Nivedita Menon, a feminist- except when it comes Indian Muslim women- writes-
Foucault has had enormous and wide-ranging influence on Indian scholarship, (and scholarship on India), but I am going to focus here only on one concept - governmentality.
Governance costs money. To focus on governmentality you have to focus on fiscal policy, mechanism design, incentive compatibility etc. But, why would a King or Duke who has plenty of meat and wine and pussy bother? The answer is the danger of invasion or the opportunity to conquer resource rich territory. Every part of the world has had soldier-administrators at some time or the other who rationalized territorial control and sought to stabilize the fiscal foundations of the state. In France, the archetypal figure in this connection would be the Marquis Vauban who sought to use 'Chinese' methods for the greater glory of the Sun King. Foucault, paranoid nutter that he was, knew no Economic nor, to be fair, understood Europe's own history. Since Nehruvian Socialism was founded on an impartial ignorance of both History and Economics, it was always inevitable that the Indian academy would embrace the foolish Frog.
This concept has implicitly and explicitly shaped some very significant work trying to understand the shape, form, nature and content of “modernity” in India.
Which suggests that these people neither understand India nor themselves even though they are modern and Indian.
I will take up two such bodies of work: first, a debate among a number of scholars (largely historians) about the nature and impact of colonial intervention in the 18th and 19th centuries,
That 'intervention' was economic in nature. This is a matter for econometricians.
and second, Partha Chatterjee’s 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.
Since India does not have an established religion nor does it have military rule, there is no point having a notion of 'civil society'. Thanks to 'panchayat raj', everyone, everywhere in India is or is becoming part of political society- unless, of course, they are in the fortunate position of being able to ignore the thing entirely. Campuses, of course, were very political- unless they weren't shit and were devoted to STEM subjects.
Partha isn't an intellectual. He is a moralist of a nihilistic and mischievous kind. This is a typically fatuous remark of his-
“it is morally illegitimate to uphold the universalist ideal of nationalism without simultaneously demanding that politics spawned by governmentality be recognised as an equally legitimate part of the real time-space of the modern political life of the nation.
In other words, if you aren't doing the stupid shit I am doing, you are fucking immoral mate. You will burn in Hell!
'Without it, governmental technologies will continue to proliferate and serve, much as they did in the colonial era, as manipulable instruments of class rule in a global capitalist order.'
Governmental technologies cost money. They only proliferate if they can more than pay for themselves or are exogenously subsidized. The 'global capitalist order', like any other order, can't subsidize shit once it goes off a fiscal cliff. States are welcome to fail and to turn into narco-terrorist infested shitholes.
Complaining about the immorality of what is done with subsidies is foolish when those subsidies have already disappeared.
'By seeking to find real ethical spaces for their operation in heterogeneous time, the incipient resistances to that order may succeed in inventing new terms of political justice.”
Like what? Labelling Macron's shocking refusal to pay for training in sodomy for senior citizens, 'homophobia' equal to that of Hitler?
No 'real ethical space' is opened up by complaining that Government's aren't doing stupid shit with tax-dollars.
To begin with, a short account of Foucault’s 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.
Maybe in France which was weaker than England till the rise of the Sun King. But not in China and India and the Islamic realms. It is obvious that a weak King may claim sovereignty over a lot of territory which he doesn't actually control. He may receive some 'tribute' but, fiscally, he remains weak and can't do much 'governmentality' which merely means raising the economic productivity of the territory so as to boost tax revenue and thus the State's military power.
Earlier, from the Middle Ages to the 16th C, there had been a “juridical principle” that “defined sovereignty in public law: sovereignty is not exercised on things,
Foucault was wrong. Sovereignty was exercised on people, things- e.g. ships or swords which could be commandeered, and animals- some could only be killed and eaten by the King and his courtiers.
but on a territory and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it…”
No. There was extra-territorial sovereignty- e.g. that of the Pope and certain sovereign orders. Moreover, a sovereign might have zero ability to help or harm a 'subject' by reason of the superior power of a 'feudatory'.
In contrast, “what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things.
Bullshit! Government has to do with the husbandry of men and things so as to pay for military defence without which there may be no fucking territory.
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 specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility etc…men in their relation to other kinds of things, customs, habits etc…”
Men are linked to men through economics. Things pass between them. Taxes can be levied on these transactions. Government is about trying to increase transactions so as to have more resources. This is fiscal policy plain and simple. As for 'customs, habits,' religious beliefs, ritual practices, etc. these have economic and geopolitical implications. There is a Cost Benefit trade-off which ultimately comes down to fiscal policy.
“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 attentive as that of a head of a family over his household and goods.”
This stupid cunt hadn't heard of the 'invisible hand'. A daddy may have to ensure that his sons aren't fucking the sheep instead of shearing them, but the Government doesn't need to. It just needs to find incentive compatible mechanisms such that productivity rises and thus tax revenue rise and the State becomes more secure.
Legitimate sovereignty is about ensuring the common good,
No. Anybody at all can clam to be ensuring the common good though it is only the farts produced by registered members of the Institute of Socioproctology which actually have that property.
which Foucault points out, consists of a state of affairs where all subjects obey the laws, accomplish the tasks expected of them, respect the established order. “This means that the end of sovereignty is circular…The good is obedience to the law, hence the good for sovereignty is that people should obey it…”
Foucault hadn't noticed that sovereignty is contested. Its good is survival. It doesn't matter whether obey the law- or indeed if there is any law to obey- all that matters is that any internal or external threat is easily crushed. A population wholly obeying the law may be conquered and enslaved. Their sovereignty is lost.
With government, we see “emerging a new kind of finality. Government is defined as a right manner of disposing of things so as to lead not to a form of the common good…but to an end which is ‘convenient’ for each of the things that has to be governed.
But this obtains on open markets without any sovereignty or governing body. Foucault truly was as stupid as shit- which is why Indian Lefties worshipped him.
A free market economy may give no right to the Government to dispose of anything save under stringent conditions defined by law and subject to the test of 'public interest'.
This implies a plurality of specific aims: for instance, government will have to ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced,
Why? No such government has ever existed. It is not the case that civil servants are obliged to sell their kids to foreign countries in return for gold or other precious substances.
that people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence
people tend to be able to do that for themselves. Perhaps what is meant is 'the population should be left with sufficient means of subsistence.' Otherwise they will run away or die off.
…In order to achieve these various finalities, things must be disposed…” (94-5)
up Foucault's arsehole while the Pope looks on laughing maniacally- right?
With sovereignty, the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim (i.e. obedience to the laws) was law itself.
So, if Baluchistan wants to become independent and sovereign it is enough that Balochis proclaim a law code. The Pakistani Army would fuck off by 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.
This is also true of how a universe can be created or a Time Machine constructed.
However, until the early 18th C, this doctrine of government could not develop, because of the great crises of the 17th C (97).
England was doing sell enough in the fifteenth century. During the long Seventeenth Century, it evolved doctrines of government which prevail in all liberal societies. France has a different doctrine of government, but it is more than a bit shit.
Also because of “mental and institutional structures”. As long as sovereignty remained the central theoretical question
for shitheads
and principle of political organization, the “art of government” could not be developed.
It was well developed by the time of the early Sumerians and Egyptians and so forth. China had a great bureaucratic class for over a thousand years. China was considered a model of good governance in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Europe. Competitive Exams and 'careers open to talent' were inspired by Jesuit reports on the Celestial Empire.
“Mercantilism, the first rationalization of the exercise of power as a practice of government” , was blocked by the fact that it “took as its essential objective, the might of the sovereign”, it sought, not to increase the wealth of the country but to allow the ruler to 3 accumulate wealth.
No. England kept the Crown poor so it would be dependent on Parliament. It sought to increase the stock of specie so as to prevent deflation. This was a monetary strategy- a stupid one. Foucault was too ignorant and stupid to understand this.
“The instruments mercantilism used were laws, decrees, regulations, that is to say, the traditional weapons of sovereignty.”
No. Its instruments were tariffs and quotas. It required the policing of borders to prevent the import of certain things or, in the case of capital goods, to prevent their export.
It was in the 18th C that things changed.
Nonsense! There had been sumptuary laws during the Roman Empire to prevent the excessive drain of precious metals caused by the import of luxury goods. Such laws have existed at different times in every polity.
The new factors were demographic expansion,
which started during the agricultural revolution over ten thousand years ago
an increasing abundance of money,
or credit. This happens because there are more transactions. Monetization is good for fiscal policy and yields 'seignorage'. That's High School Econ. Foucault was wholly ignorant of this. He thought that there are money trees just as there are apple trees.
expansion of agricultural production. It was due to the perception of the specific problems of population, and to the isolation of “the area of reality we call the economy”, that the “problem of government finally came to be thought, reflected and calculated outside of the juridical framework of sovereignty.”
Nope. Fiscal and monetary policy are within that framework. 'Legal tender' is what the country's monetary authority issues. If the country gets conquered, or it goes off a fiscal cliff and resorts to printing money, it is likely that a new 'legal tender' will replace the old.
And statistics becomes the major technical factor of this new technology.
The technology involved existed at least two thousand years previously. Statistics developed rapidly not in administrative but actuarial contexts. The market for annuities drove it while the theory of gambling and lotteries (like the one which Voltaire won, thus becoming financially independent) drove probability theory.
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.
Spain and Portugal had huge Empires by the end of the sixteenth century. They covered one tenth of the earth at their peak and generated a far bigger share in National Income than was the case for either the British or the much smaller French Empire.
Indian scholarship inevitably does focus on this factor,
Portugal got to India first and was the last to leave. Why does Indian scholarship not focus on that?
but such a focus does not, I think pose a challenge to Foucault’s theory of governmentality so much as it lights up a dark corner indicated by it.
Foucault had shit for brains. Indian scholars were just lazy virtue signallers. They wanted to whine about the fact that many women in India don't have dicks. This is because of Brahminical patriarchy under conditions of globalised neo-liberalism. If you vote for the BJP, yet more poor Dalit women will be condemned to dicklessness. Fuck is wrong with you? Haven't you read Kristeva?
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.
The answer is no. The Brits kept saying so and the Indians knew it was easy enough to put on a trousers instead of a dhoti and say 'suck my cock', instead of 'मम लिंगं चूषयतु'.
It is generally recognized
by cretins
that the colonial census intervened critically in processes of identity formation.
This is an utterly foolish availability cascade. The fact is, caste was dropped from the census long ago whereas 'caste identity' has gone from strength to strength since then. Moreover, the Princely States and Nepal had no census but precisely the same type of caste based identity formation. What I mean is that, both jati and varna for many lineages changed in the same way across borders between British and Princely India.
What is interesting is that Foucault’s understanding of governmentality
which was somewhat inferior to a goldfish's understanding of it
undergirds both positions in the debate (at least implicitly) – the disagreement lies elsewhere. At the risk of flattening 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 official enumerations of the late 19th century.
In which case why did it also exist in Princely India and Nepal? How come Bali has the same varna castes as India (except they don't have Dalits) though Indonesia only started conducting censuses in 1960?
To be fair, this crazy argument was produced by the anthropologist Bernard Cohn whose silliness was foundational to the Subaltern school. Benedict Anderson is the other nutter involved. The notion here is that Darkies are too stupid and backward to produce a class system. White Rulers have to create these differentiations so that, later on, the Darkies can have a nice Commie Revolution or just sodomize each other to death.
Sudipta Kaviraj, for instance, argues that people who lived in pre-modern social forms, while they had a strong sense of community, did not define themselves primarily in terms of their difference from other groups, and did not perceive themselves as belonging to only particular communities and not to others.
Also, there was no distinction between women and men. All had dicks of prodigious girth.
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).
Like that between Zoroastrians and Muslims in Persia- right? But Iran wasn't colonized. There were pogroms and there was forcible conversion. But there was no fucking Census or Western 'Coloniality' or Governmentality in Iran or Turkey.
“Modernity does something quite fundamental to the logic of identities, to the ways in which people fashion self-descriptions.” (Kaviraj 1997:27).
What did it do to American identity? It homogenized it in one sense, but it also made it strategic and elective. But Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy taking swings at each other aren't so very different from Modi and Rahul taking swings at each other. Nikki had to step down from the Trump administration to bail out her parents. She is only worth about 8 million now which, adjusting for age, makes her poorer than Bernie Sanders. Vivek is a billionaire. Yet Vivek is pitching himself as the nerdy equivalent of a red neck, while Nikki is patrician. Similarly, Rahul is the homeless tramp while Modi, with his beautifully manicured beard, incarnates wealth and privilege.
Dipesh Chakravarty argues that although pre-modern government too used statistics of produce, land and revenue, it was not systematic or regularly updated in the way it was with modern government.
Actually, countries with parish or other household registration systems had good enough 'running totals'. The Indian Census was only introduced because of a fad for racist anthropology. This was a time when 'Aryans' were supposed to be superior to 'Mongoloids' or some such shit. Still, it kept a few bureaucrats happy.
This systematic, regular process of census-taking, which the colonial government introduced, led to the hardening of community boundaries and the fixing of religious and caste identities. The “fuzzy” boundaries of pre-British times became, through enumeration, distinct and discrete.
No. That happened with reservations and later, with Caste Certificates. The Census can be important- e.g. if it leads to the redrawing of parliamentary seats- but, in India, it hasn't been important at all. Will we even have one this decade? Perhaps not, because of the OBC quota problem on the one hand and the fact that the moratorium on seat redistribution (which would hurt the South) expires in 2026.
Further, the logic of modern electoral democracy, the fight for numbers, operating at every stage of the nationalist movement, meant that “communities” had a vested interest in enumerating and clarifying their boundaries.
No. They had and have an incentive to inflate their numbers. Those with muscle get what they want regardless of the statistics.
The logic of modern competitive politics was such that people came to fit the categories that colonial authorities fashioned for them.
Colonial authorities fashioned three categories 'White British', 'Native British subjects', 'Native protected subjects'. That was it. Indian politicians and notables made various demands and some White civil servants and journalists took sides on various issues- e.g. non-agriculturists acquiring agricultural land, caste eligible for army recruitment, etc. But this has nothing to do with 'governmentality'. It is merely politics.
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 reification of "religious identity" by the British.
Why then did language, not religion, matter in Sri Lanka? How come religion was not an issue in Madras Presidency but Caste (Brahmin v Non-Brahmin) and language (Telugu v Tamil) had salience?
Had the British picked language as a criterion of community demarcation, he holds, the result would have been conflicts along the lines of linguistic community identity (Chakrabarty 1995:3377).
There were such conflicts in Orissa and Assam as a Bengali should know. Islam and Christianity do make sharp distinctions even between their own sects. Hinduism and Sikhism and Jainism and Buddhism did not, back then. However, post Independence, Jainism and Sikhism have separated themselves from Hinduism. The Brahmos did try to separate themselves from the Hindus during British rule and had a measure of success but that collapsed after Independence. Perhaps, the Lingayats will gain and retain a separate identity. Perhaps not.
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
Jalal is from Pakistan. Does she think it was the Pakistani Census which led to Qadianis being classified as non-Muslim?
The plain fact is that religious identity classes- Anglican vs Catholics & Dissenters- declined in salience in the UK during the nineteenth century as the modern census methodology- adopted in modified form in India- evolved. Did it have the opposite effect in India? No. Religion was important in some parts of the country, Caste in others and Language or Script elsewhere.
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 5 further, existing ways of constituting the self. The precolonial state did not simply extract revenue from a society composed of “a harmonious mélange 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.”
It is obvious that 'the State' had no existence save as a 'Stationary Bandit'. Otherwise Maratha could not have replaced Moghul only to be replaced by merchant adventurers from a far off isle. Nothing explains the State except economics. Why was it 'Gandhi-Nehruvian'? Follow the money. Who financed the craziness of the former and who benefitted from the stupidity of the latter?
) Sumit Guha,
who has a perfectly sensible paper here
who shares Bayly’s understanding, in a recent paper, focuses on enumeration, acknowledged as a crucial process in state-building and identity formation.
Yet China didn't bother with it till 1952. This changed nothing. Anybody can enumerate shit. This does not build or form anything.
The Hapsburgs in the Eighteenth century and Ottomans in the Nineteenth had censuses but both fell apart. The Romanovs had a census in 1897 and fell apart. The Brits in India thought their rule might last a thousand years when they started doing censuses. No 'identities' were created by Imperial 'enumeration'. Empires built the dust as ancient Nations revived and gained sovereignty.
His purpose is to establish that the Mughal empire, by the late 17th C, already had begun the process of enumeration,
Was that why it had turned to shit by the early 18th Century?
and its administrative practices were widely appropriated by contemporary and successor regimes.
Not by the Brits. It isn't the case that the Directors of the East India Company issued firmans. It is a different matter that local displayed continuity. But what is merely local is not of the State. It does not represent 'Governmentality'. This is because there need be no State, no Government, and nothing need greatly change at the micro level.
Econ 101 distinguishes between micro and macro. Only in the latter is there fiscal policy and monetary policy and exchange rates determining the apportionment of gains from trade. But this has a geopolitical strategic component.
These cunts claimed to study history but could not understand the history of their own times. Instead they engaged in wholly unreal campus politics and felt great moral outrage that other people weren't as fucking stupid as themselves.
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 fissures in local society.” (2003:162) What is fascinating about Guha’s 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 identityformation. For instance – “The political norm in pre-British times was that of vertical ties of subordination…So fewness, exclusivity, was the point of honour…
this remained the case. Not a lot of Indian dudes got Knighthoods or seats on the Legislative Council.
The mature colonial regime inevitably undermined these structures.
Nope. Collapsing imperial regimes had to gradually transfer to a few, highly exclusive, demagogues who claimed to represent millions of people of their own faith or supposed class or caste or linguistic group.
Vis-à-vis the colonial masters, distinctions among black people were not hugely significant to the average British official.”
Nor the distinction between white people. Whether it was a Duke murdering a Duchess or a dhobi murdering a dhobin, the legal process was pretty much the same.
Further, the gradual emergence of institutions of representative democracy, however limited, meant moves towards homogenization of communities in order to establish “majorities”.
Indians know that no 'homogenization' occurs in such cases. There are caste based 'vote banks'. However, Nehru's attempt to gain lower caste Muslim votes failed- perhaps because Congress workers on the ground sabotaged it. The League was able to do cross-caste Muslim vote consolidation. Still, Partition only became inevitable when Hindus suddenly remembered that Muslim rule was horrible while Muslims remembered that Hindus do stupid shit because they start listening to some Mahacrackpot or Professor of Kali Marxism or whatever.
“Thus 20th C changes in the political system required a homogenization of communities whose dominant elements had previously sought to differentiate and structure them. The relevant communities increasingly came to be religious in character.”
What about Ireland? How come it, like India, is partitioned? Was it because when Henry VIII broke with the Pope, he and his successors started conducting Censuses in Ireland which resulted in the creation of a Gaelic Catholic Irish identity different from an English speaking, Protestant, Ascendancy identity?
He shows how political anxieties of the colonial regime impacted on census categories – the 1945-6 census
there was no such 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”.
So, 1846 was meant.
Tellingly, Guha 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 Government Of India 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 different races.
Which had already been revealed because they were fucking obvious. On the other hand, it is true that gender was invented by the ICS. Previously, all Indians had dicks.
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”
like what? Sitting on the face of the Viceroy? There are a number of videos on that female subject on Pornhub.
. Again, I am struck by how Radhika’s 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.
This is meaningless. Indian jurisprudence now has more fucking ambiguity and multiplicity than ever before. This is because there are more lawyers and many many more laws. Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
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.
There are no such requirements. The Indian Supreme Court went utterly bonkers long long ago.
In one of her essays (Singha 1998) she takes great pains to refute an argument, attributed primarily to Ranajit Guha, that colonial rule was “an absolute externality”.
That may be true of protectorates but not of directly administered areas.
She holds that “new conceptions of sovereign right had to find expression through existing agencies of order and information”
only in the sense that new conceptions of everything have to find expression through stuff that already exists. This is because 'conceptions' are abstract, not concrete.
or as the editors of the volume in which that essay appears put it in the Introduction, “Denying...that the colonial judiciary began with a tabula rasa, she (Singha) shows nonetheless how both resistance from and cooption by indigenous ruling elites shaped the edifice of Anglo-Indian justice” (S. Guha and M. Anderson 1998).
This is like saying 'denying that Rishi Sunak invented the United Kingdom, Vivek Iyer shows nonetheless how both cats and dogs have shaped Enid Blyton's edifice of some shite or the other'.
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 Singha’s 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).
The ruled bribe the rulers or pose a nuisance to them in the hope of some amelioration of their condition. Bribes work. Being a nuisance might not unless being the ruler is no longer profitable or prestigious.
This perspective, argues Singha, would not take us very far “in examining the realignments of agency,
agency is a meaningless word. It can only be realigned in the sense that invisible pudding can be realigned
and the reorientation of cognitive structures
fuck does that mean? Brains stopped working in one way and started working in a different way?
involved in the construction of colonial law.”
If 'constructing laws' causes brains to work differently, a small country could turn all its citizens into mathematical geniuses just by some Act of Parliament.
She concedes that Rule of Law under a colonial despotism was riven with contradictions,
but the Rule of Law is always riven by such things- which is why the law is a thriving service industry.
but nevertheless it provided the legitimacy for British rule
no it didn't. Lots of lawyers were seditionists.
- a despotism based on law was said to be better than the arbitrary oriental variety.
Positive law is law as command. Sovereign immunity means the Executive is only subject to 'due process' type Judicial review in so far as the Judiciary is it self an organ of Government. Oriental despotism was about the Sultan strangling his brothers and surplus concubines while high on drink and drugs while his Governors incarcerated and tortured wealthy merchants till they handed over all their wealth.
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.
These silly sausages didn't get that Courts made a profit. If they were obnoxious in some way, they would be disintermediated. Timur Kuran explains this in the Ottoman context but Indian lawyers know this well enough. Because the Indian Bench is so utterly shit, a lot of the more lucrative work is going to barristers in London or Singapore and even Mauritius.
Thus, all persons of “high caste and rank” were exempted from taking a religious oath in court and could use an affirmation instead.
No. All persons of any rank whatsoever took oaths in the manner customary for their religion. Section 5 of the 1840 Act substituted affirmation so as to avoid the nuisances such as that of having cows produced in court so Hindus could take oaths by holding their tail. The Hindu Oaths Act of 1873 which consolidated such practices and remains in force.
Singha sees this concession as “ironically introducing a certain ambivalence into the principle of equality before the law.”
Because she is as stupid as shit.
I find 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.
Nope. The Brits, like the Muslims, could have given lower weight to 'infidel' witnesses because they were obviously incapable of swearing on the right Scripture. But, if the Brits had done this, they would have lost business to some other jurisdiction.
And how is this argument so different from Ranajit Guha’s 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 century...that the regime’s isolation from the people under its rule would gravely undermine its security”
Nope. What might undermine it was a Mutiny. But there was an effective Secret Police and enough White garrisons with Artillery to inspire confidence. On the other hand, there was the problem of the poorer White whose vicious habits might undermine the prestige of the Sahibs. Deportation was the solution.
and therefore adopted the political strategy of persuading the indigenous elite “to attach themselves to the colonial regime.”
the difficulty the Sahib Log faced was that too many of slimy Babus were trying to attach their tongues to their collective arse.
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 8 serves this specific purpose here; see 273-274) with “no space provided for a transaction between the will of the rulers and the ruled”, 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 latter, and was hardly an exchange between equals.
This was even more true after the Brits left. Nehru didn't want to engage in 'exchanges between equals' with various Banias or Vakils or other such 'bourgeois' elements. Mrs Gandhi threw them in jail the one time they got uppity.
There is no suggestion of a tabula rasa upon which the colonial state operated.
That tabula rasa was the blankness of a Book of Accounts. If, as time when by, the administration covered its costs- well and good. But the moment you had a lot of red ink on the page then, even if there was no red blood being shed, the colonial state disappeared.
Further, the adherents of the first 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.
Like the Sumerians by 3800 BC. Interestingly, a small tribe of Punjabis started using enumerative technologies in the UK some fifty or sixty years ago. The result was that Rishi Sunak was able to colonize Engyland.
The point is that there is something distinctive about colonial modernity.
White peeps speaking Engylish.
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 first set of scholars. Take Sumit Sarkar in his two essays critical of certain kinds of “postmodern” influences in the writing of Indian history (Sarkar1997 and 2002). The dominant thrust of the Subaltern Studies project, under the influence of a certain kind of “postmodernism”, notably that of Dipesh Chakrabarti, Gyanendra Pandey and “above all” Partha Chatterjee (2003:186) has become, he says, “focused on critiques of Western-colonial powerknowledge, with non-Western ‘community consciousness’ as its valorized alternative.” (1997: 82) The result is that “Radical left-wing social history…has 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)
The truth is 'radical left-wing social history- moved from actually being radical and left wing and doing actual historical research into social conditions, into coprophagous imbecility and paranoid virtue signaling.
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)
Which is like saying the British Raj was about turning everybody into Queen Victoria
He interprets the arguments of Partha Chatterjee for example, to be assuming that power is located uniquely in the modern state, whereas power within communities matters less. (1997: 101) 9 At the same time, Sarkar is concerned to recuperate Foucault’s understanding of governmentality from Partha’s reading, which he believes to have ignored the really “original and disturbing” thrust of Foucault’s 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).
useless shitheads stayed on at Uni to teach even more useless shitheads. They had pretended to be Lefties, but too stupid to be worth recruiting to any Communist faction, so as not to have the shit kicked out of them. (This was because Communism, having realized it was stupid and useless, had decided to focus on a 'long march through the institutions'- but only useless ones, like Liberal Arts campuses.) To resist the domination of clever people, everybody had to turn to post-modernism which is meaningless jibber-jabber. But, some paranoid nutcases where better able to dominate this resistance than others. So, these useless shitheads spent their time resisting or dominating each other. Since Foucault was some sort of sado-masochistic sodomite, his schtick prevailed. Meanwhile the kids who had studied STEM subjects changed the world.
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 Singha’s work (2003: 187) in this respect.
Useless nutters were 'appropriating' useless paranoid shite to create citation cartels of useless shitheads.
The concern is that with the assumption of a total pre-colonial/colonial disjuncture, “The polemical target is no longer the state as related…to 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)
Translated, this means 'Hurray for Hamas. Boo to Hindutva'. The former fucks over Palestinian peeps. The latter helps India and the World.
This kind of selective appropriation of Foucault, it seems to me, is an attempt to escape the destabilizing implications of the “postmodernism” of Foucault
which involve being sodomized and beheaded by Hamas terrorists while the Pope, in a gimp suit, and the Sun King, dressed up as Dolly Parton, look on laughing maniacally.
while retaining what can be retained within the modernist world-view. We find both Sarkar and Sumit Guha arguing that to ascribe any uniqueness to the colonial state’s 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).
In other words, instead of saying no Darkies had dicks till Colonialists invented 'Gender', you can say some Darkies had a Talent Agency. Mahatma Gandhi got his start modelling Togas before endemic racism in the Roman Empire forced him to move towards the loin cloth end of the market.
This is a rather naïve 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.
Only in the sense that being alive is implicated in crucial ways with having committed tax fraud.
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.
but only in the sense that there is no way out of sodomizing oneself incessantly because sodomy exists irrespective of the agents it works through.
Subjectivity has to be understood very much more complicatedly – Foucault sees power as productive - of subjectivity, of identity.
Why not see Love as productive of these things? Power can eliminate any type of subjectivity or identity not useful to it. Still, it is true, if you think you can only really be yourself if Hamas terrorists are sodomizing you while Islamic Jihad swings the axe to behead you and the Pope, wearing a gimp suit, is in the room along with the Sun King, got up as Dolly Parton, and both are laughing maniacally, then it is worthwhile to see things as Foucault saw them.
Through the mechanisms of "governmentality", the subject of governance is created -
Just as through the mechanisms of 'homosexuality' the subject of buggery is created
and subjected to classification,
on the basis of age. Anybody over the age of 8 is less worthy of
surveillance,
by perverts. In order to overthrow Patriarchal Neo-Liberalism, Academics must strive for the
normalization
of paedophilia and the decapitation of kaffirs otherwise what will prevail is the Neo-Liberal project which demands
(the increasing homogenization and organization of society in modern times).
Coz what would be cool is a return to the Dark Ages.
The huge bureaucratic machinery evolves endless ways of classifying people.
because people can classify people in endless ways
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.
Foucault, who was mentally ill, was genuinely helped by his psychiatrist who was a pioneering researcher in the use of lithium salts. Sadly, he was chased out of the profession by Maoists and settled for a seat in the French Academy on the basis of his vacuous prose style.
Here we come to the old charge laid at Foucault’s 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).
We can resist good advise. That isn't a resistance to power. It is mere stupidity or obstinate perversity.
Thus wherever there is power, there is the possibility of resistance.
We are welcome to resist anything we like. The problem with resisting genuine power is that beating, or the threat of beating, may cause resistance to collapse. On the other hand, the example of Vichy France suggests that the urge to collaborate with power is stronger than the Nationalistic will to resist a hated foreign invader.
Nivedita Menon would probably collaborate with a Hamas like Moplah state precisely because her urge is to collaborate with Power only if it is evil and targets her own people. This is the 'moral inversion' Michael Polanyi spoke of. Your own people are evil. Those who want to kill them in a sadistic manner are virtuous. Polanyi, apart from being a great Chemist, was also quite a good Economist. Sadly, Indian 'social theorists' have no understanding of Econ or scientific method.
I would like to draw our attention to what I think is the real problem that social theorists of our postcolonial condition have to deal with,
their problem is that feed on their own shit
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 better understood as a recalling to memory of the manner of entry of modernity into our societies.
In other words, our actual memory.
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 Chatterjee’s evocative phrase) from modernity as it emerged in Europe.
Every Indian family I know of had a wholly non-violent encounter with modernity. At any point, they were welcome to stop encountering it and take up an ultra-orthodox habitus. Europe experienced two world wars which involved conscription and the more or less forcible mobilization of entire populations for 'total wars'. India experienced nothing of the sort though there was some ethnic cleansing in the North.
The dislocation caused by modernity in Europe four centuries ago was equally brutal,
This stupid woman doesn't get that Europeans wanted to live less nasty, brutish, and short' lives which is why they gave up medieval mores in favour of things we might consider more modern. She thinks 'Modernity is very evil. First it went and fucked some Europeans over. Then it came to India and fucked lots of Indians over. Our job as stupid shitheads teaching worthless shite is to eat yet more of our own shit.'
but in Asia and Africa there was a double violence involved – the simultaneous disruption caused by modernity and colonialism.
Most Indians didn't know there was any fucking modernity or colonialism in 1912. It is difficult to care about such things when you are more malnourished than your ancestors because you are using the same technology but with a smaller endowment of natural resources- i.e. you are experiencing a Malthusian disaster of involuted agriculture.
However, this disruption does not mark
anything at all. It is just some shit stupid cunts pulled out of their arse.
a complete break between state and subjects - on the one hand we have a “despotic” colonial state strategically making adjustments at various levels with different sections of the subject population, and on the other, there are the differing kinds of investment these sections have in the modern norms and institutions brought in by colonialism.
The Raj wasn't particularly profitable. Still, Indian soldiers showed valour on the battlefield and as a whole the upper class was gentlemanly enough.
Why pretend the Brits wanted to change Indian culture or psychology? If they didn't bother to do it with their immigrant Asian populations in the Fifties and Sixties (there was no Citizenship test till a homegrown Islamist terror threat emerged) then why would any one jump to the conclusion they had tried anything like that in India? The fact is, if Rishi Sunak is in Number 10 speaking English, rather than speaking Punjabi to the other Punjabis who eat at his dhabha, it is because his parents spent a lot of money sending him to a posh Skool. But this was also true of Jawaharlal Lal Nehru.
What is puzzling for the student of politics is that scholars like Sumit Guha and Radhika Singhaf
don't understand Indian politics. Prashant Kishore has a degree in Statistics. In ten short years he transformed Indian politics. These nutters simply screamed hysterically at the BJP and shat themselves incessantly. What have they achieved?
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.
Very true! They don't show that Viceroy Sahib was beating and sodomizing billions of bahishkrit peeps every day so as to rob them of their exiguous earnings. Also, he would mercilessly suck them off so as to deprive them of their precious bodily fluids.
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).
All legal systems are 'alternative' ones. We disintermediate those which are useless. Thus an Indian judge didn't go to law to get rid of a tenant who would not pay rent. Instead he contacted the local Don who delivered justice and contract enforcement in the area.
Such a characterisation effectively airbrushes out the force and coercion which characterised the imperial state.
What about the force and coercion this silly bint is using on her students? Is she not epistemically strangulating and sodomizing them while forcing the Pope, wearing a gimp suit, and Emperor Aurangazeb to stand around laughing maniacally?
The point is that it was the “despotic” colonial state that was also the bearer of modernity and modern values,
Nope. That was private enterprise. John Company was a trading venture. It turned out it could turn a profit on providing public goods. This was because it had sound enough commercial ethics and zero interest in intervening in Indian culture or morality or religion. Indians were welcome to become modern if they could afford to spend their own money to achieve that goal.
a package not unambiguously emancipatory for colonised societies – other significant 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)
not to mention actual subalterns like Winston Churchill many of whom died of dysentery or a bullet from an Afghan rifle. 'Frontier Arithmetic' didn't add up. Indeed, as Pakistan is discovering, it still doesn't.
who were drastically marginalised and disciplined by the operation of modern codes of identity and governance.
No. They were marginalized by the fact that they had very low productivity and were disciplined by the fact that guys with lathis beat the fuck out of them if they tried any rough stuff. Codes don't mean shit. What matters is which command is better backed up with beating and killing.
What follows from this understanding is a question-mark upon on the agenda-setting legitimacy of the contemporary state.
McKelvey's Chaos theorem shows that 'agenda control' is worth gaining for the purpose of rent extraction. That's why nutters like this silly bint gain a small public subsidy. You can rely on them to shit on any topic of debate till everybody gets disgusted and leaves.
I find suggestive here the distinction that Partha Chatterjee makes between civil society and political society in postcolonial democracies (Chatterjee 1997, 1998a, 1998b).
Ooooh, Prof. Chatterjee you are being too suggestive! I am fisting myself vigorously while imaging Civil Society taking it up the arse from Political Society.
“Civil society” according to Chatterjee is constituted by the institutions of modern associational life, and is marked by modernity,
So, Civil Society is constituted by lawyers, accountants, actuaries etc. But such professions are always a little less than modern and a step or two behind what is 'cutting edge' and contemporary.
while “political society” is a domain of mediating institutions between civil society and state,
No. Political society is about political coalitions and the lobbyists and activists and ideologues representing various interest groups who help those coalitions get money and votes. There may be an institutional aspect to this but then again there may not.
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.
But many Western democracies- e.g. that of the UK which had a monarch and a hereditary peerage seated in the upper house was less modern than Republican India. Indeed, the UK only got a Supreme Court a dozen of so years ago.
That is, between civil society, composed of a small section of “citizens”, and political society, composed of “population.”
Chatterjee's view of the West is actually quite mature and sophisticated in that he does not mention wizards or dragons. Yet, is it not the case that the Top Hatted 'Citizens' were secretly in thrall to Count Dracula while the 'population' was being led by Frankenstein's monster?
Chatterjee 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, differentiated but classifiable, describable, and enumerable. This new concept, Foucault noted, was central to the emergence of modern governmental technologies.
Sadly the type of 'governmental technology' Foucault's 'agregation' entitled him to implement was useless shit. Still,
In the way in which Partha Chatterjee produces the distinction between the civil society of citizens, and the political society of population groups, the latter, 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.
Implementing 'policy' costs money. If the 'population' can't pay for the 'policy', there is no fucking policy as opposed to hot air.
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 mission” of enlightenment.
No. A few stupid Professors may teach worthless shite at public expense but if anybody tries any pedagogical shite with us, we beat the fuck out of them.
Political society – parties, movements, non-party political formations – channelises popular demands on the state through a form of mobilisation that is called democracy.
But such things exist in monarchies without elections of any sort.
“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”
The reverse is more likely. Civil Society may have a stronger motive to expel a minority than the 'population' which has little interaction with it.
Democratic aspirations in other words, often violate institutional norms of liberal civil society
Where is there or has there been a 'liberal' civil society? One may as well speak of the ideal Gandhian village where everybody wants to abstain from sex.
. 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. Take for instance, secularism in India, which it seems to me, has functioned almost exclusively in "civil society" understood in this way. The affirmation of secularism has been through the state and its institutions, and by the rational contractual associations of civil society - for instance, schools and universities,
unless they are 'minority' run.
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,
as shitty little Lefties
follows the explicit agenda of redressing what is claimed to be a distortion of the past.
which these nutters thought they could monopolize
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.
As opposed to one which has always slaughtered Lefties.
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.
These nutters were put in by the Dynasty. They carefully excise the fact that dynasticism is not democratic.
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.
Which is what Gandhi, Nehru and the Indian Constitution did. The alternative is to let Brahmins be a minority just like Muslims and Christians. Let them run their own educational institutions.
On the other side in this controversy are historians and social scientists
i.e. useless tossers
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 conflict over power cannot be ignored while writing history.
But who will read the history written by illiterate nutters? If the BJP stays in power then kids will have to memorize Savarkar's shite rather than Nehru's shite. But they will believe in the one as little as the other. Their aim is to get into the IAS and gain wealth and power.
The Hindu Right's project therefore, is rejected by them as a distortion of social reality.
The political reality is that Modi may reign for three terms.
What is significant is that the textbooks that the Hindu Right wants to do away with have been in use for several decades.
during which the Leftist shite those textbooks taught has been rejected comprehensively by all Indians- including the Communists in Kerala.
Generations of school-students have read them and learnt history the secular way.
Nobody learnt any history. They have mugged up some shite to get through the UPSC exams and some imbeciles ended up teaching that shite, but nobody could learn anything from boring, stupid, shite.
And yet, every college teacher knows that the majority of students who come into her class in the first 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."
Hindu students of History need to understand that they are studying a shite subject and will have a horrible future. They may as well be taught that their ancestors were utterly shit and thus they were genetically foredoomed to tell stupid lies for the greater glory of Hamas or whichever bunch of nutters most thirsts for Hindu blood.
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.
So what? It isn't unusual for tourist guides to be smarter than teachers of History.
In other words, secular history had dominated the academy and intellectual circles (civil society),
No. It has dominated shitty shitheads teaching worthless shite. It doesn't matter whether Hindus have or don't have a glorious history. It is advantageous to them both collectively and individually to hold that they did. They should think that they were like Zoroastrians and Christians and Buddhists in Muslim dominated lands rather than some inferior species of monkey.
Hindu communal history, the streets and common sense - political society.
This lady has no problem with Muslim communal history or Pakistan's political society.
In reading "political society" in this way, I unhitch Chatterjee's notion of "political society" from its link in his argument to the "welfare" function of government. I find his more recent explications of "political society" that emphasize this function reduce the initial potential he offered of understanding a hitherto untheorised realm.
This silly sausage thinks some great theory is required to say Hindus are shit and should just flush themselves down the toilet already.
In "On Civil and Political Society in post-colonial democracies" Chatterjee outlines four features of political society (2002:177). Two of these are significant - 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.
Which is why development took off.
These two other features are a) that mobilizations in political society make demands for governmental welfare in the form of "right"
but there is entitlement collapse if the Government goes off a fiscal cliff
and b) that agencies of the state and NGOs deal with these people not as citizens, but as population groups deserving welfare.
Governments deal with citizens as population groups. Judges may deal with them as citizens. However, both Corporations and Hindu temple deities may have legal personality.
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, pitting 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 off common thoroughfares through middle-class residential colonies, from neighbouring working-class settlements). 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.
This silly sausage hasn't noticed that most NGOs are bogus and benefit the ex-bureaucrat or corrupt politician who set it up.
In short, "political society" in Chatterjee's sense is better understood today as a problem for civil society's conceptualisation of democracy and development, rather than as the target of that development.
The NGO 'Nyayabhoomi', founded in 2002 for auto-drivers, tried to take down Kejriwal after he denied a ticket to an auto driver. They failed miserably. Since then, the 'conceptualization' Delhites have is that 'civil society' eats shit. Political parties kick ass.
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 squatters on government land to claim residence rights (which would include illegally tapping electricity lines, for example), but they could as easily be the effort of a religious sect to preserve the corpse of their leader in the belief of its resurrection or the decision of a village panchayat to kill a woman accused of adultery.
What of the decision of a Sharia Court? Menon shows her prejudice against 'villagers' while being careful to preserve her head from the swords of the jihadis.
The point is not to romanticize and valorize this realm as “subaltern”.
Rather its is to romanticize and valorize one's shower-head.
Indeed, “political society” in this sense is inhabited by many new kinds of loci of power and new elites.
This dim bint prefers old elites.
The point rather, is that any project of radical democratic transformation would have to
speak the vernacular, not gas on about Foucault
engage and collide with the ideas, beliefs and practices in this sphere. It cannot remain in the rarefied realms of "civil society" where in fact both the struggles of the "unauthorised" squatters as well as that of the religious sects would be dismissed as uncivilized.
What if the squatters belong to a religious sect?
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."
Mugging is a survival strategy. So is shop-lifting. American cities may legalize both. In India, local people will use lynch law if the police stand by idly.
I would therefore, relocate "political society" as the realm of struggles that attempt 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 17 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.
Menon supported AAP in 2014- indeed she even went to Varanasi where Kejriwal lost his deposit. He repented having quoted an article by her saying he'd win. Since then he has stayed away from 'anti-national' nutters. There can be no 'governmentality' and no welfare, if the Nation tears itself apart. Foucault literally died of ignorance- as the AIDS awareness slogan of the time put it. Indian intellectuals who had shoved his tomes up their arse did not, very sadly, die. They lived to bear witness to their own futility.
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