Abstract
If anyone wants to understand the process of nation building from a liberal perspective, no doubt this book, Enlightenment and Violence: Modernity and Nation-making by Tadd Fernee gives a very good insight into the subject. It is a kind of intellectual history which also covers society and economy. The book is a critique of authoritarian regimes which have evolved majorly from the line of thought which opposes enlightenment and its legacy. The author thinks that, nature of state in nations which follow enlightenment and its political and intellectual heritage promotes human dignity and mutual respect. While on the other hand, the counter-view promotes violence. The conciliatory process expressed in the Indian National Movement is seen as key to its democratic development. Nature and structure of the state are seen to have developed as an impact of the broad intellectual development in the European world. On the other hand the politics of authoritarian states like Iran and others, used politics of violence in a specific way in their nation-making process.
Though, the central argument of the book rejects authoritarian tendency in totality, the author chooses the prescriptive method rather than descriptive. Criticising the revolutionary method of nation building in the twentieth-century world, the book suggests adopting the democratic method (basically the method of non-violence) for the twenty-first century. From the author’s point of view, there is no difference between fascism and communist revolution (mainly the Russian and Chinese revolutions). As per this argument, whether it is Hitler or Stalin, both of them have destroyed the idea of enlightenment heritage. In fact, Kemal Ataturk’s reign in Turkey comes under the same category of authoritarian regimes. In other words, the secular nature of the nation does not preserve the enlightenment heritage but the state which adopts the tenet of non-violence is a protector of enlightenment heritage.
In nineteenth-century India, the author sees two distinct political options for Indian nationalism. The first option comes under the category of economic nationalism while the second option was that of cultural nationalism. The leaders who talked about the ‘common economic interest’ were Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjee, Govind Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale; while Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Aurobindo Ghosh were the political thinkers who asserted that religious consciousness (mainly Hindu religious identity) should be the uniting as well as mobilising factor to fight against the colonial state or in the making of a nation.
As far as the Indian National Movement is concerned there were mainly two leaders, according to the author, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru who preserved and promoted the enlightened heritage as both shared this legacy. Its importance is stressed to understand and tackle the politics and spectres of violence seen in the contemporary world scenario. By saying this, we ignore or rather criticise the contribution of the labour movements, peasant movements, tribal movements, etc., which adopted ‘violent methods’ in the ruling-class terminology, in the nation-building process. It also ignores the role and importance of the Quit India Movement in the freedom struggle of India which was violent and was tacitly endorsed by leading Congressmen. It is ironical that the author does not differentiate between the violence of the oppressed and the oppressor. In Gandhi’s politics there was no space for any radical peasant struggle and labour movement against the zamindars and the capitalist class who were the main collaborators of an oppressive colonial regime. Denying space to such movements is also a form of violence. We cannot ignore the fact that it was Nehru, whom the author portrays as a ‘promoter’ and ‘preserver’ of enlightenment heritage, who dismissed the first democratically elected communist government in Kerala. In any nation-building process where the voice of the subaltern is not heard or grass-roots politics is discouraged, the idea and formation of an egalitarian democratic state is very difficult.
It appears that violence is seen through the narrow lens of mass movements, thus restricting the scope of the ‘violence of the other’ which the enlightened mass movement unleashes. The ideological and state-sponsored suppression of local violent mass-based movements in the name of democratic nation-building is equally violent and repressive. These local mass-based movements help in shaping the dominant political discourse towards an egalitarian model of growth and development which might not always be authoritarian. It is rather difficult to assume that only ‘non-violent democratic movements’ promote human dignity as the violence of oppressed class can also promote the same. While criticising political violence, we should differentiate between the political violence of the rulers and that of the oppressed.
This attempt, although well intentioned, is overly ambitious as it disregards and downplays the role of local dissent by categorising it as ‘un-thought’ which stand in opposition to the ‘thought full’ process of enlightenment and its legacy.
It is a short and ideologically convenient escape from claiming enlightenment heritage for the subalterns/oppressed by rejecting a Marxist analyses of India, something which the subaltern school of history has done amply. In the same sense, Ashish Nandy has spoken of the ‘ontological priority of the consciousness of the oppressed’ which apparently is supposed to be free of normative categories and Western conceptual prisons.
The whole idea of the book is to rid ‘Enlightenment heritage’ of what is called the authoritarian nationalist frames, racist ideas and violent corruptions of the Left. But, authoritarianism is one essential constitutive of Capitalism. All this new theorising is haunted by the ghost of Capital. Think global warming, global disparity, resource crunch, global food crises, energy crises and so on. This new theorising names it all and yet tries to short circuit the connection with Capitalism—for that would amount to a ‘totalising discourse’.
The book talks about the politics of authoritarianism but this notion is a convenient handle to escape the totalitising tendencies of Capitalism itself. Moreover it seems that this terminology is borrowed from a century of anti-communist theorising, later even more particularly in the context of the Cold War. Global post-colonial spaces are now being used to exemplify this old authoritarianism, and thereby becoming eligible for the introduction of democracy which, to some, is the same as neoliberalism.