Civil Society and the

Predicament of Multiple Publics

Vivek Bhandari

n a newspaper article published recently, Neera Chandhoke, someone who has written
extensively on the subject of civil society, lamented the emergence of “global civil society
organizations.”1 The organizations, she pointed out, first became dramatically visible at
the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when about fifteen hundred of them had assembled to collec-
tively chart out the world’s future on matters ranging from environmental reform to human
rights. By 1995, this sector of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy groups, and
social activists had reached enormous proportions, as thirty-five thousand of them descended
on the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. In the article, Chandhoke argues that
far from signaling the advent of a new global civil society in which the organizations provide
an alternative to a nation-state-centric global order and the exploitative global economy, the
newly emerging consensus reflects a moral vision determined predominantly by powerful
nations in the West. Her doubts on the subject have as much to do with the neoliberal ideo-
logical consensus emerging at these meetings as with the growing valorization of particular
forms of civil society organizations at the expense of many others.
Given the validity of such concerns, especially as they pertain to the postcolonial world,
there is a pressing need to move the dialogue further. In the period following the collapse of
the Soviet Union, it is true that considerable efforts are being devoted to rejuvenating institu-
of
d ies tions of civil society. A concept that was largely moribund when models of state-led modern-
e St u ization dominated both Marxist and liberal conceptions of social change and development,
ra ti v d
pa an it has made a dramatic comeback and is slowly beginning to percolate into a number of disci-
ca
C om fri
,A plinary arenas. Ongoing discussions approach it from a range of vantage points, informed by
A si a
u th st shifting views on the nature of modernization, the growth of new social movements, and the
So Ea
le
M idd discourse of rights. In these debates, new formulations on the nature of statehood and citizen-
th e ship are necessitating a reevaluation of the meanings of civil society. With a backward glance
06 04
1, 20 -0 at this literature, this essay attempts to identify the parameters of civil society in countries that
o. 05
,N 20
26 1x- ss were once colonized by addressing a very specific question: In what ways has the emergence
l. 20 Pre
Vo 89 ty
10 r si
15 / i ve
of nation-statehood and modern notions of subjectivity shaped the relationship between civil
.1 2
i 10 e Un
do D uk society and public culture in postcolonial societies? By focusing on developments in India,
6 by
2 00 the essay argues that an understanding of the discursive fields and practices normatively
©
associated with civil society and the public sphere in Western liberal thought, while useful, is
inadequate for explaining various forms of participatory politics, and indeed the nature of
“political society” itself, in postcolonial contexts where the historical relationship between the

1. Neera Chandhoke, “Civil Society Hijacked,” Hindu, January 16,

36 2002.
state and society (a false duality in itself) has
been one of stark inequality. The essay argues
that the peculiar circumstances of colonial rule
in India created a fractured, stratified public
culture in which a normative bourgeois public
sphere coexists with multiple “subaltern coun-
terpublics.” Although colonial forms of knowl-
edge sought to discipline the sociocultural
it, for Habermas, everyday interaction makes 37
life, but organized interaction makes history. 5
The emergence of new histories of the popu-
lar struggles of women, peasants, workers, and
minorities—those not formally admitted to the
public sphere in much of nineteenth-century
Europe and America—suggests the historical
inadequacy of Habermas’s distinction. Indeed,

Vivek Bhandari

Civil Society and Multiple “Publics”

landscape in the Raj from the mid-nineteenth
century onward, the coexistence of multiple
publics demonstrates that numerous constitu-
encies resisted, indeed subverted, such reorder-
ing. Over time, this has had a profound effect
on the way people in India understand their
role as citizens and, in turn, their relationship
with existing institutions of civil society.
Locating the “Public”
In the voluminous scholarship on the subject,
the origins of civil society are generally attrib-
uted to G. W. F. Hegel’s nineteenth-century
theoretical formulations. 2 More recently, the
revival of the study of civil society, it is often
suggested, is the outcome of debates in Eastern
Europe and the English translation of Jürgen
Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere.3 Partly because of the prominence
of Habermas’s formulations on the “public
sphere” and modern institutions in general,
the concept of civil society has been particularly
important to political philosophers, who have
been its primary explorers in recent times.4 In
his work on a theory of “communicative action,”
Habermas makes a clear distinction between
the “lifeworld” and the “system”— a distinction
that indicates a radical rupture between the
significance of everyday interaction and inter-
actions made possible by institutions and orga-
nizations. The latter, according to Habermas,
serve as the locus of the modern public sphere
and, in turn, the associational life that ani-
mates civil society. As Ashutosh Varshney puts
in his more recent positions, Habermas has all
but dropped the radical distinction he drew
earlier, 6 and, as Varshney points outs, if more
organized and institutional civic sites are not
available generally or to some specific groups,
street-corner activity can now be viewed as a
serious civic form as well.7
How do these formulations apply to India?
Christopher Pinney points out that the Haber-
masian conception of orthodox politics is prob-
lematic and peculiarly unsatisfactory for the
study of public culture in the Indian subconti-
nent. The context for Habermas’s conceptual-
ization is the outcome of a particular European
history in which a public sphere emerges to rou-
tinize certain forms of communicative agency,
debate, and resolution. In Pinney’s concise
synopsis, Habermas’s public sphere “blossoms
within a cognitivized chronotope (archetypi-
cally the coffee house where one could read and
discuss The Tatler ) within which a certain model
of cerebral rationality is privileged. The cultural
agency that Habermas embodies in this form
of politics is linguistically overdetermined and
is grounded in a notional dyadic interchange
between two discoursing (and immobily seated)
men.”8 He goes on to point out that the theory
of political culture that emerges from such con-
straints is “structured by two absences, which
limit its powers of elucidation: the absence of
any consideration of the bodies that produce
these elocutions and of the performative ele-
ment in these encounters” (19).
Recent writings on the subject of public

2. For an intellectual history of the concept, see
Adam Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
3. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Fred-
eric Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). For
a rich collection of essays on Habermas’s formula-
tion, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public
Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
4. See, e.g., Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Soci-
ety and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992); Charles Taylor, “Modes of Civil Society,” Public
Culture 3, no. 1 (1990); and Michael Walzer, “The Con-
cept of Civil Society,” in Towards a Global Civil Soci-
ety, ed. M. Walzer (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books,
1998), 41–68.
5. Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life:
Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2002), 45.
6. Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the
Public Sphere,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public
Sphere, 421–61.
7. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, 41.
8. Christopher Pinney, “Introduction: Public, Popular,
and Other Cultures,” in Pleasure and the Nation: The
History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Culture in
India, ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 18–19.
38 culture in India have tried to fill these absences.
Most of them are inextricably linked to new
media and varieties of print culture, within
larger discussions on the nature of national-
ism. This research finds that the circulation
of images and texts and the proliferation of
cultural flows are of long standing in India (2)
e and have facilitated a rich culture of opposition
ra ti v
pa against dominant institutions. Stuart Hall has
m
Co in fact suggested that the only viable definition
f
ie so
tu d
of popular culture positions it “in a continuing
S
ia , tension (relationship, influence, antagonism)
As
u th to the dominant culture.”9 Such a position is
So he
n dt
aa congruent with the model of “subalternity” that
ri c
Af st has emerged in the pioneering work of Ranajit
Ea
le Guha. Within South Asianist historiography,
M idd
the emergence of subaltern studies paralleled
the recognition that there were fundamen-
tal problems with colonialist historiography.
Guha’s pioneering formulation sought to rectify
what he perceived as the historical discipline’s
blindness to mass politics by highlighting the
Indian bourgeoisie’s failure to “speak for the
nation.” 10 Subaltern culture works against
dominant groups by using a plethora of eclectic
signs and strategies of resistance in a search for
autonomy.11 In this context, Arjun Appadurai
and Carol Breckenridge’s claim that public cul-
ture is an ally of subaltern studies, extending
that perspective to India considered as a “post-
colony,” makes sense.12 Their model of public
culture defines it as a “zone of contestation.” In
their remarkably rich interpretation, the term
public is not a “neutral or arbitrary substitute for
all these existing alternatives [popular, mass,
folk, consumer, national, or middle class].”
Instead, Appadurai and Breckenridge use the
term public culture to “escape these by now con-
ventional hierarchies [like ‘high’ and ‘low’ cul-
ture] to generate an approach which is open to
the cultural nuances of cosmopolitanism and of
the modern in India.”13
9. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popu- 12. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, “Why
lar,’” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Public Culture?” Public Culture 1 (1988): 4.
ed. John Storey (New York: Prentice Hall, 1997), 462
13. Ibid., 6.
(emphasis added).
14. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,”
10. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony:
in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 115.
History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), xii. 15. Ibid., 114. For Eley’s detailed discussion, see Geoff
Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing
11. Ibid.
Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun,
Habermas and the Public Sphere, 289–339.
This use of the term public gains addi-
tional support from revisionist historiography
of the public sphere. Commenting on this schol-
arship, Nancy Fraser argues that scholars like
Joan Landes and Geoff Eley demonstrate the
degree to which Habermas’s account idealizes
the liberal public sphere because he fails to
study “other, nonliberal, nonbourgeois, compet-
ing public spheres.”14 These scholars argue that,
despite Habermas’s claims about the accessibil-
ity of the public domain, the “official” public
sphere rested on, indeed was importantly con-
stituted by, a number of significant exclusions.
Fraser points out that for Landes, the key axis
of exclusion is gender; she argues that the ethos
of the new republican public sphere in France
was constructed in deliberate opposition to
that of a more woman-friendly salon culture
that the republicans stigmatized as “artificial,”
“effeminate,” and “aristocratic” (113–14). Con-
sequently, a new, austere style of public speech
and behavior was promoted, a style deemed
“rational,” “virtuous,” and “manly” (113). Tak-
ing Landes’s argument further, Eley demon-
strates the degree to which exclusionary opera-
tions were essential to maintaining the liberal
public sphere in countries like England, France,
and Germany, where gender exclusions were
linked to other exclusions rooted in processes
of class formation. In these situations, he claims
that “the soil that nourished the liberal public
sphere was ‘civil society,’ the emerging new con-
geries of voluntary associations.”15 As Jacqueline
Urla puts it, mechanisms of exclusion applied
most forcefully to those citizens who “did not or
will not speak the language of civil society.”16
Clearly a number of the discussions hinge
on the question of whether or not the groups
participating in public discourse are in fact act-
ing autonomously. In his efforts to formulate
a more nuanced and textured view of “publics
and counterpublics” in the wake of the insight-
16. Jacqueline Urla, “Outlaw Language: Creating
Alternative Public Spheres in Basque Free Radio,” in
The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed.
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 280.
ful revisionist public sphere literature, Michael
Warner argues that the “existence of a public
is contingent on its members’ activity, however
notional or compromised, and not on its mem-
bers’ categorical classification, objectively deter-
mined position in social structure, or material
existence. In the self-understanding that makes
them work, publics thus resemble the model of
voluntary association that is so important to civil
society.”17 Warner goes on to point out, however,
that, unlike a voluntary association (and indeed
any civil society organization), a public is not
necessarily tied to any institutional being and
instead commences “with the moment of atten-
tion” of its participants. Publics thus “continu-
ally predicate renewed attention, and cease to
exist when attention is no longer predicated”
(61–62). In this sense, they are “virtual entities,
not voluntary associations,” and become an
integral part of political society because they
act as organic points of convergence for social
constituencies. Warner’s formulation forces us
to recognize that a public can be seen as an
expression of volition—of agency—on the part
of its members, and this allows us to under-
stand “publics as scenes of self-activity, of his-
torical rather than timeless belonging,” as sites
of “active participation rather than ascriptive
belonging” (62–63).
Virtually from the beginning, counter-
publics contested the exclusionary norms of the
bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles
of political behavior and alternative norms of
public speech, a pattern as true of European
nations as of colonial settings. As Eley puts it,
“The emergence of a bourgeois public was never
defi ned solely by the struggle against absolut-
ism and traditional authority, but . . . addressed
the problem of popular containment as well.
The public sphere was always constituted by
conflict.”18 According to this view, members of
subordinated social groups repeatedly found
it advantageous to constitute alternative pub-
lics. Fraser calls these social groups “subaltern
counterpublics” in order to signal that they are
parallel discursive arenas where members of
17. See Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpub-
lics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 61.
18. Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures.”
Cited in Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 116.
subordinated social groups invent and circulate 39
counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional
interpretations of their identities, interests, and
needs.19 The point, which was made persua-
sively by Fraser and can be applied to colonial
and postcolonial societies, is that “subaltern
counterpublics have a dual character. On the
one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal
Vivek Bhandari
Civil Society and Multiple “Publics”
and regroupment; on the other hand, they
also function as bases and training grounds
for agitational activities directed toward wider
publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between
these two functions that their emancipatory
potential resides. This dialectic enables subal-
tern counterpublics to partially offset, although
not wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory
privileges enjoyed by members of dominant
social groups in stratified societies.”20 Argu-
ing against a singular, comprehensive public
sphere, Fraser opts for a more flexible theoriza-
tion of the public that makes room for a plural-
ity of competing publics. This move away from a
strong normative conception to a more histori-
cally grounded one has the virtue of expanding
our view of available and politically relevant dis-
cursive spaces by including subaltern counter-
publics as crucial alternative forms of publicity
that have an integral influence on the activities
associated with civil society.
Revisionist conceptualizations of the
public open up ways of decentering our under-
standing of the processes through which ideas
are produced and shared. Based on these writ-
ings, it would seem that the structural relation-
ship of public culture with civil society organi-
zations is clearly far more complex than what is
described in Habermas’s early formulations on
the subject. For the purposes here, it is more
useful to argue that the diversity of political
practices and publics—many (though not all)
of which are constructed around collective, not
individual, notions of subjectivity—requires us
to recognize that civil society in postcolonial
societies should be understood as a fragmented
space, one that has a symbiotic relationship with
the multiple publics that inform it.
19. Fraser coined this phrase by combining two sity Press, 1989). See Fraser, “Rethinking the Public
terms that other theorists have recently used. She Sphere,” 109–42.
has taken subaltern from Gayatri Spivak’s use of
20. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 124.
the term and counterpublic from Rita Felski, Beyond
Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
40 The State and Civil Society
Most discussions of civil society derive suste-
nance from differing interpretations of state-
hood and citizenship, concepts that have long
and distinguished lineages. Although there is
not enough space to delve into these in detail,
the influence of Foucauldian insights on postco-
e lonial literature, and how the latter has altered
ra ti v
m pa our use of these concepts, needs to be acknowl-
Co edged. Before moving on to the discussion of
f
ie so
tu d
the relationship between civil society and pub-
S
ia , lic culture, our understanding of these concepts
As
u th should be clarified.
So he
n dt
aa In a seminal essay challenging Hegel’s
ri c
Af st claim that “the state is not mere mechanical
Ea
le scaffolding” but a vital force for realizing the
M idd
ethics of freedom, 21 Timothy Mitchell argues
that “the edges of the state are uncertain; soci-
etal elements seem to penetrate it on all sides,
and the resulting boundary between state and
society is difficult to determine.”22 In this, he
is building on the work of Philip Abrams, for
whom the state is not an institution, let alone
a thing, but an “ideological project,” so that
the key to the problem is to acknowledge the
“cogency of the idea of the state as an ideologi-
cal power and treat that as a compelling object
of analysis.”23 For Mitchell, the state is impor-
tant because “of its political strength as a mythic
or ideological construct.”24 As C. J. Fuller points
out, Mitchell’s approach crucially depends on
the argument that although there is no clear
boundary separating the state from society, an
apparent boundary between them is produced
by the modern nation-state, so that “the dis-
tinction between state and society . . . [is] the
defining characteristic of the modern political
order.”25 For Mitchell, the state is to be analyzed
not as a structure but “as a structural effect,”
that is, as the effect of practices that make state
structures appear to exist. Significant among
these practices are Foucauldian disciplines help-
ing to produce the armies, schools, bureaucra-
cies, and other distinctly modern institutions.26
These structured effects of modern technolo-
gies of power tend to privilege static notions of
citizenship that are at odds with the historical
movement of peoples and ideas.
Such static notions of statehood—and the
ways in which they have become integral to ide-
ologies of nationalism—have had a detrimental
effect on democratic practices in postcolonial
societies. One way of understanding this better
is by exploring the intrinsic relationship between
civil society and citizenship in such societies, a
juxtaposition that also helps us to better com-
prehend some of the ways in which moderniza-
tion has gone wrong. The inherently patriarchal
and authoritarian (rather than participatory)
form taken by modern institutions in such soci-
eties has undermined modernity’s emancipatory
potential, in large part because the state, as a
structural effect, has failed to protect the rights
ensured by citizenship for large segments of the
population. In India, for instance, the postcolo-
nial government is structurally not too different
from its colonial predecessor. The situation is
compounded by the fact that in this period, cap-
ital is monopolized by a dominant elite, one that
spearheaded what Partha Chatterjee (following
Antonio Gramsci) describes as a “passive revolu-
tion” against India’s erstwhile colonial rulers.27
This has created a situation in which the idea
of democracy as it is used by dominant groups
serves as little more than an ideological foil for
their self-preservation. According to Dipankar
Gupta, “When democracy no longer encourages
the well-being of citizens along the lines of civil
society, it is largely because the ethics of free-
dom are being subverted by technological ratio-
nality, or by market principles, or by the majority
principle, or the pure and dogmatic assertions
of communal or group equality (as in caste-
based politics).”28 I would like to argue that the
solution to this problem is for disenfranchised
groups not to abandon the notion of citizenship

21. Cited from G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right,
cited in Dipankar Gupta, “Civil Society or the State:
What Happened to Citizenship? ” in Institutions
and Inequalities: Essays in Honour of Andre Beteille,
ed. Ramachandra Guha and Jonathan P. Parry (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 253.
22. Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State:
Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” Ameri-
can Political Science Review, 85 (1991): 77–96.
23. Philip Abrams, “Some Notes on the Difficulty of
Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1
(1998): 79.
24. Mitchell, “Limits of the State,” 81.
25. C. J. Fuller and John Harriss, “For an Anthropology
of the Modern Indian State,” in The Everyday State
and Society in India, ed. C. J. Fuller and Veronique
Benei (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000), 3–4.
26. For Mitchell’s explanation of the phrase structural
effect, see Mitchell, “Limits of the State,” 94.
27. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? 2nd ed. (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). See
chapters 1, 2, and 5 for a detailed discussion of this
subject.
28. Gupta, “Civil Society or the State,” 253.
altogether but to create viable spaces to engage
institutions that serve as the loci of power. This
was a point that Pierre Bourdieu made while
warning new social movement activists that a
rewriting of meaning is an effete exercise in and
of itself; it must be supplemented with a direct
engagement with the state.29
In India, definitions of modern statehood
have historically been normalized to accommo-
date the imperatives of nation building. Partly as
an extension of this process, the concept of citi-
zenship has been made more parochial, render-
ing it virtually incapable of accommodating the
cosmopolitan impulses of mobile communities.
Historically, social groups resisting the postcolo-
nial state’s efforts at modernization have tended
to draw on a rich repertoire of resistance strat-
egies developed over a prolonged engagement
with colonial rule, indeed many precolonial
forms of disciplining. Although the constitu-
encies of these groups are usually local, their
repertoire is enriched by extranational cultural
images, narratives, and modes of representa-
tion. Such communities view liberal notions of
citizenship through a lens conditioned by deep,
and in many cases well-founded, suspicion of
governmental efforts at ordering. In the pre-
colonial and colonial periods, migrant groups
and seasonal workers moved in large numbers
into trade, warfare, manufacturing, building,
and hauling, all perennial options. 30 These
movements have continued in the postcolonial
period, but they fi nd themselves frequently at
odds with an increasingly archaic notion of lib-
eral citizenship. Building on his argument that
nationalism in colonial societies was “a deriva-
tive discourse” that normalized the hegemony
of bourgeois groups, Chatterjee has recently
emphasized that in countries like India, civil
society—those institutions of modern associa-
tional life that are based on equality, autonomy,
freedom of entry and exit, and other such prin-
ciples—is accessible only to a small section of
the population whose rights are protected by
the legal-bureaucratic apparatus of the state. 31
29. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of
Groups,” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 723–44; cited
in Gupta, “Civil Society or the State,” 253.
This has not changed too much with India’s pas- 41
sage from colonial rule to postcolonial nation-
hood because, in the latter, the discourses and
practices of civil society still emanate from a
small group of “citizens.” These groups were
the nationalist elites in the era of colonial
modernity and have remained dominant in
the postcolonial period. However, despite the
Vivek Bhandari
Civil Society and Multiple “Publics”
proliferation of NGOs, citizens’ groups, and so
on in recent times, a large segment of Indian
society still remains outside the bounds of civil
society but—and here is the catch—within the
realm of “political society.” The emergent forms
of this political realm are still unclear, but Chat-
terjee tackles the problem by designating this
segment as the population, a descriptive and
empirical (not normative) characterization
formulated to capture the “material of society”
that is not rationally explicable. 32 Without say-
ing so, he seems to imply that the realm of sub-
altern agency is to be found in sections of the
population whose lives are governed by alterna-
tive forms of knowledge and reason. Inhabiting
alternative modernities, these groups have an
uncomfortable relationship with the appara-
tus and practices associated with the modern
nation-state.
Multiple Publics and Civil Society in India
I would like to take Chatterjee’s formulation fur-
ther to argue that the relationship between civil
society and what Chatterjee somewhat vaguely
describes as the population can be clarified by
reassessing our understanding of public culture
in India. The process of state formation in post-
colonial societies—shaped as it is by the violent
interaction of colonial and precolonial forms of
knowledge—is intertwined with the existence
of multiple publics and counterpublics, nor-
matively very different from the Habermasian
public sphere. In this section, I examine three
small examples to illustrate the ways in which
publics, in starkly different historical contexts,
played a critical role in animating political cul-
ture. The first example is from late-nineteenth-
30. David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia tory and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25, Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
218–19. 2001), 165–78.
31. Partha Chatterjee, “On Civil and Political Societ- 32. Ibid., 173.
ies in Postcolonial Democracies,” in Civil Society: His-
42 century Punjab (in northern India); the second
is from the 1940s, the “twilight” of British rule
in India; and the third has strong resonance for
contemporary India.
Oratory, Publishing, and the “Indian Ecumene”
As one of the many colonial institutions that
became entrenched in nineteenth-century Pun-
i ve
rat
m pa jab, the printing press became a major force of
Co change in the region. A newly burgeoning print
f
ie so
tu d
culture, animated by the activities of prolific
S
ia , writers, influential thinkers, and activists, came
As
u th to be supplemented by precolonial and colonial
So he
n dt
aa channels of oral and performative communi-
ri c
Af st cation by the third quarter of the nineteenth
Ea
le century. As the ordering of colonial society
M idd
under the Raj restructured social relations and
the cultural landscape of urban India, a new
class of public intellectuals increasingly found
itself going back and forth between the realm of
ideas and the sphere of practical political con-
cerns, between the circle of high politics and
the messy realities of local politics, between the
promise of Western learning and the timeworn
conventions of what Chris Bayly has described
as the “Indian ecumene.” In Bayly’s definition,
the Indian ecumene was “a form of cultural
and political debate which was typical of North
India before the emergence of the newspaper
and public association, yet persisted in conjunc-
tion with the press and new forms of publicity
into the age of nationalism.”33 Many of the per-
sonalities who inhabited this world spoke from
positions both within and outside the bound-
aries of political rationality sanctioned by the
institutional structures of colonial society and
articulated their bold new demands for consti-
tutional reform with age-old cultural references
while investing familiar constructs with new,
often foreign content.34 A key figure of this gen-
eration was Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who played
a seminal role in trying to reconcile modern-
ist notions of science and rationality with tra-
ditional Islam. Although he is remembered for
his extensive writings and as the founder of
the Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College in
Aligarh in 1875, he was also one of the most
public figures of the nineteenth century, a per-
son who adjusted to the radical transforma-
tions of this turbulent period by redefining the
nature of public speaking and oratory.
By the time Punjab entered the 1860s,
new public settings and the emergence of town
halls, municipal committees, and other such
institutions restructured the way in which audi-
ences received the spoken word. This, in turn
shaped the idiom of public debate. By the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century, in addition to the
ulama and pandits, “lay” spokesmen increasingly
began to share ideas and articulate opinions.35
In Punjab, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan was among
the earliest figures to play this role. The reason
for his success lay as much in the provocative
nature of his reformist ideas as in the incisive
ways in which he adjusted his oratorical style
to suit the requirements of new public spaces.
His biographer, Hali, claims that Sir Sayyid was
the first person in British India to introduce
public speaking in a language other than En-
glish or Persian. Describing the oratorical style
of Sir Sayyid in a speech that he delivered in
Ludhiana in 1884, David Lelyveld says that he
“modulate[d] skillfully from a brief expression
of Persianized politeness formulas to bits of
Arabic piety, finally to end in an intimate style
in which he addresse[d] his audience in the
familiar tum mode.”36 The intimacy, informal-
ity, and spontaneity of this style of public speak-

33. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence
Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–
1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
chap. 5.
34. A good example of this is the democratization
of the concept of adab. Most of the urban publicists,
and various other public figures of late-nineteenth-
century Punjab, were familiar with the normative
directives laid down as adabiyat, defined by Barbara
Daly Metcalf as “the proper discrimination of social
order, behavior, and taste; it espouses breeding and
nurture; and it is sustained by deference towards
those who embody its norms.” Although originally
identified with an Islamic ideal, the content of adab
was fundamentally cosmopolitan and shared by non-
Muslims as well. When adabi norms were carried
over into colonial settings, they were increasingly
adapted to new settings and forms of discourse. By
the late nineteenth century, a number of publicists
recognized the need to adapt their modes of articula-
tion to new contexts, not by denying the relevance of
adab norms, but by modifying them. Referring to the
relevance of adab in colonial society, David Gilmartin
notes: “The reformers in the modern period . . . are
less concerned with elites because it is not just the
elites who provide the cultural basis for the political
system; rather there are larger groups of people who
are now involved. This becomes particularly impor-
tant in the late nineteenth century . . . when the
political system itself . . . becomes more and more
democratic.” Metcalf’s definition is in Moral Con-
duct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian
Islam, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984), 12–13. Gilmartin’s quota-
tion is taken from the same book, 19.
35. Barbara Daly Metcalf, “Polemical Debates in
Colonial India,” in Religious Controversy in British
India, ed. K. Jones (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992), 232.
36. David Lelyveld, “Fragments of a Public Sphere:
Urdu Oratory and Printing in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury” (paper presented at the Association of Asian
Studies meeting, Chicago, 17 April 1990).
ing marked a major break with the timeworn
conventions of the past. What is also apparent
from a number of Sir Sayyid’s speeches all over
Punjab in 1884, 37 at sites ranging from railway
platforms to town halls, is that his audience cut
across class and religious lines. By attracting
the interest of such an audience he, in effect,
conceded the existence of a larger public as
judged, and acted. The public speeches of men 43
like Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Lala Lajpat Rai
brought together the same social groups that
attended the public spectacle of the shastrar-
thas, where Christian missionaries, Muslim cler-
ics, and Hindu Brahmans debated the glories
of their religions. Punjabis who participated in
associational and civic life frequently engaged in

Vivek Bhandari

Civil Society and Multiple “Publics”

enfranchised in its own fate.38 Sir Sayyid’s activi-
ties also brought him into contact with several
groups at “traditional” arenas such as mushai-
ras, munazarah, and the recitation of dastans, 39
which were historically limited to specific social
constituencies such as the ashraf (notables or
nobility). Many of these settings became loci of
political debate and surveillance that subjected
both rulers and society to critique through
meetings, performance, and poetry.
Administrative infrastructure set up
in the early decades of formal colonial rule
created institutional spaces that altered the
parameters within which Punjabis expressed
themselves. Together with the emergence of
new economic opportunities, especially in com-
merce, the urban centers of Punjab witnessed
a rapid increase in the number of libraries,
schools, bookstores, and publishing institu-
tions. In sum, all of these changes transformed
the expression and circulation of knowledge in
radical ways, and together with institutions of
modern education and the colonial adminis-
trative edifice, restructured the social habitus
of urban Punjab. Into this context emerged a
restless group that cut across kin ties, neighbor-
hood networks, and caste affiliations by publicly
debating issues of social morality and political
reform. This group represented itself not as a
single collective united by ideology but through
individuals and organizations whose schemes
of perception shaped the way they classified,
debates on issues of caste, religious, municipal,
educational, and literary “reform.”40 The emer-
gence of a public culture, in which disparate
individuals speaking for specific social constitu-
encies sought to influence a large audience, was
a key component of this process. Public artic-
ulations were diverse and often contentious,
generating emotional pronouncements and
counterassertions in the name of associations
“representing” a range of social constituencies.
Although not necessarily subaltern in nature,
the speeches of men like Sir Sayyid were efforts
at appealing to new audiences by developing
discursive strategies that relied on the creative
use of the new urban topography and the new
public arenas it created. Many of the publics
that converged around such spaces symbolized
the restlessness of a newly emerging class forma-
tion and went on to shape the channels through
which anticolonial sentiments were articulated
over the course of the next century.
Performing Politics, Staging Resistance
In 1942, a group of progressive writers who
recognized the potential of popular theater as
an effective weapon in the fight against British
imperialism and fascism, and in the struggles of
peasants, workers, and other oppressed classes,
formed an informal organization called the
Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).
According to the founders of the IPTA, the
goal of the organization, as articulated in the

37. Sayyid Iqbal Ali, Sayyid Ahmad Khan ka Safar-
Namah-i-Panjab (The Travels of Sayyid Ahmad Khan
in Punjab) (Aligarh: Aligarh Institute Press, 1884).
38. Ibid.
39. Mushairas are poetry readings, normally con-
ducted in closed settings. Munazarah, according to
Bayly (Empire and Information, 190), refers to forms
of critical debate on religious subjects. On dastans,
see Frances W. Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in
Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
40. In a fascinating discussion on the impact of
“colonial liberalism” in India, David Scott argues that
the discourse on reform in colonial society has to be
understood as central to modern power, to “mod-
ern forms of political rationality.” In this sense, Scott
argues, reform is “connected to the construction of
a specific kind of knowledge (a rationalist, universal-
ist knowledge), a certain kind of division of social-
institutional space (the secular/religious, state/civil
society division), a certain kind of historical under-
standing (a teleological and progressivist history),
and a certain kind of subject (a self-improving one).”
The boundaries governing agendas for reform were
determined by the class configurations of colonial
society. As shall be seen, the specificity of the reform-
ist space was (and continues to be) constantly chal-
lenged by subaltern counterpublics that resisted the
political rationality embodied in reformist agendas.
For a detailed discussion of these themes, see David
Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postco-
loniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), 84–90.
44 “All Indian People’s Theatre Conference Draft
Resolution,” was to mobilize “a people’s theatre
movement throughout the whole of India as the
means of revitalizing the stage and the tradi-
tional arts and making them at once the expres-
sion and organizer of our people’s struggle for
freedom, cultural progress and economic jus-
e tice.” 41 As Nandi Bhatia describes it, founders of
ra ti v
m pa the IPTA described the organization as neither
Co “a movement which has been imposed from
f
ie so
tu d
above but one which has its roots deep down in
S
ia , the cultural awakening of the masses of India,
As
u th nor . . . a movement which discards our rich
So he
n dt
aa cultural heritage, but one which seeks to revive
ri c
Af st the lost in that heritage by interpreting, adopt-
Ea
le ing and integrating it with the most significant
M idd
facts of the people’s lives and aspirations in the
people’s epoch” (432).
The IPTA’s activities, which creatively
blended ideas drawn partly from Western and
Chinese practices, as well as forms of traditional
drama performed at the local level in numerous
parts of the Indian subcontinent, were clearly
inspired by a Marxist utopian vision. In this
sense, the IPTA sought to challenge existing
hegemonic structures, both colonial and those
intrinsic to Indian society. Bhatia points out that
for many of the founders of the IPTA, the Little
Theatre Groups in England, the 1930s Works
Progress Administration (WPA) theater project
in the United States, the Soviet theaters, and the
strolling players in China who staged antifascist
plays to protest Japanese exploitation exerted
immense influence. Inspired by these groups
abroad, IPTA members turned to theater as a
political weapon amid the political turmoil at
home, created by the war in Europe, increasing
repression from British imperialism, and deep-
ening nationalist sentiments manifested in the
Quit India movement of 1942.
What makes the IPTA interesting for this
discussion was that right from its origin, it was
forced to adapt to a diverse range of public
spaces that, its founders soon realized, were
critical for animating political discourse. To
seek the “widest possible mass basis for its activi-
ties,” the IPTA turned to indigenous popular
traditions of different regions such as the jatra
of Bengal, tamasha of Maharashtra, and bur-
rakatha of Andhra Pradesh (433). Given the lin-
guistic, cultural, and geographical diversity of
the Indian subcontinent, the IPTA was forced
to make tough decisions regarding language,
theatrical space, stylistic devices, viewership,
and audience in order to address the specific
constituencies it sought to politicize and ener-
gize. To some degree, it succeeded in its aims
because of its ability to look beyond the assump-
tions of Western revolutionary theory and thus
inaugurated a theater of collective resistance
and liberation, yet was heterogeneous in its
constitution and varied depending on the geo-
graphical, linguistic, and cultural differences of
a diverse populace.
Although the plays performed by the
IPTA frequently drew on themes from around
the world (as in the play Roar China), perhaps
its most successful play was Bijon Bhattacharya’s
Nabanna, about the Bengal famine of 1943.
Under Shombhu Mitra’s direction, the Bengal
IPTA squad performed the play in many parts
of the country as part of a festival called the
Voice of Bengal. Bhatia says that the purpose
of the festival was to collect money for the relief
of famine victims in rural Bengal. Nabanna pre-
sents the intensity of the famine through the
starving family of a Bengali peasant, Pradhan
Samaddar. As the play progresses, it goes on to
critique the inherently exploitative nature of
colonial rule by demonstrating that the fam-
ine was not a natural disaster but a man-made
calamity. Nabannna’s challenge to imperialism,
according to Bhatia, also occurs in “the play’s
violation of the conventions of ‘high realism’
presented in the ‘well-made’ plays that domi-
nated metropolitan theater in India in the early
decades of the twentieth century” (439). This
“disruption occurs through the episodic struc-
ture of the play, which prevents the action from
being resolved at the end, frustrating an inter-
pretive closure. In so doing, Nabanna purports
to evoke ‘recognition’ from the audience as the
operative and critical political response” (439).
The possibility of popular accessibility to
the IPTA productions was facilitated, in part, by
the IPTA’s ability to move from place to place
41. Nandi Bhatia, “Staging Resistance: The Indian
Peoples’ Theater Association,” in Lowe and Lloyd,
Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, 432.
quite easily. Bhatia describes how its provincial
squads emerged out of the closed halls of city
theaters to stage plays five or six times a day
under open skies, in public parks, on street cor-
ners, or in village and city courtyards. By travel-
ing to remote areas, villages, and working-class
settlements, the directors, producers, and play-
wrights came into direct contact with their audi-
ences. Citing James Clifford, Bhatia argues that
ethnographic stories “simultaneously describe
real cultural events and make additional . . .
ideological statements” (440). Dramatizing the
stories of “the people” in their settings provided
patterns or associations that pointed to coher-
ent meanings. Thus, the “meanings would be
provided in two ways: by virtue of the spectators’
familiarity with a story, so that they could recog-
nize and understand the processes that caused
oppression, and through identification with the
popular traditions of specific regions. While
the familiarity of a story had the ability to elicit
audience participation in the political process,
the knowledge of the intimate cultural details
was useful for directors to engage in address-
ing the problems of a particular region.” 42 What
IPTA directors learned during their travels was
that the stories of imperialism and exploitation
made maximum sense when these were per-
formed in settings that were closest to home
for the viewers. Decisions regarding the “cor-
rect” public space were of critical importance
in determining the success of a performance—
and Bhatia’s research corroborates this.
Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags, and
Cultural Chauvinism
In postcolonial India, the RSS (Rashtriya Sway-
amsewak Sangh), an organization banned after
its culpability in the assassination of Mohan-
das Gandhi was established, has maintained a
strong foothold in communities scattered across
parts of the country. This is because its shakhas
(literally branches or training meetings) use
seemingly apolitical spaces such as public parks
42. Ibid. For an updated and more detailed assess-
ment of the relationship between nationalism, colo-
nialism, and the politics of theater in colonial and
postcolonial India, see Bhatia’s Acts of Authority/
Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and
Postcolonial India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2004).
and temples to recruit members and to build 45
enduring relationships with specific communi-
ties. Although the RSS has its own unique his-
torical trajectory, the organization’s strategy of
mobilization is similar to that of the Shiv Sena
in Bombay, which draws on the discourse of
Muslim demonization, Hindu militancy, politi-
cal nationalism, and the restitution or specific
Vivek Bhandari
Civil Society and Multiple “Publics”
religious rituals relying on the public enactment
of religious spectacles such as the Ganapati fes-
tival.43 The RSS’s ideological position is based
on a dismissal of Nehruvian socialism and the
“pseudo-secular” pretensions of the postcolo-
nial state in India. Since the 1930s, Pune (in
western India) has been an important center
of RSS activities and has served as a point of
convergence for numerous other Hindu nation-
alist organizations. The driving force behind
this cluster of organizations—also called the
Sangha Parivar—is the dense network of RSS
shakhas spread out across most parts of the city.
Over the past eighty years or so, the network
of RSS supporters has grown in size, embracing
a range of institutional spaces such as schools,
colleges, banking institutions, and merchant
guilds (some of which are caste based) and a
number of associations for youth, students,
women, children, and social service organiza-
tions (working in slums). These are supple-
mented by the RSS’s propaganda tools such as
newspapers and magazines. This “alternative
civil society”—as Thomas Blom Hansen calls
it 44 —plays an important role in the daily life
of the RSS. However, the backbone of its orga-
nizational structure is a labyrinthine system of
informal networks encompassing RSS-affiliated
families who exert a high degree of surveillance
over their own constituencies.
Although the upper echelons of the RSS
have close ties with institutions of organized
politics like political parties, the RSS’s bloated
self-perception as the repository of high moral
and cultural values finds its most insidious man-
ifestation in the activities of the shakhas whose
43. The four “pillars” of the Shiv Sena’s ideology 44. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democ-
are described in detail by Mary F. Katzenstein, Uday racy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (New
Mehta, and Usha Thakkar in “The Rebirth of Shiv Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117.
Sena in Maharashtra: The Symbiosis of Discursive
and Institutional Power,” in Community Conflicts
and the State in India, ed. Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 215–38.
46 leaders are recruited locally. The RSS shakhas
generally rope in young boys from the age of
six onward and congregate in playgrounds and
open public spaces to conduct their activities.
These include games, religious rituals, physi-
cal training, and, in some cases, the singing of
patriotic songs. The boys are expected to wear
e khaki shorts and conduct their activities under
ra ti v
m pa a saffron f lag, which has come to symbolize
Co Hindu nationalism. Following the initiation of
f
ie so
tu d
the boys into the organization, a sense of cor-
S
ia , porate belonging is inculcated through peer
As
u th mentoring in the shakha, in which the group
So he
n dt
aa leader consciously makes an effort to establish
ri c
Af st a relationship with a member’s family, so that
Ea
le over time the distinction between the individ-
M idd
ual member’s political mission and personal
life is blurred.45 This not only makes it difficult
for a swayamsewak (individual member) to leave
the organization but also encourages a lifelong
attachment of the family to the organization.
In addition to the indoctrination that lies
at the heart of shakha activity, the RSS’s reper-
toire also includes the use of public spectacle as
a means toward greater social integration and
visibility. Six specific festivals punctuate the
annual calendar and play a pivotal role in pub-
licizing the different strands of RSS ideology.
The articulation of a hypermasculine patriotism
through the elevation of Shivaji—a Maratha
ruler who challenged Mogul authority—to
the status of a demigod serves to “nationalize”
this medieval figure. This is done through the
public enactment of his ideas in plays. The RSS
also promotes the use of Sanskrit verses in all
of its public rituals (marching, exercising, etc.)
in order to project the idea of Hindu cultural
purity around the idea of “dharma” and the
timeless quality of Hindu civilizational identity.46
For the purposes here, the point worth making
is that the durability of the RSS’s network needs
to be understood as a function of its success in
penetrating and controlling those public spaces
that are frequently considered outside the realm
of “organized” political society.47
The RSS’s proselytizing mission has had
remarkable success through the strategic use
of public spaces to enhance its political goals.
The approach has allowed it to preserve a core
group of followers whose commitment to its ide-
ology has transformed the character of whole
neighborhoods and castes.48 An excellent exam-
ple of this kind of success is to be found among
the Chitpavan Brahmans of Maharashtra. For
such groups, the other is always the Muslim
community, which is thoroughly demonized,
and the Anglicized establishment, from which
these groups have been excluded. In this sense,
the RSS’s alternative civil society draws suste-
nance from its “besieged” mentality and is pit-
ted against the postcolonial state. Indeed, every
act of criticism and ridicule of the RSS by the
government has been used by the organiza-
tion to strengthen its core constituency and the
commitment of its members. In this sense, the
seemingly apolitical activity of the shakha, which
thrives on its use of precisely those local spaces
that lie outside the bounds of mainstream civil
society, continues unabated in its efforts of
Hindu fascist indoctrination.
The above examples, all of which are rooted in
completely different historical contexts, reveal
the complexity and texture of political culture
in modern India. The diversity of political prac-
tices, discursive strategies, and the multiplicity
of locations where these take shape demon-
strates that our understanding of civil society
in postcolonial settings needs to be broadened.
In a recent essay, Arjun Appadurai argues that,

45. The strategies used by the RSS shakhas have been
captured by Lalit Vachani in two documentary films,
which describe the subtle ways in which shakha
leaders are able to initiate and sustain contact with
young boys and indoctrinate them with ideologies of
Hindu nationalism. See The Boy in the Branch (New
Delhi: Wide Eye Films, 1993) and The Men in the Tree
(New Delhi: Wide Eye Films, 2002).
46. For a discussion of the RSS’s history and its strat-
egies of mobilization, see Tapan Basu, Pradit Datta,
Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen,
Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (New Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1993).
47. Members of Shikshantar (also called the Peo-
ple’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Devel-
opment) based in Udaipur (in Rajasthan) told me in
April 2002 that in their efforts to energize local play-
grounds and public spaces as places for dialogue and
play, they were confronted with members of the RSS
who “claimed” these territories. Shikshantar’s goals,
which are geared toward creating “open spaces” for
dialogue among local communities, families, etc.,
came into direct conflict with the RSS’s much more
chauvinistic agenda. Shikshantar’s own approach is
based on a sensitive appreciation of the interplay
between multiple publics, culture, and politics, and
over the past few years it has found itself in situa-
tions of conflict with the RSS.
48. For an in-depth discussion of the creative use
of public spaces by the RSS, see Hansen, The Saffron
Wave, chap. 3.
semantically, “deep democracy” (as he describes
the form taken by political practices in contem-
porary India) suggests “roots, anchors, intimacy,
proximity, and locality.” 49 These terms also help
us to better grasp the morphology of the publics
that animate political culture. Multiple publics
thrive on intimacy and are remarkably mobile
and capable of cutting across social boundaries,
rather like those constituted by the speeches of
Sayyid Ahmad Khan and by the plays of the
IPTA. Research from other parts of India cor-
roborates these patterns.
Veena Naregal’s recent study of colonial
western India shows how, over the past century
and a half, new patterns of social stratification
have been shaped as much by the imperatives
of colonial rule as by the active participation
of the “native” intelligentsia, which was able
to achieve a position of ideological influence
because of its ability to negotiate the arenas of
educational policy, the press, reform organiza-
tions, and voluntary associations to advance its
interests. 50 It shows how the English-educated
urban elite were completely dependent on
ground-level activists who used subaltern pub-
lic spaces to mobilize support. Such mobiliza-
tions played a critical role in shaping the dis-
course on issues of reform, politics, and religion
as it was transformed by the interplay between
competing nationalisms in the early part of
the twentieth century. Naregal’s fi ndings and
my research are consistent on the position that
at no stage was colonial hegemony total. Even
though Indians were subject to the mechanisms
that preserve colonial states, the diverse forms
of associational activity that emerged in the
late nineteenth century reveal that subaltern
groups exercised their own agency in carving
out autonomous spaces. Urban groups, faced
with the dilemma of reconciling British ideas
of justice, religious reform, economic change,
and social identity with their own views that
frequently drew on precolonial forms of knowl-
edge, formed associations and reform groups.
Social groups frequently challenged each other
49. Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Gov-
ernmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Public Cul-
ture 14 (2002): 45.
50. See Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and
the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism
(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).
in Punjab, whose urban spaces were animated 47
by multiple “agonistic” publics that had begun
to acquire an associational quality by the end
of the nineteenth century. Similar patterns are
discernible in different parts of colonial India,
although Bengal was the region that took the
lead. The emergence of regional identities in
different parts of India, voiced in religious,
Vivek Bhandari
Civil Society and Multiple “Publics”
linguistic, or cultural terms and shaped by
the institutions of colonial administration and
Western learning as well as the diverse forms of
associational civic activity, was inextricably tied
to the entrenchment of a distinct urban culture
characterized by these multiple publics.
An important aspect of these publics that
mark the political landscape of India is the
performative element. In a remarkable set of
studies over the past decade, Sandria Freitag’s
work draws one toward what Pinney describes
as “the centrally important corporal dimension
of performance, the performative space of the
procession, and the strangely neglected role of
visuality, as constituents of the nexus of what in
other contexts became the public sphere.”51 In a
similar spirit, Ravi Vasudevan draws one’s atten-
tion to the virtual inseparability of reception
and production in such situations. His research
shows how Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s production
of a space for politicized Ganesh processions in
1890s Bombay mobilized Hindu participants in
ways where it would be impossible to “separate
‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ on opposite sides
of a semiotic exchange.” 52
The role played by social movements in
animating these publics cannot be emphasized
enough. India’s long history of organizational
activism has ensured that in the postcolonial
period, NGOs, community groups, and social
movements have played a critical role in shap-
ing political society and in directing (in some
cases, resisting) the efforts of the government
to normalize its hegemony. Of course, many
NGOs and citizens’ groups are incorporated
into the official discourse of development ema-
nating from a state increasingly committed to
51. Pinney, “Introduction,” 19. For some of Sandria ism in North India (Berkeley: University of California
Freitag’s writings on the subject of performative Press, 1989).
publics in India, see her Culture and Power in Banaras
52. Pinney, “Introduction,” 24. See Ravi S. Vasudevan,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and
“Bombay and Its Public,” in Dwyer and Pinney, Plea-
her edited collection Collective Action and Commu-
sure and the Nation, 19.
nity: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communal-
48 neoliberal economic reform. Sangeeta Kamat
has recently demonstrated that they coexist with
numerous grassroots organizations that are part
of a vibrant democratic tradition.53 In the same
vein, Mary Katzenstein, Smitu Kothari, and
Uday Mehta argue that, although identity and
interest movements play a direct role in shaping
e the political culture and civil society of India by
ra ti v
m pa engaging the state in its electoral, judicial, and
Co bureaucratic domains, these movements coexist
f
ie so
tu d
with a vibrant “civic discursive space.”54 This pat-
S
ia , tern is clearly not exclusive to India. Judith Adler
As
u th Hellman underscores the value of such a space
So he
n dt
aa in her work on Mexico, and Sonia Alvarez points
ri c
Af st out the importance of movements operating in
Ea
le a “third” civil society. 55 Regardless of political
M idd
ideology, it seems that movements around the
world operate in ways that are frequently disen-
gaged from the state but are remarkably public
and political in nature.
Activities outside of “modern” civil soci-
ety can have the effect of laying the foundation
for the kind of organized politics that one wit-
nesses at the electoral level, or through advo-
cacy and citizens’ groups. Katzenstein, Kothari,
and Mehta point out, for instance, that the RSS
helped to nurture a Hindu identity in sections
of the Indian population that has now become
a secure foundation on which the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) has been able to build elec-
toral power.56 Television, print, processions, and
other creative uses of public spaces continue to
play a critical role in preserving this social base
for the BJP. Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta also
provide examples of a vibrant civic discursive
space within the women’s movements in India.
In addition to engaging the state and pressur-
ing for legal and institutional change, women’s
organizations mobilize in order to challenge
patriarchal beliefs and practices through inno-
vative strategies in public domains. Marches
and demonstrations, street theater, plays, jour-
nal stories and personal accounts, songs, and
poster exhibitions play a significant role in ani-
mating a discursive civic space in contemporary
India. A significant part of this movement activ-
ism walks, as Kothari has argued, “on two legs”
(267). He points out that many of these move-
ments use their energies not just to influence
government policy and exercise critical surveil-
lance over the state but also to organize pro-
grams and to develop strategies that are aimed
at transforming attitudes and practices through
society at large. He points to examples from the
anti-arrack mobilization of the late 1980s and
early 1990s in Andhra Pradesh (267).
In postcolonial settings, multiple publics—
agonistic and associational—are not spaces in
any topographical or institutional sense. Since
the nineteenth century, they have appeared
where social groups gather to create, share, or
debate various forms of knowledge. Porous and
dynamic, these publics help in the creation of
newer forms of civil society that have the poten-
tial to exercise critical surveillance over the
state as well their own social constituencies. In
this sense it might make sense to speak of not
a singular normative civil society but “multiple
civil societies,” which exert considerable influ-
ence on political life at many levels without
being tied down to the normative practices of
modern liberal democracy. This flexibility has
allowed subaltern groups to subvert those forces
of the liberal/capitalist order that sanction the
“colonization” of civil society as bourgeois inter-
ests gain control of mass media and commodify
public culture on their own terms. In this con-
text, an appreciation of the role of subaltern
counterpublics has the potential to redraw the
conceptual geographies that are used to com-
prehend modernist forms of disciplining.
Conclusion
In a remarkable study of the rise of Hindu
nationalism in India, Thomas Blom Hansen
attributes the “saffron wave” of the past fi fteen

53. Sangeeta Kamat, Development Hegemony: NGOs
and the State in India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
54. Mary Katzenstein, Smitu Kothari, and Uday
Mehta, “Social Movement Politics in India: Insti-
tutions, Interests, and Identities,” in The Success of
India’s Democracy, ed. Atul Kohli (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 242–69.
55. Judith Adler Hellman, “Mexican Popular Move- Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, ed.
ments, Clientelism, and the Process of Democratiza- Richard Fox and Orin Sarn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rut-
tion,” Latin American Perspectives 21 (1994): 124–42, gers University Press, 1997).
cited in Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta, “Social
56. Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta, “Social Move-
Movement Politics in India,” 266; Sonia E. Alvarez,
ment Politics in India,” 266.
“Reweaving the Fabric of Collective Action: Social
Movements and Challenges to ‘Actually Existing
Democracy’ in Brazil,” in Between Resistance and
years not just to “imaginative political strategies”
or “reserves of religious nationalism” among
proponents of this ideology, but to the growth
of new public spaces in which Indian individu-
als and communities imagine, represent, and
recognize themselves through political dis-
course, commercial and cultural expressions,
and the representational strategies of state and
a population and the quality of its civic life. 49
Explaining further, he uses the terms civil society
and civic life to mean that part of life that “exists
between the state on one hand and families on
the other, that allows people to come together
for a whole variety of public activities, and that
is relatively independent of the state. Civil soci-
ety is not a non-political but a non-state space

Vivek Bhandari

Civil Society and Multiple “Publics”

civic organizations. 57 The discourses, expres-
sions, and organizations that Hansen describes
as constitutive of public space have strong moor-
ings in India’s long history of civic life. Countless
samajs (societies or associations), sabhas (congre-
gations), and anjumans (gatherings)—among
many other forms of civic life—have been an
integral part of public culture in India. 58 The
existence of these multiple publics and civic
institutions makes it futile to talk of civil society
in narrow terms, as the other of the state, or in a
more facile sense, as inherently intertwined with
the neoliberal reform process that was initiated
in India over a decade ago. It makes far greater
sense to move beyond the narrow definition of
civil society that Neera Chandhoke criticized in
her essay, especially as the movement of peoples
and ideas forces us to reevaluate our notions of
citizenship and subjectivity.
The growth of ethnic violence in different
parts of the world lends urgency to these issues.
In a detailed assessment of the cities in Gujarat,
which in early 2002 witnessed a pogrom against
Muslims by militant Hindu nationalist organiza-
tions, Ashutosh Varshney argues that the reason
for Gujarat’s history of communal violence was
that its cities had suffered a steady and progres-
sive decline in civic life. 59 Varshney fi nds that
there is an inverse relationship between the
amount of sectarian violence experienced by
of collective life.” 60 Varshney goes on to qualify
this definition in another crucial respect: “If it
is crucial to civil society that families and indi-
viduals connect with others beyond their homes
and talk about matters of public relevance with-
out the interference or sponsorship of the state,
then it seems far too rigid to insist that this takes
place only in ‘modern’ associations. . . . Cities
tend to have formal associations, but villages
make do with informal sites and meetings.” 61
Varshney’s timely book succeeds in large
part because of his use of a broadened defini-
tion of civil society and because he appreciates
the interplay between organized and informal
forms of civil life. The latter, as we have seen,
play a critical part in the political life of post-
colonial societies where the emergence of the
nation-state—and together with it, modern
notions of subjectivity—has had a profound
influence on political practices and attitudes.
Commentators, who have lauded the “success of
India’s democracy” in the face of difficult odds
like ethnic diversity and poverty, have looked
favorably at the “democratic-federal-secular”
quality of India’s political institutions. 62 The
fact remains, however, that the meanings of
these ideas have changed considerably over the
past century, and the institutions of postcolo-
nial governance in India, despite their avowed
claim to serve the interests of all Indians, are

57. Hansen, The Saffron Wave. For an in-depth study
of how xenophobic elements of Bombay’s culture
have been shaped by a long history of regional his-
tory and contested identities to produce unprece-
dented levels of urban violence in the past decade,
see Hansen’s Urban Violence in India: Identity Poli-
tics, “Mumbai,” and the Postcolonial City (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001). His study of Hindu
nationalist groups’ use of public culture is particularly
useful for this discussion; see chap. 1, esp. 53–56.
58. Amrita Basu argues persuasively that the success
of Hindu nationalism lies in the fact that it shares the
attributes of both a social movement and a political
party. For a detailed discussion of this argument, see
her essay “Mass Movement or Elite Conspiracy? The
Puzzle of Hindu Nationalism,” in Making India Hindu:
Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in
India, ed. David Ludden (New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 55–80.
59. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life.
60. Ibid., 4 (italics mine).
61. Ibid., 44–45. Varshney’s findings have important
ramifications for our understanding of ethnic vio-
lence. One wonders, however, whether he puts too
much faith in top-down initiatives. Although his defi-
nition of civic life accommodates a wide range of ini-
tiatives, Radha Kumar points out that he stays away
from the role played by religious organizations, or
the role played by governmental institutions like the
Human Rights Commission and the judiciary. As she
puts it, “The greatest conundrum of all might well be
the role that religious organizations play in sparking
or dampening Hindu-Muslim tension.” See Kumar’s
review essay, “India’s House Divided: Understand-
ing Communal Violence,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4
(2002): 177. Hansen’s study of the “saffron wave” in
the 1990s in India might help to fill the gaps here. See
Hansen, The Saffron Wave. Also, in the aftermath of
the violence in Gujarat in 2002, it is apparent that the
dynamics of civic life in India have a fairly direct rela-
tionship with these governmental institutions, the
mainstream media, and the multiple public spaces
that are all a part of political culture.
62. Kohli, The Success of India’s Democracy.
50 monopolized by a social elite. 63 This has obvi- There is a certain irrepressible quality to politi-
cal life in India, to the incessant transgression of
ously not dampened the richness of political life
in India, as the parallel coexistence of diverse established languages of contention in the polit-
ical field, the incessant recoding, sliding, and
civic spaces demonstrates.
reevaluation of virtually every identity and polit-
It is important to clarify that the purpose
ical position. Indian society . . . is possibly one
of this discussion is not to valorize the ubiq- of the most politicized societies in the world, . . .
uity of politics but to illustrate that the politi- not because its leaders wanted it to be so, but
e cal impulses of social groups draw on a much because the democratic order that they fought
ra ti v
m pa wider repertoire of practices than has hitherto for and ultimately established released new,
Co been recognized. As seen in the case of the assertive, and uncontrollable social identities
f
ie so that produced a form of modernity—pluralist,
tu d
movements promoting Hindu majoritarian
S
ia , nationalism, some public spaces are used for creative, chaotic, and brutal at the same time.66
As
u th the promotion of religious extremism and cul-
So he Research on India’s public culture demonstrates
n dt
aa tural chauvinism. The key is to recognize that that spaces for political articulation in India
ri c
Af st political practices (tolerant or not) are rooted in
Ea flourish in all sorts of nooks and crannies. The
le official as well as hidden cultures that serve as
M idd real challenge, of course, is to identify these
sites of contestation and/or consensus around spaces.
questions of cultural politics. Although multiple
publics are frequently subaltern in nature, often
targeting the hegemony of dominant forms of
knowledge, they can also serve as the breeding
ground for intolerance and cultural chauvin-
ism, as the example of the RSS demonstrates.
It is fair to say that the pervasiveness of pub-
lics signals the coexistence of diverse political
viewpoints, some 0f which are chauvinistic and
extremist in nature.
Chatterjee’s claim that postcolonial civil
society, defined in narrow, modernist terms, is
fundamentally exclusivist and elitist should not
be read as a romantic appeal for the resurrec-
tion of communitarian (dare I say, traditional?)
forms of organization. It should, instead, force
us to “take up the more difficult task of think-
ing fundamentally against the normalization or
the epistemological and institutional forms of
our political modernity,” such as it is in the pres-
ent. 64 There is a pressing need to explore the
forms that political society has taken in India in
the postcolonial period, in order to appreciate
the diversity of social and political activities that
animate the subcontinent.65 Hansen describes
this political complexity quite evocatively:

63. Sumit Sarkar, “Indian Democracy: The Historical
Inheritance,” in Kohli, The Success of India’s Democ-
racy, 46.
64. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 20. Scott’s passion-
ate plea to force the development of critical frame-
works that address the “demands of the political
present” is particularly timely at a juncture when
the arrival of economic liberalization in India is, in a
somewhat facile way, being mistaken for an era of
political liberalism. The situation, given India’s colo-
nial legacy, is far more complicated.
65. As I pointed out earlier in this essay, Arjun Appa-
durai has taken an important step in this direction
by drawing our attention to the ways in which glo-
balization is producing new geographies of govern-
mentality that, in turn, are behind the efforts of new
social movements to reconstitute citizenship. See
Appadurai, “Deep Democracy,” 21–47.
66. Hansen, The Saffron Wave, 58–59.