Abstract
Written with a keen eye for politico-historical genealogy in lived experience, Citizenship in a Caste Polity unpacks the everyday entanglements of language, caste and citizenship for Goan Catholics at the margins of South Asian historiography. Jason Keith Fernandes complicates received notions of democratic governance and citizenship in the subcontinent by tracing the claims staked and contested by the postcolonial Goan public over their language, caste and political recognition. Three questions animate this monograph. First, how do those caught between the colonial epistemologies of Portuguese and British empire negotiate their social location within and outside them? Second, how—and for whom—does caste delimit the possibilities and experiences of citizenship? And lastly, how might Partha Chatterjee’s writings on the making of civil and political society be read anew to reckon with the place of those who rupture their neat boundaries to carve out a legitimate space for themselves? Ultimately, Fernandes argues that understanding citizenship as everyday practice—as opposed to citizenship as juridico-legal status—more seriously considers how subaltern actors negotiate ‘room for manoeuver’ against state attempts to ‘fix’ their identity within a caste-dominated national polity (p. 105).
In five chapters, the book compellingly narrates a story of how the Konkani language became a ‘marker of Goan modernity’ and subnational axis of postcolonial mobilization after it was declared the official state language in 1987. Konkani—written in both Antruzi-Devanagari and Roman scripts—was recognized only in the former, historically claimed by the dominant castes of Goa and rendered inaccessible to most others. Fernandes draws on an extensive period of fieldwork and archival data to show how democratic politics in contemporary India rests historically on an intertwined set of contestations over caste, citizenship, script and language. In Goa, these historical processes collapsed speaker and speech into one another in the political imaginary, with the Antruzi-speaking figure of the Hindu Saraswat Brahmin now taken to embody the ideal secular citizen-subject or Konkani Munis. Conversely, the figure of the Goan Catholic came to stand in for Nagari’s other—the Roman script, a historically ‘inauthentic’ form that fell short of the state standard of Nagari (p. 104). This book ventures artfully through these conflicts over language, political representation and claims to the Munis, tracing them to the ‘subalternised’ location that present-day Goan Catholics are forced to occupy in a democratic polity that offers anything but ‘free and equal’ citizenship to all (pp. 142–143).
In Chapter 1, Fernandes follows Partha Chatterjee’s concept of political society—which serves as the theoretical mooring for much of the book—to establish the de jure logic of citizenship for those who cannot de facto claim the same rights to the polity as those located in civil society can (p. 17). The vagaries of citizenship for those who occupy hierarchically ordered locations in the sociopolitical field form the focus of this chapter. Who can stake a claim to the rights embodied by the ideal secular citizen-subject, and who must relate to the law at a skewed angle? Drawing on an extensive body of scholarship, Fernandes argues that an anthropology of citizenship necessitates a shift away from juridico-legal frameworks and towards citizenship as a practice, whereby those at the margins of the state negotiate a space for themselves within civil society while finding moments of recourse in political society amid their structural expulsions from the body politic.
Chapters 2 and 3 trace the genealogy of the Konkani language and most vividly capture the argumentative core of the book. Chapter 2 begins with the premise that Konkani was long held to be the language of subaltern Goan Catholics whose songs, everyday prayers and cultural practices spoke to its central location in their lifeworld. Yet over a mere century, with Goa’s unification with India in 1961 and demise of the Marathi-speaking Bombay presidency, the upper caste echelons of Goan society—Catholics and Hindus alike—claimed Konkani in Marathi’s stead. Konkani first emerged as a means to unite a newly consolidated Goa but eventually transformed into a manoeuvre for the local elite to fashion themselves into the mould of a model postcolonial citizen-subject (the Konkani Munis). These self-making practices of the Goan elite involved not only Sanskritizing the language and claiming for it an older Brahminical origin via the Antruzi dialect and Nagari script but also marginalizing subaltern Catholics claiming the Roman script and Hindus claiming Maratha. Chapter 3 builds on the stakes of Konkani history for those variously caught up in the strictures of postcolonial Goa’s caste society. The model citizen-subject (the Munis)—embodied in the figure of the Hindu Saraswat Brahmin—is one marked most distinctly by caste, offering up the possibility for Catholic Brahmins to stake some claim to its normative ideals, too. The labouring underclasses, however, regardless of religion, were ‘effectively excluded from the realm of civil society’ (p. 143). Far from constituting monolithic blocs, Goan ‘elites’ and ‘subalterns’ fall along historically contingent scales of privilege and marginality.
Chapter 4 highlights the dissension that riddled the labour of activists and language enthusiasts who either supported or opposed the recognition of the Roman script in Goa. The 1980s marked a pivotal moment in the state’s postcolonial trajectory, with supporters of the Roman script denied their right to its legitimacy in civil society and effectively subalternized in script and political status at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. Chapter 5 asks how, amid these struggles over language and caste, the bodies of those fixed in a condition of subalternity experienced citizenship as an aspirational ideal that the Goan Catholic, in particular, could never fully embody. To experience citizenship, Fernandes argues, is to experience and practice feelings of humiliation over the vulnerability that comes with sharing a culturally and historically ‘inauthentic’ script that renders them outsiders to civil society. Paying sensitive attention to the role of emotions in the (un)making of citizens, Fernandes delves into the complex ways in which Goan Catholics relate to the Roman script. Their script is one that demands shame in its incongruity with the normative ideals of the Munis and, at the same time, balms Goan Catholics with dignity against their marginality and subalternity.
Profound in ethnographic and conceptual insight, Citizenship in a Caste Polity concludes that subalternity is a relative historical condition, with elite and subaltern subjects variously positioned within ‘webs of subalternity’ (p. 309). If subalternity is necessarily relative, so is the experience of citizenship in contemporary India. Amid the belligerent rise of Hindu nationalism in the subcontinent, this book is an essential read for those interested in how (sub)national hegemonies are contested, preserved and negotiated in everyday practice. While the book does at times rely excessively on Partha Chatterjee’s dichotomy of civil and political society in ways that do not always further the author’s case for their malleability, the theoretical scope of this monograph offers a novel view of citizenship in South Asia from its margins. Citizenship in a Caste Polity rethinks the stakes and histories of citizenship in the region, promising to guide new conversations on the limits and possibilities of political belonging.