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THE INSURRECTION OF LITTLE SELVES: The Crisis of Secular-Nationalism in India by Aditya Nigam. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006.
IN the last two decades, academicians as well as public intellectuals have made important interventions in the debate on secularism. The book under review is a welcome and refreshing contribution to this debate. In the very first line, the book makes its object clear – an exploration of the ‘entity’ called ‘secular-nationalism’. It further claims, ‘As the ruling ideology of the postcolonial Indian state and elite, it (‘secular-nationalism’) represents a specific, historically constituted, ideological configuration.’ Refreshingly, the rest of the book does not confine itself to defining this construct (or track its historical roots in conventional manner) and instead opens it up at its specific genealogical moments, mobilizes a wide range of political thought and anchors on the scrutiny of the construct of ‘modern unmarked abstract citizen’. The idea of this unmarked individuated abstract citizenry (a dream of modern democracies) is interrogated by rupturing it with the Foucauldian expression, ‘insurrection of little selves’.
In this project, the author focuses on 1980s and early to mid-1990s and a wide spectrum of activities these decades witnessed, threatening the project of nationhood in India. These are lower caste movements (including the Dalit movement), ecological movements, women’s struggles, eruption of ‘subnational’ assertions like the issue of Khalistan and Assamese nationalism (absence of a full length discussion on Jammu and Kashmir is striking in this context) and so on. The term used in this context is ‘infra-nationalism’ which should be understood as different from ‘subnationalism’ in that they need not ever express themselves in the desire for another nation... but they nevertheless insist on redrawing the internal cultural boundaries of the nation-in-the-making.’ Avoiding existing currencies like ‘identity politics’ or ‘class politics’, the politics of this period is described as an insurrection of little selves. Another thematic focused on in this study are locations, concerns and perspectives of Muslims and Dalits in this discourse.
With these two threads, the author moves up and down in colonial as well as post-colonial periods, draws comparative insights from the South African context and engages with liberal, Marxist as well as post-colonial thinkers from across the globe. Venturing across the colonial times, he argues that ‘the project of Indian nationalism was an impossible one, precisely because it was impossible to have one common history.’ It can of course be argued here that no matter how flawed the nationalist legacies, for a large section of the population the nation was ‘imagined’ as one community. Nevertheless, unlike what is argued by western theorists, in India, the heritage of these legacies was not predicated on ‘a past of common memories and common amnesia’ but on a contested ensemble of often mutually conflicting and heterogeneous memories and forgetfulness.
To puncture the hegemonic discourse of nationhood, the author looks ‘at the historical imaginations at work among the Dalits and the Muslims.’ In his selection of examples and narratives he remains fruitfully fragmentary, which further opens up threads and problematics rather than lead to a closure of the arguments. However, in this reading of colonial voices (of Dalits and Muslims) the agenda he sets up is ‘the question of the hegemony of one particular voice’ and not mere recovery of the many voices of Dalits and Muslims. Hence we find critical scrutiny of figures like Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Periyar, Sayyed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Ali among others. This reader, however, was expecting more analytical space to the developments that took place in late 19th century as this period has been regarded as the foundational moment in the emergence of Indian nationalism.
Similarly, while the discussion on Muslim voices remains confined to the north Indian ruling elites, the debate on the Dalit question is based on voices from the South. This disjuncture, one can argue, is due to the lack of historical studies on the respective subjects – Muslim communities of the South and Dalit voices from the North. This analytical gap is partly filled up with references of caste associations from north India (i.e. Kayastha Sabha from colonial UP and a very detailed discussion of lower caste movements in the second half of 1970s). Here, it would not be unfair to expect more space to figures like V.P. Singh and Laloo Prasad Yadav along with a more nuanced analysis of the relation between Mandal and Mandir. On the other hand, in exploring the colonial roots, the book provides a rich understanding on a complicated relationship between Ambedkarite Dalit politics, Hinduised mainstream Congress attitudes, Hindu nationalists and, last but not least, the Hindu communalist elements.
Along with Dalits and Muslims another ‘self’ examined closely in this book is of the Indian Marxists. Pointing to the gulf between ‘high’ theory and ‘low’ practice among the secular Marxists, the author for the first time goes beyond the level of political elites and interviews local leaders, activists and party workers of CPI(M) in Bengal. On the basis of this interesting interaction he notes the immense variation of the meanings assigned to the term ‘secular’ which further points out that ‘there is an attempt in the present conjuncture to try to negotiate the rapidly changing situation.’ These discussions help highlight the disjuncture between the demand of local level politics (to actively participate in the religious life of the community) and the impositions from above to conduct political behaviour in a highly sanitized manner. As two activists put it, ‘despite party injunctions, "we have to" participate in the life of the community’ (p. 295).
These narratives and references thus calls for a scrutiny of various concepts, i.e., ‘mass man’, ‘homogeneous empty time’ of modernity (Walter Benjamin) and nation (Benedict Anderson) and demands a recognition of different temporalities and their articulation. This is particularly crucial as ‘nationalism, because it was coeval with industrial/capitalist development, was also coeval with large-scale dislocation in social terms, leading to an uprooting of communities and their insertion into a different logic of modern community-identity formation’ (p. 307). This is a helpful framework and allows substantive analytical freedom to engage with the community of Dalits who ‘represent a deep resistance to the two great artefacts of our modernity, secularism and the nation. By privileging lived experience, as for instance feminism does, it also represents a resistance to the fundamental epistemic disruption instituted by modernity, that between the subject and object’ (p. 309).
The merit of the book lies in its successful translation of this ‘lived experience’ of the concept of abstract unmarked individual citizen at theoretical levels, that too in a remarkably lucid language. On the other hand, it demonstrates how ‘lived experiences’ of the communities like Dalits, Muslims and Marxists are represented by ‘secular-nationalists’ in their own terms, not merely denying these communities a political participation in their own manner but making the very process of the (non)emergence of ‘mass man’ a unique one in Indian contexts. It is these denied voices or repressed selves that have returned in the last two decades forcing us to adopt new analytical frames. This new framework demands we move beyond the language of either state or civil society. The notion of political society (Partha Chatterjee) is helpful in this context. ‘Here the key figure,’ the author concludes, ‘is the bilingual intellectual/activist who speaks at once the language of community and that of civil society. In other words, the privileged position of the enlightened intelligentsia has to be abandoned’ (p. 325).
Sadan Jha
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