How Did We Become Modern?
A Few Answers According to Sudipta Kaviraj
Sailen Routray
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| Photo Credit - Permanent Black |
We live in a world that is apparently coloured with the dyes of modernity. Some like modernity’s colours. Some want to change its hues. Others rue its colour palate and want to go back to a pristine white of what they see as the traditional world. But before we can act on the inevitable fact of our modernity, we need to have some sense about how we got from ‘there to here,’ from ‘then to now.’
The question therefore, is, do all societies/social
formations need to travel down the same path to reach the same destination of
‘the modern,’ or is modernity to be thought through in the plural? The answer
that Sudipta Kaviraj provides to the above questions is a resounding yes for the plural nature of the enterprise of modernity. He
argues that there are many modernities that are fashioned through historically
contingent processes.
Who is Sudipta
Kaviraj?
Sudipta Kaviraj is, arguably, India’s foremost
scholar in the field of intellectual history. His contributions to
understanding Indian politics and the state have also been immense. He has worked on two areas of
intellectual history; these being Indian socio-political thought in the past
two centuries and the politics of modern literary and cultural production. His
other scholarly interests include tracing the genealogy of the state in India,
and social theory.
He finished his
undergraduate education at the then Presidency College (now Presidency
University), Calcutta. He has a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),
New Delhi. He currently works as a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern,
South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York. Before
joining Columbia University, he has taught politics and political science at SOAS
(School of Oriental and African Studies), London, and JNU. He has also been an
Agatha Harrison Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
He was a founding member of
the Subaltern Studies Collective. Kaviraj’s books include The Imaginary
Institution of India (2010), The trajectories
of the Indian state: politics and ideas (2010), The enchantment of democracy and India:
politics and ideas, Civil Society: History and
Possibilities co-edited with Sunil
Khilnani (2001), Politics in India (edited) (1999), and The Unhappy
Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist
Discourse in India (1995).
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Colonialism and Plural Modernities
For Kaviraj, colonialism is a central watershed in the story of modernity in postcolonial societies such as India. He has often argued that telling the story of their modernity is impossible without foregrounding the impact of colonialism. While doing so Kaviraj tries to veer a middle ground between two extremes.
There are scholars such as David Washbrook who have often argued that the origins of the ‘Indian modern’ temporally lie before colonialism. According to them processes of transformations in the Indian social formation whose results we see now all around us can be traced back to a period of time predating colonialism.
There are other
scholars, who influenced by Edward Said, argue for a completely transformative
impact for colonialism. According to them, colonialism completely
changed everything from inter-community relationships, to relations of
production, to forms of performance. Sudipta Kaviraj intervenes in this
scholarship on the links between colonialism and modernity by arguing for a
much more calibrated and careful entanglements between the two.
The scholarly work of
Sudipta Kaviraj have had a sustained and sometimes invisible impacts on the
narratives surrounding society, politics and the state in India. Each one of
his interventions has gone on to structure the academic, and sometimes even
popular, commonsense regarding Indian social formations. His work on the
intellectual history of India and the dynamics of Indian politics can be seen as forming part of a larger project of tracing the genealogy of the modern state and a
biography of modernity in India.
Sudipta Kaviraj argues that Western social theories regarding modernity (some would argue that the word ‘modernity’ is a superfluous word here since all Western social theory is about modernity in some sense), especially its most important strands, as evidenced in the works of theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, revolve around two conceptual fulcrums.
One of these conceptual fulcrums constitute of
the idea that modernity is a homogenous process that is singular and is
explainable through a single causal principle. The second conceptual fulcrum
constitutes the idea that modernity spreads from Western centers and wherever
else it migrates into the world, it invariably produces societies similar to
the ‘original’ Western ‘models.’
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| Photo Credit - Permanent Black |
Kaviraj argues that there are at least three reasons why modernity cannot be homogenous. He argues that modernity as a process is essentially plural and will produce different institutions and social processes in different contexts.
First, he argues that although
modernity often involves significant ruptures with extant social practices,
often the processes and practices engendered by it are not completely
unprecedented. He argues analogically with the example of learning a second
language. When an Odia-speaking person learns English as a second language,
often the English of such a person carries the lilt and cadence of Odia.
Similarly, Kaviraj argues, modernity carries traces of the pre-modern. And
since the premodern is of a varied vintage and is inherently plural, ‘the modern’
is also produced in a context-specific manner.
Second, Kaviraj argues, that modernity is a plural process. Based on actual historical evidence of various societies’ experiences with modernity, he says that unlike what most Western theorists of modernity posit, no single causal process can produce all the artefacts and institutions of modernity. Further, he argues, the actual ways in which social processes occur and connect with each other have a strong bearing on the final outcomes. Since these processes are inherently plural, the outcomes cannot be singular. In this context, he gives the example of secularism in India.
By the time democracy with adult
suffrage arrived in Western societies, these were sufficiently secularized.
Hence in the West, there was no major conflict between democracy and
secularism. But in the Indian context, democracy with adult suffrage arrived in
a country where group loyalties, including religious loyalties, were important
and society was not sufficiently secularized. Hence, in the Indian context,
there are always fault lines between constitutional demands of a secular polity
and the imperatives of a non-secularized society.
Third, Kaviraj puts
forth, modernity is characterized by reflexivity in two ways. In the first
sense, modern institutions and practices are directed as much towards the
other, as they are towards the self – towards their own societies. In the
second sense, reflexivity refers to a recursive process through which the
technologies of modernity get refined and perfected over a period of time.
Because of this fact, it is not likely that colonial and postcolonial societies
will have to repeat the experiences of Western societies in order to become
modern.
The introduction of Western state practices under colonialism in India did not lead to a duplication of the experiences of state-formation of Britain or other European countries in India. Because of reformation and the growth of absolutism in Europe, nation-states had developed a form of sovereignty in internal affairs that had no parallel in India.
The colonial state in India also operated from
within a framework of orientalism where certain state practices and legislative
imperatives that were seen as important in the European context were simply not
extended to the colony of British India. Thirdly, because of the very structure
of Indian civilization and society, the practices that were introduced by the
British in India went through, what Kaviraj calls, an ‘accent shift.’
Kaviraj’s thesis on modernity,
state and politics in India can be summarized in the following propositions –
a) the modern, postcolonial state in India is, in many ways, a successor of the
colonial state, and to understand processes of its formation we need to have
sophisticated accounts of changes produced by colonial intervention; b) to be
able to do this, we need to provide two parallel accounts – the first account
is that of the governing principles structuring Indian sociality before and
during the colonial experience, and the second account is that of the responses
to colonial interventions such as those of anti-colonialism and nationalism,
and the narrative structures enmeshed in these discourses.
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Fuzzy and Enumerated Communities
For Kaviraj, as it must
be clear by now, the question of modernity is inherently entangled with the question
of colonialism. For him, therefore, the question regarding what is produced by
the process of colonialism has an important obverse – what confronted
colonialism in the first place, or what is it that was changed by colonialism.
Thus, we are confronted with the question of civilizational/cultural/societal
difference.
Pre-modern society in Europe had symmetrical hierarchy; this meant that along all the axes of power the ranking of communities could neatly map onto each other. But Kaviraj has often argued that we can understand precolonial and colonial Indian sociality as being structured through the principles of asymmetrical hierarchy in which aspects of social power are dispersed across social groups unevenly.
This
meant that whereas one community could be in the middle of the hierarchy with
respect to ritual ranking, with respect to political power it could at the top.
This also meant that precolonial India was a peculiarly segmented society where
the state was marginal with important executive powers but limited judicial and
legislative powers. The state in India operated through the principle of
subsidiarity; because of the specific nature of social power in precolonial
India it could never claim sovereign powers.
Kaviraj then goes on to provide a powerful story of how the earlier social formation based on the existence of ‘fuzzy’ communities changed substantially through the imperatives of the colonial state such as the decennial census. No aspect of identity of a person could have claims of complete representation of all aspects of selfhood in India in precolonial times.
Before colonialism communities were ‘fuzzy’ in
broadly two senses. First, no aspect of a person’s identity was absolutely
central for her in a context-independent way. Second. The organization of these
communities involved a fine and complex ordering of differences, and therefore,
getting a sense of numbers and sizes would have been next to impossible.
In this social field of graduated differences colonialism introduced new forces. The boundaries of communities started hardening through processes of colonial enumeration such as censuses. The colonial state slowly instituted a regime of liberal rights in the economic and social spheres. One of the results of this process was the carving out of the sphere of 'politics' as a domain of social action.
Following this, communities, aided by the technologies of
enumeration, started engaging with the colonial state on a platform of
claim-making. This meant that a process of associationism produced the
network of enumerated communities as we know them today. Thus, Kaviraj posits a strong relationship
between the establishment of the colonial state in India, its interventions in Indian
society, and the production of communities in India as we know them now.
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| A Map of British India Published in 1864 Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
Emergence of State Sovereignty
in Colonial India
One key difference in the exercise of political power in India after British conquest was the way the state conceptualized its power and exercised it. Before the advent of British rule the exercise of state power (if the matter can be framed in such a manner at all) was through the principle of subsidiarity. The state did not have ‘legislative’ powers so to speak. Its ability to dictate the quotidian functioning of the communities was extremely limited; these were mostly governed by caste rules and councils.
The state definitely had ceremonial majesty (the best example of which is perhaps the Mughal Empire) and could successfully exercise significant extractive imperatives. But it could not significantly change the ways in which society was organised and governed in India. The state in precolonial India thus had spectacular majesty, but was socially marginal.
This provided for long-term social stability to Indian civilization. It also meant that the state was not ‘sovereign’ in the ways in
which the modern nation-states in Europe were beginning to become sovereign over
the societies that they governed over in the post-Westphalian era.
The colonial state was, thus, an unprecedented phenomenon in India. At first the colonial apparatus in India did not intervene too much and occupied the ceremonial majesty of the state left vacant by the Mughal Empire. But it represented the great conquering ideology of enlightenment rationalism. This ideology had restructured the ethical and cognitive regimes, and economic and political systems in Europe.
Therefore, the colonial state did not stay marginal for long. Although the
colonial state initially kept up with the pretensions of being only a revenue
gathering organisation, the colonial state started reengineering the Indian
social almost immediately after assumption of political power. It introduced a system of liberal rights in the social and
economic spheres, thus instituting a new cognitive order that mediated
between the state and the individual.
Emergence of Politics: Anti-colonialism and Nationalism
From the time the British dominance in India was cognized the initial response was one of bafflement. For most thinking people in India it was inconceivable that a sophisticated civilization such as India could be subjugated by the ‘mlechha’ British.
According to Kaviraj, when ‘Indians’ started interrogating colonial subjection and moved from a position of anticolonialism to that of nationalism – from asking questions surrounding reasons for India’s civilizational defeat to the possibilities of freedom from colonial rule - certain key processes got initiated.
One set of
diagnosis regarding Britain’s superiority over India and the reasons for the
latter’s defeat in the hands of the former was seen as a result of social
organization. The British were seen to constitute a collectivity – a nation –
and were seen to have at their command a state that acted at the behest of this
nation.
The British colonial state in India could not completely implement its liberal, utilitarian agenda in the colony for very obvious reasons. Instituting a system of liberal political rights would have been suicidal to the colonial state in India. Instead, what it did, as already mentioned, is to institute a system of liberal rights in the social and economic spheres.
This meant that at the level of
experience by the people the totality of social cognition got divided into
three spheres; the social, the economic and the political, and because the
sphere of the political was left without a governing framework of rights by the
colonial state, over a period of time it started leading to a process of
intense contestation. Politics thus became the name for claim-making on the
state by communities whose very nature started changing through the processes
of contestation involved in claim-making.
These processes of
claim-making led to a peculiarly new form of ‘we-feeling’ where people could
collectively work together for enhancement of collective interests. Initially
these collectivities were jati-based. But over a period of time, the sense of
nationhood started developing. For some time it was not clear whether it is
language or religion or something else that can be the basis of nationality.
But over a period of time only ‘the Indian nation’ was seen as capable of
overthrowing the foreign yoke. But the way Indian nationalism was fashioned, it
was done with the understanding that a blind imitation of the Western
experience will not work.
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| 'Rashtrapati Bhavan' when it was the Viceroy's House Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
In this context, Kaviraj contrasts two ideal type positions. On one hand, leaders such as Gandhi and Tagore argued that India as a civilization cannot follow Europe blindly. The Western experience of modernity involved a lot that was undesirable, for example widespread violence. India as a civilization was seen as needing to chart out its own path of inhabiting the present moment.
Nehru on the other hand saw
modernity as desirable, but he also saw it as an essentially reflexive process
that will necessarily involve India making different political choices for
constituting the nation. Since the linguistic reality of India is that of
pluralism and diversity, imposing one language (such as Hindi) as the basis of Indian
nationalism was see as counter-productive in this reading. Similarly in a
society which is not sufficiently secularized, not taking into account the
religious concerns of a substantial minority can only make the foundations of
nationalism weak.
Thus, a parallel set of processes involved the production of ‘the nation.’ These included the production of language-based linguistic identities/regions, and the birth and growth of politics as a domain of sociality during the anti-colonial national movement. Indian nationalism grew up as essentially diaglossic.
Since European forms
of social organisation such as the state were seen as key to the success of the
colonial enterprise, the nationalist movement (despite contrarian noises by
some key players such as Gandhi and Tagore) took as its objective the removal
of foreign control over the state, rather than a radical restructuring of
state-society relations and politics per se.
Conclusion
The discussions in this essay till now might seem esoteric. But they are not. Questions surrounding the role of religion and/or language in Indian politics remain important even now. As Kaviraj argues, the adoption of adult-suffrage and parliamentary democracy after independence produced an inevitable clash between democracy and bureaucracy with development as a discourse playing a role comparable to the one played by utilitarianism during colonialism.
The peculiarly colonial origins of politics in India continue to
mark it even now. Politics in India persist in being about claim-making upon the
state. The debates surrounding language and religion that were crucial to the growth of nationalism stay important.
But there are many ways
in which the Indian experience of dealing with the imperatives of modernity
have global relevance. For example, in the post-communist era, Europe,
especially Western Europe faces the challenge of significant and growing number
of racial, linguistic and religions minorities in various countries. The ways in
which the Indian national movement and the post-colonial state have tried to
deal with the question of diversity as a part of a civilizational quest to
chart out an alternative path to modernity can be of contemporary relevance to the originary countries of modernity.
References
Kaviraj, S. 2010a. ‘Modernity and Politics in India’
in The trajectories of the Indian state:
politics and ideas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black: pp. 15-29.
Kaviraj, S. 2010b. ‘On State, Society, and Discourse in India’ in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 9 – 38.
Kaviraj, S. 2010c: ‘On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse, Hegemony’, in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 39 - 84.
Kaviraj, S. 2010d. ‘On the Structure of Nationalist Discourse’, in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 85-126.
Kaviraj, S. 2010e. ‘’Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India’, in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 127-166.
Kaviraj, S. 2010f. ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 167-209.
Kaviraj, S. 2000. Modernity and politics in India. Daedalus 129 (1): 137-162.
Routray, Sailen. 2011. Review of ‘The imaginary institution of India:
politics and ideas’ by Sudipta Kaviraj. Contemporary
South Asia 19(3): 339 – 340.
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| Parliament House in 1926 (Wikimedia Commons) |
Interesting Facts
1. Sudipta Kaviraj completed all his education in
India. He is an alumnus of Presidency College, Calcutta. He completed his PhD
from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
2. Sudipta Kaviraj’s extension of the idea of
passive revolution to the Indian context has been extremely productive as a research
framework and has been influential on many important scholars such as Partha
Chatterjee.
3. Sudipta Kaviraj is a founding member of the
‘Subaltern Studies Collective.’
4. Sudipta Kaviraj’s father Narahari Kaviraj (who
died in 2011) was an eminent Marxist historian and ideologue of the
Communist Party of India.
Web Links
Download Sudipta Kaviraj’s paper on the state here,
for free: http://icspt.uchicago.edu/papers/2005/kaviraj05.pdf
Read Sudipta Kaviraj’s paper on the postcolonial
state here for free: http://criticalencounters.net/2009/01/19/the-post-colonial-state-sudipta-kaviraj/#more-29
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