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Foucault and Indian Scholarship

Posted: 25/02/2009 by Nivedita Menon in Enlightenment, Governmentality, History, Indian intellectual traditions, Knowledge, Modernity, Nation-state, Politics, Postcolonial, State, Theory Tags: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chaerjee, political society, Radhika Singha, Ranajit Guha, Sumit Guha, Sumit Sarkar 1 By Nivedita Menon Foucault has had enormous and wide-ranging inuence on Indian scholarship, (and scholarship on India), but I am going to focus here only on one concept governmentality. This concept has implicitly and explicitly shaped some very signicant work trying to understand the shape, form, nature and content of modernity in India. I will take up two such bodies of work: rst, a debate among a number of scholars (largely historians) about the nature and impact of colonial intervention in the 18th and 19th centuries, and second, Partha Chaerjees take on the idea of governmentality, through the lens of which he reworks, in the context of postcolonial democracy in India, conventional political theory understandings of the civil society/political society distinction. To begin with, a short account of Foucaults argument about governmentality. (Foucault 1991). In the late 16th and early 17th C, the problematic of government (88) emerges, which can be clearly distinguished from sovereignty, the concept that had concerned political theory until then. Earlier, from the Middle Ages to the 16th C, there had been a juridical principle that dened sovereignty in public law: sovereignty is not exercised on things, but on a territory and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it In contrast, what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specic qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility etcmen in their relation to other kinds of things, customs, habits etc (93) To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as aentive as that of a family over his household and goods. (92) Legitimate sovereignty is about ensuring the common good, which Foucault points out, consists of a state of aairs where all subjects obey the laws, accomplish the tasks expected of them, respect the established order. This means that the end of sovereignty is circularThe good is obedience to the law, hence the good for sovereignty is that people should obey it With government, we see
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emerging a new kind of nality. Government is dened as a right manner of disposing of things so as to lead not to a form of the common goodbut to an end which is convenient for each of the things that has to be governed. This implies a plurality of specic aims: for instance, government will have to ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that people are provided with sucient means of subsistenceIn order to achieve these various nalities, things must be disposed (94-5) With sovereignty, the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim (i.e. obedience to the laws) was law itself. But with government, it is not a question of imposing the law, but of disposing things - that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics to arrange things in such a way that certain ends may be achieved. However, until the early 18th C, this doctrine of government could not develop, because of the great crises of the 17th C (97). Also because of mental and institutional structures. As long as sovereignty remained the central theoretical question and principle of political organization, the art of government could not be developed. Mercantilism, the rst rationalization of the exercise of power as a practice of government (97), was blocked by the fact that it took as its essential objective, the might of the sovereign, (98) it sought, not to increase the wealth of the country but to allow the ruler to accumulate wealth. (98) The instruments mercantilism used were laws, decrees, regulations, that is to say, the traditional weapons of sovereignty. It was in the 18th C that things changed. The new factors were demographic expansion, an increasing abundance of money, expansion of agricultural production. (100) It was due to the perception of the specic problems of population, and to the isolation of the area of reality we call the economy, that the problem of government nally came to be thought, reected and calculated outside of the juridical framework of sovereignty. And statistics becomes the major technical factor of this new technology. Unspoken here by Foucault is the role of European imperialism and colonialism in bringing about the transformations in Europe in the 18th C that made governmentality practicable. Indian scholarship inevitably does focus on this factor, but such a focus does not, I think pose a challenge to Foucaults theory of governmentality so much as it lights up a dark corner indicated by it. I The debate among historians of India that I focus on is over whether there is a sharp break between pre-colonial and colonial India as far as identity formation is concerned. It is generally recognized that the colonial census intervened critically in processes of identity-formation. What is interesting is that Foucaults understanding of governmentality undergirds both positions in the debate (at least implicitly) the disagreement lies elsewhere. At the risk of aening the contours of a rich and complex debate, I will broadly sketch the two major positions. One kind of argument holds that modern community identity as we know it today was produced by the colonial censuses and other ocial enumerations of the late 19th century. Sudipta Kaviraj, for instance, argues that people who lived in pre-modern social forms, while they had a strong sense of community, did not dene themselves primarily in terms of their dierence from other groups, and did not perceive themselves as belonging to only particular communities and not to others. It was the mechanisms of modern governance introduced through colonial rule that reconstituted the meaning of community along the lines primarily of religion, sharpening the hitherto fuzzy boundaries of overlapping community identitites (Kaviraj 1992:20-21). Modernity does something quite fundamental to the logic of identities, to the ways in which people fashion self-descriptions. (Kaviraj 1997:27). Dipesh Chakravarty argues that although pre-modern government too used statistics of produce, land
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and revenue, it was not systematic or regularly updated in the way it was with modern government. This systematic, regular process of census-taking, which the colonial government introduced, led to the hardening of community boundaries and the xing of religious and caste identities. The fuzzy boundaries of pre-British times became, through enumeration, distinct and discrete. Further, the logic of modern electoral democracy, the ght for numbers, operating at every stage of the nationalist movement, meant that communities had a vested interest in enumerating and clarifying their boundaries. The logic of modern competitive politics was such that people came to t the categories that colonial authorities fashioned for them. Dipesh Chakrabarty goes so far as to argue that the fact that these identities in contemporary India are based on religious categories is a result of the reication of religious identity by the British. Had the British picked language as a criterion of community demarcation, he holds, the result would have been conicts along the lines of linguistic community identity (Chakrabarty 1995:3377). Ayesha Jalal too states that it was the various provincial censuses of the 1850s that made religion the central factor superceding all forms of social relationships. (Jalal 2003:40, cited in Guha 2003:150) The position counter to the one outlined above contends that colonial authority was not the exclusive source of community identities as they are constituted today. Rather, a critical public was already in place in India, as C.A. Bayly for example, argues (Bayly 1994:9). This public was the body of intelligentsia and administrators who represented the views of the populace to the rulers during the late Mughal rule and afterwards. Thus, this argument emphasises the agency of this indigenous domain of social and political critique in constituting identities of various sorts. That is, the colonial state only took over and took further, existing ways of constituting the self. The precolonial state did not simply extract revenue from a society composed of a harmonious mlange of syncretic cults and local cultures. Both as a revenue extracting apparatus and as an accumulation of knowledge, the state in immediate pre-colonial India was more formidably developed than this suggests. (Bayly 1999: 368 Cited in Guha 2003:162) Sumit Guha, who shares Baylys understanding, in a recent paper, focuses on enumeration, acknowledged as a crucial process in state-building and identity formation. His purpose is to establish that the Mughal empire, by the late 17th C, already had begun the process of enumeration, and its administrative practices were widely appropriated by contemporary and successor regimes. In short, the warm fuzzy continuum of pre-modern collective life was not suddenly and arbitrarily sliced up by colonial modernity. Local communities had long dealt with intrusive states that had penetrated along, and augmented, the ssures in local society. (2003:162) What is fascinating about Guhas paper though, is that his rich evidence in fact goes against his stated theoretical position. Again and again we come across evidence from his own work that shows how colonial modernity marked a break with previous ways of identity-formation. For instance The political norm in pre-British times was that of vertical ties of subordinationSo fewness, exclusivity, was the point of honourThe mature colonial regime inevitably undermined these structures. Vis--vis the colonial masters, distinctions among black people were not hugely signicant to the average British ocial.(160). Further, the gradual emergence of institutions of representative democracy, however limited, meant moves towards homogenization of communities in order to establish majorities. Thus 20th C changes in the political system required a homogenization of communities whose dominant elements had previously sought to dierentiate and structure them. The relevant communities increasingly came to be religious in character. (161) He shows how political anxieties of the colonial regime impacted on census categories the 1945-6 census was conducted in a period of outbreaks of insurgency among forest tribes. The Governor of Bombay, in order to ascertain turbulent and predatory classes, proposed that instead of the confused medley of communities, the next census should classify people into 8 groups which, apart from 7 religious and caste groups, would include Wild tribes. (158)
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Tellingly, he draws a link between the Western race-science project, which grew with the world-wide spread of colonial science and the use of the machinery of the GOI by ambitious young ICS bureaucrats, to generate the ethnographic data they needed. This is particularly evident in the all-India censuses of 1901 and 1911, says Guha, which apparently revealed the existence of dierent races. Radhika Singha is another historian who places herself on this second side of the debate. She studies colonial law the creation/transformation of criminal jurisprudence and in more recent work, the drive towards legal rationalization, that locates the female subject for various projects of colonial governance (2003:87). Again, I am struck by how Radhikas own painstaking, rich and detailed research shows that colonialism, far from introducing no break at all in contemporary indigenous modes of thinking, economy and social arrangements, rather made the move towards erasing the kind of ambiguity and multiplicity in existing forms of jurisprudence the situation so clearly evoked by Sumit Guha in the paper we discussed above. Of course in this process it had to work with existing notions of identity, but as she demonstrates, the colonial intervention decisively transformed indigenous notions and brought them in line with the requirements of modern legal discourse. In one of her essays (Singha 1998) she takes great pains to refute an argument, aributed primarily to Ranajit Guha, that colonial rule was an absolute externality. She holds that new conceptions of sovereign right had to nd expression through existing agencies of order and information or as the editors of the volume in which that essay appears put it in the Introduction, Denyingthat the colonial judiciary began with a tabula rasa, she (Singha) shows nonetheless how both resistance from and cooption by indigenous ruling elites shaped the edice of Anglo-Indian justice (S. Guha and M. Anderson 1998). Thus both the editors and Singha set up the contours of an argument that they are concerned to refute this argument is apparently that colonial power acted upon a tabula rasa and reshaped Indian society out of thin air. Now who exactly makes such an argument? In Singhas paper, Ranajit Guha is quoted as making the argument mentioned above, that colonial rule had no mediating depth, and provided no space for transactions between the will of the rulers and the ruled (in his paper in Subaltern Studies volume VI, 1992). This perspective, argues Singha, would not take us very far in examining the realignments of agency, and the reorientation of cognitive structures involved in the construction of colonial law. She concedes that Rule of Law under a colonial despotism was riven with contradictions, but nevertheless it provided the legitimacy for British rule a despotism based on law was said to be beer than the arbitrary oriental variety. She also concedes that the colonial magistrates and judges while displaying sympathy for indigenous norms of patriarchal authority and values of masculine honour brought these norms (as they did other indigenous norms) into line with the legal claims to superiority of the state. That they engaged with indigenous norms at all, (resulting in the realignments of agency she refers to above) in her own argument is understood to be in order to ensure that the standardized procedures of British courts would not be threatening to Indian elites. Thus, all persons of high caste and rank were exempted from taking a religious oath in court and could use an armation instead. Singha sees this concession as ironically introducing a certain ambivalence into the principle of equality before the law. I nd interesting the word ironic used in the context of the ambivalence in the Rule of Law as introduced by the British, for it appears to me that this refracted operation of Rule of Law was the only possible form a colony could have. And how is this argument so dierent from Ranajit Guhas which we discover on going back to the paper cited, refers to the fear which haunted so many of the more perceptive British observers during the second quarter of the 19th centurythat the regimes isolation from the people under its rule would gravely undermine its security (243) and therefore adopted the political strategy of persuading the indigenous elite to aach themselves to the colonial regime. (242) After such an argument therefore, when Ranajit Guha says that the colonial state was structured like a despotism (as opposed to a bourgeois state the term despotism serves this specic purpose here; see 273-274) with no space provided for a transaction between the will of the rulers and the ruled,

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what he means is simply that the kind of exchange between Indian elites and the state under these circumstances was necessitated by reasons of security of the laer, and was hardly an exchange between equals. There is no suggestion of a tabula rasa upon which the colonial state operated. Further, the adherents of the rst position do not necessarily hold that processes of modernity began with the entry of colonialism. It is not inconsistent with their position to recognize that the Mughal state had, by the 17th C, begun to use certain enumerative technologies. The point is that there is something distinctive about colonial modernity. So although posed in this way, the debate is not really about whether there was a complete break with the past, a tabula rasa on which colonial government wrote, for nobody makes this argument. I suggest the debate is about something else altogether the continuity school is really addressing the problem of a supposed traditionalism, an indigenism that they see in the work of the rst set of scholars. Take Sumit Sarkar in his two essays critical of certain kinds of postmodern inuences in the writing of Indian history (Sarkar1997 and 2002). The dominant thrust of the Subaltern Studies project, under the inuence of a certain kind of postmodernism, notably that of Dipesh Chakrabarti, Gyanendra Pandey and above all Partha Chaerjee (2003:186) has become, he says, focused on critiques of Western-colonial power-knowledge, with non-Western community consciousness as its valorized alternative. (1997: 82) The result is that Radical left-wing social historyhas been collapsed into cultural studies and critiques of colonial discourse, and we have moved from [EP] Thompson to Foucault and even more, Said. (1997: 84) Sarkar is critical of the assumption that the postcolonial nation-state was no more than a continuation of the original, Western, Enlightenment project imposed through colonial discourse. (1997: 93) He interprets the arguments of Partha Chaerjee for example, to be assuming that power is located uniquely in the modern state, whereas power within communities maers less. (1997: 101) At the same time, Sarkar is concerned to recuperate Foucaults understanding of governmentality from Parthas reading, which he believes to have ignored the really original and disturbing thrust of Foucaults arguments, that is, their search for multiple locations of power and their insistence that forms of resistance also normally develop into alternative sites of domination. (1997: 101). He also, as part of the recuperation, points to creative and selective appropriations of Foucault in South Asian scholarship outside the Subaltern Studies project, citing Radhika Singhas work (2003: 187) in this respect. The concern is that with the assumption of a total pre-colonial/colonial disjuncture, The polemical target is no longer the state as relatedto class rule, exploitation, and forms of surplus appropriation, but rather, the modern state as embodying Western (mainly rationalist) values against which indigenous communities need to be valorized. (2003: 187) This kind of selective appropriation of Foucault, it seems to me, is an aempt to escape the destabilizing implications of the postmodernism of Foucault while retaining what can be retained within the modernist world-view. We nd both Sarkar and Sumit Guha arguing that to ascribe any uniqueness to the colonial states intervention is to deprive indigenous actors of agency real historical agency is fundamentally western (Guha 2003:151) and the colonized intelligentsia is virtually robbed of agency (Sarkar1997:91). This is a rather nave understanding of agency as if to argue that colonialism built on existing indigenous practices gives agency to indigenous elites, or on the other hand, that the colonizing elites show agency if they break with existing practices. Both possibilities are inscribed within the practices of governmentality, and to that extent agency and subjectivity are implicated in crucial ways with power. To take Foucault seriously is to recognize, however reluctantly, that there is no real way out of power governmentality, in a sense then, works despite the actual historical agents it works through. Subjectivity has to be understood very much more complicatedly Foucault sees power as productive of subjectivity, of identity. Through the mechanisms of governmentality, the subject of governance is created and subjected to classication, surveillance, normalization (the increasing homogenization and organization of society in modern times). The huge

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bureaucratic machinery evolves endless ways of classifying people. The construction of subjectivity by those who tell us the truth of who we are doctors, psychologists etc is at the same time a subjection to the power they exercise. Here we come to the old charge laid at Foucaults door What about resistance? But as he said in an interview, an important indication of the existence of power, is a display of resistance to it. At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. (1982). Thus wherever there is power, there is the possibility of resistance. Interestingly, there seems to be a similar selective appropriation of Foucault in other postcolonial contexts. For instance, Roman de la Campa, in Latin Americanism describes Foucaults work as a divided corpus the rst Foucault (Order of Things, Archaeology of Knowledge ) focuses on discourse and its simultaneous potential for empowerment and constituting the prison house. The second Foucault (History of Sexuality, Technologies of the Self) emphasizes the micropolitics of subjection. In de la Campas reading this second Foucault, rather than permiing the theorization of colonialism, imperialism and agency, leads to a cul de sac of aetheticism. (Cited in Trigo 2002) This kind of sharp distinction between a Foucault assimilable within modernist emancipatory discourse, and the other, uncomfortable postmodern Foucault, ends up merely reiterating common modernist wisdom power must be resisted, the people have agency. This kind of selective appropriation also leaves us with no understanding of, within a Foucauldian understanding, the tension between, and the interpenetration of, language/reality, resistance/discipline. A characteristic misreading in this mode, of the invention of caste by colonial government argument is a recent article by Irfan Ahmad (2003). Answering a question he chooses to pose thus: Is caste a colonial invention? he argues that while upper caste Hindu and Muslim organizations campaigned against the inclusion of caste in the census, in order to produce larger, homogeneous Hindu and Muslim communities, low-caste Hindu and Muslim organizations demanded recognition of caste in order to highlight their oppressed condition. He reads this phenomenon as for the former, caste was a colonial invention while for the lower castes, the caste question was one of recognition. That is, he seems to understand invention as referring to something unreal, made up, while recognition is of something real. It is worth reiterating the crucial point here that the term invention in this kind of argument does not mean creating out of thin air, (or working on a tabula rasa) invention/imagined is being counterposed, not to real, but to natural something that merely needs to be seen and recognized, but which exists outside all forms of seeing and recognition. Thus, to argue that the Nation is an imagined community is not to deny that is real, simply that the land mass in the Indian Ocean could have been understood by its inhabitants in various dierent ways prior to the advent of nationalism. Further, in Ahmads view, by implication, to argue that caste was a colonial invention is to succumb to indigenism/traditionalism, thus arming powerful groups in their project of projecting their own leadership of homogeneous communities, while to accept that caste was already in existence (prior to the census-dened category of caste even?) is to recognize caste oppression. But going by his own evidence, what I see is that whether certain groups resist identities oered by particular types of colonial classication or demand inclusion within those identities, they are participating in the practices of governmentality. What is in question is not self-identication (which is in any case, inextricable, in Foucaults terms, from practices of subjection) in both cases they seek recognition and armation by the state . At this point I would like to draw our aention to what I think is the real problem that social theorists of our postcolonial condition have to deal with, a problem rendered unrecognizable by the terms in which the debate in Indian historiography is set out. I suggest that what is understood as indigenism in the work of the Indian communitarians (as they have been termed by Sarah Joseph) is beer understood as a recalling to memory of the manner of entry of modernity into our societies. The fact that this encounter with modernity occurs through a political system which is at its core, violent, radically distinguishes our modernity (to use Partha Chaerjees evocative phrase) from
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modernity as it emerged in Europe. The dislocation caused by modernity in Europe four centuries ago was equally brutal, but in Asia and Africa there was a double violence involved the simultaneous disruption caused by modernity and colonialism. However, this disruption does not mark a complete break between state and subjects on the one hand we have a despotic colonial state strategically making adjustments at various levels with dierent sections of the subject population, and on the other, there are the diering kinds of investment these sections have in the modern norms and institutions brought in by colonialism. What is puzzling for the student of politics is that scholars like Sumit Guha and Radhika Singha can produce subtle and layered accounts of the transformation of the public sphere by the colonial state without evoking any sense of the violence involved in this transformation. Such accounts are possible only if the colonial state is understood to be just another administrative system, and all the protestations that it did not act upon a tabula rasa (a straw man to knock down if ever there was one), seem to suggest that. the fundamental transformations introduced by the British were simply an alternative legal system as another scholar, Sandria Freitag puts it (Guha and Anderson 1998: 108). Such a characterisation eectively airbrushes out the force and coercion which characterised the imperial state. The point is that it was the despotic colonial state that was also the bearer of modernity and modern values, a package not unambiguously emancipatory for colonised societies other signicant research shows how colonial transformation of judicial discourse and administrative institutions, and the emergence of the language of rights had devastating consequences for many subaltern sections (sansiahs, Nayar women and female mill workers in Bombay) who were drastically marginalised and disciplined by the operation of modern codes of identity and governance.[1] The Indian state after independence inherited this judicial discourse and the legitimacy to intervene in practices of society. What follows from this understanding is a question-mark upon on the agenda-seing legitimacy of the contemporary state. This is understood by historians of the second school outlined above, to be a return to traditionalism, which, I have argued above, is not the case. To explain this further, in the next section I will look at Partha Chaerjees development of the concepts of civil and political society, that is based on Foucaults governmentality, and that leads us from looking to the state to reform society, to a more complex notion of political transformation. II I nd suggestive here the distinction that Partha Chaerjee makes between civil society and political society in postcolonial democracies (Chaerjee 1997, 1998a, 1998b). Civil society according to Chaerjee is constituted by the institutions of modern associational life, and is marked by modernity, while political society is a domain of mediating institutions between civil society and state, and is the sphere of democracy. There is a contradiction between modernity and democracy in his terms what characterises non-western modernity (that which marks postcolonial societies) is precisely the hiatus between the two. That is, between civil society, composed of a small section of citizens, and political society, composed of population. Chaerjee acknowledges that Foucault was one of the earliest philosophers to recognize the crucial importance of the conceptual move from the idea of society as constituted by the elementary units of homogeneous families to that of a population, dierentiated but classiable, describable, and enumerable. This new concept, Foucault noted, was central to the emergence of modern governmental technologies. (2002:173) In the way in which Partha Chaerjee produces the distinction between the civil society of citizens, and the political society of population groups, the laer, unlike citizens, are not the product of rational contractual association, but rather, are the target of the policy of the legal bureaucratic apparatus of the state. The civil society of citizens, on the other hand, shaped by the normative ideals of western modernity, excludes the vast mass of the population, towards which it assumes a pedagogical
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mission of enlightenment (1997:31-32).[2] Political society parties, movements, non-party political formations channelises popular demands on the state through a form of mobilisation that is called democracy. The point is that that the practices that activate the forms and methods of mobilisation and participation in political society are not always consistent with the principles of association in civil society (1997:32) Democratic aspirations in other words, often violate institutional norms of liberal civil society. However, precisely because this is so, if we accept this understanding, then it is clear that the struggle to reclaim and produce meaning will have to be waged in this uncomfortable realm, that of political society. Secularism in India it seems to me, has functioned almost exclusively in civil society understood in this way. The armation of secularism has been through the state and its institutions, and by the rational contractual associations of civil society for instance, schools and universities, the English media. Take for example, the recent controversy over the re-writing of history text-books. The Hindu Right-directed project of rewriting standard history textbooks produced in the 1970s by historians of world-wide repute, follows the explicit agenda of redressing what is claimed to be a distortion of the past. In this redressal, the declared aim is to valorize Hindu achievements and to present the Hindu community as one that has existed from time immemorial, one that has always been and continues to be egalitarian. This community that is evoked is a homogeneous one that basically looks like the 19th century, North Indian, upper-caste version of Hinduism, with all its taboos and beliefs presented as eternal, but with caste inequality carefully excised. The other aspect of this project is the assimilation of all religions other than Christianity and Islam into the fold of Hinduism, and the location of these outside India, forever alien and inimical to Hindu civilisation. On the other side in this controversy are historians and social scientists ranging from left to liberal persuasions, but who would broadly identify themselves as secular, who lay emphasis on the need to recognize society as historically constituted, in terms of underlying structures rather than manifest appearances, and for whom therefore, power relations and conict over power cannot be ignored while writing history. The Hindu Rights project therefore, is rejected by them as a distortion of social reality. What is signicant is that the textbooks that the Hindu Right wants to do away with have been in use for several decades. Generations of school-students have read them and learnt history the secular way. And yet, every college teacher knows that the majority of students who come into her class in the rst year of the undergraduate course invariably tell the story of India the way they tell it. That there was a Golden Age of Hinduism, when women were respected and educated, that the Muslim invasions destroyed an egalitarian society, that India has existed since the Vedic Age. Tourist guides at historical monuments all over the country retell this story in various ways, alleging the previous existence of temples at almost every monument built by Muslim rulers. In other words, secular history had dominated the academy and intellectual circles (civil society), Hindu communal history, the streets and common sense political society. In reading political society in this way, I unhitch Chaerjees notion of political society from its link in his argument to the welfare function of government. I nd his more recent explications of political society that emphasize this function reduce the initial potential he oered of understanding a hitherto untheorised realm. In On Civil and Political Society in post-colonial democracies Chaerjee outlines four features of political society (2002: 177). Two of these are signicant that many of the mobilizations in political society make demands on the state that are founded on a violation of the law and that such demands are made on behalf of a collectivity, not as individual citizens. However, the two other features that he outlines, while they may have been true till the 1980s, fail to capture the changing nature of political society since the liberalization era of the 1990s, when the state withdrew more and more from its development obligations. These two other features are a) that mobilizations in political society make demands for governmental welfare in the form of right
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and b) that agencies of the state and NGOs deal with these people not as citizens, but as population groups deserving welfare. Certainly demands from political society are made in the form of demands for rights, but no longer in the form of demanding welfare, and nor do government agencies assume that they deserve welfare. NGOs too, no longer conform to the 1980s picture of voluntary agencies working on behalf of the poor there are powerful NGOs in civil society that make demands on behalf of legitimate citizens, piing their interests against those of political society. For example, NGOs that demand the right of citizens to clean air and safety of property (that involves say, removal of slums and closing o common thoroughfares through middle-class residential colonies, from neighbouring working-class selements). Recently, an NGO was formed in Delhi on the issue of blackmail by autorickshaw drivers who were on strike demanding fares be raised. This NGO issued advertisements in English newspapers addressing commuters, and lobbied with the government to ensure the protection of the rights of the middle-class clientele who use autorickshaws. In short, political society in Chaerjees sense is beer understood today as a problem for civil societys conceptualisation of democracy and development, rather than as the target of that development. Of course, the problem with political society understood in this way is that the activities here would not necessarily conform to our understanding of what is progressive or emancipatory. They could be struggles of squaers on government land to claim residence rights (which would include illegally tapping electricity lines, for example), but they could as easily be the eort of a religious sect to preserve the corpse of their leader in the belief of its resurrection[3] or the decision of a village panchayat to kill a woman accused of adultery. The point is not to romanticize and valorize this realm as subaltern. Indeed, political society in this sense is inhabited by many new kinds of loci of power and new elites. The point rather, is that any project of radical democratic transformation would have to engage and collide with the ideas, beliefs and practices in this sphere. It cannot remain in the rareed realms of civil society where in fact both the struggles of the unauthorised squaers as well as that of the religious sects would be dismissed as uncivilized. On the other hand, there is nothing inherently progressive in the realm of civil society. From the point of view of constitutional norms, the large grey realm of survival strategies of the urban poor can only be dismissed as simply illegal. I would therefore, relocate political society as the realm of struggles that aempt to fashion an alternative common sense alternative that is, to the common sense of civil society. This alternative common sense may not always be progressive, but we have no alternative but to engage with it. It is in political society understood in this way that points of resistance may be found, that resist the hegemonic governmental practices of civil society. REFERENCES Ahmad, Irfan (2003) A Dierent Jihad. Dalit Muslims Challenge to Ashraf Hegemony in Economic and Political Weekly November 15, 2003. Bayly, C A (1994) Returning the British to South Asian History: The Limits of Colonial Hegemony South Asia Vol xxvii no.3 December. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1995) Modernity and Ethnicity in India: A History for the Present Economic and Political Weekly December 30. Chaerjee, Partha (1997 ) Beyond the Nation? Or Within? Economic and Political Weekly January 4-11 (1998 a) Community in the East, EPW February 7 (1998b) Introduction in Partha Chaerjee ed. Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the
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Indian Nation-State, Oxford University Press, Delhi. (2002) On civil and Political Society in postcolonial democracies in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani ed Civil Society Cambridge University Press (South Asian edition). Foucault, Michel (1991) Governmentality in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, ed. The Foucault Eect: Studies in Governmentality Harvester/Wheatsheaf London, Toronto, Sydney. -(1982 ) The Subject of Power in Dreyfus and Rabinow Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Guha, Ranajit 1989. Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography Subaltern Studies Volume VI Delhi OUP. Guha, Sumit (2003) The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600-1990, Comparative Studies in Society and History Volume 45 No. 1 January. Guha Sumit and Michael Anderson (1998) Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia Oxford University Press, Delhi. Jalal, Ayesha (2000) Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Routledge, New York Kaviraj, Sudipta (1992) The Imaginary Institution of India in Partha Chaerjee and Gyanendra Pandy eds, Subaltern Studies VII Oxford University Press, Delhi - (1997) Introduction in Sudipta Kaviraj ed Politics in India, OUP Delhi. Sarkar, Sumit (1997) The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies in Writing Social History , Oxford University Press, New Delhi. (2003) Postmodernism and the Writing of History in Beyond Nationalist Frames, Permanent Black, Delhi. Singha, Radhika (1998) Civil Authority and Due process: Colonial Criminal Justice in the Banaras Zamindari, 1781-1795 in Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha eds. Changing Concepts of Rights in South Asia , OUP Delhi. -(2003) Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject Studies in History 19, 1. Trigo, Benigno (2002) ed Foucault and Latin America: Appropriations and Deployments of Discursive Analysis Routledge, New York and London. Endnotes [1] See essays by G. Arunima, Sandria Freitag and Radha Kumar in Sumit Guha and Michael Anderson eds Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice [2] I think it may be necessary here to clarify, since Chaerjees argument has been so persistently misunderstood, that civil society and political society in this sense do not refer to some empirical reality that critics can prove to be otherwise, by adducing facts that show civil society to contain elements of political society, for example. The distinction is a heuristic device used to illuminate and focus on a trend that Chaerjee has identied in Indian democracy (and postcolonial societies in

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general.) As Alan Ryan puts it in his classic work on social science method, referring to Durkheims adapting the word anomie to cover a cluster of symptoms of social disorder Under these circumstances, it would be absurd to complain that he had called the symptoms by the wrong word, for of course, the word meant no more and no less than those symptoms he had aached to it. The Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, London, 1970, P 7. [3] Both of these are examples used at dierent points by Chaerjee to illustrate his argument. Comments How is Anthropology Going? Redux. Kevin Karpiaks Blog says: 27/02/2009 at 9:15 PM [...] Foucault and Indian Scholarship by Nevidita [...]

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