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The 'modern' of modern Indian political

thought: Outline of a framework of appraisal


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This essay explores the theme of the 'modern' as a determinative and/
or reflective underbelly of an intellectual and ideological history of
modern India. There are no primary texts on which the essay is based;
and, indeed, instead of rendering a systematic account of any one
aspect of modern Indian political thought, I shall try to follow a few
lines of appraisal that might interest scholars and native intellectuals
alike. Particularly, I have had to choose between a continuous reading
of the traditions of modern Indian political thought conceived along
the stipulated lines, an interpretation that would follow the apparent
order and chronological sequencing of an intellectual and ideological
history traceable back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
opening up to the West, and another reading - less diachronic and
more systematic - which would undertake to make apparent, for the
same historical space, a configuration of themes, images and
dispositions that do not habitually appear within this order. It is this
second course I have taken partly because it may not be possible to
read together, linearly, all of the texts and trends that comprise
modern Indian political thought, and partly because the actively
interpretive, selective, and directed reading that I am about to
attempt requires it. Of course, I do not take this interpretive reading
as the only or the best one possible, but it does not strike me as
impossible either. Indeed, it is of importance from the perspective of
both a vision of political inquiry and a criterion of democracy that
such a reflection is interested to mediate. My thought is not that this
will help us reach new goals, but that it might help us stop for a
moment: to introduce hesitancy in the way which we habitually dwell
among our concepts of culture and politics.
The advantage that one can hope to gain from this sort of process
is that it requires the clearest statement possible with respect to the
problems and tendencies of Indian cultural and political practice in the
period under consideration. What is more, this should not be
confused with a survey of either schools or debates in contemporary
Indian politics and philosophy. Indeed, given that few commentators
discuss more than one tendency or problem, the failure to
acknowledge more than one type of modern Indian political thought
is hardly surprising. The situation also is fraught with the tensions

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on the attributes of the 'modern' attaching to this modality - has known four
renewals, four moments of a speculative and at times intense questioning. Let
me set up these moments formulaically, albeit in a discursive mode. The first
is broadly the instituting moment, with the 'modern' of modern Indian
political thought appearing as an embrace of the Enlightenment in the early
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and mid-part of the nineteenth century and when 'reformers' like
Measures of the modern in India: a compounded articulation
Rammohun Roy, Jotirao Phule and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, among others,
More than a thesis, the framework implicating our essay - the 'modern' of assign to reason a critical role in fighting the effects of custom. The moment is
modern Indian political thought - announces itself as a theme, the theme of a characterized by a warm embrace of the themes of rationalism, science,
question, and of a species of drama that remains as yet open. That this theme/ equality and human rights that the European Enlightenment promulgated.3
drama is most often misunderstood, and only taken in a polemical sense, This encounter gave rise to interventions that took the form of legislative
simply betrays a two-fold ignorance: that of the disguised, complex and enactments on the part of the colonial state, which clearly demonstrates the
paradoxical history of the concept of modernity and that of a long and essentially polemical value of the modern to critique 'tradition' as indeed to
complex meditation on the idea of the 'modern' as articulated through reinvent it (cf. Mani 1998).
particular conjunctures and contextual locales. Having reviewed aspects of
The second moment concerns the discourse and politics of nationalism,
the first elsewhere - in the very pages of this journal' - let me try to clarify the drawing on various sources and put together in the second half of the
second here. Of course, one has never quite been at ease with modernist nineteenth century and thereafter. This marks broadly a renewed
formulas, and the problem is compounded by the fact that the 'modern* interrogation of the nature of modernity, with nationalists of the late
names not a single coherent phenomenon but an amalgam of many cognate nineteenth century in general opposed to proposals for enacting social
ones. Even so, I must reiterate, that the attempted outline is important. The reforms through the legislative enactments of the colonial state, often on the
plea for a deeper analysis of the intellectual and ideological history of modern ground that (as Chatterjee has indicated) "such a method of reform seemed
India cannot do without an appraisal of the categories of historical to deny the ability of the nation to act for itself even in a domain where it was
consciousness as they occurred progressively in the context of practice. What sovereign [namely, the domain of culture]" (1993: 132). Precisely how and
follows is potted description of the hybrid space that is the modern in India, a why Indian nationalism sought to legitimize its claims of cultural particularity
rendering which will be successively complicated in course.
and national sovereignty - and this often within the terms of a universalistic
If, for the sake of clarity, we take the modern era to include at least the post-enlightenment discourse that was indissolubly tied to colonial
period from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, we can domination - is hard to determine.
define modernity in terms of the social conditions of life in the West during
All the same, even more often nationalism in India, through its various
that period, and the 'modern' (or modernism per se) as the cultural response phases and by way of its non-secular and secular counterparts, has been
to the experience of modernity. It is perhaps easiest to start with this characterized by several denials, which one could read not only as a refusal of
characterization of the modern, which must, of necessity, already contain an the label "nationalist", but more importantly as a refusal of any idea of
implicit definition of modernity, all of which come to a head in the same time modernist univocality.4 It would seem that for those who agreed in their
and place - Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century - although the last rejection of certain motifs coming from the Enlightenment - particularly in
quarter of the twentieth century (our time basically) have seen the the form given them by Empire (of a subjecthood without citizenship, say) simultaneous rise of movements determined to question their achievement: nothing was more urgent than to bring out the limits of a modernist
fundamentalism in religion and politics and post-modernism in philosophy interventionism founded on either a reliance on history or leaning on
and the arts.2 We need not be concerned to review these developments here; political action as the prime deliverer of progress. What Tagore argued in a
and while the limits set by them are quite generous, they are still restrictive controversial public address in T&kyo (1916), namely, that the hegemonic
enough to force us to stick to the most essential moments in retrieving the aspirations of the Japanese national-imperial project rested on a doubled
orders of questioning emblematic p / modern Indian political thought in conflation of modernization (capitalist development) with modernism and
particular.
Europe, is worth quoting at some length:
I take it that modern Indian political thought - as indeed any reflection
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implicating the effort, within extant modes of political and cultural practice
in India, to develop a mutually critical relationship between the national and
the modern, but I shall not engage the question head-on here (except perhaps
for a nudge here and there on the issue).

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... I must warn [-] that modernizing is a mere affectation of modernism,


just as an affectation of poesy is poetizing. It is nothing but mimicry,
only affectation is louder than the original, and it is too literal. One
must bear in mind that those who have the true modern spirit need not
modernize, just as those who are truly brave are not braggarts.
Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans, or in the hideous
structures where their children are interned when they take their
lessons, or in the square houses with flat, straight wall-surfaces, pierced
with parallel lines of windows, where these people are caged in their
lifetime; certainly modernism is not in their ladies' bonnets, carrying on
them loads of incongruities. These are not modern, but merely
European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is
independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European
schoolmasters (Tagore [1917] 1992: 34).

collectively posited. But interestingly enough, the correspondence also


concerns the insufficiency of the reference to past - or pasts, a term both
inherited and transformed - to express the project whose necessity it had
designated, namely, modernization. As always, Nehru articulates this vision
well, interestingly in The Discovery of Indict a work composed in the early
1940s from the confines of a colonial prison:
India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively
thrilled me. And yet I approached her almost as an alien critic, full of
dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I
saw. To some extent I came to her via the West, and looked at her as a
friendly westerner might have done. I was eager and anxious to change
her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity. And yet
doubts arose within me. Did I know India? - 1 who presumed to scrap
much of her past heritage? (Nehru [1946] 1986: 50).

Indeed, the self-consciousness of this affective modulation, at once political


and aesthetic, underlies the cultural practice of many modern Indian
intellectuals. In fact, what Habermas has noted in the context of the
neoconservative confusion of cause and effect in the political culture of
Europe and America of the 1970s and after - namely, the tendency to "shift
onto cultural modernism the uncomfortable burdens of a more or less
successful capitalist modernization of the economy and society" (Habermas
1983: 7) - is being anticipated here, albeit with theoretical resonances that
may not be entirely retraceable to the aesthetic modern in the West. Tagore
himself, outside of this explicitly antinationalist invocation, will in an avowal
of his literary practice project 'history' (or, in the words of the historian
Ranajit Guha, 'historicality1) into areas beyond the bounds of historiography
and historical duress.5 The point is important, especially since politically there
is a tendency for thinkers to turn modernist only under historical duress; a
case in point, in the context of the recent history of Europe is Heidegger and
the capitulation of his philosophy to National Socialism (see Lacoue-Labarthe
1990). Tagore, clearly, is breaking with this symmetry, albeit with paradoxes
of his own (as indeed those of his generation).

The question for this moment, accordingly, concerns how something like the
Indian modern can evolve with its own set of canons. This is of course not to
imply that this moment, in its shading of the national into the modern, did
not have its echoes or its complexities. For one, there is the 'civilizationaT
dimension to be contended with - at once a developed metaphysics (which is
also a vastly hegemonic discourse) and a pragmatic style of operation (as
deducible through the categories of marga and desi) whereby "the high or
classical cultures that are extant relate with the popular or vernacular cultures
to form reciprocal patterns" (Kapur 2000: 289).7
All this might seem perplexing: cannot the possibility of an Indian
modern evolving with its own set of canons be thought to be informing also
the second (and even the first) moment of modern Indian political thought?
The nature and sources of this perplexity need not detain us here, although
the problem is accentuated by the fact of a constant slippage between the
descriptive levels of discourse and the normative poles of analysis.that each of
the moments record. Indeed, one might ask specifically of the third moment
whether the possibility and actuality of an Indian modern evolving with its
own set of canons is paradoxically proving to be the result of something like
an 'incomplete' modernization. The thought, needless to say, implicates the
fourth moment, again deflecting off the third (perhaps also in a retroactive
vein shading into it) while allowing for distinctive voices to come into
prominence as well. It would seem that for this moment of the modern many
of nationalism's commonplaces Had to be decentred in favour of a radical
multiplicity or u n i q ^ singularity - depending upon which way one would
want to look at it - and that, in the final analysis, it was impossible to
formulate the conditions for entering the field of nationalist discursivity

The conjuncture shades into (or heralds, one might even say) the third
moment of modern Indian political thought - that of modernization, often
recreated in the image of the discourse and politics of nationalism (as enacted
in the second moment), while also constituting a reflective and/or
determinative underbelly of the same.6 Of course, the apparent agreement
between nationalism and modernization, as internal to this moment of the
modern, was only possible insofar as thcn-reducibility of the nation to a single
epistemological model and a bounded national space was immediately and

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without immediately looking for the way out. Ambedkar needs to be situated
here, as indeed Savarkar and the Hindu nationalist viewpoint. The fourth
moment thus consisted as much - and more - in the testing of the limits of the
nationalist imaginary as in the construction of its (in) consistency; indeed that
it represented a unique and unavoidable moment in which all varieties of the
modern found themselves implicated.
More generally, this has meant a politics of reaction and benchmarking
founded on selective appropriations of the past, a transgressive mixing of high
and low cultures, and a prodding (at times) and a dismissing (at times) of the
need for any justificatory meta-discourse. It has also meant a representational
structure which is not a simple 'return' or 'recovery', but a case of old forms
taking on new and highly political meanings.8 This is why, even more than as
a cultural and specifically aesthetic category, the 'modern* in India represents
not an idea but a divergent encounter, contributing as much and more to
affirming (or configuring) it's problematique as in the construction of their
concrete tonalities.
Clearly, modern Indian political thought has today gone beyond this,
marked out not only by those who have sought to reconfigure its problematic,
but also those who, having refused it, have been obliged to transform
themselves by this very refusal. At any rate, I would be inclined precisely to
emphasize and maintain the paradox constitutive of the fourth moment of
the modern in India. It encodes a complex subjectivity which I am not so sure
any theory, embryonic or full-blooded, can embody. The issue here is no
doubt a general one, proper both to the moments that we have been talking
about and to the dimensions that we shall presently come to inhabit. All the
same, it would be necessary to return to the definitional balance of modern
Indian political thought as formulated within the broad telemetric of encounter
with the West and in the context of Indian nationalism particularly.

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The pathos of distance: on the projects of nationalist authenticity


Obviously, in the light of the foregoing, it is not easy to link the work of
modern Indian political thought to the agendas of academic political theory,
and one need not make any effort to do so. But of course the fact that the
modern - to restrict oneself to the historical periods in contention, namely,
nineteenth and twentieth centuries India - at least initially, comes as an
embrace of the political theory of the Western Enlightenment (even as that
moment is soon transcended, indeed trans-created in the context of Indian
nationalism) guarantees in some respects that the burdens of judgment
attaching to the work of intellectual historians, cultural practitioners and
socio-political theorists will not be and indeed cannot be narrow and one-

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sided. To be sure, this is not often vindicated by our descriptions, social


scientific, historical or otherwise, being overly given over to a politics of
reaction - a broader understanding of which is indeed called for.
We cannot but impose protocols - contestable by definition - on our
description and 'classifications' therefore. Particularly, one needs to take issue
with two theses that name the projects of nationalist authenticity as they bear
on the themes and dispositions of modern Indian political thought
reconfigured above - the term 'authenticity' understood as the inscription of
the salient traits of identity into a unique life course - and address the tensions
arising from their juxtaposition. For reasons of simplicity, I will notify them
by means of two metatheoretical expressions, alluding to the first as a
'substantive* thesis and the second as a 'methodological* one. For those
willing to accept the suggestions anchoring the second, third and fourth
moments of the modern in India, the theses are not only meant to foreground
the specifics of nationalism per se; indeed, they might be read as internal to
the concrete processes of the Indian nationalist movement, and by no means
an exclusive recreation of either the historiographical record or social
scientific representation.
According to the first - namely, the substantive - thesis, the space of
nationalist argumentation is a matter of a plea for a generalization of an idea
that goes back to the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment and
which, until today, has continually increased in 'action-guiding' and 'worldguiding' significance. In keeping with this substantiality, nations (or peoples)
should represent to themselves that which is meant by individual freedom in
modernity, as symbolized not only by a model of self-determination but also
according to the schema of the actualization of an 'authentic' national core.
Nationalists of various hues within the extant spaces of modern political
thought have held on to such an understanding of authenticity,9 Of course,
several different arguments by which such a thesis would be supported from
within Indian nationalism are conceivable - liberal, Hindu, cultural-nationalist,
traditionalist, Marxist, subaltern or whatever - but essentially probably all are
connected with a particular interpretation of the weight of freedom. In other
words, with the attempt to understand what the modern discourse about
freedom means, one cannot but see in a claim to self-determination the
reference to an actualizing core, so that in the end only a generalization of the
idea of nationalist authenticity is possible. Let me try to elaborate.
Charles Taylor (1998) has, in an expansive exploration, sought to
distinguish between the "context^and "sources" of nationalism, while noting
that modern politi<M life has an inescapably national dimension to it and that
the process of nation building inevitably privileges members of the majority
culture. This for him explains much the rise of nationalist movements, not

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only in the sense that they are a natural concomitant to the modernizing
project of nation building but also in the sense that they are themselves a form
of nation building. However, Taylor insists that these considerations are not
yet sufficient to explain nationalism because we still need to know why "some
put up a fight and create nationalist movements, while others do not" (ibid.:
194). To answer this question, he argues, we need a deeper theory of the
"sources" of nationalism - while going on to offer the same in terms of the
need for "dignity" and "recognition." Now, one might be wondering how all
this bears on the substantial thesis outlined above. In one sense, it does, in
that a demand for recognition and the employment of rhetoric of dignity are
used to express the actualization of an 'authentic' core. But in fact the kinds of
questions we face regarding the "sources" of nationalism are different from
the ones Taylor identifies and require different sorts of answers.10 What is
more, we need to distinguish between liberal and illiberal claims to nationalist
authenticity coexisting within a national space, while also figuring out why
some nationalisms take a liberal form and others do not. To be sure,
references to dignity and recognition as measures of nationalist authenticity
are hardly of any help here, a problem accentuated by the fact that majority
and powerful national groups are just as likely to generate illiberal projects of
nationalist authenticity as minority and disadvantaged national groups. This
brings me to the second thesis that undergirds projects of nationalist
authenticity.
This other thesis, as I notified it earlier, is the 'methodological' one,
because it is directed at the epistemic form in which validity-claims of various
kinds can be grounded. Within the process of formation of nationalist
sensibility - in the broad terms recounted - the methodological ideal of
authenticity enters much more comprehensively, meaning that the validity of
statements about a state of affairs or even the justification of norms be
determined finally only in accordance with what a 'people' or a nation really
wants. It is clear that bound up with this methodological thesis are rival and
multiple modifications of customary understandings of truth and norms; but
however such modifications may be constituted, in essence they all amount to
the idea that if one is to understand in a coherent fashion the nationalist
claim, they must correlate with actualizations of an 'authentic' national core.
In this methodological idiom, then, nationalist authenticity would mean
that the validity of theoretical as well as even normative claims would be
measured only by whether they are proportionate on a deeper level to what a
people 'actually' are or want depending on cultural affiliations. But obviously
this conclusion is a hasty one, because it forgets that the various validityclaims nonetheless open problematic horizons that must each be dealt with.11
This is as true of Ambedkar as of Savarltar and the Hindu-nationalist

viewpoint - who as we saw earlier found it impossible to formulate the


conditions for entering the field of nationalist discursivity without
immediately looking for the way out - as indeed the Swadeshi articulations of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or even Nehru for whom the
respective value spheres had to be dealt with by adhering to the appropriate
cognitive learning mechanisms.
I am sorry to be rendering these two theses in the abstract mode and, in
an intellectual culture that has known to disabuse us of essentialist
tendencies, the parameters of my conflation may be unpardonable.
Nevertheless, my supposition is that if one had wanted to treat together what
these two theses name, then they amount to a passage - a temporal
succession, if you will - that is quite complex and suggests a number of
possibilities. That the projects of nationalist authenticity have acquired a
normative dimension in our present and, because of various cultural
vicissitudes and social processes, has grown from being the central notion of a
specific nation-building programme to being the defining element of the
moral climate typical of late twentieth century India is worth considerable
attention in itself. But it is the setting out of a process of culture formation
that is even more striking: it directs our attention to the contrasting
uncheerful, indeed morbid, tone of our politics and pedagogy, indeed
national culture.12
All the same, it would seem that most projects of nationalist authenticity
are trying to draw attention to, rather than express or identify with, a certain
kind of 'loss' - the tone appropriate to the belief that a kind of death has
occurred, that a group or a people (as indeed a whole mass of population)
were responsible, and that this lapse from a certain authentic core results only
in some unbearable (frightening?) absence. So one feature of the history of
the reception of the theses that name the projects of nationalist authenticity in
the Indian present is that what seems clearly to be a kind of symptom of a
modern pathology (for which one wants a diagnosis) is often taken as the
diagnosis of the modem 'orientation' or mood itself. Nationalism is a banal
trap in more ways than one. Born in the closing year of the 1950's, one is a
post-independence creature anyway, far too irreverent to bother with the
needs of authenticity or the demands of ethnocentricity.
Ill
Moving on: a context wrought upon an interpretation
The foregoing overture might s^em to have lent a certain self-deprecating
quality to the definkional balance of modern Indian political thought and of
nationalism per le. Let me here quickly tackle the sources of this
disparagement, before resuming and recasting the terms of the engagement. It
has to do with the cursory treatment of the spatiotemporal contextualization

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of the 'modern1 in India - not simply the conjuncture in which each moment
conies wrapped and the overflows within them and between them, but the
problem that concerns the moments' own self-mediation, the question
precisely of when to initiate a politics and what kind of politics to initiate.
This is bound to be a highly contextualized matter, one that resists formal
description. Of course, the reader will recall that our analysis started with the
limit defining the advent of the modern in India, albeit posited from within
the continuities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It went on to
present the means (without entirely mobilizing the dimensions of reflection
found in modern discourses) for a valid synthetic reflection that overcomes
this limit, while also playing on the idealizations of identical meanings that
have provided the basis for intersubjective agreements and disagreements on
India's socio-political and cultural landscape. One might nevertheless ask
whether this intersubjective mediation went too far in an extra-subjective
direction, thus emptying the contest of wills and representations of their
substance. What this must entail is a thinning of the space of discourse in
India, a not entirely unexciting prospect in a context saturated with and
demanding 'thick' (or thicker) discourses.
Without doubt, in providing the matrix that I have and in reading it the
way I did, one is interested less in the interpretation offered than in the
challenge that emerges from that interpretation. Of course, we might read this
urge back into each of the moments reconstructed - that could also animate
situated episodes of 'emancipatory' critical reflection germane to modern
(read postcolonial) social science and political theorizing in India and
elsewhere. Again, I am not implying that the onus of reflection and initiative
has only recently shifted to these disciplines (the fifth moment of the
'modern' in India?). For, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued recently - in the
context of Bengal, to be sure - with the intensification of the colonial political
reforms and the cascading dimensions of nationalist electoral politics during
the 1920s and 1930s, politics itself was no longer about transcending interest;
it would increasingly come to be seen as "arising not from 'spirit' but from the
dynamic of the social structure", a matter really of "creating 'general' interests
around class, caste, religious, or 'secular-Indian' communities" (2004: 66869). Chakrabarty rightly avers that this was a dynamic that "emergent new
disciplines of the social sciences were far more suited to study and address
than art or literature" (ibid: p.669).13 This is something that one might have to
account for as a sedimentation of historical experience (without thereby
committing oneself to an iron law of determination). The value of this
experience however is another matter, much harder to assess, with historical
experience not always converting into an advantage of thought or practice.
This is why, I think, projects of the order given to focusing on the nature

of the Western impact and emblematizing the Indian response - the recent
work of Raychaudhuri (1999) for one, or even the collection anchoring
Dallmayr and Devy (1998) - have to be thought through. It is as if the
distribution of meaning is so well organized that the interpretations are
already constructed before the events 'happen' or are disclosed. I need
reiterate here that the 'moments' identified in the foregoing section both
translate into conjunctures shading into each other - as part of a unique and
singularly complex story of the 'modern' of modern Indian political thought
- and as unique, incommensurable moments of a modernity without
measure. There is also the question of the object of these depictions - whether
they are meant to animate our stories about Indian nationhood or indeed
accentuate the complex spaces of subjectivity and subjectivation in modern
India. Needless to say, I find the latter a more interesting field of narration of course accented over the longer term, indeed implicating more frontally
the theatres of action and representation on the eve of colonialism in India although living in a rapidly modernizing and globalizing India one cannot
quite come to repudiate the founding coordinates of our nationhood either.
The observations that follow, selective and directed as they might seem, are an
effort to extend the terms of thematization. It may be necessary, after all, to
bring the teleology implicating modern Indian political thought, as it turns
into the meaning and significance of past 'acts' and present 'events', back to
the conditions and circumstances of its signifying.

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Internal and external: armatures of change and modes of intelligibility

"To understand political modernity in the non-Western world", Sudipta


Kaviraj tells us, "is impossible without Western social theory; it is equally
impossible entirely within the terms of that tradition", while going on to
prescribe a modality of reflection that would "read Western texts with an eye
on non-Western history" (Kaviraj 2001: 287-88). I am a little apprehensive
about the mechanisms of this modality of reflection though, not only when it
might seem to propel a rubbing of history against its grain but also since a lot
of us (Kaviraj included) see historical sociology as drawing the limits of the
investigation:
As the processes of modernity are universal, but these processes are
realized through a trajectory of historical events which are specific to
each society, we must learn from Western social theory, but not expect
it to tell us about our precise future. Therefore we must climb this
essential and edifying ladder, but learn to dispense with it when the time
comes; that nme comes precisely when historical sociology begins
(Kaviraj, ibid.: 287).

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Focusing on the specific urgencies of the disciplinary edifice of historical


sociology might take us too far afield; and Kaviraj himself is concerned to
fashion his historical sociology on a more substantial register, focusing on (in
his case) the analysis of politics and history of ideas about 'civil society' with
specific reference to the non-Western world. All the same, the formulation
calls attention to an intelligibility that has guided intellectual and political
practice in India, accentuated often by the colonial mode of encounter with
the West and especially the rise of the colonial state and its enveloping
vocabulary of control and mediation.
For want of a better characterization, I foreground the armature of this
intelligibility as one of 'internal' and 'external' - although 'particular' and
'universal' or 'inside' and 'outside' may have done as well - a topos lending
itself to, not always fencing off, the nationalist imagination of indigene and
alien, Western and traditional. As always, the question is about process and
dynamics, a matter really of drawing their limits. Not that this topos were
accepted in all its abstruse ramifications in philosophy, art, and literature (or
even politics and theology), but it calls attention to a work of will
undergirding modern Indian texts that take their measure from modern
Indian history. While the link between formal characterization (the text as
'text') and dynamic principle (the modalities of its inscription) is being
elaborated in terms of modes of intelligibility and\or culture, the place of the
dynamic principle within a broader concept of society remains obscure. This
needs unraveling, and I here make some tentative suggestions on this score.
Needless to say, I will be doing so with the same kind of historical detachment
that my essay has displayed so far, which, while sensitive to the array of ,
positions - indeed aware of the proportions of'hegemony' that attach to each
of them and not collapsing them to a unitary totalization called 'ideas of
India' - takes a certain distance from them. Sensitivity to context need not
always produce context-sensitive results, be it in the work of reflection or the
hard ground of political practice.
Allow me to establish straightaway a clear thesis on the point: if no one
now takes seriously the entirely self-promoting notion of a dissociation of
sensibility that supposedly took place under colonialism, it is generally
acknowledged that something more momentous - less literary - than
sensibilities did change in the course of the period. A whole body of native
bilingual intellectuals in various parts of India, to be sure, are a part of this
period of cultural invention and depredation; and yet, I am convinced - from
the sheer point or force of their articulations - that there is more to them than
having 'invented' (or, at least, radically re-described) a way of talking about
hierarchies, both cosmic and social, of knowledge, of behaviour and of
entitlement. The theorist Homi Bhabha (19&) has a name for this condition,

t/i

what he has termed 'hybridity', which although the historical effect of


colonialism is to be deployed as a discursive device to decode the condition of
postcolonialism. The problem with this concept, however, is that even as it
demonstrates the usefulness of bilingual intellectuals as virtuoso heroes to a
whole array of nameless modernists, it does not get at the texts themselves or
the 'reality' which their writings claim to depict. Take, for instance, the
political thought of Jotirao Phule who is at his polemical best when he, acting
upon the knowledge (provided by Phule himself) of the way fields of cultural
production function, calls upon his lower caste\non-Brahmin constituents to
pursue a realistic programme of self-defense, away from the dominant uppercaste view of the political possibilities within colonial modernity. This,
however, remains undefined; and, given the conflictual nature of the
intellectual field which his own work both describes and exemplifies, the
omission is not surprising. While the recent scholarship has been quite right
in affirming Phule as a unique figure among colonial intellectuals - who, in
harnessing the universal compass of Western discourses, did so not in order
to reinforce the hegemonic claims of an emerging nationalist consciousness,
but to produce 'historical' narratives of caste injustice and humiliation questions about the nature and place of his texts must be asked. Indeed, the
problem is accentuated quite precisely by the kind of rhetorical devices that
Phule deploys in his prose writings.14 For one, they are combative - this is as
true of his English writings as in his native vernacular - with a strong, if
sometimes more ambiguous, sense of an authorial persona, which is more in
tune with the colonial- modern public arena than with indigenous spaces of
articulation. In fact, Phule's over-determined use of the concept of
resentment - as in his frequent allusions to the caste divide structuring
colonial cultural politics - when combined with his habitual self-referentiality
(not for nothing that Phule's language had come to acquire an abrasive
linguistic tone, and which, incidentally, many interpreters finds quite
exemplary from a rhetorical point of view) takes on an altogether more selfcongratulatory quality.

>.
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The effect is not so much to muddy the intellectual waters as to produce


an intriguing extra-level of drama to colonial cultural articulation and local
intellectual bilingualism. The situation is compounded by the fact that when
Phule's writings adduces to fragments of peasant life and is privy to a native
schema of classification, it often in the final analysis repackages the material
in the normative mode of Orientalist discourses. It is almost as if a topos of
'inside' and 'outside' which Phute's writings effectively displace have to be
inevitably brought Mck to generate a normative discourse about oneself and
the others around them.
To take another example, from the outer horizon of Indian nationalism,

31

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Ambedkar and the work he addressed on the life and thought of the Buddha,
namely, The Buddha and his Dhamma ([1957] 1992). In a characteristic
modernist reversal, Ambedkar takes the teachings of the Buddha as the
original reincarnation of the universalist idea(l)s that became the basis of
many modern movements: liberty, equality, solidarity. Buddhism for
Ambedkar was different from other religions, above all from Hinduism, with
belief in god and worship of god (as an absolute being) as well as belief in a
soul being rejected. The concern of the Buddha was to gain salvation,
"happiness of the sentient being", within life on earth, not after death, not by
escaping from this world. Ambedkar accordingly is looking for the
establishment of a new social ethics, built on the respect of every human for
other humans. He does not perceive Buddhism as religion for his community
only, but as "the only religion" the world, and above all the new world, can
have: the "only real religion". In the Buddhist dhamma, as Ambedkar affirms,
"morality has been given the place of God." If one looks at this concept in
relation to John Dewey's idea of a "secular religion" - "sacralizing
democracy" - it becomes apparent how Ambedkar is on the look-out for what
can be termed in the French idiom religion civUe.{h Interestingly again, both
Dewey and Ambedkar shared, over and above their interest in what one might
term 'nonreligious religion', a possibilist notion: the idea that new
possibilities inhere (latently) in the social imagination, not as ephemeral or as
a form of ideology, but as yet unrealized possibilities.
It has been said of Utopian projections, in particular, that they are
attempts to compensate for a deficit of political opportunities so that the
imagined becomes a surrogate for what is not immanent. Ambedkar here is
clearly complicating this possibility, so that even on the terms recounted
earlier on in our essay - Ambedkar as one who found it impossible to
formulate the conditions for entering the field of nationalist discursivity
without immediately looking for the way out - he is seeking to compensate
not for a deficit of political opportunities but a whole cultural idiom. And yet,
the entire textual space of The Buddha and his Dhamma is hardly given over
to an appraisal of its own evaluative language. What exactly are we debating
about a particular action or a desirable state of affairs when we find ourselves
debating whether or not it ought to be applied as an affirmation of
'philosophy' or (on Ambedkar's terms) a new social ethics - this question
eludes the discursive space of Ambedkar. Charles Taylor has in another
context - in the context of modernity - drawn attention to two kinds of
descriptions about sociocultural forms, what he terms "cultural" theories and
their "acultural" counterparts. The former account for a specific cultural
form in terms of the intrinsic appeal of the normative content of that form,
whereas "acultural" theories explain a phenomenon in terms of the

actualization of some universal but dormant capacity for thought and action
or by way of the performance of some social operation which is definable
independently of culture (Taylor 1999). On these terms, evidently, Ambedkar
is offering an appraisal of the second order. The consequence of his
juxtaposing of the teachings of the Buddha as the original incarnation of the
modern idea(l)s of liberty, equality and solidarity has been to make the
disparate descriptions of a social philosophy reconcilable; but, at the same
time, it makes their individuation harder to discern. It is as though one felt
that if one let go of the pattern, or the magnet that created the pattern - in
Ambedkar's case, the new social ethics - then the whole picture would
disintegrate, fall back into a randomized heap.
My third example of the intelligibilities on offer is Gandhi, the
conceptualization of whose possibilities is a wee bit complicated by the fact
that a single wholesome text representative of his oeuvre is I think
unavailable.16 Much unlike perspectives that link the ethical with progressive
activities that resist the social and the religious and extend the reach of the
political - Ambedkar and even Nehru come to mind immediately - Gandhi
marks a response that is substantially indifferent to the political, and does so
by emphasizing the ethical as the decisive feature of life. This is encoded in his
life text - down to every biographical detail, I would think - and endorses a
way of life that cannot be separated from the relationship that an individual
or community can have with itself, with others and with its deities. This is also
partly why, although the heart of Indian nationalism, he is also neither
exclusively nor even primarily concerned with nationalism. Indeed, I am
inclined to push the point further, in another gesture of difference, this time
from the armatures of reflection internal to the art critic and historian
Ananda Coomaraswamy: that whereas the latter, all through his oeuvre, does
not differentiate between society and civilization, Gandhi's entire political
action is guided by this distinction. That is why, for instance, Gandhi was
always insistent that the struggle against untouchability and caste
discrimination is as important as resisting the pernicious growth of the
multiplication of wants and machinery. What Gandhi calls attention to is a
certain practice of internal critique - maybe necessitated by the colonial mode
of the encounter with the West - that actually could be the basis of a
philosophical anthropology that avoids the lures of Indian nationalism and
the projects of nationalist authenticity that ground it.
All this raises fundamental issues, which I can only gesture at and leave it
at that. The topos being called attention to in the context of the texts and
figures named wouM most certainly have to be multiplied in their range,
variety and reference. It must also be complicated by the contextual
recognition that social and religious identities in colonial society may have

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33

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become more caste-bound and 'brahmanic' in character than they were in


pre-colonial India - so that what colonial Indian intellectuals were
responding was the transformed fabric of Indian society, indeed the
'traditionalization of colonial society.17 But of course this level of historical
complication cannot be overdrawn, for even invented traditions, if they have
to have some resonance, must connect with a 'collective memory' and
consequently cannot be entirely new and discontinuous. The sociologist
Eisenstadt, in an earlier discussion of'post-traditional' societies, argued that
modernization stimulates traditionalism as an ideology that must be
distinguished from mere adherence to tradition. In his words:
"Traditionalism is not to be confused with a 'simple' or 'natural' upkeep of a
given tradition. Rather, it denotes an ideological mode and stance oriented
against the new symbols; it espouses certain parts of the older tradition as the
only legitimate symbols of the traditional order and upholds them against
'new' trends" {Eisenstadt 1973:22). Surely, in general terms, in the context of
colonialism and the structures of opposition and complicity that it spawned
(including the history of Indian nationalism), this dynamic did obtain. But
clearly the modernist bias in theories of modernity and colonialism would
have to be faced, and the neglect of premodera history (especially the history
on the eve of colonialism) corrected. 18

"0

All the same, let me conclude with a few grand sweeps, interested as we
have been here to outlining a matrix of appraisal. Is the horizon of cultural
transaction germane to modern India the translation of Western thought and
practice or, inversely, the exposure of a fundamental untranslatability? In my
scheme, facets of which have been disclosed in the foregoing pages, there is
neither a given translatability nor an inherent untranslatability: translation is
to be done by gradual interpretation and never to be completed - the spirit of
transcritique? - so as to capture what thought and practice continually lets
pass but is never completely identifiable each time. In a similar vein though,
the 'modern' of modern Indian political thought and the strategies across this
space which I have chosen to inhabit consists in arguing that the orders of
subjectivity and subjectivation that I read are coherent, and can thus be
understood. For me, there is not a 'Indian mentality' - or particularizing
sensibility - withdrawn into its own shell, but rather intelligibilities which are
more or less split apart from one another, feeding into and fending off each
other. Our outline has consisted in rendering more readable these
intelligibilities from such an angle that which is less so from another. To
measure its implication, however, is an infinite task.

34

Sasheej Hegde is with the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad,


Hyderabad.
.

Notes
1 The reference here is to Hegde (2000), an extended review discussion surveying
work in India and elsewhere on modernity.

on
a>

2 For modernity, modernism, and the modern at large, see the following:
Anderson (1992); Lash and Friedman (1992); Larmore (1996).

I
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ffQ

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3 On Rammohun Roy and Vidyasagar, see Joshi (1975) and Sen (1975)
respectively. For Phule, see O'Hanlon (1985). Interestingly, the historian
Raychaudhuri has characterized the modern Bengali intelligentsia as "the first
Asian social group of any size whose mental world was transformed through its
interactions with the West" (1988: ix).
4 Thus consider, for instance, Gandhi whose universalistic ethics stems from an
endorsement of a way of life which cannot be pushed into a national frame or
even Tagore of the post-Swadeshi internationalist humanist incarnation. I
return to consider these figures below.
5 For a reading along this axis see Guha (2002). The appendix of this work has a
translation 'Historicality in literature' of the authorized Bengali transcript
(1941) of what turned out to be one of Tagore's last observations and strictures
on modernism and realism in literature.
6 The art critic and cultural historian Geeta Kapur has introduced the
conjuncture thus, one that straddles the two fully developed concepts of
nationalism and modernization: "We know that these two concepts are
historically consonant and even at the deepest level mutually contingent, as
nineteenth-century Europe exemplifies. In the case of India too the convergence
is fully manifest. It was Nehru's modernizing project that entailed strongly
centralized governance of the newly founded nation-state. What is more, in this
grandiose design for the modern nation his own ontological quest (as perhaps
that of many nationalists with an ambitious project of selfhood) was movingly
but perhaps naively inscribed in his last will and testament" (Kapur 2000: 291).
On Nehru, more presently.
7 Determining and demonstrating precisely how they do so, and in what
circumstances, is clearly a challenge. I venture some thoughts in the concluding
part of this paper, although for general perspective and epistemological
anchoring one must probe the ideas stated in Ramanujan (1989) and Ganeri
(2001: Introduction). For intimations on marga and desi, see Nagaraj (1998
passim).
8 It is worth noting, again, what Kapur has observed in an invocation of trends
that bear on this context: "What all this also implies is that modernism has no
firm canonical position in India. It has a paradoxical value involving a continual
double-take. Sometimes it serves to make indigenist issues and motifs
progressive; sometimes it seems to subvert if not nationalism, then that on
which it rests and purports to grow, that is, tradition" (2000: 292).
9 It is worth spelling out the issues at stake in this constellation, but would fake us
too far afield. Fdf perspective and readings that bear on the point, however, see
Balakrishnan (1996). I venture a clarification nevertheless in the paragraph that
follows.

35

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or s

10 But of course a demand for recognition and the rhetoric of dignity is being used
by Taylor to express a prior attachment of people to their language and culture;
it is not, by any means, an explanation of that attachment. This opens up a
problem internal to Taylor's account.

Anderson, Perry. 1992. Marshall Berman: modernity and revolution. In his A zone of
engagement. London: Verso, pp. 25-55.

11 A lucid examination obtains in Goswami (2004)

Bayly, Susan. 1989. Saints, goddesses and kings: Muslims and Christians in south Indian
society, 1700-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.

12 For some perspective on this, see Kumar (2001). But see also the thoughtful
review of this book by Geetha (2003).

o
Z

13 Chakrabarty, it must be mentioned, is concerned to map critical moments in


the history of transmission of certain kinds of sentiments about Bengali
language and literature, deflecting directly off the question regarding the nature
of the bhadralok investment in literature and language that had once formed the
basis of feeling one's Bengaliness. This is a much better hypothesis to pursue
than, say, the loud prognostications lamenting the modernist predilections of
India's intellectual and political life (for example, Nagaraj [1998]). But note the
point that follows in the text.

"O

14 The writings of Phule have not been easily available in English. The situation has
changed recently with the compilation put together by Deshpande (2002). My
reading issues from an understanding of this collection.
15 Dewey, as we know, had been one of Ambedkar's teachers at Columbia
University, and he had held the former in special esteem throughout his life.
While Ambedkar looks for a particular religion, Buddhism, as the source of a
general ethics for (modern) society, Dewey looked for a religion of democracy,
refraining from connecting his concept to any religion. It thus lacked a
(religious) language in which to express ideas, becoming an abstract ethics, a
deculturalized and desociaUzed notion. For a comparison between Ambedkar's
and Dewey's concepts of civil religion, see Fuchs (2001).
16 Hind Swaraj is hardly the text to be calling attention to. My thoughts on Gandhi
are developed in an extended note (Hegde 2004). Readers may look up this
paper, lest it seem that I am compressing Gandhi's ground too quickly. I am
inclined, however, to see the compression here as offering a perspective not
entirely tackled in that note.
17 For the 'traditionalization' of colonial society, see, for example, Bayly (1989:
esp. concluding chapter).
18 For some thoughts on the question, see Subrahmanyam (2001: esp. Chs.6-8).
Evidence about the long-term preservation of traditions, such as the
transmission of Sanskrit texts, also shows that traditions can be more stable
than the mutating social or political contexts that promote their invention. On
this, see Pollock (2004: esp. Intro and Ch. 1). An essay reviewing the challenge of
this work is under progress.

36

Balakrishnan, Gopal. (Ed.). 1996. Mapping the nation. London: Verso.

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Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge.


Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2004. Romantic archives: literature and the politics of identity
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Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The nation and its fragments: colonial and pqstcolonial
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Dallmayr, Fred and Devy, G. N. (Ed.). 1998. Between tradition and modernity: India's
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Deshpande, G. P. 2002. Selected writings of Jotirao Phule. New Delhi: LeftWord
Books.
Eisenstadt, S. N. 1973. Post-traditional societies and the continuity and reconstruction of tradition. Daedalus 102 (1): 1-27.
Fuchs, Martin. 2001. A religion for civil society? Ambedkar's Buddhism, the Dalit
issue and the imagination of emergent possibilities. In Vasudha Dalmia et al. (ed.),
Charisma and canon: essays on the religious history of the Indian subcontinent. Delhi:
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