Abstract
The study of the political is a fraught enterprise. Much thinking on the political happens in the abstract and with a rugged sense of prolepsis, proceeding from the belief that there are already existing ideal states in some places as opposed to others. European analysts of areas called the Third World, the Global South, and other appellations ask the question: when will true democracy come to these areas? They ask this question unreflectively from their own sclerotic institutional and ideological spaces, where politics has become about elections and government rather than about emancipation, human belonging beyond narrow ideas of the citizen, and so on. Fortress Europe, to use the current cliché, has generated little in terms of political thinking, trapped as it is within ideas of borders, nations, and passports. It is time for a rethinking of politics and that, too, away from the congealed, self-congratulatory genealogies of Euramerica and its “mythical space time of philosophical thought” (5).
There are two fundamental questions that Banerjee raises in her excellent intervention on rethinking the very idea of the political. The first is to ask what follows from “displac[ing] philosophy itself from being the natural ground of the political?” (6). The second inquires into the consequences of relocating the geographical locus of thinking the political. What does it mean to reflect from the Global South as a “deterritorial intellectual domain” (3) and mobilize other histories that are, as in this case, only “contingently Indian” (3)? What would this thinking across traditions allow us to do? Some of the standard narratives that she questions have a set of implicit assumptions about the following themes. Is politics an idea or a practice, a quotidian enterprise or transcendent philosophy; is it multidirectional or teleological? Furthermore, is everything to be considered political because the fundamental injunction on being in the world is for us to reflect less and act more? If everything is always already political, what purpose do categories like prepolitical or postpolitical serve given that there is neither preparatory before nor transcendent after? Depending on the paradigm of one’s choice, there are historical sequences and the question of phases of transition to democracy, revolution, or whatever utopia lies at the end of the road. There are implicit judgments of course: those who will attain the kingdom of God and those who will fail and, of course, those who are condemned to remain in the “waiting room of history.” Is the political about the quest for bringing about the equality of all humankind? Or is it rather about asking whether equality is the substance as much as the telos of politics? The problem with thinking solely with the idea of inequality, of course, is that this is, as Joel Robbins put it, a desolate half of a concept because absolute equality is found nowhere.
To grapple with these questions, Banerjee institutes a series of moves in her work. The first is that of thinking with “ordinary politics”—that is, elections and parties—as much as reflections rooted in everyday concerns rather than “philosophy” alone. The second is to insist that politics is only “one kind of orientation towards power” (8). The third is to move us away from the political as an “always already known orientation,” such as an idea of the “enactment of equality” (as in Rancière) toward the question of contingency: “when does equality become political?” (11). The final move is to insist that the history of the political is always also a history of “the social, the religious, the economic, and the aesthetic” (11). One must think the political through multiple genres, spaces, and times. Riffing on Durkheim, and more proximately, on Ranajit Guha, Banerjee titles the common forms and general ideas she works with as “the elementary forms of the political.” This is not an a priori exercise of a search for basic units prior to ideology. As she disarmingly puts it, there is a “secret implausibility” (14) at the heart of each elementary aspect—the self, action, the idea, and the people. Tested against some idea of empirical reality, none of these concepts quite cohere and may pull in different directions. This indeterminacy allows for the creative play at the heart of the book.
Banerjee begins with the conceptualization of the political human from within a South Asian cultural matrix. Politics is conceived between the idea of renunciation (sanyas) and that of realpolitik and being in the world (arthasastra); it will always have spirituality and philosophy as supplements. Such a starting point alters how political action is itself to be conceived. Is it to be governed by a renunciatory disposition, as a subjectivity detached from the result (the idea of nishkama karma, or action without attachment)? However, is this a particular position available only to a casted self that is abstracted from labor? As the untouchable thinker B. R. Ambedkar put it resonantly, labor cannot be theorized by those who do not labor. In fact, the abstract idea of labor is always compromised in a society constituted by a hierarchy of labor (16). It is amidst the iniquity of division and hierarchy that equality comes to be thinkable. Under the sign of the colonial rule of difference, the idea of formal equality has to be conceptualized in a field of competing inequalities while resisting the idea of a single overarching difference (18). Spirituality and the worth of the human always remained central to an imagining of equality, and possibly it was only the communists who tried to resolve the problem within the realm of economic reason alone. The book culminates in the staging of an idea of the “people”—the entity abstracted from these debates as the prospective inhabitant of the nation-in-waiting. The Indian National Congress presents itself as an umbrella organization that subsumes the idea of the people; the Communist Party, on the other hand, represents the part, the working classes. However, both speak in the name of the “people”: an entity that is assumed to be in existence even as it is being invoked and constructed. Banerjee names this phenomenon as the “fictionality of the people” and so suggests that politics has as a necessary supplement the literary, which engages in the parallel venture of creating the people as a “credible fiction” (19). Thus bookended, Banerjee’s book moves through the progression: the self, action, the idea, and the people.
Self: In colonial India, politics was the colonizer’s domain. Moreover, what existed in the realm of the social could hardly be called society, characterized as it was by a hierarchy sanctioned by religion and with the force of Law. Society was a contingent construction lacking in the bonds of sociability, hence all action was in a sense compromised and reflected an “indebtedness to the world” (34). The political human was faced with the dilemma of having to speak for others, but then could “he ever really be himself?” (23). Away from the conventional binaries of state versus society (the state being external and colonial, and society being absent as such), the political act and the agent had to come into being together. Banerjee thus raises the question of political efficacy—of being politic rather than doing politics. Efficacy is about generating political intelligence, and political power comes to be less about the ability to make law and more about cutting through an existing context (46). Philosophy must be subsumed in the service of making a politics; arthasastra, or a science of politics, must generate an orientation toward power (59–60). A “new sanction” was needed, deriving neither from the state nor society (for the reasons given previously), hence the appeal of the Buddha as renunciant agent, or Gandhi’s own resort to renunciation as a mode of the political. The spiritual was called in to address the imbalance of the compromised social and political realm.
Action: The question of action has always been thought in the spectacular mode—of agency, violence, and revolution. However, there are other modes of conceptualization of everyday forms of action and making the world (as seen in the work of James Scott, Asef Bayet, Abdoumalek Simone) and of working with the “propensity of things” (Francois Jullien). The nineteenth-century thinker Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay instituted the idea of anusilan as an action-oriented principle—of humans being ceaselessly active, even in “abjection” (73). Efficacious action was akin to divine action, and as Banerjee carefully shows, conventional binaries of sacred and secular, religious and rational have little purchase in the thought of the colonized intellectual. The political constantly sits alongside its supplements in other domains. As Aurobindo, drawing upon the Bhagavad Gita, argues, given that one lived in a state of war, to act decisively was to act spiritually and vice versa. The individual was a nimitta—a pretext or medium to action—and people were required to act politically, particularly because everyday life was impossible (85). This dilemma was experienced with greatest force by the untouchable because, as Ambedkar pointed out, the conceit of labor unattached to outcomes was not possible for the upper castes. The question of whether labor could create collectives not underwritten by religion or morality pulled thinkers in different ways; only Gandhi would sentimentalize labor by unmooring it from its nexus with caste. Ambedkar saw labor as creating not community but fractures. As he put it with characteristic economy, caste is not just a division of labor, it is also a division of laborers. 1 And unlike other groups in society, lower castes could not act politically, because “they were the means of other people’s actions” (111). In Hinduism, religion and work were conjoined, which made a politics of labor a necessary struggle against the rules that undergirded the caste performance of labor by some for the many. Labor could not necessarily be projected as political; it had to be indexed along axes of sacrifice and war in order to separate it from the mundane wretchedness of caste performance (115).
Idea: In India, one cannot begin with the conceit of humans being equal because they are born unequal. Inequality and difference were imbricated because the former was experienced as the latter amidst “diverse asymmetrical inequalities” (121). The question was how to conceive of equality as something more than inequality’s opposite, and also as not mediated by the state or society. As Banerjee argues, equality had to be staged on a “spiritual register” (125). This meant a removal to the realms of a higher philosophy, the abstractions of which were then rendered in a demotic register as a set of propositions about egalitarianism. For example, the presumed identity of self and pure consciousness (brahman) in Advaita Vedanta became over the late nineteenth century a resource to think about the equality of all human selves. Difference was the default condition of being, and equality had to be considered within this condition. There was no prior condition of equality that could be presumed (such as a prelapsarian one, for example). Arguments had to “arrive at equality” (126) through a working out of nondualism in the world. Banerjee puts this beautifully as the moment of enlightenment when “equality, equanimity, and equilibrium” (126) synchronize. This is a moment of apprehension of humans as a species-being living amid other beings. Political consciousness does not rest on a prior separation between the human and animal but on an understanding of unity as in Narayana Guru, or in the case of Kazi Nazrul Islam, of tawhid, or the oneness of Allah. As Mohammad Iqbal also argued, the difference between humans and animals was one of degree rather than of quality (131). Reflecting on the idea of the political in South Asia is marked by a constant reaching beyond secularized binaries as well as the rendering of abstract philosophical entities, like consciousness, as concrete. Ambedkar, in his classic text Buddha and His Dhamma, saw little use for abstract questions such as “what is the self?” or “what happens after death?” (137). The exigent question at hand was the thinking through of equality in an “encounter between unequals” (140).
People: The political form of the party, whether of the Indian National Congress or the Communist Party, wrestled with the idea of encompassing the people, in part or in whole. Was a party an association of associations; was it a vanguard; did it require a perfect theoretical orientation or a pragmatic political one; was it to be premised on ethical personhood—these were some of the dilemmas of shaping a Western form to mass mobilization in India. Alongside these practical negotiations was the simultaneous aesthetic imagination of the idea of the “people.” Politics was also about a desire and emotion premised on the need for an entity called the people who were the carriers of modernity. Banerjee makes the original argument that it was theater rather than the novel that became the vehicle of this desire and the emplacement of plays within locales of being (anchal) with specific dialects, landscapes, and so forth, which then created an ecology of being (196–97). Staging common life was also a staging of a politics where playing the people (“impersonation” rather than representation) allowed for the transcendence of class difference and the “imagining of a political community of the future” (208).
This extraordinarily nuanced book sets aside an older and rather tired trope of the critique of Eurocentric categories and embarks on a robust enterprise of generating a mode of thinking from the Global South. What is made clear throughout the book are the different genealogies, vocabularies, and histories that go into the thinking of the idea of “the political.” These are rooted and local stories that also invite a moving beyond the provincialism of European political theory that is mired in its too proximate histories of nationhood, citizenship, and democracy.