Book Review: Ajay Gudvarthy,ed.,Reframing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society and Ajay Gudavarthy,ed.,Politics of Post-Civil Society: Contemporary History of Political Movements in India

The conceptual innovation named ‘political society’ that Partha Chatterjee coined almost a decade ago has, over time, acquired a life of its own. The idea of political society has implicitly or explicitly influenced several other scholarly interventions in the study of contemporary Indian politics. In these years Chatterjee himself has revisited and elaborated upon the idea, and has been asked for clarifications about it. The notion of political society has displayed the capacity to resonate with various contexts, transform and be refined through these engagements. Anyone attempting to understand the sites of democratic activity in Indian politics would be interested in this realm Chatterjee outlines. He sees this democratic activity in the sphere outside of modernity, beyond civil society. He sees a large number of Indians, part of a continuous political negotiation and management, and inhabiting a space of non-corporate capital. They constitute democracy in action, that is, political society. Distinct from the political practice of citizens, they as populations are in the process of constant political negotiations and manipulations, seeking benefits which may or may not become legally codified rights.

The two books this essay reviews are engagements with the transformative potential that the two concepts of political society and civil society possess, in that order. The first book, Reframing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society edited by Ajay Gudavarthy is an informed debate on political society with Partha Chatterjee. Gudavarthy in this book collects a set of essays that have thought with and against the notion of political society. The book ends with a rejoinder by Chatterjee responding to the essays. The essays have been divided in three sections; the first looks at the relationship between various shades of protest politics and the notion of political society. The second examines the new forms of community that political society claims to outline. The third set of essays evaluates the status of political and civil society as a norm and as an exception.

Many essays raise one or more of the above issues by conducting semi-ethnographic studies that bring fascinating texture and depth. As is expected, looking at real concrete political practices brings to light the inadequacies of any conceptual category. Ajay Gudavarthy and G. Vijay look at Kazipally to demonstrate a systemic pull against organized collective actions and in favour of contextual negotiations. They believe that democratization occurs in India outside the contextual survival strategies not through it. The political society/civil society binary are considered unsustainable as representative of concrete political practices in some other essays. Each of them investigates a different site and a different dimension of the idea of political society as defined by Chatterjee. Supriya Roy Chowdhury traces the presence of political modernity within the political society of Bangalore slums. Jolie M. F. Wood looks at the politics of traders and the lawyers of Varanasi’s civil society to argue that civil society is in fact more inclusive than Chatterjee’s vision of it. Contesting Chatterjee’s ideas on the changed forms of social relations, the essay by G. Ram Reddy and G. Haragopal points to the social function of the middlemen in rural India, and demonstrate the coexistence of older social relations with newer negotiations. Similarly, J. Devika and A. K. Rajashree examine the widows’ organizations in Kerala to emphasize the dangers of putting various layers of political actions and agents within the seamless category of political society. Irrespective of whether the reader agrees with their reading of Chatterjee, the essays raise significant concerns. For instance my reading of Chatterjee does not see him making a claim of a complete and total transition from older forms of political relations to newer ones. Neither does Chatterjee see democratic politics located only and solely within political society.

Three important essays highlight the idea that civil society and political society must not be seen in conflict with/opposed to each other but along a continuum. Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Sriastava and Rene Vernon argue this through their studies of local politics in Bengal and Bihar. Tom Harrison looks at NGO’s and village clubs of West Bengal and confirms the reading of Corbridge and others. Aparna and Nandini Sundar look at two groups, the fishing communities in Tamil Nadu and the Adivasis in Chhattisgarh to point to the contestations that exist within the space of civil society, as a sphere of contestation with the state as well as with classes. They point out that societies are both civil as well as political simultaneously. A fascinating aspect of these essays (along with J. Devika’s) is the significant role that middle class activists play, mediating between marginalized people and governmental institutions. Given that the dominant way to understand the middle class is to consider them as consumers, it is refreshing to see them as producers of a distinct political activity.

The essays of Ranabir Samaddar, Swagato Sarkar, Omar Kutty and Sanjeeb Mukherjee are a conceptual analysis of the idea of civil as opposed to political in Chatterjee’s work. They highlight analytical inconsistencies and gaps in the idea of civil society/political society. One of the themes that emerge in these essays is that perhaps Chatterjee has been too quick to dismiss the potential of civil society.

It is this potential and hope in the notion of civil society that Ajay Gudavarthy addresses in the introduction of second book under review, ‘Towards the Politics of Post Civil-Society’. Gudavarthy begins his book with a discussion of why it is that the hope from the notion of civil society remains undiminished. The capacity of civil society to reinvent itself and its flexibility as a concept play a part in creating this hope. Gudavarthy, however, believes that several creative attempts in actual political practice have been understood within the familiar category of civil society simply because there is no alternative concept available. Arguing against scholars who believe that political movements in India have been able to expand and transform the very nature of civil society, Gudavarthy argues that many political movements cannot be accommodated within the parameters of civil society.

He gives two reasons why ‘civil society’ cannot accommodate these creative practices. One is that ‘the very practices that they seem to inaugurate, in the name of democracy and democratization become hegemonic – in actively replicating and reproducing dominant and structured power relations’ (Politics of Post Civil Society, p. 3). Second, ‘the claims of civil society to be autonomous of the dominant interests in state and market allow for increasing convergence, in the sense of replication and reproduction of such interests’(Politics of Post Civil Society, p. 4). He focuses on five movements in contemporary India that to his mind have been in perpetual tension with the notion of civil society and have inaugurated new terms of politics which he calls ‘post-civil society’. These are: (a) human rights movement in India, (b) Dalit movements, (c) the naxalite movements, (d) feminist movements and (e) activism against pollution. Each of these movements challenges the notion of civil society in their own way. The human rights movement in India goes beyond the site of civil society as it makes a shift from the interest based politics of civil society towards a value based politics. Dalit movement in his opinion does it by simultaneously claiming the secular voluntary identity on the one hand and cultural ascriptive identity on the other. He also draws on examples of conflicts and negotiations between Dalit and Naxalite movements in the country that have made these movements broaden their agenda. Women’s movement in India has been torn between looking towards the state to arrest violence against women, and also disappointed with the potential of law. In that and in questioning the public–private divide that much liberal theory works with, they have challenged core assumptions of civil society. The last instance he examines is of various collectivities against pollution in Andhra to show how their politics cannot be represented by the category of civil society. To him, these movements are inaugurating the politics of post-civil society.

Let me raise a few concerns regarding the distinction between civil and post-civil society that Gudavarthy introduces. While he makes a persuasive case demonstrating how each of the movements he has cited, cannot be represented by the category civil society or political society for that matter. It is less clear what unites them as initiating a similar politics of post-civil society. The constitutive core ideas of post-civil society movements seems to be in what they negate, not what they have in common.

Secondly the very binary of civil society vs. post-civil society needs more thought since the definition of civil society that Gudavarthy chooses continues to reflect the context of western Europe. In the introduction to ‘Reframing Democracy and Agency in India’ Gudavarthy criticizes Chatterjee for leaving the notion of civil society unquestioned while detailing the idea of political society. He also points out that Chatterjee’s definition of civil society is largely the way Marx understands civil society that is, bourgeois society. Gudavarthy argues that the notion of civil society,

has been in the centre of debate in capturing the process of democracy in India. It is precisely for this reason that it should have warranted some exploration from him. Instead he argues that he would use the concept as Marx did, without surprisingly being sensitive to its variants to the Indian context. (Reframing Democracy and Agency in India, p. 18)

Having stated this valid objection, Gudavarthy proceeds to conceptualize civil society in similar Eurocentric ways that he had earlier criticized. In the context of human rights movements for instance, he writes,

Another set of ambiguous practices that human right movements had to face was the expectations of individuals to maximize their self interest as ‘bourgeois individuals’ working around the ethics of competition, individualism, ego as self actualization, pursuing private interests as making profits and accumulating wealth that is well protected through the founding principle of right to private property, yet, simultaneously strive for as citizens to build common interests of society as such through the embodiment of ‘civic virtues’ and ‘moral sentiments. (Reframing Democracy and Agency in India, p. 12)

I do feel that both Chatterjee and Gudavarthy seem to deploy a notion of civil society that seems unchanging and insensitive to the variants as well as contestations that exist within the realm of civil society. The postness of the post-civil society has to be established only having mapped out the diverse antecedents of particular civil societies in South Asia. That said, Gudavarthy’s book does mark out a territory that needs attention from scholars on Indian politics as it is only upon naming and categorizing varied political practices that one can refine and clarify on them. Gudavarthy’s book in naming post-civil society has provided an opportunity to do that.