Abstract
In Lineages of Political Society, Partha Chatterjee unlocks the peculiar nature of democracy in postcolonial India. Two different societies coexist in postcolonial India: civil society and political society. He explains that civil society is concerned with modernization whereas political society is driven by survival needs. The cohabitation of these two societies makes the peculiar case of postcolonial democracy. We remember that one of the main characteristics of British colonization was the ‘divide and rule’ policy that effectively divided Indian society into these parallel entities. This idea of ‘political society’ comes from Chatterjee’s previous work, The Politics of the Governed (2004), where he explored the rise of ethnic or identity politics in the postcolonial world. As one of the founders of the Subaltern Studies Collective (along with Gayatri Spivak), and as one of the most influential scholars in postcolonialism, Chatterjee traces the origin of this distinct society (what he calls ‘political society’) back to the colonial experience. He shows how it created a sort of ‘illegal’ yet legitimate component of postcolonial democracy in India and to some extent South Asia. The book also has a number of beautiful illustrations that zigzag across time, places, and faces. The pictures, color collages, lithographs, engravings, and drawings take the readers to India in its intimacy, depth, and transformations. The artistic talent of the author shines as his meticulous choice of illustrations help us visualize the lineages of political society in its physical form. The book contributes to the analysis of social problems related to ‘modernity’ by precisely tracing the roots of these problems back to the European colonial period and examining its lasting impact on postcolonial societies.
Chatterjee’s interest in postcolonial democracy stems from his bewilderment concerning his realization that all the exploitation, discrimination, violence, and marginalization that dominated our modern history have managed somehow to keep modern political thought and its normative reasoning intact. His statement is a powerful and recurrent message of postcolonialists who challenge, among other things, the rigidity of the study of international politics and its unwavering focus on power. The most striking point is what he expresses as the ‘insatiable need to love Europe’ (p. 41) by the once-colonized, something we should keep pondering. Chatterjee is not satisfied with a limited conceptualization of modernity and democracy as coming from Western modern thought and to be replicated in a Western modern fashion. Thus, he takes us on a genealogical journey to explore, among other examples, satyagraha, the philosophy of nonviolent insistence, which we can connect with the resilient nature of political society. He also dedicates a chapter to the polymath Rabindranath Tagore to expose his recurrent argument that the concept of nation is not appropriate for India because, unlike Europe, its people are not from the ‘same colour’ or from the ‘same blood.’ Chatterjee then brings in the work of Benedict Anderson on ‘imagined communities’ to show that ‘nation’ is after all just an imagined political community. This imagined community constitutes the crisis of the postcolonial state as the history of its violent nationalism is a forceful realization of an ill-suited universal modernity project.
For Chatterjee, the problem with Western democracy is its rigid attachment to normative reasoning. This unfortunate attachment hinders the proper appreciation and understanding of what postcolonial societies are able to do in terms of democracy ‘customization.’ The political society described is stubborn yet it adapts. It is even more active in checking on the state and serving democratic values than civil society because it targets and exploits the incompetence of the state. Could it be that survival needs as advanced by political society will still be a priority for the postcolonial state? It seems that political society is more potent than civil society in ‘making things happen’ and winning moral battles. One could argue that in Morocco, for example, the incumbent ruling party, an Islamist party, won the election because the party was perceived as more suited to the needs of Moroccan political society. There was this perception that they could deliver more. The strength of Chatterjee’s study lies in unveiling the political ‘power’ of a social group, the political society. This society could be considered as subaltern and voiceless yet it manages, of course with much struggle, to expunge its survival needs from the state. Two great examples are featured in the book. The first concerns the phenomenon of illegal squatters who ‘legitimize’ their squatting by insisting on their survival needs and morality. The second concerns the example of a destitute Bengali woman who ingeniously manipulates the ruling party and the opposition to routinely plea bargain.
Tracing lineages is an important exercise of understanding and evaluating our current political institutions, something Chatterjee does beautifully in his book. For him ‘civil society is where corporate capital is hegemonic, whereas political society is the space of management of non-corporate capital’ (p. 224, emphasis in the original). Even though political society is excluded from the urban middle-class’s (or civil society’s) hold on corporate capital accumulation, it still manages to organize a ‘parallel’ space for its informal sector. In terms of seriality (the social construction of labels for these two societies), the two groups are unbound. Another problem concerns mixed or hybrid groups in which subjects permeate the boundaries between civil society and political society. Finally, the author emphasizes the nonrevolutionary nature of the political society as it bases its strategy of struggle on bargaining: but for how long? Let us not forget that Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor and a central figure of the Arab Spring uprisings, used to play a game of bargaining with the authorities as they used to sporadically confiscate his wares, until he could not play that game anymore.
Overall, I find Chatterjee’s message concerning postcolonial democracy to be rather hopeful. In response to Gayatri Spivak’s famous question ‘can the subaltern speak?’ this book retorts that the subaltern can check on her state and can bargain for her survival. We might wonder if insistence and bargaining are sufficient for her to ‘speak’ but it could be a step forward in order for her to be heard.