Abstract
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Manu Bhagavan voices the analytic concern in the title Heterotopias by writing of ‘the multiplicity of historical unfolding, that there are many ways of thinking, acting, and being happening at the same time’ (p. 5). While there is much that is new and welcome in this volume, the agenda, themes and their treatment are not entirely unfamiliar. The six articles that are themselves paired so as to give the volume the appearance of three interrelated conversations are in a sense marked by particular disciplinary orientations—history, literature and philosophy–hermeneutics—even as they share overlapping thematic concerns. Gyan Pandey’s contribution on the ‘post history of communalism’ serves as a conclusion to the volume.
The first pair of articles is written by Yasmin Saikia and Chitralekha Zutshi on aspects of Assam and Kashmir respectively. Saikia takes as her focus the Thai-Ahom identity, an ethnic identity that traced itself historically to the Ahom Dynasty and ‘regionally’ to Upper Burma, Thailand and South-East Asia. She engages in the task of tracing the history of this movement until the present, through its relationship with New Delhi and the better known politico-cultural and militant movements in the Assam region represented by the AGP and ULFA in the context of an Indian state that was critiqued for its cultural hegemony and economic policies that extracted natural resources while neglecting capital investment and employment generation. The latter has been richly documented by Amalendu Guha, Hiren Gohain and Tilottoma Misra among others, and it is a surprise that there is little reference to this literature. On the Thai-Ahom movement, Saikia argues that its need for past cultural hegemony was supported in such historical imaginings by pan-Thai arguments emanating from Thailand as well as the locally formed AGP government in the 1980s and early 1990s. However the recession in South East Asia and the significant diminishing of ULFA’s influence since the later 1990s resulted in the waning of the Thai-Ahom movement. The challenging nature of understanding movements that have complex and fraught relationships both with similar kinds of movements as well as ‘the’ national discourse are brought out; as is the difficulty of locating them within the territorial grid of the nation-states.
Chitralekha Zutshi historicizes and problematizes the category of ‘Kashmiriyat’ by tracing it to colonial and pre-colonial accounts which portrayed Kashmir as a peaceful and harmonious place bereft of religious discord. The indirect rule of the British perpetuated the myth of a uniquely distinctive, syncretistic identity for Kashmir that led to the forging of a particular brand of Kashmiri nationalism down to the present that Zutshi argues is a ‘tremendous disservice’ to the complex history and culture of the region. The National Conference adopted the same discourse of Kashmiriyat and when it came to power, it all the same passed draconian laws to silence opponents across the ideological spectrum. The contradictions between theory and practice apart, the increasing emphasis on Kashmiriyat led to well known hostilities with Delhi. However rather than seeing them as merely oppositional, Zutshi argues that Kashmiriyat was a product of a ‘collusion of Kashmiri and Indian majoritarian nationalisms, both of which needed to obscure the inherent contradictions in their logic and rhetoric’ (p. 52). To avoid this opportunistic and dishonest use of Kashmiriyat, Zutshi turns to the historical record claiming that if religious differences were better managed in the past this had little to do with an innate cultural disposition towards tolerance and had more to do with political structures that were better able to manage religious difference without erasing them. This is less convincing as it does not extend beyond a cursory discussion of a few writers and thinkers of the region in the nineteenth century without squarely addressing the issue of political structures.
Paula Richman offers us a fascinating glimpse into the world of Tamil and Telugu short story writing in the twentieth century that re-tell the Ramayana in their own distinctive ways. Stories on the kinship of Surpanaka and Sita, the urban and the forest world, the possible imagining of what Sita would have said, are narrated through multiple literary forms. In this way literature here becomes an acutely sensitive instrument to register the social and its inequalities, specifically those relating to gender. Syed Akbar Hyder’s essay nicely complements Richman’s analysis by focussing on Ghalib and his inspiring presence in the Urdu Progressive Writers Movement via Altaf Hussain Hali and Muhammad Iqbal. Through a reading of Ghalib’s verse, Hyder explores its ‘poetic and mystical textscape’ (p. 91) that codes and recodes a ‘trans-Islamic sacred geography’ via a poetic and physical encounter with Kashi. Such a ‘cosmopolitan’ transcreation is what allows the Urdu Progressives to be inspired by Ghalib’s verse even though their specific Marxism inflected concerns would otherwise have sat incongruously with the aristocratic opulence that was to have given the latter such pleasure. It is poetic idiom that provided ‘the multi-vocal ideological parameters and a negotiable hermeneutic province wherein [his] word would be subject to ever new interpretations’ (p. 107).
The next two essays by Faisal Devji and Ajay Skaria dwell on two ‘Indian’ responses to liberalism. Devji identifies liberalism with the logic of interest, representation and contract which in turn (allegedly) forms the language of nationalism against which Iqbal’s writings are arraigned. According to Devji, for Iqbal, the inadequacy of liberalism for India is best represented by its inability to negotiate the differing claims and identities of communities, its assumption of a money economy and its negation of religion. Rather than the territorial form of nationalism and its ‘liberal’ logic that is seen to irreversibly lead to conflict and competition at the local and global level, Iqbal argued for a metaphysical and ethical aspiration that was universalistic in a way that was distinct from both liberalism and Hegel. Islam, going beyond the two, was to have stood for an ethic that captured social relations rendered invisible by the (universalistic) logic of representation, opening the possibility of ‘converting’ one cultural identity into another rather than having them represented as though (their) identity was knowable a priori. This ‘conversion’ was practiced by Iqbal in its literary–philosophical form wherein ‘Hindu’ figures and tropes were translated in such a manner so as to not leave any markers of their original habitat; thereby refusing, in Devji’s words, the mediation of the Hegelian universal, by which particulars were assumed to be fixed and static. This form of engagement, Devji argues, moved from the metaphysical (Iqbal’s treatment of Sankara) to the social (prejudice), and was more attuned with the reality of the subcontinent than the national–liberal logic of representation, interest and contract.
Ajay Skaria argues that Gandhi counters modern civilization which rests on an ‘inclusionary transcendence’ (p. 164) (where the human is the animal and yet is able to transcend it) by an ethics that treats the human and animal as radically different, requiring a ‘unilateral and immeasurable’ obligation to the latter which is also a stand in for the ‘strange’. This notion of the ‘stranger’ and its ethic is elaborated in a discussion of Satyagraha, which Skaria says, is characterized by an ‘ineradicable violence’ (171). Involved in such an orientation is the notion of an ‘everyday’ that can never quite be captured by history, invoking the well known remarks on history in Hind Swaraj. While Skaria’s surefootedness in the Gandhian archive is evident throughout the essay, arguments regarding the relationship between violence and obligation, the distinction between the latter and state violence, are not fully followed through. At times the burden of analysis is displaced onto allusion whether to Derrida or Levinas. When there have been illuminatingly precise arguments about Gandhi and ‘liberalism’ (in the Millian guise), such as that of Akeel Bilgrami’s, one wonders why such analyses have not been brought into the ambit. As in the introduction, in Devji and Skaria too, it is not uncommon for the names of Foucault, Kosselleck, Hobbes and Hegel, and contentious philosophical categories like ‘liberalism’ and ‘the representation’ to make almost ritual appearance sans analysis, phantom like, as though that were all that were needed for a Pavlovian reader to chew the philosophical cud.
The volume ends with Gyanendra Pandey’s lucid argument for a ‘post history of communalism’. Pandey argues that communalism in the colonial period was marked by the aspirations and anxiety for a citizenship that had not arrived. However, the contemporary enormous concentration of power in the state has led to it becoming ‘a much more active (and partisan) party to “communal” conflicts that, once upon a time, it was supposed to have mediated’ (p. 199). While underlining the violence of the state in the present can certainly never be understated, one may ask whether the point of comparison for a fuller understanding of the modern state should not merely be the ‘communal’ conflict of the colonial past, but a world of imperial (and totalitarian) varieties of violence and conquest that have had, among other things, the world wars as their trophies.