside becomes supremely ambiguous
and misleading. It turns that the inside goes outside, messes with the
outside, is the outside in a very concrete sense, even when we continue to
adhere to the fixity of their boundaries with absolute abandon. Reflection
forces other ideas on us though. There are parts so active, so much a
dynamically creative nucleus of their whole, that their effects transcend
the borders of a whole and become unbounded. To put it paradoxically
which is inevitable here the exterior of the whole becomes the interior
of the part and hence in turn also the interior of the whole.
To make the preceding clearer take the beginnings of a charismatic
leader in any area. The leader is then confined in space and time to the
region in which he started, but when the leaders influence exceeds the
initial domain of action then such domain goes outside itself. The original
boundaries are not deleted, they have become porous; the past is never

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

31

annihilated, it is still a member of the origins, what happens is that the

past has moved to the ever-larger present taking with itself the whole of
the events in which it occurred.
Think also of a contagious illness which has spread to the entire body
of a person; from organ to organ it now covers the whole organism. But
then the illness appears in other people by contagion; the body where
the illness first showed up still has the same visibly circumscribed bounding
surface, yet the illness has made the body be expanded into a larger
biological system that includes the exterior of such body. Physiology has
forced single location into a new complex spatio-temporal entity which
transcends the initial settings.
11. The Role of Intuition in the Apprehension of These Processes
It would be missing the point to take the last two examples as merely
cases in which a whole simply becomes enlarged. This only would show
how much we are trapped by interpreting wholes as being plain collections.
The point is that in both examples the old whole still remains a whole
by itself throughout the entire expansion, but it is transformed in the
process into a paradoxical entity in which the original exterior and the
original interior coalesce by a detour through the part. This new whole
has the same boundaries, but becomes an ontologically contradictory entity
remindful of those impossible Escher pictures in which going up is
seen as simultaneously going down and vice versa. To fully apprehend
this situation requires a shift of intuition, which calls on us to dwell further
on how intuition is an essential factor in our understanding of the world.
To begin with, intuition is as real as any other instrument of our real
consciousness, as instrument that plays an essential role in generating the
different mental frames within which we carry out our thought. Intuition
gives us directly the changing meanings of a Gestalt or of an emergent
whole, it allows us to penetrate a cloudy apprehension and come out
with clear-cut interpretations of how to think of a whole and its parts.
Intuition is a most pervasive activity of the mind. Perception, in particular,
is a form of intuition, framed and shaped by previous intuitions. Atomistic
thinking looks at intuition with suspicion, yet even in following a
mathematical proof intellectual intuition plays a considerable role. And it
is intellectual intuition that guides us also in solving a mathematical
problem. Practical considerations make us be satisfied in taking wholes as
simple collections and parts as separable elements of such collections. It is
a reflective intuition that opens our mind to the perception of a whole as
a mini-universe made up of teeming parts, a lively active beehive which
occasionally steps beyond itself.10

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F.G. ASENJO

SUMMING UP:THE WHOLE IN THE PART

12. Examples
A physical field of forces is a clear instance of how the whole distribution
of attractions and repulsions affects every region of the field and vice
versa. This is true of the electromagnetic field, of the gravitational field,
and of any other physical field of actions. We have already mentioned the
physiology of a given living organism as a biological example of how the
global functioning of the whole influences its local functions, in effect is
actually present in the latter. We also mentioned the constant presence of
the lexical field of a sentence in each and every one of the sentences
parts. I would like here to add the example of the very telling title of a
book by the linguist Fernando Lzaro Carreter: The Dart in the Word.11
He does not explain explicitly what makes the dart in the word which
produces the impact that the word lacks devoid of such content. But
obviously, the extraordinary way in which a word may hit us is unmistakably
a semantic phenomenon, a clear case of the whole in the part.
Other examples from disciplines other than physics, biology, and
linguistics could be added, but what interests us at this point is to answer
this question: what all these previous disquisitions about Gestalt
psychology and physical emergence have to do immediately with the
way we live our daily life? By now we know well that categories undergo
changes and that our explicit thinking of them needs constant readjustment,
great or small; we learn this way. But in our usual behavior we do not put
our categories on trial before we perceive, think, feel, will, and ultimately
act even as we have the old and new categoreal schemes subconsciously
setting the mental scene. Let me give a personal example of how, without
even thinking about it, the whole in the part directly and concretely takes
over our experience, and our actions henceforth.
When I first met Bethsabe, my future wife, I only saw an
uncomplicated fragment of her, as it is the case with most people who
meet somebody unknown for the first time: she was one more acquaintance.
Later on we came to know one another better and fell in love with each
other. By then, her presence had become something entirely different: I
never failed to perceive her whole person in each of her acts; her total
personality and all her potentialities were always present. Little gestures
became every time part of her whole being which, as a consequence,
made me able to see myself through her eyes, kindly.
Something similar can be observed in a good friendship. Jean Renoir,
the French movie director, said: When a friend speaks to me, whatever
he says is interesting. This is true, and the reason is again the presence of

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

33

the whole person in each of its acts. Of course, when friendships fall out
without remedy the same acts lose their touching value, which only shows
how difficult can be to be truly objective. These are not metaphors that
we are bringing in: we perceive the whole in each part directly and having
the same reality that a color has: we never doubt the existence of, say, a red
dot in a painting.
13. The Perspectives of the Whole
When a part covers the whole it generates for itself a singular perspective
of that whole. The part functions as a point of view from which to
apprehend the whole with its own different ordering and with its own
peculiar sense. In the Mller-Lyer picture we obtain two distinct
perspectives, the vase and the two faces, seen respectively from the two
diverse points of view produced by how our intuition sets an order in the
perception of foreground and background. This allows to look at the
picture anew not as two contrasting wholes, but as a single whole which
offers two opposite perspectives. This view of looking at concrete objects
can be extended from the finite case just referred, to the case of, say, a
sculpture that can be seen from a seemingly infinite number of angles, a
single whole that offers many perspectives as it is observed from all the
possible positions from which it can be viewed as we walked around the
sculpture, each position providing a distinct point of view with a partial
apprehension of the whole. Thus, each angle creates different feelings,
different attractions and thoughts that accompany the minds perception.
Any concrete three-dimensional objet is subject to the same observations.
We must emphasize that the perspectives are real; we can even say
that it is a good approximation to state that a concrete whole is the sum
total of all the perspectives it offer s. Perspectives are not mere
phenomenological constructions; although genetically each belongs
principally to one part, they are instruments of the whole with which it
acts on the reality in which it is placed.
Things get a little bit more complicated when imagination becomes
an additional component of my external perception. As one looks at
the Venus of Milo for example, striking even without her missing arms,
one could try to imagine how the sculpture might have looked complete,
how its perspectivistic impact might have been then. A different added
dimension enters the picture when one allows such a creative subjective
fancy tamper with the concrete aesthetic object as it stands today. The
physical and the subjective merge then to meddle creatively in how the
whole is apprehended.

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F.G. ASENJO

14. Impacts on Other Categories

From the beginnings of Relativity Theory it has become well-known that
the whole universe is the sum total of all the perspectives that each and
every moving body creates as a coextensive part of that whole. Within
each perspective, space and time are different, sometimes displaying a
very little change from moving body to moving body, sometimes differing
a very great deal. Space and time, further, can be so prone to change, so
structurally labile that even the presence of an active mass of matter alters
their configuration. So much for their being a huge container eternally
equal to itself; now we know that they are reduced to being just properties
of relative movements.
In a smaller scale, something similar happens to feelings. Diffuse moods
are floating realities of the mind filling it completely. Yet they are usually
very much subject to change: the emergence of a directed feeling can cut
through a moods cloud like a dart in a word cuts through an unformed
state of vague awareness. The psychological distribution of forces in the
mind is being differently polarized with this constant interplay of mood
and directed feeling.
But what is perhaps more surprising is that to see the whole in the
part can take place even within atomistic settings. Mathematics is based
on set theory for the most part, an atomistic foundation to be sure. Kurt
Gdel, describing the proofs of his theorems on the incompleteness of
arithmetic for which he is justly celebrated, said: [it is] not selfcontradictory that a proper part should be identical to the whole. The
structure of the series of integers, e.g., contains itself as a proper part, and
it is easily seen that there exist also structures containing infinitely many
parts, each containing the whole structure as a part.12 Anyone who has
gone through Gdels long proof can agree to the correctness of these
statements showing a synthetic mental frame blooming within an atomistic
foundation. All of which should make fully clear that to reduce a reasoning
to its presumably ultimate components is not always to clarify but rather
can become a form of obfuscation. Not that atomistic analysis is necessarily
wrong, of course, but that analysis does not explain concreteness, it merely
points at abstract regularities which, important as they may be, leave behind
the fullness of reality in the flesh.
WORKS CITED

Khler, W. 1969. The Task of Gestalt Psychology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press,
Anderson, W. 1972. More is Different, Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No.
4047, Aug. 4.

THE WHOLE IN THE PART

35

Laughlin, R.B. 2005. A Different Universe, New York, NY: Basic Books.
Geckeler, Horst. 1976. Semntica Estructural y Teora del Campo Lxico, Madrid:
Gredos.
Goldstein, K. 1995. The Organism, New York, NY: Zone Books.
Kluckhohn, K. 1963. Parts and Wholes in Cultural Analysis, a chapter in
Parts and Wholes, edited by Daniel Lerner, New York, NY: The Free
Press of Glencoe.
Asenjo, F.G. 2010. The Primacy of Intuition, Chapter 9 in Psychology of
Intuition, edited by B. Ruelas and V. Briseo, Hauppage, NY: Nova
Science Publishers.
Carreter, F.L. 1997. El Dardo en la Palabra, Barcelona, Spain: Galaxia
Gutenberg.
Gdel, K. 1944. Russells Mathematical Logic, in The Philosophy of Bertrand
Russell, edited by Paul A. Schilpp, New York, NY: Tudor Publishing
Co., p. 139.
Websters Third New International Dictionary, Springfield, MA: G.&C. Merriam
Co., 1961
NOTES
1. Websters Third New International Dictionary, Springfield, MA: G.&C. Merriam Co.,
1961, p. 901.
2. W. Khler, The Task of Gestalt Psychology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1969, p.61. The quotation is from a lecture given by Planck in New York
City in 1909.
3. P.W.Anderson,More is Different, Science, New Series,Vol. 177, No. 4047, Aug.
4, 1972, p. 394.
4. Ibid., p. XIV.
5. R.B. Laughlin, A Different Universe, NewYork, NY: Basic Books, 2005, p. XV, the
underlining in the original.
6. Ibid., p. 393.
7. Cf. Horst Geckeler, Semntica Estructural y Teora del Campo Lxico, Madrid: Gredos,
1976, p. 136.
8. K. Goldstein, The Organism, New York, NY: Zone Books, 1995, p. 247.
9. K. Kluckhohn, Parts and Wholes in Cultural Analysis, a chapter in Parts and
Wholes, ed. By Daniel Lerner, New York, NY:The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963,
p. 114.
10. Cf. F.G. Asenjo, The Primacy of Intuition, Chapter 9 in Psychology of Intuition,
ed. By B. Ruelas and V. Briseo, Hauppage, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010.
11. F.L. Carreter, El Dardo en la Palabra, Barcelona, Spain: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1997.
12. K. Gdel,Russells Mathematical Logic, in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, ed.
By Paul A. Schilpp, New York, NY:Tudor Publishing Co. 1944, p. 139.

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT:

ON MICHEL FOUCAULTS NON-READING OF
MACHIAVELLI1
Pravu Mazumdar

I guess there is no art of government in Machiavelli.

MICHEL FOUCAULT2
1. Introduction
With the topic at hand I find myself entering a field of tension between
two thinkers, who are both complex, innovative and controversial. My
exposition will therefore remain within the orb of this dual constellation,
with only one of the stars appearing in the light of the other, Machiavelli
in the light of the somewhat persistent genealogy of power, which Michel
Foucault tried to chart out in several attempts. This initial constraint will
prevent me from unfolding my own reading of Machiavelli and compel
me instead to show what happens to Machiavelli, when he lands on
Foucaults genealogical dissecting table. This has two methodological
consequences for the following essay: (1) In keeping with Foucaults
discourse analytical approach, I will have to resist the temptation of treating
Machiavelli as the author of a work, contrary to a methodological norm,
which is broadly established in the humanities. (2) Prior to unearthing
the details of a discourse analytical perception of Machiavelli, I will have
to summarize the fundamentals of Foucaults archaeo-genealogical
methodology, so as to be in a position to reveal any possible correlation
between method and result in what I term Foucaults strange non-reading
of Machiavelli.
For a start I would like to point out, how sparsely Foucault mentions
Machiavelli, to be precise, only on three occasions, at least in the context
of his genealogy of governmentality: once during his Collge de France
lectures on the art of government in spring 19783; and twice more during
two American lectures in 19794 and 19825. That is rather surprising,
considering that Machiavelli is widely acknowledged as one of the founding
figures of modern political reflection and that Foucault was mainly

38

PRAVU MAZUMDAR

concerned with questions of modern power in this particular phase of his

genealogical endeavours.6
Foucaults main observations on Machiavelli in connection with the
history of governmentality are to be found in a few stray remarks in the
Collge de France lectures just mentioned. At first sight these remarks appear
somewhat sporadic or unsystematic, and in fact somewhat paradoxical.
For on the one hand it can hardly be overlooked, that Machiavelli is only
rarely mentioned in these lectures, in fact, almost incidentally in what
seems to be chance comments at the margins of an otherwise loaded
genealogical argumentation and without the slightest tendency to
undertake anything like a systematic reading of the Florentine thinker.
On the other hand it does not escape an observant reader that Machiavelli
plays almost a central role in the genealogical process focussed upon by
these lectures: the birth of governmentality. In this connection I would
like to underscore the following three traits in Foucaults treatment of
Machiavelli.
Firstly, Foucault never refers to Machiavelli in his own terms, neither
as an author nor as an immediate discursive phenomenon, but always as
a contrastive background and point of departure for the process of
constitution of governmentality. Accordingly, Machiavelli appears as a kind
of contrastive foil with respect to the 16th and 17th century discourses on
the reason of state, which is to be understood as a new type of reason
characteristic of modern governmentality. In other words, Foucault is not
concerned with Machiavellian thought in the first place, but rather with
the manner in which a specific picture of Machiavelli surfaces in the mirror
of these discourses, and further, with the mode, in which affirming or
refuting Machiavelli has factually contributed to the constitution of these
discourses.
Secondly, Foucaults strange art of non-reading seems to treat
Machiavelli merely as the author of Il Principe, in seeming compliance
with the strategy adopted by the historical discourses on governmentality
in dealing with Machiavelli. This widespread and familiar technique of
reduction, which played such a fateful role in the history of Machiavelli
interpretations, never seems to be questioned in Foucaults genealogical
analyses. Machiavelli, the author of the Discorsi is not brought to attention.
Machiavelli, the republican and historian of his city, is not evoked, as is
usually done to reveal the questionable nature of this reduction. Only
once does Foucault more in irony than anything else point out, that
in the historical context of the discourses on governmentality (sixteentheighteenth centuries), Machiavelli has never been anything other than a
Machiavellian7, not unlike all those political and theoretical rivals, when
they had to be effectively discredited. Thus Machiavelli appears as a kind

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

39

of medium to be used, whenever it was deemed necessary to affirm or

refute the nascent concept of an art of government. Foucault depicts this
strategy as a discursive technique of trying to say something via someone
else8, which, as he notes in passing, is rampant in his own discursive
environment of the seventies, in the mode of a discursive exploitation of
Marx. Our own Machiavelli in this sense, as he remarks, is probably
Marx.9 However that might be, the historical reduction of Machiavelli to
the author of Il Principe is considered by Foucault for methodological
reasons as a positivity of discourse, which he does not intend to question
in any way. He decides instead to treat it as an object of discourse analysis
and to analyse the function exercised by it.
Thirdly, Foucault casually strews in his assessment of Machiavellis
historical status in the third of these thirteen lectures, which stands in
stark contrast to the widespread appreciation of Machiavelli as a founding
figure of modern political thought.10 In the following lectures this finding
will not only be not withdrawn, but will in fact be deepened and made
more precise, as the details of the history of the art of government come
to the fore. Foucaults assessment consists in the observation, that
Machiavelli is not a modern thinker, but represents the threshold of decline
of an older political discourse, which disappears with the emergence of
the discourse on governmentality. In this perspective, Machiavelli appears
as the representative of an archaic thinking, in which the central problem
is not the government of populations, but rather the security of the Prince and his
territories.11
All this is formulated almost word by word in the two American
lectures mentioned above. I will quote from the later one delivered in
1982:
Machiavellis problem in The Prince is to know, how to safeguard inherited or
conquered territories against internal or external enemies. His entire analysis intends
to merely determine all the factors, which can serve to strengthen the bond between
the Prince and the state, in contrast to the question that emerged at the beginning
of the seventeenth century along with the conception of a reason of state, which
focussed on the existence or nature of the new entity called state. Perhaps that is
the reason, why the theoreticians of the reason of state tried to distance themselves
as far as possible from Machiavelli, from someone, who had an extremely bad reputation
and whose problem they could not recognise as their own, which was not the problem
of the state, but rather that of the harmony between the Prince and his territory and people. And irrespective of all the controversies around the Prince and
Machiavellis work, the reason of state became an important factor for the emergence
of a type of rationality, which was completely different form that, which Machiavelli
envisioned. It was not the intention of this new art of government to enhance the
power of the Prince, but rather to consolidate the state itself as such.12

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The peculiarities of such an appraisal of Machiavelli can be lead back to

Foucaults genealogical method in general and the conceptions of problem
and problematisation in particular. One can in fact expect a correlation
between them and the technique of discourse analysis, which Foucault
had been practicing and developing for almost two decades at the time of
his Collge de France lectures. For this reason I would like to introduce a
few methodological clarifications in the next section, before I turn to the
issue at hand, which is Machiavelli and the art of government.
2. Methodological prelude: Foucaults concept of problematisation
Speaking about an author involves the integration of a series of utterances
ascribed to the author into a work. However we define a work and its
limits: the work remains an indispensable correlate of the author and a
fundamental category of the history of ideas. Integrating authorial
utterances into a work is therefore connected to the function of the author
and serves as an operational principle guiding the practice of reading an
author.
One could of course follow Quentin Skinner and split the authorial
function by distinguishing between a sense-oriented and an act-oriented
(performative) intention of the author.13 A methodological consequence
of this distinction is the possibility of substituting the traditional question
regarding what the author could have meant by quite a different type of
question regarding what the author has actually done through a series of
utterances. According to Skinner, the latter question can hold its ground
against all deconstructionist critique due to the well-reasoned answers
enabled by adapting hermeneutic techniques methodologically to such
questions. But also in the perspective of an act-intention the authors
utterances continue to be integrated into a work, even though they are
additionally to be rated as discursive inroads into the historical debates
contemporary to the author.
However, Foucaults methodological reserve with respect to the
hermeneutic depth of a work is well known. The perspective, in which
discourses/discursive strategies rather than intentional depths come to
view, is quite different from the hermeneutic view-point, irrespective of
Skinners distinction between the sense and act-intentional approaches.
In the following I would like to delineate Foucaults methodological
position in 12 compact steps.14 It is only against this methodological
backdrop, that the specific value of Foucaults appraisal of Machiavelli can
be convincingly presented.
(1)

Method is a procedure (Verfahren) in the act and instant of its application.

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

41

Under procedure I understand a realised strategy of thinking.

Thinking always takes place, whenever and wherever there is a
problem. Thus methodical thinking involves the application of a
strategy of coming to terms with a problem.
A problem results on the one hand from a constellation of resistance
and adversity. On the other hand, however, the problem itself evokes
the conflicting tendencies and forces dealing with it. Method
therefore can be seen as the phenomenality of a strategy in a field of
controversies and conflicts around a problem.
However, the category of the problem does not imply an a-temporal
and continued existence of a controversy/adversity, which can be
traced back to the a-historic essence of an anthropological constant.
Instead, all problems are subjected to transformations, which are
specific to them and which lie at the root of a specific history of the
emergence and disappearance of problems. What turns into a
problem in one age can cease to be one in the next.Thus the problem
appears as a pr ivileged instant of a histor ical process of
problematization, entailing three distinct aspects: (a) something, which
possessed unquestionable evidence in an earlier age, is no longer
evident; (b) something, which is no longer evident, is suddenly
also no longer known; suddenly, from within all that has been known
and familiar till now, the unknown begins to surface; (c) something,
which was known in earlier times and has now become unknown,
is therefore also something, which is dangerous. A history of
problematisation shows, how something that used to be evident
becomes something, which is no longer evident and no longer
known, which is ultimately something dangerous. It therefore does
not come as a surprise, that a history of problematisation mobilises
strategies of defence and security.15
Thus, wherever thinking takes place, a problem has surfaced. And
wherever there is a problem, there is also a practice of
problematisation at work. Problematisation is the process, in which
something, with which people lived without any problem,
something, in other words, with which people lived with trust,
becomes problematic and, in the final consequence, dangerous.
History of thought can be taken as a history of ideas. But history of
thought can also be taken as a history of problematisations. We have
here two distinct perspectives, from which a history of thought can
be formulated.
Methodical thinking thus requires a specific and often unconscious
practice of problematisation prior to it. However, practices of
problematisation are visible and real only under the condition, that

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(7)

(8)

(9)

PRAVU MAZUMDAR

they involve the use of signs in general and language in particular.

All use of signs, in which a previously unproblematic entity becomes
a problem, can be termed a discourse.
Discourse is neither a work, nor a text, but rather an arrayal of forms
of problematisation involving mainly the use of language and
characterised by a regular and regulated emergence of series of
objects, modes of speech, concepts and themes, which problematise
through their sheer existence other, older series of objects, modes
of speech, concepts and themes, buts are in their turn also
problematisable. The time of discourse is the time generated by
problematisation.
The essential obstacle on the way to perceiving discourses and their
correlative forms of problematisation is the familiar and evident
practice of categorising said things (choses dites) according to the
principle of the author. That is why discourses and discursive
regularities can come to view and become discursive phenomena only
under the condition that the principle of the author is put into
brackets. That does not however mean a negation of the authority of
the author. That also does not imply, that the reality of the author is
simply whisked away by applying the traditional techniques of
abstraction, attaining thereby higher levels of genera and
generalisation. That simply means that the function of the author is
temporarily suspended, to use a familiar Husserlian expression. In
other words, the author is temporarily put out of function, in order
to effect a methodological switch of perspectives, so that an alternative
categorisation of said things (choses dites) becomes possible.
The principle of such an alternative categorisation is what Foucault
terms a discursive regularity, which allows the categorisation of said
things (choses dites) into epistemic ages or epistemes of distinct
discursive rules.16 For example, in the sixteenth century a historically
specific type of discursive regularity was effected by the episemic
figure of resemblance, which regulated numerous discourses involving
biblical, medical, cosmological knowledge. 17 Later on, a quite
different type of discursive regularity was generated by problematisation
of resemblance, incarnated by a relation of substitution of an object
through an idea. The idea and the object no longer resemble each
other, they are simply different from each other, the relation between
them operating under the title of representation. The figure of
representation, functioning as a form of problematisation of
resemblance, regulated numerous discourses in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. 18 The two distinct discursive figures of
resemblance and representation, as well as the relation of problematisation

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

43

between them reveals the constitution of an epistemic age, which

Foucault termed since the 60s as the classical age (lge classique), which
by means of its two thresholds at the end of the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries breaks up the monolithic unity of what is
termed the modern age (Neuzeit) in the traditional history of ideas. It
is known that Foucault uses the term archaeology for this type of
historiography, which reveals such forms of problematisation or
discourses and the corresponding division of historic time into
epistemic ages. 19 Archaeology is thus a type of historiography,
correlative to a history of discourses, understood as a history of
problematisations.
(10) However, archaeology itself, taken as the writing of a history of
problematisations, can be seen as the application of a technique of
problematisation specific to itself. Archaeological method is rooted
in an act of problematisation of the anthropological evidences,
which are constitutive for the history of ideas. One of these evidences
is the principle of authorship. Thus what appeared as those lengthy
and anti-humanistic diatribes launched by Foucault in the sixties,
are simply expressive of a discursive process of problematisation of
an anthropological historiography that reduplicates Man as its
methodological foundation and its empirical object at the same time.
(11) This background of problematisation shows, that the results yielded
by the application of archaeological method can only be taken as
relative findings. Foucaults archaeological historiography illustrates
something like a relativism of method, standing in contrast to all familiar
postures of scientific objectivism. That means, that the findings of
an archaeological history of discourse are relative with respect to the
specific, contingent and variable practice of problematisation at the
root of a particular archaeological programme. If the foundational
act of problematisation is different, then the cor responding
distinction of ages in the flow of historical events is also different.
For this reason, the themes, concepts, objects involved in the work
of one and the same author can be associated with different sides of
the same inter-epochal threshold, depending on the context of
problematisation. Thus in The Order of Things Francis Bacons theory
of idols is associated with the epistemic age of Renaissance20, whereas
in the Collge de France lecture of 1978 an essay of the same Bacon
on sedition and overcoming it by the application of the reason of state
is seen as belonging to the classical age21. The work of the same
author is cut up by the threshold between two succeeding ages due
to the different acts of problematisation at work in the respective
historiographic descriptions.

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(12) Thus, archaeological history reveals in the background active practices

of problematisation, which then appear in the foreground as reactive
practices of critique, exclusion or inclusion. The background
practices of problematisation are essentially productive practices. An
example is the background problematisation of madness, producing
as a surface effect the historical constitution of psychiatric reason.
Foucault has depicted this productive process in his history of
madness.22 Similarly, in Foucaults history of the prison, a background
problematisation of crime generates by installing the dispositive of
the modern prison delinquency as a surface effect.23 Finally, a
governmental problematisation of Machiavelli and the theoretical
axioms unproblematic to Machiavelli himself can be shown to be at
work in the background, to generate as a surface effects the discourse
on governmentality and a correlative entity called the reason of state.
This is what Foucault demonstrates in his history of governmentality
and this is what I will now try to describe in the following.
3. Situating Machiavelli in a history of problematisation
As a first step I would like to trace back Foucaults strange non-reading of
Machiavelli to his discourse-analytical attempt at situating Machiavelli in
a history of problematisation. In an immediate sense, we are faced with a
history of the practices of problematising Machiavelli, constitutive for
certain typically Western and obviously also modern political reactions,
which have retained their function till today, like the practice of attaching
the malignant title Machiavellianism to certain morally questionable
political practices.24 In a more complex sense, however, such a history
reveals a problematisation of certain Machiavellian pre-suppositions, which
Machiavelli himself could not have problematised.
An important event in the history of problematising Machiavelli is
the emergence and circulation of a veritable flood of anti-Machiavellian
literature in the classical age. Foucault subjects these discourses to a careful
analysis, which, however, differs in a significant manner from the familiar
moder nist cr itique of the moralism inherent in traditional antiMachiavellianism. For he treats this anti-Machiavellianism as a discursive
positivity and seeks to determine the strategies and productive forces at
work in it, due to which his analysis results in certain rather unaccustomed
deviations. Thus Bacon no longer emerges as a grateful advocate of
Machiavelli, as a widespread platitude in Machiavelli scholarship would
have it, but instead differs from him due to his economistic conception of
the reason of state.25 Similarly, Foucaults analysis is at odds with Friedrich
Meinecke, who appraises Machiavelli as the actual initiator of the idea of

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

45

the reason of state.26 In contrast, Machiavelli figures in Foucaults history of

the art of government as a constant object of refusal, which is (negatively)
constitutive for the discourses on the reason of state.
As already mentioned27, we have here a typically Foucauldian figure,
surfacing for the first time in Madness and Civilisation28 as the connection,
in which occidental reason consolidates itself in two distinct waves through
two different ways of relating itself to madness or whatever it determines
as such. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reason consolidates
itself through a politics of security consisting in the exclusion of madness
and supported by the governmentality of a police-state, whereas it comes
to itself since the end of the eighteenth century via a clinical and psychiatric
practice of inclusion and betterment of madness, supported by the clinical
and psychiatric dispositives of modern power. In a similar vein, the discourse
on the art of government in the classical age consolidates itself through its
inherently negative relation to Machiavellis Il Principe:
This bone of contention, in relation to which, in opposition (to which) and (through)
the repudiation of which the literature on government allowed itself to be categorised,
this obnoxious text is of course Machiavellis Prince.A text, whose history is interesting,
or rather: it would be interesting to delineate the relations between itself and all the
texts that came after it, which criticised and repudiated it.29

The historical discourse on the art of government is thus essentially antiMachiavellian. Foucaults analysis makes it clear, that the interpretation of
the anti-Machiavellian trend prevailing from the sixteenth century till
Frederick the Greats Antimachiavel30 as an expression of moral indignation
merely responds to a surface effect. What actually takes place via the act of
repudiation is the constitution of governmental discourse. In other words:
the moral indignation accompanying the Machiavelli reception of the
classical age is nothing but a strategy of constitution of governmental
discourse. That is why anti-Machiavellianism does not set in immediately
with the (posthumous) publication of Il Principe in 1532, but later on in
the sixteenth century with the emergence of governmental literature. And
it is for the same reason, that exactly at the end of the eighteenth century,
when the discourse on gover nmentality enters a crisis, the antiMachiavellian trend disappears and is substituted by a radically different
assessment of Machiavelli, ranging from the neutral to the positive.
According to Foucault, the reason for a renewed interest in Machiavelli in
the aftermath of the French Revolution is to be seen in the Napoleonic
context, which was created by the revolution and the problem of the
revolution31. This post-revolutionary political context is determined by
the question: How and under which conditions can the sovereignty of a
sovereign within a state be kept intact?32

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Thus the history of problematisation, in which Foucault attempts to

embed Machiavelli, appears only at a first glance as a history of
problematisation of Machiavelli. For, as the analysis progresses, the
governmental problematisation of Machiavelli is seen to indicate the
existence of further and more important practices of problematisation at
work in the background and directed against the basic axioms of an older
political thinking, which they attempt at dislodging. Foucaults genealogy
of governmental thinking thus unfolds itself by anchoring Machiavelli in
a history of problematisation, which goes further than a mere
problematisation of the author Machiavelli. That is why such an anchorage
cannot be achieved by a mere analysis of Machiavellis works and why
Foucaults genealogy must be characterised as an art of non-reading.
Instead, a genealogical anchorage of Machiavelli makes it necessary to
analyse three externals constitutive for the discursive phenomenon
Machiavelli. I have touched upon these only sporadically till now and
would now like to treat them more systematically, in order to be able to
assess their role and importance in Foucaults treatment of Machiavelli:
1) Machiavelli lives in a city and is mainly concerned with the
conservation of a sovereign power at the helm of the city-state. But it
is precisely this concern, which makes the city becomes a problem for
him.
2) The history of the Machiavelli reception in the classical age is
characterised by a reduction of Machiavelli to the author of the small
tractate Il Principe, published five years after his death and nineteen
years after he had written it. This reduction was so deep and farreaching, that the term Machiavellianism still in use today refers
mainly to the political options recommended in this work. Thus,
Machiavelli becomes a problem only to the extent, that the type of
power he is supporting in this work becomes a problem. This is the
power of the sovereign, or, as Foucault often terms it, sovereign power.
3) In the context of the reception of Machiavelli from the beginning of
the classical age till the eighteenth century, a body of antiMachiavellian writings was constituted, which set the trend and
became conspicuous through their air of moral indignation. However,
as I have already said: what can actually be observed by looking
through this layer of moralism and as the other side of the coin, so to
say, is the process of constitution of governmental discourse.
I will now proceed to present Foucaults analysis of the phenomenon
Machiavelli in the classical age by taking these three externals as a starting
point.

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

47

4. Machiavelli and the city

Foucault characterises the history of power in European societies since
the sixteenth century as a complex struggle between three types of power:
sovereign power, disciplinary power and governmental power. Even though
governmental power can be said to be the youngest of these types of
power, the history of power can in no way to be taken as a mere succession
of ages, each under the sway of only one of these types. Foucault
characterises the history of power instead as a series of complex structures,
understood as specific systems of correlation between these three types
of power, so that in each case one of them is effectively dominant with
respect to the other two.33
However, one can simplify matters by distinguishing between the three
types of power by naming their respective points of reference, keeping in
mind the risk of unduly reducing the real complexity of their historical
modes of appearance. In this vein, sovereign power may be roughly
characterised as essentially targeting a territory; disciplinary power a body
of individuals or groups of individuals; and governmental power a
population.34
The operational target of sovereign power is to secure the link between
the sovereign and his territory. Even if this type of power occasionally
includes its subjects in its strategic calculus, then only to the extent that
they figure as inhabitants of a territory or as internal rivals laying claim to
a territory. Thus Foucault repeatedly draws attention to the fact that
Machiavelli, the author of Il Principe, appears in the mirror of governmental
discourses as someone, who is mainly concerned with the security of a
territory, meaning the security and legitimation of the link between a
sovereign and his territory. In contrast, the target of disciplinary power is
to dominate bodies and render them submissive. And the target of
governmental power is to govern populations.
The category of a population comes to view somewhat late in the
sixteenth century35 and confronts power with new types of problems,
which can no longer be dealt with by the usual means available to sovereign
power and its legal machinery: the practice of issuing decrees and bans to
restore a relation of obedience. The new problems posed by populations
can only be dealt with by means of a governmental intervention in the
essentially statistical processes of a population. In the history of the art of
government disciplinary power plays no significant role, so that the actual
rivalry is that between a politics of territory and a politics of population.
The essential option is therefore: prohibition or administration?
However, not only sovereign power correlates with a space, that of the
territory, but also governmental power, which, due to its association with

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the category of population, correlates with the space of the city required
by a population for its statistical processes to surface. Thus Foucaults
genealogy of population issues from the elementary opposition between
the territory and the city, which is certainly one of the essential conditions
for the emergence of governmental power.36
A rudimentary manifestation of this opposition is revealed by the fact
that the city presents a space of fortification in contrast to the openness of
the territory and its diverse zones. Fortification, however, is not to be
reduced to the merely military objective of exclusion of the enemy. Besides
and beyond that, fortification effects the inclusion of the citizen, which
leads to far-reaching consequences. Whereas, for example, the
transportation of goods in the open space of the territory can cause them
to vanish into the distance, the limited space of the city offers them nothing
more than the possibility of circulation. However, not only do goods circulate
within the closed space of the city, but also humans, animals, vehicles and,
above all, diseases. And since besides goods or humans also diseases circulate
within the walls of a city, the space of the city is feared as a potential
source of epidemics.
Circulation of goods, circulation of means of conveyance, circulation
of diseases: the city reveals itself as the characteristic space of circulation,
and the term retains till today its economic, transportational and medical
connotations, as is exemplified by the present-day French expression
circulation, standing alternately for circulation of goods and money,
traffic and blood circulation. With growth in trade volume and the
size of a city population, the phenomenon of circulation becomes an
incontestable fact, consolidating by virtue of its circular dynamics the
individuals affected by it to a milieu, in which the collective effects of a
collection of individuals begin to surface as statistical events and their
series. Foucault draws attention to the fact that in the same period, meaning
the seventeenth century, in which the milieu advances to an increasingly
perceptible social phenomenon, Newtonian physics explains long-distance
effects between bodies by taking recourse to a physical milieu between
them called fluidum or aether as the medium of conveyance of the effects.37
This conceptual concoction of milieu and circulation can be given the title
population, which is to be understood as a milieu functioning
simultaneously as a vehicle and instrument of circulation.38
Whereas sovereign power reacts to problems specific to the territory
to the internal problems of territory through juridical means and to the
external problems of territory through military means the younger
governmental power has to deal with problems specific to the new urban
milieus by means of administrative and scientific techniques. For the
problems assailing governmental power do not result from the bad will of

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

49

individual subjects, but rather from effects due to processes of circulation

and possessing a consistency, which is normally ascribed to natural
phenomena. This is why practices of governmental intervention in milieu
processes are not juridical, but technical in nature. They are based on
extensive statistical knowledge, which emerges in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in the context of a knowledge grounded in a new
type of dispositive called the police (Polizey).39 Here lies the reason, why
the Physiocrats of the eighteenth century tried to reformulate economic
problems in scientific terms on the basis of such a knowledge.40 All those
phenomena, which were reflected upon as Fortunas whimsies in the
Machiavellian context of sovereign power, are now treated as statistical
events under the onslaught of governmental intervention.
With the transition of milieu knowledge into scientific knowledge,
the city transforms from a rudimentary and fortified space of inclusion
into a space perceived as a source of wealth to be tapped by wellcoordinated and knowledge-based measures of governmental power. With
the fringes of the city becoming increasingly permeable, circulation spreads
out in great ring-shaped waves and consolidates the entire population of
an entire land, so that at the end of this process governmental power no
longer has the task of securing circulation within the enclosure of the city,
but quite the other way round: its problem now lies in identifying a
proper site for the city within the nascent economic space of circulation.
Governmental power thus formulates the question of an optimal location
for its headquarters in economic and administrative terms, and not
primarily in the context of war and military strategy, as was previously the
case with sovereign power. Foucaults genealogy points out, that one of
the main problems, with which governmental power is confronted in the
eighteenth century, concerns the correct method of opening up and
reconnecting (dsenclavement) the city spatially, legally, administratively and
economically, of repositioning the city within (an enlarged) space of
circulation41
These connections show that in the mirror of governmental discourses
Machiavellis Il Principe can only be seen as a document of sovereign power,
understood as an atavistic type of power, which is more medieval than
modern. With the Machiavelli reception setting in at the threshold of the
age of governmentality, the small treatise called The Prince gets caught up
in an antagonism between two paradigms of political thought, in which
the essential contradiction of this transitional period is expressed: the
opposition between problems of the territory, which were the norm up
to the sixteenth century, and problems of populations, which begin to
surface during the sixteenth century and constitute the main target of
gover nmental thinking. Machiavellis problematisation reveals an

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intensification of the territorial concern of securing the power of the citystate, for the traditional target of sovereign power was to conquer new
territories and guard their integrity: to mark, fortify, protect and enlarge
the territory of the sovereign. Protecting the territory was synonymous to
protecting the sovereign and consisted therefore in the prevention of all
movement that did not issue from the sovereign himself. Foucault
formulates the problem of sovereign power, which can be identified as
Machiavellis problem and consists in the protection of a sovereign territory,
as follows: How (can I) prevent things from getting into motion, how can
I make headway, without letting things getting into motion?42
However, with its essential mistrust of movement, sovereign power
does not only seek to protect itself against external enemies, but, on a
different level, also against the dynamism of the circulation processes,
which emerged with the birth of the city as space of enclosure. Thus
Machiavellis problem, seen in the mirror of the nascent governmental
discourses, is also articulated in the question, how to exercise sovereign
power within the specific territoriality of the city. From the standpoint of
governmental power, Machiavelli treats the city not as an emergent modern
space capable of generating a population and a milieu, but rather as a
territory to be targeted by sovereign power.
Such an observation, incidentally, cannot result from a hermeneutic
histor iography of sense-horizons, but rather from a genealogical
historiography of problem-horizons. The question at the root of Foucaults
genealogy is therefore neither what hermeneutic tradition would have us
ask What does Machiavelli want us to say? nor the act-intentional
question proposed by Skinner43 Was is Machiavelli doing by saying,
what he is saying? , but rather: What is Machiavellis problem? It is only
when a problem-horizon is laid bare, that it becomes possible to connect
certain utterances by Machiavelli with a certain discourse and to disconnect
a specific problem-complex from Machiavellis work as a whole.
As a result of his genealogical reflection Foucault thus outlines
Machiavellis problem:
Machiavellis problem was to know precisely, under what conditions it was possible,
that upon a given territory, gained through conquest or inheritance, the power of
the sovereign is not threatened. () Securing the power of the prince: that was the
problem of Il Principe, and I believe that this was the political problem of sovereignty
associated with the reality of the territorial power of the sovereign.44

These genealogical considerations thus result in Foucaults ultimate

judgement on Machiavellis historical status, which, as I mentioned earlier,
radically differs from the widespread appreciation of Machiavelli as the
author of the concept of reason of state and a pioneer of modern political

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51

theory45:
far from thinking that Machiavelli has laid the groundwork for the emergence of
modernity in political thought, I would say that on the contrary he marks the end of
an age, in which the problem consisted in the security of the prince and his territory.46

Governmental thinking, on the other hand, is based on an entirely different

problem related to the emergent phenomenon of circulation:
Not to mark and fortify a territory, but rather to let the processes of circulation take
their course, to gain control over them, to separate the good and bad forms of
circulation all these are ways of seeing to it that everything remains in motion and
keeps changing and adapting itself incessantly and keeps moving from one point to
the next, but in such a manner that the inherent dangers of this circulation are
neutralised.The issue at stake is no longer the security of the prince and his territory,
but rather the security of the population and those governing (it, P. M.).47

The problem-horizon of governmentality is thus quite different from

that associated with a politics of sovereignty. This governmental
preoccupation with the nascent phenomena of circulation and milieu,
thus appears as the genealogical precursor of the subsequent discourses
on political economics in the late eighteenth century.
5. The reduction of Machiavelli to the author of Il Principe
We have seen, that Machiavelli is not only a recurrent theme for the
nascent discourses on the art of government in the sixteenth century, but
also, that reducing him to the author of Il Principe is indispensable for the
process of their constitution. The exclusive association with his treatise
lets Machiavelli appear as the representative of a sovereign power that
equates the protection of the sovereign with the defence of a territory.
The sovereign, characterised by his unquestioned right to the territory,
enjoys the highest possible standing. He is the principle and raison dtre
of the political sphere. He stands above truth and lie, state and law, his
subjects and his territory. In the classical age it is precisely this status of the
sovereign that stands to be challenged by the emergent discourses on
governmentality, which generate through their critique of the sovereigns
right to sovereignty the populational rationale of the reason of state in
opposition to the territorialistic rationale of pre-governmental sovereignty.
This tendency of all governmental politics towards a problematisation
of sovereign power can be traced back to a fundamental transformation in
the medieval conception of the power of the king as a pastoral power.Thomas
Aquinas determined the pastoral power of the king on the basis of three
analogies characterised by Foucault as the analogies of government.48
These are:

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PRAVU MAZUMDAR

1. The analogy with God: The king governs his territory as God governs
nature.
2. The analogy with nature: The king governs a land or a city as life-force
governs an organism, so that the stomach does not (go, P. M.) one
way and the legs go another49. He has to conduct the egoism of the
individuals, incessantly striving towards their own specific well-being,
towards a common welfare.
3. The analogy with the pastor and the father of the family: The king has
been assigned by the history of Gods grace to govern like a Good
Shepherd or a guide of souls. The function of the king is to provide
welfare to the people by following a method, which ultimately allows
them the attainment of celestial bliss.50 The task of the king is thus
similar to that of the pastor or the father of a family. In all his terrestrial
and temporal decisions he must see to it, that the eternal salvation of
the individual is not jeopardised, but rather enabled.51
It is this analectic continuum between divine sovereignty on the one
hand and the practice of the king on the other, which confers on the king
the authority to govern and provides him the models aiding him in his
work. The power of the king is embedded in this continuum, functioning
as a process, in which Gods power is transmitted via the intermediary
stations of nature and the pastor to the lowest rung, represented by the
father of the family. However, the emergence of governmental thinking
leads to a break-up of this continuum between sovereign power and
government. God no longer reigns over the world in a pastoral manner
via the king and the father of the family, but rather on the basis of laws. In
physics and astronomy these laws were formulated by Copernicus, Galilei,
Kepler as the mathematic laws of nature. In the field of natural history they
were articulated as John Rays taxonomical orders of plants and animals. In
Antoine Arnaulds and Pierre Nicoles General Grammar they were
presented as the logical laws of discourse. The world is no longer governed
immediately by God, but by laws.52
The disappearance of Gods immediate pastoral power over the world
at the threshold of the classical age is, as Foucault puts it, compensated by
a dual and antagonistic process of a de-governmentalisation of the cosmos53
and a governmentalisation of the res publica54, the public sphere. The cosmos
on the one hand is no longer conceptualised politically, but rather
scientifically, so far it is now governed by mathematical and taxonomical
laws. On the other hand, the public domain is governed by a new kind of
art, the specific art of the sovereign, regulated no longer by the model of
divine governmentality, but supported instead by the techniques of a
specific craft. In other words: the sovereign is now expected to do something

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

53

quite different from God with respect to nature or the pastor with respect
to his lambs or the father of the family with respect to his children or the
herdsman with respect to his flock.55 The art of government in this sense
is not merely different from the exercise of sovereign power, rather it is more
than what the pre-governmental prince does. It is a specific practice with
its own laws, belonging to the sphere of neither the sovereign nor the
politics of the pastor56.
The disintegration of the continuum between Gods sovereignty and
the government of the king is the condition of possibility of the emergence
of the art of government and the reason of state and goes back to the two
major transformations mentioned above: (1) God no longer intervenes
immediately in the physical processes of nature in an act, which is a mixture
of grace and government; instead, he holds together the cosmos via the
inherent rationality of natural laws. (2) The political sphere is no longer
analogous to nature, but invested with its own consistency and regularity.
The rationality of the natural and the rationality of the political have fallen
apart into the mathematical and taxonomical rationality of the laws of
nature, articulated in the concept of mathesis universalis; and the political
rationality of the reason of state. From each of these follows an objective logic
of the processes relevant to the cosmic and physical sphere on the one
hand and the political on the other.57
Natural processes thus take place in an ontological sector governed
by a reason common to God and Man and manifested in the principia
naturae, the so called principles of nature.58 In contrast, societies are
politically dominated by a certain type of action guided by rules derived
from a specifically political model and a specifically political type of
rationality, both of which are external appendages to sovereign power.
This extra something is government, a government, which needs to seek
out its own raison.59 Thus, the order of things derives from the principia
naturae on the one hand and from the ratio status or the reason of state on
the other.60
Against the background of this major transformation of pastoral power,
the problematisation of sovereign power can be seen to be constitutive for
the reason of state as the specific rationality regulating the government of
populations. What is implied in this conception of government and its
rationality is a new type of state, existing by and for itself. The new prince
is therefore merely the highest servant of the state, exercising a function
that is at the top of an entire governmental hierarchy. This is the model of
the prince represented for example by Frederick the Great. The opposition
between these two different and incompatible conceptions of the prince
as an imitator of God on the one hand and as a servant of the state on
the other is articulated through identifying Machiavelli as the author of

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Il Principe, deriving the power of the sovereign not from the politics of
governmentality, but rather from that of the pastor.
It makes no difference, whether this identification of Machiavelli is
associated with an acceptance or rejection of the idea of reason of state.
Machiavelli functions here merely as an argument. The supporters of the
idea of the reason of state in the classical age criticise in him a representative
of princely interests and therefore an opponent of the idea of the reason of
state. They say: We() have absolutely nothing to do with Machiavelli.
Machiavelli does not give us, what we are looking for. Machiavelli is, in
other words, nothing other than a Machiavellian, nothing other than
someone, whose calculations are adapted to the interests of the prince,
and we reject him as such.61 The opponents of the reason of state on the
contrary all of them integralistic Catholics like the French Jesuit Claude
Clment, the rival of Richelieu and a supporter of Spain criticise the
supporters of the reason of state for their devotion to the state, which they
see as a new cult to be called statolatry62, which they accuse of godlessness
and lawlessness and which they regard as the emblem of an unabashed
Machiavellianism. They say: Go deeper into your idea of a specific art of
government, as much as you want, you will only find Machiavelli.63 For
these critiques of statolatry, the reason of state, supported by their opponents,
is nothing other than the old sovereign power of the pre-governmental
prince behind the mask of a new rationality.
Thus, in connection with these governmental discourses, Machiavelli
is to be ascribed a rather paradoxical status. On the one hand no art of
government can be found in his theoretical horizon. Foucault explains
this absence by drawing attention to the history of problematisation
discussed above: Machiavellis problem (does) not lie in the preservation
of the state through itself. () What Machiavelli is trying to save and to
preserve, is not the state, it is rather the relation of the prince to the object
of his domination, meaning, that his objective is to save the principality as
a power relation between the prince and his territory.64 Nonetheless, Machiavelli
as the author of Il Principe plays a major role, precisely to the extent that
he is rejected in connection with the controversies around the art of
government and the reason of state. Ultimately, as Foucault observes, he
is at the centre of the debate during this entire period from 1580 to 16501660. But he is by no means at the centre of the debate within a context,
which establishes itself above and beyond him, but rather one that articulates
itself through him It is not he, who defined the art of government,
rather it is through what he said, that whatever constitutes the art of
government can be found.65

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

55

6. The anti-Machiavellian counter-discourse

An innate property of the governmental discourses is thus their explicit
or implicit anti-Machiavellianism. The first anti-Machiavellian text in the
age of governmentality, identified by Foucault by taking recourse to the
researches of Luigi Firpo66, a historian from Turin, is a diatribe by a
Dominican monk called Ambrogio Politi, who considered Machiavellis
treatise as one of those books that deserve to be abhorred by every righteous
Christian.67 Other books of this category were not only heathen literature
in general, but also the works of its imitators like Petrarca and Bocaccio.
The piece by Politi can be taken as one of the earliest signs of a rising tide
of anti-Machiavellianism, which coincided with the birth of governmental
thinking. In 1557 the original papal imprimatur for the publication of
Machiavellis Il Principe under Clemens VII. was withdrawn under the
pressure of the Jesuits, so that the book had to be put on the Index. The
fire of anti-Machiavellian polemics was sustained till the eighteenth century,
finding a kind of climax in the famous commentary by Frederick the
Great and Voltaire entitled Anti-Machiavel, the title itself signalising the
essentially polemical trait of governmental discourse.68
Thus, typically governmental concepts like population or the reason of
state are constituted by the sheer act of opposition of a counter-discourse,
which constructs in a first step an antagonistic persona of the prince, which
is not necessarily always explicitly ascribed to Machiavelli. In a second
step this persona is rejected by projecting the image of a categorically
different type of prince, whose function is to exercise government in the
name of the new governmental state.
Thus, before the governmental practice of problematisation can take
place, its target, the Machiavellian prince, has to be set up. It is obvious
that this counter-discourse is not meant to do justice to the historical
Machiavelli, but simply functions to establish a representation of
Machiavellian thinking, which in a sense is devoid of all content. You
simply construct a Machiavelli or inflate him to an opponent, which is
needed, so as to be able to say whatever is there to be said.69 However,
the function of negation is in no way crucial to this anti-Machiavellian
literature. Far more essential is, what constitutes itself through it, which is
why Foucault chooses to treat this literature in good archaeological manner
as a positivity. It has not merely the negative function of blocking and
censoring, the function of turning down whatever is not acceptable all
this is quite irrelevant in the anti-Machiavellian literature.70 What really
counts is, that this literature is a positive genre equipped with its own
specific object, concepts and strategy71, which is why the archaeologist
of this discourse has to learn to see it as nothing other than a positivity.

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In the space of this counter-discourse, Machiavellis prince acquires

three distinctive features. Firstly, he has a status of transcendence and
exteriority with respect to his principality for he acquires his principality
through inheritance, procurement or conquest; at any rate, it does not
belong to him, but is something external to him. What binds him to his
principality derives either from force or tradition or is founded upon
contractual arrangements of agreement and consent with other princes.72
From this follows secondly the fragility of the external link between the
prince and his principality, for it can be attacked any time from without
by other princes or from within by rebellious subjects. Thirdly, what follows
from the first two features, is the unconditional imperative of protecting
and strengthening the power of the prince. In the mirror of governmental
discourses, the Machiavellian principality is in the first place neither a
territory, nor the totality of its inhabitants, nor both. It is rather the abstract
relation between the prince and his territory, so that the most important
faculty of this constructed prince is his competence and aptitude at securing
his principality. In any case, his function does not lie in the exercise of an
art of government.
Foucault derives other important differences between the sovereignty
of the pre-gover nmental pr ince and the pr ince as an agent of
governmentality from a treatise, which he characterises as the first
theoretically relevant representative of anti-Machiavellian literature in the
age of governmentality.This is a treatise entitled La Mirroir politique, contenant
diverses manirs de gouverner written by Guillaume de La Perrire in 1555.73
As an answer to the question as to who can be considered a governor, the
text provides an entire range of possibilities: The governor can be any
monarch, emperor, king, prince, the lord of a country, a magistrate, a
prelate, a judge 74. La Perrires tractate reveals the following differences
between sovereign and governmental power:
(1) Whereas for the Machiavelli constructed by governmental discourse
only one type of government, that of the prince, exists, La Perrire
talks of a multiplicity of governmental forms and considers the prince
merely as one of the possible modalities of governmental power.
Contrary to the Machiavellian prince, who is transcendent with respect
to his territory, the government of the governor can only unfold
itself within a society.
(2) The power of the Machiavellian prince is defined in terms of territory.
For La Perrire, however, government is understood as the correct
disposition of things and targets the sphere of things, which includes
humans as well as all factors comprising their living circumstances.
In La Perrires understanding things seem to indicate the entity

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

57

that will figure in later governmental discourses as population.

(3) The ultimate end of sovereign power is the Machiavellian prince
himself. The exercise of sovereign power aims at securing the link
between the prince and his territory and involves the enforcement
of obedience. For La Perrire, however, the target of government is
the correct disposition of things, meaning guiding and marshalling
them optimally towards the ultimate end of securing wealth and
welfare.
(4) The person of the Machiavellian prince is characterised by anger,
impatience and the right to kill, whereas La Perrires governor is
qualified for his function through his wisdom and zeal. These
specifically governmental qualities involve a precise knowledge of
the things, which have to be brought into an optimal disposition
by the act of government. To be able to govern, the governor must
take note of the events constituting the sphere of the population.
These differences and oppositions concretise the extent, to which the
distance from Machiavelli, as constructed by governmental discourses, is
constitutive for the idea of government and associated concepts like
population, state, governor. The point by point rejection of Machiavelli is
part of the process of construction of his prince as the medium, in which
governmental discourse is constituted.
7. Conclusion
At the end of this essay, I would like to sum up its main results. We have
seen that the Machiavelli to be encountered in Foucaults genealogy never
corresponds to anything like a Foucauldian Machiavelli or a wellbalanced and complete description of Machiavelli as to be expected of a
history of ideas. What is instead encountered, is the Machiavelli mirrored
in governmental discourses, which surfaced in the sixteenth and lasted up
to the eighteenth century. With a discursive status no different from that of
madness in an archaeological history of madness, Machiavelli is that, which
has to be produced by the discourses on governmentality in a first step, in
order to be excluded by them in second step. As psychiatric reason in the
history of madness, a specific type of reason is also constituted here through
the discursive processes of production and exclusion of Machiavelli. This
is the reason of state, which relates to Machiavelli and the Machiavellian
view of power as its other. Thus also the Machiavelli mirrored in the
governmental discourses is just another of those powerful fictions like
madness, delinquency, sexuality, which have systematically effected the
constitution of discursive and political realities in Western societies on

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PRAVU MAZUMDAR

their way to modernity and have been repeatedly analysed by Foucault

during his extensive researches into the history of truth.
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Althusser, Louis. 2006: Politique et histoire, de Machiavel Marx. Cours

lcole Normale Suprieure de 1955 1972. Paris.
Althusser, Louis. 1999: Machiavelli and Us. Translated by G. Elliott.
London.
Cassirer, Ernst. 2007: The Myth of the State. Text and annotations ed. by
Maureen Lukay. Gesammelte Werke. vol. 25. Ed. by Birgit Recki.
Hamburg.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1835: ber Machiavelli, als Schriftsteller, und
Stellen aus seinen Schriften in Nachgelassene Werke. Vol. III, p. 401453. System der Sittenlehre. Vorlesungen ber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten
und vermischte Aufstze. Edited by Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Bonn.
Firpo, Luigi. 1967: La prima condanna del Machiavelli in Annuario dellanno
accademico 1966-1967, Turin.
Foucault, Michel. 1969: Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft. Eine Geschichte des Wahns
im Zeitalter der Vernunft. Translated from French by Ulrich Kppen.
Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 1971: Die Ordnung der Dinge. Eine Archologie der
Humanwissenschaften. Translated from French by Ulrich Kppen.
Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 1973: Archologie des Wissens. Translated from French by
Ulrich Kppen. Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 1976: berwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefngnisses.
Translated from French by Walter Seitter. Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 1977: Sexualitt und Wahrheit. Erster Band. Der Wille
zum Wissen. Translated from French by Ulrich Raulff and Walter
Seitter. Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 1979: Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of
Political Reason in Foucault 2005, p. 165-198.
Foucault, Michel. 1982: The Political Technology of Individuals in
Foucault 2005, p. 999-1015.
Foucault, Michel. 1986: Sexualitt und Wahrheit. Zweiter Band. Der
Gebrauch der Lste translated from French by Ulrich Raulff and
Walter Seitter. Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 1994: Dits et crits. Vol. IV. Ed. by Daniel Defert et al
Paris.
Foucault, Michel, 1999: In Verteidigung der Gesellschaft.Vorlesungen am Collge
de France (1975 1976). Translated from French by Michaela Ott.
Frankfurt/M.

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Foucault, Michel. 2004: Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevlkerung. Geschichte

der Gouvernementalitt I. Vorlesung am Collge de France (1977 1978).
Edited by Michel Sennelart. Translated from French by Claudia BredeKonersmann and Jrgen Schrder. Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 2004a: Die Geburt der Biopolitik. Geschichte der
Gouvernementalitt II.Vorlesung am Collge de France (1978 1979). Edited
by Michel Sennelart. Translated from French by Jrgen Schrder.
Frankfurt/M.
Foucault, Michel. 2005: Schriften in vier Bnden. Vol. IV. Edited by Daniel
Defert et al Frankfurt/M.
Friedrich II. 1740: Anti-Machiavel. Den Haag.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1996: Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo stato moderno.
Rom.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1923: Die Verfassung Deutschlands. In: the
same, Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophie. Smtliche Werke.Vol.VII,
p. 1-136. Ed. by Georg Lasson. 2. revised editionLeipzig.
Herder, Johann Gottfried von. 1881: Briefe zur Befrderung der Humanitt.
Brief 58. In: the same, Smmtliche Werke. Vol. XVII, p. 319-324. Ed. by
Bernhard Suphan. Berlin.
Lemke, Thomas. 1997: Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft. Foucaults Analyse
der modernen Gouvernementalitt. Berlin & Hamburg.
Mazumdar, Pravu. 2008: Der archologische Zirkel. Zur Ontologie der Sprache
in Michel Foucaults Geschichte des Wissens. Bielefeld.
Meinecke, Friedrich. 1924: Die Idee der Staatsraison in der neueren Geschichte.
Mnchen & Berlin.
Mnkler, Herfried. 1984: Machiavelli. Die Begrndung des politischen Denkens
der Neuzeit aus der Krise der Republik Florenz, Frankfurt/M.
Perrire, Guillaume de La. 1555: La Miroire politique, oeuvre non moins utile
que necessaire tous monarches, roys, princes, seigneurs, magistrats, et autres
surintendants et gouverneurs de Republicques. Lyon.
Ranke, Leopold von. 1824: Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber. Leipzig &
Berlin.
Senellart, Michel. 2010: Machiavelli aus der Perspektive der Gouvernementalitt
in: Zwierlein/Meyer (Ed.) 2010, p. 281-301.
Skinner, Quentin. 1990: Niccol Machiavelli zur Einfhrung. Translated from
English by Martin Suhr. Hamburg.
Skinner, Quentin. 2009: Visionen des Politischen. Edited and with Afterword
by Marion Heinz & Martin Ruehl. Translated from English by Robin
Celikates & Eva Engels. Fankfurt/M.
Strauss, Leo. 1958: Thoughts on Machiavelli. Glencoe, Illinois.
Thuau, Etienne. 1966: Raison dEtat et pense politique lpoque de Richelieu.
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Waetzoldt, W. 1943: Niccol Machiavelli. Mnchen.

Zwierlein, Cornel/Meyer, Anette (Hrsg.): Machiavellismus in Deutschland
Chiffre von Kontingenz, Herrschaft und Empirismus in der Neuzeit. Beiheft
der Historischen Zeitschrift 51. Mnchen.
NOTES
1. This essay is a translation and revised version of: Machiavelli und die
Regierungskunst. Zur Kunst des Nichtlesens bei Michel Foucault in Manuel
Knoll & Stefano Saracino (eds.), 2010: Niccol Machiavelli. Die Geburt des Staates;
series: Staatsdiskurse. Series Editor: Rdiger Voigt,Volume 11. Stuttgart. Since
the original was written in Germany and the English versions were not readily
available, all citations from Foucaults works are my own renderings into English.
2. Foucault 2004: 353.
3. Ibid.
4. Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason, Foucault 1979.
5. The Political Technology of Individuals, Foucault 1982.
6. Two years before his lectures at the Collge de France, in The Will to Knowledge,
Foucault regarded Machiavellian analysis as a genealogical precursor of his own
analytics of power (Foucault 1977: 118). However, the problem-horizon here,
which is that of war (in opposition to law) as a model for power relations, is quite
different from that of governmentality.This is, by the way, Foucaults only written
statement on Machiavelli, for the others I have just enlisted are, in a strict sense,
oral remarks. Also the short allusion to Machiavelli in the lectures entitled Society
Must Be Defended and held in early 1976 is to be rated as a stray oral remark in
which Foucault observes that although Machiavelli described power relations as
relations of forces, he did so in the prescriptive terms of a strategy (), which
he perceived exclusively from the standpoint of power and the prince (Foucault
1999: 195).Also here, Machiavellian thinking is for Foucault a rudimentary type
of modern political reflection rather than its complete opposite, like the
conceptualisation of a territorial power, which is essentially pre-governmental in
nature and which Foucault found to be typical of Machiavellian thought in his
1978 lectures. See Senellart 2010: 283 ff.
7. Foucault 2004: 355.
8. Ibid.: 353.
9. Ibid.
10. This appreciation, or rather renewed appreciation of Machiavelli which has
been characterised in its hagiographic dimension as a white mythology (Waetzoldt
1943: 231) is an essential symptom of the anthropological age, which Foucault
has revealed in all its epistemic idiosyncrasies in his archaeology of human
sciences (Foucault 1971, part 2). The revaluation of Machiavelli in the Age of
Man sets in towards the end of the eighteenth century, at the same time as (1)
the emergence of a self-critical and self-limiting type of governmentality (Foucault
2004a, lecture 1) and (2) the return of the problem of sovereignty in the context
of the post-revolutionary confusions of the Napoleonic era and the constitution

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

11.
12.

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

61

of nation states, primarily in Italy and Germany. Thus Machiavelli reappears

precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, or rather at the beginning of the
nineteenth century at a moment, when people like Rehberg, Leo, Ranke and
Kellermann translate him and write introductions and commentaries on him.
The same applies to Italy and Ridolfi, as I imagine, in a context (), which was
on the one hand that of Napoleon, but on the other also a context, which was
created by the Revolution and the problem of the Revolution: How and under
what conditions can the sovereignty of a sovereign be retained within the framework
of a state? In a similar manner, the problem of the relation between politics and
strategy surfaces with Clausewitz, meaning the political significance of force relations
and their calculability as a principle of the intelligibility and rational practice of
international relations, all of which became apparent in the aftermath of the
Congress of Vienna in 1815. And finally the problem of the territorial unity of
Italy and Germany. You know, that Machiavelli was one of those, who had
tried to determine the conditions, under which the territorial unity of Italy
could be achieved. It is under this climate, that Machiavelli reappears at the
beginning of the 19. century. Foucault 2004: 137. (emphasis by Pravu Mazumdar)
This tradition of an essentially post-revolutionary Machiavelli renaissance, brought
about by the resurrection of the typically Machiavellian problems of sovereignty,
territoriality and force relations as constitutive factors of politics, is exemplified in
the nineteenth century by the following works: Herder 1881; Fichte 1835; Ranke
1824: 182-202; Hegel 1923: 110-113. In the twentieth century, the tradition
continues with works like Cassirer 2007; Meinecke 1924; Strauss 1958; Gramsci
1996; Althusser 1999 and 2006; Mnkler 1984; Skinner 2009. Contrary to this tradition,
Foucaults genealogical distinction of epochs reveals Machiavellis discourse as
that, which has to be excluded, so as to enable the constitution of the specifically
modern political reflection at work in governmental thinking in the classical
age.This connection will be discussed in the final sections of this essay. Such a
process of exclusion of an Other situated in a past as a condition of possibility
of discursive self-constitution is discussed at length in Mazumdar 2008 (chapters
14 and 15) as the figure of non-positive affirmation, functioning in Foucaults archaeogenealogical historiography as a motor of a transformative and discontinuous
history.
Foucault 2004: 101.
Foucault 1994: 817-818. (emphasis by Pravu Mazumdar). Noteworthy in this
citation is the use of the expression problem, which plays a decisive role in
Foucaults technique of situating Machiavelli genealogically, as is shown in the
following section.
Cf.Introduction: On Interpretation, Skinner 2009: 7-18.
For a more detailed discussion of Foucaults methodology, specially the ontology
of language as a constitutive dimension of discourse-analysis, see Mazumdar 2008.
See Foucault 1999.
See Foucault 1973, chapter 1.
See The prose of the world, Foucault 1971, chapter 2.
See Representation, Foucault 1971, chapter 3.
Cf. the late Foucaults famous characterisation of archaeology as a technique of

62

20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

25.
26.

27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.

PRAVU MAZUMDAR

analysing neither behaviourial forms, nor ideas, nor societies and their ideologies,
but rather processes of problematisation, in which Being gives itself as whatever can
and must be thought, as well as the practices leading on to their formation. The
archaeological dimension of the analysis is concerned with the forms of
problematisation itself; its genealogical dimension is concerned with the formation
of problematisation processes based on practices and their transformations.
Foucault 1986: 19.
Foucault 1971: 84 f.
Foucault 2004: 386-393.
Foucault 1969.
Foucault 1976.
Henry Kissinger, for instance, categorically rejected the suggestion made by one
of his interviewers to the effect that there might be a Machiavellian influence in
his thinking. See Skinner 1990: 11 f.
See Foucault 2004: 386-393.
See Meinecke 1924. Thomas Lemke claims that Foucaults discussion on the
reason of state is based on Friedrich Meineckes work. (Lemke 1997: 158, footnote
29.) Michel Senellart however rejects this by pointing out, that although Foucault
does mention Meinecke in a footnote in Omnes et singulatim (Foucault
2005: 184), he says nothing about the content of Meineckes work. Senellart
suggests, contrary to Lemkes claim, that Foucault bases his assessment of Meinecke
on the work of Etienne Thuau (Thuau, 1966). (See Senellart 2010: 286, footnote
22)
See above, end of footnote 10.
Foucault 1969.
Foucault 2004: 136 f.
Friedrich II 1740.
Foucault 2004: 137.
Ibid.. See footnote 10 of this essay.
Foucault 2004: 23. See further below, footnote 44.
Ibid.: 27.
With the 16. century we enter the age of governments. Ibid.: 336.
Ibid.: 28 ff.
Diderot and dAlembert draw attention to this connection in their article Milieu
in the Encyclopedia. See Ibid.: 40 and 49, footnote 37.
Ibid.: 40.
See lectures 12 and 13 in Foucault 2004.
Foucault 2004: 101 f.
Ibid.: 28-29.
Ibid.: 100. In his 1979 lectures, Foucault begins his analysis of liberal
governmentality by quoting the British statesman Robert Walpole as saying:
Quieta non movere (What is quiet, should not be moved). (Foucault 2004a,
lecture 1: 13.) With the crisis of governmentality in the late eighteenth century,
identified by Foucault as an essential characteristic of liberalism, the old
Machiavellian mistrust of movement, which can transform any time into an attack

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

43.
44.

45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.

63

from without or a sedition from within, seems to return. To expand further on

this would lead us beyond the scope of this essay.
See above, beginning of section 2 of this essay.
Ibid.: 100 f. However, this is not to be taken in the sense, that from the late 16.
century onwards territorial power has simply been pushed away by governmental
power. In the rsum of his 1978 lectures Foucault leaves no doubts on this
issue:The lectures were concerned with the emergence of a political knowledge,
which placed the concept of population at the centre. Does that mean, that we
are confronted with the transition from a territorial state to a populational
state? Certainly not, for what we have here is not a substitution, but rather a shift
in emphasis and the emergence of new objectives, meaning new problems and
new techniques. Ibid.: 520. (emphasis by Pravu Mazumdar) It is important for
the connection of this essay to note, that Foucault here draws attention to a
history of problematisation as a dimension of the genealogy of governmentality.
See footnote 9 of this essay.
Ibid.: 101.
Ibid.
Ibid.: 338.
Ibid.: 339.
Ibid.: 340.
Ibid.
Ibid.: 345 ff.
Ibid.: 343.
Ibid.: 344.
Ibid..
Ibid..
Ibid.: 345 f.
Ibid., S. 345.
Ibid..
Ibid.: 346.
Ibid.: 353.
Ibid.: 352.
Ibid., S. 354.
Ibid.: 352 f. (emphasis by Pravu Mazumdar)
Ibid.: 353. (emphasis by Pravu Mazumdar)
See Firpo 1967 and Foucault 2004: 167, footnote 11.
Ibid.: 138.
Friedrich II 1740.
Ibid.: 139.
Ibid.: 138.
Ibid..
Ibid.: 139.
Perrire 1555. Foucault 2004: 140 ff.
Ibid.: 141.

COUNTING AND TREMBLING DURING THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION: ELEMENTS OF A
HISTORICAL MULTIPLICITY
Soumyabrata Choudhury

Introduction: Adunation
Let us begin with a somewhat unfamiliar word used by the greatly
influential logician and pamphleteer of the French Revolution, Emmanuel
Joseph Sieyes, Abbe Sieyes: In 1789, Abbe Sieyes proposed the term
adunation to the Constituent Assembly to convey a kind of statistical
project of nation-building. This was a project meant to construct a system
of common references for revolutionary France in objective and quantitative
terms, a system not dissimilar to the political arithmetic of someone like
William Petty who urged the uniformity of measure, weights and
numbers for the whole of England.1 Yet there was something peculiar
about Sieyes adunative proposal. While data with respect to the
population, the incidence and distribution of births, marriages, death etc.
therein, were being collected in the age of Louis XIV and one could say
there were specific statistical styles prevalent in Germany and England
too in the 17th century Sieyes seemed to be speaking from another place
and level of pre-supposition. So, what is this peculiar locus of enunciation?
To Sieyes, adunation did not mean the collection or aggregation of
data originally dispersed all over the existent provinces of the Old Regime.
Such provinces were too haphazard in their distribution, unequal in size,
population, abundance of natural resources; even their formal unity secured
by the feudal thread running through them, in actuality, betrayed striking
disparities of seignuerial practices and relations. Of course the king was
meant to unify the regime but this symbolic function was increasingly
being weakened by fiscal and administrative crises in the time Sieyes was
campaigning. But even if these disparities and heterogeneities could be
statistically regulated and reduced by a process of ar ithmetical
standardization, or the imposition of standard measures, weights, numbers
on the French provinces, the demand of Sieyes adunative project would
still not be sufficiently met.

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

Adunation, then, did not mean the arithmetical homogenization of

qualitative and contingent differences of political, economic, geographical
phenomena that encompassed the monarchical realm; rather, it meant the
index and blueprint of a kind of statistical, mathematical and existential
sharing of the nation, nay, Nation which was already pre-supposed,
understood and declared to be One and Indivisible. But at this point,
consider the following paradox: How can one think in any meaningful
way the existential sharing of a reality which does not yet exist? Because in
the year 1789, that is precisely the revolutionary commitment the
commitment to something that does not quite exist yet. One could also
say, this is the paradox of the municipal existentialism of this period. And
it is at the municipal level that the Constituent Assembly attempts to
mitigate the statistical and organizational paradox, or knot, that Frances
historical existence, at this point, is tied up in.
To this end, the municipal unit sought to be operationalized was the
department as different from the provinces of the Old Regime. The
departments would be of equal size unlike the provinces and would consist
of prefectures and sub-prefectures. The operational principle was that a
person could travel to the prefecture within a day and from a subprefecture she could even come back the same day. One extreme municipal
and revolutionary vision at this time was the ideal physical partition of
France into equal squares mapped by latitude and longitude. This
idealization, however fantastic (and fanatic), did reveal the axiomatic presupposition of Sieyes idea of the nation: The nation, which was One and
Indivisible, was also strangely a composition of ideal and equal ones.
Now compare this situation of discourse with another of Sieyes acute
formulations in 1789: The nation is the people assembled.2 Which
means, the people in this formulation, are not to be considered either as
a congregation (of which religious liturgical assembly was a standing model)
or as a multitude (of which the ideas associated, from at least Machiavelli
to DAlembert, were those of dispersion and danger). Rather, the people,
in the above axiomatic, were distinguished by the supreme and sovereign
attribute of being counted-as-one without being any sort of corporation
or body or entity. Sieyes adunative project, which sought to operationalise
new statistical and administrative units, which is to say new forms of
corporations, new ones called departments etc. , pre-supposed that a
non-corporate reality called people already existed and counted for
one. However, this was precisely the knot or paradox mentioned above.
And the difficulty presented itself in a historical and structural dimension.
First the historical dimension: In George Lefevbres great study and
unfolding of the French Revolution, he relates the event of a particularly
municipal revolution starting from 1789. According to Lefevbre, the event

COUNTING AND TREMBLING DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

67

was a municipal articulation towards direct democracy. So, people in the

provinces and districts (units chosen for election of deputies to the Estate
General) wanted to be present to the new nation so as to disarticulate the
older forms of centralization of which the king was the most visible
talisman.3 But this subjective demand for absolute, direct and localized
presence to the axiomatic of national sovereignty was also a demand not
to be counted as a local corporate entity in the earlier fashion of the
estates. And therein enters the structural dimension of the paradox, or
knot, being discussed: How to count a non-corporate reality and by
what measure? What form of being to assign to an absolutely localized
existence which refuses to present itself as a local body an entity?
And yet...When Sieyes proposes the principle of adunation and in
another place, announces that the nation is the people assembled, it is
exactly that an announcement, a historico-axiomatic declaration of
modern political ontology with, if I may call it that, a mathematical
unconscious. And if the unconscious, to follow Freuds teaching, surfaces
in its displacements and disavowals, then the mathematical unconscious
of the political discourse of the revolution was encountered at the flickering
conjuncture when the enunciative apparatus of bringing into existence a
new political reality (Nation as people assembled) was simultaneously
disavowed into the pre-supposition that such a reality (the new nation)
was already existent. Consequently, the fundamental task of an investigation
such as this is to invent and forge tools of a kind of archaeology of these
disavowals. Of course the possibility of such a structure and history of
disavowal is predicated on the mathematical property of an axiom that it
is declared in the mode of a decision and not proven in the form of a
deduction, inference or theorem. So the historically specified question is,
does Sieyes adunative, statistical and counting project for the Constituent
Assembly acknowledge the precarious nature of its axiomatic decision(s)
or does it attempt to bury the courage and risk of the declaration in the
mute depths of pre-supposed existence?.
Counting
However, to the specific question of history there is no exhaustive and
proper historical answer. Any such answer would itself presuppose a
saturated reflection of the ontological movement of coming into existence
by a kind of transparency of historical consciousness and intentionality
embodied in the leader and protagonists of the Revolution, whether Sieyes
or the several others. But what the structural aporia of the logic of adunation
indicates is the exigent insertion of that labour and passion we call the
new in the gap between the intentionality of the historical actors and

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

the blurred forms of actual historical existence. Lets take two situations of
the new from the first half of 1789 and both connected with the person
of Abbe Sieyes. First, his text from January 1789, What is the third estate?
Then the issue of re-naming the Constituent Assembly as National
Assembly with Sieyes proposal at the centre of the debate
If Sieyes can ask the fundamental question he did in January 1789
What is the third estate? and he can hypothesise the existence of the
third estate itself, it is in the wake of a series of moves made in 1788 from
different quarters to historically and numerically rectify the relation of
the third estate with the two others. This rectification is attempted on the
question of voting in the Estates General. Hitherto the estates voted as
single units or corporations and each the clergy, nobility and the third
estate had one vote. Thus on issues of both feudal and clerical privileges,
whether they related to tax exemptions or such impositions as the tithe
(among other things) it was a foregone conclusion that the clergy and the
nobility would vote on one side and against the third estate which had to
bear the enormity of the fiscal burden at hand.4
Now, in 1788, when the king called a meeting of the Estates General
to be held the following year, the first one after 1614, it was not for reasons
of correctional or egalitarian justice. The finances of Louis XVI were in
doldrums and his minister of the exchequer Jacques Necker knew that it
was impossible to fiscally sustain the nobiliary privileges any further. And
thus he responded with tactical and vigilant approval to the third estates
demand for a doubling of its vote and additionally, counting by heads on
crucial matters in the Estates General. Because that was the only way to
defeat the motions for continuing exemptions and privileges. The demand
of the third estate was of course articulated along the self-evident
justification of its large numbers (over 98% of the total population) and
the material deprivation of its condition. On this point, lets open a short
parenthesis with regard to some protocols and stakes of the historiography
of the French Revolution.
It was in the 1970s that Francois Furet, in several studies including his
most influential work Interpreting the French Revolution, diagnosed a kind of
Jacobin fallacy in the dominant history-writing around the Revolution
which was history writing on the Left.5 The singular source of this
fallacy, according to Furet, was the mid 19th century writer Jules Michelet
and its approximate shape was the following: Led by Michelets magnificent
and ambiguous Jacobin passion, historians of the Left had mistakenly
identified the material state of a part of the population that is the
deprivations of the sans-coulotte with the rational cause of the
revolutionary act of 1789. And in this fallacious schema of reasoning, the
leaders of the revolution provided the ideal mirror of reflection whereupon

COUNTING AND TREMBLING DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

69

the lucidity of the cause yielded its corresponding passion, imperative

and organization that made revolutionary action possible. Clearly Furets
criticism was the diagnosis of a proto-Leninism in the discourse of this
type of history writing. Without involving oneself too much in the
densities of this contestation and there are several chapters to it let us
take a brief look of the modalities of the source mentioned above, that is,
of Michelets narrative singularity and the bent arrow it becomes when
aimed at the heart of the revolutionary present.
No doubt Michelets account lends a double imagery to the fluid
presences of 1789 a passive imagery of popular destitution, hunger and
expropriation on a massive scale and a strangely active one which presents
these very conditions of existence and their mass as gesture.6 One could
hazard naming this gesture: the revolt of Number. What are the
phenomena dramatized by Michelet that this name seeks to capture? Well,
this seems the place to make a preliminary numerical observation: In the
passive type of imagery, the statistical support comes, from a citation of
numbers numbers relating to poverty, famine, people imprisoned in the
Bastille before July 1789 in a certain form and order that could be called
sequential. Unlike numbers which are counted in sequence, that is,
one after another, Number, to roughly paraphrase Alain Badious superb
thesis, presents itself as a gesture of Being.7 This can be illustrated from
Michelets narrative, though the example is only a random citation from
the historical multiplicity we are studying.
Michelet recounts the date 5 th October 1789 when eight to ten
thousand women led a large crowd to Versailles to fetch the king to Paris.
Why? Because the king must live with his people who havent enough
bread to feed their children. The king must live among those who love
him, the people, that is. And so Michelet writes, it is this love and hunger
that galvanise the people towards Versailles where the king is secured.
Further, it is the women who materialize this combination of forces more
than the men whose subjectivities are still oriented to the militant event
of the storming of the Bastille. At this point, Michelet writes these most
vivid, most enigmatic lines, . What is most people in the people, I mean
most instinctive and inspired, is assuredly the women. Their idea was this:
Bread is wanting, let us go and fetch the king; they will take care, if he be
with us, that bread be wanting no longer. Let us go and fetch the baker.8
No doubt it takes the historian to add the acid of enunciation to the other
ferocious but mute forces of history. And it is with the event of this
enunciation, that an infant people who were merely the idolatrous
lovers of the king hitherto, produced this same love as a torn gesture from
their own fabric of being, their immanence. The ontological name I
hazarded earlier for this gesture is Number. Thus women who led the

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crowd to Versaille, and who bring the king to Paris are indeed counted as
persons and bodies, peoples and sexes, individuals and genera but they
also are most people in the people, meaning, they are the event of a
people in the set called people who can be counted in several ways or
as several sub-sets. The ontological as well as operational enigma that
Michelets singular narration presents us with is indeed, how to count an
event?
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in their doctrine of the multitude,
have powerfully recognized the above problem but preferred a kind of
chaosmic solution attuned to contemporary spinozisms, or should one
say, Deleuzisms.9 To them, the event of a people is a chaosmic singularity,
i.e., a chaosmos of ontological possibilities such as love, poverty, revolution,
subjectivised by the praiseworthy name multitude. What the name
expresses is a splendid if miraculous transmutation and metamorphosis
of number (in their sequential, counted unity) into subject of possibility,
into enactment. Its leap of faith, hope and love, why not, takes it to a
ontological and political region where the field of possibilities is
tendentially maximized and saturated. The contemporary region is global
capitalism but in its own time, the French Revolution in the discourse of
history and political philosophy did claim a similar maximization beyond
its local gestures. However, it seems to me, the local premise of the global
multitudinarian thesis is unable to cross the threshold from numbers to
Number. It would sujbectivise Michelets women too quickly in the
direction of a chaosmic force or potentiality hence the common
identification of Michelets Jacobinism- and its enthusiasm would spring
from the hopes of a maximal actualization of this potential which is already
inscribed in the ontological field of politics. Strangely, this enthusiasm
which, in the revolutionary conjuncture, must be nothing if not enthusiasm
for the new, itself prevents anything unforeseeably new from taking
place. And thus in this hypothetical argument over how to interpret a
certain historical text and its situation the very fecundity of Jules Michelets
source of historiographical passion might be at stake. To retain the passion
of the situation, if not to save its truth, let us take another path, the path
of Number as gesture.
The proposition for this other movement is the following: Unlike the
counting (and counted) sequential numbers which present themselves in
specific cardinalities at specific crossroads so the cardinal figure of eight
to ten thousand for women going to Versailles Number, as a gesture
torn from the fabric of Being, is a swarm.10 What does this mean? In a
simple way, it means that unlike the single chain or order of numbers,
which can be an ascension, descent, accumulation, subtraction etc, taken
as a swarm, numbers display a simultaneity of orders and by that property,

COUNTING AND TREMBLING DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

71

can be capitalized into the gesture of Number. Applied to Michelets

imagery and formulation, the most people in people, that is, women
marching to fetch the king, does not merely convey a point of extraordinary
psycholgical intensification or of ontological potentiality; it transmits the
actuality of women condensing in their being the simultaneous ordering
of several demands of existence. Each supposed generative potential, love
hunger revolution, constitutes, in this thesis, an actual and nonlocalizable element of an emergent historical multiplicity. The women of
France on 5th October 1789 tear these elements from their domestic habitats,
their expected localities and re-deploy them in the tremulous hollow or
void which the multiplicity that they are is perpetually sutured to. The
economy of the above proposition on numbers and Number, the passage
between them, deserves some elaboration.
In this effort, lets recapitulate Francois Furets effective allegations of a
kind of Jacobin Micheletism or Micheletesque Jacobinism colouring
historiography on the Left to the detriment of the analysis of the other
French Revolution, the long and elusive one. Furet intervenes in and
revises decisively what he considers to be the presumptive innocence of
those who incarnate the Revolution as the Antigone of the new era,
absolutely transparent, absolutely trustworthy.11 Indeed, what is at stake
in this discussion is a certain reading of the interruptive innocence in
Michelet and a certain search for the matheme of this interruption rather
than the repetition of its consecrated image(s). It is not unknown that
guided by Tocqueville, Furet de-stresses the very point of concentration
and intensity that enacts the caesura between the Old and New Regimes
in the year 1789. He mobilizes all the revolutionary parameters extending
from economic data, political acts to religious and cultural indices against
themselves to produce a generic indiscernment of criteria by which the
Revolution can be reliably identified and evaluated. This, in essence,
provides the effective force of Furets revisionism. And I will suggest that
it is precisely the generic resources of this revisionism that must be reinserted in the constitutive void of Michelets discourse. Of course it is
the void which demands the most urgent, most persuasive demonstration.
And the poetic horizon within which this demonstration might unfold is
that of a Micheletesque innocence whose ontological name is the void.
Which is to say, Furets figuration of the Revolution in Michelet as the
trustworthy Antigone must be displaced from its substantive pathos to a
kind of logical and indiscernible space of possibility which must be taken
up, re-commenced. And only upon such a re-commencement will the space
be filled up with a supposed subject, intentionality, project and language.
In the above sense, the innocence or transparency Furet alleges attaches
to the void of Michelets theatre not its busy mise-en-scene of signifiers.

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

And that historians on the Left, with varying degrees of accuracy and
vehemence, have repeated the filled signifiers, not re-commenced the
void strangely unites the so-called revisionist Furet with them, not set
him apart. Now to demonstrate the void in Michelet, with admittedly a
great deal of ellipsis, let us shift back to June 1789 when in the Constituent
Assembly, two proposals were made by Sieyes and Mounier regarding
the composition, status and name of the Assembly. In short, the
demonstration takes as its object the very coming-into-existence of the
Assembly, its constitution. It is difficult not to be transported from crest to
crest in Michelets rhythmic narration of the names of this constitution:
from Sieyes rousing declaration of the third estate to commune to
Mirabeaus flexible people to the final movement from Constitutent
to National Assembly. Yet it is required to modulate this undulating
reception to a more interruptive tone and pitch, a response which every
time breaks the rhythm of history and every time re-commences it. In
concrete terms, it means taking up the problem of June1789 when Sieyes
emphasized that the deputies of the third estate must he known as
acknowledged representatives of the French Nation, as different from
the deputies of the other orders (clergy and nobility)who could only be
presumed to be so. Sieyes was further advanced by other proponents
who desired the eventual and urgent constitution of the Assembly as
General and Indivisible. But how was that possible with the formal
composition of the Assembly still consisting of three separate orders or
corporations? There was only one logical and political way out to produce
a non-corporate form which was constitutively indivisible: To this end, Sieyes
proposed the non-corporate and interruptive name Nation or National
Assembly.
Let us pay close attention to Michelets terms of narration: Michelet
says that the proponents who were precursors to Sieyess proposal on
change of name wanted that nothing should separate the declaration of the
new name (General, then National) from the ontological truth of the
nations indivisibility. This was a desire against the void and yet this desire
brings up the void in history and discourse in a razor-edged way. Now
note the tremendous paradox that Mirabeau, who, according to Michelet,
feared Sieyes radicality, desired precisely another sort of repetitive
adherence in history notwithstanding the Revolution, a desire against the
void and for adherence the cipher and glue of which was the king. In
particular, Mirabeau campaigned for the retention of the kings veto on
the Estates General, the Assembly now, thus, in effect, retaining the
corporate and idolatrous mark of the kings haloed body on another,
drastically altered non-corporate, revolutionary body.
Yet Mirabeau preferred, in the penultimate rounds of discussion before

COUNTING AND TREMBLING DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

73

voting, the formula for the Assembly as a forum for the Representatives
of the French People. People was a flexible word whose meaning was
manipulable. But the two proper motions, Mouniers and Sieyes that
were to be voted raised the formal even mathematical stakes of the political
discourse of this per iod. Mouniers motion said that the Assembly
consisted of the Representatives of the major part of the Nation, in the
absence of the minor part. Obviously the major part of the nation could
be construed as the people, the word Mirabeau preferred. Sieyes motion
clearly asked for the enunciation of National Assembly. Mouniers
arithmetical basis was that the people constituted the simple majority
of the total members of France - an overwhelming 98% or so - and so
simply understood, their deputies were representatives of the simple major
part of the Assembly. So arithmetically argued, the nation was a sum of its
simple parts, a class of its constituent classes, an abstract body of empirical
bodies. That was its justice. Michelet calls this Mouniers unjust justness
and I will suggest that Michelet draws out here the unjust justness of a
kind of arithmetical masking of the problem of political and ontological
constitution. To perform this task, Michelets historiographic arrow bends
with devious, almost unjust innocence.
Michelet draws the readers attention to the ironic fact that the
arithmetically simple and negligible part of the national sum, the privileged
classes, owned two-thirds of land in France and thus most of its source of
wealth (in physiocratic terms, at least). This unsurprising knowledge
possesses a political and mathematical surprise: Mouniers simple scale
according to which the parts, corporations, classes are counted next to
each other has already been interrupted and indeed voided by the
surreptitious smuggling in of a inconsistency, which means, the presumed
simple and countable parts of the welcoming national totality are
inconsistently, thus complexly, weighted. This further implies that between
the parts apparently passively subject to this just count (of major and
minor partitions), an inconsistent, unjust void must exist. Now, the void
which is the ontological and mathematical name for inconsistency in the
scale of count must not be confused with the physical image of a passive,
neutral empty space that must lie between discrete, indifferent, countable
parts. In other words, while the empty space is a structural condition of
repetition, the void is the inconsistent, interruptive and in the context we
are studying, definitely violent event of decision. Sieyes motion in the
Assembly was the enunciation of such a decision.
It was a decision, neither an arithmetical nor a political demonstration,
that the people were not a simple if major part nor the nation a sum
of parts; rather the latter was a complex and re-composed articulation of a
decision in response to the structural complexity indicated above and

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

disavowed in Mouniers proposal. The nation was a re-composed

articulation beyond the schema of aggregation or collection an adunative
decision enunciated by Sieyes. When the deputies voted in Sieyes proposal
(with four hundred and ninety one in favour and ninety against) and the
Assembly was proclaimed National Assembly, the decison that won against
Mouniers arithmetical and unjust exactness was, in set-theoretic language,
a generic decision. Meaning, the decision wagered the imminent
existence of some element, some reality, some combination of elements
that is, some sub-set that was indiscernible within the contemporary
order of countable, identifiable entities.12 Thus, the decision to name this
indiscernible set nation was a new and perilous axiomatic declaration
with the only generic attribute of being new. And it is not a matter of
negligible irony that the only way to force the new into the existent dispositifs,
apparatuses, of the present was to demonstrate the new as an exercise of
sovereignty. In the case of the Revolution and its perilous dialectic of
interruption, forcing and re-composition, the demonstration was by
asserting the right of taxation once the Assembly had been founded, it
existed. According to Michelet, the assertion of exercise was the infusion
of life to an axiomatic constitution, its founding decision which,
according to our thesis, was a decision to suture a name, a gesture, a
subject to the void.
Let us open a cinematic parenthesis on the question of the void in
relation to the subjects suture and its degree of ontological and topological
freedom an example from contemporary Iranian Cinema to be resonated
with Sieyes great wager on the peoples will, their sovereignty in the
January1789 pamphlet What is the third estate? In Majid Majidis film Children
of Heaven (made in the last decade of the 20th century) the young boy is
relentlessly led by a single prescription issued by the terrible contingency
of the situation he must acquire a pair of shoes for his sister such that
they dont have to share the same pair for school. A contingency which is
the cause of their running late to school, their consequent anxiety and
unhappiness. Then the boy discovers there is a long-distance race at school
and the person coming third will win a pair of new shoes. This, then, is the
boys greatest will to be third in the race, win the shoes and restore their
lives to equanimity. And he will try as hard as he can to translate his will to
the desired result. What does trying mean here? It means that the boy
must run hard enough be within the first three but slow down or should
one say, turn down enough at the critical moment when the group of first
three has crystallized in the race such that he retracts from the fundamental
numerical logic of the game which is to be counted in the proper
place and according to the proper scale of the set of competitors. Thus
he wills a void at the point of crystallization so as to suture himself to that

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75

void with an explicitly, sovereignly, unjustly, innocently chosen thread of

Being. This is the thread of the third, the existential thread of the boys
and his sisters salvation in desperate immanent retreat from the universal
fabric of arithmetical, unjust justice whose other war-like synonym in
the game is victory. Can the boy win this retreating victory, this existential
victory over the universal rule of the game but also this numerical victory
of being the exact third over the force of existence that running or the
running body is? The film simply, wisely, tenderly demonstrates he cant
his body runs ahead of his will and he comes first in the race. The film
demonstrates that the subject, at the very point of his disorientation,
retraction and renewed declaration of the will, cant will the void. And
because the void cant be willed, the event (of standing third in a pure
filling of the void with the desired existential cardinality beyond the ordinal
environment of the race) cant be willed as ones will.
What is the mathematical meaning of the above example? It is that
while the void is constitutive of the number series or an ordinal (that is,
ordered) multiplicity (whether sequential or swarming), it cant be actively
which is always immixed with passion, the passio or pathos localized.
The void structurally pre-exists the will and at the point of the emergence
of the subject, in all its epic disorientation and delicate, courageous creation,
this perpetual and non-localizable pre-existence must be the subtle
material, the ontological fabric of its decision. In Majid Majidis film, this
decision is pointed at in the last scene when the boy dips his tender,
wounded unbound feet in water indeed the decision has crossed the
threshold of anxious and finite will, anxious because finite, and become
unbound from all relational capture. The infinite feet of a very small, very
finite boy. Both in Michelets early 19th century account and Abbe
Sieyes January 1789 pamphlet What is the third estate? the people are
understood as very callow, an infant people enjoying a least existence. In
his pamphlet, when Sieyes starts with the famous text what is the third
estate? Nothing. What must it become? Everything nothing announces
the decision to suture the subject to the void more decisively.13 Yet the
void is not the name of the event, it is the friable infantile material of
Being. In other words, the event of the people is not decided in the
revolutionary pamphlet; but its imminence is prepared for with a tensile,
coming energy.
Negri and Hardt have praised Sieyes central tenet of constituent
power as a multitudinarian intuition that resists the rigid constitution of
people and nation as fixed names of sovereignty. Indeed Sieyes calls
the history of the idea of people the history of constituent power. All I
am arguing for here is that instead of adding a third name, multitude,
let us not shirk from muddying our boots on the rough trail to the structural

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

support of the void to the process of constitution and the indiscernible

component of the event that befalls this process. So with some mud soiling
it, let us still risk the rough proposition that Sieyes doctrine of people as
constituent power is a revolutionary subjectification of what could be
called a constituent void. And insofar as the void makes possible an
order of the count and prescribes the re-commencemnt of the count at
every critical step but is itself not counted and doent have an algebraic or a
political location, the people as a constituent void are not counted and
must never be. They are not sovereign and must never be! To any objection
that the people in this thesis oscillates between the constituent power of
the void and the indiscernible localization of the event, one can reply
with the caveat that the suturing decision unto the void decides the event
without personifying it in the alternative forms of theological or secular
sovereignty. In this sense, the people do not come to occupy the same
space of sovereignty as the king of the Old Regime and if they do, it is
already an attenuation and retractive personification of its drastic evental
and indiscernible precision. The revolutionary and the later so-called
Jacobin wills to incarnate the new in the personae and figures of the new
whether the new calendar and the commemorative figures of the festival
between 1790 and 1794 were examples of resolving the historical
oscillation of the new political being in favor of certain resplendent and
full signifiers. These wills willed the pacification of the trembling induced
by the constitutive void and the domestication of the enthusiasm (Kants
ephocal word for the French Revolution as an intensity of pure thought)14
generated by the event. And exactly to the measure that this project of the
will was an executive, governmental failure, the government imposed on
the people a state of emergency and its decision took the figural and
intensive form of the Terror.
Trembling
Before Gods inscrutable decision and command that Abraham must
sacrifice his young and innocent son Issac, the father felt trembling. Or at
least he must have this is what Kierkegaard hypothesized about Abrahams
state on Mount Moriah and in this unrelieved, trembling state, Abraham
must decide his faith in the face of the void of Gods command. Modern
philosophy, of which Kierkegaard was indeed, a trembling source, gives
a simple and shattering name to the void absurd.15 In his play Dantons
Death, Georg Buchner wrote an absurd scene: In the flurry of deaths by
guillotine during the Terror, well after the king had been executed in
January 1793, a woman in the public witnessing another such beheading
shouts out, long live the king! What explains the absurdity of this

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77

declaration? Its errancy? Its innocence? Its terrible injustice in a time

inundated by the blood demanded by an endless revolution? Paul Celan,
in a lecture cited this absurd declaration from Buchners 19th century
play and Jacqus Derrida has written about it in more than one place
as the poetic condition for revolutionary sovereignty which is not a simple
structural and temporal transfer from an earlier sovereignty.16 The poetic
revolution of the French Revolution
Of course it is possible to object that the woman in Buchners play
was only a crypto- royalist unable to control herself in the heat of the
moment. Even if that be the case, the singularity, the non-localized errancy
of the utterance in a revolutionary situation must be given its poetic instance
of enunciation, or rather, such an enunciation demands its errant, weak
place-holder in a truly revolutionary place of speech. In other words, true
revolutionary sovereignty must include inconsistent, absurd, other
instantiations. The revolutionary intensity must calm the trembling in the
air not by sedating (or terrorizing) it but by affirming its uneconomical
thus in the sense George Bataillie gave to the word sovereign core. Let
us draw a provisional conclusion at this point: Buchners absurd, definitely
comic, example counterposed to our earlier structural proposition on the
void indicates, a counter-attribute of the situation we are trying to
formalize. The situation secretes an excess, an uneconomical and
transverse movement of bodies, affects and utterances, which, nevertheless,
must not be left to the expressive resources of a chaosmos. Insofar as
trembling is an intensity of errant, inconsistent forms, it passes between
the form of the void and the form of excess.
On the fundamental and inconsistent immanence of the revolutionary
situation and its bloody yet strangely burlesque consequences, Francois
Furet quotes from a letter from Friedrich Engels to Marx in which the
former says the Terror was a reign of the terrorized.17 For historical logic
and its Jacobin historiographer i.e., Michelet as seen by Furet the crucial
question was, how to formalize the division between revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary forces without dividing the true subject of this history,
the people? For Furet, the problem is more ironic in the sense that the
divisions of the Terror put the unity of people into question and further,
these divisions had a denser history than the one inaugurated by
Robespierres normal declaration of Terror in 1794.
This is not the place to treat these issues in detail but some summary
remarks are in order: First, if Furet contrasts the opacity of circumstances
leading to the Terror to the transcendental transparency of Michelets
interpretation, it is eventually to convert the sharp figure of the peoplesubject into something vaguer, fuzzier. Furet calls this converted milieu
democratic sociability formed during the Revolution with its constituent

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

societies, clubs, media, groups, groupuscules an array of socio-historical

variables (of which the Jacobin tendency was one) that implodes into
the decision of the Terror. So on the one hand, the Terror decides the
undecidable and precarious event in the direction of revolutionary virtue
(subjective condition of the militant of the event) and terror (the objective
name of the event declared in 1794); on the other, this mode of decision
returns the var iability of the temporal sequences, their enigmatic
swarmings without cardinal discernment into the number and figure of
the subject of history, to the binary and obsessive distribution of personae
revolutionary and counter revolutionary, people and enemy of the
people, humanity and the criminal against humanity.
Second remark: in Furets analyses and schematizations, the Terror
was also an abstraction from the actual history of mixtures between 1789
and 1794. What was the composition of these mixtures? Well, two leading
ingredients seemed to be the older corporate exercise of power and
privilege and the new, vaguer form of a kind of mass-politics wherein
the idea of mass couldnt be equated with the corporate form (whether
that be the clergy, nobility, even the corporate presence of the king etc.)
Yet out of the theological core of the older corporations a core in
which the theology of divine grace and the terror of sovereign exercise of
power were indistinguishable and the political constitution of the new
mass which was a locus, or topos, of strategy and passion the horizon
of a modern style of trembling was composed. We could say this was the
horizon of the state whose Hobbesian theory intended it to be a space
of eternal and economical trembling but whose historical experience
between 1789 and 1794 revealed it to be a staccato and unstable rhyme of
various emergencies. And so it is not surprising that at least in theory,
Joseph de Maistre, avid polemicist against the Revolution, admired the
Jacobin readiness to shed uneconomical amounts of blood for the sake of
a mysterious economy- the economy of theological authority whose
permanent mystery was further demonstrated by the abstract blood of
the Terror, according to Maistre.18 However, according to Michelet, the
alleged Jacobin, the trembling of the Revolution was born of its concrete
enthusiasm, its feverish eros, not its abstract Terror. But how does this
testimony relate to our argument about the functioning of the constitutive
void in Michelets discourse and that joins him with Sieyes?
I think Michelet conveys an essential materialist truth in his historical
narration: In the situation of trembling, the void functions as a nonlocalizable and tremulous ontological condition but the trembling itself
accrues to bodies. And so in January 1789, when Sieyes put out his influential
pamphlet, the infant body of the people was both trying to get itself

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79

counted according to some representative scale and (in the pamphlet) staking
a super-numerary national (adunative?) claim. Between July 1789, when
Bastille was stormed and October 1789, when the king was forced back
to Paris, the people were an improvisation, a gestural actuality whose
numerical name we have given swarm and whose complex order had
already breached the historical condition of infancy. This movement
Michelet narrates with a kind of partisan accuracy. In the episode of
October he presents to the reader two trembling bodies, but this time
removed from the popular stage the king and the queen. Strangely, this
pathetic drama of corporate destitution is transmuted by Michelet into an
account of popular and ambiguous eros.
On the one hand it is true that in Michelets scenario, the royal couple
are trembling before the hungry and volatile crowd. On the other, when
the same crowd sees and hears the queens young son, the dauphin, cry
out Mamma, I am hungry they gasp for tenderness at the sight of royal,
innocent, infantile hunger Michelet writes of this instantaneous
communication of incorporeal intensities, this shared affect of hunger
between classes otherwise separated by the abysses of history, Hunger
passes from people to the king!19 This, Michelet writes at this point and
into the next chapter, is the ideal conjuncture of pardon, of popular
clemency. It is the subjective emergence of an unbound and generous
horizon which, indeed includes both the people and king on the same
plane. Here the king is as if liberated from his own court, its artifice, its
false images, automata and lifeless statues, to be restored to his natural
body. Thus from trembling, the king is delivered to the eros of the people
such is the subjective horizon painted with a exuberant brush by
Michelet. When the people, in this period, want to free themselves from
the churchs imposition of the traditional tithes, they seek to unbind
themselves from the infinite debt of religious inheritance.Through a similar
act of forcing a defaulting on inherited debt, only in the reverse direction
of the king, the people would force the king to default on his own
artificial sovereignty to restore him to natural, forgiving, loving life.20 In
other words, the people, in Michelets impassioned plea, in the first year
of the Revolution were full of magnanimity, clemency and forgiveness.
Their will is a will to unconditional forgetting, a lifting of what the ancient
Greeks called stasis (civil strife)21 once and for all will to revolutionary
void to which a new, emancipated society could be sutured. Of course
everything Michelet, and the historians after him will write of the
developments following this idealized conjuncture confronts us again with
our earlier ontological thesis: The will cant will the place of the void, it
cant will the event in its own image as will, the will can only decide, the

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event as an indiscernible effectivity In this confrontation, the people

fantasized as a great count of the One and in that exact sense of fantasy,
Sovereign are forced to turn towards and face the trembling reality of
what I will call historical multiplicities.
What is a historical multiplicity? A concluding note on torsion
A historical multiplicity, being a multiplicity, is not One. What is the
historical dimension of this general definition? It is, negatively put, not a
historical period. What is a period in history? It is a bloc of repetition
within an empty temporal schema. The content and intensity of reflection
gives the schema a certain density but the very structure of repetition
gives this density a homogenous presumption despite enormous
differences of coloration and texture between historical periods. The
generalized form and name of this presumption is subject. So, for
example, in the first half of 4th century AD, we see the insertion of
Christianity in the Roman Empire as a countable element in the open
totality that the Empire was. Once countable and historically designated,
Christianity also became the specific subject of history, whose amplitude
increased from the scale of the West to world-history. Thus Paul Veyne
could write a book recently with as simple and provocative a title as When
Our World Became Christian: 312-394.22 Here the becoming-Christian
of the world is not an isolated question of either religious conversion or
political change but the befalling of a new and true subject of history.
The befalling and the constituting divide the terrain of history into the torsion
between that which periodises and the repetitive closure of the period.
Pending the meaning we give to the mathematical idea of torsion, lets
call historical multiplicity as that which periodises as different from the
unity (one-count) of the period.
In the appendix of his book, Paul Veyne uses an interesting term that
would describe the nature of a historical multiplicity very well it is a
generic plural.23 A generic plural indicates a non-localizable set of forces
that effect an interruption of repetitive, even rhythmic sequences the
case of Constantines conversion to Christianity in all its non-localizable
pragmatics, its multiple durations of actualization in history for which the
date 312 AD marks a subtle index and must be distinguished from the
predicative unity of a historical period with its sovereign subject the
case of a Christian Roman Empire as a period of ancient history and after.
The mathematical concept of torsion corresponds to this process and
distinction and helps formalize it to an extent but before I explicate that
notion, lets outline the stakes of such generic philosophies of history
in relation to those who oppose them.

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81

Joseph de Maistre poured counter-revolutionary vitriol on the

generic philosophy of the Revolution.24 He carried out at least three
polemical operations against this philosophy: First, Maistre refused any
credence to generic humanity; hence according to him, the Declaration
of the Rights of Man was a document based on a false premise of generic
Man. Second, he shot down the claims to a French republic on the grounds
that no cohesive republican body (res publica) could correspond to the
largeness of the number of France (whether expressed as population,
number of provinces, the number of representatives of the people etc.);
in this he mocked the use of the (adunative) word nation as a
mystification of the real impasse of representation. Third, and crucially,
Maistre insisted on an alternative philosophy of history as war enacted in
the numbers killing and the numbers killed, encoded in a kind of economy
of blood; thus his main concern was not the impossible emancipation
from bloodshed but the constant quantity of blood shed which must not
flow too much more, shouldnt exceed the economy. Consonant with the
these unsparing operations, Joseph de Maistre laid down the prescription
of the counter-revolutionary and sovereignist Right in the discourse of
revolutionary historiography. It was that the axiomatic declaration of
sovereignty, a declaration intrinsic to the nature of an axiom, must never
pretend it can issue from a void in history. History is only the repetitive
series of pre-existences (thus the Rights of Man was only a specific polemic
against already existing rights with no real change of substance) and no
real interruption, no event occurs in this schema (neither the Revolution
nor the Thermidor were real events for Maistre). Indeed there is a generic
depth (or height) to the world and to life but that originary place of
mystery in that sense, a void was beyond any intra-historial declaration,
however inventive and courageous. In this way, Joseph de Maistre opposed
the glacial transcendence of sovereignty (of which the most lucid
embodiment was always the one king, not the multitudinous and childish
people) to the immanence of historical multiplicity. This was also the
paradigmatic prescription against torsion in history.
The mathematical notion of torsion involves a series where an element,
lets call it x, is repeated a certain number of times, lets say n times, upon
which the value of x+x+x+x (nth place) is equal to o, or nx=o.25 A
group, series or multiplicity with such a place of interruption, disappearance
or voiding may be called a torsion group. Now it must be remembered
that there is no code or algorithm or programme by which this voidpoint (the nth place) can be anticipated or calculated. Its befalling is its
event-quality and as a formal place or location, it is strictly indiscernible.
In other words, a torsion group (call it T) is similar to any repetitive or
rhythmic sequence (call it S) with the indiscernible difference that there

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comes an interruptive, non-relating whole number (n) when the

repetition disappears into an abyss, the accumulating value meets with
the caeusra of null-quantity, or in set-theoretic terms, the empty set. So in
this abyssal but determined sense, between S and T, there is nothing.
What consequences does this simplified meaning of torsion have for
historical multiplicities? Well, the first consequence is paradoxical in that
the event of disappearance is also the event of excess over the designated
place of repetition, which upon torsion, has been voided. Only from the
perspective of such an excess can the punctual failure of value at the torsionplace be thought of as lack. And from the anxiety of lack, the excess is
viewed as a wandering, nomadic, almost anarchic search for a singular
place. Why singular? Because the place in question doesnt follow from the
last place of the economy of repetition or it is not the next place. And
precisely for the reason of this non-localizability, the interrogation of this
singular place becomes all the more historically razor-edged: which would
be the next step from the interruptive, periodising and dividing (non)
place of torsion, the step to the next. new period of history? And who
takes that purely prescriptive, purely un programmable decision of the
next step? Thus we are confronted with the second historical-ontological
consequence of the mathematical concept it pertains to the status of the
subject of history. If the form of the subject doesnt pre-exist the periodising
torsion and is the locus of stabilisation and crystallation that renders a
historical period accessible to nomination (Christian,French, Popular,
Elite, Sub-altern. Revolutionary etc.), then the periodising and
abyssal step is not the subjects. Lets formulate the anonymity of the step
with two ciphers: The step is any-ones. And any-one is the one first to
pass by the (non) place of torsion. One among the countless winds to
pass through the void and yet the first wind to commit to the void. In that
sense, not the one which insists in and repeats the place of identity but
the singular one, the one one. A brief illustration from Michelet: In July
1789 on the brink of insurrection in Paris, there was formed a kind of
citizen-police which was meant to be a permanent committee to watch
over public order. The general consensus was that this committee would
comprise the electors which of course implied that the deputies on the
Constituent Assembly would mainly perform this task. A man, during
these discussions, steps forward, why electors alone? He is asked, Why,
whom would you have named? Myself . The man is appointed to the
committee by acclamation.26 According to the ontological schema I have
drawn out, with its tremulous boundaries and abyssal neighbourhood
and the perturbation of that schema by what I have called historical
multiplicity or event of torsion, the declaration of myself is made by
any one. Thus any-one-whomsoever, exactly equal to the one one who says
myself , is acclaimed, appointed.

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83

WORKS CITED

Badiou, Alain. 2009 Theory of the Subject. trans. Bruno Bosteels. London:
Continuum.
, 2009. Number and Numbers. trans. Robin Mackay Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2006 Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan.
(ed.) Thomas Dutiot and Outi Pasanen . New York: Fordham University
Press.
Desrosieres, Alain. 1998 The Politcs of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical
Reasoning trans. Camille Naish . Cambridge, Massachusetts, London:
Cambridge University Press,
Furet, Francois. 1988 Interpreting the French Revolution. trans. Elborg Forster
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kierhegaard, Soren. 1985. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death.
trans. Alastair Hannay, Penguin Books
Lefebvre, Georges. 2007. The French Revolution: From its origins to 1793
trans. Elizabeth Moss Evanson. London and New York: Routledge.
Loraux, Nicole. 2006. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient
Athens. trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books.
Maistre, Joseph de. 1994. Considerations on France. trans. and ed. Richard
A. Lebrun. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Michelet, Jules 1967. History of the French Revolution. trans. Charles Cocks,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Negr i, Antonio and Hardt, Michael , 2001 Empire. Cambridge,
Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press
Sieyes, E.J. 1899. What is the Third Estate? in Translations and Reprints
from the Original Sources of European History. Vol.6, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Veyne, Paul. 2010. When Our World Become Christian: 312-394. trans. Janet
Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Press.
NOTES
1. For adunation and the context of statistical history in this period, see Alain
Desrosieres, The Politcs of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning trans.
Camille Naish (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Cambridge University Press,
1998) pp. 16-66.
2. For Baillys statement,The assembled nationa cannot receive order in relation
to the kings power to command the estate in June 1789 along with Sieyes
declaration to the third estate, You are today what you were yesterday, See
Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From its origins to 1793 trans. Elizabeth
Moss Evanson. (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) p. 110.
3. ibid., pp. 121-122.

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

4. ibid, p. 98-111. On the question of tithes and their eventual abolition, see, Jules
Michelet. History of the French Revolution tans. Charles Cocks, (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1967) pp.249-50.
5. See Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution trans. Elborg Forster
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
6. We can summarize our impressions of Michelets mobilization of numbers in
the paradoxical formulation that they are historically generated but they have a
natural appearance. This formulation will be substantiated as we proceed but
this much must be said here that the natural being of numbers is their ordinal
character.That is, they present themselves as relations, networked and ontologically
woven rather than simply as cardinal quantities or units.
7. For this thesis and the entire range of philosophical and mathematical inspiration,
see Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2009).
8. See Michelet, op.cit., p. 282.
9. Among their trilogy on the potentia of the multitude Empire, Multitude, CommonWealth let us refer to the first for its inauguration of the debate,Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University
Press, 2001.
10. In Alain Badious view, as swarm, Number displays its infinite extension albeit that
extension is also orderly. While as sequential progression, each number comes
step-by-step Such that we recognize them in their assigned place. But that
counting also involves the structural and ontological complication of the void.
See Alain Badiou, op.cit., p. 30, p.141.
11. In his revisionist evaluation, Furet counter poses the early 20th century sociologist
Augustin Cochin to the Historian from the early 19th Michelet and analyes the
paradoxical similarities between the two. See Furet, op.cit, pp. 164-203.
12. For the narrative material of the above analysis see Michelet, op.cit., pp.108121;for the idea of indiscernible and generic sets, See Alain Badiou, Theory of the
Subject trans. Bruno Bosteels, (London: Continuum, 2009) pp. 271-274.
13. See E.J Sieyes (1899), What is the Third Estate? In Translations and Reprints from the
Original Sources of European History.Vol.6, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
PA (first published 1789).
14. The word enthusiasm that Kant uses in The Conflict of Faculties (1798) for what
the thought of the Revolution evokes occurs in Michelet frequently. For the
latter, enthusiasm is not just a subjective experience, it is equally the objective
milieu of the Revolution.
15. Apart from in the Old Testament contexts,fear and trembling also accompanies
St. Pauls message. But these are not accidental affects in Paul; rather they are the
generic Pauline intensities that announce the event of Christ. Kierkegaard is not
away from this generic logic when he joins the pure decision of faith to the
sense-less, absurd command of God. See Soren Kierhegaard, Fear and Trembling
and The Sickness un to Death trans. Alastair Hannay, contribution by Johhanes De
Silentio, (Penguin Books 1985).
16. Among other sources, See Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question:The Poetics of
Paul Celan, ed.Thomas Dutiot and Outi Pasanen (NewYork: Fordham University

COUNTING AND TREMBLING DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

85

Press, 2006).
17. See Furet, op.cit., pp. 128-129.
18. Joseph de Maistres several responses and polemics against the French Revolution
are contained in Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France trans. and ed. Richard
A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
19. See Michelet, op.cit., p.313.
20. On the tithes and defaulting on the heirs of the old regime, see ibid, pp.249-50.
21. For a brilliant historical and theoretical account of the role of stasis in ancient
Greek Society, see Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in
Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort, (New York: Zone Books,
2006).
22. See Paul Veyne When Our World Become Christian: 312-394 trans. Janet Lloyd,
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
23. ibid., p. 158-159.
24. For the following arguments and polemics, see, among others, the essays On
the Violent Destruction of the Human Species and Can the French Republic
Last? by de Maistre. See de Maistre, op.cit., pp 23-40.
25. Several questions of method and ontology are involved in this exploration:There
is the initial question of the productivity as well as hazard of the encounter
between mathematics as knowledge and the serial descriptions of history. Also,
the ontological question of mathematics as a possible science of the Real, or as
the reprise of the event.This much can be proferred here that the algebraic idea
of torsion, which presents the aleatory, non-progammed interruption of the
series, apart from holding metaphoric attractions, also realizes the gesture of
language or discourse in its improvisational capacity to precipitate a limit-signifier:
Torsion is such a signifier whether extracted from mathematics or historical
analysis and in its adherence to these fields, it divides them, hollows them.
Strangely then, the limit-signifier is also always s signifier in the middle, a partitive
gesture of discourse. So torsion doesnt only convey a marginal or great crack,
cut in the fabric and field of being we are concerned with but it also raises
anew the epochal questions of new coherences or restored totalities. The locus
of the French Revolution that we are following and which goes by the canonical
distribution between revolution, counter-revolution is nothing but the
topology of these epochal questions. In its algebraic opening, torsion helps
formalize a certain tendential movement towards topology from algebra.Which
replicates, in our terms, the movement form historical period to the periodising
event. See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, pp. 148-153.
26. See Michelet, op.cit., p.156. 27 For adunation and the context of statistical
history in this period, see Alain Desrosieres, The Politcs of Large Numbers:A History
of Statistical Reasoning trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London:
Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 16-66
26. For Baillys statement,The assembled nationa cannot receive order in relation
to the kings power to command the estate in June 1789 along with Sieyes
declaration to the third estate, You are today what you were yesterday, See
Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From its origins to 1793 trans. Elizabeth
Moss Evanson. (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) p. 110.

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SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

26. ibid., pp. 121-122.

26. ibid., p. 98-111. On the question of tithes and their eventual abolition, see, Jules
Michelet. History of the French Revolution tans. Charles Cocks, (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1967) pp.249-50
26. See Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution trans. Elborg Forster
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
26. We can summarize our impressions of Michelets mobilization of numbers in
the paradoxical formulation that they are historically generated but they have a
natural appearance. This formulation will be substantiated as we proceed but
this much must be said here that the natural being of numbers is their ordinal
character.That is, they present themselves as relations, networked and ontologically
woven rather than simply as cardinal quantities or units.
26. For this thesis and the entire range of philosophical and mathematical inspiration,
see Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2009).
26. See Michelet, op.cit., p. 282.
26. Among their trilogy on the potentia of the multitude Empire, Multitude, CommonWealth let us refer to the first for its inauguration of the debate,Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University
Press, 2001.
26. In Alain Badious view, as swarm, Number displays its infinite extension albeit that
extension is also orderly. While as sequential progression, each number comes
step-by-step Such that we recognize them in their assigned place. But that
counting also involves the structural and ontological complication of the void.
See Alain Badiou, op.cit., p. 30, p.141.
26. In his revisionist evaluation, Furet counter poses the early 20th century sociologist
Augustin Cochin to the Historian from the early 19th Michelet and analyes the
paradoxical similarities between the two. See Furet, op.cit, pp. 164-203.
26. For the narrative material of the above analysis see Michelet, op.cit., pp.108121;for the idea of indiscernible and generic sets, See Alain Badiou, Theory of the
Subject trans. Bruno Bosteels, (London: Continuum, 2009) pp. 271-274.
26. See E.J Sieyes (1899), What is the Third Estate? In Translations and Reprints from the
Original Sources of European History.Vol.6, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
PA (first published 1789).
26. The word enthusiasm that Kant uses in The Conflict of Faculties (1798) for what
the thought of the Revolution evokes occurs in Michelet frequently. For the
latter, enthusiasm is not just a subjective experience, it is equally the objective
milieu of the Revolution.
26. Apart from in the Old Testament contexts,fear and trembling also accompanies
St. Pauls message. But these are not accidental affects in Paul; rather they are the
generic Pauline intensities that announce the event of Christ. Kierkegaard is not
away from this generic logic when he joins the pure decision of faith to the
sense-less, absurd command of God. See Soren Kierhegaard, Fear and Trembling
and The Sickness un to Death trans. Alastair Hannay, contribution by Johhanes De
Silentio, (Penguin Books 1985).
26. Among other sources, See Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question:The Poetics of

COUNTING AND TREMBLING DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

26.
26.

26.
26.
26.

26.
26.
26.

26.

26.

87

Paul Celan, ed.Thomas Dutiot and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2006).
See Furet, op.cit., pp. 128-129.
Joseph de Maistres several responses and polemics against the French Revolution
are contained in Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France trans. and ed. Richard
A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See Michelet, op.cit., p.313.
On the tithes and defaulting on the heirs of the old regime, see ibid, pp.249-50.
For a brilliant historical and theoretical account of the role of stasis in ancient
Greek Society, see Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in
Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort, (New York: Zone Books,
2006).
See Paul Veyne When Our World Become Christian: 312-394 trans. Janet Lloyd,
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
ibid,. p. 158-159.
For the following arguments and polemics, see, among others, the essays On
the Violent Destruction of the Human Species and Can the French Republic
Last? by de Maistre. See de Maistre, op.cit., pp 23-40.
Several questions of method and ontology are involved in this exploration:There
is the initial question of the productivity as well as hazard of the encounter
between mathematics as knowledge and the serial descriptions of history. Also,
the ontological question of mathematics as a possible science of the Real, or as
the reprise of the event.This much can be proferred here that the algebraic idea
of torsion, which presents the aleatory, non-progammed interruption of the
series, apart from holding metaphoric attractions, also realizes the gesture of
language or discourse in its improvisational capacity to precipitate a limit-signifier:
Torsion is such a signifier whether extracted from mathematics or historical
analysis and in its adherence to these fields, it divides them, hollows them.
Strangely then, the limit-signifier is also always s signifier in the middle, a partitive
gesture of discourse. So torsion doesnt only convey a marginal or great crack,
cut in the fabric and field of being we are concerned with but it also raises
anew the epochal questions of new coherences or restored totalities. The locus
of the French Revolution that we are following and which goes by the canonical
distribution between revolution, counter-revolution is nothing but the
topology of these epochal questions. In its algebraic opening, torsion helps
formalize a certain tendential movement towards topology from algebra.Which
replicates, in our terms, the movement form historical period to the periodising
event. See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, pp. 148-153.
See Michelet, op.cit.

SEEKING AFTER TRADITIONS:

ANALYTICAL FORAYS
Sasheej Hegde

The social world does not divide at its joints into perspicuous wes with
whom we can empathise, however much we differ with them, and enigmatical
theys with whom we cannot, however much we defend to the death their
right to differ from us.
Clifford Geertz, The Uses of Diversity

The mandate of this paper is fairly explicit and clear: to comment upon
and foreground the academic (read, social scientific) analyses of traditions.
In giving effect to it, however, I have had to modify its focus giving it an
altogether analytical twist - while also striving to avoid an excessive
historical self-consciousness about the problem of the order, say, which
asks of a representation, any modality, whether it is Indian, whether it is
not actually Western or Hindu, and, unto this frame, whether it is not
always or already Brahminical or Sanskritic. There are many reasons for
this avoidance, not least my ignorance, a sense of incredulity about matters
formulated as either traditional or modern; but also to fend away a line of
criticism that would interpret any (or all) concern about traditionality
and traditionalisation as both archaic and abstruse or as lending themselves
to a variety of nativist exceptionalism.
An even more decisive impetus marking out the contours of my
engagement is the contemporaneity configuring the question of tradition;
but as I seek to formulate it this contemporaneity would have to be placed
within a normative analytical grid. What I want to talk about in this
contribution, therefore, is not strictly speaking the character of tradition.
One might imagine at least that one is talking about processes of
transmission to be sure, one is here trading off the etymological sense
of tradition, from the Latin tradere, to give over, the act therefore of handing
down or transmitting something from generation to generation when
one is talking about the character of tradition; but I do not want to talk
about transmission per se. Rather, my concern is with how we social
scientists, the secular liberal intelligentsia, by and large stand relative to

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transmission, to that which is handed down, be it doctrine, practice or

belief. I want to think about what we think we know, what there is to
know, and how one goes about seeking after traditions. These nearprogrammatic outlines should not be lost sight of in responding to my
arguments herein. What is more, I think, they could lend some further
perspective to the whole talk today about either retrieving traditions or
reinstituting them.
I. CONSTRUALS OF FORM AND CONTENT

The imperative of providing a necessary corrective to the standard picture

of Indian traditions (where metaphysics, theology and spirituality
dominate, and ethics, politics and sociology are relegated to the
background) cannot be gainsaid. But the perspective from which most
such attempts at correction are undertaken, it appears to me, embody a
concern less with the deliberations in the Indian thought about man,
society and polity than with the intuitions and basic concepts that guide
the design of the traditions itself.Thus, for instance, Daya Krishna, prefacing
his attempt to foreground the socio-political matrix of traditional Indian
thought, observes:
The question is not whether the understanding of a concept or a set of concepts is
correct in the light of what has been said in a particular text or a series of texts on
the subject, but whether one is creatively using and developing it to understand ones
own experience as did so many of the great thinkers in the past (Krishna 1996: ix).

The problem with such a schematization is that its terminology indicates

a certain lack of clarity about what is in need of justification the past, the
present, Indian traditions, the thought about man, society and polity? And
besides, one can even add that the metaphors using and developing
have their own history of expediency.
An alternative strategy in seeking after traditions is what might be
termed reconstructive appropriation an effort, that is, to reconstruct and
analyze a substratum of ideas and concepts latent in the political culture
of a society and its normative footholds. I have tried to give effect to this
procedure in a piece written some years ago (see Hegde 1998). The scene
and the object of this recuperation was an effort to come to terms with
the imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions; that is to say, traditions
as something binding and commanding, offering themselves with a sense
of obligation, and whose determining ground can and ought to be adduced
alongside a certain normativity.1 I had maintained that the existence of
this normativity roughly equivalent to the questions, internal to
normative political and moral philosophy, about What is justice? or Why
be moral? or, even more squarely within traditions of virtue ethics, the

SEEKING AFTER TRADITIONS: ANALYTICAL FORAYS

91

preoccupation with codes of conduct considered to be exemplary or

desirable is the mark of a concern within the tradition to articulate a
space of power in accordance with a criterion of legal regulation and/or
moral subjectivation. The force of this marking is what gives the tradition
its currency, that is to say, informs its strategies of individuation and control
and ensures its articulability in different histor ical and discursive
circumstances. For the most part therefore, in attesting to the conceptuality
surrounding traditions, we have to be wary of a necessary limit to
contextualist determinations. Recall Marxs adage to the effect that texts
have a remarkable capacity to circulate without their contexts. I will return
to this point about contextuality later, albeit in the backdrop of a
philosophically mediated appraisal.
At any rate, it remains moot to ask, not only what kinds of passage
into the present traditions conceived as alternative form of life and ideas
can facilitate (vide their contemporaneity) but also what ethical and political
standards independent of what one is used to, say, in modern culture
are implied in it. Yet there are bound to be difficulties here. It has been
suggested that the Indian situation is best approached as a juncture of
traditions:
When considering Europe and India, the two traditions can, of course, be
considered comparatively; (but) the contemporary Indian case has to be examined as
a juncture of the two traditions also (Saberwal 1990: 1).

And what is more: apropos the earlier traditions, one notices on the
Indian side that there is a multiplicity of traditions (ibid.) so that it may
be maintained for the Indian case that not only is there not one tradition
from which to mediate claims, there is no one tradition to mediate.
It is to what that formulation, namely, a juncture of traditions can
yield that I wish to turn the readers attention. The late A. K. Ramanujan,
in a delightful and tantalizing essay, formulates this well:
I think cultures (may be said to) have overall tendencies (for whatever complex
reasons) tendencies to idealise, think in terms of, either the context-free or the
context-sensitive kind of rules. Actual behaviour may be more complex, though the
rules they think with are a crucial factor in guiding their behaviour. In cultures like
Indias, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation (Ramanujan
1989: 47).

Interestingly, he notes, in an admission brimming with insight drawn

from a long history of tradition:
Yet societies have underbellies. In predominantly context-free societies, the countermovements tend to be towards the context-sensitive. In traditional cultures like
India, where context-sensitivity rules and binds, the dream is to be free of context
(1989: 54).

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What this translates into is a condition of contingency underwriting most

institutional and cultural forms as well as overseeing their realization in
forms of life. The question is: what is one to make of this condition? Let
me set up a passage through Saberwal and Ramanujan again, names that
I take as emblematic rather than final or figural.
To be sure, both are concerned to traverse different contexts, institute
different totalities. Ramanujan, clearly, is groping towards a description of
the two kinds of emphases underlying cultures, namely, the contextsensitive and the context-free, maintaining that
(n)either the unique, nor the universal, the two, often contradictory, concerns of
Western philosophy art and polity, are the central concerns of the Indian arts and
sciences except in the counter-cultures and modern attempts, which quickly get
enlisted and remolded by the prevailing context-sensitive patterns (Ramanujan
1989: 55).

Alternatively, Saberwal may be seen to be fixing on the question of appraisal

that in appraising any tradition, what is at issue is the quality of the
societys institutions and that in contrast to the West,
the grain of Indian society has run in the direction not of unified, impersonal codes
but of multiple, segmental ones; so that our tradition has not displayed notable
capabilities either for devising unified codes or for promulgating reorganized ones in
any considerable social depth (Saberwal 1985: 208-9; see also his 1995 passim).

One can discern an argument here about the nature of traditions in India,
not just about their remarkable polysemy, but also (as in Saberwal, more
so) their historicity, the possibilities they contain as well as their historic
costs. Yet it seems that they both tend towards a universalistic orientation,
though reflecting in this mode critically. Consequently, we may have to
contend with an implication emanating from these proposals: that even as
they alert is to the contingency suffusing Indian cultural and institutional
forms, the regulative idea concerning these proposals, to the extent that
we can formulate it as universalism (that is, the rendering of traditions
from the standpoint of their universalizability), seems to mark a break
with this very contingency.2 Thus, for Saberwal, it is not enough to accept
mediation from within a tradition; one would also have to consider the
possibility that the standards of a tradition could have something
fundamentally wrong about them.3 Or, again, Ramanujan: that cultures
despite all the complexity and oscillation have a definite bias (1989:
57), and that this bias may yet have to be approached in rendering a
traditions contents as representative of ways of life and thought.
The problem here is as much a logical one of an unauthorized
slippage between two levels of discourse, the prescriptive and the
descriptive as one of a straining within and against significant language

SEEKING AFTER TRADITIONS: ANALYTICAL FORAYS

93

(to use a phrase from Wittgenstein) that any reflection on traditions must
accept.4 We need to take this problem seriously, if we are to avoid dissolving
the contingency that one is describing. It is not our contention of course
that the universal horizon ought to be unthought or jettisoned (indeed
the very critique of universalism gains its force, so to say, from universalism);
for the universalism-particularism divide, in terms of its competing
imperatives, can also be an argument between different forms of the
universal perspective.5 Rather, that there is a whole problem of the should
the straining within and against significant language in a word, the
imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions, that must be grasped (and
which, I might reiterate, most arguments for or about contingency smooth
over).6
The foregoing considerations enable us to approach, and even
reformulate, aspects of the imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions,
some allusions to which can be had from the contexts specified, but
perhaps most concisely in Veena Das (again, a name being taken here as
emblematic rather than figural). Working through an extant interpretation
of the sociology of India, she calls attention to an aspect of the Brahmanic
construction of tradition:
Texts (including the Dharmashastras which lay out rules of conduct) do not prescribe
behaviour in the sense of laying out areas of obligation as much as describing codes
of conduct considered to be exemplary or desirable.This is why the actual governance
of conduct came under customary law, and even the king was not entitled to alter
the customary law of the people (Das 1995: 37).

She further observes, in a stunning footnote attached to these claims: (I)t

does seem to me that by characterizing this as a purely Brahmanic
conception, one loses the opportunity of treating it as an important
conceptual resource (1995: 37-8, n.9).
I shall here take these suggestions through, to see what they might
yield in respect of our theme. Das allusions relate to a matrix that one
might construct as textual, and yet do not lend themselves to such an
exclusive determination. Thus, even as she is prepared to admit a distinction
between local circumstances for which customary rules were valid and
authoritative knowledge which was only contained in texts as crucial to
the Brahmanic construction of tradition, she seems quite unwilling to
come to terms with this disjunction in the way that some scholars (she
mentions M. N. Srinivas) have, by positing a sharp difference between
book-view and world-view in Indian society, [and] reserving the latter
as the legitimate domain of inquiry for the anthropologist (Das 1995:
38). While this can make for the point noted by Das, it also slants the
investigation of the imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions in a

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certain direction: towards a focus on stipulation, rather than regulation. In

other words, Das construal, although adverting to a vocabulary of
prescription, even of imperativeness, seems to imply a concept of tradition
as necessarily stipulative as establishing an ontology of acts, specifying
what kinds of acts can be.7 What this cannot accommodate, at least not
entirely, is a concept of tradition as regulation, indeed that another quite
different sense in which the imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions
may be outlined as constraining action in an already existing context of
constraint and, therefore, as adverting to an economy of power.
One might, following Ramanujan, read this regulation alongside a
matrix of context-sensitivity and/or particularism, that while the main
tradition of Judeo-Christian ethics is based on a premise of
universalisation, Manu will not understand such a premise that to
be moral, for Manu, is to particularize to ask who did what, to whom
and when (Ramanujan 1989: 46). What this avoids however is a focus
upon the economy of power that we have taken the concept of tradition
as regulation as betokening8. One may of course reappropriate that claim
in Das, take the situation that it alludes to (namely, of the actual governance
of conduct coming under customary law, and even the king not being
entitled to alter this law) as implying precisely this economy.
II.THE QUESTION OF APPRAISAL

It is important to be quite clear what is at issue here. There are, it seems to

me, grave difficulties facing the idea of difference, of radically distinct
traditions, concepts and/or discursive agendas. For instance, where do we
or us (or our) stop and they or others (or them) begin? Certainly geography
and time may help implicate separateness, even exclusivity, and therefore
difference, but this does not, of itself, establish the difference as difference.
What has to be shown, and this is important, is that there are points of
separation or exclusivity beyond these spatio-temporal ones that constitute
incommensurable differences. A line of reasoning familiar from
Wittgenstein and Davidson suggests that this may not be possible.9 The
case being made here and I am compressing somewhat the lines of
what must remain a more elaborate formulation is that we may be
required to reorient the focus of our investigations, into ourselves, into
(say) what our traditions are and what their limits might be, by pressing
more insistently than ever upon the problem of inheritance: of what we
are heir to, and whether there is only one legitimate heir? The question,
to be sure, inhabits a substantive historical ground of appraisal, but it is
the more analytical point that this animates places in perspective that
I am interested to foreground, if one is to grasp that line of reasoning with

SEEKING AFTER TRADITIONS: ANALYTICAL FORAYS

95

reference to which the question of traditions is being raised here. Our

accounts of ourselves, of traditions per se, to the extent that they can (and
ought to) obtain as normatively compelling, require us to have an
independent conceptual grasp of the relevant identifying norms. We might
require a philosophy in order to tell a story about anything, after all.10
One might confess to a certain perplexity about what is being entailed.
Cannot the claim about tradition implying a certain process of handing
down be taken to signify, precisely, the axis of such a retrieval that it
could yet constitute the basis of a higher order conviction, an independent
conceptual grasp of the relevant identifying norms vis--vis processes of
transmission that is tradition? Perhaps, but I have the problem of reconciling
this near-relativist construal with the lessons that our above considerations
incorporate. The fact of difference is salient but not, of itself, crucial. What
must preoccupy us is the question of the conclusions to be drawn from a
proper recognition of this fact. Indeed, the question will only be seen in
sharp relief when one weaves the position that our point of view has led
us to with (say) the work of Wittgenstein. Consider the following:
But how can a rule show me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on
some interpretation, in accord with a rule. That is not what we ought to say, but
rather: any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and
cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning
(Wittgenstein 1968: #198).
Can one say that at each step of a proof we need new insights? Something of the
following sort: If I am given a general (variable) rule, I must recognize each time
afresh that this rule may be applied here too (that it holds for this case too). No act
of foresight can absolve me from this act of insights. Since the form in which the
rule is applied is in fact a new one at every step. But it is not a matter of an act of
insight, but of an act of decision (Wittgenstein 1974: 301).

The challenge is: what construction to put on these remarks? Wittgensteins

point would be missed by anyone who took him to be simply arraigning
against the realist case (the thesis, broadly, that thoughts are either true or
false, and are so antecedently to our knowing which; in short, that there is
something in virtue of which they are true or false). Again, it seems to me
that the characteristic concern of these passages has nothing to do with
the reality of states of affairs whether traditional or modern - but is (as
one might say) epistemological. Read straight, they amount to a sort of
idealist construal that the determinacy of reality comes from what we
have decided or are prepared to count as determinate. But it is important
to reiterate that the determinacy in question is one of sense not of truth:
dont think, but look (Wittgenstein 1968: #66).11 There is again no

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special problem, for this position, as to the relation between the sense
and the reference it determines: it simply is in the nature of a sense to
determine a referent. But ultimately the question would have to be faced,
why this sense of something, and not another? Also, how it is that the
existence of an activity or an idea could constitute grasping any particular
sense?
Wittgenstein, in the remarks cited, is of course trading on the possibility
of an oscillation between two orders of sense between what one might
term a descriptive pole (where, for a given order of entailment relations, it
could be affirmed that they are necessary yet contingent, that is, they
could be false and/or refuted by new experience) and a normative pole
(where everything is what it is and not another, not just happening to be
so but also, what is more, cannot be otherwise). And yet, it is important to
note, not quite obliterating the difference between the two poles. When
Wittgenstein states that interpretations by themselves do not determine
meaning and/or that there need not only be one correct way of being
guided by a rule, he is supposing that the order of reasons can be separated
from what those reasons are about, and hence what we are responding to
when we raise validity claims about a state of affairs. The latter too are
responses, that is, they record the place of the pull of the world in claims of
that kind.12 What all this would require is an order of appraisal which
asks, of any given claim be it of what can be known or what must be
done, or even what should be hoped for, within or about traditions not
only why it must be so, but also the relevant identifying norms that bear
upon it.
In focus, then, is not some ultimate truth about traditions, but rather
the cultivation of an attitude an order of conviction proper to that
question. The tendency to think that something is not quite right about a
tradition, as indeed the thought that there can only be one correct way of
enunciating or applying a tradition, leads us to think that the conventions
proper to a tradition could not possibly guide another tradition, since (as
is claimed) the situations specific to these traditions are so different. It is
precisely in order to dispel us of this fixation that I have sought, in the
foregoing pages, to orchestrate come analytical remarks on the enterprise
of seeking traditions as a whole. In what follows, I propose to give further
body to this evaluation, while going on, in a final sweep, to mediate another
locus for bearing upon the question of traditions today.
III. FURTHER ANALYTIC PROTOCOLS

The foregoing, in a sense, constitutes the dynamic under which to generate

our hypotheses about traditions as a whole. One is still left baffled however

SEEKING AFTER TRADITIONS: ANALYTICAL FORAYS

97

as to the hypotheses themselves: what can they amount to and how should
they be understood? Let me take up the latter question first this first of
all since it bears upon a dynamic about how traditions could be extended
(as separate, say, from being universally applied) before gravitating,
without necessarily specifying so, into the former question.
A deep source of interest in the arguments condensed above is the
help they provide in opening up the space of traditions to a normative
reading or rendering. It wasnt that we began with an alternative between
which one had to decide; and yet, everything that I have just discussed
seems to me to lead in only one direction, namely, the analytical construal
of the act of appraising traditions. It is important to be quite clear about
what is in question here. If the warrant for any kind of judgment about
traditions is the carrying out of an elaborate argument for it (or against it),
then this simply cannot be so: one cannot decide about its normativity
tout court, from a mere thought about its contents and contexts. That indeed
was the whole problem in the first place, although, in the course of
deliberating it, we were also concerned to mediate an appraisal that would
emphasize methodical ways of working with traditions; within recognitions,
that is, which properly belong to the formation and application of sociopolitical precepts, whose imperative/prescriptive character is also a
hallmark of traditions conceived as alternative forms of life and ideas. The
basic form of this mediation was of course derived from Wittgenstein, but
then an ambiguity seems to attach itself to the procedure here. It is far
from clear whether, in foregrounding a thought given over to recuperating
traditions, one is seeking after an alternative to it or an alternative for it. We
need some firmer hold on this contrast, before coming to resolve it either
way. Some scholars have, in fact, read this indeterminacy back into the
very heart of the Wittgensteinian corpus; and, to be sure, it can be seen to
underly all proposals for or against traditions. Allow me a staging,
preparatory to a determination.
The question has conventionally been whether, in thinking the ground
of our traditions as well as conceptualizing divergent outlooks, we have to
think in a relativistic way, in a way that argues, for instance, that truthclaims and value-claims are to be relativized to the culture within which
they are made. The aim of relativism, so conceived, is to resolve
disagreement, to take views, outlooks, or beliefs that apparently conflict
and treat them in such a way that they do not conflict: each of them turn
out to be acceptable in its own place (Williams 1985: 156). The problem
however, as Williams himself avers, is to find a way of doing this, in
particular by finding for each belief or outlook something that will be its
own place (ibid.). It is important, for our purposes, to see what Williams
is getting at here. According to him, social practices could never come

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forward with a certificate saying that they belonged to a genuinely different

culture, so that they were guaranteed immunity to alien judgments and
reactions (1985: 158). This claim, however, in our multicultural times,
characterized by the self-assertion of groups and lifestyles, all seeking to
entrench themselves more fully into the political system, might well have
to be qualified. More particularly, Williamss thought here is being directed
at a heuristic which, while accommodating the relativists concerns about
divergent outlooks - of viewing others as at varying distances from us also confronts the relativist suspension of assessment (1985: 160-62
passim). The possibility that is inscribed what is termed a relativism of
distance would consist in rendering the confrontation between divergent
outlooks notional rather than real:
We should distinguish real and notional confrontation.A real confrontation between
two divergent outlooks occurs at a given time if there is a group of people for
whom each of the outlooks is a real option. A notional confrontation, by contrast,
occurs when some people know about two divergent outlooks, but at least one of
these outlooks does not present a real option (1985: 160).

Now the concept of notional confrontation is significant. For one, it

saves the relativistic standpoint from the charge of inconsistency or
confusion. For if, in keeping with relativism, truth claims and value
claims are to be relativized to the culture within which they are made,
then there hardly can be a disagreement between them or a confrontation
to settle across them. Also, what is more, the concept of the notional
allows us to think the moral and conceptual concerns of another culture,
even to use a language of appraisal across cultural boundaries, without
necessarily implying a substantive relationship between our moral and
conceptual concerns and theirs. According to Williams, it is the presence
of some substantive relation between the various concerns of different
cultures that alone can give any point (or substance) to the appraisal. As
long as this is avoided, the evaluation of traditions, even alien ones, could
proceed without invoking charges of moral absolutism or conceptual
dogmatism.
There is a sort of crossroads here that one must acknowledge, if we
are to accommodate aspects of above discussion to the notion of seeking
after traditions. It should be made clear that our advocacy of notional
confrontation has nothing to do, as it seems to be in Williams, with asserting
a truth in relativism (or, even, the plausibility of a relativistic standpoint
defined in terms of a distance that makes confrontation notional
[Williams 1985: 162]). Nor is it meant, strictly, to ward off a criticism
about our procedure of appraisal here, in the though implicating all our
pages above, that it seems to presuppose some form of an appeal to

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99

universally accepted criteria as the ground from which to negotiate

traditions per se. The issue clearly is not one of universalism versus
particularism, where the versus often translates into a jettisoning of one
side of the divide for the other. Indeed, as we inferred earlier, this very
divide would need unpacking, for one, because the very idea of a
particular gains its force, so to say, from a universal (or, better still, is
being raised to the possibility of a universal).
I do not for all that have any intention to push the concept of notional
confrontation to its extreme; and, as Matilal (1994: 146) has tried to
emphasize, the distinction between real confrontation and notional
confrontation can remain a delicate matter. Nevertheless, in offering a
way of gathering together the many problems that surround the direction
of the treatment of traditions today, the concept seems to me essential to
any procedure such as ours - given to explaining what it is that substantive
disagreement over traditions and/or the application of a tradition could
consist in. The latter must always already presuppose some agreement
indeed, that one cannot even say, of a norm or a tradition, that it is alien
or other, unless one could also identify something tantamount to it. Or,
again, that any apparent disagreement about traditions could disappear if
the parties concerned are, after all, arguing over the application of different
criteria.13
IV. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

To be sure, the issues are much more complicated than what this
condensation would permit. For one, it seems to be adducing to a level of
nor mativity that goes beyond, if you will, an internal (broadly,
understandings in which traditions are made intelligible by being revealed
to be, or to approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be) and
external (a style of understanding in which one makes traditions intelligible
by representing their coming into being as a particular instance of how
things generally tend to happen) norm in operation and held to underly
the study of traditions generally. Now, of course, one could ask whether
this sort of approach is compatible with the ground being deliberated in
this paper. Here allow me to do little more than set the scene for an
argument that I hope to comprehensively formulate in the near future. I
am afraid the analytical line of appraisal would have to be endured.
To be sure, an analysis given to tracing the history of effects through
which a tradition (or an identity) effectively took shape may be necessary;
only, I remain unconvinced about its sufficiency. As if to implicate a
possibility from within this impasse, the theorist Vivek Dhareshwar has
recently suggested that we make a distinction between Western theories

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about us and Western theories about its own experiences that

nevertheless impinge on us (Dhareshwar 1998: 223). The distinction is
salient, but not of itself crucial; and to the extent that it is made to subserve
the requirement of offering a metatheory of Western theories (ibid.), it
inevitably connects up with the Orientalist enterprise (albeit as the latters
flip side or dialectical other) of making comprehensible what actors are
doing and thinking out of a context of tradition interwoven with the selfunderstanding of actors. I think this matrix of genealogy simplifies what
is really a complex matter about judgment, about the translatability of
traditions and the kinds of necessity that bind previous or parallel instances
of a tradition (or practice) with a new one while also failing to reflect
upon the ontological status of discourses directed at creating a normativity
out of themselves.
All the same, it should be obvious that a simple sociological dualism
of tradition and modernity will not do. Surely we need a counterpoint to
work for which the dualism of tradition and modernity appears less as a
theoretical issue than as a question recounting the fate of tradition in
modernity. But my point is that a more complex schema issuing off the
historical study of multiple modernities will not do either.14 Indeed, in
the context of the latter, the very meaning of modernity as destruction or
overcoming of tradition, as also the idea of the production of tradition
within modernity, have both ceased to resonate. The historian Christopher
Bayly has implored the need for taking a longer perspective on
contemporary (read, modern) India, in order primarily to soften the
sharp break between tradition and nationalist modernity, and between
East and West, which still impoverishes the historical literature (Bayly
1996: 180). I think we need to take this suggestion on, while of course
contriving to separate object-level contentions about context from the
meta-level issue of whether contexts could be explicated free of normative
criteria. Perhaps, then, we ought to be returning to the founding coordinate
of this analytical orchestration.The point surely cannot be to comb through
traditions for their difference, but for the resolution of the problems that
the difference(s) is invented to solve, a problem that is as real for
philosophers and social scientists as for those reject their sense of
contingency, as real for Indian scholars as for their western counterparts.
Coda: further thoughts on the prescriptive and descriptive
In the normal course, my paper ended above somewhat tantalizing
poised, the choice of a pathway of work negotiating specific traditions
and substantive histories quite unclear and undefined. Without doubt,
the analytic nature of my construal has something to do with this

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101

indecisiveness (although it might seem paradoxical that properly analytical

work should yield to such an atmosphere of uncer tainty, even
unpredictability). But I have had a most thoughtful response from Manas
Ray, this journals editor, and I feel honoured (and compelled) to offer
some remarks, more in the nature of reminders for a task on hand, which
I hope to accomplish in the near future.
I offer readers only a glimpse of Manas Rays comments.15 He sees
the paper as making two claims: one, articulating another mode of situating
tradition in the present by giving a different analytical twist to
understanding its normative make-up which is neither universalistic
nor relativist, and, two, positing the existence of an imperative/
prescriptive dimension of traditions that give them their currency over
time. These are two direct inferences from my paper, and they are both
productive ones at that. In fact, I am taken in by both, although I must
admit that the latter point is not a defining motif of my paper. I will get
back to this point later, but let me look at the structure of the first inference
that my paper is trying another mode of situating tradition in the present
(by giving a different analytical twist to understanding its normative makeup) which is neither universalistic nor relativist. Mark the phrase that I have
italicized: it is well put, and captures an aspect of what the paper was
attempting. I am only not too sure that the analytical move I was making
through Saberwal and Ramanujan has been adequately captured in the
claim that (as he puts it) every attempt to situate tradition in the grid of
contemporary knowledge systems misses the contemporaneity of tradition
by bringing in a dose of universalism which among other things ignores
the contingent life of a tradition by inserting discursive protocols that we
assume to be modern. Perhaps I need to rethink this along the lines that
Manas Ray is positing, but my point off these scholars mentioned was
somewhat different, broadly in keeping with the analytic nature of my
construal. I saw the position represented as oscillating unauthorizedly
between two levels of discourse, the prescriptive and the descriptive; and,
what is more, that the language of their appraisal entailed a sort of straining
within and against significant language that any reflection on traditions
must accept. To be sure, I am categorical that we need to be taking these
dimensions seriously, if (as I have said early on in this paper) we are to
avoid dissolving the contingency that one is describing.
Of course, dissolving contingency is one thing; putting in place a
proper heuristic to address it is another, and it is this latter axis that I am
interested to explore. Before pushing this further, let me take up the
second inference: the point that I am positing the existence of an
imperative/prescriptive dimension of traditions that give them their
currency over time. Manas Ray here pointedly asks, But are you also

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attributing a kind of normative kernel to a tradition if you at all agree to

call it so across different historical and discursive circumstances?; while
going on to observe (and I shall be quoting him at some length):
I guess what I am pondering is whether there can be an articulability cutting across
histories and discourses. In other words, are we denying that norms or normativity
get(s) one life in one discursive context and another in another context? Can we read
the prescriptive outside the descriptive, though the importance of not to flatten the two
up into one is paramount? Can we identify and understand the significance of
norms outside the processes of transmission? (Emphasis added).

These are astute questions, sharply posed and deeply challenging. In what
follows, I will try to lay out the basis of an answer. I shall be persisting
with the analytic mode.
To be sure, there is a large amount of critical writing on the problems
of instituting and managing a tradition and/or ideological inheritance.
One could be asking a range of questions about what we, as a people
handling an ideological inheritance or managing a tradition, should be
aiming at, even whether we should be aiming at anything at all; whether
the normative visions that are informing a society (or a time) is a code for
something else, indeed whether, in the context of multiple visions and
multiple claims to inheritance and transmission, there could be anything
stable; about how are comprehensive norms related to such other modern
values as efficiency, merit, liberty, the rule of law; and so on.These questions
can and have been raised from a variety of standpoints, and are open
to historical, sociological and normative-political modes of elucidation. I
am inclined to the view, however, that much less attention has been devoted
to the more abstract question: What is the character of our - any
collectivity or segment of a populations deeper commitment to treating
a tradition or ideological inheritance as foundational, a commitment which
is held to underlie particular protestations? Note, not What are its
implications? but What does this foundational ascription amount to?
and What it is based on?
One way of capturing this difference of viewpoint is by positing a
dichotomy between, yes, the prescriptive and descriptive interests in a
foundational tradition, that is to say, interest in a foundational tradition as
aim as opposed to interest in a foundational tradition as a fact or as a
descriptive claim. This framing is certainly problematic; and in fact, if one
were to formulate from within the evidence presented by historical and
sociological scholarship, it can never obtain. Indeed, as extant modes of
histor ical and sociological prognoses testify (while not themselves
rendered in these terms) prescriptive and descriptive views are hopelessly
mixed up and the terrain of tradition is pushed and pulled in all directions
right, left and centre. Now while a softening of the contrast between

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103

prescriptive and descriptive interests in a foundational tradition is desirable,

one must be wary also of an unwarranted oscillation between these two
types of interest. There is the imperative yet to capture the difference
yielded by our abstract question, although I will have to be brief here
(considering that my thoughts on the question have not crystallized fully).
The fact that a space of power informs strategies of individuation and
control underlying traditions clearly implies that it is the character of our
deeper commitment to a tradition which is in question. As already
mentioned, it is not a commitment that translates into a contrast between
a prescriptive and a descriptive interest in a foundational tradition. Rather,
it is a commitment which seems to underlie an interest in tradition as an
aim, and interest in tradition as a background commitment that underlies
many different aims/positions. Indeed, I am inclined to push the point
even further: the interest in a tradition as an aim must presuppose the
importance of that tradition as a background commitment that underlies
many different aims.
I must hasten to clarify that the boundary thus delineated is not to be
construed as a boundary between empirical and transcendental frames of
reference. In an important sense there is no such boundary, and so nothing
outside the realm of the contingent and the contextual. Tradition in the
first instance, accordingly, is to be understood as a background commitment,
not in the sense of acts of claiming but in the sense of claimable contents
that would be expressed by such (possible) claimings.16
One last clarification and I am through (although I suspect the terrain
has been opened up for further scrutiny).17 Quite apart form the formal
nature of my appraisal, what further lends credence to my remarks here is
the idea lurking behind any concept of tradition, namely, the suggestion
that social and cultural life in the present begins with some kind of
inheritance from the past; but far from inflecting this idea outward, I was
concerned to mediate an internal conversation about where we
philosophers and social scientists, primarily stand relative to a process
of inheritance. In a manner of speaking, I am concerned to fashion a
heuristic of inquiry one which is neither (in Manas Rays terms)
universalistic or relativist - which works off the insight that since reason
operates only within tradition (MacIntyre 2006: 11), it (reason) has to
rely on the standards of some specific and ongoing approach to a given
subject matter, and since these standards can change as different theories
are devised to handle new problems, no tradition in this sense simply
passes down unaltered some supposedly age-old pieces of wisdom: a
tradition is a conflict of interpretations of that tradition (ibid.: 16). Of
course, I have been concerned to put some pressure on this mode of
assessment as well. Hopefully, a precise heuristic is in the process taking
shape.

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WORKS CITED

Balibar, Etienne. 1995. Ambiguous Universality. Differences, Vol.7: 48-74.

Bayly, C. A. 1996. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Brandom, Robert B. 1994. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and
Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Das,Veena. 1995. Critical Events:An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, Donald. 1985. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. In
John Rajchman and Cornel West (ed.) Post-Analytic Philosophy. New
York: Columbia University Press, pp.129-44.
Hegde, Sasheej. 1998. Rules and Laws in Indian Traditions: A
Reconstructive Appropriation. In Satish Saberwal and Heiko Sievers
(ed.), Rules, Laws, Constitutions. New Delhi: Sage, pp. 97-118.
Hegde, Sasheej. 2000. Modernitys Edges: A Review Discussion. Social
Scientist, Vol.29: 33-86.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1992. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews. London: Verso.
Revised and enlarged edition.
Krishna, Daya. 1996. The Problematic and Conceptual Structure of Classical Indian
Thought about Man, Society and Polity. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2006. The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays,Vol.1. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Matilal, B. K. 1994. Pluralism, Relativism and Interaction between Cultures.
In E. Deutsch (ed.) Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic
Perspectives. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, pp.141-60.
Monk, Ray. 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London:Vintage.
Osborne, Peter. 1992. Modernity is a Qualitative, not a Chronological,
Category. New Left Review, No.192: 65-84.
Ramanujan, A. K. 1989. Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal
Essay. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), Vol.23: 41-58.
Saberwal, Satish. 1985. Modelling the Crisis: Megasociety, Multiple Codes
and Social Blanks. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.20: 202-11.
Saberwal, Satish. 1990. A Juncture of Traditions. Paper presented at IDPAD
Seminar on Changing Relations between State and Society in India
and Trends towards an Emerging European State. New Delhi.
Saberwal, Satish. 1995. Wages of Segmentation: Comparative Historical Studies
on Europe and India. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Winch, Peter. 1981. Im Anfang War Die Tat. In Irving Block (ed.) Perspectives
on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.159-78.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1965.A Lecture on Ethics. Philosophical Review, No.74:
3-12.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1974. Philosophical Grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
NOTES
1. The tradition in question here related to certain Indian ideas about rules and
laws, which my reconstructive appropriation sought to frame and contemporanize.
The imperative/prescriptive dimension of rules and laws in the Indian traditions
that I ventured to theorize could be extended to a more generalized context of
tradition per se. It is with this presumption that my current paper proceeds.The
first three sections of the paper, therefore, mark an adaptation of the terms
offered in that earlier analysis.
2. Cf. Habermas:What does universalism mean, after all? That one relativizes ones
own way of life with regard to the legitimate claims of other forms of life ... that
one does not insist on universalizing ones own identity, that one does not
simply exclude that which deviates from it ... (1992: 240). Broadly, this is what is
being meant by the rendering of traditions from the standpoint of their universalizability.
3. This is the import of what I take to be Saberwals remarks against relativism, as
well as his recourse to a concept of resilience (see his 1995: esp. pp.20-1).
4. Wittgenstein, of course, was querying our capacity to rationally discourse about
ethics: that ethics is an attempt to say something that cannot be said, a running
up against the limits of language. See his A Lecture on Ethics (1965). Of this
lecture, a recent biography has noted: In what was to be the only popular
lecture he ever gave in his life, Wittgenstein chose to speak on ethics. In it he
reiterated the view of the Tractatus that any attempt to say anything about the
subject-matter of ethics would lead to nonsense, but tried to make clearer the
fact that his own attitude to this was radically different from that of a positivist
anti-metaphysician (Monk 1991: 277). But see the considerations to follow.
5. The scholarship on this question is vast, but for one that bears on aspects of our
problem, see Osborne (1992). Balibar (1995) is another provocative place to
grasp the complexities that attach to this formulation
6. By way of an elaboration, Wittgenstein further contrasted absolute with relative
value, taking the latter to involve a pre-determined standard (as when we say
that this is a good table, and mean by good that the table comes up to a
certain standard of excellence for tables).Thus such judgments, being relative to
a pre-determined standard, are, on Wittgensteins view, simply disguised statements
of fact. As such they do not express what he regards as absolute or ethical value
(1965: 5-6). Rendered thus, I suppose, there can be a way of judging a condition,
without smoothing over what that condition can entail, namely, contingency.
7. Although the construal, on the face of it, sets up a sort of contrast (or, the very

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

SASHEEJ HEGDE

least, a dualism) between behaviour prescribed in the sense of laying out areas
of obligation and codes of conduct considered to be exemplary or desirable,
I am glossing the same in terms of an idea of prescription. Besides, the recognition
among philosophers and jurists alike that there are difficulties in treating tradition
as command, that the bulk of traditional rules are not in the form of prescriptions
- which, incidentally, Das forces us to engage (1995: 38, n.9) - seems to be an
attempt to query a specific idea of prescription, and not prescription per se..
Note also that a concept of tradition as stipulative inflects the vocabulary of
prescription in a certain direction.
For a further framing of this economy of power, see the piece from which I
have been extrapolating thus far, namely, Hegde (1998).The decision to avoid a
substantive ground of appraisal here in this current paper is deliberate. It opens
up the space for a more formal ground of appraisal.The rest of my text rehearses
this analytical ground more fully and deliberatively. Social scientists not given
over to reflective philosophical work might find the sections abstruse and tedious.
I can only implore their patience and capacity for deliberation.
See Davidson (1985). He has argued that, as a consequence of the nature of
interpretation, we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts
of beliefs radically different from our own (1995: 143), that therefore there
could not be others with concepts or beliefs radically different from ours, and
thus the idea of a dualism of scheme and content is incoherent. I shall return
to Wittgenstein presently, and am therefore avoiding a reference here.
To generalize our terms somewhat: the point, note, is not that if there are no
decisive reasons to live in one way rather than in another (among the more or
less disparate forms of life or traditions, if you will - that are known or that can
be conjectured) then we may as well conduct ourselves as the people around us
expect - whether or not they themselves have any good reasons for regarding
their rules of life as right and proper. This would be to take for granted the
relativist arguments that since forms of life (or traditions) differ, none of them
are absolutely right. But this is logically mistaken. Numerous though forms of
life/traditions may be, and however discrepant they may be from one another, it
could still be the case that just one of them was (or is) absolutely right. It is not
self-contradictory to assert as much, and plainly it is a logical possibility. The
question, however, as to how we should discover the one right form of life is
separate, and not a purely logical matter. But the consideration that has to be
borne in mind is that the relativist has given us no proof that it is not to be
found. Note also the arguments that follow.
Whether Wittgensteins position here is a triviality, as Williams (1981 passim)
has tried to suggest, might have to be readdressed in this light. Note also that
our point about the determinacy in question being one of sense and not of
truth is drawn from Winch (1981: 163). It is again, I might add, a moral of
Wittgensteins thought that what we need to learn is not the right view of
language, but rather how hard it is to look. What this must imply for our efforts
to re-inscribe the secular-communal question is perhaps only too obvious.
Our point, note, is not about either denying facts or asserting that all facts are
interpretations; rather, that there are plenty of facts, but then insisting also that

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107

to identify anything as a fact is itself to make an interpretation.

13. Note, Williams himself has formulated this elsewhere (1981 passim) as the need
for an element in conflicting claims which can be identified as the locus of
exclusivity.
14. For a fuller appraisal of these schemas, see my extended review essay encountering
the theorization of modernity both in the larger context of social and political
theory and the specific post-colonial context of India (Hegde 2000).
15. I am drawing on his detailed email comment on my paper. All quotations
henceforth are from this comment. I have been greatly stimulated by his remarks,
and I am grateful.
16. A delicate point, which is not quite the same thing as orders of exposition. For,
whereas explanatory priority requires that one can grasp the explaining concepts
first, independently of any sort of grasp of the explained ones, I am claiming that
in rendering something as normative, something over and above explaining, one
can make various aspects of it explicit without explicitly mentioning background
commitments, but that when one does, what one sees is that a background
commitment can amount to and is itself based on many different positions. I
certainly realize that this claim can be stretched to an objectionable kind of
positivity, although it is still defensible. My thoughts on the question have been
clarified by Robert Brandom (1994).
17. Manas Ray has in his communication raised more issues: I hope to take these on
separately elsewhere.All the same, my thanks to our editor for this conversation,
which enabled me to extend the terms of my argument.

THE DEHUMANIZING MISSION OF IMPERIAL

REASON AND HUMANIZING BLACKNESS
Anjali Gera-Roy

Dirty Nigger! Or simply,Look, a Negro!

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my
spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I
found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. .
All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come and the
world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where
I belonged. (Frantz Fanon The Fact of Blackness.Black Skin,White Masks
1967 109)

Calling attention to the European civilizing mission as an effective strategy

of imperial control, postcolonial writers and scholars have sought to unpack
the complex process through which a large proportion of the worlds
population was denied human status by the legitimacy accorded to
Christian theology by 18th century ethnosciences in British and other
imperialisms that often intersected with the discourse of slavery. A large
body of literature in the 18th century is devoted to examining the claims
of black people, who are often described as a different species, to human
status. For this reason, black writers and intellectuals have implicated
European religion, history and philosophy in the dehumanizing project
of Imperialism through which imperial reason staked its moral claims to
rule the colonies. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebes oft quoted opinion
of Conrad as a bloody racist, for instance, was endorsed by fellow Nigerian
Wole Soyinka in his Nobel Lecture when he made a similar charge against
some of the greatest western thinkers and philosophers just as AfricanAmerican writing bears witness to the dehumanization of black slaves.
Homi Bhabhas insertion of the discourse of race into what he calls the
ambivalent temporality of modernity calls attention to the colonial
disjunction between modern times and colonial and slave histories. (2006
221) Arguing that the moral, modern disposition of mankind, enshrined

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ANJALI GERA-ROY

in the sign of the revolution, only fuels the archaic racial factor in the
society of slavery, Bhabha explains that modernity needs to create a
rhetoric of retroversion for the emergence of racism. (2006 219) Drawing
on Benedict Andersons view of colonial racism as a strange historical
suture in the narrative of the nations modernity, he shows how the
representation of racism as ahistorical outside the progressive myth of
modernity structures its split-consciousness. (2006 222) Through
examining imperial and postcolonial texts, this paper focuses on the nexus
between reason, writing and the imperial text in writing black people
out of history, culture, and humanity and their reinscription into the human
race through the technology of writing.
As the first to theorize the black condition formally, Frantz Fanon
offers a good starting point for focusing the question of blackness and the
limits of the human. Fanons unmasking of the corporeal schema
exchangeable with a racial epidermal schema through which blackness
is inscribed with cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial
defects(1967 112) and so on evokes the history of the construction of the
black people as savages, brutes, illiterates. (1967 117) Although half a
century separates the revolutionary and philosopher from Martinique from
the King of Pop Michael Jackson, who died in 2009 allegedly of an
overdose of prescription painkillers, the shared black experience of
negating corporeal consciousness could account for the global icons
hopeless task of sculpting and bleaching himself into a simulacrum of
a white man, which suggests a profound loathing of blackness. (Gates
2009 Npg) Fanons reported production of a serum for denegrification
in laboratories worldwide that might make it possible for the Negro to
whiten himself appears both prophetic and diabolical in light of Michael
Jacksons fatal attempt to throw off the burden of that corporeal
malediction. (Fanon 1967 111) Similarly, Henry Louis Gates Jrs arrest in
2009 his own home demonstrates that his credentials as the nations most
famous black scholar, did not emancipate him from the burden of
blackness in the year America elected its first black President reinforcing
the continuity of the historico-racial schema in the present. In wanting
to be a man among other men, Fanon was articulating the longings of an
entire group of people whose claim to human status was challenged
through an arbitrary definition of being human in which physiognomy
became linked to mental or spiritual attributes. (1967)
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon equates dehumanization to being
an object among other objects through his being fixed by the glance of
the other or being for others(1967 109). The black mans problem,
according to him, is not of being black but of being black in relation to
the white man because of the ontological impossibility of blackness within

THE DEHUMANIZING MISSION

111

the western episteme. The other important point that Fanon makes is the
gap between the wests intellectual understanding/knowledge of the
equality of all beings and ground realities. Citing his own experience of
being fixed as an object of the white gaze, he shows that it was impossible
for the black person to inhabit a physiological space consisting of residual
sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic,
and visual character but to mould itself into the image of the other as
produced by the white self. (1967 111) This remaking of himself as an
object, in Fanons view, is the source of the black persons dehumanization.
Focusing largely on the construction of the Negro as an alterity to the
white in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon engages specifically with the logical
conclusion of Christian Manicheaism in the natives dehumanization and
its turning him into an animal in The Wretched of the Earth. (1968 42) He
examines the zoological terms - the yellow mans reptilian motions, of
the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn,
of gesticulations - employed by the settler to describe the native and
other references to the bestiary to show how their naturalization in the
colonial vocabulary dispossesses the native of his humanity. (1968 42)
Following Kenyan writer Ngugi wa thiongos description of Karen
Blixen as a racist author in his essay Literature and Society and inclusion
of her text among those that define the colonized world for the European
colonizer(1973 16) Out of Africa and Shadows of the Grass, Baroness Karen
Blixens(Isak Dinesen) memoir about her life on a farm in Kenya, has
come to be regarded as a textbook illustration of the reification and
dehumanization of black people that Fanon had located at the base of the
imperial mission. Notwithstanding the justifications provided by white
scholars to exonerate Blixen from racist allegations, the tone and imagery
of her text is unambiguous in tracing a Christian trajectory through which
the black person has been reified through his cosmic location between
the natural, the animal and the human.
The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood. The tall extinct volcano of Longonot
that rises above the Rift Valley, the broad mimosa trees along the rivers, the elephant
and the giraffe, were not more truly Africa than the Natives were small figures in
an immense scenery. All were different expressions of one idea, variations upon the
same theme. (Blixen 26-27 1984)

Despite her admirers citation of her self-description as a Lioness, Ngugi

finds her deployment of animal imagery in her description of native people,
such as her manservant Kamante whose actions she compares to those of
a civilized dog, that has lived for a long time with people, will place a
bone on the floor before you, as a present extremely offensive. (Blixen
1984) Beneath Blixens ostensible exoticization of native Africans, Ngugi

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detects both a paternalism and a corporeally structured historico-racial

schema predicated on a Christian hierarchical arrangement in which
blackness ranks below the animal and the natural. In his formulation of
the Manichean allegory, Abdul R Jan Mohamed classifies Blixens novel
in his category of symbolic texts, whose writer tends to fetishize a
nondialectical, fixed opposition between the self and the native. (2006
20) Arguing that the power of the imaginary binding the narcissist
colonialist text is nowhere better illustrated than in the fetishization of the
Other, which works by substituting natural or generic categories for
those that are socially or ideologically determined, he cites her description
as an extreme form of fetishization that transmutes all specificity and
difference into a magical essence, which he calls an essentialist
metonymy. (2006 21) JanMohamed shows that ideological function of
the Manichean allegory is to dehistoricize and desocialize the conquered
world in addition to prolonging colonialism. (2006 22)
Comparing the stereotyped representation of the Jewish other in the
white imaginary with the black other, Fanon asserts, in Black Skin, White
Masks, that despite the history of persecution structuring white Jewish
relations, the Jews have never been denied their humanity unlike the
black person who is viewed as a new kind of man, a new genus. (1967
116) His description of white Jewish hostility as a family quarrel is
confirmed by the figuration of Africa as the heart of darkness in Saul
Bellows novel Henderson the Rain King, in which the protagonist, on
encountering the Masai, the nomadic, cattle-owning nation of Blixens
novels is at once fascinated and repelled: You have to understand that
these people love their cattle like brothers and sister, like children. (Bellow
1974 192)
Henry Louis Gates Jrs arrest by a police officer on July 20 2009 in his
own residence for allegedly unruly behaviour foregrounds the
stereotyped associations of blackness with mental and moral proclivities
that has been the subject of many of the African-American scholars books.
It evokes the ghost of James Somersett, a negro who became the
celebrated case for 18th century debates on the nature of the negro led by
one Samuel Estwick, the assistant agent of the island of Barbados. Gates Jr
shows how Estwicks tract Consideration on the Negro Cause published in
1772 reveals the fashion in which romance, myth and metaphor, coupled
with rather imaginative anatomical and philosophical disquisitions, meet
in the vulgar practical application of the metaphor of a chain of being as a
rigid construct of nature, which somehow is held to exist in fact. (Gates
Jr 1987 62) Estwicks rationalization of distinctions between human beings
through the distinctions between the natural and animal world draws on
Lockes use of reason and the existence of moral sense to distinguish

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humans from beasts as well as on Humes idea of different kinds or species

of men to justify the Christian notion of the chain of being. He picks up
Lockes privileging of reason, which serves to raise[man] from the tenth
to the ten thousandth link of the chain and marries it to Humes theory
of the tropical degeneration of the human mind to distinguish humans by
their natural capacity or incapacity of exerting in degree the rational
powers, or faculties of understanding and adds to it the moral sense or
moral powers to conclude that the Negro is a man apart from the
inhabitants of Europe and destined to be a slave. (Gates Jr 1987 66) Gates
Jrs unveiling of the relationship between the contradictions between the
Enlightenment myth of reason and the discourse of slavery has established
the complicity of western religion and philosophy in the denial of humanity
to the black person through the construction of a complex corporeal
schema in which mental and spiritual capacities were mapped on
physiognomy and skin colour. The earnestness with which western
philosophers and thinkers engaged with the presence or absence of
arbitrary traits or qualities that were valorized or devalorized would be
amusing if not for the role they played in the justification of slavery.
Irrespective of their verity or verifiability, the humiliating experiences of
black people from Phillis Wheatley and Fanon to Gates Jr himself confirms
their continuing hold on the western imagination.
Gates Jr underlines the emblematic status of Estwicks piece that
articulated the shared concerns of European and American philosophers
wrestling with the unreconciliable contradictions of human enslavement
by providing an overview of the pamphlet debate over African mental
capacity that raged in Philadelphia later the same year in which Phillis,
the Negro servant to John Wheatley of Boston, played a key role. He
unpacks the relationship between environmentalist thinking beginning
with Sir William Temple in 1690 and the political ideology of the revolution
predicated on the rights of man following Lockes denial of the existence
of innate ideas and Rushs assertion that the human nature was the same.
Due to the assertions of the sameness of human nature during this period,
he argues, environmentalism offered a convenient explanation for making
distinctions between various peoples. His identification of instances of
disjuncture between the argument about the natural rights of mankind
and the justification of slavery foregrounds a fundamental ambivalence at
the base of western imperialism in which the institution of slavery could
be justified only by showing that the African race are not men. (David
Cooper quoted in Gates Jr 1987 67)
Through his analysis of the debates generated by the publication of

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an anonymous pamphlet Address to the Inhabitants of the British

Settlement in America, Upon Slave-Keeping by Benjamin Rush, a noted
Philadelphia physician, Gates Jr proceeds to show how the publication of
a slim volume of poems by an eighteen year old slave girl, Phillis Wheatley,
becomes the site for the contestation over the rights of man. Viewing
Rush as the first anti-slavery advocate to cite the poetry of Phillis Wheatley
as an irrefutable proof of the Africans mental equality with the European
and of the Africans fundamentally human nature, he shows how it
catalyzed a public debate involving the most respectable figures of the
time. (1987 67) He views Rushs use of environmentalism and aesthetic
relativism to refute the biblical exegesis about the chain of being, which
was carried over by philosophy as a brilliant strategy that turned the natural
rights thesis on it head to establish the equality of blacks and whites. His
summary of the response to Rushs pamphlet by Richard Nesbits
anonymous publication of Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture: Or a
Defense of the west Indian Planters that cited the same climactic argument
to allow for exceptionalism and Rushs rebuttal A Vindication of the
Address, To the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, on the Slavery of
the Negroes in America, In Answer to a Pamphlet is valuable for its
revelation of the fact that barely two hundred years ago African mental
capacity was still in doubt and that the Negros place in nature and the
debate on slavery could be determined by the presence or absence of
genius in a few silly poems of a Negro girl in Boston, as Nesbitt
described them. (1987 70) Notwithstanding the differences between pro
and anti slavery champions, the earnestness with which environmentalism
was used to elucidate the differences between human beings and the
requirement that the black self must produce evidence to make a case for
his humanity is underlined by the trial that the young girl had to face to
prove her authorship of her poems. Elsewhere Gates Jr describes the
attestation of the teenaged black girl on October 8 1772 before an eighteen
member jury consisting of venerable members of the dominant community
to press home his point about Africans status to the human resting on
Phillis Wheatleys capacity for writing poetry. (2002 Npg) Arguing that in
the hands of this group, a self-constituted judge and jury, rested the fate of
a teenage slave named Phillis Wheatley, and to a certain extent the destiny
of the African American people, on that October day in 1772, Gates Jr
reconstructs one of the most dramatic contests over literacy, authenticity,
and humanity in the history of race relations in this country. (2002 Npg)
Quite rightly, he describes Wheatley as a synecdoche who stood for Africas
mental capacity and her poems for African civilization and systematically
establishes the relationship between reason, writing and humanity before
focusing on the high stakes involved in the black adolescents capability

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of writing poetry. His reminder that Phillis appearance before the tribunal
must be contextualized against the vast body of Renaissance and
Enlightenment literature debating on the humanity of Africans, which
could be summarized simply as whether they were human beings
descended along with Europeans from a common ancestor or if they
were, as Hume had put it in 1753, another species of men related more
to apes. If Wheatley could conclusively prove that she had indeed written
the poems that were attributed to her, the Euro-american world was willing
not only to set her free but also to concede the rationality and humanity
of the black race. While Gates Jr engages with the question whether the
humanity of the Africans was essentially related to the possession of reason,
it is not quite clear how the faculty of reason becomes connected, following
Hume, with the capacity to create arts and sciences. Meticulously
establishing the European philosophical tradition represented by Hume
and Kant as racist, he concludes that Phillis was auditioning for the
humanity of the entire African people.1 (2002 Npg)
Writing could be privileged as the instrument of reason and used to
denigrate black people and cultures only through a reversal of the wests
inherent phonocentricism since western thought, in general, has historically
valorized speech as primary and authentic and relegated writing to
secondariness and inauthenticity. The suspicion of writing is traced back
to the oft-quoted passage from Platos Phaedrus in which King Thamus,
warns the god Thoth that writing would affect human beings power to
remember. Platos distinction between false memory, improved by the
technology of writing, and real memory, between the semblance of wisdom
and real wisdom and between seeming to know much and knowing
nothing(Plato Phaedrus 275 a-b) has been debated for centuries as are his
views on the naturalized relationship between speech and understanding,
between the spoken word and meaning. In view of the widely held view
of the spoken word as the repository of knowledge and the devaluation
of writing that has been carried over even in modern linguistic theories
such as those of Saussure and the effects of western logocentricism that
reach down to the present day, it is pertinent to inquire the reasons for the
appropriation of writing as the prime instrument of reason in imperialism.
This movement appears to have begun with the Age of Enlightenment in
the mid-decades of the 17th century to the 18th century with its absolute
faith in the power of Reason to lead humankind into an advanced stage
of progress. Enlightenment regarded Reason as an instrument of
emancipating one from the medieval world-view based on faith and from
immaturity to maturity and writing as the seat of Reason. Imperialisms
strategic appropriation of writing and reason to societies without writing
to justify its rule foregrounds the relationship between writing and power.

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The tradition of western science and philosophy that situates the logos,
the word or act of speech as epistemologically superior and logocentric
linguistics that confirms the phonic sound of the word coupled with the
sense of the word as the ideal location of metaphysical significance presents
speech as a presence. The notion of writing as a sign of a sign runs from
Aristotle (384BC-322BC), spoken words are the symbols of mental
exper ience and wr itten words are the symbols of spoken
words to Rousseau (1712-1778): writing is nothing but the representation
of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the
image than to the object. Denial of Reason and humanity to those without
writing even as it continued to insist on the primacy of speech belongs to
the string of contradictions that underpin imperialist thinking. But
imperialisms deployment of writing in colonized cultures confirms the
relationship between writing and power disclosed by Ong and Levi-Strauss.
Viewing writing as a technology and the written word as frozen, and in
a sense dead, Ong was the first to call attention to the political effects of
writing. In his critique of writing, Levi-Strauss held that the real reason
for writing was not scientific or philosophical advancement but to facilitate
subjugation or to increase social oppression as illustrated by the incident
of the Nambikwara Chief who had instantly recognized that writing gives
some individuals power over others. It was Levi-Strauss who pointed to
the historical coincidence between the invention of writing and social
and economic stratification. While Derrida has effectively deconstructed
the Nambikwara episode to reveal the presence of classificatory structures
that were used by non-literate societies in the absence of writing, the role
of writing in subjugating colonized subjects and knowledges cannot be
denied.
Whether writing contributed to scientific advancement or not, the
complicity of the new scientific disciplines in using pseudo-sciences to
promote a form of scientific racism has been well established. The scientific
racism of 18th century pseudosciences intersects with Enlightenment
thought in its denial of Reason and humanity to the black people. This
racism is articulated either in the monogenism of European naturalists
and scientists such as Johann Blumenbach, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte
de Buffon or the polygenism of Carl Linnaeus (17071778) and Georges
Cuvier (17691832). As Gates Jr demonstrates, the most revered names in
European philosophy including Voltaire, Kant (17241804), Hegel(1770
1831) and Schopenhauer (17881860) subscribed to the climatology or
environmentalism of the polygenists. However, it was the valorization of
Reason in the rationalism of Descartes, one of the key figures in 18th
century scientific revolution that Reason came to be regarded as the
measure of humanity and writing as the visible sign of Reason. Gates Jr

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argues that Hume provided the legitimacy of enlightenment philosophy

to the myth about Africans rejection of writing cited by the 17th century
Dutch explorer William Bosman and that it was subsequently confirmed
by Kant and Hegel. Having established Reason as a sign of humanity and
writing as a visible sign of Reason, the inhumanity of people without
writing could be logically inferred.
Without writing, no repeatable sign of the workings of reason, of mind, could exist.
Without memory or mind, no history could exist.Without history, no humanity, as
defined consistently from Vico to Hegel, could exist. (Gates Jr. 1987 11)

The imperial logic that served as the perfect justification for the control of
the colonized people was obviously not without its contradictions. Black
people were not deemed to be human because they could not write and,
thus, reason. But they could not write because they were forbidden by
law to write. The relationship between political and economic alienation
with racial alienation is foregrounded through a 1740 Southern California
statute quoted by Gates Jr that made it impossible for black slaves to
acquire, leave alone, master literacy.
Despite Phillis Wheatleys having successfully proved the black persons
capacity to create arts and sciences, black creativity still required rituals of
authentication from the white world against a historical backdrop in which
the ghosts of Hume and Kant could not be easily exorcized.2 More than
two hundred years later, the first black recipient of the Nobel Prize for
Literature, Wole Soyinka pointed out that the greatest figures in western
thought Hegel, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire - an endless list were unabashed theorists of racial superiority and denigrators of the
African history and being. (1986 Npg) In his acceptance speech, Soyinka
broke the polite silence with respect to race in the western world by
addressing the histor ical discourse of slavery and colonization and
implicating the white world in the most heinous of crimes against
humanity. His recall of the symbolic significance of each act of defiance
Sharpville, 1930s burning of passes, the 1919 protest against the Native
Pass Law and other acts of racial terror as an acknowledgment of improved
knowledge and respect for the potential of what is feared imbued the
black writers standing before the Swedish academy with a symbolic
significance. (1986 Npg) He unambiguously positioned himself as a
representative figure whose winning the award was connected in a similar
way to the rights of the black person as Wheatleys and his winning the
highest Euro-american literary honour as a historic victory for the entire
black world. The first black Nobel Laureates address to the white other
rather than the black self carried strong overtones of speaking back with
the triumphal moment of black creativity turning into an inquisition: In

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your anxiety to prove that this moment is not possible, you had killed,
maimed, silenced, tortured, exiled, debased and dehumanized hundreds
of thousands encased in this very skin, crowned with such hair, proudly
content with their very being?(1986 Npg)
Citing the Hola Camp to illustrate black white relations, he expressed
astonishment at the fact that the white overseers clearly did not experience
the reality of the victims as human beings. Animals perhaps, a noxious
form of vegetable life maybe, but certainly not human. (1986 Npg) It
was Soyinka who demonstrated how sub-human denigration of black
people became the altruistic remedy for the civilizing mission and
established their connection with imperial greed. (Soyinka 1986 Npg)His
allusions to the naturalization of race thinking among the whites who
had no conceptual space in their heads which could be filled - except
very rarely and exceptionally - by the black as also human drummed
the historical significance of the black man receiving the award across the
world. (1986 Npg) However, it was his shocking revelation of the
persistence of such attitudes voiced by Eddie Roux, the Afrikaaner political
rebel and scientist, at the turn of the 20th century that epitomized the
Afrikanner attitude in the present:
The African was on a different plane, hardly human, part of the scene as were dogs
and trees and, more remotely, cows. I had no special feelings about him, not interest
nor hate nor love. He just did not come into my social picture. So completely had I
accepted the traditional attitudes of the time. (Roux in Soyinka 1986 Npg)

Quick to point out the contradiction between a minds racial tabula rasa,
if you like - in the first decade of this century and the time, in short, when
the Nobel series of prizes was inaugurated, Soyinka viewed his
recognition as an antidote to the dehumanizing label implicit in the Native
Pass Laws. He consciously used the space provided him by the Swedish
academy as an opportunity to voice the hurt and anger of the black people
at their dehumanizing treatment even in the present summing up an entire
history of race relations and race thinking that persists even in the 21st
century in his brief address. He deftly transformed the paternalistic
celebration of the black spirit into a searing reminder of the long history
of oppression to prevent it from becoming a troublesome event of no
enduring significance. (1986 Npg)
Soyinkas Nobel lecture is remarkable in its reiteration imperial
metaphors through the imagery of nature and nurture, metaphors of the
jungle and of inherent infantilism of the African, which are then turned
against the imperial construction. It is interesting that Soyinka should
have turned the wests own environmentalism and its jealously guarded
sovereignty of Nature and the Cosmos by viewing the explosion of black

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119

creativity in terms of man tempering his environment, adapting,

moderating, converting, harmonizing, and even subjugating. (1986 Npg)
Drawing on the 19th century vocabulary to remind the European world
of its history of violence, his prose touched poetic heights as he demanded
from that world that is finally coming to itself, a measure of expiation.
(1986 Npg) He made a deft transition from documenting the denigration
of black people to the exoticization of black art particularly during the
Expressionist movement through the discoveries of Africanists such as the
German Leo Frobenius Van Lvyck. Calling Frobenius a racial slanderer
in addition to being a notorious plunderer, Soyinka demonstrated the
schizophrenic split in individuals such as Frobenius whose deep
appreciation of African art went side by side with racial condescensions.
(1986 Npg) He touched upon the colonization of African space by the
imperialist masters by overwriting the places of the colonized with their
own and the discursive indenturement of black people through the works
of Frobenius, of Hume, Hegel, or Montesquieu. In what would appear
like a masterly stroke, Soyinka concluded the lecture by invoking the
spirit of Christianity to underline the largeheartedness of the black people.
However, it is the final paragraph in which he logically demonstrated
Apartheid as contradicting the spirit of modernity that the nexus between
imperialism, dehumanization and modernity was exposed. Through his
critical engagement with the philosophical and aesthetic tradition
represented by Hume, Hegel and others, Soyinka was, in Gates Jrs words,
signifyin(g) upon the figure of the chain itself (1989167).
Gates unmasking of the Cartesian privileging of reason and the view
of writing as the visible sign of reason, Humes notion of writing as
the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human demonstrated
the importance of the recording of an authentic black voice through
which the African would become the European, the slave become the
ex-slave, brute animal become the human being. (1985 11) By winning
the highest honour for the black people, Soyinka was bringing the task
began by the five pioneers named by Gates of deliverance from the
deafening discursive silence which an enlightened Europe cited to prove
the absence of the Africans humanity to a logical conclusion(2006 218)
Like other black writers writing as if their lives depended on it, Soyinka
wrote the black people out of slavery. The signifyin(g) upon writing
as violence is visible in other black voices from Africa and African diaspora.
Toni Morrison, in Beloved, thematizes the commonly held ideas of
irresistible racial differences in 1850 through the experiments conducted
by the schoolmaster on the menbred slaves to determine their human
and animal characteristics by wrapping string around Sethes head, nose
and behind and counting her teeth. (Morrison 1991 173) Paul D, one of

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the six men on Sweet Home, who survived to tell the tale, is made to
understand the difference between treated like a human being and
dehumanized when, bit on mouth, he imagines the rooster Mister smile
at his bondage. Chinua Achebe admitted that his motivation behind writing
Things Fall Apart was to tell the world that the African past was not one
long night of savagery from which the white man, acting on Gods behalf,
delivered them. As writing was the prime instrument of imperialism
through which blackness was figured as an absence, the act of writing
becomes the means with which the black writer reinscribes the black
person into human race. Through using writing, the prime culprit in the
denigration of blackness, in emancipating the black race, black writers
turn the masters tools against himself.
Yet Black people, as we know, have not been liberated from racism
by our writings, Gates Jrs words have a prophetic ring in light of his
own recent experience(1985 12)
Gates Jr points out that in the the recording of an authentic black
voice through which the African would become the European, the slave
become the ex-slave, brute animal become the human being or that
through writing themselves out of slavery black writers(Gates Jr 1987 1213) fell into a trap through accepting the premises of the western discourse.
In other words, there is a certain irony in black writers writing themselves
and the black race out of slavery into humanity in that they themselves
become complicit in the destruction of their oral cultures through the act
of writing. If the written word is death, as Ong maintained, Chantal Zubus,
in an essay on Chinua Achebe, brought out the implications of the
incorporation of African traditional oral material that she called ethnotext for the demise of orality(20) through the linguistic concept of
glottophobia, which means the swallowing of languages that dont go
into print by those that do resulting in the extinction of the former. In
their deployment of writing to celebrate speech, African writers become
implicated in the violence that was writing and repeat the Levi-Straussian
gesture of resorting to writing in order to establish the authenticity of
speech and innocence of oral societies. Although the Kenyan writer Ngugi
wa thiongo has proposed orature as a term for defining Africas creativity
that remained unwritten, the majority of black writers, including thiongo,
have adopted writing as a panacea for recovering the African self.
This ambivalence of writing is, however, implicit in the Greek term
pharmakon [poison; cure] that Derrida deconstructs to show the nature of
writing. Derridas reading of Phaedrus shows that the failure of Platos
text to accomplish what its arguments explicitly require: the priority of
speech, logos and presence over writing. Writing serves as both poison
and cure, as it is a threat to the living presence of authentic (spoken)

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121

language as well as indispensable means for anyone to record, transmit or

commemorate that presence. Like Plato, the black author is condemned
to writing, even as he denounces it effects and upholds the authority of
self-present speech. Unlike Levi-Strauss, whose recognition of his own
culpability in bringing the corrupting effects of writing to societies with
no knowledge of writing, leads to self recrimination, black writers appear
to be oblivious to their implication in the violence of writing.
Therefore, the restoration of humanity to the black people through
the act of writing fails to emancipate the black writer from discursive
indenturement to the west, which appears to be a problematic of postcolonial discourse in general. Like the black writer who is condemned to
writing while foregrounding its violence, black and post-colonial discourse
is bound in a relationship of discursive indenturement to the west. In
borrowing imperial discourse to inscribe the presence of black or colonized
cultures, the writer succeeds in turning the masters tools against the master
but also becomes implicated in the violence of the discourse in which
these cultures and societies figured as an absence. In doing so, he also
confirms, even though positively, the imperial syllogism through which
black people were denied human status: Black people can write. So they
are human. To be fully human, writing would have to be disengaged from
reason and humanity and other criteria for defining the limits of the human
be evolved. Such as orality, which the writer is ill-equipped to through
his own corruption by the knowledge of literacy.
WORKS CITED

Bhabha, Homi K. 2006. Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity.

The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. 1994. The Post-colonial
Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin.
London: Routledge, 219-223.
Fanon, Frantz. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. 1967. Black Skin, White
Masks. New York: Grove.
Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Gates, David. 2009. Finding Neverland: Death of an Icon. Newsweek.
June 27. http://www. newsweek. com/id/204296. accessed on 24
August 2009.
Gates Jr, Henry Louis. 1987. Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial
Self. New York: OUP.
, 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism. New York: OUP.
, 2002. Mister Jefferson and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.
Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. 2002. www. neh. gov/whoweare/

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gates/index. html. accessed on 24 August 2009

, 1986.Writing Race. From Editors Introduction Writing Race
in Race,Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
, 1985. Editors Introduction: Writing Race and the Difference
It Makes. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 1. 1-20.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. 2006. The Economy of Manichean Allegory:
The Function of Racial Difference. Critical Inquiry. 12(1) 1985. The
Post-colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen
Tiffin. London: Routledge ,18-23.
Morrison, Toni. 1991. Beloved. New York: Penguin.
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
Routledge: London and New York.
Soyinka, Wole. 1993. This Past Must Address Its Present. Nobel Lecture,
December 8, 1986. From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editorin-Charge Tore Frngsmyr, Editor Sture Alln, World Scientific
Publishing Co. Singapore.
Zubus, Chantal. 1990. The Logos-Eaters: the Igbo EthnoText, Kunapipi (Special Issue in Celebration of Chinua Achebe), 12:2,
19-30.
NOTES
1. We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified
in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young
Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian
from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of
serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of
the best judges, and is thought qualified to write them.
2. I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for
there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. (
Hume)
The Negroes of Africa have, by nature, no feeling that rises above the triflingSo
fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to
be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color. [if a] man [is] black from
head to foot, [it is] a clear proof that what he said was stupid. (Kant)

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE SOCIAL IN

19TH CENTURY NORTH INDIA: REFLECTIONS
ON THE CONCEPT OF SAMAJ IN HINDI
Mohinder Singh

It has been argued recently that the genealogy of the modern concepts of
society and community in India can be traced back to the nineteenth
century colonial, reformist and nationalist discourses. (Kaviraj, 2002;
Prakash, 2002) As the studies on the colonial governmental rationality in
India tell us, Indian society was identified in the colonial discourse
with a definite and clear intention as an object of reform and restructuring.
(Scott, 1995; Prakash, 2002) In the colonial discourse of Indian society, the
practical-refor mist intentions and epistemological perspectives got
combined as society was perceived as an object of knowledge and an
object of transformation simultaneously. This conceptualization took place
clearly under the influence of utilitarian-liberal worldview dominant at
that time, particularly from the early 19th century onwards. (Scott, 1995,
204-205; Cf. Stokes, 1989) The restructuring of the domain of the social
under the regime of liberal governmentality and the emergence of concept
of society in liberal political philosophy as a high order abstraction that
provided a grounding for the new political rationality was happening
simultaneously in the countries of Europe as well. But as David Scott and
Gyan Prakash have argued, the imperatives of colonial governmentality
were different from the liberal governmentality in the Europe.
The colonial project, Prakash argues, was enmeshed in the basic
contradiction between colonial despotism and possibility of a society as a
domain of freedom. Colonial regimes inability to constitute a civil
society in India manifested in its application of the rule of colonial
difference according to which the state-society relationship in India were
viewed very differently than in the case of European state where liberal
political philosophy provided the model for such relationship. The state
in the liberal framework relates to citizens in the civil society and civil
society is constituted by free and equal individuals. In case of colonial
India on the contrary, Indian society was perceived and constructed by
colonial discursive and institutional practices as consisting of religious
communities, castes, and tribes. (Prakash, 2002, 28-34) These entities are

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supposed to act on the basis of collective, and not individual, interests and
affiliations as they were supposed to invoke frequently collective bonds
and rights based on imagined ties of kinship, religion, culture, past and
sentiments. Such assumptions about the nature of society in India played
important role not only in the formation of Orientalist, missionary, and
utilitarian discourses but also in the new legal system and the governmental
technologies of counting and classification of population.
The conceptualization of the domain of the social by the Indians
beginning with the refor mers should be understood against the
background of such discursive and institutional practices. That they should
be understood and explained against this background doesnt mean that
Indian conceptualization of the social was simply a replica of the colonial
construction of Indian society. On the contrary, the colonial conceptions
based on colonial assumptions were fiercely contested by the reformers
and later by the nationalists. The conceptual structure of the Indian
discourse about society and the social should be understood by analyzing
the specificities of this conceptualization in all its historical details.
At the same time, it must be recognized that the process of
conceptualization of the social in different regions of India in the
nineteenth century is related but at the same time there are crucial
differences because of the differing nature of political and social
transformations they undergo during this period. (Kaviraj, 2002, 97-142)
Some of the differences also appear because of the different dynamics of
the vernacular modernity in each of the linguistic region of India,
depending on the level of penetration of the colonial administrative and
educational institutions. Related to the spread of new educational regime
is the colonial linguistic practices, directed mainly from the Fort William
College. These practices focused on defining languages discretely by
producing literary histories, standardized grammars, dictionaries and
glossaries, and gradually led to the standardization of modern vernaculars.
(Kaviraj, 2009, 312-349)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, these standardized modern
vernaculars became the media of communication in the newly emerging
vernacular public spheres. (Kaviraj, 2009, 312-349) Gradually, they also
became instruments for the formation of the regional linguistic identities
under the leadership of regional cultural elites, a process that went parallel
with the formation of a sense of national identity.(Kaviraj, 2009, 328-335)
The formation of regional linguistic identities took place at a much larger
geographical scale than was possible hitherto. The extension of the
geographical scale was linked to the extension of the scale of social and
political action made possible by administrative instruments such as
language based census and the language policy on the one hand, and by

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the spread of print culture on the other.These sites of vernacular modernity

are particularly rich as sources of information about the formation of
modern social and political ideas and concepts. Most of the leading actors
in these public spheres made use of both the western and indigenous
intellectual sources for the articulation of their politics. Thus, they are
particularly rich sites for understanding the process of concept formation
in relation to their social and political histories. At these sites of vernacular
discourses were articulated the ways of being modern, Indian, and regional
at the same time by the nationalist intelligentsia in different regions. (Seth,
2008, 159-180) Rest of the paper is focussed on the analysis of the
conceptualization of the social in the nationalist discourse in Hindi in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Intertwinement of Linguistic, Reformist, and Nationalist Discourses
In the decades of 1860s and 70s, the social reform movements of Bengal
and Bombay were beginning to influence the intellectual worlds in other
regions of the country also. In the North-West Provinces, the social
reformism of Bengal based Brahmo Samaj was active, but not very effective
or successful. The social reform movement which was more successful in
the North Indian regions, particularly in Punjab, was the Arya Samaj
movement founded by Swami Dayanand Saraswati in 1875.The Arya Samaj
and its foundational text, Dayanand Saraswatis Satyarth Prakash, provided
a trenchant critique of some of the Hindu religious practices such as idle
worship, promoted monotheism and provided a challenge to the traditional
authority of the Brahmins in the performance of rituals. (Jordens, 1978;
Jones, 1989) Before the publication of Satyarth Prakash, through the 60s
and early 70s, Swami Dayanand was spreading his ideas through his lecture
tours in the Northern parts of India. He gave a series of lectures in Banaras
and other cities and towns of the North-West Provinces. The educated
Hindu elite of this region stood up against Swami Dayanands ideas and
the Arya Samaj movement, in defence of what they understood as orthodox
Hinduism, naming it Sanatan Dharma. Bhartendu Harishchandra of
Banaras was connected to one such conservative organization, the Kashi
Dharma Sabha. The Kashi Dharma Sabha was constituted in order to
counter the challenge posed by the growing activities and influence of
Swami Dayananda and to defend what was understood as the Hindu
tradition. (Dalmia, 1997, 35)
The basic function of the Kashi Dharma Sabha pertained to religious
rituals and ritual status involving an authoritative interpretation of canonical
texts. The larger purpose of the Dharma Sabha was to defend the Sanatan
Dharma equated, in the conservative discourse, with Hinduism as such

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from the reformist critique. (Dalmia, 1997, 356; Zavos, 2001, 109-123)
The Dharma Sabha understood Hinduism as a clearly definable entity
that could be governed by rules and regulations authoritatively defined
and interpreted by the Sabha itself. The Kashi Dharma Sabha was in a
privileged position to carry out such a task as Banaras pundits enjoyed
this privileged position since ancient times among the Hindus.
The movement for the official recognition of Hindi language with
Devanagari script started around the same time i.e. during the decades of
1860s and 70s. Bhartendu Harishchandra, along with Raja Shivprasad
Sitarehind, was actively involved in this movement. As the movement slowly
gained momentum, it emphasized the separation of Hindi from Urdu
and its distinct identity. From the very beginning the movement for Hindi
language linked the identity of Hindi with the Hindu religious community
and presented Hindi as the language of the Hindus of North India and
Urdu as the language of the Muslims. In the course of time, particularly
among the urban educated populations, the identification of Hindi with
Hindus and of Urdu with Muslims was consolidated through literary and
political discourses. Most remarkably, despite their mutual quarrels on
the reform question, when it came to the promotion of Hindi, the Arya
Samaj and the Sanatan Dharma supporters formed a united front. Thus at
the moment of the birth of modern politics in the Hindi-Urdu speaking
regions of North India, the construction of a new social imaginary took
place in these separatist discourses in the first phase of the nationalist
movement wherein linguistic, social, and political issues get intertwined
with each other.
In first phase of its development, the literary and political discourse in
Hindi was deeply influenced by the ideas of Bhartendu Harishchandra.
Many of the prominent literary figures of this period, who were active in
politics also, actively promoted his ideas. In the rest of the article, I analyze
the works of some of the most prominent Hindi intellectuals of this period
such as Bhartendu Harishchandra, Balkrishna Bhatt, Radhacharan
Goswami, Pratap Narain Mishra, Chaudhary Badri Narayan Upadhyay
Premghan, with a view to understand the conceptualization of the social.
Most of these figures were editors of important Hindi newspapers and
magazines of that period such as: Harishchandra Magazine, Kavivachan
Sudha, Hindi Pradeep, Brahman, Anand- Kadambini, Bharat-Mitra, etc.
Some of them were active in politics, being delegates for some sessions of
the Indian National Congress or otherwise taking deep interest in politics
and influencing public opinion.
These figures played a historical role in the shaping of modern Hindi
literary as well as political discourse in this region. Their historical role
acquires an added importance as they were also instrumental in developing

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the language or idiom of modern politics in this region as they had a

wide readership among the newly educated. According to Krishan Kumar,
their readership was constituted by a heterogeneous public consisting of
educated elements from landed and money-lending castes, or from families
of men employed in government offices, and professionals in law, medicine,
and teaching. (Kumar, 1990, 1247) In addition, their discourse is also a
site for the production of social and political concepts with which the
vernacular intelligentsia attempts to influence and shape public opinion.
Conceptualization of the Social I: The religious and the social
Although the Hindi intellectuals were critical of Arya Samaj and its method
of social reform that combined social reform with religious reform, they
were by no means the defenders of the social status quo. Thus, in his
public speech delivered at Balia (1884) Bharatvarsh ki unnati kaise ho
sakti hai (How can India progress), (Harishchandra, 2008 (VI), pp. 66-72.)
Bhartendu Harishchandra defined the relationship between the religious
and the social whereby these domains could be related and separated
simultaneously. He differentiated between Dharmaniti (religious code)
and Samajniti (social code). He said that we have mixed up the two like
milk and water. Then he gave examples of this mixing up. In these
examples he provided non-religious, mostly utilitarian, explanations of
many relig ious r ituals and festivals. For example, according to
Harishchandras explanation, the ritual of bathing in the religious fair of
Balia existed in order to make it possible for the people of that region to
meet periodically and show solidarity by sharing in the happiness and
grief of each other. The ritual of fasting was observed in order to purifying
the body once in a month. Similarly the festival of Diwali was there so
that the houses could be cleaned properly once a year. He further told his
audience that such festivals and rituals were like your municipality. The
big mistake people made, according to Harishchandra, was that they
considered these outward rituals like religious fairs and festivals as real
religion. But this was clearly wrong because real religion (vastvik dharma)
was devotion of god. The rest was only samaj dharma (social ethics). And
this could be and should be changed and reformed according to the
needs of time and place (deshkala). (Harishchandra, 2010 (VI), pp. 6672.)
Harishchandra also argued that many unnecessary rituals and festivals
had been included as a result of the later additions to the original doctrine
of dharma. There was no need to follow all of them. He advised that
people be selective about them. Thus Harishchandra made two arguments
here: first argument was that there were some rituals and practices which

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didnt have any basis in religion but had only non-religious justifications;
such practices were not essential to religion. The second argument was
that those social practices should be accepted which were prohibited by
contemporary society but which were not contrary to the scriptures, but
later, accretion. His examples for such practices included nothing but the
main agendas of the nineteenth century social reform movements:
promotion of widow remarriage, child marriage as socially harmful,
criticism of Kulin polygamy, promotion of womens education etc. Like
other social reformers of the nineteenth century, in this argument also,
the rationalist-utilitarian justification of social reform was often combined
with the invocation of the authority of the scriptures. (Harishchandra,
2008 (VI), pp. 66-72.)
Now such arguments for this kind of separation from Harishchandra
were interesting also because he consistently defended the claims of
Sanatan Dharma against the social reformers of nineteenth century while
at the same time underscoring the need for reforming many of the social
practices of the Hindus. (Cf. Dalmia, 1997, 25) The strategy here was to
promote the social reform agenda by separating the domain of the social
from that of the religious. Harishchandra publicly defended some Hindu
religious practices such as idol worship sharply critiqued and censured
by the Arya Samaj movement.
In an essay titled Vaishnavta aur Bharatvarsh (Vaishnavism and India)
where Harishchandra sought to present Vaishnavism as the only real
religion of the Hindus1, he ended up, towards the end of the essay,
redefining the role of religion itself in interesting ways. As a matter of fact,
Bhartendu argued, on the one hand, that religion should be understood
as a private concern of the believer, on the hand, he conceived of
communities (samaj) basically in terms of religious communities.
Interestingly, religion here emerges as an important source of public
identity for the people. He argued that religious worship was a matter of
heart (hriday ki ratnavastu) and hence should not be made a matter of
propaganda. On the other hand, he urged all the sects among the Hindus,
Vaishnav, Shaiv, Sikhs, Brahmasamajis, Aryasamajis to be united under the
true and natural religion of the Hindus, (Vaishnavism) so that the
united Hindu religious community could compete for secular and worldly
things like jobs, political power, and other economic resources. And the
competition of the Hindu religious community, and this was a communal
argument in the strict sense of the word, was supposed to be with other
religious communities, Muslims and Christians. (Harishchandra, 2010 (V)
p. 288)
Reconfiguring the role of religion in relation to the domains of the
social, the economic, and the political is one of the important recurring

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motifs in the nationalist discourse of the last quarter of the nineteenth

century. Thus Balkrishna Bhatt, the editor of Hindi Pradeep, keeps coming
back to this motif in many of his writings of this period. In an article,
Jatiyon ka Anoothapan (National Character, English title given by the
author himself), Bhatt argued that to properly understand the essential
character of a nation (jati) we needed to discover one essential element of
the jati by studying its history. (Bhatt, 1973, 41-47) He further argued that
this element was like a seed that, in the manner of Aristotelian teleology,
unfolded in time to reveal the true character of that jati. It is the study of
these essential elements that would reveal the specific differences of the
jatis from each other. The defining and the differentiating element of the
Hindu jati, according to Bhatt, was manansheelata (contemplative
disposition). This element differentiates Hindu jati from other jatis as this
element was absent in other jatis. (Bhatt, 1973, pp. 41-47)
There had been, according to Bhatt, both advantages and disadvantages
of the dominance of this element in the history of the Hindu jati. Its main
advantage was that Hindu jati accomplished great achievements in the
field of religion and metaphysics. But there have been many disadvantages.
First of all, Hindu jati remained lost in contemplating otherworldly affairs.
This otherworldly spirit was basically responsible for the prevalence of
inactivity in the worldly affairs such as science and politics. In the worldly
fields such as science and politics, the Hindus always lacked the concept
of praxis, an essential requirement for success in these fields. The Hindu
jati always lacked a taste for free politics (swacchhand rajniti)of the kind
that prevailed in Europe.The defining element of the English jati, according
to Bhatt, was liberty (swacchhandata) which made the English people
achieve what they had achieved with their active interest in free politics.
(Bhatt, 1973, pp. 41-47)
The second major disadvantage of this spirit of contemplative
religiosity, according to Bhatt, had been that the Hindus had never been
able to conceptualize the domains of social life free from the intrusion of
religion.Thus, Bhatt complained that religion intruded in almost all spheres
of life of the Hindus: there was religion in morality (naitikata), in astrology,
and even in medicine. So much so that it was impossible to imagine a
sphere of morality independent of religion. Finally at the end of the essay,
Bhatt argued that need of the time was to create a sphere of politics by
learning from the English jati in order for the Hindu jati to become a
politically organized community. This was the basic precondition of the
progress (unnati) of the Hindu jati, according to Bhatt. (Bhatt, 1973, pp.
41-47)
In another essay titled Dharam ka mahatva (Importance of Dharma),
he again deplored the interference of religion in all spheres of life and its

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negative impact on the social and political life of the nation. He wrote,
exasperated, that religion (dharma) was present in everyday activities of
sleeping, waking up, sitting, standing, eating, drinking etc. (Bhatt, 1996,
pp. 93-97) The social issues such as improvement of the condition of
women among Hindus could not be undertaken unless they addressed
this deeper problem of the dominance of the religious. In an essay titled
Hamare Dharam sambandhi kharch (Our Religion Related Expenses)
Bhatt argued against spending too much money on religious rituals. He
said that there was a need to save money from such useless expenses and
for using this money for economic and political purposes. (Bhatt, 1996,
pp. 93-97) Similar arguments about the importance of learning natural
science, economics and politics from Europe are given in the essay Naye
tarah ka junoon (A New Obsession). (Bhatt, 70-72)
Throughout his work, Bhatt places a heavy emphasis on the critique
of orthodoxy, dogmatism, and prevalence of old customs among the
Hindus. According to Bhatt, the persistent resistance to change, which he
calls Hamari Parivartan Vimukhta (Our Dislike of Change) (Bhatt, 1996,
9-10) is one of the causes responsible for the decline of the Hindu
community in social, economic, and political fields. These elements prevail
more in those regions of India, where there is predominance of the Sanatan
Dharma. Bhatt squarely holds sanatanis attitude towards the new winds
of change blowing in the wake of the movement for reforms, responsible
for the backward condition of the Hindus in sanatani dominated regions.
Although he doesnt subscribe to any of the reformist movement, Bhatt
would like the sanatanis themselves to take up the reformist task for the
removing the social evils prevailing among the Hindus. One of the
locations of the prevalence of all social evils is the institution of the of the
family. It is in the domain of the family that the individuality and freedom
of the young people is crushed.
Child marriage and the joint family are the two social evils that stand
out in Bhatts works as the greatest enemies of individuality and freedom.
Critique of the practice of child marriage keeps recurring in his articles.
So much so that he often chides himself for repeating the same things too
much. He promotes the spirit of freedom (swacchhandata) among young
people and thus praises the institution of family in European countries
that promotes freedom and independence among the young people.
Educated and independent young people who are not crushed by the
unnecessary burdens of the family life at too early a stage are important
for the progress of the nation (jati) as they can contribute much more to
it.Whereas the institution of joint family among the Indians and the practice
of child marriage tend to burden young men (not women so much!) too

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early in life with too many household responsibilities and also disturb
the progress of their education: samajik bandhan jakarate hain (social
ties immobilize). (Bhatt, 1996, 65-66)
In a short autobiographical write-up, Radhacharan Goswami, the
editor of the paper Bhartendu, introduces himself as a kattar Hindu
(orthodox Hindu) and a vaishnav. (Goswami, 1998, 24) In Bharatvarsh
mein dharma-charcha (Discourse of Religion in India) May, 1886, He
writes that: when we think of the question of the progress of nation,
religion is of no use whatsoever, particularly for national progress. There
came and flourished many religions in the history of India from Jainism
to Islam to Theosophical society, but they havent contributed to the
progress of the nation. They have merely created temples and mosques.
What India needed at present, according to Goswami, was not religion,
but wealth, force, education, art, commerce, etc. He further argued that
any serious thinking about progress of the nation has to exclude religion
as an element. (Goswami, 1998, 74-75) Although Goswami places the
imperative of deshonnati (progress of the nation) high among the important
questions of the times, he doesnt undervalue the importance of the need
for social reform among the Hindus.
In order to effectively combine the two imperatives in his approach,
he follows a strategy which is somewhat akin to the one argued by
Bhartendu in his speech in Balia mentioned above. It is a two pronged
strategy: the social issues are separable from the religious issues and that
social customs should be changed according to the needs of the times.
About the separability of the social and the religious, he even says, albeit
unconvincingly, that the issues of vaishnav religion and widow remarriage
are very different (Vaishnav dharm aur vidhwa vivah alag alag vishay
hain), implying that they are unconnected. (Goswami, 1998, 105)
Goswami was a passionate supporter of widow remarriage and wrote a
great deal on this question. He criticises the Hindu community for being
too resistant to change. He says that times are changing, but the Hindus
are not. (Goswami, 1998, 84) Criticizing Bharat Dharma Mahamandal for
not taking up the question of the widows plight, he gives fifteen arguments
for the remarriage of the widows. Among these arguments, he combines
the textual evidence in support of his position from the scriptures along
with rationalist and utilitarian arguments. He argues that society has to
change according to the needs of the times and for that customs and
traditions governing the community should be changed by reinterpreting
and reworking the scriptures. (Goswami, 1998, 84-85)
Conceptualization of the Social: II. The Social and the Political

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In the last decades of the nineteenth century political opinion was turning
more and more against the interference of the colonial state in social and
religious affairs. After the formation of the Indian National Congress in
1885 and of the National Social Conference in 1887, a debate started in
the reformist and nationalist circles on the question of the colonial states
legitimacy to carry out social reform legislations. As most of the leaders
did accept the need for carrying out social reforms, the question had two
dimensions: a) which was the appropriate agency to carry out such reforms;
and b) whether the social question should precede the political question
of gaining representation and finally Independence from the colonial
rule. The views of Pratap Narain Mishra and Chaudhary Badrinarayan
Upadhyay Premghan, who took active interest in the political activities
of Indian national Congress, can be taken as representative of the antireformist position, the position of most Hindi intellectuals of this period.
Pratap Narayan Mishra was in favour of strict separation of the social
and the political questions. One of his arguments for separation was that
the task of reforming the community (samaj) was much more sensitive
and needed delicate work and much more sophisticated skills than the
political work of reforming the government institutions. Thus the task of
social refor m needed people who could gain the respect of the
communities they were going to reform. Secondly and more importantly,
Mishra argued that although the Social Conference had similar kind of
influence as the Congress, its nature (swabhava) was very different. (Mishra,
2001, 144-147) Why? Because, unlike the Congress, it was not possible
for the Social Conference to unite the people of different religious
communities like Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. In the matters of social
questions, the legitimate method would be for the Hindus to reform
their community and for the Muslims theirs. According to this argument,
while the social question separated Hindus and Muslims as religious
communities, the political question united them.(Mishra, 1986, 273-276)
Thus arguing for an institutional separation of the social and political
questions, Mishra further wrote: Smaran rahe ki samaj ka jitna sambandh
Brahmamin aur Maulviyon se hai utna government se kadapi nahin hai.
(Samaj is related more directly to Brahmins and Maulvis than to the
Government). (Mishra, 1986, 223-226) The appropriate agencies for
carrying out social reform, according to Mishra, were the religious
communities themselves and within the religious communities, the
authority of Brahmins and Maulvis had to be recognized. The colonial
state had once already established the authority of the Brahmins and the
Maulvis in the legal sphere by assigning them the authoritative role of
interpreting the scriptures for assisting the judges in personal law cases
and it is obvious that Mishra, along with many other contemporary Hindi

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intellectuals had internalized the colonial discourse in accepting the

Brahmins and the Maulvis as the leaders of their respective communities.
(Mishra, 1986, 284-285)
In another essay, Sehwas Bill Avashya Pass hoga (Age of Consent
Bill will definitely be passed), Mishra makes privacy of the family as the
main argument against the government passing the Age of Consent Bill.
But at the same time, he agrees with the substantial issue of the raising the
age of consent for marriage. He argues that practices of consummation of
marriage below the age of thirteen are compatible with neither the
scriptures nor the folk custom (lok reeti). (Mishra, 1986, 285) The
enactment of a law for such matters, Mishra says, will set a dangerous
precedent, wherein the entry of the government and the police inside the
essentially private space of the family will be allowed and its sanctity will
be violated. Therefore, it is an urgent task of the community leaders to
take up this agenda and persuade the people to eliminate such practices
from the community.
Chaudhary Badrinarayan Upadhyay Premghan, Editor of Anand
Kadambini and an influential intellectual of this period, is a supporter of
the Sanatan Dharma Sabhas, which appeared, in his view, to counter the
growing influence of the reformist organizations such as Brahmo Samaj
and Arya Samaj. He considers the reformist organisations enemies. He
says that if Christians and Muslims are enemies of our dharma, Aryasmajis
and Brahmasamajis are half enemies (adhe shatru). (Premghan, 1950,
214) The new samajes like Brahma Samaj and Arya Samaj, have managed
to carry our social reforms within their own narrow sects. They havent
been able to influence the larger world of the Hindu samaj. The only one
concrete benefit of these samajes has been to prevent a number of Hindus
from going into the Christian fold. Otherwise these samajes have become
a working ground for those people who are promoting Western
values.(Premghan, 1950, 214-215)
But Premghan also complains, like Radhacharan Goswami, about
the old mentality of the leaders of the Sanatan Dharma Sabhas. Expressing
his discontent with Bharat Dharma Mahamandal and other Sanatan Dharma
Sabhas, Premghan writes: What can be done! Unfortunately those who
have old mentality in every way are neither capable of doing anything
new, nor are they willing to learn what is in their interest.They just promote
fatalism and dont even know how to work in the field of action. Anyway,
despite having lost many valuable things because of this laziness and
indifference, our nationality (jatiyata) and dharma are still intact. But now
such a time has come that further indifference would definitely destroy
both of them. (Premghan, 1950, 220) Like other contemporaty Hindi
intellectuals of this period, Premghans strategy is to promote some social

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reform agendas in order to save both the dharma and the jati (nationality).
It is an important part of the thinking of these intellectuals that for them
social reform in itself is not important but must be subjugated to the
imperative of deshonnati, (progress of the nation) and the defence of the
Hindu community. But at the same time, the old authorities among the
Hindus, the traditional Brahmins and priests, are people with old mentality
(purani soch) and backward looking. They cant be any longer trusted
with the leadership of the community in such testing times. Old leadership
according to Premghan is neither forward looking nor responsible. Such
people are giving bad name to the entire community. Premghan also
argues that the old structures of authority among the Hindus have crumbled
anyway and it is not possible to revive them. (Premghan, 1950, 214)
At the same time, the newly educated people and the enlightened
(naveen jyoti dhari) are more attracted to the superficial attractions of the
Western civilization. They want to change India in the image of Europe.
They should, according to Premghan, instead clean up the old garden of
the Hindu samaj. (Premghan, 1950, 214) The ideal situation for Premghan
consists in replacing the old leadership with a responsible conservative
leadership of the newly educated. Such people have indeed come forward
in the form of Sanatan Dharma Sabhas but they are still not realizing the
enormity of the challenge facing them. They should, according to
Premghan, take up upon themselves the task of eliminating the social
evils from among the Hindus. Otherwise the nexus between the social
reformers and the government will carry out the same tasks.
The problem with the approach of the social reform organizations is
that they always seek out the help of the government even in matters
which are clearly internal affairs of the Hindus. (Premghan, 1950, 217)
But Premghan wants to drive home this point for the sanatanis that such
tasks of removing social evils such as child marriage cant be ignored any
longer if the community and its dharma is to be saved. He exhorts: Apna
prabandh aap keejiye apne bhoole bhaiyon ko samjhaiyeapne upper
unke sudhar ka bojha uthaiye, unke liye kuchh apne samay, sahas, aur
artha ka vyay keejiye; sharir ko kashta deejiye, purane andhkar ko chhod
tuk naye unjele mein aaiye, sansar ki dasha aur pravah ke anusar anusaran
karma aaranbha keejiye (Manage your affairs on your own persuade
your mistaken brothers take responsibility of reforming them upon
yourselves. Use some of your time, courage, and money to accomplish
this; there will be bodily hard work, but do come out of the old darkness
and enter the new light; start behaving according to the situation and the
movement of the world.) (Premghan, 1950, 222)

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Conceptual-Historical reflections on the term samaj

It has been argued recently that the that to understand society as a prepolitical category is wrong simply because its conceptualization this way
is nothing but a liberal fiction. The alternative conceptualization argues in
favour of understanding its constitution as political through and through.
Gyan Prakash, for instance, argues that in the 19th century context of colonial
India, the specific features of concepts of society and community in India
should be understood against the background of a definite colonial
intention of reforming Indian society and economy. Thus in the colonial
discourse, the concept society in their usage, refers to a definite and
positively identifiable object of knowledge and transformation. Since the
colonial discourse also foregrounded the question of the status of women
and the institution of family, these issues acquired centrality in the discourse
of social reform. Later on other agendas gradually get included as part of
the social question.
The key terms used for the conceptualization of the social in this
discourse are samaj and jati. The usage of the term samaj in this historical
context eludes any precise connotations. Writing about the Hindi public
sphere in the second quarter of the 20th century Frencesca Orsini notices
the semantic indeterminacy of the word samaj. Orsini also writes that
two words were used in Hindi for society, samaj and jati, both with a
number of significations and both used as equivalents of the English word
society. (Orsini, 2002, 224-239) It should also be added here that both
these terms could also simultaneously refer to the concept of community.
The term jati also had multiple connotations as it was used to refer to
community, but also to caste, nation, and species. What is interesting here
is the fact that the meaning equivalent of the English word society got
crystallized around the Sanskrit term samaja in some Indian vernaculars
including Hindi. and Bangla. But in its modern conceptual usage, the
meaning of the term shifts interestingly.
The philosopher Daya Krishna, in The Problematic and Conceptual Structure
of Classical Indian Thought about Man, Society, and Polity, lists 32 concepts
around which the classical thought in India regarding society was woven
among which samaj is one: 1. dharma 2. vyavhara 3. samskara 4. varna 5.
jati 6. kula 7. sreni 8. puga 9. rna 10. dana 11. daya 12. maitri 13. karuna 14.
lokasamgraha 15. sarvabhutahita 16. lokakalyana 17. samabhava 18. samatva
19. samaja 20. samajika 21. nagarika 22. vyavastha 23. sambandha 24. sangha
25. samasti 26. para 27. paraspara 28. parampara 29. rudhi 30. varga 31. vis
and 32. janapada. (Daya Krishna, 1996, 157) Daya Krishan writes: The
most obvious and interesting fact that emerges from even a cursory glance
at these concepts is that there is no single equivalent of the word society

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MOHINDER SINGH

in the Indian conceptual repertoire relating to this domain. The terms

that come closest to society are samaja, loka, samasti. But samaja was
traditionally not used in the sense that it has come to acquire in Hindi
these days. This is clearly indicated by the way the term samajika was
used in the tradition. It was closer to what was conveyed by the word
nagarika, that is, cultured or civilized, than what is understood by the
term social today. (Daya Krishna, 1996, 157-158)
Daya Krishna mentions other interesting dimensions of the classical
conceptual framework for referring to the social world. One is the cosmic
dimension of the social world, wherein he claims that the classical
conception of the social world has trans-empirical dimension. He writes:
.as the society in which we live is not only related to the past, but is also part of
the cosmos which includes worlds other than our own and beings other than those
familiar to us. the idea of loka makes an addition of a different kind. It suggests
that what happens in this world of ours, or is enacted in it, is intimately related to
worlds other than this one. (Daya Krishna, 1996, 158)

The main concepts used for referring to the domain of the social in the
late nineteenth century Hindi vernacular discourse are: dharma, samaj,
jati, desh, unnati, kaal/samay, public and niji (private) or gharelu/parivarik
(domestic), ihlaukik (this-worldly) etc.. This set of conceptual terms are
better understood in relation to each other and also as used together for
describing the social world as it is being simultaneously transformed by
this very discourse. This conceptual configuration is different from Daya
Krishnas conceptual apparatus in terms of both temporal and spatial
dimensions. As indicated earlier, an acute awareness of the critical nature
of the times is one of the key features of this discourse, as indicated in
frequent usage of phrases like vartaman samay (present time), hamara
samay (our time). Other terms that indicate time dimension are: unnati/
taraqqi (progress), itihas (history, as used here, this meaning too is different
from the ancient meaning of the term itihas), ateet (past) etc.
The concept of progress, expressed with terms unnati, pragati, and
taraqqi, with the notion of this-worldly expectations linked to the concept,
had acquired great importance during this period, and thus becomes
indispensable for understanding other social and political concepts in this
discourse. Another theme that often appears in this discourse and which
again recognizes the specific quality of the present is the theme of newness,
expressed with terms like naya/nutan (new), nai roshni wale (literally,
people of the new light, the enlightened, referring normally to the english
educated). Metaphors like sun of knowledge rising in the West, morning
of the new light, also indicate the time dimension of the new conceptual
framework.

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137

Another crucial feature of this conceptual configuration is that all the

terms refer to entities that are understood in this-worldly, secular terms
even though they dont necessarily give rise to a concept of secularism, at
least not as yet. Spatial and territorial references are also more definite.
The concept of nation, expressed most clearly with the terms jati and
desh, comprehends geographical entities in a secular historiographical
framework. Nations and communities, both expressed with the term jati,
become definite subjects of history.
In the history of the Western modernity, the concept of society as
elaborated in moral and political philosophy in the eighteenth century
plays a foundational role. As Keith Michael Baker argues, the concept of
society is an implied referent of all the main Enlightenment concepts like
progress, civilization, toleration utility etc. They are unthinkable without
society as they assume its logical priority as the essential frame of
collective human existence. (Baker, 2001, 84-104) Baker shows that before
the eighteenth century the term society was used either for private
associations of individuals or for referring to the high society. With
secularization, it comes to refers to a somewhat universalistic conception
of the whole of the social order: The Enlightenment invented society as
the symbolic representation of collective human existence and instituted
it as an essential domain of human practice. (Baker, 2001, 84) Baker
further argues that the social provides existential ground beneath our
feet and a bedrock of reality beneath the shifting sands of discourse.
(Baker, 2001, 84) In other words, despite the fact that the concept of society
is a product of the Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse, it is
used to refer to a vague notion of the whole, that provides grounding for
all other practices, and discourse. This universalistic notion of society was
in turn perfectly compatible with and supported by the notion of
bourgeois subjecthood that emerged during the same period. As an entity
grounded in the mutual interests of the rational individuals, society was
understood in opposition to the more particularistic notion of community.
While the word samaj has come to acquire a meaning in Hindi in the
last century and half which is closer to the concept of society, in its late
nineteenth century usage, its references are much less universalistic than
in the case of classical Western social theory. In the nineteenth century
Hindi discourses also the word samaj is used in at least three different
senses. In one sense it is used for various voluntary associations - religious
and caste associations, but also association formed for promoting various
secular causes like promotion of science. The examples are Arya Samaj,
Brahma Samaj, Prarthana samaj etc. In the second sense, samaj also meant
community: caste or religious community. For example, Brahmin samaj
or Kayastha samaj, or Muslim samaj. Community in this context could

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MOHINDER SINGH

mean either face-to-face community or imagined community. Another

sense also gradually emerges in Hindi discourse, a sense described by
Kaviraj as society made of communities the idea of a field, a secondary
order of reality, a plane on which all communities of the first type existed.
(Kaviraj, 2005, 116) Albeit, in case of Hindi, the third sense emerges only
in the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly after the more
universalistic ideology of socialism emerges in Indian politics as a major
political force. As Benedict Anderson and Naoki Sakai have argued in
their respective works on non-Western nationalisms, the nationalist
thought emerges though comparison with the West. (Anderson, 1998;
Sakai, 1997, 40-71) From the very outset, the specific nationalist modernities
in different parts of the non-Western world, emerge by invoking a
particularistic we (people/nation). Therefore, the conceptual framework
that emerges within the framework of the nationalist problematic can
only have a particularistic reference in contrast to the universalistic
reference of the Enlightenment concept of society. Thus the concept of
samaj too appears, in the beginning, with the adjective our as our society
(hamara/hamari samaj).
The term samaj also refers to a notion of community, in the second
sense discussed above. But this should not be understood as the persistence
of some kind of pre-modern forms of collectivity. As we discussed in the
beginning, the specific communities the term samaj refers to are also a
product of a specific interaction with colonialism as the discourse of
community rights cannot be understood outside the governmental
practices of the colonial state. (Prakash, 28-34) An important conceptual
twin of samaj that can help us understand the conceptualization of the
social in the nineteenth century Hindi public discourse is jati. The word
jati too exhibit an impressive range of meanings in this discourse. The
various meanings of jati are: caste, communities of various types (racial,
religious), nation. Although the terms jati and samaj are sometimes used
interchangeably during this period, mostly to refer to community, a closer
analysis shows that there appears a subtle difference in connotations. It
seems that the concept of samaj is gradually beginning to acquire a sense
and reference much broader than that of jati. The immense popularity of
jati concepts (referring to religious, linguistic, caste, and national
communities) in this discourse can be explained by referring back to the
way colonial legal and administrative practices are restructuring the social
domain. Both the new legal apparatus, based on the recognition of
religious communities person codes, and the community based census
operations legitimize communities as the proper subjects of social and
political action.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE SOCIAL IN 19TH C. NORTH INDIA

139

NOTES
1 . The phrase translated by Vasudha Dalmia, (Dalmia, 1997, Chapter 6)
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Anderson, Benedict.1998. Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast

Asia, and the World. London and New York: Verso.
Baker, Keith Michael. 2001. Enlightenment and the Institution of Society:
Notes for a Conceptual History in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani
(ed.) Civil Society: History and Possibilities, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bhatt, Balkrishna. 1973. Bhatt Nibandhmala: II, Ed. By Dhananjay Bhatt
Saral, Varanasi: Nagri Pracharini Sabha.
Bhatt, Balkrishna. 1996. Pratinidhi Sankalan, edited by Satya Prakash
Mishra, New Delhi: National Book Trust.
Dalmia,Vasudha. 1997. The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition: Bhartendu
Harishchandra and the Nineteenth Century Banaras, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Daya Krishna. 1996.The Problematic and Conceptual Structure of Classical
Indian Thought about Man, Society, and Polity, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Goswami, Radhacharan. 1998. Radhacharan Goswami ki Chuni Hui
Rachnayen, edited by Karmendu Shishir, Allahabad: Par imal
Prakashan.
Harishchandra, Bhartendu. 2010. Bhartendu Harishchandra Granthavali
Vol. VI, ed. By Omprakash Singh, New Delhi: Prakashan Sansthan.
Harishchandra, Bhartendu. 2010. Bhartendu Harishchandra Granthavali
Vol. V, ed. By Omprakash Singh, New Delhi: Prakashan Sansthan.
Jordens, J T F. 1978. Dayanand Saraswati: His life and Ideas, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Jones, Kenneth W. 1989. Arya Dharm: Hindu consciousness in the 19th
Century, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Krishna Kumar. 1990. Quest for Self-Identity: Cultural Consciousness
and Education in Hindi Region, 1880-1950, Economic and Political
Weekly, June, 9 Issue.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2002. Ideas of Freedom in Modern India in Robert
Taylor (Ed.) Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2009. Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the
Historical Formation of Identities in India in Asha Sarangi (Ed.),
Language and Politics in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mishra, Pratapnarayan. 2009. Pratap Narain Mishra Rachnavali Vol. 3., edited

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by Chandr ika Prasad Mishra, New Delhi: Bhartiya Prakashan

Sansthan.
Mishra, Pratapnarayan. 1986 (Samvat 2043). Pratap Narain Mishra
Granthavali, edited by Vijay Shankar Malla, Varanasi and New Delhi:
Nagari Pracharini Sabha.
Francesca Orsini. 2002. Hindi Public Sphere, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Orsini, Francesca (Ed.) 2010. Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary
Culture, Orient Blackswan.
Prakash, Gyan. 2002. Civil Society, Community, and the Nation in
Colonial India Etnogrfica, Vol. VI (1).
Premghan, Chaudhary Badrinarain Upadhyay. 1950 (Samvat 2007).
Premghan Sarvasva, Vol. II, edited by Prabhakareshvar Prasad and
Dinesh Narayan Upadhyaya, Prayag: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan.
Sakai, Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural
Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Seth, Sanjay. 2008. Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial
India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Zavos, John. 2001. Defending Hindu Tradition: Sanatan Dharma as a
Symbol of Orthodoxy in Colonial India, Religion, No. 31.

MIGRATION MYTHS AND THE MECHANICS OF

ASSIMILATION: TWO COMMUNITY HISTORIES
FROM BENGAL1
Joya Chatterji

Assimilate; do not be assimilated.

LEOPOLD SENGHOR

In 1993, the Sylheti Social History Group in London published a little

book entitled The Roots and Tales of Bangladeshi Settlers. Ten years later, in
2003, Biharis. The Indian Emigres in Bangladesh: An Objective Analysis, was
brought out by the Shamsul Huq Foundation, a non - governmental
organisation based in the old railway town of Syedpur in Bangladesh. The
former, Roots and Tales, is an account of the Sylheti diaspora in the United
Kingdom.Written in the first - person by Yousuf Choudhury, who migrated
to Britain in the 1950s as a bachelor in his twenties, it purports to be the
view of the migrant - insider and its style is personal and confessional.
The latter, Biharis, tells the history of a community twice displaced by
violence, the so - called Biharis of Bangladesh. Although its author - the
journalist, social worker and poet Ahmed Ilias - is himself a Bihari who
migrated from Calcutta in 1953 to what was then East Pakistan, as the
subtitle of the book suggests, he strives to write as objectively as a
professional historian might, supporting his narrative with references to
primary and secondary sources.
On the face of it, the two texts appear to have very little in common.
One - Roots and Tales - is apparently a classic story of economic migration.
It chronicles the temporary sojourn and eventual settlement in the United
Kingdom of people largely drawn from a single region in the Bengal
delta, the lowland districts of Sylhet, who now number about 300,000,
living mainly in defined localities in the East End of London and in Greater
Manchester. Choudhury traces their history back to the heyday of the
Raj, when young men from Sylhet worked as lascars in the British merchant
marine, some jumping ship in London in search of better working
conditions. Others followed their lead, and through typical chain migration,
gradually quite significant clusters of Sylheti migrants developed within

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JOYA CHATTERJI

working - class neighbourhoods of Londons East End, Manchester and

also in Birmingham. In due course, these men were joined by elderly
parents, by wives and children and other relatives, and became a typically
self - sustaining diasporic community. Choudhurys is an optimistic story
of (upward) mobility: of people who used their connections and their
wits to survive, and who, through hard work and sacrifice, prospered and
built a better life for themselves and their children.
Ahmed Ilias Biharis, in contrast, is a stark account of forced migration.
It tells the grim tale of how in 1946, just before India was partitioned on
the lines of religion, Urdu - speaking Muslims fled from the deadly
communal violence in Bihar. They sought and were given shelter first in
Bengal (a province then run by a Muslim - dominated government).
After partition, they fled to Bengals eastern wing - which now became
East Pakistan - only to become, once again in 1971, the victims of genocidal
violence. This was when Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan
in a civil war of unspeakable brutality. Today, perhaps 300,000 Biharis
remain in Bangladesh, most of them still living in the squalid and
desperately over - crowded camps where they took shelter during the
war and in its aftermath. This is the story Ahmed Ilias attempts to tell in
Biharis, objectivity being his declared aim. But inevitably it is a much
darker work than Roots and Tales, reflecting as it does on the defeat of a
once - proud community and the death of its culture2.
Yet a closer look at these two very different works reveals interesting
parallels between them. Both are written in English, although for
Choudhury and Ilias it is quite evidently their third language. Both authors
are thinking men who might be described as organic intellectuals,
members of the group or community whose experience they sought to
articulate, though Choudhurys comes from a working - class background
while Ilias is a product of the north - Indian Urdu - speaking service
elite. Both began their research and writing at roughly the same time,
Choudhury in 1981 and Ilias in 1978. Both works were published by
community groups. On careful scrutiny, the two books prove to have similar
themes, similar internal structures and similar patterns of emphasis. This
essay will contend that both texts produce origin myths as well as
migration myths which have many tropes in common. By teasing out
the features which the two books share, it will explore the inwardness of
how, when and why migrant groups come to write their own histories. It
will argue that both these histories were written with a view to enabling
the assimilation of the community they claimed to speak for, and to seek
rights and recognition for that community in its place of settlement. It
suggests that reading these texts in a comparative and historical way throws

MIGRATION MYTHS AND THE MECHANICS OF ASSIMILATION

143

light on the complex processes by which migrant communities try to

assimilate into host cultures.
Assimilation itself is a controversial concept. Since the early seventies,
it been subjected to a sustained critique. Scholars have rejected the classical
portrayal of assimilation as a one - sided process by which alien
communities are incorporated into an apparently homogeneous host
culture, gradually (and inevitably) shedding their foreign ways and
increasingly adopting the cultural values and mores of their hosts. As
Rogers Brubaker has argued, this perspective was analytically and
normatively Anglo - conformist. It posited, endorsed and expected
assimilation towards an unproblematically conceived white Protestant core
culture3. In challenging this perspective, the differentialist critique has
informed (and was in turn inspired by) the politics and practices of multi
- culturalism. It was supported by a growing body of evidence that ethnic
diversity persists and survives among the new migrants in the West, so
much so that the new orthodoxy is that the melting pot never happened4.
In recent times, studies of migration have come to recognise the trans
- national networks of migrant communities5. It is increasingly well
understood that migrants remain embedded simultaneously in a variety
of locations and networks6. They are seen to maintain and deploy these
networks to circulate7 between locations, rather than permanently to
settle in one. Many scholars now see migrants as cosmopolitans who
constantly and creatively renegotiate hybridity8, rather than as conformists
who either maintain their traditional culture or aspire to or adapt to the
lifestyles of the host countries in the west. These studies regard the practice
of hybridity as challenging and unsettling the logic of modernity and its
vehicle, the nation state9.
These are valuable insights. Yet they gloss over the harsh realities of
the contemporary world, where nation states monopolise the legitimate
means of movement10, control their borders ever more stringently and
erect ever higher barriers against entry and naturalisation, making it
increasingly difficult for migrants to circulate, let alone to enter and stay
on with full rights of citizenship. This is as true not only of the west
(which implicitly or explicitly has been the focus of these new theories of
diaspora) but also of states in the global south11 which, as Zolberg and
Shmeidl have shown, since 1945 have absorbed the vast majority of the
worlds migrants12. For many compelling reasons - which in turn have
much to do with the constraints upon their options - many migrants
today, whether in the west or elsewhere, seek permanently to settle in the
locations where they presently dwell. Like Yousuf Choudhur is
Bangladeshi settlers and Ahmed Ilias Bihari emigres, they aspire to

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JOYA CHATTERJI

live with dignity and in security in their new homelands. By examining

the circumstances in which two migrants seek to negotiate assimilation in
two very different national contexts - in Britain and Bangladesh
respectively - this essay may throw light on concepts of assimilation which
are still not well understood, and reveal the complex and textured quality
of hybrid subjectivities.
But first an important caveat. One of the authors of the works discussed
here is still alive and well, and both have living children and families.
Roots and Tales and Biharis are important works, not only for the
communities they describe, but also for scholars of migration. Both contain
much vital information. By suggesting that these works construct myths
which deserve close analysis, this essay is not impugning their value or
their sincerity of purpose. Rather, it underlines the fact that these books
have a great deal to tell us, indeed much more than meets the eye.
Mythical pasts and sacred origins
Both books begin, as well they might, with an account of the origins of
their community. But both represent these origins using tropes that
betray their intent to invest them with a special moral quality and purpose.
Choudhurys Roots and Tales is the more obviously fabulous: indeed in
places it resorts to the style of magical realism.The author traces the origins
of the Bangladeshis who are the subject of his book back to the central
lowlands of Sylhet at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In ancient
times, he tells us, this low - lying territory to the south of the kingdom of
Kamrup in Assam lay partially submerged under the waters of the Bay of
Bengal. But a swan - shaped gulf rose out of the sea and nestled among
low hills covered with lush monsoonal forest, in an area rich in natural
beautyfull of exotic fruit trees, splendid flowering plants and birds such
as parrots, mynahs and seagulls. This came to be the site of a market town and port, known on account of its rare beauty as Sri Khetro or
Beautiful Field. It served as a commercial centre for traders from many
nations Seafaring Arab merchants used to call at that port regularly for
silk, spices and other oriental products13.
In a work written in a rather prosaic style (as the Foreward by the
Oxford theologian Clinton Bennett puts it, Choudhury makes no claim
to literary finesse in his third language, although he is an accomplished
writer in Bengali14), this passage stands out for its almost lyrical quality15.
Home is, first and foremost, a landscape of extraordinary loveliness, a
veritable Garden of Eden. But it is significant that Choudhury choses to
stress Sylhets ancient and original connection with the sea. Present day
Sylhet is far from the Indian Ocean, and yet the sea plays a crucial part in

MIGRATION MYTHS AND THE MECHANICS OF ASSIMILATION

145

his story.The ancient Sylhet of Roots and Tales is a hub of trade and exchange;
Choudhurys Sylheti ancestors in a long - distant past were already itinerant
sea - faring cosmopolitans.
In 1209 and 1300, according to Choudhury, two earthquakes changed
the landscape around Sri Khetro, lifting the gulf out of the deep and
severing its connection with the sea16. At that time, the land around the
town was still partly submerged and remained largely uninhabited. But
in 1313 it was conquered by Gour Gobindo, a cruel Hindu king who
had no mercy for anyone17. At this juncture in its early history, so we are
told, there were only thirteen Muslim families in the area, descendants of
seafaring merchants and Islamic missionaries, and they lived together in a
village by the River Surma, a waterway which connected the hills of
Assam to the Bengal delta. In 1340, the wife of one of these Muslim
pioneers, Borhanuddin, gave birth to a baby son, and to celebrate, the
proud father slaughtered a cow. On hearing of this, Raja Gour Gobindo
ordered that the baby be beheaded and the arms of the mother be cut off.
After the death of mother and child, Borhanuddin sought the protection
of neighbouring Muslim rulers in Bengal, and travelled to Delhi to raise
an army to challenge and defeat the cruel king.
It was in Delhi, Choudhury relates, in the presence of the great sufi
mystic Nizamuddin Auliya, that a fateful meeting took place between
brave Borhanuddin and the leading Muslim saint Shah Jalal, who had
travelled to Delhi from Yemen with 313 followers. On hear ing
Borhanuddins story, Shah Jalal decided to volunteer himself along with
his followers18 to fight Gour Gobindo. Together with an army of 360
saints, Shah Jalal marched eastwards into Bengal and defeated Gour
Gobindo in a battle replete with miracles in which the saints deployed
supernatural powers and witchcraft to bewitch and destroy the enemy.
And then Sylhet revealed its sacred destiny. Before he set out on his
mission in Al - Hind, Shah Jalal had been given a clod of Arabian earth by
his spiritual mentors who instructed him to settle wherever he found
similar soil. Miraculously, the marshy soil of Sri Khetro exactly matched
this sacred lump of earth from dry and distant Arabia. So Shah Jalal settled
permanently in Shil - hotto, and the 360 saints spread all over Sylhet to
propagate Islam. They also set to work reclaiming the land, building simple
structures as their mosques, fishing in the waters and farming the land:
Most of the saints got married, and many of them had a farm and a family. They
worked all day long, growing crops or vegetables, looking after their cattle and
catching fish. When the work was done they swam in the open clean water, then
they sat and had some food. At the end of the day, they could go to their own straw
built mosque and pray to their hearts content. Many of the saints were married to
the new converts, had families, ran farms by themselves but the saintliness of the

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JOYA CHATTERJI

working saints was never washed away or wasted. Their faith was always with them
and passed on to their descendants.19

Here the story of conversion deploys sexual metaphors of fertility and

insemination so prominent in descriptions of Islams spread in Bengal20.
But whereas in other parts of Bengal, the exotic soil (or host society)
produced a version of Islam distorted by caste hierarchy and contaminated
by other Hindu manners and customs, Sylhets wondrous soil - in
Choudhurys account - nourished the true faith. The homeland emerges
from Roots and Tales as a beautiful green paradise adorned by the graves of
saints. It is a land of plenty which sustains a casteless society of hard working, peace - loving and god - fearing peasants21, a truly Islamic
brotherhood governed by the simple but robust moral values of their
forefathers.
Some of these themes recall other better - known foundation myths22,
and the story as a whole powerfully echoes Richard Eatons classic account
of the role of ghazi - pirs or soldier - saints in establishing Islam and
settled agriculture on the Bengal frontier23. But the point here is a rather
different one. Choudhurys story is not only a myth of origins, it is also
parable about settlement. In ascribing this cosmopolitan origin to the
Bangladeshi settlers in Britain, Choudhury constructs them as living
descendants of saints from all over the Muslim world who long ago settled
in Sylhet, bringing their faith with them and establishing Islam in the
delta. By tracing the communitys roots back to these pioneering saints
and settlers, it validates the struggles and journeys of present - day migrants
and sets them up as vectors for the expansion of the Islamic frontier in the
western world. Implicitly, it imbues their story of migration and settlement
not only with legitimacy derived from this origin myth, but also with a
deeper moral and religious purpose24.
But there is also another process at work in this account of origins:
the construction of a notion of a single Bangladeshi community. That
process begins, of course, with Choudhurys choice of title, which alludes
to the Bangladeshi settlers. In his preface or introduction, the author
admits that his story is mostly about the settlers from Sylhet as they are
95% of Bangladeshi settlers. The remaining 5% came from other places. I
have tried my best to cover these people too25. Yet Choudhury makes
hardly any reference to these other people, and when he does, as we
shall see, his remarks are disparaging and dismissive. But by describing
his subjects as Bangladeshis rather than Sylhetis, and then by assigning a
single foundation myth set in ancient Sylhet to all of them, the work has
launched the enterprise of incorporating (and indeed assimilating)
different groups with disparate histories into a single national community
with shared origins and with a destiny in common.

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Ahmed Iliass account of the origins of the Biharis is not as colourful

as Choudhurys tales of Syhet, but nonetheless it shares with it some
significant features. Biharis begins with description of The Home and
Culture which sets out, in ten pages, the glorious history of Bihar. Even
though, in the second paragraph of his preface, Ilias states (accurately) that
Biharis did not come from the Indian state of Bihar alone26, a few pages
later, he contradicts himself and states that the Biharis are proud of their
ancient history which he locates in the Indian state of Bihar. This is
reminiscent of Choudhurys strategy where he first admits that all
Bangladeshi settlers in Britain are not in fact from Sylhet, but then proceeds
to give the whole community a single foundation myth located in ancient
Sylhet. Iliass constructs the home of the Biharis not only as a place lost
forever, but as a vanished golden age of Indian achievement. The thrust
and tone of his argument are captured in the following paragraph:
Historically, Bihar is a land of faiths and religions, myths and mysticism,
parables and legends. Islam began to spread in this part of India from
around the twelfth century. Both its Hindus and Muslims were always
seen at the forefront of every movement launched for the glory and
greatness, liberty and independence of India27.
At home, the Muslim minority lived scattered in villages and towns
with all their (pride) and (prejudice), with the low standards of skills and
education and the high esteem of old orthodox society. They were happy
with their own way of life, culture, customs and traditions28.
In the same way that Choudhurys Sylhet is idealised, Ilias Bihar is
also a rich and bountiful land. Indeed, readers might be surprised by
Ilias confident assertion that as a geographical unit, Bihar is the richest
State in India29 (in fact it is one of the poorest). It is also, just as Choudhurys
Sylhet, a land sanctified by faith. Ilias describes Bihar as a sacred site where
Islam first took root in the sub - continent:
Long before the arrival of Muslim rulers, many Sufis and saints came to Bihar to
preach Islam among the cast - ridden (sic) Hindu community. Hazrat Shahbuddin
reached Bihar before the attacks on Punjab byMahmud Ghaznazi (999 - 1027).
Imam Mohammed Taj Fakir, another Muslim saint(,) came from the Middle East in
1104. His grandson Makhdum Sharfuddin Yahia Muniri belonged to the oldest and
most widely dispersed Sufi orders in Bihar, the Suhrawardy and Chisti. A branch of
the Suhrawardy order later emerged (and) was known as Firdausia under Yahia
Muniri30

So far, so similar. Both accounts trace the origins of the migrant

community back to a single place; both describe that place as a land of
peace and plenty; both locate the ancient homeland as a sacred site which
witnessed the birth of Islam in the Indian sub - continent; and both claim

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cosmopolitan and saintly ancestors, who played a key role in expanding

the frontiers of the Islamic world.
But there are also important differences between Ilias account and
Choudhurys, and their significance will become apparent when the
authors political intentions are considered. Ilias situates his Bihar within
a robust tradition of syncretism, and constructs it as a place where as well
as Islam, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Jain cultures and polities thrived.
Biharis understanding of culture is more syncretic than that of Roots and
Tales, claiming as part of the communitys glorious history the
achievements of other religions besides Islam. Ilias takes pains, for example,
to inform his readers that the two founders of Buddhism and Jainism
inspired the world from this land. Rams wife Sita, the most significant
character in Hindu mythology (,) was born in this land of faiths and
religions.31
He also repeatedly insists on a powerful Bihari tradition of anti imperialism. He claims that Bihar gave birth to many valiant sons, who
fought for the liberation of India from the yoke of British Empire. From
the earliest times, Ilias tells us, Bihars rulers have repelled invaders.
Chandragupta Maurya put an end to Greek rule in India. 32 Mir Quasem
shifted his capital from Murshedabad (sic) to Munghyr to defend his
rule against the forces of the East India Company33. To a far greater extent
than Choudhury, Ilias claims for his community a history of political
sacrifice and leadership in the national struggle against British rule. By
contrast, Choudhurys text is far more muted in its criticisms of British
rule, for example, quickly glossing over an uprising in Sylhet against the
Raj in 178234. Its heroes are not rebels who fought the British, but trade
unionists like Aftab Ali who organised and defended Sylheti seamen, and
community leaders like Ayub Ali Master, who helped illiterate lascar
migrants to cut through the red - tape in Britain. Ilias emphasis on Bihars
traditions of high culture has no counterpart in Choudhury. Unlike
Choudhurys idealised but rustic Sylhet, Iliass Bihar was an ancient seat
of learning which attracted people from far and wide: ever since
Kumaragupta founded the Nalinda (sic) university near the capital Patna.
This was a great seat of learning where more than a thousand teachers
and scholars used to teach about ten thousand students drawn from middle
and Far East countries35.
Home to the Khuda Baksh library, the richest library of manuscripts
on Islam in the world36, Bihar was the seedbed for poets such as Kazi
Nazrul Islam and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. Bihar also produced many
eminent writers, poets and critics in Urdu literature37. The authors pride
in this tradition shows how different his class - perspective is from
Choudhurys. Ilias views history from the vantage point of a cultured

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literati which has fallen on hard times, while Choudhurys angle of vision
is that of a working - class community making its way up in the world.
These different perspectives helped to shape strategies for assimilation, as
will be seen below, were subtly but significantly different.
Migration myths: tales of loss and exile
Having established their singular origins in an idealised homeland, the
next task for both authors is to explain why their subjects left their
homeland behind. Both struggle to produce a seamless narrative of
migration, even though this often strains the historical evidence and their
own accounts. In both works, this distinctive narrative is repeated throughout
the text at regular intervals, so that it assumes a normative power - appearing
to elevate and encapsulate a truth about the community which is truer
than mere fact.
In the case of Choudhurys Roots and Tales, the central theme of this
narrative is that all Bangladeshi settlers in Britain are sea - farers or their
descendents:
Most Bangladeshi settles are the descendent flesh and blood of those who were lost
in the seas and survived to tell their tale, so it is our duty to keep our history alive
and remind everyone of who we are and why we are here38.

This assertion is repeated three times on the very first page of the
introduction. It is then rehearsed no less than fifty times in the book. So
how did Sylhetis - whose homeland was so far away from the waters
margin - come to be seafarers? According to Choudhury, the explanation
is the River Surma, the only waterway which connected Assam to Bengal
and the sea, passes through Sylhet. In consequence, Sylhet had a long
tradition - beginning with the early settler saints - of mercantile boats,
carrying goods from Assam to Bengal and beyond. Although Sylhets
farmers were prosperous, its spare young men (younger brothers and
cadet sons) traditionally worked as boatmen. When the region came under
British rule, things changed, particularly in the 19th century when the
British introduced steam ships and steamer stations linking Calcutta to
upper Assam. Aware that the new water way arrangement (had) hit the
boatmen hard, Choudhury argues, the (British) steamer companies
perhaps realised the need to compensate the boatmen by recruiting them
mainly as engine room crew.. This is the story of the Sylheti boatmen
and how they became the steamers crew.39 Here again we see evidence
that Choudhury would like to take a benign view of British rule in Sylhet,
even though he has to admit that these Sylheti lascars began to be ill
treated and ill fed40. They were exploited by British navigation companies

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JOYA CHATTERJI

who paid them a sixth of what British crews received, he tells us, but even
more by the Indian sarongs and bariwalas (or gaffers) who took a large
part of their wages in return for finding them jobs on ships and housing
them at ports while they waited for work. Out of frustration, they decided
to desert their ships and go wherever they would find a chance, whether
in Rangoon or Singapore or London41. But it was only during the First
World War, when, according to Choudhury, over one thousand
Bangladeshis were brought to Britain to replace British seamen, that a
few began to settle in London42. And it was during the Second World War
that the Bangladeshi population began to increase in the U.K. When the
war ended in 1945, and with Indias independence and partition in 1947,
more and more Sylheti seamen found themselves unemployed, and sought
work in Britain to support their families. The present Bangladeshi
community in Britain, Choudhury insists again and again, are all
descendents and kin of these first seafaring settlers, and almost all can
claim to be related to persons who fought and died in the two world
wars.
This account, while superficially plausible, does not bear historical
scrutiny. A few Sylheti lascars did indeed jump ship in London, and some
of them, in all probability, did eventually settle in Britain. In their turn,
they assisted others to do the same43. But it is very unlikely indeed that all
of todays Bangladeshi settlers are their descendents. If this assertion had
merit, the migrations from Sylhet to Britain would have peaked in the
1940s and 1950s, since after independence and partition in 1947, very few
Sylheti lascars (by Choudhurys own account, supported by other
authorities44) were able to find work on British ships. Instead, the numbers
of Bengali migrants in Britain remained tiny in this period: by the early
1950s, there were perhaps no more than 300 Sylhetis in London; their
numbers had grown only to about 5000 in the whole of Britain by 196245.
It was only after this date that their numbers began to grow rapidly, a
consequence not only of new British restrictions on immigration46, but
also of the dangers and uncertainties of life in Bangladesh during and
after the civil war of 1971. By 1986, when the British government published
its first White Paper on Bangladeshis in Britain, it estimated that there
were about 200,000 in the country47. By 2001, as the last census suggests,
that population had grown by another 100,000 in the next 15 years.
The point to be stressed here is that contrary to Choudhurys account,
the vast majority of Bangaldeshis now settled in Britain were never lascars
on British ships, and were born long after the Second World War and the
end of empire.The great majority of Bangladeshis who migrated to Britain
did so in the two decades after Bangladesh achieved independence from
Pakistan in 1971.

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So why does Choudhury repeat his unsubstantiated claim over fifty

time in the course of his book? For one thing, of course, it gives the
community a single shared history, and glosses over the deep political
divisions which have long beset it48. It provides it with a simple genealogy
which connects todays British Bangladeshis - through the lascar seamen
who served on British ships during the world wars, and through them
back to the Sylheti boatmen who were recruited to work on steamships
on the River Surma in Sylhet - right back to the original band of 360
saints who accompanied Shah Jalal on his mission to spread Islam on the
frontiers of Bengal. This genealogy serves both to unify the community
as fictive kin, and gives it an intelligible history imbued with a continuing
moral purpose. But no less significantly, as we shall see below, it provides
the foundations on which the settlers built their claim to rights and full
membership as citizens in Britain.
In Iliass history, the communal riots in Bihar in late 1946 are depicted
as the root cause which explains why the Biharis left Bihar. Throughout
the book, Ilias returns again and again to these horrific events which (in
his account) claimed 50,000 lives49 and forced many thousands more to
flee from their homes. When Pakistan was established in 1947, he tells us,
many of these frightened people sought and were given shelter in its
eastern wing. Later on, their numbers swelled as anti - Muslim violence
in India in 1950 and again in 1964 drove more and more people out.
Iliass purpose is to imprint on the readers mind the fact that the people
he writes about were victims of catastrophic events, refugees who, through
no fault of their own, were evicted from the land of their birth and had to
seek shelter elsewhere: The Muslim minority in Bihar were happy
with their way of life, when India fell for communalism and Bihar became
the target50. Even the language he uses to describe these events emphasises
their passive victimhood: the Biharis were sorted out and shunted off 51,
and forced to leave their country of origin52. Ilias recurrent theme is
that the Biharis are descendents of those optees and emigrants who came
to East Bengal after the great divide in India in 1947.53
Yet there are contradictions, and a noticeable instability, in this
construction of events. As Ilias himself admits, from the late 19th century
onwards, the British had employed large numbers of Biharis on the railways
when these were extended into eastern Bengal, and also many others in
the police, judiciary and other civil departments54. So when the calamitous
events of 1946 - 47 took place, there were already a large number of
Biharis long settled in parts of what now became East Pakistan55. After
partition, some were joined by their families, but they were not refugees
from violence. By Ilias own account, (which the censuses and other studies
support), many of the Urdu - speaking service elites who migrated to

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East Pakistan after 1947 did so in fits and starts over more than two decades
between 1947 and 1970, attracted by the better opportunities for
employment in East Pakistan.
As we read on, then, it becomes clear why Ilias describes his
community as Bihari, even though he himself admits, its members do
not all come from Bihar, and despite the fact, as he would be the first to
acknowledge, that Bihari has become a derogatory term in present - day
Bangladesh. To call them Urdu - speakers (arguably a more accurate
appellation) would draw unwelcome attention to the question of language
which sets his community apart from a national culture into which he
seeks their assimilation. But more importantly, by calling them Bihari he
fixes in the readers consciousness an association between this migrant
group and the carnage in Bihar in 1946. The Bihar riots have long been
held up as the moment when Pakistan was born, when the sheer brutality
of the attacks demonstrated the impossibility of any reconciliation or
rapprochement between Indias Hindus and Muslims. They hold as large
a place in the collective memory of Partition in the east as do the Calcutta
Killings of 1946. Used in particular contexts, the very word Bihar conveys
all the horrors of the deadly ethnic riot56. By calling his community
Biharis, Ilias seeks to recall these outrages in order to evoke the sympathy
of fellow Muslims and hosts in Bangladesh, sympathy which his
community patently deserves, despite their later mistakes (more of which
below). The word Bihari in Ilias book thus carries a powerful moral
charge and is deployed with a clear purpose.
But at another level, the myth of their enforced exile from Bihar also
works to provide a single, straightforward common history for the Bihari
community in Bangladesh today. Present - day Biharis are represented as
linear descendents of those who fled the carnage. In turn, they are
descended from the saintly pioneers who brought Islam to caste - ridden
India, and all are legatees of the great revolutionaries who resisted imperial
incursions. Thus, they are the standard bearers of a sacred mission with a
long history and heirs of a great culture. This history seeks to unify the
community, sanitise and simplify its complex and multi - stranded
chronicles by providing a single and intelligible root cause for its presence
in Bangladesh. In this sense, it has much in common with the foundation
myths of so many migrant groups, which typically see their migration as
being the consequence of a single catastrophic event, even though historians
might agree that they migrated gradually over a period of many decades,
and sometimes over centuries57.
Both these accounts, then, simplify a complex history of migration.
Choudhury ignores the fact that the great majority of Sylhetis migrated to
Britain during and after the upheavals of the liberation war in Bangladesh,

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153

and he greatly exaggerates the role of lascars - typically enterprising

economic migrants - in that history. For his part, Ilias plays down the long
process of economic migration from Bihar and upper India to eastern
Bengal, proposing instead that all Biharis were forced migrants, victims
of communal violence. These constructions enable both writers to provide
a simple answer to the question why are we here? But as we shall see,
they deliberately privilege one particular answer to the big question over
others because it suits their purposes here and now. What purport to
be histories are not only about the past, but about the present and about
responses to contemporary challenges. They also offer prescriptions for
the future.
Myths for assimilation: intertwining community and host histories
In what way do these histories advance the cause of assimilation if, as has
been shown, one of their purposes is vigorously to claim the unity, the
integrity and the separate identity of the community? This essay will
suggests that people must first be assimilated into a community with a
single story about itself before it can begin to negotiate its acceptance as a
part of a host nation. Ethnicity maintenance does not prevent assimilation,
as the critics of the concept have sometimes argued. Instead it is sometimes
a necessary prolegomenon to it. Nor are the two processes mutually
exclusive, as are the salad bowl and the melting pot views of migration
and ethnicity. The reality, it would seem, is rather more complex than the
conventional wisdom assumes.
The first technique our two books deploy for this work of assimilation
is to insert community history into the national history of the host
country. Of course, no nation has a single national history, no matter how
much nationalists might claim it does. But at certain times and in certain
places, there may be a measure of agreement about which key historical
events have crucially shaped a nations identity, and migrant intellectuals
seem to be quick to spot these areas of national consensus. In the case of
Britain in the late 1970s, when Yousuf Choudhury began to write his
book (and indeed even today, as the recent votes for Churchill as the
greatest Briton suggest) the world wars, and particularly the Second World
War was one such defining event. Ordinary Britons who fought and died
in these wars, as well as those who manned the home front, are seen as
having displayed national unity and national character. Courage, pluck,
stoicism and humour in the face of adversity, and just getting on with it
came to be seen as typically British traits, displacing more aristocratic
and more English gentlemanly attributes. Fighting and dying for ones
country in its finest hour, the epic struggle against Fascism, was the highest

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JOYA CHATTERJI

proof of Britishness58.
The very first page of Choudhurys Roots and Tales makes plain his
intention to insert the Bangladeshi settlers into this narrative of British
patriotic sacrifice, and calls to be quoted in full:
Many people have misconceptions about the Bangladeshi settlers because they either
have wrong information or lack of the same. Many do not know that the Bangladeshis
were asked to come and fight for Britain in the two world wars. We fought both
wars for them. We were in the warships and troop carriers when they were facing
enemies.We were in British cargo - ships to bring in the vital supplies. Bangladeshis
worked on the deck, went down to the bottom of the ships, and ran the engines for
them.We were part of the British war power.
The ships were attacked and sunk on the high seas. Many of our men were killed,
not all of their dead bodies floated to the surface of the water. The dead bodies
were eaten by sharks or simply decomposed.
Many dead bodies went down with their ships leaving no trace, no grave or headstone
is there to be seen, so our dead Bangladeshi seamen have been forgotten for all time.
Most Bangladeshi settlers are the descendent flesh and blood of those who were
lost in the seas or survived to tell their tale, so it is our duty to keep our history alive
and remind everyone of who we are and why we are here59.

This is a remarkable passage for many reasons. On the one hand, it makes
very explicit the authors intention to inform many people about his
communitys sacrifices on their behalf, and it is clear that his intended
audience is the host society,the British. But what is particularly interesting
is how he maintains the boundary between us and them (we fought
both the wars for them etc.), even as he weaves the history of the settlers
into the tapestry of British history.
As soon as it is recognised that Choudhurys work is not only a book
about the past, but also a polemical tract staking claims in the present and
for the future, many peculiarities of its language and structure become
intelligible. It explains the authors decision to write the book in English
rather than Bangla. It explains, for example, why the author insists
repeatedly - despite compelling evidence to the contrary - that all
Bangladeshis are descended from lascar seamen; it explains why his brief
account of his communitys origins stresses its primeval connection with
the sea; why his Sylhet is literally born out of the ocean and why his
community (just as its British hosts) is presented as a sea - faring peoples.
It explains why so much of the book is about the period of British rule
over Sylhet, and why its account of British rule is so uncritical. It explains
why it seeks to downplay the fierce conflicts between Sylhetis and

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Britishers, positing instead a chronicle of largely cordial interdependence

between rulers and ruled. It explains why it stresses the kindness and
paternalism of the British owners of steamer ships, as shown when they
employed the Bengali boatmen their ships had put out of business, and
the decency of the British people towards them when they first arrived
on these shores60. And of course it explains why the crucial and recurrent
theme - which stresses Bangladeshi sacrifice for Britain during the wars,
is the leitmotif of the work. This is the basis on which Choudhury rests
his case for the communitys right to settle in Britain. It is a right they
have earned by their sacrifices on behalf of Britain.
But it also explains why Choudhury strives so hard to compress and
simplify that history of the settlers into a single narrative. That narrative
has to be controlled tightly if Choudhury is to be able to make this claim
convincingly. If the true variety of histories and experiences of Bangladeshi
migrants were acknowledged, this would weaken his claim to rights for
the community in Britain today.The community has first to be constructed
as Bangladeshi in order for it to be accepted as British. Those migrants
whose stories palpably strain the unified account of the community and
its origins - for instance the snobbish Dhaka gentlemen who turn their
nose up at their more humble countrymen from Sylhet61 and the Arabic
- educated pro - Pakistanis (persons of the same group Ilias describes as
Biharis) who become the imams at their new mosques62 - are reconciled
with the larger Sylheti population, soon gain their forgiveness63 and are
apparently assimilated into it, as they disappear from the account as
suddenly as they enter it. It is only after this work of constructing, inventing
and assimilating migrant Bangladeshis of very different sorts into one
community has been achieved by the myths of origin and migration that
Choudhury begins to describe his community as British Bangladeshi.
Significantly, the term is first used only on page 196 of a 230 - page work.
Thereafter, the book refers repeatedly to British Bangladeshis - their
culture but also their secular problems - particularly their
underperformance in education - and their politics in Britain.
But another interesting point is that the author simultaneously aligns
his community with a general British past and also with particular sections
of British society. His discussions of the lifestyles of the early post - war
migrants - their liaisons and marriages with working - class white women,
their sharing of food and lodgings with migrant workers from other parts
of the world, their long shifts in the factories, their renting of premises
and leasing of shops from East End Jews - identifies Bangladeshis with a
kind of enterprising working - class cosmopolitanism that, Choudhury
suggests, characterised the Britain in which they lived and worked.
Palpably it is this Britain into which he seeks the incorporation of his

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JOYA CHATTERJI

community. In this sense, Choudhury bears out Brubakers suggestion

that assimilation must be understood as being a process by which a
community repositions itself with regard to many different cultural referents,
rather than to a single monolithic core culture64.
Towards the end of the book, moreover, Choudhury begins to describe
Bengalis as part of the immigrant population65. They are represented as
part of Black movements66, an integral element in the fight against racism
in the 1980s: Bangladeshis had done a lot of fighting and were still fighting
for their existence and rights67. Increasingly he discusses their politics:
their long - distance nationalism68 vis - - vis Bangladesh (through their
support of the liberation movement), but also their political activism in
the local councils in Britain to improve living conditions in the inner
cities. He mentions certain liberal Britons as friends of the community:
the social worker and historian Caroline Adams, Ken Livingstone and
even Prince Charles, proudly reproducing a photograph of the Princes
visit to Aldgate. So one can see that Choudhury is positioning his
community within a certain construct of Britain and of Britishness,
one that is by turns hard - working and enterprising, cosmopolitan,
egalitarian, tolerant and inclusive. In some senses, one might argue, he is
constructing the Britain into which the community of Bangladeshi
settlers is seeking to be assimilated, quite as much as he is constructing
the community itself.
Ilias adopts similar strategies in Biharis. He, too, strives to insert his
community into the national history of Bangladesh. But his is a rather
more difficult enterprise and one that is fraught with enormous pitfalls.
Above all, it requires him repeatedly to admit his communitys past
mistakes and seek forgiveness for them.
The first move Ilias makes is a bold one, considering that some of the
deepest differences between Biharis and their hosts revolve around the
question of language: Bihar is are widely believed by Bangladeshi
nationalists to have looked down on the Bengali language and to have
stood aloof from the Language Movement (of which more below). In the
first chapter of his book, Ilias asserts that the Bengali language and Bihari
Urdu have a common origin, that both descend from a single great
linguistic tradition: that of Magadhi Prakrit.
Bengali, Oriya and Assamese have their root in Bihar. Bengali is a typical descendent
of the great language that, under the name of Magadhi Prakrit, was the vernacular of
eastern North India for many centuries. This was the official language of the great
Emperor Asoka and the Buddha and Mahavira, the apostle of Jainism
Bihari Urdu (is) unlike the (literary) Urdu evolved in Delhi and UP, (it) was
overwhelmingly plain and simple. Even today, most Bihari Muslims speak Magadhi,

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Maithili and Bhujpuri rather than Urdu69

In this passage, Ilias seeks to construct a common linguistic heritage for

eastern north India and to place Bihar squarely inside it. Iliass Bihari
language is not a product of the courtly and aristocratic world of north
India; rather it is an intrinsic part of a syncretic family of plain and simple
spoken languages. By making this claim, he seeks to defuse the tension
engendered by the language question, and also to rid Urdu as spoken in
Bangladesh of its elitist and North Indian associations. He rhetorically
shifts the Bihar homeland eastwards - in the direction of its Bengali
neighbourhood and away from Upper India and Pakistan. He also pushes
Bihari Urdu - speakers downwards in terms of social class, associating
them not with the elite or ashraf north Indian tradition of Persianised
Urdu, but with the more lowly atrap or ajlaf everyday bazaar dialects of
the eastern region.
In his next set of strategic moves, Ilias faces up squarely to the greatest
obstacle to Bihari assimilation into Bangladeshi society - the charge that
the community fought against the nation in the war of 1971, joining
hands with the Pakistani army in its brutal and merciless suppression of
the peoples uprising. Ilias attempts to explain this in a variety of ways.
The Bihari refugees from India, he admits, made grave mistakes. But they
did this largely because they were misled, misguided and ultimately
betrayed by their leaders who took them into the wilderness70. Despite
the fact that the local Bengali community was very sympathetic towards
(them)71, they kept themselves aloof from the locals, living apart in
reservations72. By adopting for themselves the title and status of Mohajers
- the Islamic term that the Pakistani state used for refugees - they isolated
themselves from other groups in society. This created in them a psyche
which led them mistakenly to regard the cultural and political struggles
of the local people as being against their interests. Instead of demanding
that they should be treated equally as citizens of Pakistan73, they claimed
a special status for themselves as Mohajers who had made special sacrifices
for the state, and who therefore deserved special privileges and special
recognition. Unlike the Mohajers of Karachi and Hyderabad in West
Pakistan, who were harsh critics of the Pakistani regime, the Bihari
Mohajers in Bengal remained apathetic74, won over by the regime by
special allotments of housing and other facilities. Under the martial law
regime of General Ayub Khan, the Bihar i Basic Democrats were
submissive to the political programmes of Ayub Khan. They performed
their duty not as representatives of their community but as agents of the
ruling clique75. Their failure to adapt and assimilate, Ilias admits, was a
huge error. It was this separatist psyche which led to their failure to
throw their weight behind the rightful political struggles of Bengalis against

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JOYA CHATTERJI

successive Pakistani regimes; and this was the reason for the dreadful
reprisals against the Bihari community after the war ended.
These are profoundly moving passages. Like many interested
historians of vanquished peoples, Ilias labours under the burden of having
to explain why events turned out as they did, and this leads him to reflect
with great seriousness on the past. In common with others in this
predicament, he laments the short - sightedness of his people, but also
shifts the blame to their former leaders, now deposed76. Again and again,
he shows and regrets how the Biharis were betrayed by their leaders.
Iliass Biharis were misled first by the speeches of the creator of Pakistan77,
and then by the Muslim League leadership and their religion - based
politics78. After partition, they were let down by the Pakistani state, which
encouraged them to cling to their refugee status as Mohajers and to their
Urdu language79. In the late 1950s, they were betrayed by corrupt Bihari
representatives who were too busy making money to give a proper lead
to the community; and in the sixties, they were exploited by Governor
Monem Khan who had very close contact with notorious (criminals),
and who used them to create a wedge between locals and non - locals80.
In the late 1960s, when the campaign for the autonomy of East Pakistan
gained ground, they were misled by West Pakistani - based Urdu
newspapers and their false propaganda against the Bengal leader, Mujibur
Rahman81. In the months before the outbreak of the civil war, they were
betrayed again by the media when it falsely alleged that the Mohajer
Convention had called for the partition of East Bengal82, and after the war
began, they were led astray by a false prophet - Warasat Khan, the leader
of the Mohajer Party - who dragged orphaned Bihari boys into the war
on the side of Pakistan83. In the aftermath of the war, when Biharis were
hunted down and killed in their thousands by the so - called Bengali
Sixteenth Divisions, they were betrayed by the Red Cross which
encouraged and organised bewildered people to register themselves for
repatriation to Pakistan84. Terrified victims of grisly reprisals, as they
huddled in their make - shift camps after the war, they were exploited by
the Indian soldiers who, instead of protecting them, took all their money
on the false promise of getting them out of Bangladesh85.
This theme of betrayal is repeated so often, and at such regular intervals
in the book, that it demands reflection on its deeper discursive intent.
Arguably, it takes forward two crucially important strategic purposes. On
the one hand, it clearly seeks to drive a distinction between the innocence
of the general Bihari community and the culpability of the bad apples
among their leadership. By this device, Ilias suggests that it is right for the
soft - hearted Bangladeshi nation to forgive these poor misguided people,
in their own way as much victims of the old Pakistani order as the Bengalis

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159

on whose mercy he is throwing his community.

But on the other hand, there is a less explicit but nonetheless potent
message in this saga of betrayal, directed at the Biharis themselves. Ilias
warning to his fellow Biharis is to be wary of the siren calls of the false
prophets of today. In particular, he appears to appeal to them not to be
misled by the likes of Nasim Khan, the retired railway guard who organised
Bihari railway employees to fight for their repatriation (to Pakistan), and
his organisation, the Stranded Pakistanis General Repatriation Committee
(SPGRC). Since the mid - 1970s, Nasim Khan and the SPGRC have
waged a long and highly publicised battle to arrange the transfer of all
Stranded Pakistanis to Pakistan, albeit with very little success86. Ilias
describes the followers of Naseem Khan as frustrated and uneducated
and half - educated youths87. He clearly believes them to be misguided,
and their goals for repatriation to a country they have never seen and
which has repeatedly repudiated them, to be unrealistic as well as evidently
not in their own best interests.
Since 1980, Ahmed Ilias himself, and the Al Falah NGO which he
directs, have worked for the rehabilitation of Urdu - speaking
Bangladeshis88 living in camps. His very description of them as Urdu speaking Bangladeshis (as opposed to Khans Stranded Pakistanis) reveals
his underlying purpose - to bring them out of the camps in which they
have lived in a state of suspended animation and increasingly desperate
poverty, and to help them negotiate their assimilation into the society and
polity of Bangladesh. Hence Ilias writes with approval of those individuals
among the Bihari community who are struggling for a place in the soft
heart of the Bengali society, the literate and educated, representing the
young generation wants to come out from the depressed situation and
overcome the agony they have suffered for the last three decades89. The
deeper intent of his whole history is to suggest that the literate and
educated syncretists of today represent the true progressive spirit of the
communitys history, and hence represent the true leadership for the
community today. Of course, in making this claim, Ilias glosses over the
cracks within the community, particularly, but not exclusively, those that
distance Syedpurs railway workers and Dhakas jute - mill hands from
the Urdu - speaking literati. His aim is to persuade the community and
their hosts alike that Biharis are in fact Urdu - speaking Bangladeshis.
The fact that this term is first used only towards the end of his book (on
p. 154 of a 200 - page text) suggests that through this usage Ilias seeks to
transform Biharis into Urdu - speaking Bangladeshis, in much the same
way that Yousuf Choudhury metamorphosises Sylheti lascars into British
Bangladeshis.
Iliass other objective is to provide this community of Urdu - speaking

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JOYA CHATTERJI

Bangladeshis with an impressive record of service to the cause of

Bangladesh. He painstakingly catalogues every act by Urdu - speakers whether as individuals or groups - which displayed their loyalty to their
new Bengali home and to the national ideals of Bangladesh. He notes
with pride that on 21 February 1952, when Bengali students took up
their celebrated protest against Pakistans decision to enshrine Urdu as
the only state language of Pakistan, the Urdu - speaking civil servant
Hussain Haider refused to issue orders proscribing the movement, and
was transferred for his pains. In this way Ilias inserts Biharis into the
history of Ekushey90, 21 February 1952, symbolically the moment that
Bangladeshi nationalism was born91. He then goes on to describe the
contribution of progressive Urdu poets, writers, journalists and students
to the Language Movement:
Dr.Yusuf Hasan, Arif Hushyarpuri, Ayaz Asmi, Massod Kalim,Akhtar Payami, Akhtar
Hyderabadi, Adeeb Sohail, Khwaja Mohammed Ali, Qamar, Manzur Rahman,
Salahuddin Mohammed, Badruddin Ahmed (Engineer), Perwez Ahmed (Barrister),
Hasan Sayeed, Abu Sayeed Khan and Zainul Abedin were prominent among the
supporters of the language movement. Dr.Yusuf Hasan being a member of the Urdu
speaking community played a significant role in the language movement. He issued
press statements on behalf of the Urdu Progressive Writers Association in favour of
the movement. He was also selected as one of the founder members of the Rashtro
Bhasha Sangram Parishad (the National Language Movement Council).
At a later stage, others like Ataur Rahman Jalil, Naushad Noori, Suroor Barabankwi,
Habib Ansari, Bamo Akhter Shahood, Umme Ammarah and Anwer Farhad joined
the movement. It was Salahuddin Mohammed, who had even said that if Urdu and
Bangla were not accepted as two state languages of Pakistan, he then would demand
only for Bangla as the state language.
The Language Movement also greatly influenced the progressive Urdu poets and
writers in both wings of Pakistan. In East Pakistan, Urdu poet Naushad Noori
wrote a very powerful poem, Mohenjodaro, in Urdu.

(Ilias then quotes the full text of the poem Mohenjodaro, first in Urdu
and then in English translation).
The Urdu - speaking writers expressed their solidarity with the Language Movement.
Anjuman Tarraq - e - Urdu (Organisation for the Development of Urdu) in East
Pakistan severed its tie with the All Pakistan Anjuman for its support to the
government on language policy.The progressive Urdu students formed Anjuman
- e - Adab, a literary organisation in Dhaka University (,) to support the contemporary
progressive Bengali writers for their cultural struggle.92

And so on. Later, according to Ilias, when political movements against

General Ayub Khan gained momentum, the progressive and pro -

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161

democratic Urdu students, youths, journalists, teachers, writers and poets

mobilised themselves in their support93. The Bihari railway workers in
Syedpur Railway Workshops joined the anti - Ayub movements following
the directive of the Bihari labour leaders Azim Nomani and Mohammed
Ibrahim94. On the eve of the fateful general election in 1970, Ilias tells us,
a progressive Urdu - speaking businessman Mahmood Hasan of
Chittagong, who had been associated with progressive movements since
1952, brought out a new weekly Jaridah, whose first banner headline
Hamri Nijat Tumhari Nijat, Chey Nukat, Chey Nukat95 explicitly
supported Mujibur Rahman and the Awami Leagues Six Point Charter
for autonomy for East Pakistan96. In 1971, many Bihari labour leaders and
journalists joined the liberation movement97. He recalls that two officers
in the army - Bihari Saghir Ahmed Siddiqui and the Bengali, Nurul Islam
- were incarcerated and killed by the Pakistani Army. Two bloods he
tells us, had mingled together to live in union98, graphically demonstrating
the syncretistic character of the freedom struggle and, (he suggests
implicitly), the true spirit of the Bangladeshi nation.
At every stage in the history of the nations struggles for liberation,
Ilias therefore insists, Biharis had played a role. From the earliest days of
the battle against British rule, Biharis had been at the forefront of every
struggle. During the movement for Bangladeshs freedom, Biharis had
joined with Bengalis in fighting Pakistans oppression. While some had
admittedly been misled, coerced or inveigled into joining the Pakistani
army and its depredations on the people of Bangladesh, the communitys
true leaders - intellectuals and writers - had fought and died for the nation.
So too had the hard - working Bihari masses, notably the railway workers
of Syedpur. Here again we see Ilias strategy of incorporating Bihari
workers into the progressive history of the larger community.
So we see that Ilias skilfully weaves Biharis into the narrative of the
making of the Bangladeshi nation. But also of considerable significance is
the way in which he seeks to align his community with specific sections
of Bangladeshs polity. As highlighted in the passages cited above, Ilias
repeatedly uses the adjective progressive to describe his list of Urdu speaking Bangladeshi heroes. Clearly, he is seeking to enlist the support
of similarly progressive segments of local Bengali society to achieve the
rehabilitation of his community as true members of the Bangladeshi nation.
Here again we see at work the subtle and complex mechanics of
assimilation. Just as Choudhury positioned his community as part of a
certain kind of Britain, Ilias positions his Biharis as part of a certain kind
of Bangladesh - one that is progressive in a specifically South Asian
meaning of that term: secular, anti - imperialist, egalitarian, tolerant and

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JOYA CHATTERJI

inclusive, one that celebrates the pluralism and syncretism of South Asias
faiths and cultures. There is a subtle suggestion that this progressive vision
of Bangladesh has as yet to be to be realised, and Ilias hints at the prospect
of Urdu - speaking Bangladeshis joining with like - minded Bengalis in
its construction and achievement. Just as Choudhury seeks to fashion
Britain, so too Ilias constructs the community of Urdu speaking
Bangladeshis while also seeking to join with progressive elements in
the host country to reconstruct Bangladesh itself.
The myth of return and the context and politics of assimilation
The final set of questions raised by these texts has to do with their timing.
Why were they written and published when they were? What was it
about that moment of their production that made them appropriate,
relevant or even possible? And if we can uncover these conditions of
production, might we be able to speculate on the conditions in which
migrant groups in times past wrote histories or genealogies of their
communities?
The first set of answers seem to lie in generational changes within the
community. The coming of age of a generation of children who have
grown up in the diaspora (in the case of Choudhury) or in camps (in the
case of Ilias) is a compelling fact and a concern that clearly animates both
works. Choudhury refers directly in his introduction to these changes as
one of his motives in writing his book:
Now in 1993, most work - mates, room - mates and close friends of my earlier times
have passed away. Their sons and grandsons became the family head, living in this
country with their own wives and children.The new generation in our community
need to know more about us. What we were, what we are and where we come
from. It is their roots, their identity, which are unknown to many of them. That
identity is vital, no matter where they live.Without it, they will be lost99.

Ilias is less explicit about his intention to write for the young, but he too
refers repeatedly to the rise of a new generation of young people who
have grown up in camps, and who understand little about the causes of
their situation. Ilias seems keen not only to educate, but also to guide the
young towards a brighter future, which he believes, can only come if they
embrace an Urdu - speaking Bangladeshi identity.
However a deeper imperative behind their writing appears to come
from a recognition that the myth of return is no longer sustainable.
Choudhury writes poignantly of the gradual fading of the dream of going
back home:
After spending ten or fifteen years here, some Bangladeshis often decided to go

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163

home to resettle. They sold their propertieswhatever they owned, then went to
Bangladesh with a lump sum of money quite confident of a happy life.
As the dealing really started, obstacles began to emerge. He realised that, without
his conscious knowledge, he himself had picked up a lot of habits from the host
country and was used to another pattern of life.
He found himself inexperienced in many day to day matters. He needed a guide at
every step and gradually began to discover himself as a foreigner in his own home
land. Still (he kept hoping) to get over it
As time passed on, either money or health went down, if not both. Otherwise, if he
was unlucky, he might get involved with a court caseThe people stayed on until
their patience ran out.
Eventually the spirit to resettle in the home land began to fade away. The first
generation of Bangladeshi settlers might have had several tries to settle in the homeland
and failed. Some are still alive (Now) they grow a beard, dress up in white and
attend the nearest mosque and spend hours praying.Although the father and son
(may live) under the same roof, sharing the same food, with love, affection and care,
yet in their minds they are living in different worlds100.

With the long, slow and painful death of this dream, Choudhury and
many of his contemporaries had to reconcile themselves to the fact that
not only are their children not keen to return, but they themselves have
been so changed by their years abroad that they can no longer slip back
easily into life at home. Perhaps (as suggested by the references to court
cases and conflicts) they also have to recognise that home too has changed
forever. It seems that the very purpose of writing this history is to come to
terms with this loss, finally accepting that the Bangladeshi settlers are
really here in Britain to stay.
For Ilias, too, the book signals a recognition that the dream of
repatriation to Pakistan is just that - a dream. In a chapter titled The
Long March he describes, at some length and in much painful detail the
process of disillusionment by the step - motherly attitudes of the Pakistan
government101. The Red Cross had raised false hopes among Bihari
displacees that they would be repatriated to Pakistan if they signed
declarations of intention, but immediately after the Delhi Agreement of
1973, the Pakistan government made it clear that it had no intention of
accepting these stranded peoples. So too did its citizens: Pakistanis in
Sindh raised the slogan Bihari na khappan (Biharis are not wanted),
taking advantage of the known views of (Bhuttos ruling) Peoples Party
regarding Biharis.102. Despite the efforts of Naseem Khan and the SPGRC,
and the Saudi - sponsored organisation Rabita, the Government of Pakistan

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JOYA CHATTERJI

had stuck to its guns that Biharis will have to live in Bangladesh103. Ilias
urges his community to face the harsh fact that there is no place for them
anywhere else than in Bangladesh - they have been abandoned by Pakistan
and forgotten by the international community. They have no choice, he
suggests, but to come to terms with this fact and seek finally to settle and
assimilate in Bangladesh.
So both our authors reach the same conclusion at roughly the same
time - four decades after Partition and two decades after the birth of
Bangladesh. The natural cycle of generations - as has been suggested
above - helps to explain why this should be the case. But it would be
unwise to ignore the changing political context in both host countries,
which encouraged the migrant community to take bold steps towards
assimilation. The post - war decades in Britain had seen ever - harsher
rhetoric against non - white immigration (Enoch Powells rivers of blood
speech was only one example of a wider trend) and deepening racial
conflict. In 1978, Margaret Thatcher had promised in a television interview
that if elected, her party would finally see an end to immigration; in the
1980s, Asians in Thatchers Britain had experienced a further entrenchment
of institutionalised racism, particularly in the form of immigration laws
and the British Nationality Act (of 1981),104 These were also decades of
escalating racist violence105: in a poignant passage Choudhury lists the
names of victims of racist attacks killed during this period106. But in the
early 1990s when Choudhury wrote his book, the Poll Tax riots and the
defenestration of Margaret Thatcher from the leadership of the Tory party
seemed to presage moves away from the harsh attitudes towards
disadvantaged social groups in general, and immigrants in particular, which
had characterised the previous decades. New Labour was in the process
of being born, and a new alliance of the centre - left - with the support of
many sections of British society including the trades unions, the church,
the liberal intelligentsia and the media - was gaining ground.
In 1988, the publication of Rushdies Satanic Verses prompted
widespread violence among outraged Muslims in Britains inner cities.
But of no less significance (Choudhury makes no mention at all of
Rushdies book) was the publication two years earlier by the British
Government of the first policy document on Bangladeshis in Britain.
This did not merely reveal official concern about the continuing
backwardness of the Bangladeshi population, but also showed beyond a
doubt that their children were underachieving at school, faring far worse
than Indian and Pakistani children. It is significant that Choudhurys book
ends with a long discussion of the White Paper. He argues that it shocked
the community - hitherto complacent about the education of its children
- into action, and shows how British Bengalis began to enter local politics

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165

to seek to redress these issues. (Again, this bears out Brubakers insight
that assimilation for secular purposes continues to be salient for many
migrant groups107). Instead of focussing their energies solely on Bangladeshi
politics - as they had done in the past - they increasingly began to see the
good reasons to seek to influence, or even to enter, local councils. Local
politics appear to have become a vital arena for interaction between new
spokesmen for the community and particular British people: constituency
MPs, of course, but also local councillors, school head teachers, social
workers and representatives of church groups. These interactions can be
seen to have created a new space perhaps what Brah calls a diaspora
space108 in which assimilation could begin to be negotiated by certain
Bangladeshis and certain individual Britons. It is highly significant that
Caroline Adams path - breaking study of the community, Across Thirteen
Rivers and Seven Seas, came out of her interaction with Bangladeshis as a
social worker in the East End109, and that this book explains the Bengali
presence in Britain in precisely the same terms as Choudhurys does,
recalling the sacrifice of Bengali lascars in the World Wars. It is also
significant that Choudhurys book was published by the Sylheti Social
History Group in London - a small group of British liberals and left leaning Bangladeshi community leaders such as Tassaduq Ahmed - who
also is the author of the foreword to Adams book. The fact that the preface
to Roots and Tales was written, in a neat symmetry, by a leading Christian
theologian, underlines the enabling role played by such individuals, and
by civil society - based and religious groups in the processes of Bengali
assimilation.
But the most interesting feature of the last chapter of Choudhurys
book which discusses the 1986 White Paper is its suggestion that
assimilation (at least with the secular purpose of raising educational
standards of the community, and improving their access to healthcare and
housing) is a national duty for all British Bangladeshis. The community
must encourage educational achievement, he suggests, because its failure
in this regard lets the nation down. The fact that both Indian and Pakistani
children had outstripped Bengalis at school is stressed again and again. It
is as if Choudhury is seeking to play upon Bangladeshi anxieties about
their overweening neighbours in South Asia to provoke them into taking
steps to improve themselves in Britain. Thus we see the playing out of an
apparent paradox - long - distance Bangladeshi nationalism being deployed
to drive forward Bengali assimilation into British politics and British
culture.
Iliass Biharis must also be placed within the political context in which
it was published. In 2003, months before Biharis came out, Bangladeshs
Supreme Court ruled in the case of Abid Khan and others vs The

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JOYA CHATTERJI

Government of Bangladesh that the Urdu - speaking Bihari petitioners

were citizens of Bangladesh by birth, and could not be deprived of their
political rights. This landmark judgement followed other rulings in favour
of Bihari petitioners (Mukhtar Ahmed vs Government of Bangladesh, Abdul
Khaleque vs the Court of Settlement and Others, and Bangladesh vs Professor
Ghulam) where the Court found that even Bihari petitioners who had
acted against Bangladesh and collaborated with Pakistani soldiers during
and after the civil war could not be denied their rights as citizens. In their
turn, these rulings came in a context of a growing liberal pro-democracy
movement, spearheaded by civil society groups such as Ain-o-Shalish
Kendra, which began to challenge discrimination against Biharis, but also
against Hindu minority groups and Muslim women. It was supported by
sections of the academic community, notably by the Refugee Migratory
Movement Research Unit (RRMRU) at Dhaka University, which
published findings of research on the appalling conditions in which the
Bihari camp - dwellers eked out their existence. Sections of the media
took up the Bihar i cause 110 . Soon after Ilias book came out, in
Swapnabhumi (The Promised Land), documentary film - maker Tanvir
Mokkamel portrayed the community and its history in a deeply sympathetic
light. That film, made in the Bengali language, was clearly directed at the
local Bengali - speaking population, and it explained the Biharis
predicament to local Bengalis in much the same way that Caroline Adams
explained the Sylhetis history to white British readers. The fact that Ilias
mentions some of these rulings and trends in his book111 suggests that he
was extremely aware that his goal of Bihari assimilation enjoyed the support
of many progressive Bangladeshis.
Like Choudhury, Ilias identifies the pressing need for his community
to attend to its secular needs in Bangladesh. He urges it to consider the
future of the young generation here and now, a generation that want(s)
to come out of the depressed situation and overcome the agony112 instead
of hankering after repatriation to Pakistan in an indefinite future. His
particularly concern is that without better provision for their education in
Urdu and Bengali, they would fail to improve their circumstances. But he
also warns of the danger that the great Urdu literary tradition to which
they are the heirs might die forever. Once again, we see how Iliass Urdu/
Bihari nationalism sits comfortably with his case for assimilation: indeed
nationalist sentiment is deployed to advance arguments for assimilation.
He sees no contradiction between the survival and persistence of the
ethnic culture and secular incorporation into the national life of
Bangladesh.
So both projects work with and through nationalisms, but in complex
ways. Both identify the community with not one but two territorial nations

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167

(the British Isles and Bangladesh/Sylhet in the case of Choudhury;

Bangladesh and Bihar/India for Ilias). But both also construct diasporic,
de - territorialised transnations113. The British - Bangladeshi people
and Urdu - speaking Bangaldeshi people are both shown to have been
formed, in a fundamental sense, by repeated migrations: they are migrant
- nations who have successively sacralised the spaces in which they have
settled.
But it would not do to gloss over the differences between these two
projects. Choudhurys shows greater self - confidence and aspiration. It
seeks to build coalitions actively to influence the direction of British
national politics, by working through and with local government, the
church, the race relations industry114 and other civil society groups. Ilias
goals appear to be rather more modest and tentative: he seeks basic social
recognition for Urdu - speakers, to supplement the very basic political
rights they have finally achieved. Their respective projects for assimilation
appear to work within the particular spaces their authors see as being
open to them: they creatively respond to particular circumstances and
negotiate particular challenges while pursuing similar (but not identical)
goals.
Conclusion
In Roots and Tales, Choudhury recalls that when he and his friends were
young men working in Britain, they used to laugh when people described
them as immigrants. They knew that they were in Britain temporarily.
They counted the money they earned in terms of Bangladeshi takas
(rupees). Now, however, their sons didnt regard his pounds as takas to
invest in paddy farmland in Sylhet, as his father did. He preferred the
things here - red brick houses, good carpets, modern furniture, fashionable
clothes to wear and a nice car to drive. When he got a pound he spent it
as a pound in the place where it was earned and where he lived115.
This essay has attempted to uncover the processes by which takas
became pounds and sojourners became settlers. It has suggested that the
apparently clumsy and anachronistic, but in fact revealing, title of
Choudhurys book - The Roots and Tales of Bangladeshi Settlers - provides a
clue to the process by which Sylhetis became both Bangladeshis and
Settlers simultaneously. It has underscored their strong emotional bonds
with the national project in Bangladesh, but has shown how they came to
view assimilation (or true settlement) in Britain as a Bangladeshi patriotic
duty. Both community histories by Choudhury and Ilias reveal the
complexities and inwardness of the long - distance nationalisms of migrant
groups, complexities which previous studies have tended to overlook.

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JOYA CHATTERJI

Both histories suggest, moreover, that concept of hybridity calls to

be refined to capture all the subtle nuances of the cultural and political
processes by migrants try to assimilate into their new homes. For our
migrants, constructing and recognising their own cultural hybridity is a
process replete with pain and confusion, and is part and parcel of the
ending of their dreams of returning home. Their stance towards the
nation - state - whether of origin or of settlement - is also rather less
critical than some authors have suggested. Most migrants (like Choudhury
and Ilias) are caught up in a deeply asymmetrical relationship with the
host society, and their tentative steps towards assimilation can only succeed
if they are supported by civil society groups in the host country. They
have no choice but to couch their claims for rights in terms that the host
country (or sections of its political classes) deems to be legitimate. The
third space about which Bhabha has written proves, in their case at least,
to be extremely constrained.
One further question arises from this effort to compare these
community histories.This essay has investigated the circumstances in which
they were written and published, and has concluded that both were written
at the moment in the communitys history when the myth of return
could no longer be sustained. This suggests a different approach to the
foundation myths of much older migrant communities. Might these older
genealogies and myths - whether inscribed in copper and stone as in the
case of the weavers Roy and Haynes have described, or in the Huguenot
community histories Susan Lachenicht has studied, or in the tales of origin
of the Goths discussed by McKitterick, Christensen and others116 - also
have been produced at a not dissimilar juncture in their history? Might
they also have been constructed with similar purposes and goals? It may
well prove interesting to explore further the question of when and why
communities produce origin myths and legends. As Ilias and Choudhurys
histories have hinted, such explorations in their turn might help us
construct a more historically informed understanding of the mechanics
of assimilation.
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Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
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Solomos (eds), Sage Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies, London:

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Perspectives on Assimilation and its Sequels in France, Germany, and
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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1996. Remembered Villages: Representation of
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and Political Weekly. Vol. 31, No. 32, 10 August.
Chatterji, Joya. 1998. The Bengali Muslim; a contradiction in terms?,
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol.
XVI, 2, 1997; (republished in Mushirul Hasan (ed), Islam,
Communities and the Nation, New Delhi: Oxford University Press
Chatterji, Joya. (forthcoming). The Disinherited. Migrants, Minorities and
Citizenship in South Asia, Delhi: Permanent Black.
Chattopadhyay, Haraprasad. 1987. Internal Migration in India. A Case
Study of Bengal. Calcutta: South Asia Books.
Christensen, A. S. 2002. Cassiodorus, Jordanes and the History of the
Goths. Studies in a Migration Myth, Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Eaton, Richard. 1993. The Rise of Islam on the Bengal Frontier, 1204 1760, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ho, Engseng. 2006. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across
the Indian Ocean, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press.
Horowitz, Daniel. 2003. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Ghosh, Papiya. 2007. Partition and the South Asian Diaspora. Extending
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Glazer, Nathan. and Moynihan, Daniel. 1963. Beyond the Melting Pot:

170

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The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York
City, Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press., cited in Brubaker, The Return
of Assimilation, p. 532.
Lachenicht, Susanne. 2007. Huguenot Immigrants and the Formation of
National Identities, 1548 - 1787, Historical Journal, Vol. 50:2.
Leach, Kenneth. 2001. Caroline Adams: youth worker devoted to the
welfare of Londons Bangladeshi community, The Guardian,
(Obituaries), 23 June.
Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Markovits, Claude. 2006. et al (eds.), Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures
in South Asia, 1750 - 1950, London: Anthem Press.
Quddus, Md Ruhul. 6 October 2007, Recognising citizenship right in
The Independent (Dhaka)
Rose, S. O. 2002. Race, Empire and British Wartime Identity, 1939 45, Historical Research, Vol. 74, No. 184.
Roy, Tirthankar and Douglas Haynes. 1999. Conceiving Mobility:
Migration of Handloom Weavers in Precolonial and Colonial India,
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 36 (1).
Tololyan, Khachig. 2003. Elites and Institutions in the Armenian
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Torpey, John. 2000. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship
& the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turack, Daniel. 1972. The Passport in International Law, Lexington:
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Salter, Joseph. 2010. The Asiatic in England: Sketches of Sixteen YearsWork
among Orientals, London: New Press
Joseph, Salter. 1895. The East in the West: Work among the Asiatics and
Africans in London. Michigan: University of Michigan Library.
Salter, Mark. 2003. Rights of Passage: The Passport in International
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Schiller, Nina Glick and Georges Eugene Fouron. 2001. Georges woke
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Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 2003.The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma,
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Uddin, Sufia M. 2006.Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, ethnicity, and
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Visram, Rosina. 1986. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes. Indians in Britain 1700
- 1947, London: Pluto Pr.

MIGRATION MYTHS AND THE MECHANICS OF ASSIMILATION

171

Waters, C. 1997. Dark Strangers in our Midst: Discourses on Race and

Nation in Britain, 1947 - 63, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 36, 2.
Waters,C. 1994. J.B. Priestly in Susan Pederson and Peter Mandler (eds.)
After the Victorians. Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern
Britain, London: Routledge
Wavell to Lawrenece, Pethick. 1980. 22 December 1946 in N. Mansergh
and E. R. Lumby (eds.) The Transfer of Power,Vol IX, p. 140. London:
HMSO
Weight, R. Patriots. 2003. National Identity in Britain, 1940 - 2000, London:
I. B. Tauris
Zahur, A.B.M. S. 2007. Enrolling Stranded Pakistanis, Dhaka: The Daily
Star, 1 October.
Zamindar, Vazira. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South
Asia:Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, Chicago: Columbia University
Press.
Zolberg, Aristide. and Benda, Peter. 2001. eds, Global Migrants, Global
Refugees: Problems and Solutions, New York and Oxford: Columbia
University Press.
NOTES
1. The research on which this essay is based was funded by the UK Arts and
Humanities Research Council under the auspices of the Bengal Diaspora Project
and the Diasporas, Identities and Migration programme. I am grateful to my
colleague, Claire Alexander, for her advice; and to Alan Strathern,Tim Hochstrasser,
David Washbrook, Peter Mandler and Rosamond McKitterick for pointing me
to relevant historical literature.
2. In this context, it is an excellent example of the histories of the vanquished
which Schivelbusch describes. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat.
On NationalTrauma, Mourning and Recovery (translated by Jefferson Chase), London,
2003.
3. Rogers Brubaker, The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on
Assimilation and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States, Ethnic
and Racial Studies,Vol. 24 No 4 July 2001, p. 540.
4. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot:The Negroes, Puerto
Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, Cambridge MA, 1963, cited in
Brubaker,The Return of Assimilation, p. 532.
5. Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001; Khachig
Tololyan,Elites and Instituions in the ArmenianTransnation, International Migration
Review,Vol. 37, 3, 2003; (also see Alejandro Portes conclusing remarks in the same
special issue of IMR); Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora. Sikh
Cultural Formations in an Imperial World, Durham and London, 2006.
6. Migration: a Welcome Opportunity, RSA Migration Commission Report , 2005
7. Claude Markovits et al (eds.), Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia,

172

JOYA CHATTERJI

1750 - 1950, London, 2006.

8. Homi Bhabha, The Third Space, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity. Community,
Culture and Difference, London, 1990; Homi Bhahba, The Location of Culture, London,
1994;Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, London, 1996;Arjun Appadurai, Modernity
at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, 1996. For a critical
discussion of the concept of hybridity, see Claire Alexander, Diaspora and
Hybridity, in P. Hill Collins & J. Solomos (eds), Handbook of Race and Ethnic
Studies, London (forthcoming).
9. James Clifford, Routes.Travel andTranslation in the LateTwentieth Century, Cambridge
Mass., 1997.
10. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State,
Cambridge 2000. Also see Mark Salters Rights of Passage: The Passport in
International Relations, Boulder, 2003; and Daniel Turacks The Passport in
International Law, Lexington, 1972.
11. On the control of borders and membership in South Asia, see Vazira Zamindar,
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories,
Chicago, 2007; and Joya Chatterji, The Disinherited. Migrants, Minorities and Citizenship
in South Asia, (Delhi: Permanent Black, forthcoming).
12. Aristide Zolberg and Peter Benda, eds, Global Migrants, Global Refugees: Problems
and Solutions, New York and Oxford, 2001
13. Choudhury, Roots and Tales, p. 10.
14. Ibid, p. viii
15. Deliberately or otherwise, it evokes Bankim Chandra Chatterjees famous verse
Bandemataram, which describes the motherland as a place of sweet waters, ripe
fruit and cool breezes (sujalam, suphalam, malayaja sheetalam).
16. Roots and Tales, p. 11.
17. Roots and Tales, p. 12.
18. Roots and Tales, p. 14.
19. Roots and Tales, p. 17.
20. Joya Chatterji,The Bengali Muslim; a contradiction in terms?, Comparative Studies
of South Asia,Africa and the Middle East,Vol. XVI, 2, 1997; (republished in Mushirul
Hasan (ed), Islam, Communities and the Nation, New Delhi, 1998.
21. Roots and Tales, p. 20, 26.
22. Gour Gobindos act of infanticide resembles, of course, the evil acts committed
by King Herod and also the wicked King Kansa of Mathura in Hindu mythology.
Kansa was the maternal uncle of Lord Krishna, who imprisoned his sister and
killed each one of Krishnas siblings at birth.
23. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam on the Bengal Frontier, 1204 - 1760, Berkeley,
1993.
24. Also see Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim. Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian
Ocean, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2006.
25. Roots and Tales, p. xii.
26. Biharis, p. ix.
27. Biharis, p. 17.
28. Biharis, p. 25.
29. Biharis, p. 16.

MIGRATION MYTHS AND THE MECHANICS OF ASSIMILATION

30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.

44.
45.
46.

47.
48.
49.

50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.

173

Biharis, p. 18.
Biharis, p. 17.
Biharis, p. 17 - 19.
Biharis, P. 18.
Roots and Tales, p. 21.
Biharis, p. 17.
Biharis, p. 25.
Ibid.
Routes and Tales, p. ix.
Roots and Tales, p. 31.
Roots and Tales , p. 33.
Roots and Tales, p. 43.
Roots and Tales, p. 50
Joseph Salter, The Asiatic in England. Sketches of SixteenYears of Work among Orientals,
London, 1873; Joseph Salter, The East in the West. Work among the Asiatics and
Africans in London, London, 1895; see also RosinaVisram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes.
Indians in Britain 1700 - 1947, London, 1986.
G. Balachandran,Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen, 1890 - 1945, in
Markovits et al (eds.), Mobile People.
Caroline Adams,Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers. Life Stories of Pioneer Settlers in
Britain, London, 1987, p. 54, 64.
In 1962, the Conservative Government Enacted the Commonwealth Immigration
Act, which restricted the entry to Britain of migrants from the Commonwealth
by instituting a new voucher system. This led to a spurt in migration from
Commonwealth countries, as many migrants from countries such as Pakistan
rushed to bring close relatives over to Britain before the Act came into force.
Bangladeshis in Britain, Vols 1 and 2, UK House of Commons Home Affairs
Committee, HMSO, 1986.
The community was divided by its attitudes towards Pakistan before 1971; since
then supporters of different regimes and parties have frequently clashed.
It is always difficult to verify the numbers of those killed in riots, but 50,000 is
clearly a very exaggerated figure. Lord Wavell, then the Viceroy of India, guessed
that between 5000 and 10000 people lost their lives.Wavell to Pethick Lawrenece,
22 December 1946, in N. Mansergh and E. R. Lumby (eds.) The Transfer of Power,
Vol IX, London, 1980, p. 140. See the discussion of numbers killed and displaced
by the violence in Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora. Extending
the Subcontinent, London, New York and Delhi, 2007, pp. 2 - 3.
Biharis, p. 26.
Biharis, pp. x, xi.
Biharis, p. xiii.
Biharis, p. ix.
Biharis, p. ix.
See Haraprasad Chattopadhyay, Internal Migration in India.A Case Study of Bengal,
Calcutta, 1987.
Daniel Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Berkeley, 2001. Interestingly, the 1946
Bihar killings feature in Horowitzs book as an exemplar of this type of violence.

174

JOYA CHATTERJI

57. See, for instance, the account of the foundation myths of mobile weaving
communities in Tirthankar Roy and Douglas Haynes, Conceiving Mobility:
Migration of Handloom Weavers in Precolonial and Colonial India, Indian Economic
and Social History Review, 1999; and Dipesh Chakrabarty,Remembered Villages:
Representation of Hindu - Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of Partition,
Economic and Political Weekly, 1996.
58. Chris Waters and other historians of British national identity have argued after
the war, British national culture was reconstructed to include the working classes
in the nation, and the war was the crucible in which this new identity was
forged. See C.Waters, Dark Strangers in our Midst: Discourses on Race and
Nation in Britain, 1947 - 63, Journal of British Studies,Vol. 36, 2, 1997.Also see C.
Waters,J.B. Priestly in Susan Pederson and Peter Mandler (eds.) After the Victorians.
Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, London, 1994; S. O. Rose,
Race, Empire and British Wartime Identity, 1939 - 45, Historical Research,Vol. 74,
184 (2002); R.Weight, Patriots. National Identity in Britain, 1940 - 2000, London,
2003. Joanna Lumleys recent campaign in support of the Gurkhas claim to
settle in Britain also rested on their support for Britain on the battlefield.
59. Roots and Tales, p. 1x.
60. Roots and Tales, pp. 90, 118 - 20.
61. Roots and Tales, p. 196.
62. Roots and Tales, p. 177.
63. Roots and Tales, p. 179.
64. Brubaker, The Return of Assimilation, p. 543 - 44.
65. Roots and Tales, p. 195.
66. Roots and Tales, p. 192.
67. Roots and Tales, p. 195.
68. On long - distance nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison.
Politics Culture and the Nation, London, 1998, and Nina Glick Schiller and Georges
Eugene Fouron, Georges woke up Laughing. Long - distance Nationalism and the
Search for Home, Chapel Hill, 2001.
69. Biharis, pp. 19 - 20
70. Biharis, p. 66.
71. Biharis, p. 60
72. Biharis, pp. 67 - 68
73. Biharis, p. 61.
74. Biharis, p. 88.
75. Biharis, p. 85.
76. Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, pp. 3 - 13.
77. Biharis, p. xi.
78. Biharis, p. 66.
79. Biharis, p. 68.
80. Biharis, p. 92.
81. Biharis, p. 93.
82. Biharis, p. 95.
83. Biharis, p. 114.
84. Biharis, p. 132.

MIGRATION MYTHS AND THE MECHANICS OF ASSIMILATION

175

85. Biharis, p. 133.

86. See Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora, pp. 57 - 122, Abingdon,
2007.
87. Biharis, p. 151.
88. Biharis, p. 154.
89. Biharis, pp. 155 - 6.
90. Ekushey, literally the 21st, recalls the date when Bengali students protesting
against Pakistans language policy were killed by the police. It is still
commemorated as Shaheed Dibas (or Martyrs Day) in contemporary Bangladesh.
91. Biharis, p. 75.Also see Sufia M. Uddin: Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, ethnicity,
and language in an Islamic nation, Chapel Hill, 2006.
92. Biharis, pp. 77 - 78. (emphasis added).
93. Biharis, p. 94.
94. Biharis, p. 95.
95. Literally,Our salvation, your salvation, Six Points, Six Points. Emphasis added.
96. Biharis, p. 102.
97. Biharis, p. 118.
98. Biharis, p. 119. Emphasis added.
99. Roots and Tales, pp. ix - x.
100. Roots and Tales, pp. 219 - 223.
101. Biharis, p. 150.
102. Biharis, pp. 150 - 51.
103. Biharis, p. 153.
104. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 37 - 38.
105. Ibid., p. 39.
106. East End - Altab Ali was knifed on his way from work. Isaak Ali was murdered
near his home. Southall Gurdip Singh Chigger was stabbed to death. Newham
- Akhtar Ali Baig was killed. Hackney - Michael Ferreira was murdered.
Liverpool Street Station Famous Mgutshini, an African student was knifed.
Windsor - Sewa Singh was killed. Leamington Spa - racist threw petrol over
an Asian woman and burnt her to death. South London Fenton Ogbogbo
lost his life. Swindon Malcolm Chambers and Mohammed Arif were murdered
by racists. Leeds - a Sikh woman burnt to death in her home when it caught
fire following a racist attack.Walthamstow - Mrs Perveen Khan was sleeping in
her home, with her three children, when racists set fire to the house, she and
her children lost their lives. Roots and Tales, p. 193.
107. Brubaker, The Return of Assimilation?
108. Brah defines it as a place of intersectionality and confluence: where multiple
subject positions are juxtaposed, proclaimed or disavowed; where the permitted
and the prohibited perpetually interrogate, and where the accepted and the
transgressive imperceptibly mingle even while these syncretic forms may be
disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition. Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 208.
109. Kenneth Leach, Caroline Adams: youth worker devoted to the welfare of
Londons Bangladeshi community, The Guardian, (Obituaries), 23 June 2001.
110. See, for instance, Md Ruhul Quddus, Recognising citizenship right in The
Independent (Dhaka), 6 October 2007, A.B.M. S. Zahur, Enrolling Stranded

176

111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.

JOYA CHATTERJI

Pakistanis, The Daily Star, 1 October 2007;Quazi Quamruzzaman et al,The

camp - dwelling Biharis and Bangladesh, New Age, 17 September 2007.
See the chapter on Legal Aspects, pp. 191 - 5, and the reference to Dr C. R.
Abrar of RRMRU on p. 157 of Biharis.
Biharis, pp. 155 - 6.
As in Tololyans Armenian Transnation.
Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 28.
Roots and Tales, p. 223.
Roy and Haynes, Conceiving Mobility; Susanne Lachenicht, Huguenot
Immigrants and the Formation of National Identities, 1548 - 1787, Historical
Journal,Vol. 50:2 (2007);A. S. Christensen, Cassiodorus, Jordanes and the History of
the Goths. Studies in a Migration Myth, Copenhagen, 2002.

THE STRANGE HOMELINESS OF THE NIGHT:

SPECTRAL SPEECH AND THE DALIT
PRESENT IN C. AYYAPPANS STORIES
Udaya Kumar

Dusk is my favourite time; next to that, the night. When dawn breaks, it is as
if you have lost something.A sort of homesickness. Sometimes, you are sitting on
a low branch of a tree, your pals lift you up without warning, and you feel a
quivering rush of fear inside. I feel like that when the night ends. Days feel
like an unrelenting spell of anxiety. From twilight, consolation begins.
C. AYYAPPAN, in an interview1

C. Ayyappan (b. 1949), one of the foremost Dalit writers in Malayalam,

passed away in August 2011. Although Ayyappan began writing short fiction
in Malayalam since 1960s, it is only in recent years that he began to be
known and read widely. Ayyappans early stories were read as belonging
to a modernist imaginary when they first appeared; the unquiet destinies
of his protagonists were assimilated into the familiar idioms of an obscure
modernist angst. However, Ayyappan did not inhabit the literary space of
modernism very well. As existentialist idioms gave way in modernist
writing in Kerala to a more publicly vigorous ethics of radical politics
after Naxalbari and the emergency, Ayyappan treaded a different historical
path alone, staying away from the glare and eventually slipping into the
night.2 However, the luminosity of a different literary climate has begun
to fall on his pages now, giving them a strangely unseasonal legibility.
Today, Ayyappan is seen by many as the most significant Dalit fiction
writer in Malayalam.When he began writing in the late sixties, the category
of Dalit writing was not available to writers and readers in Kerala. The
dominant idioms of resistance in writing and politics came from diverse
idioms of left politics. Lower caste social reform movements, especially
the successful Ezhava movement and the nationalist and left movements,
appear to have prevented the public recognition of an autonomous domain
of Dalit articulation, especially in the decades after independence and the
formation of a Kerala state. TKC Vaduthala and Paul Chirakkarode, for

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UDAYA KUMAR

instance, were not read as Dalit writers but as writers who focused on the
experiences of certain disadvantaged sections in society. The past decade,
however, has seen the emergence of distinctively new idioms of Dalit
politics in Kerala, and this has also generated a new cultural politics that
questions the foundational narratives of Keralas modernity.3 The new
visibility of Ayyappans texts has an intimate relation to this moment.
Nonetheless, something unseasonal marks Ayyappans art, and this
prevents him from being the toast of the times. The bodies and selves
staged in Ayyappans literary apparatus are forged in what may be designated
as the darkroom of social time. Darkness here should not be seen as the
constraint necessary for working on photographic plates inscribed by light,
to render them legible and restore them to the day, as in the work of
memory in literary modernism. Ayyappans art is more like nocturnal
photography, or if we were to attempt greater precision a spectrography
of the night. It works precisely by impeding a daytime reading of what is
recognized as Dalit experience, and issues of masculinity and memory
figure centrally in the strange temporality of this interruption.
Spectres haunt Ayyappans stories: dead people appear before the
protagonists of these stories to accompany them and speak to them,
blurring the boundaries between the present and the past, the everyday
and the exceptional. The time of the ghosts begins at midnight, marked
by the siren from a distant factory; they disappear with the break of dawn,
when the first roosters crow.4 Ghosts are not mere visitors to the world of
the protagonists; they are the principal narrators in many of Ayyappans
stories. Links between death and story telling offer a familiar theme in
many literary traditions: story telling may ward off death, or rather postpone
it night by night, as in the Arabian Nights. But death also authorizes the
narratability of life, functioning as the sign under which lives acquire
completeness. This is one of the senses in which biographies are
thanatographies; and, wrapped within the folds of every autobiography,
lies the autothanatographic sign, the self-authorizing signature of death
and completion. How should we rethink this for mal, structural
dependence of all autobiography on an imagined death, in the case of
Dalit writing, where if we are to infer from scholarly studies on the
topic autobiography seems to have the status not of just one genre
among many, but of something of the order of a paradigm?
Ayyappans spectral narratives often adopt the first person, testamentary
form, frequently and powerfully, invoking the autobiographical as the
enabling instance of articulation for their Dalit characters. However, death
in the formal sense of a conclusion to temporal unravelling is insufficient
to enable the acquisition of posthumous powers of narration. It is a certain

THE STRANGE HOMELINESS OF THE NIGHT: SPECTRAL SPEECH

179

species of death inauspicious and unmitigated what in Malayalam is

usually called durmaranam or bad death that causes ghosts to be born.
Accidents, murders, executions, lives cut off thus before it has run its course
such forms of durmaranam constitute the dead person as a victim, a prey
to the unjust will of others or the brute and contingent force of the external
world. In such instances, the forced exit from life is the act of injustice
against which the spectres continued desire for speech and life struggles.
The dead persons spirit returns to the world again and again to fulfil
desires unrealized in life, an appeasement the form of which needs to be
determined anew.
The world of deaths and spirits and rituals of propitiation has occupied
an important place in the cultural history of lower caste practices in Kerala.
Rituals like the Theyyattam, for instance, have been studied as
commemorating the unjust killing of lower caste subjects, invoking them
as Gods and propitiating them.5 Such ritual commemoration is seen on
the one hand as effecting an admission of injustice and a reconciliation,
and on the other inscribing a history of oppression and injustice which
later on is mobilized by secular, radical political projects.
The ghostly narrators of Ayyappans stories do not quite fit this model;
they are not victims of murders or accidents. They are the authors of their
own deaths; putting an end to ones own life the voluntary embrace of
a spectral existence is what allows them to speak. Their autothanatography is not just retrospective; it looks forward, scripting forms of volition
and action that extend into the future. Suicides in Ayyappans world indicate
a wilful embrace of ghostly life. And spectrality, in these Dalit narrators, is
the very condition of their voice and agentiveness.
I use the words ghost and spectre with some diffidence: these
words are not entirely inaccurate, but spectral terminology crosses language
borders with difficulty. The Malayalam words Pretham and Bhutham
appear in Ayyappans stories. There is another word in Malayalam
Badha - which I shall invoke to clarify the circuits of spectral inhabitation
and narration. The word Badha has two senses: one the literal minimum
threshold of meaning refers to the process of affecting someone or
something. For example, a building that has caught fire is under
agnibadha. In the context of spectral transactions the word Badha or
Prethabhadha refers to possession by the spirits of the dead. In a related
second sense, the word Badha also refers to that spirit which possesses
you: the ghost that enters human bodies, possessing them and taking
control over their actions. The currency of this word, especially in its
second sense, is linked to the ritual practices of forcing the spirits of
ancestors or other unquiet dead to leave the bodies they possess

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UDAYA KUMAR

(ozhippikkal). The word possession carries burdensome resonances from

the history of anthropology and religion. By invoking a handful of
Malayalam words, I do not intend to secure a space of meaning that is
immune from these histories; however, these words in Ayyappans stories
rub against the borders of such histories with an almost haptic, uncanny,
vernacular force.6 This essays aim, among other things, is to sense the
traction of that force.
The spectral storytellers in Ayyappans stories are possessing spirits or
badhakal. However, they defy all efforts directed at their eradication or
propitiation. Let us consider the beginning of the story Kavalbhutam
(Guardian Spirit):
Devi, it is me.The self-same evil spirit who has just quit your body, according to your
parents and the jewelled magician they summoned. But I cannot leave you. In
occupying your body and your hair and your planetary house, I have an aim.You are
not aware of this or its seriousness.That is why you had to suffer so many thrashings
today. Perched on a banana branch, I watched the grey haired magician beat you
until three canes broke into pieces. All that you told them were inflammable lies. Hit
first, ask later: this was the shamans method. Thus, at the end of your tether, you
shouted out all the evil deaths that you knew or had heard about. Ittuli who
drowned herself, Elamma who died when the rice boiled over on to her, Perekkattu
Kuttan who was trampled to death by the elephant, the spirit of Chothikunju from
the south how many lies you told them! None of these dead were in your body.
But you were trapped when the magician asked for evidence for each spirits leaving
you. Scared that you may die from flogging, somehow you thought of me. No way
could I come close to you; yet I made you say that a branch of the banana tree
would break as the sign of each evil spirit going away. Accordingly I broke at the
right moment branches one after the other including the one on which I had
perched.You were saved for the time being.Then I made up my mind: I need to tell
you certain things.7

Badha or possession or, to be more precise, spectral inhabitation is

not domination or taking over; the possessing spirit or the Badha views it
as a relationship between two subjectivities. The spectral speech in many
of Ayyappans stories is addressed by the Badha to the subject it possesses.
This address does not seek to rouse the possessed subject to action, as
Hamlets father arguably tried to do, but to explain the rationale of the
actions being performed by the Badha, especially why it has inhabited
the body of the addressee. The mode of self-explanation allows the spectre
to give an account of itself, to engage in autobiography or autospectrography.We shall later see that the discursive format of the explanatory
note, clearly visible in these narratives, has in Ayyappans writing a life
that extends beyond ghosts and ghostliness.
Most of the spirits who tell stories in Ayyappans fiction are men. The

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181

striking exception is Prethabhashanam or Ghost-Speech.8 In this story

a woman spirit, who has come to stay in the body of her betrayer-lovers
younger sister to induce incest between them, explains to the possessed
girl the logic of her actions. In some of the stories female ghosts appear in
the world of living male protagonists.9 Spirits carry their gendered identities
and personal histories with them a strangely immaterial experience of
embodiment.
Spectral inhabitation in Ayyappans fictional world mobilizes several
attributes of ghostliness familiar to us: the past and the present, objects of
insufficient and impossible mourning, melancholically introjected losses.
All these lines of thinking consider the ghostly domain as that where the
unfinished business with the past is played out. Ayyappans stories, however,
seem to work with a different sense of time. Stories like Kavalbhutam
or Prethabhashanam present the ghosts as unrelenting in their grip over
time. Life itself takes place under the effect of the ghosts; their domain is
lived out as an unsurpassable present.
Kavalbhutam concludes with the ghost outlining his plans for Devi,
who spurned his love:
Your threat is ridiculous.When you say that you will kill yourself and that then there
will be two souls, yours and your husbands, and that both of you will get together
to tie me down, I feel like laughing. My Devi, are you such a fool? You think that I
stay on your body on account of my anger at your husband, dont you? I am not
angry with him any more I dont have anything anymore to ask that fool. But,
dont you long to die! It is to ensure that you dont die that I have kept around you
this vigil as strong as fate.You should continue to live. Become a living lesson to both
you and your lover. This is your ninth month of pregnancy. There is a saying that
there is no difference between the ninth and the tenth. But, for you, there will no
difference between the tenth and the eleventh. You will be pregnant for ever and
ever.You will die at the age of sixty-seven, delivering a dead foetus! Until then, you
will live in constant suffocation.Thinking about you, your lover and your cowardly
husband hiding in your womb should also struggle for breath.10

The name for this unrelenting relationship of binding and suffocation, in

the world of C. Ayyappans male ghosts, is love.
I tell you all this in such detail only because of my love for you. Love is such a
terrible deity! It is the ember of that terror that keeps my soul cool. But sometimes,
from my eyes sparking fire red with rage, a tear trickles down. Then, I long to howl
with earth-shaking loudness: Devi, why, but why, did our life shatter like a clay pot
thrown on the rock?11

Rejection, the suffocating presence of desires that do not know how to

articulate themselves, humiliation, awkwardness, the sense of a love that
seems akin to murder the world of affect that orients ghostly agency is
marked by all this. Ayyappans readers will find them recur in the world

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of the living too, sometimes making it difficult to differentiate between

the living and the dead. Dreams and nightmares, insanity, the blurring of
perception in nocturnal travel these are recurrent sites of confusion
between the logic of the living and the dead. In Arundhatidarsananyayam,
nightmares come to haunt a young Dalit graduate, waiting for employment:
a beautifully dressed woman appears before the dreamers eyes his eyes
move from her feet slowly upwards through her body to her face; as they
reach her face, the dreamer wakes up with a loud, chilling cry.12 A careful
orchestration of suggestions indicates the appearance of fangs from the
desirable lips of the dream woman. In order to escape this horrific
nightmare, the graduate begins to read novels, and this brings him close
to his beautiful upper caste neighbour, Geethu S. Nair, an enthusiastic
reader of novels and the relentless author of tedious short stories. The
relay of affect in the story would eventually replace the woman in the
dreams with Geethu, but when the identification takes place in the dream,
her face falls off like a dolls head, presaging Geethus own subsequent
suicide in the story. In Ekalochanam the protagonist, who like Ayyappan,
is the Principal of a college, is travelling home for Onam. But he boards
the wrong bus, eventually gets to his native village instead of his urban
marital home where he usually lives. He arrives in the middle of the
night in an unfamiliar landscape, and by sheer good luck finds a childhood
friend who now runs a teashop where he offers him a space to stay. When
he wakes up before the break of dawn, he finds his dead mother offering
him tea, and unfamiliar girl smiling at him, figures who had appeared in
his dreams during his nap in the bus. This unfamiliar girl accompanies
him to the bus stop, makes love to him on the way as they huddle together
on a veranda away from the rain, and reveals herself to be a young girl
whose love he had betrayed in the past. As he boards the bus, the dawn
breaks, the time of the ghosts comes to an end, and she disappears, and
the colours of her fleeting figure hint at a confusion between her and his
mother.13
Dreams and disorienting spaces and journeys are sites where the
boundaries between the ghostly and the diurnal become permeable. The
protagonist of Bhranthu tries to police them with great success.14 His
sister, suffering from insanity, is being taken to a mental hospital by a
Panchayat member and some other well-wishers. When they come to his
house, the protagonist pretends to see nothing, making one of them ask
him if he too has gone mad! The story takes the form of his explanation:
just as the ghosts explain their actions, this sane protagonist his name is
Krishnan Kutty - explains the rationale behind his strange behaviour. He
cannot risk his status in society by admitting to the existence of his insane
sister and his poor, unsophisticated family whose identity as Dalits will be

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183

evident to any observer. He would like to visit his sister in hospital, but
what really is the point of visiting an insane person who cannot even
recognize the visitor?
This story, like that told in Ekalochanam, may be identified as
belonging to a second set of narratives in Ayyappans work. Unlike the
narratives of ghostly spirits who live through their acts of possession over
the living, these stories are told by the living. At an apparent level the
stories in this second group are not about victims but about Dalit men
who seem to have succeeded in life, obtained jobs, and married into
families with higher material and cultural capital. Their estrangement from
their original families and the community, and the accompanying sense
of guilt and awkwardness, are the avenues through which these stories
explore the Dalit question. Krishnan Kutty, the narrator of Bhranthu, is
as we saw a study in this fragile pathos of sincerity and betrayal.
Sarvajnanaya Kathakrthum Oru Pavam Kathapathravum begins by
rehearsing the other side of these affects: after the farewell party on the
day of his retirement, the protagonist becomes increasingly suspicious of
the behaviour of his colleagues: did the familiar rituals of the farewell
function conceal suppressed upper caste sarcasm?15 His way of getting
back is to repeat the same gesture, and to write a novel to humiliate one
of his own Dalit acquaintances by highlighting his inferior caste status.
Yes, I will write a novel. And dig up and expose your history. I want to
know from where you got your fair skin and light eyes. You know why?
For no reason. Just like that.16 Thus concludes the explanatory note of
this successful Dalit subject.
One of Ayyappans stor ies has An Explanatory Note (Oru
Visadikaranakkurippu) for its title.17 In this brief text, the narrator, a
government employee who participated in a public protest march
demanding a rise in wages explains why all the protesters fled in fear
without any apparent provocation. The note clarifies that when the march
was in progress a group of beggars and lepers and prostitutes onlookers
from the street joined them in support and started shouting the same
slogans. The presence of these real subalterns is felt as an unbearable
physical threat by the protesters, and eventually they flee from their
presence. Ayyappans stories of the living, using the form of the explanatory
note, effectively rehearse a deep disorientation in their protagonists
occupancy of the social domain. Deception, betrayal, and dissimulation
plague instances of success, turning the inhabitation of normalized middle
class life into nightmares of anxiety. Assimilation is accompanied by a
cycle of disavowal and humiliation.
These stories allow us to see the intervention that Ayyappans work
makes in our conception of humiliation, an experience and an emotion

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UDAYA KUMAR

which has received considerable scholarly attention in the context of Dalit

studies in recent years.18 Studies of humiliation have at times absorbed
this experience into a general grammar of victimization and injustice.
This perspective on humiliation views it in light of normative frames,
comparing the present act in relation to a desirable configuration of social
norms located either in the past or in a putative future.19 However, this
moral reading of humiliation comes into conflict with the specific affect
that is produced in instances of humiliation, which is shame.20 Humiliation
comprises acts of enforced shame.
A moral framework is often used in discussions of shame as well,
linking it to self-esteem and indirectly to moral self-indictment. Levinass
and Agambens discussions of shame show the inadequacy of this
approach.21 A poor man in tattered clothes may feel humiliated by his
appearance in spite of his awareness that poverty is nothing to be ashamed
of. An alternative way of understanding shame and humiliation is to
consider them as instances of improper, undesired visibility; the subject is
forced into a field of vision which he or she is unable to occupy or flee
from. The paradigmatic example of this can be found in enforced nudity:
the stripped body cowers, making the gesture of wanting to disappear
into itself, to erase itself from the field of visibility. Humiliation here is the
simultaneous experience of the impossibilities of escaping or inhabiting
ones own body.22
The field of visibility that constitutes the grid of our mutual exposure
and thus our identities is the domain of the social, constructed through
rituals of mutual exhibition and recognition. This field is destabilized in
the experience of forced, improper exposure. The anxious narratives of
assimilation in Ayyappans work reveal the faultlines of the social, which
promises inclusion at the cost of a deep disavowal. The lines of
disorientation extend from skin colour and beauty and marks of
community and family to documented caste identity itself. They open up
a world without positivities, a conflicting crosshatch of images and affects.
Nocturnal journey on a Moolamattam fast passenger bus can open this
up, as can the cursory knowing glances exchanged between colleagues at
a farewell party. The language of the social that undergirds progressivist
developmentalist narratives slips away, opening a chasm of silence or
incoherent speech before which it abandons the subject.
This way of looking at shame and humiliation also opens up the
space of the spectral, bringing us back to the initial discussions in this
paper. The ghost narrators of Ayyappans world draw their ability to act
from their lack of accommodation in the world. The recurrent trope of
suicidal agency may need to be understood in this light. Spectrality stages,
as if through reflection in a distorted mirror, the problem of bodily

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185

unaccommodation that we encountered in the structure of shame. Instances

of possession in Ayyappans work foreground an idiom of violent
inhabitation, where vengefulness and desire become difficult to distinguish
from each other. It would be simplistic to see in the logic of possession in
Ayyappans work a direct reversal of caste violence, the turning of the
perpetrator into the victim. More often than not, it is women of ones
own caste that the Badha turns against. This is true of Prethabhashanam
too, where the narrator is a female spirit. In this is sketched Ayyappans
tragic configuration of love, where it becomes the fiercest and most violent
way of connecting.
Ayyappans fictional work draws deeply from the practices and beliefs
of the Pulaya community in the part of central Kerala where he grew up.
The sound world of sirens and the frightening shrieks of birds that float
across the fields, the rituals of exorcism of Badhas and propitiation of
ancestors, and the stories he grew up listening to, of innumerable betrayals
and brutal punishments, of executions of untouchable lovers of caste
Hindus of Christians they supplied Ayyappan with crucial elements of
his narrative apparatus. Ayyappan speaks about the years he spent as a
young boy with his grandmother. Like the possessed subject in
Kavalbhutham who breaks into a litany of unquiet Dalit souls, she could
recount the stories of all bad deaths (durmaranam) in the area. These stories
were so powerful and frightening that young Ayyappan would cover his
face with a sheet as he listened to them; the sheet would be drenched in
sweat soon out of sheer fright.23 Many of these tales get into Ayyappans
stories. Even the most benign reworking of a folk narrative in his work,
Elumban Kochatthan where the honest Pulaya worker, in spite of the
betrayal of his own sister, and thanks to the unalloyed love of his cousin,
goes in search of his five lost buffaloes and gets them all back in rich
recompense, five hundred buffaloes thronging around the hill on which
he stood.24 This story ends with the buffaloes trampling to death the
unloving blood sister, mixing her body with the soil in the fields. But the
story he heard in his childhood was even more frightening. Each of the
five hundred buffaloes appeared like a Badha, a possessing spirit.25 They
already carried, for the listening child, the frightening aura of inauspicious
deaths in rich intensity.
Ayyappan spoke in an interview about how this fear eventually led to
a sort of mental breakdown for him when he was a child. It was impossible
for him to go out or look at the world. Every object, each tree or bush or
shadow, appeared like a spirit: dark fear-provoking spirits as tall as a
coconut palm, the fierce goddess who comes to strike you down, preceded
by long flashes of light. It was atheism and rationalism that enabled him,
Ayyappan says, after some years, to gain the courage to walk around, to

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inhabit the world.26 At the same time, it is this very same rationalism that
prevented him from engaging with this frightening domain of spirits,
from which his best stories were to develop later. Rationalism extracted a
price for letting him into the world of the day; a disavowal of the night, of
the energies and spirits, was that price.27
Ayyappan refers to this disavowed world as a domain of Dalit atmiyata;
but the word is not his own, it comes from his interlocutor in an interview,
but Ayyappan does not challenge it.28 Atmiyata has as its meaning both
the spiritual domain and the nexus of beliefs and practices oriented towards
the self. Ayyappans own comments move in the direction of a sort of
religion that mobilizes the energies of generations of ancestors rather
than a single God or multiple Gods. This, as we saw from his stories, is
irretrievably tied to the lives of spirits, to spectral existence. It is in this
sense that we may read atmiyata; it is the domain of the atmakkal, dead
spirits, demanding an articulation of the self in relation to ghostly experience
of inheritance and tradition.
Two frames for thinking the divine are invoked in Ayyappans stories.
One of them belongs to the supraterrestrial level, where after ones death,
one encounters all the dead, and somewhere in that densely populated
other world, one also encounters a single God, the master and manager.
Here God appears as an old man, a sort of grandfather figure, chewing his
paan and spitting the betel juice at length on to the courtyard.29 The
ghosts of Ayyapans protagonists defy this God, spit on him. It is as if God
in this form is no match for the defiant and disruptive agency they acquired
by taking their own lives.
However, there is a second theology, based on the communitys
practices. This centres on Periyapurathu Devis shrine.30 Even though the
shrine is called a Devi shrine, there are two sister Goddesses who reside
there. The elder sisters fierce glance destroys in eight days anyone on
whom it falls. The younger sister, out of care for humanity, has pulled
down the idol of her elder sibling to prevent her from looking at passers
by. Nonetheless, whenever she hears footsteps she would ask her younger
sister, who goes there? The younger sister would answer these questions,
but once in a while, when she runs out of patience, she would tell off her
elder sibling, and ask her to get up and find out herself. The elder Goddess
would raise her head from where she lies and the look will fall on someone,
destroying him, making him die in eight days. If one goes to this shrine at
midnight one is sure to incur the wrath of the sisters and meet ones
death.
Always, in Ayyappan, such fiercely enchanted worlds find a parallel in
the everyday. The protagonist who wants to die goes to the shrine at

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187

midnight only to encounter, in the sudden glare of an electric torch, a

naked woman and two street rowdies. The woman embraces him making
him flee in panic.31 The story ends with the protagonist going to the
shrine to commit suicide. He will step on the fallen Goddess to place his
head in the noose to hang himself from a tree. He hopes to acquire, as
reward for embracing death in front of the Goddesses, half the spirits at
their command. Suicide in a defiant and taunting ritual would get him the
power and agency to pursue his enemies in the other world.32
In working with nights filled with ghosts and a day world teeming
with anxious and failed subjects, Ayyappans work, I believe, allows us to
think of Dalit identity in contemporary Kerala more than that of any
other writer in Malayalam. Ayyappan speaks about the distrust and rage
he felt as a young man towards the dominant trajectories of lower caste
reform, which had usurped the mantle of progress denying its benefits to
the Dalits. He felt ostracised to various degrees by the upper caste Nayars,
Christians and Ezhavas. His most hurtful experience of caste pollution
was at an Ezhava house. It was only the communists who behaved to him
like to a human being, he says.33 At the same time, it was not in the
idioms of the left that Ayyappan found the space for his fictional,
mythographic work. As a rationalist or yuktivadi, he tried to expose the
falsity of the enchanted world, only to return to it and draw elements for
a fictional apparatus in order to conduct experiments on the real nature
of the world far more incisively than through rationalist practice.
Ayyappans engagement with the beliefs, practices and histories of his
community should not be seen as aimed at the valorization and restoration
of a tradition. The uses to which Ayyappans work puts elements of a Dalit
mythography are distinctively modern. The mythographic elements work
as props for the staging of modern scenes of subjection and desubjection.
Ayyappan once compared his turn towards the indigenous to the work of
Poykayil Yohannan, the millenarian prophet who founded the dissident
Christian sect, Pratyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha.34 As Sanal Mohans studies
point out, Yohannans project was directed by two impulses. Firstly, it
stressed the need to create a history for the history-less community of
Pulayas. This history would be a divine history, authorized by God, but
carried out by men. The Bible contained epistles to peoples such as the
Romans or the Corinthians but not to the Pulayas. Secondly, Yohannan
told his congregation that he was the bearer of the letter to the Pulayas.
Yohannans histor y making was accompanied by practices of
commemoration, where the community enacted and lamented the
sufferings of its ancestors. Yohannan prophesied that at the end of time he
would appear dressed in a slaves attire to lead the community to a new
life.35

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UDAYA KUMAR

The Ghost-work in Ayyappans fiction can be seen as performing a

similar function, in relation to the contemporary. The magician who
searches for a Kanjiram tree to imprison an unquiet woman ghost finally
uses her lovers body as a substitute, hammering a nail into the chest to
keep the Badha, or the possessing spirit, confined within. The lover buttons
his shirt up carefully above the protruding nail, and carries on with his
normal social life. The domain of the social, with its assured identities,
reveals itself as the product of a magical act that imprisons unquiet haunting
spirits.36 Ayyappans stories rehearse a rite against this performative magic:
the result is a spectrography that defies realist mappings of the social;
figures of time which break with historicist and developmental grammars
and strain against the limits of narrativizability.
The story Aana (Elephant) offers a complex allegory of this.37 Framed
against shifts in caste power, Aana is about a Nambuthiri Brahmin of a
renowned, now declining family in the village, who wants to buy an
elephant but cannot afford it. He has an explanation for his obsessive
desire: in earlier times, in the time of his grandfather, the family owned an
elephant called Ramakrishnan. Just for fun, the elders would let him
loose in the night to trample and destroy the crops in the village. The
villagers tried all they could to tie down this violent elephant, but all
attempts failed. Then they started attacking it, throwing at it stones, lit
torches, knives, household objects, anything that came to their hands. The
elephant retreated into the inaccessible folds of the night. All darkness
turned into the elephant. Even as they trembled at the fearsome trumpeting
of the elephant, the villagers continued their relentless battle with darkness.
The elephant is dead, but it continues to roar in the mind of the Nambuthiri.
He wants to buy that elephant, retrieve it from across generations. Here,
in an uncanny moment of spectrographic transformation, the words slip,
and the Nambuthiri turns into an image of rage. Now he wants to kill the
elephant; he is among the obsessive stone-throwers. He stands divided
and united with his longing for the elephant and his urge to kill him; a
desire to translate all unwieldy heritage into the ambit of light and an
uncontrollable, blood-thirsty anticipation of the dark.
Ayyappans Ghost narrators interrupt the enchantment of foundational
idioms of the modern social domain. Their autobiographical acts stage
the unaccommodation of the social for Dalit subjects, foreground the
residue of stigma in its resistance to recompense and its constantly renewed
intimacy with life, and respond with idioms of mythical violence. Yet, in
the middle of their fierce work of vengeance and destruction, they cry
inconsolably, exclaiming why their lives and loves had to smash to
smithereens like a clay pot thrown on a rock. Their ghost-speech, the

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litany of rage and lament with its unflinching grip on time, is to conjure
with Poykayil Yohannans redemptive trope the letter that Ayyappan
insistently brings before contemporary Kerala. It is in this sense that his
fiction joins the work of history in the deepest sense.
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Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the

Archive, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.
Ayyppan, C. 2008. C. Ayyappante Kathakal. New Delhi: Penguin Books
in association with Malayala Manorama.
Guru, Gopal, ed. 2009. Humiliation: Claims and Context. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Kumar, Udaya. 2009. Two Figures of Shame. tudes Anglaises: Revue
du monde Anglophone, 62:3, pp. 345-57.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 2003. On Escape, De levasion, tr. Bettina Bergo.
Stanford: Stanford Universiy Press.
Menon, Dilip M. 1993. The Moral Community of Theyyattam: Popular
Culture in Late Colonial Malabar. Studies in History, 9: 2, pp. 187217.
Mohan, P. Sanal. 2005. Religion, Social Space and Identity: The Pratyaksha
Raksha Daiva Sabha and the Making of Cultural Boundaries in
Twentieth-Century Kerala. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
28:1, pp. 35-63.
Mohan, P. Sanal. 2006.Narrativizing Oppression and Suffering:Theorizing
Slavery, South Asia Research, 26:1, pp. 1-40.
Palshikar, Sanjay. 2009. Understanding Humiliation in Guru, Gopal (ed.),
Humiliation: Claims and Context. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, pp. 79-92.
Ramakrishnan, E. V. 1995. Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam,
Marathi and Hindi Poetry. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
Rammohan, K. T. 2008. Caste and Landlessness in Kerala: Lessons from
Chengara. Economic and Political Weekly, 43: 37 (13 September),
pp. 14-16,
Satyanarayana, K. and Susie Tharu, eds. 2011. No Alphabet in Sight: New
Dalit Writing from South India, Dossier 1: Tamil and Malayalam. New
Delhi: Penguin.
Sreerekha, M. S. 2012. Illegal Land, Illegal People: The Chengara Land
Struggle in Kerala, Economic and Political Weekly 47: 30 (28 July), pp.
21-4.
Tutuola, Amos. 1952. The Palm-wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine
Tapster in the Deads Town. London: Faber.

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NOTES
1. C.Ayyappan,Abhimukham, Interview with Dilip Raj, in C.Ayyappante Kathakal
(New Delhi: Penguin Books in association with Malayala Manorama, 2008), p.
176. The italicized word is in English in the original. All translations from the
Malayalam are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
2. For an account of modernist poetry in Kerala, see E.V. Ramakrishnan, Making It
New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry (Shimla: Indian Institute
of Advanced Study, 1995).
3. Writings by K. K. Kochu, K. K. Baburaj and Sunny Kapikad, to name but a few
prominent Dalit thinkers, may be seen as belonging to this moment. For a
selection of English translations of Dalit literary and political writing from Kerala,
see K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu, eds., No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing
from South India, Dossier 1:Tamil and Malayalam (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011). See,
for an account of the land struggles central to this moment, K. T. Rammohan,
Caste and Landlessness in Kerala: Lessons from Chengara, Economic and Political
Weekly, 43: 37 (13 September 2008), pp. 14-16, and M. S. Sreerekha,Illegal Land,
Illegal People:The Chengara Land Struggle in Kerala, Economic and PoliticalWeekly
47: 30 (28 July 2012), pp. 21-4.
4. For a discussion of the acoustic world in which Ayyappans stories took shape,
see C. Ayyappan, Abhimukham, pp. 167-8.
5. See Dilip M. Menon,The Moral Community of Theyyattam: Popular Culture
in Late Colonial Malabar, Studies in History, 9: 2 (1993), pp. 187-217.
6. Ayyappan, in an interview, recalled that it was his later encounter with the work
of the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola that gave him confidence in his own
exploration of ghosts and their trajectories. C. Ayyappan, Abhimukham, pp.
180-1. See Amos Tutuola, The Palm-wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-WineTapster in
the Deads Town (London: Faber, 1952).
7. Kavalbhutam, C. Ayyappante Kathakal, p. 7. For an English translation, see C.
Ayyappan, Guardian Spirit, tr. Udaya Kumar, in K. Satyanarayana and Susie
Tharu, No Alphabet in Sight, pp. 355-63.
8. Prethabhashanam, in C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 71-7. For an English translation,
see C. Ayyappan, Ghost-Speech, tr. Udaya Kumar, in K. Satyanarayana and
Susie Tharu, No Alphabet in Sight, pp. 350-5.
9. See, for instance,Bhutabali,Oru Kashanam Jeevitam,NeramVelukkukayanu,
and Ekalochanam in C.Ayyappante Kathakal.
10. Kavalbhutam, p. 16.
11. Ibid.
12. Arundhatidarasananyayam, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 17-28.
13. Ekalochanam, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 153-66.
14. Bhrantu, C. Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 34-9. For an English translation, see C.
Ayyappan, Madness, tr. Jobin Thomas, in K. Satyanaraya and Susie Tharu, eds.,
No Alphabet in Sight, pp. 363-7.
15. Sarvajnanaya Kathakrthum Oru Pavam Kathapathravum, C.Ayyappante Kathakal,
pp. 128-39.
16. Ibid., p. 139.

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191

17. Oru Visadikaranakkurippu, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 96-9.

18. See, for example, Gopal Guru, ed., Humiliation: Claims and Context (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
19. See, for example, Sanjay Palshikar,Understanding Humiliation, Ibid., pp. 79-92.
20. For a more detailed presentation of this argument, see Udaya Kumar, Two
Figures of Shame, tudes Anglaises: Revue du monde Anglophone, 62:3 (2009), pp.
345-57.
21. Following Emmanuel Levinass Of escape, which attempts to free the analysis of
shame from a frame of moral culpability, Giorgio Agamben sees in the experience
of shame a convergence of disidentification and inescapability. In shame,
Agamben says, the subject has no other content than its own
desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a
subject. This double movement, which is both subjectification and
desubjectification, is shame. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:The Witness
and the Archive, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 106.
See also Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, De levasion, tr. Bettina Bergo (Stanford:
Stanford Universiy Press, 2003).
22. Levinas, p. 64; Agamben, pp. 104-6.
23. C.Ayyappan,Abhimukham, pp. 172-3.
24. Elumban Kochathan, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 64-70.
25. C.Ayyappan,Abhimukham, p. 186.
26. Ibid., p. 173.
27. Ibid., p. 187.
28. Ibid., pp. 188-9.
29. Kavalbhutam, pp. 14-5.
30. Arundhatidarsananyayam, pp. 14-5.
31. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
32. Ibid., pp. 27-8.
33. C.Ayyappan,Abhimukham, p. 175.
34. Ibid., p. 188.
35. P. Sanal Mohan, Narrativizing Oppression and Suffering: Theorizing Slavery,
South Asia Research, 26:1 (2006), pp. 1-40; Religion, Social Space and Identity:
The Pratyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha and the Making of Cultural Boundaries in
Twentieth-Century Kerala, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 28:1 (2005),
pp. 35-63.
36. Bhuthabali, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, p. 33.
37. Aana, C.Ayyappante Kathakal, pp. 78-83.

SUMMER HILL: THE BUILDING OF

VICEREGAL LODGE
SusanVisvanathan

Purchase of Properties, Costs of Building and Electrification of Vice Regal Lodge.

In a letter to the Marquis of Salisbury, who was Secretary of State for
India, Lytton and his team wrote that the Municipal committee of Simla
had been expanded for purposes of conservation and improvement. For
this purpose, he said a new order of bureaucrats had been appointed, and
these officers were primarily, one Superintending Engineer and two
Executive Engineers with supporting staff, who were under the direct
control of himself and his staff. These men were now busy checking the
details of water and drainage projects, and were preeminently hired to
make sure that accommodation would be made ready for the coming
season. He adds that,
The general instructions to the Superintending Engineer will be
found in our letter to that officer, No 383 M, dated November 7th, 1876,
which is also one of the enclosures of this dispatch.
These houses and the other buildings on the estates which were
planned, would eventually serve for several of the public offices. In the
mean time, until a residence for the Viceroy could be built, they were
intent on making certain additions and alterations to the building called
Peterhoff , at an estimated cost of about 10,000 rupees. Lytton argued
that this would not only give a necessary increase to the accommodation
that was required for the public offices, but would, render the house
more suitable and convenient for occupation. However,
These additions and alteration will not however make Peterhoff a really well
arranged or suitable residence, and it is necessary to build an entirely new house, and
as will be understood from the 3rd para of our Resolution, measures have been taken
for securing the only eligible site which the limited space in Simla affords, and for
purchasing as a cost of about 7,000 rupees the surrounding private estate.
The expenses connected with the arrangement will be in addition to the sums of
10,000 rupees and 50,000 rupees set down in the 3rd para of our new Despatch.
No I dated 14th January 1876 as the probable outlay that may be anticipated on

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general sanitary improvements, public offices and clerks quarters.The precise addition
will be duly reported after the necessary plans and estimates have been submitted,
but we may here notice that on the estates which we have acquired during the current
and past years there are various houses (occupied for the most part by the Viceroys
staff) for which rents are paid, so that a considerable portion of the outlay incurred is
even now remunerative.
Nothing has yet been definitely settled in respect to the financial arrangement
which will have to be entered into with the Muncipality, nor as to the precise share
to be borne by that body in the execution of the several works, but these points will
receive our attention during the ensuing season at Simla, and as desired by Her
Majestys government, we shall take care that every project is fully scrutinized in
detail in view to ensuing the utmost economy.
Signed Lytton, H.W.Norman, A. Hobhouse, C.Bayley, J.Arbuthnot,
A.Clarke, John Strachey
It is stated (see No 34. Public Works date March 15 1877) that while
Peterhoff was being expanded and renovated, steps were afoot to procure
more land,
As to permanent arrangements, it is under consideration to build a viceregal residence
on the Observatory or Bentinck Hill between the present Observatory House
and Squires Hill. But whatever precise site is ultimately selected it will be necessary
to acquire the other estates on Bentinck Hill.

Pamela Kanwar in her detailed study, Imperial Simla:The Political Culture

of the Raj (2005) gives us a detailed report on locations and historical
configurations of the early years of colonizing Simla. She writes that Simla
was first sighted and recorded by two officers who were mapping the
terrain. It was Captain Charles Pratt Kennedy, who was posted as Garrison
Officer until 1821, and then became the Political Agent with supervisory
powers over the hill states, who first built a residence. Kennedy is described
as being a dandy who was quite at home dominating over the local elites,
even sending them to prison and fining them, or hanging them when he
thought it necessary. For fourteen years he made Simla his royal estate
and contributed to the towns growth. He is associated with the introduction
of potatoes in the hills.
Kennedys house, according to the journalist Vipin Pubby, was the
first retreat for those looking for a change of routine. (Pubby 1988:20)
The town was later in demand among those who saw it as sanatorium.
Land for house construction was leased free of rent from the rulers of
Keonthal or Patiala, depending upon the site chosen. Begarees (landless
forced labour), building material and wood were also secured from them,
and the transactions recorded in Kennedys office. (Kanwar 2005:16).
Begar or forced labour was finally abolished in 1929 through the work of

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Samuel Evans Stokes, who was close to Mahatama Gandhi. (Pubby

1988:87)
Lord Amherst had chosen Simla, in 1827, for his summer camp, and
he spent two months there, leaving before the rains. Pamela Kanwar writes
that he came with an entourage and 1700 coolies. Much of the colonization
of the hills was also about the networking of roads. Coolies were often
not paid, and there were complaints of non-payment of wages from local
zamindars. The subjugation of hill territory depended on the making of
these roads.
This road was not permanent because it takes several years before paths cut into
hillsides can stabilize into roads. The monsoons often wash segments down into
khuds while landslides carry stones and segments down on to the roads. While
Kennedy did much to laying down roads, and this was noted by the administrators,
he was refused a request for a special allowance. He was also responsible, as we saw,
for introducing potatoes into the villages of the hills. ( Kanwar 2005: 23)
Kennedy had been host to Lord Amherst and many others.
Jacquemont, a visitor is quoted by Kanwar as writing that they were well
fed and received champagne, hock and delicious Mocha coffee at dinner,
as well as receiving the Calcutta journals at breakfast. (ibid 23) Kennedys
work is reported to have taken only one hour after breakfast, but it was
his imagination that unfurled, that saw the houses, bazaars and roads as
they came to be. (ibid 24). The British officers saw Simla as a sanatorium,
but then, it must be remembered that foot passengers, horses, mules,
ponies or cattle, travelled over 41 miles of mountain road. Coolies were
rounded up, but even with sedan chairs and porters, the hill climb to
Simla was extremely difficult. (ibid 25) Captain Mundy, an aid de camp,
wrote that in 1828 hundreds of mountain laborers and coolies were
employed for cutting timber, laying blocks of stone and erecting buildings.
(ibid 17). There were often scuffles with the Raja of Keonthal and his
men, who did not want their forests cut. The Raja said If I give all my
trees how will my subjects be able to live in my country? (ibid 17)
In 1837, with the Afghan question, Lord Auckland saw the significance
of Simla politically and moved there. The trips were not yet official, but
Aucklands visit was not a holiday trip, for his staff travelled with him. In
1838, Emily Eden, his sister, wrote in her journal on Good Friday, April
13th,
This dear Simla! It snowed yesterday, and has been hailing today, and is now
thundering in a cracking, sharp way that would be awful, only its sublimity is
destroyed by the working of the carpenters and blacksmiths, who are shaping curtain
rods and rings all around the house. It has been an immense labour to furnish
properly. We did not bring half chintz enough from Calcutta, and Simla grows
rhododendrons and pines, and violets, but nothing else no damask, no glazed

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cotton for lining nothing. There is a sort of country cloth made here, wretched
stuff, in fact, though the colours are beautiful but I ingeniously devised tearing up
whole pieces of red and white into narrow strips, and then sewing them together, and
the effect for the dining room is lovely when supported with the scarlet border painted
all around the cornice, the doors, windows etc. and now everybody is adopting the
fashion. (Eden 1978:127,128)
In yet another note, dated April 22nd, she writes,
I am quite well again now, thank you, and have begun riding and walking
again, and the climate, the place, and the whole thing is quite delightful, and our
poor despised house, that everybody abused, has turned out the wonder of Simla.
We brought carpets, chandeliers and wall shades from Calcutta, and I have got a
native painter into the house and cut out patterns in paper, which he then paints in
borders all round the doors and windows, and it makes up for the want of cornices.
Altogether it is very like a cheerful middlesized English country house, and extremely
enjoyable. I do not mean to think of the future (this worlds future) for six months. It
was very well to keep oneself alive in the plains by thinking of the mountains or to
dream of some odd chance that would take one home there is no saying the
inventions to go home that I had invented but now I do not mean to be imaginative
for six months. (ibid 128,129)
The relief at being in Simla was patent. When she had arrived after
the interminable journey, she exclaimed,
Well, it really is worth all the trouble - such a beautiful place and our house,
that everybody has been abusing, only wanting all the good furniture and carpets we
have bought - to be quite perfection. Views only too lovely; deep valleys on the
drawing room side to the west, and the snowy range on the dining room side where
my room also is. Our sitting rooms are small, but that is all the better in this climate,
and the two principal rooms are very fine. The climate! No wonder I could not live
down below! We never were allowed a scrap of air to breathe now I come back to the
air again, I remember all about it. It is a cool sort of stuff, refreshing, sweet, and
apparently pleasant to the lungs. We have fires in every room, and the windows
open, red rhododendron trees in bloom in every direction, and beautiful walks like
English shrubberies cut on all sides of the hills. God! I see this to be the best part of
India (ibid 125).
In the website of Exhibitions at Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta
which chronicles the achievements of Emily Eden, drawing from her
letters and paintings, it is established that, Emily Edens paintings are
preserved at the Victoria Memorial at Calcutta. J. Dickinson published
her paintings. Emily Eden was the author of two novels, The Semi Detached
House (1859) and The Semi-Attached Couple. According to the website,
on October 21st 1837, Lord Auckland accompanied rather reluctantly by
his sister, set out from Calcutta on board the Megna a flat or long barge
towed by a steamer. They alighted at Benares and went on foot to Simla.

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Emily Eden writing of the servants accompanying them on the barge

from the Sunderbans describes the nights on the barge as very hot and
sleepless.
The native servants sleep any and everywhere, over our heads, under our feet, or
at our doors; and as there are no partitions, but green blinds at the sides and grating
above, of course, we hear them coughing above. (Eden 1978:5)
In Simla too, the servants were often ill. In the entry for April 29th
1838, she writes,
All the natives servants are, or have been sick, and I do not wonder. We have
built twenty small houses since we came, and have lodged fifty of our servants in
these outhouses. Still, there were always a great many looking unhappy, so I got J to
go round to all the houses and get me a list of all who were settled, and of those
whose houses were not built, and I found there were actually sixty seven who had no
lodging provided for them. I should like to hear the row English servants would
have made, and these are not a bit more used to rough it. There is not one who has
not his own little house at Calcutta, and his wife to cook for him; so they feel the
cold and their helplessness doubly, but they never complain. (144)
Indira Ghose in one of her chapters in her book The Power of the
Female Gaze: Women Travellers in Colonial India, (1998) discusses Lord
Aucklands sister, Emily Eden who set sail in October 1835 to assist him
in his duties when he became Governor General. The narrative of Up
the Country describes a political journey made by Auckland in the
company of his sisters from Calcutta to Simla between 1838-1840. Ghose
writes that Emily Edens hallmark was irony, and describes the march to
Simla.
Accordingly, a vast imperial machinery was cranked into action for the tour,
with a cavalcade ten miles long led by the Governor-General and his sisters on
elephant and on horse-back, followed by armies of elephants, the camels and horses
and their grooms; next the British members of the party, on horse-back in carriages
or in palanquins; then came bullock carts loaded with household goods; eight thousand
soldiers in all and trailing at the end, crowds of camp followers, including fakirs and
robbers. (Ghose 1998:73)
Fanny Parks who joined the cavalcade had said the cost to the
exchequer was 70,000 rupees. Emily finds the march uncomfortable with
12,000 people with tents and elephants, camels and horses, but says, What
can one do? (ibid)
It was in Simla that Emily Eden found herself to be supremely happy.
(website .victoria memorial-cal.org/rx eden Exploring India: The travels
of Emily Eden 1837-1840) Other viceroys and their families were to follow.
Ellenborough and Hardinge visited Simla in 1842 and 1846. (Kanwar
2005:260)

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Ellenborough, before his visit, released funds for the improvement of

roads. Lord Dalhousie found Simla overrated, though the five day journey
did not seem such a chore. He too was overwhelmed by the festivities
and balls, concerts and entertainment available in Simla, though he saw
that it had a wonderful political advantage as administrative views went.
(Kanwar 2005: ibid 27).
Vipin Pubby quotes one of Dalhousies letters of 1851.
We have had a terrible fortnight of festivities. Balls without numbers, fancy fairs,
plays, concerts, investitures and every blank day filled up with a large dinner
party. You may judge what this hill station has grown to when I tell you that
460 invitations were issued for the last ball at Government house, and most of them
came.
Further, Dalhousie wrote,
Balls here, balls there, balls by the society; amateur plays, concerts, fancy fairs,
investitures of the Bath and co and co. I quite sigh for the quiet of Calcutta. (Pubby
1988:24)
The summer palace was necessitated however by the need for
continuous work, where five days of work in the plains was equivalent to
one day in the hills. Ian Stephens writes, The memory that sticks in my
mind is of those coolies pulling and humping terribly heavy loads on
their backs up-hill slopes. The exodus involved tonnes of baggage, heaps
of files and dispatch boxes besides the families of the officials. (cited in
Pubby 1988: 42) Further, Andre Wilson describes the passage of officials
as there were colonels and clerks of departments and other men so
tremendous in their spheres. Assistant Deputy Commissioners, still
relatively unburdened with the cares of highest office, cantering lightly
along parapet-less roads skirting precipices, and the ton weight of a post
office official requiring twenty groaning coolies to carry him. (ibid 42)
The increase in population after the opening of the railway was 24
percent. In 1899, it was 24,179 and in 1898 it was 30,405. (ibid 44) The
Reservoir was constructed in 1880. Prior to 1880 there were only the
natural springs or baolis. The Church reservoir which lay below the ridge
held 1,200,000 gallons, the Sanjauli Reservoir carried 1,00,000 gallons. A
third reservoir was built at Saog in 1904. The cost of these reservoirs was
Rs 606000. A pump installed then, was still in use when Vipin Pubby
wrote his book. Rain water storage was made compulsory by the British.
The Europeans received 25 gallons each and were allocated 1,000,000
gallons. The Indians received 5 gallons and totalled 1,80,000 gallons. Major
General Beresford and Mr Pook suggested pumping water from the Sutlej,
but this was refused. The cost then was Rs 25 lakh. Pubby writes that the
idea was revived at the cost of 35 crores. Incinerators were in existence,
which not just burnt the garbage, it provided steam and electricity for

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heat. ( ibid 46) The number of houses increased from 30 houses in 1830
to 290 in 1866. The number of occupied houses in Simla in 1881 was
1,141. (ibid 20)
The details of planning and building were closely documented by
administrators in their dealing with bureaucrats and engineers.
A Letter from Maj General W.A. Crommelin to W. Smith says that the
The Resolution of the Government of India in the Public Works Department
dated 3rd November 1876 a copy of which is enclosed, will make you acquainted
with the general scope of the duties which will devolve upon you, and of the works
which will have to be carried out in connection with the superintendence of the new
Circle of Public Works which may be styled the Simla Imperial Circle.
The Circle was to be under the direct orders of the Government of
India, and Mr W. Smith was expected to correspond directly with the
Secretary to the Government of India in the Public Works Department.
The works to be engaged could be summarized as follows, according
to Maj. W.A. Crommelin,
Additions to Peterhoff to render it a more convenient temporary
Viceregal residence, until a permanent structure can be provided.
The construction of a permanent Vice Regal residence on the
Observatory or Bentinck Hill
Water supply for the whole settlement.
Quarters for public offices and clerks.
Certain major works for the improvement of the drainage and
conservancy of the settlement.
Peterhoff, Inverarm have been acquired. Negotiations are on foot for
Landsdowne House, Squires Hall, Morvin
You will understand from the Resolution that a sum of 2 lakhs has
been authorized to meet immediate requirements, and that the accounts
are to be dealt with by the Examiner of Military Works Accounts who is
located at Simla. It is desirable that you should arrange with the Examiner
for the subdivision of the above and subsequent grants under certain main
heads of outlay such as:
Purchase of house
Improvement to property
Original Works
Repairs
Establishment
Tools and Plant.
In the carrying out of the tasks with regard to the formation of the
new circle the duties of the Executive Engineer of the Provincial division
were not to be interfered with. The specific interest was to transfer to your
charge the house which have been purchased already for the Government of India

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and which are at present under the charge of the Provincial Executive Engineer, but
this will not be done until your arrangement are fully matured.
In a document at the National Archives, New Delhi, referred to as
No 35 Public Works
Fort William, March 15 1877, it is recorded that Lytton writes to Marquis
of Salisbury,
Referring to our Despatch No 34 P.W of this date, on the subject of the proposed
improvements at Simla we have the honour to inform your Lordship that we have
selected Captain H. H. Cole to prepare the designs for the new Government House
and the other public buildings and offices.
Captain Cole, after inspecting the sites has gone home on leave, and will be in
London, at the time when this Despatch reaches your Lordship; he proposes to
prepare certain of the designs during his stay in England, and we request that, if
your Lordship sees no objection, he may be allowed to employ a draftsman to aid
him in the manual part of this work, and to leave him more free, than he would be
without this aid, to employ his own time in the most useful way.We enclose for your
Lordships information, copy of a report by Captain Cole on several points of detail
relating to the Vice Regal residence, with the remark that, the suggestions of this
officer are generally approved by us.
Captain Cole has also requested permission to purchase some books on
architectural subjects. ( Signed Lytton et al.)
The British Government of India had decreed that,
Simla shall be for the greater part of the year, the Head quarters of
the Supreme Government. It is indispensable that the present make-shift
and unbecoming arrangements should cease.
Till then, houses were rented for accommodation, but these were
expensive.
Summer residence for the Vice Roy was to be built at a cost of over 13
lakhs of rupees. 13 lakhs and 20,000 rupees was asked for.Peterhoff where
the Viceroy stayed previously was unhygienic and too small.Three members
of the Viceroys family fell ill there due to typhoid. When Native Chiefs
visited Simla in the summer, it was believed the Viceroy would require a
space in which to interact with them. They had been put up in tents,
which inhospitality to local chiefs was thought to be unbecoming of the
British in India.
Accusation of extravagance came from the home office. Lytton was
forced to write,
We presume that you refer to the appointment of a Superintending engineer.
Our object in making this appointment was to have an executive officer of experience
who, besides conducting our own work, would be associated with the Municipality,

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201

and advise that body on the important actions which they are about to undertake:
we shall take care that the appointment does not last longer than is absolutely
necessary. (Signed Lytton, P.P Haines, R.C Bayley, A.J Arbuthnot, A.Clarke,
E.B. Johnson, B.B Johnson, W. Stokes.)
Lord Dufferin, who was to be in time a resident in Simla, wrote to
the Home Government:
The total cost of the new house (excluding the furniture and mural decoration)
and its accessories completed as sanctioned by us was estimated at Rs 6,05,131,
and on the strength of this estimate work was commenced; but unexpected difficulties
were met with in securing the foundation which have entailed an additional
expenditure of Rs 54,798 owing to increased depth and massiveness; and of Rs
12,306 in retaining walls for securing the approaches to the house.
The cost of furniture and murals was thought to be Rs 2,00,000. The
letter was signed Dufferin, Roberts, Ilbert, Hope, Colvin, Chesney.
(See Reply to the Governor General London 23rd December 1886)
There was stiff resistance from Viscount Cross, that he had not been
informed in time.
Dufferin in his letter of March 15, 1887 records his regret that formal
sanction was overlooked while pursuing the matter of congenial
accommodation for the Viceroy.
Electrification of Vice-Regal Lodge
The correspondence of August 26 1887 (in the National Archives, Delhi)
from Simla communicates the anxiety of the planners about whether to
use gas, candles or electricity while lighting the building. Installation of
electric light was seen to be more economical with regard to maintenance.
Lord Dufferin wrote to Viscount Cross,
We have decided that the most satisfactory arrangement is that the
house should be lighted by a full installation of electric light; and it appears
to us that besides the advantage of coolness and cleanliness, the
employment of electricity may be considered to a great extent as an
insurance against accidents by fire, which would be more likely to occur
if the house was lighted by gas, kerosene or candles.
Since no provision for expenditure on this was claimed earlier it is
now requested. The sum of one lakh and a half would, it was thought,
cover the entire cost including freight, carriage in India, erection of all
machinery, lamps and appliances connected with the installation. Dufferin
requested the participation of the electrical engineer of Buckingham Palace,
Mr Massey to supervise the contract with manufacturers.
In another document, titled No 50 Public Works Simla Sept 2 1887 and
available in the National Archives, Delhi, and addressed to Viscount Cross,

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SUSAN VISVANATHAN1

who was Majestys Secretary of State for India, we receive the following
information:
My Lord,
In the 7th paragraph of your Lordships Despatch No 61 P.W of the 23rd
December last, a request was made that copies of the designs and estimates of the
New Vice regal Lodge in Simla should be forwarded, for the information of Her
Majestys Government. We regret the delay which has occurred in complying with
this request, it has been mainly due to certain alterations in the design which have
suggested themselves as the work went on, and which have rendered it necessary
from time to time to amend the estimate and to alter the plans.
In paragraph 5 of our dispatch No 45 P.W of the 27th September 1886 we
stated that the estimated cost of the building was 6,87,051. The estimates which
we now forward show the manner in which that total was reached in juxtaposition
with each of the items which go to make up that sum, the corresponding items, as
they now stand, have been shown. The total of the present estimate which is
comparable with that mentioned in our dispatch of September last is 8,69,676
The excess of 1, 82,625 on the entire estate may be divided as follows
Excess on works
1,22, 287
On establishment
53,032
On tools and plants
7,306
1,82,625
Passing over the first of these items for the present we should explain that the excess
on Establishment is almost entirely due to the fact that the building has taken a
longer time in construction than was anticipated. It was at first thought that it
would be completed by the beginning of the current season, but it is now certain that
it cannot be ready for occupation by His Excellency the Viceroy before next year. To
a certain extent the extra work, to which we will presently refer, have tended to
increase the establishment charged.
The excess to the cost of the Lodge itself is to a great extent, due to a strike
among the cartmen which has entailed increased expenditure in the delivery of stone.
It is essentially due also to a variety of petty causes which led to excess either of
quantity or rates on some of the sub-heads.
Lord and Lady Dufferins New House.
In Raja Bhasins lucid account, Simla: The summer capital of British India, we
find an entry by Lady Dufferin in her journal entry dated 15th July 1887.
D took Hermie and me all over the house in the afternoon.We climbed
up the most terrible places, and stood on single planks over yawning
chasms. The workpeople are very amusing to look at specially the young

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ladies in necklaces, bracelets, earrings, tight cotton trousers, turbans with

long veils hanging down their backs and a large earthenware basin of
mortar on their heads. They walk about with the carriage of empresses,
and seem as much at ease on top of the roof as on the ground floor; most
picturesque masons they are. The house will really be beautiful, and the
views all around are magnificent. I saw the plains distinctly from my
boudoir window, and I am glad to have that open view, as I shall not then
feel so buried in the hills. (cited in Bhasin 1992:55,reference cited from
Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, Our vice regal life in India 1884-1888.
Vol 11, London, John Murray 1889)
Doz, described by Raja Bhasin as being the most amusing of diarists
in Simla, says the summer palace was The spacious medieval stronghold
of greystone on Observatory Hill, which is both a joy and an expense
forever.
Raja Bhasin documents Lady Dufferins views. She was the first
occupant, and shifted into the palace on 23 July 1888, describing it as
follows,
The entrance hall is the great feature of it. The staircase goes up from it, and
there are stone pillars dividing it from a wide corridor leading to the state rooms, and
both hall and corridor are open to the top of the house, three stories. This gives an
appearance of space and height which is very grand.The corridor opens into the ballroom with a large arch; and a similar arch at one end of the big drawing room, which
is a lovely room. Furnished with gold and brown silks, and with large bow-windows,
and a small round tower recess on it. Sitting in it you look down the ballroom the
colouring of which is a lighter yellow. It is a very fine room, and outside the dancing
space there is plenty of room for sitting, as the wall is much broken up into pillars,
leaving a sort of gallery around it. At one side is one of these high paneling of teak,
along the top of which are shields and arms or the coronets of all the Viceroys, and of
the most celebrated Governor-Generals, and above that Spanish leather in rich dark
colours. The curtains are crimson. There is a small drawing room, furnished in blue.
These are all one side of the hallMy views are, as I have said, quite splendid.
Ds room is rather dark and serious looking.The colouring of mine is a bright sort of
brown, and it has a very large bow window, and a tower room recess, which is nearly
all glass, like the one in the drawing room. The girls will have a similar sitting room
above me, and all our bedrooms are equally nice. (cited in Bhasin 1992:57)
Parties had been a routine of life in Simla quite early. The Lawrences
well known for their quiet and companionate marriage, found the routines
giddy. John Lawrences wife has documented this,
There is not much to say about our domestic life at Simla. To me it seemed one
long round of large dinner parties, balls and festivities of all kinds. My husband did
not, at Simla, go for the long early rides of which he had once been so fond, and
which he still kept up when he was in Calcutta. It seemed strange to us to be once

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more together here at Simla for it recalled many happy memoriesFew of the
friends of those days were left, and a different generation had sprung up. (Bhasin
1992:46)
Transport of Valuables and People
The road to Simla was a hard one, and Raja Bhasins book describes
the nature of the transport used. Transporting all that the British needed
for their comfort is a matter for cultural analyses. However, as late as 1904,
Sir Frederick Treves describes the scene on the Hindustan Tibet road,
It was on this road that I met the man with the planks . They are the
hill men of the poorer sort who carry planks of sawn wood into Simla
The men are ill-clad and the sun and rain have tanned them and their
rags to the colour of brown earth. They bear the planks across their bent
backs, and the burden is grievous. They come from a place some days
journey towards the snows.They plod along from the dawn to the twilight.
They seem crushed by the weight of the beam and their gait is more the
gait of a stumbling beast than the walk of a man. They move slowly. Their
long black hair is white with dust as it hangs by each side of their bowed
down faces. The sweat among the wrinkles on their brows is hardened
into lamentable clay. They walk in single file, and when the path is narrow,
they need must move sideways. In one day I met no less than fifty creeping
wretches in this inhuman procession. Each dull eye is fixed upon the
scuffled road or upon the plank on the stooping back that crawls in front.
To the beams are strapped their sorry possessions a cooking pot, sticks
for a fire, a water gourd, and a sheeps skin to cover them from the frost at
night. If there were but a transverse beam to the plank, each one of these
bent men might be carrying his own cross to a far-off crucifixion. (Ibid
34,35)
Ferdnand Braudel in his classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip writes that mountains are often described as half
wild, their residents are hardy, the villages always semi-deserted, for people
have to leave to find work. Men carrying loads described so vividly in the
preceding paragraph, appear even today. In the 19th century, one of the
most significant problems was of course the question of labour, begar
being the appropriate title for the kind of appropriation of work from the
surrounding hills. How were goods and materials transported? Pamela
Kanwar has some interesting motifs in her book on Simla.
The British had created many hill stations, the largest number in the
foothills of the Himalayas. ( Kanwar 2005: 35)
In 1864, 484 persons were transported from Calcutta to Simla for six

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months. Four lakh rupees incurred in the transportation was not thought
to be a great sum. John Lawrence believed that one day of work would
equal five days in the plains. The town expanded with the years as Viceroys
and Governments continued to visit Simla every year. A Railway line was
constructed in 1869 (ibid 39). There was a cart road from Kalka to Simla
through Dharmapur and Solan. The Ambala Kalka link was extended in
1891; twelve years later the first passenger train arrived at Simla on 9
November 1903. (ibid 40).
Simla transformed itself from being a sanatorium and holiday town
into becoming an official town. While there were questions about
extravagance, by 1880, Pamela Kanwar argues that the British saw Simla
as a certainty in terms of seven months of real bureaucratic time. (ibid 45).
The town grew according to the needs of the people living in it, or what
she calls the exigency of time and of Vice regal direction. Lower bazaar
was seen to be untidy and ugly. It was a residence for Indian clerks, camp
followers, shop-keepers, carpenters, cloth merchants, cooks, bakers, artisans,
domestic servants, coolies and porters (ibid 57). In contrast to Lower Bazaar,
was the Mall, which was a public area for the British, and this was cleared
of sweepers and coolies every evening from four to seven. (ibid 63). Along
with the maintenance of roads, sewage networks, water supply and the
maintenance of forest cover of rhodendron and oak, was the sustained
conservation measures for the water sources( ibid 65). This would be reread by Kanwar in terms of the fluctuations of population in the summer
months and winter months (ibid 132)
Raja Bhasin cites Rudyard Kipling writing to his Aunt Edie, a letter
from Lahore, dated 14th August 1883,
Privilege leave, as I may have told you before, gives you the pleasant
duty of enjoying yourself in a cool climate for thirty days and being paid 20
pounds for that duty. The month was a round of picnics, dances, theatricals, and so
on and I flirted with the bottled up energy of a year on my lips. ..Simla
is built around the sides of a mountain 8444 feet high, and the roads are just
ledges.
Yvonne Fitzroy who accompanied Lord and Lady Reading as a
member of their retinue, was not a camp follower in the uncritical sense.
She writes,
Simla must be the meanest of Imperial capitals. Seen from a distance between
April and June, before the rains have worked their annual miracle, it clings to a
mangy hill side, a forest of tin roofs, rickety wood and discoloured plaster. The gothic
crime of the Secretariat dominates the centre, the Victorian ardour of Viceregal Lodge
its western limit. The forests of pine and deodar have been very largely destroyed,
and the houses crowd as thick as the trees they have supplanted. The northern hills

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are bare and brown, and the ultimate snowline contributes the Himalayan touch
with which we exiles dazzle the envious hearts of Pimlico. (Fitzroy 1926: 90)
Later, her impressions are even more complex,
At a discreet distance Viceregal Lodge possessed a cathedral like silhouette,
rather impressive, but on near approach it revealed all the eccentricities of a Scottish
haydropathic. It sat on a peak, the views it commanded became, in due course,
superb; it was built of grey stone, quite porous, an idiosyncrasy of which we reaped
the full benefit during the monsoon.Within, I do believe it was really far uglier than
it looked.You could have found fault with it to eternity and then not have reached
with the limit of its crimes; on the other hand it was so large, so gilded, so perfectly
complacent, than in the end you grew near to accepting it at its own valuation! (ibid
191)
She complained that,
Simla, in particular is little more than a vast boarding-house every bit as
depressing, and its houses owe nothing to humanity in its building, and little in the
living. (ibid 191)
She called it the dislocation of English life in England (ibid 192)
Writing from the vantage point of the 1920s, Yvonne Fitzroy says,
I never heard a scandal worth remembering, and a few worth believing; tongues
were busier in malice than in wit, and its record of wickedness would be found
tedious by the average flapper. Which is not to deny there was scandal in plenty,
what else would you expect of a community with hardly any interest in life but the
social.(193)
There were odd sorts of dances and balls, memberships in eccentric
clubs of those who dared to consort with the unworthy publicly, such as
Knights of the Order of Black Hearts. She continues,
The summit of achievement was, I think reached only last year in the great
Chinese ball given by Their excellencies to cheer the monsoon-laden minds of Simla.
As a spectacle I have never seen its equal in either hemisphere , and even the
monsoon abetted by dropping a grey veil over the exterior eccentricities of Lord
Dufferins Scottish stronghold. Within the entire house was transformed, lit only by
countless lanterns with a dias of imperial yellow, and two huge red lacquered pailows
or gateways. The walls were adorned with panels on which Chinese dragons raged
and curled, and the costumes were limited to those of China, Japan and Burma.
Indian guests were present, such as the Maharajah of Patiala. The Indian servants
were reviled for being slow and cunning.
Preparations for any and every party were always incredibly complicated by the
Indian servants, who though they sometimes by force of numbers achieved miracles,

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are never to be hurried, and above all things, reverence the brain saving device of
habit.They are engaging enough even if of a mentality that defeats the understanding,
but for their proper appreciation you should lead a life of leisure. (ibid 195)
Yvonne Fitzroy was on the staff of Lord and Lady Readings retinue,
and she described her time in service as that of a hurrying life, the living
of which was so like running backwards on a moving staircase; you were
always at the top, however desperately you tried to get to the bottom!
Barbara Croisette in The Great Hill Stations of Asia writes of the
Viceregal Lodge that ,
At the time it was built, however, it quickly became symbolic of Simlas
hierarchical professional and social system. A summons to a viceroys reception or
dinner was something to die for. Once in possession of the engraved invitation card
and starchly outfitted in formal evening clothes and medals if he could muster a
few an ambitious officer or colonial administrator of middling ranks would travel
the three or four miles from Simla town to the viceroys baronial hall in both hope
and trepidation, aware that a casual remark or the wrong answer to a viceregal quest
from him or his wife could ruin a career. Commenting on the serious social climbing
that went on at such formal events, the journalist William Howard Russel described
the Simla scene as ball after ball, each followed by a little backbiting. (Croisette
1999:56)
Since the fear of proximity and mixture always existed, the caste, class
and race systems were jam packed with taboos. Croisette writes
At the top were the Brahmins and maharajas, who also bought property at
Simla until the British began to fear they were amassing too much of it and tried to
stall the process with red tape. Indian rulers paid formal calls on the viceroy or a
lower official befitting the rulers perceived place vis--vis the imperial hierarchy.
Gifts were exchanged. Indian professionals and rich merchants from several higher
Hindu castes bought homes and became influential in the affairs of the town as their
numbers grew, although most local business were relegated to the Lower Bazar
which still tumbles down the cliff side below the Mall. (ibid)
Yvonne Fitzroy writes, that there was much mutual entertainment,
and that they would each represent their communities. We in India, may
not be the flower of our kind, but by us will our kind be judged( Fitzroy
1926: 214).This mutual entertainment was clearly in terms of the acceptance
of colonialism by the upper castes, from whom too the National
Movement found its propagators. Madame Blavatsky was a guest in Simla
of the founder of the Indian National Congress, and there is a record of
this in the Theosophical Society archives.
In the last section, I present a short story written by me during an
Asia Pacific Writers workshop, hosted by IIAS Simla and IIT Delhi in
October 2008. I was invited there as an instructor at a creative writing
workshop. I wrote the story while Robin Hemley, another instructor,

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asked participant wr iters to close their eyes and imagine their

grandmothers kitchen. It was a case of moonlighting on my part, while
the rest were busy with the assigned task of using the reality principle to
create backdrops for writing fiction. (October 13th 2008)
Voices in the Morning
The council sat around the table. Lord Dufferin had just had the
worst nightmare of his life. He had stumbled down the stairs, his dressing
gown tassels caught in the complex web of wood. The man had stood
there facing him. His face was quite the most warped, like the rough and
pitted texture of old wood which had not been polished and planed. He
stood for fear and death and the terrible litany of labourers woes. He had
not been paid for the winding staircase. He had not been paid for the
paneling. It went on and on. The labourer was of course a ghost. Lord
Dufferin had no doubt about that. Labourers never met him. They always
met the bailiff.
The Council looked at Dufferin. They wanted to know about the
actual cost of electrification of the Lodge. They enquired about the new
estimates for the cost of the gardens.
Upstairs Lady Dufferin was getting dressed to meet the Council. She
could hear their voices,
Gentlemen, I assure you, the costs will be met from the money
allocated.
The Chandeliers, sir, are too fragile. You must do with Burmese
glass, not Belgian ones,
Sometimes she got quite nervous hearing their voices, rising from a
steady burr to a constant crescendo. They were men with some power,
these accountants. Who were they but impoverished Scots. She often
thought of the sky at home. How different, how grey, how full of tears.
And here the sun blazoned, and at night the sky was burnished with stars.
Of course silly Duff was beginning to see things. They all did that. After a
while, the heat melted their brains, specially those hot white days of light
in autumn.
Last night he had floundered into her room. He had that puzzled
look which was typical of men who see death. What was it?
The workers! They want payment!
Well, its fine work. You should pay them. We can cancel dinner for
the Council and let them eat in their lodges.
Lodges! The Council! My dear, do you really believe that I can permit
you to even think of such a thing?
The kitchen is in disrepair. The ceiling is crumbling. It will fall into

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209

the soup.
Think of another place in the Lodge to cook then.
If you dont pay the workers they will die and haunt me.The children
can hear them weeping. Its true that they have nothing to eat.
Well discuss this tomorrow. For the moment, my dear Lady, can we
now think of what you will cook for the Council.
Its too early to discuss with the staff. And not if you look at me like
that, with hollow eyes, with smoke billowing out of your ears.
The children were sleeping of course, while the argument over what
was to be made for the Council continued. Their voices were raised and
the children woke up. It was a strange space of complete annihilation.
Lady Dufferin walked out, and the mountain seemed to be as shadow in
the glow of the autumn sun. It seemed to darken in the haze of the
oncoming heat. She walked for miles, full of that odd and wary sense of
loss of being which followed every quarrel. Sometimes she thought that
life was an abyss, when all she had to do was appear in a space of tranquility
which was consumed by all.
The labourer sometimes appeared as a coffin carrier to Lord Dufferin.
Curiously, he recognized him in the oddest circumstances as heralding
death. Fear would rise like the sea in an endless ebbing, a threat of return,
a lost country. The labourer spoke to him in a dream from which he never
quite awake. Thats how he once realized that in the language of dreams,
nothing need to be said.
Lady Dufferin woke up sometimes in her room knowing that the
house was haunted. It didnt frighten her. The labourer was Duff s visitor.
Hers were different. She would open her eyes, and Duff was
somnambulently standing over her bed.
What did he say, darling?
The same thing as yesterday.
Not being paid? Dont you have any other conversations?
No.
She would wake him up, as he stood blinking at her. They would
kneel and she would pray, in her clear soft voice. She was used to him, his
eccentricities never bothered her, every one laughed at him his rude
speech as they called it, his monosyllables to hide his accent, his constant
excuses and apologies to those who were more powerful than him.
You must not be afraid of him. See him as Jacobs angel, wrestle with
him, Im sure the ladder to heaven will be yours.
Im sick to death. If only we could go on furlough.
But the wiring is still being done. The electrification is what you have
always wanted. Do not give up now.
The air was cold and swirled around them. It was a world which was

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familiar to them, and yet they felt sealed inside in glass, as if it would
break and destroy them. They had traveled so far, by sea and by road.
They had met one another as shadows in the odd circumstances of their
marriage. Deposited by history, charmed by fate. The large canvas of their
dreams in the sharing of power. She the constant chatelaine, and he the
keeper of keys. It was curious that while she was the quiet one, afraid of
company, afraid of people, she would take guests around this great stone
castle. It was a place where people loved to gather, to eat, to drink, to talk,
to dance, and it was only by invitation. There was no occasion when any
one could come uninvited. No moment thus went unsupervised. It seemed
to her that they were prisoners of their own invention, prisoners of a
grandeur which was so hollow it left them enchanted and removed from
real things.
She had her ghosts too. They spoke to her in her head. Some of them
were cruel, mocking her for her simple faith. She knew that her language
was different from theirs and yet she had learnt to speak it. Sometimes
she forgot her own language, she thought now in images. Pictures floated
in her mind, always within the frame of the baywindow, where she sat for
long hours. Peterhoff floated in the images of the past; how uncomfortable
it had been, the khansamas always cross. Here it was the same. However
hard she tired, she could never get away from the peeling ceiling.
Everything was perfect, till the new coat of paint began to detach itself
and fall into the food. They had not noticed it at first, imagined that it was
crystallized salt, but then suddenly one evening, her son had crunched on
mortar. And on days of unutterable crises such as those, she would appear,
the lovely Lady Samantha. She was the perfect embodiment of lazy
afternoons in Simla. She was the gentlest of people, with grey blue eyes,
and the streaked gold brown hair. She lived in a turret in one of the older
building near Lower Bazaar. The turret was rented to her by a writer who
made it clear that he wanted no favours, only her friendship. Samantha
Sutton, with her wealth, and misplaced title, and her Cockney accent,
over which she had a veneer of languor and affectation. She drove Lady
Dufferin mad who was forced very often to include her in their parties
because everyone liked her. But now back to the immediate question,
What time was lunch?
WORKS CITED

Bhasin, Raja. 1995: Simla:The Summer Capital, Delhi Penguin

Croisette, Barbara 1999: The Great Hill Stations of Asia, New York Basic
Books
Eden, Emily 1978: Up the Country London, Curzon Press.

SUMMER HILL: THE BUILDING OF VICEREGAL LODGE

211

Fitzroy,Yvonne 1926: Courts and Camps in India, Impressions of Viceregal

Tours 1921-1924, London Methuen and Company.
Ghose, Indira 1998: The Power of the Female Gaze, Women Travellers in
Colonial India, Delhi OUP
Kanwar, Pamela 2005:Imperial Simla:The Political Culture of the Raj,
New Delhi:OUP
Pubby,Vipin 1996. Simla :Then and Now Delhi, Indus Publications
NOTES
1. This paper uses the documents on microfilm at the National Archives, Delhi,
titled No 34 Government of India,Public Works Department, Civil Works ACC
no 1480 R no 535. My thanks to Peter Desouza, Ashok Sharma, Manas Ray,
Saagar Tiwari, Vasavi Gowda and Anil Nauriya for advice or criticism on first
drafts of the paper and to the Librarians of National Archives, New Delhi,
NMML New Delhi, IIAS Simla, CPRI Simla, and JNU, New Delhi, and specially
Dr Jaya of the National Archives, Delhi for helping me with the microfilms.

REVIEW ESSAY

PASTS IN THE PLURAL: A REVIEW OF

BHALCHANDRA NEMADES HINDU:
JAGANYAACHI SAMRUDDHA ADAGAL
Prachi Deshpande

Hindu: Jaganyaachi Samruddha Adagal,

Bhalchandra Nemade
Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2010, 603 pp. Rs. 650
Late in 2010, Bhalchandra Nemades novel Hindu: Ek Samruddha Adagal
(Hindu: The Bountiful Clutter of Living) finally hit the shelves. Awaited
for over three decades since his explosive and path-breaking first novel
Kosala (Cocoon, 1963), and the Changdeo Chatushtya (The Changdeo
Quartet) novels that followed in the 1970s, this massive, six-hundred-page
novel is the first of a fresh projected quartet. Alongside his fiction, Nemade
has also been a wide-ranging, polemical literary critic, best known for his
passionate propagation of the critical and creative philosophy of deshivaad.
His ideas ranging from the form of the Marathi novel to the ethics of
creative writing have deeply influenced the world of Marathi literature.
This latest book is a powerful work, sketching afresh many of Nemades
favourite themes even as it departs significantly from his earlier novels
and characters. In this review essay, I attempt to interrogate some of the
novels overarching ideas, in particular the critique of history and
epistemology that is at its core.
Hindu opens with a dream. Khanderao Vitthal, the protagonist, is a
promising young doctoral researcher in archaeology, part of a prestigious
archaeological project at the ancient site of Harappa. In his warm tent one
night, he dreams that he is presenting a paper to the project participants.
He proposes a startling, new interpretation of the Indus valley script that
pleases nobody, raising doubts about his future scholarly potential. Several
other images from the remote past pile upon one another in the scuffle
that follows, and riding a roller coaster through the millennia of history,
he is flung far southeast from Mohenjo-daro towards the Satpuda range

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in northern Maharashtra. He finally wakes up just as he is gently falling

from the sky into a field on his fathers vast property in the village of
Morgao.
In the cold light of day, Khanderaos anxieties about his academic
future, however, arise afresh when he receives the news that his father is
dying and he must return home at once. His older brother already dead,
his fathers farmlands are now Khanderaos; he must decide whether to
return home to be a farmer, or to go forth into the world to the West and pursue his academic interests. As he completes the slow and
complicated journey from Sindh up to Lahore to Amritsar and Delhi
down to Bhusawal and thence to Morgao, Khanderao muses on his
patrimony, his past, and his options. These musings make up the bulk of
the novel, ending ambiguously with Khanderao once more in a dreamlike
state between the past, present and future.
The conundrum of a young man torn in two between a rural home
and a (rosier) urban alternative has the danger of becoming schematic
with its predictable binaries of tradition and modernity, community and
individualism, stasis and dynamism. But Nemade infuses several rich
themes into this bare formula, making Hindu a powerful exploration of
agrarian labour on the one hand, and of education, social memory and
disciplinary knowledge on the other. Its primary concern is with the
tremendous human cost that agrarian society extracts from those who
work the land, focusing starkly on its caste and gender dimensions. But it
argues equally unflinchingly that escaping agrarian society for jobs in the
cities is not the answer to this thorny question. An urban modernity
founded on service jobs and energy hunger, with no labouring connection
to the resources it consumes is parasitical, and carries within it the seeds
of its own destruction. This is not a romantic celebration of the bucolic
idyll. Its power lies in the vivid, pulsating, emotionally rich world it creates
with extraordinary sympathy for its characters, to plead for a serious
consideration of the horrors of rural society by embracing a life on and
with the land, warts and all.
Who is it?
I am I, Khanderao.
Silence. Then I ask, who are you?
I am you, Khanderao.
Thoroughly confused, I say, Eh? So I asked you who I am? That is to
say I asked myself who I am? Then who is he? Just me?
There you go. Now we might actually recount something, Khanderao.
He, you and I are the same.
Utter silence. Of many a century. Wordless.

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215

By the way, Khanderao, be sure to tell only a story, okay?

By God, this is truly a hassle for a person like me. Nowadays people
have everything except stories to tell.
And so Khanderao, a man given to muttering to himself and wandering
off topic, recounts the story of this rural society, his own multiple selves
an intense individualist here, an unreconstructed conservative or a guilty
status quo-ist there dissenting, arguing with, heckling and interrupting
his narrative all the way. Structurally and linguistically, this punctured
narrative of rural life is a brilliant achievement (I will have more to say
about its political dimensions below). A continuous, often confusing back
and forth between options and opposing positions churns up the memories
in the protagonists head. The novel unfolds on two spatio-temporal
journeys at once. Khanderaos historical musings about the march of history
from ancient Mohenjo-daro to present-day Morgao occurs simultaneously
with his own journey from Sindh to the Satpudas. Even as he ponders on
the deep connections between past and present, we read of how he grew
into the person he now is, a farmers son turned academic aspirant.
One chapter closes in like concentric circles, starting on the outside
with the wandering tribes and outcastes who live on the village outskirts,
meeting various balutedars along the way to the Kunbis that Khanderao
belongs to. This path is followed in the next chapter by a journey through
Khanderaos own ancestry, with a mind-boggling mix of relatives across
several generations. Some are within the local environs, others far flung
an aunt in Vidarbha, an uncle who went to Benares, a grandmother in
Baroda. The furthest of these is Tironi atya, Khanderaos own fathers sister,
who was initiated into the Mahanubhav sect as a nun as a young girl.
Stranded in Pakistan after Partition during her pilgrimage to one of its
numerous mathas in the subcontinents northwest, she loses touch with
the family. While in Pakistan, Khanderaos activities include trying to find
her. The narratives in these chapters are episodic, focused on intense life
histories and struggles. This makes the novel as a whole difficult to read
but the individual episodes the Pendhari massacre of the Labhana
settlement, Chindhu-atyas escape from her inlaws, Khanderaos eye
accident, his grandmothers efforts to save his fathers life as a child are
tight, fast-paced stories.
This is the warp and weft of the social fabric that is the substance of
the term Hindu. It appears not as a religion, rituals or community, but as
a geographical and social spread in the village, which intersects with the
deep roots that every family of multiple social and religious backgrounds
strikes into the land, with a million cross-woven threads of individual
relations. Nemade peers at this richly detailed woven carpet, painstakingly

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sorting out the strands of emotion and speech patterns in each motif. The
novelist himself offers this weaving metaphor to the reader early on in the
novel, where we read that the somewhat obsessive and insomniac
Khanderao has a habit of undoing knots and winding up balls of twine.
Yet another chapter neatly intertwines Khanderaos growing intellectual
awareness with his continued, if diminishing, presence in the familys
daily farm work, culminating in one where he finally quits the village for
higher studies in Aurangabad and Pune.
It is into this trajectory that Nemade builds his critique of disciplinary
knowledge about the past. As noted above, he rejects a nationalist or
religious foundation, or an Indo-Aryan, Sanskritic origin for the term in
favour of an older geographic and material association the subcontinent
east of the river Sindhu, and everybody in it. D.D. Kosambis arguments
about material life as a living lens, and a combined method spanning
archaeology and textual criticism in approaching the past certainly inform
this critique it is no accident that Khanderao is a keen student of
archaeology. But even as he carefully cleans bits of pottery that are elusive
traces of the past, Khanderao also remembers a spooky childhood tale,
reflecting beautifully on both the possibilities and limits of such material
remains:
[Hoping to find the coins he had heard clattering earlier, Dhanji thrust
his hand into the pot] To his shock, he could feel nothing. He moved his
hand about, but that heavy, clanging pot was empty. He thrust his hand in
further, to his elbow, arm and shoulder, but still nothing. He couldnt
even feel the bottom of the tiny pot. Dhanji broke out into a sweat. He
then threw one of his own coins into the pot, and it clattered tann, tann,
far down as if into a deep well, kept falling for a long while. As if for years
on end. Throwing the rest of the coins down, listening to their sweet
echoes, Dhanji realized that this hollow was from quite another world.
This wondrous realization made him shiver, and thrusting his face into
the pot, craning his neck and straining his eyes, he gazed on the depths of
endless years. Forever. The end.
The next day the farmers broke down Dhanjis door to find that he
had got his head stuck in the pot and suffocated to death. (77-9)
Rather than simply echo Kosambi on the indispensability of
archaeology for recovering ancient history, Nemade re-examines the link
between material traces and language. Khanderao is eager to recover
popular consciousness through material remains, an approach his guide
Dr. Sankhalia dismisses as being unsuited to scientific archaeological

REVIEW ESSAY

217

protocols. But this is a bugbear with the young scholar. In his fevered
dream Khanderao puts forward two ver y different couplets as
interpretations of one of the symbols of the Harappan script. Any one
symbol, he argues, can serve as the starting point for an original reading of
the script, and there may be multiple, real interpretations. On hearing
one such interpretation, his friend Yasin says I dont care if this couplet
is from Harappa, its brilliant! Yasin is content with the moral core of
Khanderaos reading, and doesnt care about whether it can be perfectly
historicized. Yet all the senior scholars are upset and demand proof, even
as they get their own categories all muddled up.
Here, the script and its images and scratches, is at once a literal material
trace from the Harappan past. Any one of the symbols is a good enough
starting point for a very original reading of this civilization. By
underscoring the malleability of these readings, Nemade undercuts the
stability of both archaeological finds as well as textual sources. Proof is
itself as slippery a concept as the categories it is embedded in. Instead, he
appears to suggest, the past is transmitted as memory. These memories
flow through multiple modes and practices of everyday life; Khanderaos
recollections, accordingly, are mediated through a large variety of oral
poetry, formulaic conversations and the rehearsing of family lore, festival
competitions, idle gossip and political talk.
When an old matriarch at the door of the city of Harappa asks
Khanderao for the password, he answers anekvachani bhutakali (lit. third
person plural past tense). Hindu pasts, then, are necessarily in the plural;
it is only on acknowledging this can one enter Harappa. Khanderao,
however, wrestles with this plurality throughout as he contrasts his own
memories, received from different sources, with his intellectual apparatus,
and seeks to stamp his own understanding of the past against the mocking,
contrapuntal voices in his head. His agony over his career choices is at
once a dilemma about whether he should live this memory-as-knowledge,
or whether he should reclaim it intellectually as a scholar at far remove.
Although somewhat predictable and weaker in comparison to the rest of
the novel, the actual descriptions of university life and professorial intrigue,
detailing the sorry state of formal education, elaborate this epistemological
point.
Modern Marathi public culture is replete with contested narratives
of the past that bear a very thorny relationship with documentary evidence
and its authority, but which are powerful carriers of social and political
claims and regional pride and consciousness. This is true of both nationalist
or elite narratives of Maratha and Indian nationalist history as well as Dalit
narratives of protest and identity.The exact authority of the textual archive,
of mining documents for proof, and by extension the status of individual

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PRACHI DESHPANDE

or collective memories that depart from the textual archive, have been,
and continue to be, politically charged debates in Marathi cultural
discourse.
Nemade decenters the familiar, iconic motifs of regional historical
memory Khanderaos genealogical memories foreground the material
drudgery of a Kunbi life and identity, aggressively distancing it from the
narratives of high Maratha warrior families, their Rajput lineages and
their twice-born claims. Maratha history itself is fragmented in the
memories the novel excavates, into a Holkar anecdote, a Pendhari raid,
an inam grant, a seventh-generation ancestor, a dysfunctional Deshmukh
family. Any notion of a Hindu religious community, much less a political
one, is similarly fragmented into smaller devotional groups and practices
that overlap with a range of Muslim pirs and shrines. Much as Maratha
history and its popularly perceived glories are denied coherence in the
narrative, so also is the category Hindu, which remains disorderly and
contradictory.This is one of the meanings of the novels subtitle, jaganyaachii
samruddha adagal the bountiful clutter generated by the daily business of
living that defies any effort at tidiness.
The particular importance of language in this argument merits a closer
look. Khanderao is contemptuous of any civilization that rejects the
centrality of labour in favour of a social order based on language. This
applies as much to Sanskrit as it does to English. But language in this
sense is implied as ritual and recitation, on a fetishizing of pronunciation
and literary skill; throughout the novel, this alienated sense of language
is undercut with the more everyday task it performs as an archive of
memory. Multiple registers of Marathi mingle with each other, even as
Khandeshi, local to Morgao and its environs, dominates. Nemade has a
keen ability to seamlessly integrate descriptions of mood and environment
with the sketching of characters and lively dialogue. Rarely resorting to
physical descriptions of people, he brings characters to life through a
spectrum of speech patterns - Sanskritized bombastic speech, everyday
rural familial vocabulary, college slang, urbanized pretensions of PuneBombay migrants, political sugar-baron-speak, or words and accents
particular to caste and context, including a spectacular array of swearwords. Dakhni, Marwari, Gujarati, Hindi mix easily and frequently into
Marathi speech.
This technique yields one of the finest passages in the book, which
captures the sheer diversity of the people packed together in the unreserved
train compartment simply through snatches of conversation. Interspersed
with this focused use of language is a light vein of humorous wordplay.
English words are inflected with their everyday Marathi pronunciation,
and bilingual puns that play on the quite different, and hilarious, Marathi

REVIEW ESSAY

219

meanings of English words vernacularize the presence of English in the

Marathi sphere. Unlike writers like Salman Rushdie, who also employ
similar wordplay in order to lay claim to a legitimate Indian idiom for
English, Nemades interest is in absorbing the English words to fit a Marathi
idiom. In English critical writing, translated (very poorly, by Nemade
himself) as nativism, the discussion on deshiyata or deshivaad has tended
to disproportionately focus on the ahistorical essentialism inherent in the
category nativism, and the authenticity of Indian English writing relative
to that in the vernaculars. But this archival approach to language is the
methodological core of literary deshivaad - deshi vocabulary that takes
shape from a material, local existence, employed to delineate the world
from which it springs. This particular fidelity to language, it must be
emphasized, is not concerned with an imagined purity, but refers to the
nitty gritty of choice of registers, pitch and pace of narration or
conversational lilts.
Nemades effort to depict the social order and labouring population
in all its linguistic richness recalls the 1915 classic of Marathi literature,
Trimbak Narayan Atres Gaavgada. A revenue official who had served
under the colonial ethnographic survey, Atre combined the thoroughness
of colonial sociology with a self-consciously native, reformist perspective
on the village social order in a dense idiom replete with localized, workrelated, caste-specific terminology. Khanderaos memories in this part of
the book pile up in list after list in an overwhelming excess of language
that is not only informative, but also enumerative.
The [farmers] craze for cultivating the land meant work, and more work, night and
day, all year, for their wives. Backbreaking work. A start to the day with the sound of
grinding flour, laid out by the mother-in-law.The husbands wont let them go, but
downstairs the morning chores pile up the grinder, churner, whisk, broom, ash,
dung for smearing, fireplace, mortar and pestle, bhakri for breakfast, bhakri to be
packed, baths, washing, dishes, the cows and buffaloes, firewood, groggily drawing
water as if in a trance, milk boiling, curd-setting, children whining, a long line of
morning alms people vasudev, gondhali, nandibailwale, bhadangwale, tirmal,bairagis,
nathpanthis, malangs, gosains, sanyasis, cripples, karunaru, and in the afternoon the
fortunetelling joshis, almanac reading brahmans, holy men all with a rightful claim
at the large kunbis house. Then again the evening balutedars, beggars, food for the
buffaloes and cows, and cooking again for twenty five people. However simple, just
a vegetable in a pot and a basket of bhakris it might be, it has to be enough to allow
everyone, including the wage labourers, to take on nature all day. Getting up to
make yet more bhakris when the last one has been picked up from the basket. Sore
by the time everything is cleared up. It is as if the women of the household perform
thousands of bharatnatyam gestures all day. Fingers, thumbs, neck, shoulders, hands,
wrists, thighs, feet, waist how many movements? In the air, bent to the floor,
upright or seated, sweeping, rolling, patting, pouring, mashing, sifting, picking

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PRACHI DESHPANDE

agrarian civilization has swayed for ten thousand years to the rhythm of this age-old
female dance. (202-3)

This enumerative form almost seems like Nemades answer to imperial,

statistical knowledge. The details are present here too, but distributed
into particular characters and relationships.The deeply contradictory nature
of these relationships overwhelms Khanderao, who is both drawn to, and
repelled by this social web. But without wrapping oneself in this web, the
novelist seems to suggest, any effort at constructing knowledge whether
as modern scientific sociology, as a dispassionate scholarly study of the
past, or through another language is meaningless.
Nemade has been characteristically dismissive of post-colonialism as
yet another Western import that remains anchored to English in India,
but the themes of history and epistemology that run through this novel
resonate considerably with postcolonial historiography whether it is
the critique of colonial knowledge, the centralizing, imperializing impulse
of the colonial and postcolonial Indian state, or the critique of collective
categories and identity. The localism of deshivaad, finding expression
through the necessarily flexible cadences of language rather than fixed
boundaries, has at its base a thoroughgoing rejection of the Indian nationstate, and the native, anglicized elite that took it over from it colonial
predecessors. Far from being a parochial celebration of regional
vernaculars that is also nationalist at its core, it rejects the imperializing
impulse in nationalism. Nemades critics in the Marathi sphere have tended
to evaluate this position from a perspective that, for all its denunciation of
colonial exploitation, takes the concepts of modernity, progress and
universalism as its starting point and is suspicious of a vaguely designated
post-modernism as a cover for conservatism. This has been the general
tenor of the progressive reviews of Hindu too. English critics, for their
part, have generally been content to reference Nemades nativism as a
generalized example of the identitarian pitfalls of rejecting English and
all its promised, progressive possibilities.
For all the discussion deshivaad has prompted, its conceptual
categories have remained under-theorized in favour of a commonsensical,
self-evident articulation of its assumptions. The strength of the novel is in
bringing these questions to the fore through a richly textured narrative
with no easy answers, keeping categorical abstractions at bay. But these
remain of immense importance in the wider context of the deshivaadi
framework. Nemade is contemptuous of Hindutva, its anti-Muslim
rhetoric and its visions of a pure, Hindu past; the title of the novel is
squarely intended to take this category back from the votaries of politicized
religion. But his argument about the freedom of memory from the burden
of historical proof comes perilously close to these very Hindutva claims

REVIEW ESSAY

221

to the past that also rest on a deft, slippery negotiation between

archaeological proof and collective memory. Moreover, this inclusivity of
Hindu also rests on the easy assumption that local Muslims would either
unproblematically self-identify with it in their local contexts, or as the
novel seems to convey - this question would not arise in the first place
were it not for nationalist troublemakers, since all religious communities
would be necessarily locally fragmented.
Khanderao accepts the idea of plural pasts in principle. But in practice,
like his creator, he is reluctant to explicitly engage the power relations
that discipline such pluralities. Some of the best parts of the book are
those that gently illuminate the world of young male sociality. Khanderaos
school friends from humbler, landless backgrounds who dream of giving
up their hereditary occupations in favour of more modern jobs and he
sympathizes with them; indeed, he too wants out of the village. Fully
aware of the pressures farm work put on womens labour detailed in the
quote above, his radical self warns him that he must choose whether to be
a good husband or a good farmer; he cannot be both. Indeed, the novels
imbrication of womens work and the sustainability of agriculture, and
the treatment of female sociality fresh terrain for Nemade and its
intertwining with everyday work and popular culture ranging from
childrens songs to family fights is extraordinary. These contradictions
trouble Khanderao greatly, but he nevertheless cannot sympathize with
his own sisters who wish to escape the drudgery of farm labour through
an urban husband. The reader is left wondering what kind of fevered
dream and narrative of the past, if any, these sisters too might have had.
Nemade remains within the broad, century-long theme in nonBrahman discourse that displaces the problems of hierarchy or politicized
religion squarely onto Brahman groups. Social claims of Kshatriya or twiceborn status by elite non-Brahman groups themselves are displaced in
turn on to colonial enumerative instruments such as the census, which
hardened caste identities into a hierarchical order. Contrasted against these
twin evils of Brahmanism and colonialism is a diffuse, horizontal local
life that has somehow got along well over the millennia, untouchability,
invasions and all. Indeed, politics appears in the novel mostly as caricature
self-serving chiefs, the brute colonialists, hollow nationalists and finally
pompous sugar barons. There may well be a case to be made through
deshivaad for how Brahmanism and colonialism are responsible for most
of the ills that plague us, but this requires a historicization and attention
to politics and power that Nemade resists exploring.
For all the critique of colonial knowledge, then, his repeated use of
the thousands of years phrase with respect to local life ends up rehearsing
the familiar, and ahistorical colonial motif of the unchanging village

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PRACHI DESHPANDE

community. And yet, Khanderaos family lands do not remain static and
subsistence-level over the generations; they grow and prosper. His father
manages to strike a harmony between his simple Varkari devotion and his
chemically fertilized cash crops through the green revolution and presides
benevolently over cooperative societies and political party workers. It is
this empire that his prodigal son is recalled to take over, not a long-held,
tiny patch of land. The question of return to rural society, prompted by
the dramatic urbanization across Maharashtra (and across India) in the
post-independence period is an urgent question with diverse political,
economic and environmental causes and consequences for all of us. Indeed,
Nemade chronicles this phenomenon with great poignancy, keeping this
very urbanized, newly educated, young (male) reader experiencing it, in
mind. Yet, besides the ideal of localized self-sufficiency, this critique must
also acknowledge and engage the historical tendency of expansionism
within agriculture, and its links with urban areas.
Nemade is an extraordinarily gifted wordsmith, with the ability to
bend and mould his language to suit a dizzying variety of situations.
Certainly, linguistically, Hindu is deshivaad in action par excellence, Nemades
master text to demonstrate how it can be done. Although a challenge for
translators not entirely an undesirable feature - this is Marathi writing at
its best, whetting the readers appetite for the remaining three novels in
the quartet. It is impossible to do full justice to the richness of the novel
and its ideas in this single review. Hindu deserves to be read and discussed
widely.

BOOK REVIEW
Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging
Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull, 2007, 121 pp, Rs 395

Anirban Das

The short and stout volume of conversations between Judith Butler and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak deals with a very old object of inquiry in the
social sciences the nation-state. Coming from two of the leading radical
thinkers of our time, it is not surprising to find in the book a call for a
disjuncture of the hyphen to think the nation and the state separately.
What might be little unsettling for the reader with a somewhat Marxist
progressivist background is the clear preference of both the authors for
the latter, that is, state. For Butler, the need is to think of an access to the
state without the call for an access to homogeneous nationhood. For Spivak,
a possible search would be for a reinvention of the state as an abstract
structure of redistribution, welfare and constitutionality with a persistent
effort to keep away nationalisms and fascisms. I will try to make a sense of
these counter-intuitive moves with reference to certain other coordinates
of theorizing on the matter.
Judith Butler begins the discussion with a focus on the forms of
exclusion perpetrated by the nation-state. In this context, she refers to
Hannah Arendts essay The Decline of the Nation-state and the End of
the Rights of Man in the volume on The Origins of Totalitarianism (New
York, 1958) and launches a sustained critique of Georgio Agambens notion
of bare life. Statelessness is at the heart of her argument. The stateless, the
one excluded from the state, is thereby not outside the grids of power
that constitute the state, Butler asserts. S/he is also excluded by the processes
that found the specific form of state, one should not forget.These processes,
in the prevailing context of the political, has the specific articulation of
the nation and the state at its core As such, they are produced as the stateless at the same time that they
are jettisoned from juridical modes of belonging (16)
This, for Butler, is unlike Agambens notion of bare life which sets
up a simple exclusionary logic between life and politics. Such a move
evidently ignores the implication of power processes in the making up of

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ANIRBAN DAS

the category life. It reduces the connection between life and politics to
the domain of citizenship alone and disregards the processes of biopower
active in the modern nation-state. What is regarded as simple, bare life is
also defined and produced through the procedures of classification,
enumeration and normalization even when that life remains excluded
from the observable structures of power. This exclusion can occur through
complex forms of governmentality and not, pace Agamben, reducible to
acts of sovereignty, Butler instructs. Containment and expulsion occur
simultaneously and through the same grid of mechanisms of power.
Operative here is power without entitlement or obligation, power that
renounces its hold, yet power nonetheless. For Butler, destitution of the
stateless is not explained by sovereignty or bare life as key ter ms.
Statelessness is saturated with power. To bring in the act of sovereignty as
the causative element in this predicament is to simplify the complexity of
the multivalent tactics of power. This act of simplification would make
one reiterate the only available heuristic (of sovereignty) endlessly to
explain highly differentiated states of dispossession and will keep her/
him blind to the possibility of multiple forms of resistance, agency and
counter-mobilization.
One could very well question Butlers reading of Agamben (a reading
to which Spivak has also shown her sympathy). It can be argued that,
what is important in Agambens intervention is his focus on the moment
of sovereignty in modern forms of power and not his efforts to mark
empirical instances of such moments. The empir ic instances (of
sovereignty) are important not since they elude governmental techniques
but because they bring out the sovereign acts that inhere in the
governmental. Agamben (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford
University Press, 1998) defines his figure of the political, which he calls
homo sacer (the sacred man), as someone who can be killed but not
sacrificed. Homo sacer can be killed by anyone without incurring the
punishment, even the judgment, for homicide. His killing is not a homicide.
He is beyond the law of the human. He cannot be sacrificed in the name of
god. He is beyond the law of the divine. Beyond both human and divine laws,
homo sacer is always and already vulnerable to death. This vulnerability to
death is the Power that is the subject matter of politics. This is bare life,
the ultimate subject and object of the political. The inverse of this logic,
the reverse of the same coin, is the man in the modern democratic society,
whose life is invulnerable on principle.The invulnerability of life in modern
society is the exact opposite, hence guided by the same economy of death,
only in the reverse, of the absolute vulnerability of the homo sacer. It is
possible to continue with the concerns of Butler and Spivak without
denouncing the notion of bare life in this sense. But their concerns here

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225

do not directly engage with this moment of sovereign power. For the
moment, they are more interested in the dynamics of the governmental
nation state trying to open up an analytics of power that would include sovereignty as one of
its features but would also be able to talk about the kinds of mobilizations and
containments of populations that are not conceptualizable as the acts of a sovereign,
and which proceed through different operations of state power. (emphasis added,
102).

Butler points to the fact that Hannah Arendt had been acutely aware of
the force of the performative speech - speech that founds or enstates a
new possibility for social and political life (27). The act of declaration,
the performative exercise of the announcement, is seen here as a founding
gesture of articulating the nation-state. She speaks of the call to freedom
that founds freedom, of the right to rights that can only be exercised
beyond and before the domain of rights. This originary freedom, as also
this originary right, can only exist in its exercise (48). And as with all
performatives, with all repetitious moves, the act of repetition bears within
it the chances of displacement. Or rather, displacement inheres in
repetition. A statement of belonging always moves within a possibility of
loss. Butler, and later on Spivak, refers to the incident that gives this book
its name - in spring, 2006, street demonstrations were being organized for
illegal residents in the United States of America. In these demonstrations
in the Los Angeles area, the US national anthem was sung in Spanish
(along with the Mexican anthem). How to mark this phenomenon? Was
this a simple call for inverting the prevailing laws that prevented the
national anthem being sung by the foreign tongue? For Butler, this signaled
a different act. When the stateless (the illegal immigrant) sings the national
anthem, tries to move into the (nation-)state, the sheer act of the one
marked as stateless owning up to the state is not a simple reversal but a
displacement of the very logic of the (nation-)state. The logical structure
of the nation-state being grounded on a lack (of those who are thereby
rendered stateless), the entry of that constitutive outside displaces the
very structure which was built upon this definitional lack.The performance
(declaration or the call) enacts the action, stages the state they do not
possess, and in the process, displaces the hyphen between the state and
the nation. To think of the incident in this light, one has to be able to
think the state and the nation separately. Disjointing the state from the
nation is the prerequisite to think access to the state without access to
homogeneous nationhood. Butler is perfectly aware (and says that in so
many words) that this displacement is not necessary to the act. It may well
be an act of resurgent nationalism. But there is a contingency, a

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potentiality to move in multiple directions, in the situation. For her, this

might signal a different notion of multiculturalism rather than a singular
notion of the nation (112).
Spivaks take on the incident is a little different. For her, the most
important connotation of the event is in the unhinging of the US state
and the putative American nation. She analyzes the process of separation
minutely. The national anthem is untranslatable: Spivak cites the instance
of the Indian national anthem which was written in Bangla but is sung
nationally in Hindi. To translate that anthem is to attempt accessing the
state that marks it thus, without laying claims to nationhood. This attempt
brings forward the needs to theorize the desire for citizenship. Arendts
theorization of statelessness could not reach this desire, Spivak asserts.
For Spivak, the separation between the state and the nation does not
indicate, for the given event, a new thinking of a rights to come. The
notion of the rights to come, though not spelt out in detail in the book,
is of crucial importance in this regard. Jacques Derrida has often used the
French word for future, avenir, as l-venir: spaced out to ring the sense
of the infinitive to come. This sense of to come has the open-endedness
of a future as always anterior and not a future as future-present. Spivak,
when she refers to the rights to come, brings in this sense of a radical
futurity that will never be attained as future present and yet need be
pursued relentlessly as something which one cannot not want. Thus
when she will be speaking a little later on the notion of critical
regionalism working under and over nationalisms, the call for that
regionalism should also be understood not as a call for a future structure
with a full presence but imagined in the spirit of this to come-ness.
The sense of l-venir permeates the notion of the state when Spivak
surmises that global feminism might seek to reinvent the state as an abstract
structure with a persistent effort to keep it clean of nationalisms and
fascisms. The important point is to remember that this notion of absolute
futurity does not presume the future to be imaginable from naught. That
which will never be fully present will not appear sui generis. What is to
come is firmly rooted in the present, is derivable as logical extensions of
the present, and is underivable if not through such extensions. Yet it is not
wholly derivable from the present, it extends the logic of the present in
such a manner that the logic becomes inoperative and reaches an aporetic
moment. So the future will never be fully present. Spivak thus speaks of
the state which she wants to protect as a minimal abstract structure and
characterizes the modes of laying claim to this abstract structure as
performative and utopian. Again, one has to remember that the definitions
of this abstract structure are derived from the messy rudiments of the very

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227

present predicaments. Spivak reminds the reader of the determining role

of capital as something which is neither national nor determined by
state (78). Against the tendencies of reduction in the state-specific public
sphere with references to the global economic sphere, and the erosion of
the structure of redistribution, welfare and constitutionality from within
the state (90), she calls for a decline of the national state
as a displacement into the abstract structures of welfare moving toward critical
regionalism combating global capitalism (78).

She pits the abstract structures of welfare against the managerial state on
the free market model. The forms of state and the critical regionalism she
speaks of are to be thought of thus in the mode of to come yet emerging
from the very complexities of the present networks of capital, nation-state
and different discursive modalities.
In response to questions, Spivak clarifies the notion of critical
regionalism against Jurgen Habermass attempts to articulate a democracy
beyond the nation-state in Europe and against Paul Gilroys cosmopolitan
multicultural idea. Critical regionalism works in the atmosphere of erosion
of nationalisms. Elements of this regionalism may be discernible in shared
sensibilities among todays nations: Spivak talks about old links predating Bandung between pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism, about
the newly emergent (post-Soviet) Caucasus and the trans-Caucasus, about
the New Latin America, and about certain links in South Asia operative
below and beyond the hostilities between the nation-states. Arising
Butler acutely points out as a critique of the area studies map (118),
critical regionalism tries to retain abstract structures of something like a
state and allows for constitutional redress against the mere vigilance and
data-basing of human rights, or public interest litigation in the interest of
a public that cannot act for itself (94). For Spivak, Habermas occupies a
different variety of performative contradiction. His notion of a European
democracy is based on the supposedly special capacity of Europe to
ar ticulate democratic pr inciples and presupposes a notion of
cosmopolitheia continuous with the Kantian architectonics of reason.
Again, the stated reference here is to Derridas critique of Kant in Rogues
(Stanford University Press, 2005) in terms of a democracy to come (as
opposed to a future presence of universal Europeanism). What Spivak speaks
of here is also different from a cosmopolitan multiculturalism in that it
deals with the notion of a practical access to the abstract structures of the
state and not with the question of coexistence of cultures.
To speak of the state thus is not to speak of ethical universalism, not
to speak of the state to represent an ethical universal. Instead, as Spivak

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points out near the end of the discussion, what remains important is that
you cannot adjudicate an ethical state. Ethics interrupts the abstractions of the
state structure. Those structures are legal. They cannot adjudicate justice but they
serve justice and we must protect them. (100-101).

The practical act of accessing the abstractions of the state is also, at the
same instant, a philosophical act. Philosophical speculation and practical
politics is a very dangerous binary, the authors seem to agree. This enables
one to think of ethics and politics in their separate specificities, not as
opposed terms, and to access both in their intimate embrace of the ethicopolitical. The book ends, in the words of Judith Butler on the promise of
the unrealizable (120).
It would be good to have some editorial comments regarding the
context of this exchange and about the identities of the unnamed
interlocutors who pose important questions. Apart from this major editorial
inadequacy, I end with an allusion to the fact that this review has focused
on a single trajectory of argument and has not touched upon a number of
related issues in this immensely readable and significant intervention.

BOOK REVIEW
The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India: Bengal and India, 1947-1967
Joya Chatterji
UK, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in
Indian History and Society), 2007, 366 pp, Hardcover, $ 45, Rs. 895
Debjani Sengupta

All those who work in the area of Partition Studies have waited in anticipaion
for JoyaChatterjis book on the Partition of Bengal (1947) titled The Spoils
of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 (CUP, 2007). The book is a
welcome intervention in the area, dealing with the behind the scenes
political machinations, migration and other fall-outs of the vivisection of
the country with a special focus on Bengal. Chatterjis study is important
in many counts, not least because there is a serious dearth of engagement
on the topic even after 60 odd years of Indias independence. In the subcontinent, and particularly in India, Partition Studies have been to a large
extent Punjab-centric.The Partition of Bengal in 1947 has been a neglected
area in Indian historiography and we still await a comprehensive look at
the effects of the Partition combining West Bengal, the North-East and
Bangladesh. The 1947 division meant massive population migration across
the borders of the newly independent nation states of India and Pakistan.
Fifteen million people crossed the newly defined boundaries; in West
Bengal alone an estimated 30 lakhs of refugees entered by 1960. For over
a million people, it was death in various violent encounters involving
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. For an estimated 80 thousand women, in
India and Pakistan, it meant abduction and sexual assault.
Although ordinary people suffered these traumas of displacement,
murder and mayhem, the dominant hegemonic structures of public
memory of the Partition, issued by the state and the majoritarian
nationalistic discourses, have paid very little attention to these voices.
However, in the last two decades, some shifts in Partition Studies can be
discerned. In the late nineties, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin commented
on the abundance of political histories of the events equaled by a paucity
of social histories of it. 1 They also noted an absence of feminist
historiography of the Partition. Around the same time, Urvashi Butalia
began to retrieve through interviews and oral narratives the stories of the
smaller, invisible players of the events: the women and the children and
the scheduled castes. Butalias contention was that we couldnt begin to
understand what Partition is about unless we look at how people

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remember it.2 These works, as well as others like Kathinka Kerkoff-Sinhas

study of the Momins in Jharkahand, Sarah Ansaris study of the Muslim
refugees in Sind and Papiya Ghoshs work on the Biharis in Bangladesh,
question the homogeneity of nationalist discourses and have marked a
significant break from an exclusive concentration on high politics.3
These explorations have also seen marginal communities in a constant
dialogue with hegemonic state structures even as they internalize hegemonic
perspectives. Other studies that look at the unfinished agenda of nation
building especially the participation of the Dalits and minorities in the
formation of the nation state as well as issues of social mobilization have
also opened up the complexities of the Partition.4 On one hand, these
studies have recognized and documented violence to see the importance
of personal memory as well as to demonstrate the plurality of how we
remember the Partition even within the same community just as they
demonstrated that gender, caste and class variegated the memories of a
community, as the communities in turn are constantly reinvented and
reconstituted at particular moments in history. Chatterjis book takes these
issues a step further; her study is important in assessing the human and
political costs of the Partition, particularly in Bengal.
The book has three sections: the first, Hopes and Fears, traces the
early political confabulations about boundaries and the rationales behind
the Partition; the second talks of the arrival of the Hindu refugees in West
Bengal and the Muslim minority that stayed on; and the third is an analysis
of the politics of the partitioned state between 1947 and 1967. In her
Introduction, Chatterji states why she stops at 1967: The study ends in
1967, in part a consequence of the difficulties of gaining access to primary
materials, whether public or private, for the period after that date. But
there are other reasons why the book ends in 1967. Events in West Bengal
and India took a dramatically different turn in the late 1960s and 1970s, so
there is a logicto concluding the account with the elections of 1967.
(xiii) Although the closure in 1967 can be found fault with, very few
things in this book can be. Written with a great eye for detail and an
impeccable historical sense, Chatterjis account creates a new benchmark
in Partition Studies.
Chatterjis earlier book Bengal Divided looked at the enthusiastic
role played by the elite Hindu bhadralok and to a lesser extent the
communal mobilization of the lower castes in Bengal in bringing about
the Partition in Bengal. In this account she looks at the high politics of the
Partition, the drawing up of the boundaries and the part each of the political
parties played in these deliberations. The economic and social reasons for
the acts of boundary-making are particularly telling in her account:
Congress wanted one thana each of Rangpur and Dinajpur for West

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Bengal since they were deemed to be essential for bringing tea from
Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri down to the docks in Calcutta. (p.44) The
Congress plan to bid for a few well-chosen Muslim majority thanas ran
into troubled waters when even within the Congress a powerful dissident
caucus claimed a compact and even smaller state. Chatterji looks at the
various plans for partitioning Bengal and draws an important conclusion:
although these plans were ranged on a broad spectrum, they had some
interesting commonalities and she concludes that this common ground
and the geographical base of the movement that demanded the partition
of Bengal were substantially one and the same. (p.52) The political core
of the new state was to be the areas of south-central West Bengal while
the areas in the north would be the periphery. This analysis of the
formation of the new state goes a long way to help us understand the way
these areas have figured in the present day politics of West Bengal. This
continuance of unequal relationship between these areas contributed to
many of the political turbulences of West Bengal in the decades after
Partition. In drawing a new broken line between the past and its present
day shadows, Chattejis analysis once again reminds us that the long shadows
of the Partition still hover over our lives and politics.
Part II titled the Bengal Diaspora is the section that draws our attention
with the immediate fallout of the Partition: the migration of refugees who
suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the borders or in the
wrong state. Chatterjis look at the historical causes of Partition related
migration shatters many a-historical and commonly held myths. It is a
mistaken belief that communal violence was the only reason why people
moved after the Partition in 1947. That reason may have been largely true
in Punjab but in Bengal the causes were various and complex ranging
from the first wave of upper class and upper caste migrations and then the
later migrations by the agriculturists and artisans who went as late as
1950.Chatterjis study also points to the fact that refugee migrations had
begun as early as 1946 in the wake of the Calcutta and Noakhali carnages
and till date no study has assessed clearly the total number of migrations
that had resulted through that year due to the larger and smaller communal
conflagrations. Calcutta for instance remained on a boil with incidents of
confrontations between Hindus and Muslims and newspapers were
reporting cases of arson and stabbing through the months leading up to
the Independence. An important aspect of Chatterjis study is the way in
which she looks at the migration patter ns of the Hindu peasants,
sharecroppers and agricultural labourers and the population distribution
of refugees district wise in West Bengal. She builds on Nakatanis study of
the refugee migration in Nadia district to weave an elaborate and
concentrated argument about patterns of migrations, employments and

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settlements to draw two important conclusions. The patterns in which the

refugees moved upset the conventional, resolutely patrilocal and patrilineal
familial relationships of rural Bengal, with consequences which are still
little understood. (p.126) The second was the movement from rural to
urban areas in West Bengal that have turned the refugee settlements into
curious hybrid zones where rural and urban lifestyles coexisted in uneasy
equilibrium. (p.127) After the partition, West Bengal became one-third
its original size and the effects of the partition on its society, economy and
demography have been far reaching. The pauperization of vast majorities
of people through dislocation and lack of sustainable livelihoods have
certainly contributed to the dereliction and disarray that so often meets
the eye even now when one travels through the towns and cities of the
state. In her analysis, Chatterji takes a long hard look at the squatter colonies
that mushroomed all over the state but fails to assess the cultural and
social impacts of these spatial sites in any sustained manner. The reason
for this may be obvious but it does leave a gap in an otherwise flawless
analysis. In any account of refugee migration in West Bengal, the squatter
colonies become an important topographical site for the configurations
of refugee identity and memory.5 The colony bazaar, the colony school
and cultural clubs were places where a distinct public culture of colony
related activities and social interactions evolved. Extant autobiographical
narratives of the squatter colony residents or oral narratives bring out the
displacements within displacements that add new complexities to the
refugees experience.6
Chatterjis study does not go into these affective dimensions of refugeehood for obvious reasons but this lack certainly points a way in which
future partition studies can integrate two important aspects of migration:
to see how they take place in all its historical and political nitty-gritty and
to assess the processes of identity formations of the displaced and the
uprooted. One important aspect of the refugees in West Bengal that has
rarely been addressed either by the government or by scholars is the
cultural dimension of the refugee-hood. The experience of the refugee is
profoundly cultural Pradip K. Bose had once stated in a seminal study
of refugees in West Bengal and his concern still remains true to a large
extent. 7
The unprecedented number of refugees, stretching West Bengals
economy, creating dents in the social fabric of its towns and cities, was
responsible for a number of changes in policy and in attitude. Early official
and public benevolence for the hapless refugees soon transformed into
resentment and anger against the new entrants to the cities and towns
who filled it to capacity, overcrowded its streets, occupied empty lands
and orchards and introduced a new component of recklessnessin Calcuttas

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urban life.The refugees extended Calcuttas limits, filled its slums and
took up livelihoods far removed from their own. Sociologist BenoyGhosh
wrote in 1967: The New Suburbia has expanded in the last twenty-five
or thirty years. The old boundaries of the city suburbs has expanded to
accommodate wave after wave of population abandoned land, fertile
land, rice field, marshy lands, ponds, lakes, jungle and gardens all took in
the rising tidal waves of population.8 Contemporary literature, films and
theatre seemed to grasp these new changes in the city much more sensitively
than city planners did, so that the theme of an overall moral crisis generated
by a violent uprooting and the compulsions of survival appeared often in
contemporary literature.9In the poems of Samar Sen, Bishnu Dey, Sankho
Ghosh and Buddhadev Bose, in the stories by Ritwik Ghatak, Subodh
Ghosh, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Manik Bandopadhyay, Ashapurna
Devi, in the novels by Sabitr i Ray, Shaktipada Rajguru, Sunil
Gangopadhyay and Kamal kumar Majumdar we see the relentless portrayal
of a city in decline, of people struggling to survive, of colonies and their
inhabitants and, then, the union and rise of refugees as a political force in
the city in the 50s and 60s.
Another aspect of the refugee experience that Chatterji takes up but
cursorily is the settlements outside the state where the migrants were
dispersed to diverse geographical areas such as to the Andamans, the
Sunderbans and to Dandakaranya in the years after the partition and the
large scale desertions of the refugees from these camps who flooded back
into West Bengal. This aspect of the Bengali diaspora, and the early
confrontations between the refugees and the authorities often resulting
in the loss of life (the Dhubulia camp incident comes to mind) had an
impact, often elliptical, often direct, on West Bengals post partition politics.
Although Chatterji discusses the Dandakaranya rehabilitation project in
some detail, other settlements in Bihar, Orissa, Assam and the Andamans
are barely touched upon. While discussing the Dandakaranya rehabilitation
project, Chatterji overlooks an important eyewitness account that blew
the lid off from one of the biggest and most prominent rehabilitation
projects undertaken in Independent India. Saibal Kumar Gupta, Chairman
of the Dandakaranya Development Authority between 1963-64 wrote a
series of articles in The Economic Weekly (January 1965). These as well as his
memoir are important historical sources that have not been used in the
discussion.10The hugely diverse rehabilitation projects outside the state
and their corresponding histories of failure may have been outside the
ambit and scope of this analysis, but it remains one of the absences in the
book that leaves a reader disappointed.
Chatterjis analysis makes an important contribution to Partition
Studies with the section titled Staying on: partition and West Bengals

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Muslim minorities. Needless to say, the section takes a close look at the
plight of the Muslims who stayed on and asserts once again what we have
always known as true but never articulated: every community and every
individual within the community had experienced Partition in their own
ways: so instead of just one Partition, there have been many partitions
across the broad spectrums of caste, class and gender. Bengals Muslim
communitys experiences, varied and complex, have however never
featured in any detail in our historiography except in scattered ways.
Chatterji draws our attention to this hidden history and enriches our
understanding of how cartographic politics had made a certain sections of
people aliens or citizens. Territoriality has meant that the clustering and
ghettoisation of Muslims in areas where they were pushed onto, resulting
in a sharp fall in the number of Muslims in the towns and cities of West
Bengal.Yet these clusters of Muslim population, through an irony of history,
became an important player in the electoral politics of the newly
independent state resulting in the emergence of a distinctively Muslim
politics. (p. 197) In the new state, the processes by which Muslims ended
up in clusters and ghettos had heightened perceptions that Muslims were
a community apart, which needed to maintain a political identity of its
own. So in spite of the pressure to assimilate the exigencies of partition
actually did exactly the opposite. Paradoxically, the process of ghettoisation
had given Muslims not only a greater sense of grievance and a greater
sense of solidarity, but also a measure of political influence they might
not otherwise have had. (p. 201)
Part III of the book is devoted to the political reconstruction and
change visible in post partition West Bengal headed by successive Congress
governments till 1967. The two decades after the partition were marked
by rising unemployment, labour and student unrests and high food prices
that often made daily life extremely volatile in the state. The constant
negotiations between the new migrants to the state and the rehabilitation
ministry also created a situation that only made matters worse. The result
was that refugee participation made the Communist Party of India and its
off shoot the Communist Party (Marxist) major political players in the
state and helped them create large inroads in West Bengal politics at the
expense of the Congress. This may partially explain why the smouldering
communal discord in the aftermath of the partition did not tilt the balance
in the Hindu Mahasabhas favour. The parties in the left forged significant
alliances with new constituencies like the displaced Hindu migrants of
the state who were vastly alienated from the Congress. The burgeoning
urban middle classes were also disillusioned with the Congress at the
Centre and in Bengal. This section takes a close look at the rise of the
Communists in the state who came to power not due to a militancy of the

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working classes and the labouring poor but more to their pragmatic and
flexible support for interest groups not known for their appetite for
Marxism and for causes which did not conform to any text book version
of the creed. (p. 261) This section also charts out the different currents
and eddies that resulted in Bengals waning influence in national politics,
the machinations and policies of the major political players that resulted
in electoral advances or annihilation. In all this the growing refugee
population and their strident demands for relief and rehabilitation became
a key factor.The Mahasabhas handling of the refugee crisis when compared
with those of the left-winged parties brings out the tectonic shifts in
Bengals political geology. The fissures that resulted from these alliances
and considerations also created fertile ground for the periphery to become
mainstream.
The Spoils of Partition overturns many commonly held beliefs about
the Partition of Bengal. The goals for which partition was sought by the
Hindu bhadaralok were conservative with a belief in maintaining Hindu
domination in economy and politics. All these aspirations came to naught,
as were the false assumptions by the architects of the partition that West
Bengals fiscal and financial health would remain unaffected. Partition
proved to be a profoundly destabilizing event not only for the key players
but also for those millions on the march. The impact and the afterlife of
the Partition would take many such efforts, as Chatterjis, to assess. In
history writing, the relationship of memory and archive is r ichly
problematic and the methods through which we access our pasts can never
be simple and linear. All we hope is to discover newer sources that will
enable us to arrive at a nuanced account of the past. This study by Joya
Chatterji is a laudable effort in that direction.
NOTES
1. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries:Women in Indias Partition,
New Delhi, 1998, pp. 6-9
2. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, New
Delhi, 1998, p. 18. See also Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani, Tales of Two Cities,
Delhi, 2008 for personal accounts of the trauma that transformed the
subcontinent.
3. Kathinka Kerkoff Sinha, Tyranny of Partition: Hindus in Bangladesh and Muslims in
India, New Delhi, 2006. See also Sarah Ansari,The movement of Indian Muslims
to West Pakistan after 1947: partition-related migration and its consequences for
the Pakistani province of Sind and Papiya Ghosh,Partitions Biharis both in Tai
Yong Tang and Gyanesh Kudaisya, eds, Partition and Post-Colonial South Asia: A
Reader,Vol. 1, London, 2008, pp. 241-258 and 144-169.
4. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics and the Raj, Bengal 1872-1937, Calcutta

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5.

6.

7.

8.
9.

10.

DEBJANI SENGUPTA

University Monograph 5, 1990 and Mobilizing For A Hindu Homeland in

Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakazato, eds, The Unfinished Agenda: Nation Building
In South Asia, Delhi, 2001, pp. 151-195, give us an understanding of the lower
caste identity formation in Bengal.
Manas Rays memoir Growing Up Refugee History Workshop Journal, Spring,
2002 (53: 1) is a case in point.There are other important autobiographical narratives
coming from within the refugee colony that are interesting like Indubaran
Gangulys Colony Smriti, Calcutta, 1997.
I recall Sudeshna Bannerjees essay Displacement within displacement:The Crisis
of Old Age in the Refugee Colonies of Calcutta, Studies in History, 19:2, New
Delhi, 2003.
Pradip K. Bose,Refugees in West Bengal:The State and Contested Identities, in
Refugees in West Bengal: Institutional Practices and Contested Identities, Calcutta, 2000,
p.2.
Benoy Ghosh,Metropolitan Mon in Metropolitan Mon O Modhyobidtyo Bidroho,
Calcutta, 1973, p. 67.
Moinak Biswas, The City and the Real: Chinnamul and the Left Cultural
Movement in the 1940s in Preben Kaarsholm, ed. City Flicks: Indian Cinema and
the Urban Experience, Calcutta, 2006, p.53.
Saibal Kumar Gupta, Kichu Smriti Kichu Katha, Calcutta, 1994. His writings have
been discussed in some detail in Debjani Sengupta, From Dandakaranya to
Marichjhapi: rehabilitation, representation and the partition of Bengal (1947),
Social Semiotics, 21:1, London, 2011.