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This essay seeks to place the relation between state and society in India in a broader than usual perspective. It tries to do so in two ways. It tries first to set out the processes of modern Indian politics in terms of a long-term historical understanding, rather than pretend, as is often done, that all the causalities of politics somehow sprang up in 1947. Second, it suggests that the historical argument reveals problems of a theoretical character, and that without dealing with some of these methodological and philosophical issues it is impossible to tackle some of the difficulties faced by empirical explanations. The essay is divided into four parts. The first makes some preliminary theoretical remarks, the second assesses some of the initiatives or proposals for modernity that the colonial power set in motion, the third tries to analyse what happens to these after Independence, and the final part returns to some questions of theory.
It is often said that to use concepts like ‘state’ and ‘society’ is not helpful because of their abstractness and excessive generality. But I think that it is possible to begin at a still more radical starting point. To analyse the relation between state and society in India, it could be argued, is impossible because they do not exist in India, at least not so securely as to enable us to apply these concepts unproblematically to analysis. This may help us understand something quite fundamental. ‘Society’ can mean just any set of actually existing social relations, and that is the sense in which it is often used in the social science literature. But it can also mean a specific kind of society, known often as gesellschaft. ‘State’, similarly, can mean either any system of political rule or regime, or a specific, historically indexed style of impersonal governance, and, of course, there is a close historical connection between these ways of seeing society and the state.1 A state of this modern kind can exist, some types of social theory would assert, only on condition that it is embedded or surrounded by a ‘civil society’ of this kind. And it has been argued that one of the major problems for political construction in India is precisely the setting up of a modern state without the presence of a civil society.2 So the underlying theoretical questions here would be: what are the conditions in which society and state, in the generic sense of these words, allow themselves to be shaped into states and societies in the second sense; and are these processes such that collective intentionalities, like legislation or constitution-making, are able to create them, or are they products of something more glacial, less intentional, more mysterious?
If all societies have ‘structures’ (in the sense in which structuralists use the term—it can be very different from the self-description of the formal organization that a society offers), and if states have to obey their logic, and adapt to its compulsions, it becomes necessary to begin the story of the Indian state somewhat earlier than the point at which it is ordinarily done. It becomes necessary to tell the story of modernity as inextricably linked to the story of colonialism. This will, as we shall see, alter the punctuation and the shape of this narrative quite significantly at some points. In order to understand some of the present political difficulties of the Indian state, it is necessary to think in ways that are undetermined by the dominant myths and narrative strategies of nationalist historiography.
But it is important to see that modernization theories also give rise to a largely parallel illusion in the analysis of social change. It is one of their serious drawbacks to encourage the notion that it is only modernity which has institutions, and it is only modernity which is rational. It is clear that if we work with a thin theory of rationality, then many of the practices condemned as hopelessly traditional (and devoid of any possible rational justification) can be rationally justified, unless the abstract definition of rationalism itself is surreptitiously packed with presuppositions of European Enlightenment thinking. Getting people to ground their practices differently is not just dispelling a false consciousness, but a contestation of rationalities differently constructed. Similarly, modernity does not build institutions in an empty space. It has to rework the logic of existing structures, which have their own, sometimes surprisingly resilient, justificatory structures. The entry of modernity into the discourses and practices of a society depends, I shall argue, on a gradual, dialogical, discursive undermining of these historically rational grounds. And this cannot happen without extending much greater hermeneutic charity towards the practices we try to destroy. For the first condition of setting up a critical, dialogical relation with them is to identify these beliefs correctly, and to see their structures of justification.
Several features of the traditional construction of Indian society must be noted if we are to understand exactly where the state is placed and exactly what it can and cannot do. First, the caste system is significant not only for its great internal complexity, but also the principles on which this complexity is constructed. Unlike pre-modern European societies, which seem to have had a symmetrical hierarchy, its internal principle of the organization of inequality was an asymmetric one. By this I mean that if social hierarchy is a complex concept, and it is disaggregated into several different criteria of ranking individuals and groups—say, between control over economic assets, political power, and ritual status—the rank ordering in India would be asymmetric between the upper-caste groups. That is, if ritual status ranks groups as ABC, political power might rank as BCA, and control of the economy CBA. Of course, caste had a history, and the jati system which actually functioned on the ground was quite different from the ideological self-presentation of the varna system. But the advantage of seeing this model as presenting a sort of faded but still discernible background ideology of social practices is that it helps account for the relative infrequency of lower-order defiance in Indian history. It makes it cognitively more difficult to identify the structure of dominance because of some dispersal of power among the superordinate groups. Second, by this dispersal, it also imposes a strong necessity of a broad coalition among the upper strata in Indian society.
A second feature is the relation between society and the state. This depended on the way in which the social groups that were given to people's immediate ‘natural consciousness’ were themselves structured. Since the scale of social action was small, and highly segmented—despite the recent discovery by Cambridge history of much large-scale economic activity which they call, a trifle boldly, the growth of capitalism—this had some interesting consequences for the reach, structure, and form of political power. The ‘sovereignty’ of the state was two-layered. (This is to indulge in something I have been criticizing: for one of the major problems of theorizing the field of power is precisely the absence of something like ‘sovereignty’ in modern Europe; yet let us approach the unfamiliar first through the familiar.) Often, there existed a distant, formally all-encompassing, empire, but actual political suffering was caused on an everyday basis by neighbourhood tyrants. There were also considerable powers of self-regulation by these communities. (However, calling them in some ways self-regulating does not mean romanticizing them into democratic communities, or unchanging ones. Self-regulating communities can also create and maintain hierarchies of the most debasing sort.)
Thus the state, or the upper layers of it, which the colonial and the national regimes saw themselves as historically succeeding, sat in the middle of a peculiar segmentary social arrangement. I shall call this, by a deliberate misuse of a Hegelian metaphor, a circle of circles, each circle formed by a community of a neighbourhood mix of caste, religious denomination, and occupation. The state would occupy, to extend the metaphor, a kind of high ground in the middle of this circle of circles. It enjoyed great ceremonial eminence, but in fact it had rather limited powers to interfere with the social segment's internal organization. Its classical economic relation with these communities over which it formally presided would be in terms of tax and rent. And while its rent demands would fluctuate according to its military needs and its ability to despoil, it could not (in its own interest or in the pretended interest of the whole society) restructure the productive or occupational organization of these social groups. One of our crucial points is that the conceptual language of acting ‘on behalf ’ of the society as a whole was unavailable to this state.
Two implications follow from this. First, the eminence or the spectacular majesty of the state (at least the large state at the imperial centre) was combined with a certain marginality in terms of both time and space. Incursions by this high state were in the most literal sense spectacular—both wondrous to behold and unlikely to happen every day. The large and high state therefore had an ineradicable link with spectacle, pomp and majesty, and symbolic rituals, rather than the slovenly and malodorous business of the everyday use of power, a sort of double image which one finds in both the British period and after Independence.
But there is another implication of this picture which is of some importance for an understanding of the communal problem in India. I submit, against the grain of nationalist mythology about the common Indian past, that we must see the process of admission of alien groups into Indian society in a slightly altered way. For the standard nationalist picture of what happened, which normally goes under the name of a composite culture, is implicitly a self-congratulatory Hindu idea celebrating the great readiness of the Hindus (and later also of Muslims) to absorb outsiders after a few initial battles. In order to make my point, I shall use another theoretical distinction.
Using Tönnies's idea of gemeinschaft, I should like to suggest that the sense of the community can be of various types. I shall make a distinction here between what I shall call fuzzy and enumerated, or counted, communities. The traditional sense of community, I suggest, was fuzzy in two senses. It was fuzzy first in the sense that the construction of individual or collective identity depended very heavily on a sense of context. Belonging to varying layers of community was not seen as disreputable or unreasonable. Given different situations, a pre-modern person could have said that his community was either his religious or caste or occupational group, or his village or his region. He might find it difficult to render these varying communities, to all of which he belonged, into some unimpeachable hierarchy, either moral or political. But I do not think such a person could be accused of lack of precision in the use of social concepts: he would have fairly clear ideas about how to deal with unfamiliarity, or likeness and unlikeness, and be able to sort these things out for appropriate moves in social practice. The distinction I am drawing then is not between a precise and an imprecise way of thinking about the social world, but between precisions of different kinds. And of course very different types of social worlds could be constructed out of these different ways of thinking precisely about likeness and difference.
This implies an answer to the question that early nationalists inflicted on themselves: how could such a large entity as India be so easily colonized by the British? The short answer is that the question was wrong. The horizon of belongingness and consequently of conceivable social action was such that there was no India to conquer. Since the British inhabited a different discourse of social science and looked at historical and social reality quite differently, for them there was an externally given object—India—that was the target of their political control and conquest. But the Indian opposition they had to face did not reason through similar concepts. Thus, one princely ruler looked on with unruffled equanimity at the undoing of his immediate neighbour, perhaps his immediate predecessor in the British agenda of conquest, and deplored philosophically the changeability of the human condition, including those of small princes. Basically the fuzziness of their sense of community meant that it occurred to none of them to ask how many of them there were in the world, and what, if they agreed to bend their energies into a common action, they would be able to wreak upon the world to their common benefit. At one level it was of course a society like any other: people lived in groups, had wars, peace, conflicts, births, deaths, and diseases. But the great difference was that they suffered or enjoyed these constituents of their common fates more passively, without any idea of their magnitude or numbers.
Another result of this was the manner in which external groups were allowed into this society. Contrary to nationalist ideas and narratives, when new groups with hard, irreducibly different social attributes and markers entered into this society, they did not automatically create a new culture composed of elements of both; more likely, they would be allowed to enter into the circle of circles by forming a circle of their own. Initially, this would make the society's general architecture lose its shape a little, but it would generally adjust to their presence. But this circle—of Muslim culture and community—existed not in any open dialogic communication with the rest of society, but as a circle unto itself. It existed in a kind of back-to-back adjacency with the rest—by way of a very peculiar combination of absorption and rejection.
Into such a society—a circle of circles, but each circle relatively un-enumerated and incapable of acting as a collective group—colonial power brought a series of basic changes. Ironically, such changes could have been brought in only by an external power—external not merely in terms of coming from outside, but also in the sense of using a social conceptualization that was fundamentally alien to this arrangement. Even the Mughal state could not do it, because it would have accepted eminence at the price of the traditional marginality. It could be done only by a political apparatus which had totally different moral, political, and, most significantly, cognitive values.
Curiously, however, British colonial policy did not have a single, unhesitating answer to the question of what to do in this very unfamiliar society. Its political history shows that it went through two policy phases, or at least there were two strategies between which its policies actually oscillated, sometimes to its great advantage. At first, the new colonial apparatus exercised caution, and occupied India by a mix of military power and subtle diplomacy, the high ground in the middle of the circle of circles. This, however, pushed them into contradictions. For, whatever their sense of the strangeness of the country and the thinness of colonial presence, the British colonial state represented the great conquering discourse of Enlightenment rationalism, entering India precisely at the moment of its greatest unchecked arrogance. As inheritors and representatives of this discourse, which carried everything before it, this colonial state could hardly adopt for long such a self-denying attitude. It had restructured everything in Europe—the productive system, the political regimes, the moral and cognitive orders—and would do the same in India, particularly as some empirically inclined theorists of that generation considered the colonies a massive laboratory of utilitarian or other theoretical experiments. Consequently, the colonial state could not settle simply for eminence at the cost of its marginality; it began to take initiatives to introduce the logic of modernity into Indian society. But this modernity did not enter a passive society. Sometimes, its initiatives were resisted by preexisting structural forms. At times, there was a more direct form of collective resistance. Therefore the map of continuity and discontinuity that this state left behind at the time of independence was rather complex and has to be traced with care.
Most significantly, of course, initiatives for what has come to be known as modernity came to assume an external character. The acceptance of modernity came to be connected, ineradicably, with subjection. This again points to two different problems, one theoretical, the other political. Theoretically, because modernity was externally introduced, it is explanatorily unhelpful to apply the logical format of the ‘transition process’ to this pattern of change. Such a logical format would be wrong on two counts. First, however subtly, it would imply that what was proposed to be built was something like European capitalism. (And, in any case, historians have forcefully argued that what it was to replace was not like feudalism, with or without modificatory adjectives.) But, more fundamentally, the logical structure of endogenous change does not apply here. Here transformation agendas attack as an external force. This externality is not something that can be casually mentioned and forgotten. It is inscribed on every move, every object, every proposal, every legislative act, each line of causality. It comes to be marked on the epoch itself. This repetitive emphasis on externality should not be seen as a nationalist initiative that is so well rehearsed in Indian social science. I use it for just the opposite reason—to reject and de-construct some of the well-known nationalist arguments about Indian history.4
Quite apart from the externality of the entire historical proposal of modernity, some of its contents were remarkable. Institutional changes that colonial modernization sought to introduce into Indian society could be broadly divided into three main types, two of which have been fairly well documented and analysed. Economic reforms, or rather alterations (because these changes were usually unaccompanied by the moral arguments that attend genuine reformist impulses), did not foreshadow the construction of a classical capitalist economy, with its necessary emphasis on extractive and transport sectors. What happened was the creation of a degenerate version of capitalism—what early dependency theorists called the ‘development of underdevelopment’. Political changes that accompanied these initiatives were of a very peculiar sort, and have been, in my judgement, often misread. In fact it was clear from the early period of colonial rule that Britain could not, without infringing the fundamental logic of colonialism, introduce forms of political rule current in Europe. However, in order to make the economic part of the social world tractable and amenable to its control, the colonial regime brought in a set of fundamental legal identifications which were new and unprecedented in the Indian con-text. Although the political institutions of liberalism were not introduced, precisely because the political forms of liberalism were deeply intricated with the system of property rights, the colonial state gradually introduced a complete vocabulary of liberal rights in the economic and social fields. It brought in the idea of a state as an impersonal regime of relations, the idea of an individual subject (which was necessary particularly to introduce the new regime of property and the entire regime of taxes and other obligations), the equality of rights or rightlessness—in which the important thing was the constitution of the political-individual subject, rather than whether he enjoyed democracy or suffered subjection—and, finally, a state which (illegitimately under colonialism) pretended to represent the collective interest of society, and from whose legitimate interference nothing in society was morally immune.
Evidently this entire gamut of conceptual transformations formed a structure. These concepts could not exist and flourish separately, they were preconditionally linked and formed in their totality a new way of conceiving the political world. The major difference between its introduction in Europe and in India was of course that, while in Europe these were seen by the major part of society as a result of experiments in controlling and reducing irresponsible power and therefore as liberating, in India they seemed the reverse. The society had to be subject to them because of the irresistible power of the colonial rulers. This array of ideas, when seen in their totality, constituted the invention of a new political world, or a re-cognizing of the world, and of the position of the society and the state in their modern versions—society as a large complex of gesellschaft organizations, and the state as an impersonal apparatus of public power.
A final point must be made about this picture of colonialism and its imbrication with modernity. The colonial structure represented not only a set of new institutions, but also a set of discourses. And the connection between the practices, institutions, and discourses could never be underestimated by this generation of colonial rulers, bred on the idea of the strong relation between knowledge and power, and seeing Europe's conquest of India as a consequence of Europe's scientific advance. Clearly, the new institutions were operable and intelligible only if worked through the new discourses of society and power. Long inhabitance in India's society had taught the colonizers about deep differences in the structures of consciousness in this society. Traditional Indian discourse formed a structure, just as rationalist discourses did, and there was no simple incremental transition from one to the other. Since colonial authority could not be legitimized in terms of the constituted common sense of traditional Indian society, the proper course of action was to try to reconstitute this common sense. This is why the question of education, the instrumentality through which the common sense of a society is created, was of such central concern to British colonial authority.
In this field the British followed what could be called a Gramscian line. Their strategy seemed to be that if a leading section of Indian society could be made to reconstitute their common sense—through the channels of encouragement, emulation, pressure, control—the rest of society could also be expected to follow suit, at least in the fulness of time. Of course, this operation went out of control, and in time produced results which must have completely surprised them, and even their political successors. But it is interesting to see how these went. First, of course, the British colonial apparatus undertook an enormous and unprecedented enumeration of everything in Indian society. Thus, this imposed on social action a completely different picture of what the social world was really like. From fuzzy communities, people had to get used to the strains of living in enumerated ones—with very different consolations and highly abstract threats. Nationalists soon began to turn this counting to good use, and often began to comfort themselves with the eventual power of the numbers, particularly when their movement seemed to be in decline. The colonial authorities themselves would try, at a later stage, to turn this counting against them by enumerating Muslims against Hindus. This showed one implication of living in a society that was enumerated: it was not just a secular nation which could name itself in this way. If disgruntled, other communities, based on different principles, could emerge in this way. Whether they did so or not depended to a large extent on the cultural reproduction of the national community. These communities, as Benedict Anderson has argued forcefully,5 have nothing objective about them. If not given grounds for continuing to imagine themselves in a particular way, they might rapidly decline and dissolve.
At another level, too, the initiatives of the colonial state were unsuccessful, or at least came up against peculiar limits. The British had expected to alter through their cultural initiatives the self-evidential view of the social world not only of the new elite, but also of the common people. The new elite, it was expected, would carry this new alphabet of social reasoning into the lower orders via a sort of Gramscian relay of ideology. But the structure of traditional culture reflected the same segmentation as its social structure, and so it was not easy to identify the site of such a common sense which could be replaced with a new one. But the cultural space of Indian society was also divided in a different way, between high and subaltern cultures. It is wrong to believe, as conventional sociology and cultural theory does, that the difference shown by dominant and lower-order ideas are merely ‘failures’ to copy correctly, that the lower-order versions of the epics, for instance, would merely be badly-thought-out versions of high literature. More often, as the work of subaltern historians seems to show, they arc different stories, in terms of structure, escaping censorship and punishment by keeping a tenuous formal semblance of identity. Structural readings of popular stagings of the Ramlila would often be significantly different from those of the great epic. Illiteracy implies not just the ‘lack’ or ‘absence’ of high discourse, but the presence of a very different one whose rules, codes, emphases, and ironies are entirely different. And just as the intricacies of the upper discourse are not gathered by the lower, the intricacies and inflections of the lower discourse are unavailable to the literate culture. The culture of the lower orders, therefore, has potent means of not learning, or insulating out the cultural instruction coming from the top. It is not surprising that the noisy political discourse of a garrulous, ambitious, self-regarding new middle class would not by itself be able to enter into the confidentiality of the discourse of the lower orders and reorder their alphabet. It failed to create a single circle of publicity for political ideas, as the British and the Indian elite had expected. This resulted in my judgement in the most significant cultural fact of modern Indian political life. There were two ways of dividing Indian society—in terms of discourses and in terms of political ideology—and the two divisions would be asymmetric.
This will become clearer if we relate it to the history of Indian nationalism. How does it relate to the spread of nationalist ideology? Does drawing this distinction do something to the major distinctions of nationalist politics, or does it make us displace in some way our analysis of the national state?
The introduction of this new discourse—limited, imperfect, thin as it was—also produced other unintended consequences. The modern elite in Indian society of course began to inhabit this new social conceptual world with relative ease. But very soon they turned the political point of this discourse against colonial authority itself, earning (not entirely unjustifiably) notoriety for their ingratitude. They came to nurture internal dissatisfactions, which arose out of figuring the political world out in the modernist-rationalist way. Indian nationalism, at least the form in which it came to be enshrined in the Congress, was primarily a product of this discourse, a complex of dissatisfactions worked out by the modernist-rationalistic elite. It is necessary to analyse the internal logic of this body of ideas more carefully.
The first item in this ideology was of course the double complaint about the economics of colonialism. Contrary to the justificatory argument given in favour of imperialism, it seemed to impoverish the colony to enrich the metropolis. Politically, the rationalist conception of the world strongly emphasized autonomy and self-determination, and it was inconsistent to promote the autonomy of the individual and discourage it for collective entities like the nation. This was particularly so because a connection between the economic and political arguments of this rationalist liberalism seemed natural and politically inviting. To the early nationalist elite this connection was so clear as to be put into a nearly syllogistic form.
1. The proposal of rationalistic modernity was rationally acceptable, and indeed deeply desirable. It was rational to wish to live in a civilization structured according to rationalist principles. And the picture of this civilization was one that emerged in Europe. The new elite looked covetously at that part of European history.
2. Originally, colonialism may have seemed an ally in this process, through its support for social reform. But as its logic unfolded, colonialism seemed to be a more complex and sinister process, incompatible with its declared ideology. Instead of helping, it hindered politico-economic development in the direction of capitalism, liberalism, modernity. Instead of creating a worldwide commonwealth of societies moving in parallel, if somewhat unequal, motion towards this rationalist, liberal modernity, it exploited colonies and made it difficult for them to embark on such a path.
3. The rationalist argument itself suggested a different course. Liberal democracy, based on individual and collective self-determination, was rationally the best form of government. Collective self-determination implied a movement to end colonial rule in India, to take national destiny into ‘our own’ hands. Once colonialism was removed, all these ideals could be realized. The political form would naturally be some sort of universal suffrage democracy, and what this sovereign state would try to achieve would of course be what had already been accomplished in the West, in other words a re-enactment. Although startling in some ways, this shows how strong the relations are between the positions advocated by earlier nationalists like Naoroji,6 and later, far more radical ones, like Nehru, if seen in terms not of political ideology but of the discourse about history. Of course, the differences are fundamental and obvious: Naoroji expected the colonial power to accomplish this re-enactment (Or did he? Was he really pretending to be trapped inside their ideology in order to stretch it to its limits, bring it to a crisis, and reveal itself?). Nehru had no such illusions. Re-enactment for Naoroji would have meant the happy replication in India of the desirable society of nineteenth-century laissez faire capitalism of England—liberal, property-oriented, unequal. By Nehru's time what was to be re-enacted had altered in several ways. The ideal model itself had been restructured by the internal critiques of Western political reason, through socialism, to issue forth a more redistributivist model of democracy. But a re-enactment it remained. The historical task for the movement of Indian nationalism, led by its modernist middle class, was not to invent an ideal adequate to the structure, pressure, or logic of Indian history, that is, the structure and discursive possibilities of their own society and history. It was to follow tasks, models, ideals, and historical paths that were universal, but enacted earlier only in Europe, through discourses that were equally universal.
This point should be made with some care. Nothing is simpler than a sort of anachronistic criticism of nationalist leaders, accusing them of not seeing things that were revealed only by later history. As nationalists they were intensely conscious of the peculiarity and specificity of their own history. What they made appears to be not a political but a cognitive mistake, along with their generation of social scientists. They acted on an uncomplex and overrationalistic theory of social change. First of all, they considered all ‘forward’ transformations irreversible, because they assumed that, given the basic rationality of all men, there could be no two opinions about their progressiveness. It will be seen that the picture I have drawn is similar to the one offered in recent years by observers like Kothari, Nandy, and Madan.7
This kind of theory is unlikely to be valid or universally popular, but it could create difficulties in a different direction, in the internal compatibility of principles. If much of Indian society did not agree with a single rationality or its single, dominant construction, given an adult suffrage democracy, it could lead to paradoxes. Democracy works, alas, on a sociological theory of truth. It allows to members of the largest number the right to act upon the political world, assuming that their beliefs about how it was were the true ones. And they can go on building the political world for the relevant period of the ‘truthfulness’ of their views. This brings us to the elite–mass relation in the last phase of the nationalist movement, because after freedom that would be written as the state–society relation. The elite's view of the truth of the political world would become the state's view—though there are various serious internal limits to this, because a state as vast as modern India's is deeply stratified, and the lower elements of the bureaucracy would hardly share the rationality of the elites at the commanding heights. There could be subtle and subterranean resistance from some layers of society. For although the masses in times of great political movements follow their elites, they do not surrender the confidentiality of their political world. From the analytical point of view, however, it may be difficult to produce maps of these ideas or plot their cognitive terrain, because unlike the ideas of the elite and the state which are constantly broadcast, propagated, repeated, theirs are less structured. But precisely for that reason they might be excellent as defensive weapons.
The colonial period saw the appearance of two types of divisions in Indian society: the discursive division between those who made the world they inhabited intelligible via modernist discourse, and those who did not. This division ran decisively between the Indian elite and the lower orders. On top of it, however, nationalism put in place a political division between colonialism and the Indian nation. I consider Gandhi's discourse, or rather his discursive position, to be of crucial importance. This is not because he created a discourse of inexhaustible originality, as some argue; but his kind of discourse managed to bridge the gulf between the two sides, and keep the values, objectives, and conceptions of the world of the two sides intelligible to each other.
The Indian national movement did not produce an inevitable Nehruvian result. The way in which Nehru was able to shape the ideals of the Indian state after Independence was partly a result of some fortuitous circumstances. No logic of the previous movements, no wave, made it necessary for the Nehruvian elite to come to power, but there was something deeper which went in favour of this modernist dominance at the time of Independence. He enjoyed a silent but subtle and massively significant cultural approval among the modern elite. Members of this class, dispersed thinly but crucially throughout the governmental and modern sectors, approved spontaneously the assumption of power by a rationalist ‘philosopher king’—though some of them knew that he might incline towards a statist radicalism common in the 1940s and 1950s. However, this did not represent a serious discontinuity at the level of discourse. Entrepreneurial groups and politicians favouring the propertied classes knew that they would have differences with Nehru on socialism, the state sector, redistribution, foreign policy, land reforms, the state's power to take away property, and so on. But these were comprehensible differences, differences of political ideology among those who inhabited the same social discourse. Political disagreement is of course a form of successful communication.
A paradox of mobilization made this early period of political construction in India relatively easy. If the divergent types of political discourse, with what they considered to be politically rational, their incommensurable ideals, had simultaneously found utterance in Indian political life, it might have been exceedingly difficult to carry on institutional formation. But the backwash of mobilization of the national movement ensured an implicit trust within the masses in the initiatives of their leaders. Thus these various conflicting discourses were not brought immediately into dialogue on equal terms. During the nationalist struggle there had occasionally been distinct initiatives from the lower orders when political space was opened up within the national movement. But recent historical research has also shown how quickly the main Congress leadership was able to shut off such space, or bring their movements under control. Thus the support that the Congress leadership received was not of the kind that the bourgeoisie in classical bourgeois revolutions of the West created for themselves, by reconstituting through a process of prior cultural movement a hegemony and directive pre-eminence for themselves. Ordinary people were mobilized in the Indian national movement in tremendous numbers, but not by creating hegemony of this kind. At the same time, as the failure of the communist moves towards insurgency indicated, subaltern groups were not ready to break with the bourgeois nationalist leadership and prepared to take large world-constructing actions on their own.
This led to several consequences. First, of course, the setting up of political institutions passed off relatively peacefully; the Constituent Assembly, though strangely unrepresentative, still represented a sufficient consensus of the organized groups to bring off a constitution which was not seriously contested. At the same time, internal realignments within the Congress led to serious political decisions. The systematic exodus of the socialist left from the Congress weakened Nehru considerably inside the party that he formally commanded, but the death of Patel also left his own personal eminence uncontested. He was therefore free to pursue a set of policies about which his party colleagues were not wholly enthusiastic. The construction he placed on secularism, for instance, was clearly resented by a section of Congress leaders. His drive for redistributive policies of land reforms met with serious, if undeclared, hostility from his own party's lower-level leadership. Most Congress leaders were more lukewarm than Nehru about developing friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Few understood in a clear theoretical form the logic of the massive heavy industrialization drive that he pursued through the second Five Year Plan. This shows in a sense a miraculous contingency of some of the central segments of the fairly impressive institutional structure that Congress under Nehru built up. But precisely because of his relative isolation within his own party, Nehru undertook another initiative which has seemed over the long run to overshadow other parts of his institutional strategy.
Nehru began to create a base, an alternative apparatus, in the bureaucracy. Planning, on a large scale from 1956 onwards, made for a great extension of an economic bureaucracy inside government. As the rhetoric of social justice and redistribution increased, this bureaucracy expanded rapidly. This differed from classical European bourgeois revolutions, where capitalism first emerged in initiatives and in institutions within civil society, and the state was later used as an instrument to correct its spontaneous production of inequality. In India there was no developed civil society and many of capitalism's classical initiatives within civil society were undertaken by the state.8 The most serious consequence of this, of course, was that the state became omnipresent, since it was performing functions left to the institutions of civil society, and it was impossible to abjure transactions with this state. At the same time, it could work only through the techniques of an unreconstructed colonialist bureaucratic style, wholly monological, criminally wasteful, utterly irresponsible and unresponsive to public sensitivity. Its history had made it ill equipped to be civil or solicitous, or to explain itself. And naturally its manner, rather than its policies, was bound to create a scramble. Those after power would want to get into its seats, completely screened as they appeared to be from accountability, and those who could not get into them would become increasingly alienated.
The manner and structure of capitalist growth accentuated such differences. Instead of reducing regional inequalities, capitalism intensified them and tended to concentrate opportunities and resources in centres of political power. The cultural consequences of this process have not been analysed carefully until recently. Over the long term, the strategy of development in India, precisely through its relative successes, has tended to reopen the deep division of discourse in Indian society between a homogenizing elite-speaking English, the Esperanto of the upper orders, and a vast lower-order population looking and speaking with an intense vernacular hostility against some of the consequences of this form of capitalist development.
From this point of view it appears justified to say with Rajni Kothari that the first phase of Indian politics was built on a kind of consensus.9 But Kothari seems to have misjudged the nature of the consensus he identified, and its possibilities. It was of course an elite consensus, which passed uncontested because of its nearness to the mobilization of the national movement, and the relation of implicit trust between its leadership and the masses. It was a consensus of discourse, rather than of ideological positions. The institutional pattern that Nehru wished to put in place came up against serious ideological criticism from the left, especially the socialists and the communists. But there was still a commonality at a different level: they had very different things to say about the political world, its structure, purposes, and ideals, but they shared a common way of arguing about these things. This seemed to create real divisions among them, which was what they primarily saw. But it also created underlying unities among them when looked at from outside this discourse, which is what must have impressed the other classes and groups in Indian society. The constitutional frame that was adopted, though it was exhaustingly detailed (and therefore a lawyers’ constitution rather than a citizens’), still was silent and vague on various questions. And although the ideological conflicts in the Constituent Assembly went in favour of a more conservative reading of the Congress programme, the Nehru regime took significant steps immediately afterwards to counteract this in actual policy. The Planning Commission, soon to become the actual centre of economic policy-making, remained outside the formal constitutional framework. Initially the federal structure worked through the federalism inside the Congress Party rather than constitutional channels. The regime of rights, centred on the individual subject, made legal concessions to minority rights which could be enjoyed by people only as members of communities, rather than as bourgeois individuals. But despite these underlying problems, which took some time to break out into the open, the achievements of the Nehru regime were massive by any standards. True, some of this was fortuitous, and caused by the fortunate overdetermination at the time of freedom. But one can clearly see that, given a slightly different turn of events, India could have had a very different set of foundational policies, and these most likely would have been relatively retrograde.
It is in the economic sphere that Nehru's policies have enjoyed the greatest long-term success, though at the start his government often seemed on the point of being overwhelmed by financial and resource difficulties. By the time he became prime minister, Nehru had moved away from his ‘scientific socialist’ beliefs, though importantly he would still have characterized his beliefs as scientific; from his point of view he had moved away from socialist doctrine because it was not scientific. He had given up that construction of socialism, but he had not given up science. Still, his commitment to a British Labour version of social democracy made him interfere with what others would have considered the more ‘natural’ course of capitalist growth. Indeed, Nehru's certainties were shaped by and shared with the emerging discourses of social theory, soon to be inscribed on the whole world in the form of reformist Keynesian economism in all sectors of public policy. The economic growth of society was predicated on the building of the industrial sector. In this, heavy capital goods industries took precedence, and since these could not be built by private capital, this led to the steady growth of a large public sector with strong links to ministerial bureaucracies.10 In this milieu, it was subtly misleading to speak in the language of the interventionist state, and to transfer, implicitly, a whole set of expectations from the European case; because that was a language on which the history of European capitalism was inscribed quite clearly. In Europe, the state did ‘intervene’ in a society whose basic structures had earlier been formed by civil society, and the existence of a strong civil society made the state act in responsible ways. In India, where there was no prior civil society, one could hardly talk of an interventionist state since many of those institutions were brought into existence by the state. Therefore, in a subtle but significant way, the direction of the descriptive language and justificatory rhetoric was wrong.
Some of the problems with this kind of economic planning have been noted for a long time. Even economists who favour the state sector and its leading role agree that the planning models probably neglected the question of agriculture. Not surprisingly, the Nehru regime faced both economic and political difficulties arising out of food shortages during the late 1950s. The theoretical fault in all this was that the regime worked, along with all others thinking about development at the time (irrespective of ideological positions), with a heavily reductive economistic theory of social change. Economic arguments tended to be aggressively ahistorical. Everything else was turned into problems for which economic policies had the solutions. The sequence in which the sectors had emerged, their specific institutional forms, how the historical sequence of their emergence could have affected their institutional logic—such questions were seldom asked. There is a minor irony in this, since much of this discussion was analysed by Marxism, and Marxism at least in its classical form, is deeply sensitive to sequences and trajectories.
Second, the irresistible bureaucratization of social life, in the absence of the structures of civil society, created difficulties. But the effects of this politics on the discursive map of Indian society were interesting, and these have not been carefully analysed. The structure of Nehruvian democracy was raised on an anomalous base. It did represent, as some of its admirers put it lyrically, the greatest experiment with democracy in the history of the world, but that was possible partly because the large masses on whom these rights were conferred found them too unfamiliar at first to use them immediately. Planning was aimed not only at the construction of a wide industrial base, but also at the reduction of some of the gross inequalities in incomes. Nehru certainly saw the alleviation of poverty as a condition for genuine democracy, but it depended increasingly on the monologic instruments of the state and its bureaucracy rather than dialogical, movement-like forms. The falling apart of the Gandhian language in Indian politics, which had reduced for a time the hostile unfamiliarity between elite and subaltern political semiotics, contributed to this widening gap, accentuating this ironical divergence between populist government policies and popular consciousness. And the discourse of the elite tended to turn increasingly inwards, in two senses. First, the debates were directed at intelligibility and justifiability in terms of the political stances of the high discourse, leaving the task of formation of a vernacular, popular discourse around these questions to an unmindful educational policy. Second, there was a further tendency in later years to withdraw issues of development from public arenas of discussion and to surrender them to so-called expert groups, creating a sort of elite confidentiality around vital decisions about politics and society.
It must be acknowledged that Nehru personally was conscious of this withdrawal and sought to continue to publicize the development debate. But it was not a matter so much of the personal predilections of leaders, but a tendency of the structure of development strategy. Indian democracy remained vibrant, with occasional mass movements being able to register their demands on the state, as with the regional autonomy movements of the 1950s and the food movements some years later. So the enormous extension of the state was not coercive but remained external. The elite around Nehru were sensitive about retaining democratic forms and pursuing, within what they considered to be reasonable limits, the reformist aspirations of the state. But they did not see the problem of its externality. In retrospect, its basic failure seems to have been the near-total neglect of the question of the cultural reproduction of society. It did not try deliberately to create or reconstitute popular common sense about the political world, taking the new conceptual vocabulary of rights, institutions, and impersonal power into the vernacular everyday discourses of rural or small-town Indian society. It neglected the creation of a common thicker we-ness (something that was a deeper sense of community than merely the common opposition to the British) and the creation of a single political language for the entire polity.
Thus, unnoticed by the bustling technocracy of the modern sector, the transient links across the political and discursive divide tended to give way. The independent Indian state followed a programme of modernity which was not sought to be grounded in the political vocabulary of the nation, or at least of its major part. As a result, precisely those ideals—of a modern nationalism, industrial modernity, secular state, democracy and minority rights—came in the long run to appear not as institutions won by a common national movement but as ideals intelligible to and pursued by the modern elite which inherited power from the British. More than that: subtle and interesting things began to happen to this logic of ‘modernization’ which have gone unnoticed in the works of its supporters and opponents. Precisely because the state continued to expand, precisely because it went in a frenetic search of alibis to control ever larger areas of social life, it had to find its personnel, especially at lower levels, from groups who did not inhabit the modernist discourse. Thus it is wrong to believe that the Indian state or its massive bureaucracy is a huge Weberian organization binding a relaxed, fuzzy, slow-moving society in its iron structure. What has actually been happening is more complex. By overstretching, the state has been forced to recruit personnel from groups that speak and interpret the world in terms of the other discourse. Since major government policies have their final point of implementation very low down in the bureaucracy, they are reinterpreted beyond recognition.
As a result of its uncontrolled growth, the policies of the state have also lost some of their cohesion. If one does not have a purely romantic view of the Indian past, one can see the direction this reinterpretation of government policies, this utilization of internal space for lower-level initiative, would take. It is not surprising that arguments of social justice are often used as an unanswerable justification for the encouragement of nepotism and corruption. Indeed, there is very little corruption in India that is not practised in the name of high moral principles. The actual conduct of those in authority has also tended in recent years to slide backwards towards a more historically ‘familiar’ style of irresponsible power, with the withdrawal of significant decisions, under various excuses, from the arenas of public criticism and responsibility. It must be seen, while debating the effects and justifications of modernity, that these trends come straight out of India's glorious past.
However, the point here is not to tell the story of Indian politics, or to present a convincing periodization. In the accepted ways of standard social science, the story has been told many times over. Indeed, my point is that despite those familiar narratives of the achievements and failures of Indian democratic institutions, there appears to be another story to be told. This seems to be sketchily glimpsed by many recent observers of Indian politics, but no one seems to know what it is a story of. I am quite clear that this ambiguity is reflected in the curious way I have just presented the problem. I think it can be sorted out in a preliminary way by using the distinction between political ideology and structures of discourse, and acknowledging that the classifications that can be produced by their different criteria look quite different. I should like to look at some of these diagnoses of the recent problems of the Indian state, and move our discussion towards some theoretical conclusions.
One of the punctuations generally observed in Indian politics is the spectacular difference between the Nehru period, which ended in 1964, and the later one. There is a further division: the electoral instability of governments in the period after the fourth general elections in 1967 has since been changed into a more serious and frightening uncertainty about the state form itself. On the one side the political behaviour of party leaders and managers seems to discredit the institutions of democracy; on the other, sometimes popular anger against such political games has assumed a form in which it seems that it might pass into a vote of no confidence on the state form itself.
What has been the historical record of this complex of institutions? This question has been discussed so often that only some of its implications need to be assessed. But we must also keep in view the standard and fairly reasonable defence by Nehru's followers (in ideas, not in party affiliation: indeed, the Congress Party under later leaders has been the main destroyer of the institutional logic that Nehru sought to make safe) that forty years is too short a span for institutions to take root or to adapt them to a very different historical milieu. But even in the short term, its achievements are not negligible. Unlike in most other Third World states, a formal democratic constitution was not initially adopted, to be dropped soon after in favour of dictatorial authority. In fact, the way the Emergency ended in India showed the great ideological depth of the democratic idea. Mrs Gandhi believed that even the record of the Emergency regime had to be electorally justified. Often, however, other achievements of the Nehruvian model are clouded in a discussion either of pure economic growth, in which dictatorial regimes accepting subordinate productive roles in the international capitalist system are shown to be remarkably superior to India's record in growth rates, or of radical theories based on strategic ignorance which show the distributive advantages of a communist economy. But industrialization in India, though wasteful in many ways, has a wide base. And the institutional form of the economy has ensured that its political sovereignty has not been renegotiated through extreme economic pressure. All these relative achievements are undeniable, but this shows the present predicament of the Indian state in a curious light. For the state is not threatened by forces from outside. On the contrary, most powers acknowledge its resilience and regional dominance. It appears threatened from inside. Its difficulties arise not because its performance was bad, but rather from what its rulers would no doubt consider among its modest achievements. And, most remarkably, the institutional forms that the early nationalist leadership created for the benefit and well being of the common people seem to have come under greater pressure as more and more common people have entered into the spectacle of party politics.
This then is the basic form of the paradox of democracy in India. It is undoubtedly true that some of Indira Gandhi's electoral moves and the rhetoric used consistently by all political parties—of popular participation, the realization of rights, the eradication of poverty—have led to a greater political articulateness among ordinary people. To that extent high politics, even in the spectacular arenas, which were earlier the preserves of a modernist elite, are coming under pressure from the alphabet of the lower discourse. It seems, however, that the more the ordinary people have written their minds into the format of politics, the greater the pressure or threat has been on democratic structures—as generally understood in terms of Western precedents. There seems to be some incompatibility between the institutional logic of democratic forms and the logic of popular mobilization. The more one part of the democratic ideal is realized, the more the other part is undermined. The paradox, to put it in the way in which T.N. Madan has done,11 is that if Indian politics becomes genuinely democratic in the sense of coming into line with what the majority of ordinary Indians would consider reasonable, it will become less democratic in the sense of conforming to the principles of a secular, democratic state acceptable to the early nationalist elite. What seems to have begun in Indian politics is a conflict over intelligibility, a writing of the political world that is more fundamental than traditional ideological disputes. It appears that the difference between the two discourses is reappearing, now that the lower discourse is asserting itself and making itself heard precisely through the opportunities created by the upper one. The way it rewrites the political world might not be liked by the ruling modernist elites, but it is too late to disenfranchise them.
This is an interesting and challenging line of thought, and very different from earlier diagnoses of political difficulties in India. Earlier, social scientists usually began by expressing solidarity with the project of introducing modernity, equating modernity with a re-enactment of the European drama. (Indeed, there was no Asian drama to stage at all. What occurred in India was merely the Asian premier of the European narrative, luckily with an appropriately cultivated cast.) They expressed irritation or puzzlement at the obduracy with which the society seemed to resist it, and such resistance was generally accounted for by a simple, malignant form of direct political agency—corruption, lack of political will, and so on. The explanation that I am proposing seeks a less agency-oriented answer to the difficulties; it is prepared to be puzzled by deeper questions and is ready to turn the questions around towards social science itself. From this perspective, the equation is to be arranged not between a rational programme prepared by the elite and carried out by an instrumentally viewed state on the one hand, and a resisting, irrational society on the other—but the other way around. Indian politicians of the Nehru type made a mistake very similar to the one that has now been, a trifle theatrically, traced through the entire history of social science. Western social theory moved from a sort of high orientalism practised by Marx and Weber to a very inadequate theory of modernization worked out by Parsonian developmentalists, a move often celebrated as from philosophy to science, but in fact from tragedy to farce.
Nothing is more disorienting than when our fundamental taxonomies are turned around and we blink within a world in which things occupy entirely unaccustomed places. This argument tries something like this about development thinking in India. Clearly, many Indian social scientists carried on their earlier debates within a world which was firmly held by the solid homogenizing taxonomies established by nationalist beliefs. Most political argument was internal to these boundaries. The emergence of such arguments in serious social theory shows that the pervasiveness, the self-evidentiality of the nationalist construction of the world is gradually fraying and disappearing. It has been argued forcefully in recent years, by social scientists like Chatterjee, Nandy, and Madan,12 that the state and the ruling elite uncritically adopted an orientalist, externalist construction of their society and its destiny reflected in the wonderful and tragic symbolism of ‘the discovery of India’. Its initiatives were bound to be one-sided. To the world of India's lower orders, it simply refused or merely forgot to explain itself. Indeed to some it would have seemed that the Indian elite was more concerned about justifying its initiatives to external audiences than to its own. Historically, its absentmindedness about cultural unity has driven apart the political diglossia of the national movement, held together in a sense by the easy bilingualism of its political leaders and cultural intelligentsia. Today, that cultural terrain is increasingly broken into a unilingual English-speaking elite, and equally monolingual conglomerate of regional groups which are losing a dialogical relation not only with the upper strata but between languages as well, leading to greater friction and hostility across regions.
The implications of this critique must be seen clearly. It has brought into question the cognitive, the political, and the moral legitimacy of the whole institutional regime constructed after Independence. Of the whole lot—the impersonal nature of public power, the rule of law, the democratic order, the idea of a complex and composite nation, a secular polity—it asks whether it is legitimate for a relatively small elite to impose their ideals on others who do not necessarily share them. It also asks if this political form, because of its unintelligibility, can be worked by this people. It must be seen that it moves from moral to cognitive questions to radicalize its critique. It must also be clear that these questions are addressed not only to the Indian political or modernist ruling elite, but also to social theory in equal measure—because they can be logically so directed, and also because it is these theories—which the elite believed—that gave them the intellectual justification to do what they had undertaken.
But some of the more general, abstract, epistemic implications of this kind of argument should be noted. In a sense, this sort of theoretical discomfort tries to break from the vulgar pretensions of being a policy science (which posited too direct a relation between social science and government policy) and seeks to return to a more classical conception of political theory, as a kind of historical self-reflection of society. It assumes that one of the tests of good social theory is whether it can relevantly comment on what is happening in society, and contribute to a general management of social destiny. It rules out a distancing, reflective attitude to social and political questions. Its own performance must be as subject to this criterion of success as that of the previous theory that it rejects.
The approach which I am proposing offers more promise than do reassessments either of Gandhian ideas or of traditional Indian or Hindu thought. Gandhi did not seek an answer to the problems of the modern condition. He shrewdly refused to deal in modernity's terms. His answer was not about how modern conditions can be brought under cognitive and moral control, but that modernity as a condition should be abjured. In a sense he embraced a deliberate obsolescence. His critique of modernity is of course powerful and lucid, but too radical, for he offers not an alternative solution to modernity's problems, but to modernity itself. I do not therefore seriously expect help from the side of Gandhian theory, though as a student of the history of ideas I can see that there can be a great deal of good theory which flies the Gandhian flag; that a lot of good, interesting theory could be done by illegitimately using Gandhi's name.
It appears that one of the curious things about the Indian, or at least the Hindu, tradition is that although it has a high history of philosophical reflection, and though the political organization of society was highly pronounced, it lacks for some reason any strong tradition of applying this apparatus to the analysis and justification of political (it is perhaps possible to say social) phenomena. If language gives a kind of condensed history of a culture, this is reflected in the constant trouble over translating basic conceptual terms like society and state into the Indian languages. Thus, to find an indigenous vocabulary for making sense of the political world, going back to the indigenous tradition might not be very fruitful.
Even if there is a vocabulary, even if we pretend that it is interregionally sufficiently common, it will be a language that was adequate to state–society relations of the pre-modern form. The modern state cannot go back to the high ground in the middle of the circle of communities. The circles themselves cannot be made fuzzy again. There is certainly a great deal of humanity in the pre-modern languages of social living. Its sentiments are valuable, but its conceptual apparatus cannot work out solutions to modern calamities.
It should be clear that the failures that we have examined here offer a potentially rich field for political theory to analyse. When even massive coercion fails to modernize or democratize nations, it is likely that these efforts are up against an intangible barrier, like the problem of conceptually reinventing a political world. That is why it seems necessary to return to the problem of theory for this whole field. This has been analysed so carelessly that it is still in a sense unnamed. For the ‘Third World’ is really the absence of a name. We must ask if this aggregation is defensible and look into its conceptual archaeology. It remains a negative and residual description, indicating the West's ‘other’. And a negative otherness is particularly hard to theorize, because we are required to theorize what these societies are not.
Much of the blame for the blundering inadequacies of modern American development theory has been wrongly laid at the door of the Western tradition of high historical theory. This misreads the relationship between American social theory of the 1950s and its nineteenth-century European ancestry. It is to accept the past that American theory has given itself, shopping around in the earlier traditions of European social reflection. There were also critical self-limiting moves within European social theory which have not been studied with an equal seriousness in the eagerness to construct a paradigm. John Dunn has sought to revive, in a more radical fashion, some of these self-limiting moves of Western theory.13 He engages Western theory in an unaccustomed task—of finding its limits, something which in the last century at least it had become unused to doing. In India, Partha Chatterjee has offered the interesting and powerful hypothesis that nationalists accepted the Orientalist construction of Indian society and the limitedness of social reconstruction, and the present difficulties of the state begin from there. This is not a cultural complement or a version of the dependency thesis, for this line of argument is far more self-critical and modest. Dependency theory believes that most third world states do what is wrong, but it has no doubt about what it means to do right. The new line of criticism is more radical: it appears to suggest that colonialism ruptures the self-relation of a society through time in such a fundamental way that it becomes difficult to imagine what would be right. It shows the task to be one of inventing right and wrong—the true function, according to one definition, of political philosophy.14
Dunn's book speaks in the cultured, civilized tone of withdrawing into Europe as a region in history. But the withdrawal of Europe is not going to be such a simple affair. Others would object to its withdrawal; because that would amount to withdrawing not a familiar theory, but the assurance of a familiar world which made this theory relevant. Others have named their lebenswelt through these ideas and have started inhabiting them. This of course alters them unrecognizably, as happens with European languages which others have made their own. Dunn thus takes a rather narrow view of the responsibilities of Western theory. In much of the world, it faces the future of others.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dunn, John. 1979. Western Political Theory in the Face of its Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankel, Francine. 1977. India's Political Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1989a. On the Construction of Colonial Power. Paper presented at a seminar in Berlin on the Foundations of Colonial Hegemony, German Historical Institute, London.
———. 1989b. A Critique of the Passive Revolution. Economic and Political Weekly. Annual Number. March.
Kothari, Rajni. 1970. Politics in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
———. 1988. The State Against Democracy. Delhi.
Madan, T.N. 1987. Secularism in Its Place. Journal of Asian Studies 46 (4). November.
Nandy, Ashis. 1986. The Intimate Enemy. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 1988. Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Naoroji, Dadabhai. 1901. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. London.
Skinner, Quentin. 1989. The State. In T. Ball, J. Farr, and R.L. Hanson, eds. Political Innovation and Conceptual Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, T. 1985. Requiem or New Agenda for Third World Studies? World Politics. July.
First published in Rethinking Third World Politics, ed. James Manor (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 72–99.
1 For an excellent discussion of the historical stratification of the meaning of the term ‘state’, see Skinner 1989.
2 The term ‘civil society’ is used here in Gramsci's sense. But it appears that it is used in so many distinct ways, and that there are justifications for most of these, that there should be some rigorous discussion about its many, but somewhat confusing, riches.
3 In this section I have simply summarized my argument in a different but related paper: Kaviraj 1989a.
4 I use the word ‘deconstruct’ quite deliberately: for the critique of nationalism comes here as an internal critique, as the critique and rejection of those who, as Derrida would say, have been its inhabitants. Only then can it be called deconstruction.
5 Anderson 1983.
6 The most celebrated work by Dadabhai Naoroji, which illustrates my point. See Naoroji 1901.
7 Kothari 1988; Nandy 1986; Nandy 1988; Madan 1987. There are some serious differences which will become clear as we proceed. I have considerable sympathy with what they say has been happening in India, but not with their views about why it is happening, and what should be done about it, and finally about how we relate to the relevant discursive structures.
8 I have advanced an argument of this kind. See Kaviraj 1989b.
9 Kothari 1970.
10 For a detailed historical argument, rich in empirical detail, see Frankel 1977.
11 Madan 1987.
12 See Chatterjee 1986; Madan 1987; Nandy 1988.
13 See Dunn 1979.
14 T. Smith 1985 offers an understanding and wide-ranging critique of this whole field; but his criticisms of dependency are weaker and less pointed than they could have been. It seems that now it is time to do something like what Foucault would call an ‘archaeology’ of third world studies, or to provide something like an in-depth narrative of its epistemic and methodological structures.