Widow Immolation in Mughal India: Perceptions of French Travellers and Adventurers in the...

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Because of an error, one of the articles of the last issue of Social Scientist, which was a special number on the occasion of the centenary of the First World War, did not get published along with the others. We apologize for that error and are publishing that article, by Tom Brass, in the current number. Since it has already been introduced by the guest editor of the last issue in his introductory remarks to that issue, the article needs no further introduction here.

Each one in the series of annual lectures instituted in the memory of D.S. Borker is supposed to discuss the speaker’s vision of India in 2047. This accordingly is the theme of the lecture, published in the current number, by N. Ram who was the speaker for this year. The two crucial challenges before the nation, identified by Ram, are: the persistence of acute deprivation for large numbers of people; and the threat to our secular polity by the aggressive majoritarianism of the Hindu Right, which in turn both promotes and feeds on minority communalism. How the nation handles these challenges will determine our future as a nation. Ram firmly rejects interpretations of secularism in terms of ‘equal respect to all religions’ or ‘good feelings towards all religions’, and reiterates that the concept must mean equality-and-fairness for all as citizens, and the separation of religion from politics.

Akeel Bilgrami’s paper highlights how the narrowing of the scope of disciplines like Philosophy and the Social Sciences, the latter inter alia because of the sway of corporate interests upon academic institutions, has created a situation where English and ‘Culture Studies’ are increasingly made to take up the ‘slack’, and become sites for critical thinking about society and the world. While the fact that English and Culture Studies have increased their own capaciousness to accommodate such thinking is to be welcomed, this development itself is not a wholesome one. The enfeeble-ment of the social sciences, and hence the ‘burdening’ of English and Cul-ture Studies, has probably not gone as far in India as it has in the advanced capitalist countries; but the direction of movement here is much the same and should concern us deeply.

G.P. Deshpande, our colleague, long associated with Social Scientist, who passed away recently, had given an interview during a visit to the English and Foreign Languages University at Hyderabad to N. Manohar Reddy, a member of the faculty there. We publish an abridged version of

Editorial Note

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4 that interview which covers a range of fascinating themes, from the ques-tion of ‘nationality consciousness’, to the specificity of the ‘identity politics’ of the Shiva Sena, to the demand, emanating from oppressed sections in particular, for English language as the medium of instruction. GPD makes a strong case in the course of the interview for the use of vernacular sources for the writing of history.

Jean Chapman’s article links the pervasive violence against women in our society to a deep misogyny that is rooted in Brahminical patriarchy. She does not restrict herself to providing a wealth of material in support of her argument, but goes on to suggest a number of strategies, even at the individual level, for fighting such violence. These include, strikingly, a pledge not to accept or give dowry, and not to participate in any marriage ceremony where dowry is given.

The issue of violence against women also figures in Sakul Kundra’s paper which focuses on accounts of widow immolation in Mughal India, to be found in the writings of French travellers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These travellers, it appears, were not mere casual chroniclers but had a curiosity about the society they were visiting, and made perceptive comments on the prevailing patriarchy.

Finally, we publish an obituary by Prabhat Patnaik on Professor Bipan Chandra, the renowned historian of modern India who passed away on the 30th of August this year.

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The Same Old Story: Peasant Economy and Nationalist Revisions of Marxism, 1914 and 2014

Tom Brass

Examined here is the link between the collapse of internationalism in 1914, as some on the left endorsed nationalist and/or pro-war positions, and the analogous shift a little short of a century later, as some leftists saw virtue in the support of nationalist and/or ethnic politics advocated by postmodern theory. This entails a comparative analysis of the debates and conditions leading to the break-up of internationalism, both in Germany before 1914 and with regard to Asia currently. Reformism common to both conjunc-tures is linked to combined processes that have their origins in academia. On the one hand the abandonment of class analysis, socialist politics and allied concepts of progress, modernity and development; on the other, the recu-peration of the agrarian myth and the championing of peasant smallholding.

Introduction: March to the Scaffold?As is well-known, the relation between ‘barbarism and socialism’ was raised in the Junius pamphlet written during 1915 by Rosa Luxemburg (1970: pp. 257–331) in response to the nationalism fuelled by the outbreak of the 1914 War. One hundred deputies of German Social Democracy, the standard bearer of the European working-class struggle against capitalism, had just abandoned its internationalism and agreed to vote funds for the German war effort, ‘in defence of the fatherland’. It was to reassert the validity of socialist internationalism that Luxemburg outlined as the barbarism inherent in this chauvinist turn, described by her as a betrayal ‘of the most elementary principles of revolutionary Marxism without murmuring an embarrassed disclaimer’.

The cosmopolitan outlook and revolutionary politics of the First International (1864-76) had given way to the nationalism and revisionism that undermined the solidarity of the Second International (1889–1914). During the late 1890s, the revision of Marxism by Bernstein and others influenced German Social Democracy, paving way for the subsequent chauvinist political responses of many European socialists to the 1914–18 War. It is argued that a similar kind of sea-change has been – and is – taking place in academic texts about South Asia. In both epochs, revolutionary mobilisation by working class and the conquest of state power has been replaced analytically, not just by electoral politics, revisionism, and quo-tidian small-scale resistance, but also, by the centrality accorded to peasant economy and culture.

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4 When comparing the economic context and ideological role of this pro-peasant discourse in the period before 1914 and 2014, therefore, cer-tain similarities are inescapable. To begin with, both periods correspond to eras in which rural population feature as victims of war and its dislocations, either dying in large numbers as a result of conflict itself, or being com-pelled to migrate. Such processes fuelled, in turn, two forms of nationalism: in nations that had either sustained these losses or in those where migrants settled.

Economically, the locus of a strong nationalist ideology – Germany after 1871, and India, a century later – coincided with a period of sustained accumulation and an expanding middle-class, many of whom either had roots in agriculture or continued to own land in rural areas. For these components of the bourgeoisie it was important to possess a self-validating ideology, stressing both that peasant economy is important to the national well-being, and also viable if supported by the state. At each conjuncture, therefore, a discourse exists about the need to defend and conserve small-holding agriculture from ‘land-grabbing’, by what is perceived to be an externally-located process of capitalist penetration. The most enthusiastic advocates of this view are in both instances the same, it being an argument made by academic adherents of 1890s revisionism and currently by the ‘new’ populist postmodernism, notwithstanding the insistence by some of them that they were or are Marxists.

This presentation consists of eight sections, the first two of which differentiate rival political approaches not just to the state, nationalism and internationalism, but also to peasant economy and culture. How their meaning is transformed, and why, in the course of an ideological journey from Marxism, via revisionism and modernisation theory, to postmodern-ism, is traced in the next four sections. The contribution of academia to this process is examined in the final two sections.

Politics, Left and RightBroadly speaking, socialism is – and can only ever be – the outcome of class struggle waged successfully by workers against capital and its State. Unlike the ‘everyday-resistance-to-the-State’ which underwrites postmodern agency, a form of practice indistinguishable from neoliberal State-shrink-ing that informs conservative laissez faire ideology (Bhagwati 2007), Marx-ism has always advocated seizing control of (and ruling through) the State. Having captured the State, workers as a class gain power, and take into common ownership, the means of production, distribution and exchange.

In economic terms, the market gives way to central planning, and profit to need as the criterion of production. Ideologically, ethnic identity and national ‘belonging’ are replaced by consciousness of class, solidarity of which extends beyond ethnic/national boundaries. Politically, therefore,

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a socialist transition cannot be confined to a particular nation, let alone a region within this unit: it must necessarily be international in scope, so that alliances are established and reproduced along horizontal lines (intra-class), in order to prevent/challenge/pre-empt vertical ones (inter-class). This in turn raises another kind of reversal as envisaged by Luxemburg, one that corresponds to the widespread intellectual rejection of progress as either a desirable or a feasible object and outcome of socio-economic devel-opment. The main culprit in this regard is the rise, from the 1980s onwards, of postmodern theory – a conservative but academically fashionable and influential anti-Marxist discourse, and with it the agrarian myth.

Historically, agrarian myth discourse has informed the ideology of the political Right, extending from the post-1789 Romanticism of the counter-revolution to a variety of reactionary conservatism in 1920s and 1930s, in Europe and Asia. In such contexts, this discourse endorsed small-scale domestic/local/traditional economic activity, and opposed ‘dangerous’/’alien’ large-scale development (industrialisation, urbanisation in the state). In the discourse of the agrarian myth, a ‘pure’ (or middle) peasantry engaged in smallholding cultivation within the context of an equally ‘pure’ village community (that is, unsullied by an external capi-talism), is presented as embodying all the positive and culturally specific attributes that are constitutive of a ‘pure’ national identity, which is pro-tected in turn by the same peasants (warriors-who-defend-the-nation).

De-essentialisation of the peasantry corresponds to alienation from an ‘authentic’ selfhood, and thus, estrangement from a ‘natural’ and ancient identity by a combination of foreign ‘others’: capital, socialism and/or colonialism. Since ‘peasant-ness’ is in this discourse equated not just with smallholding agriculture, but also, with culture and national identity, de-peasantisation becomes synonymous with de-culturation and the ero-sion (or loss) of national identity (Brass 2000). This kind of epistemology has informed revisionist approaches to Marxist theory, both in the era before 1914, and currently.

Peasants, Left and RightEndorsements of an undifferentiated/ahistorical peasantry, initially as bear-ers of national identity, and later as a cultural bastion against the spread of socialism, have been central to conservative discourse throughout German history. This was particularly true of the reaction against the 1789 French Revolution (Godechot 1972), when counter-revolutionary ideology took its lead from the pro-peasant discourse of a German Romanticism sup-portive of traditional rural economy and culture. Thus, for example, the eighteenth century defence of rural tradition and hierarchy against the Enlightenment (aufklarung) undertaken by the conservative theoretician Justus Möser was coupled with admiration for what he regarded as the

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4 cultural ‘otherness’/ ‘difference’ of peasant society, a golden age version of which in his view constituted the authentic and timeless embodiment of German national identity.1

Much the same was true of Johann Gottfried Herder, whose defence of pre-Enlightenment ideas at that same conjuncture generated a concept of national identity, based on an innate and enduring rural culture uniting the king and the peasant.2 For Herder, therefore, the selfhood of national identity (cultural ‘difference’, ‘otherness’) was based on discourse of the agrarian myth. Every nation emerged from kinship groups, their place-spe-cific environment, culture, religion and peasant farming; he reasserted the validity of these traditional identities against the universal categories of the Enlightenment. Any and all concepts of ‘happiness’ were – and could only be – realised in such national contexts, the inhabitants of which constituted themselves as a ‘people’. Although the latter category subsumed monarch and peasant, Herder excluded from ‘the people’ the urban worker, ‘the rab-ble’ whose agency was for him synonymous with the ‘mob in the streets’.

Before the 1914–18 War, an undifferentiated peasantry continued to be regarded by conservatives as synonymous with Nature and the nation. Prince Bernard von Bülow, scion of the Junker landlord class, invoked what he claimed was an unbroken ancient rural lineage – composed of an unchanging/homogeneous peasantry (a mythical ancestral being closer to Nature, and thus, ‘more natural’) – as evidence for the existence of a pristine German nationalism, in terms which were no different from those used earlier by Möser and Herder.3 In the case of the Hapsburg empire, the ideological potency of claims to nationhood was founded on the longevity of an underlying ancient peasant culture, whether that of Austria or that of Hungary.4 That pristine cultural ‘otherness’, and its links both to Nature and to nationhood were based epistemologically on what are interlocking essentialist concepts, is evident from the attempt to connect them all in the person of the Hungarian peasant at the start of the twentieth century.5 In this context, moreover, discourse about the countryside was informed by the familiar agrarian populist dichotomy (rural = good, urban = bad), with an added pathological inference of the urban/modern as ‘unhealthy’.6 Like postmodernism now, the mere fact of Hungarian peasants having a culture was equated then with a situation of material well-being.

The debate about peasant economy, and whether and why it should be maintained, became more acute towards the end of the nineteenth century, when industrialisation spread to new areas (Russia, America). This debate surfaced with a vengeance before, during, and after the 1917 Russian Rev-olution, when the Bolsheviks took issue with agrarian populists over the role of peasants under socialism. Centrally about the transformation of social relations in the countryside and the resulting impact on economic growth, this discussion about the socio-economic differentiation of rural community goes back to debates between populists (Engel’gardt, Uspen-

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skii, Vorontsov, Chayanov) and Marxists (Plekhanov, Lenin) in Russia and elsewhere from the 1860s onwards. Then the debate concerned the future political and economic role of peasants following serf emancipation, and was answered differently by populists and Marxists (Solomon 1977). Much the same was true of Austria and Germany before 1914, where conservatives insisted that smallholding agriculture should be protected by the state.7 During this period agrarian populism – a plebeian pro-rural politics and philosophy which argued that farmers and peasants were the economic and cultural backbone of the nation – became important in all these contexts.

Populists maintained both that undifferentiated peasant economy was an innate organisational form (Chayanov 1966), and that it would con-tinue to exist despite ‘external’ systemic transformations (from feudalism to capitalism, and from the latter to socialism). According to the populists, therefore, not only was an egalitarian and innately virtuous smallholding agriculture unaffected by capitalism, but peasant economy was bolstered by, and in turn, reproduced a local version of ‘civil society’ – based on subsistence cultivation by the peasant family and household – they thought was already present in the village (mir). Bolsheviks, by contrast, insisted that the peasantry was differentiated along class lines in the course of capitalist development (Lenin 1964a), its top stratum (rich peasants) con-solidating means of production and becoming small capitalists, while its increasingly landless bottom stratum (poor peasants) joined the ranks of the proletariat. Instead of private property – the individualist smallholding economy – supported/advocated by populists, the Bolshevik programme of agrarian reform was based on collective agriculture, where rural property was owned/controlled by the State. Among the reasons for this was that the latter approach facilitated central planning.

From Marxism to RevisionismFrom the end of the nineteenth century, the debate in Germany and Austria took a different turn (Salvadori 1979; Hussain & Tribe 1984), as revisionists on the political left – among them Eduard Bernstein, Otto Baüer, Werner Sombart, Georg von Vollmar, and Eduard David – maintained that social-ists should seek to recruit a following among small property owners in rural areas. Because peasants corresponded to the ‘middle strata’ eroded by capi-talism, yet de-peasantisation appeared not to be happening, in the opinion of Bernstein and Sombart the decline of the middle strata would no longer result in a crisis of capitalism. If de-peasantisation was not occurring, con-cluded revisionist theory, then this opened the way to include within the ranks of Leftist parties all those rural categories hitherto discounted polit-ically by Marxism: petty commodity producers, smallholding proprietors, and peasant farmers generally should henceforth be recruited by socialism to form a united anti-capitalist front.


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4 Bernstein’s view that the economy of smallholding peasant proprietors in Germany had not merely survived but was thriving led him to challenge the main tenet of Marxism.8 Namely, that class formation – arising from, on the one hand, the disintegration of the peasant family farm, and on the other, from the consolidation of large agribusiness holdings – would gen-erate a capitalist crisis that would in turn bring about a socialist transition. Instead, Bernstein saw in the agrarian co-operative an institution within the capitalist system that would halt the process of class differentiation, land-lessness and impoverishment as these affected the peasantry.9

The revisionism of Sombart (1909), like that of Bernstein, amounted in effect to a similar negation of Marxism; his ‘defence’ of the latter entailed an abandonment of virtually every single theoretical claim made by historical materialism. Not only did he claim that systemic change was evolutionary, not revolutionary, but he also denied the existence of a trend either towards the concentration of capitalist enterprises (particularly in agriculture), towards monopoly capital, or towards working-class immiseration. Given the absence of pauperisation, working-class struggle was in his opinion non-material in origin, and prompted by envy. Most significantly, this benign view of capitalism led Sombart to question whether the seeds of socialism were indeed to be found in capitalism, thereby aligning himself with those anti-Marxists who argued against either the need for or the possibility of a transcendence of capitalist production. This was a view to which the Aus-tro-Marxist theoretician Otto Baüer also subscribed.

In a break with all the previous Marxist theory about agrarian trans-formation, Baüer maintained that under socialism not only would private ownership of land continue, but that the State would ensure the reproduc-tion of peasant economy in a number of crucial ways.10 Input and output prices for those commodities purchased and sold by peasants would be fixed at a level that guaranteed their subsistence, they would be protected from the impact of lower world market prices for agricultural commodi-ties, a system of marketing cooperatives would be set up, and proprietors would receive debt relief.11 Baüer equated capitalism simply with finance capital, and that those categorised by him uniformly as ‘peasants’ might contain rich peasants and/or commercial farmers – potential/actual agrar-ian capitalists, in other words – was not a possibility that he considered. In essence, this ‘socialist’ economic programme he drafted for the Austrian Social Democrats in the mid-1920s was no different from that advocated by the neo-populist theorist Chayanov in Russia at that same conjuncture.12

The perception that class fragmentation was not occurring, and that consequently no capitalist crisis would emerge, led revisionists to abandon revolutionary politics in favour of electoral success. This then led them to advocate reformist measures acceptable to the peasantry. Having discarded the revolutionary capture of the state apparatus as a political strategy, revi-sionists were as a result limited to a reform programme achieved only via

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the Parliamentary route. Electoral success, concluded Bernstein (1961: p. 181) in 1899, therefore required that socialists henceforth obtain the sup-port of the peasantry, an objective which ‘will only happen if social democ-racy commits itself to measure which offer an improvement for small peas-ants in the immediate future’. In keeping with this, and also the analogous policies advocated by Baüer, Sombart (1937: pp. 264–65) championed rural de-industrialisation, the restoration of rural handicraft production, and the protection generally of subsistence agriculture undertaken by peasant enterprises and farm household economy.

Such views were strongly opposed by other Marxists, then and sub-sequently. At the same conjuncture, therefore, Bernstein’s data about the slowing down of class fragmentation were challenged by Parvus (see Tudor & Tudor 1988: pp. 174ff.), who also criticised the former’s argu-ment that peasants bankrupted by capital would automatically join the socialist camp. Kautsky (1988) pointed out that, because smallholders were a source of cheap labour-power, such units are never wholly displaced by large commercial enterprises. It was this, and not economic efficiency, that determined the survival of ‘peasant economy’.13 The debate about whether or not European socialist parties should tailor their policies in order to attract the support of petty commodity producers resumed in 1920 during the Second Congress of the Communist International (1977: pp. 109ff.), when some delegates reported that middle peasants had ‘become rich’ as a result of the 1914–18 War, and were now to be found in the ranks of the counter-revolution.

From Revisionism to NationalismThe political outcome of the revisionist trajectory is not difficult to dis-cern. Seeking an electoral base among the peasantry, and shaping its pro-gramme accordingly to reflect this particular interest, revisionism in effect was drawn also into the wider nationalist discourse featuring such petty commodity producers. This was especially true of the kind of ideological trajectory followed by Bernstein, Baüer and Sombart. Significantly, at the start of the 1914–18 War, Lenin (1964b: p. 244ff.; 1964c: p. 109; 1964d: p. 131) traced its nationalist discourse back to 1890s revisionism, noting it was then that Marxism became ‘diluted’ with populist pro-peasant ideology and ‘patriotic sentiment.’

Bernstein wished to restore a nationalist dimension to German social democracy. Lamenting that ‘[t]here are socialists to whom every admission of national interests appears as Chauvinism or as an injury to the interna-tionalism and class policy of the proletariat’, he (Bernstein, 1961: pp. 179–80) then conceded that ‘it is not always easy to fix the boundary where the advocacy of the interests of one’s nation ceases to be just and to pass into pseudo-patriotism’. Hence the opposition expressed by Bernstein (1961: pp. 169–70) to the internationalism of the Communist Manifesto (‘The pro-


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4 letarian has no fatherland’), a view he rejected as outdated, describing it as having ‘forfeited a great part of its truth and will always forfeit more’, con-cluding that the ‘complete breaking up of nations … is not to be expected in the near future.’ Despite eventually turning against the war in 1917 (Gay 1952: p. 285), Bernstein had by then already helped to put in place a nation-alist discourse that contributed to its ideological validation, in the process undermining socialist resistance to such conflict.

National identity was linked by Baüer not simply to the fact of a shared language or territory but rather to ‘a common history [which] determines and produces [all other components]’.14 The nation was essentialised by him as an ever-present, and thus, non-transcendent social form, and Baüer regarded the decline of nationhood associated with pre-capitalist social forms (nomadism, rural community, peasant economy) as a loss, to be recuperated under capitalism and fully realised under socialism.15 For long periods of history, plebeian culture remained regional or local, and only ruling classes were truly nationalist.16 Under capitalism and socialism, however, the hitherto excluded masses would be drawn into and become part of the nation, by virtue of access to an education and a language that had become similarly national in scope.17 National ‘belonging’ therefore, both preceded and survived capitalism, and in an important sense reached it apogee in terms of emancipatory potential under socialism.18

The two interrelated difficulties facing the endorsement by Baüer of an ahistorical discourse, both about national identity and about an econom-ically undifferentiated peasantry, and those postmodernists who continue to find this approach relevant today (see below), are simply put. The first is that, once the principle of nationalism has been ceded, then in effect one has also ceded all the elements of ‘otherness’ – tradition, culture, religion – which compose identity and consciousness of nation, and without which the latter can have neither meaning nor existence. All these forms of ‘other-ness’ can then be deployed by capital to drive a wedge between workers sep-arated by non-class forms of difference (ethnicity, nationality and gender). In short, nationalism is disempowering, in terms of building working-class consciousness and solidarity. Too often it has been fostered ‘from above’ in order to undermine ‘those below’, a view that contrasts absolutely with that of Baüer, for whom nationalism is an incremental ‘from below’ form of empowerment.

The second difficulty is as important. Because he interpreted nation-alism as a positive development, a ‘from below’ emancipation, Baüer saw the resulting symbolic fusion (peasant = Nature = nation) simply as the best indicator of the way in which a hitherto marginalised peasantry would be drawn into the larger national culture. For him, therefore, the meet-ing between peasants and nationalism (bringing them into ‘the national cultural community’) could not be anything other than a progressive and

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(thus) a politically empowering process, a desirable one leading towards socialism.19 From 1920s onwards, however, this same meeting was the driving ideological force behind a very different kind of politics: the ‘Green International’ (The Vía Campesina of its day), an agrarian populist mobil-isation and a reactionary form of anti-capitalism that contributed substan-tially to the rise in Europe not of socialism but of fascism.20

The political journey followed by Sombart after the end of the 1914–18 War confirms where a trajectory based on an idealised perception of peas-ant economy and its cultural role, both of which need defending from capitalist penetration, might ultimately lead. Traversing the whole range of the ideological spectrum – from socialism to revisionism, and then on to nationalism and populist conservatism – Sombart (1937: p. 121, pp. 264–65) was, by the mid-1930s, endorsing Nazi policies of re-agrarianisa-tion and support for traditional peasant farming as anti-capitalist answers to the global economic crisis of that era (‘the Germans are a country people … attached to the soil and country life’).21 In doing so, Sombart ironically carried to its political conclusion the synthesis (socialism + nationalism = not a class but ‘the people’ empowered) prefigured in the reformist position taken during the debates of the late 1890s.22

This reactionary anti-capitalist trajectory was in the case of Sombart facilitated in turn by attaching an ethnic label to the economic system, financial capitalism having been seen by him (Sombart 1913) as an effect of ‘Jewishness’, a conflation which licensed anti-semitism as a legitimate form of anti-capitalist discourse. Ironically, the explanation of this anti-capitalist trajectory lies partly outside Europe, in his 1906 study of the United States, where the absence of socialism was attributed by Sombart (1976: pp. 115–19) to the capacity of immigrants to escape capitalism by settling on land in the West, thereby becoming peasant family farmers.23 In 1930s-Germany, however, this anti-capitalism created a space for fascism, by nourishing a relay-in-statement whereby financial capital – ‘Jewishness’ – the cosmopol-itan foreign ‘other’ responsible for undermining the hardworking German peasantry, the ‘backbone-of-the-nation’, and the embodiment of national culture and identity.

Defence of peasant economy was accordingly supportive of national culture and antagonism towards international capitalism promoted by its ‘foreign other’ (‘World Jewry’). Whereas political opposition to the viabil-ity/desirability of smallholding agriculture was equated with the promotion of capitalist development, and perceived as negative, the defence of peasant economy, by contrast, was seen as positive, since it was also resistance to further erosion of an authentic national cultural identity. The defeat of fascism in 1945, and the onset of the 1960s development decade, signalled a partial reversal in meaning of these two positions.


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4 From Modernisation to PostmodernismThe era following the 1939–45 War was characterised by an ostensibly progressive desire on the part of non-Marxist development theory (Lerner 1958; Weiner 1967; Rogers 1969; Almond & Verba 1989) to bring poor peasants and agricultural workers in the Third World into the capitalist system, not least so as to deny their grassroots agency to socialism in a period of imperial expansion following decolonisation.24 However, this was linked to a restricted concept of change: bringing peasants and workers into the wider society was to be mainly political, not economic. In a context of universal adult suffrage, a process of ‘becoming modern’ required demo-cratic participation by poor peasants and workers, therefore, but in a way that threatened neither existing property relations, the State nor the wider capitalist system.

A corollary was an acceptance that existing grassroots cultural practices and/or ideology would not just continue as before but were henceforth to be regarded as an indicator of the ‘adaptive’ success of the modernisation process. The irony here is unmissable: the construction of modernity that wished to avoid the fascist mobilisations of the pre-war era nevertheless failed to challenge the very discourse – the enduring cultural link – which underwrote those reactionary politics. Where the study of agrarian trans-formation was concerned, and in particular, how this involved peasants and workers in the Third World, therefore, this difficulty – becoming (politically) ‘modern’ while remaining (culturally) ‘ancient’ – had two important outcomes.

First, it left unchallenged a discourse about peasant/nation/Nature that historically has been the domain of conservatives and the political Right. And second, much of this same discourse was subsequently taken over by many of those considered to be on the political Left. By the 1980s, the latter had metamorphosed into the ‘new’ populist postmodernists, who mobilised this same discourse in order to challenge not just earlier moder-nisation theory but also current neoliberalism. For them, the construction of ‘civil society’ replaced the capture of State power. Similarly, preserving grassroots culture became an alternative to (and substitute for) economic development, an epistemological stance that entailed, among other things, the defence of ‘civil society’ composed of all those traditional institutions that socialist theory usually criticises and opposes.

During the Cold War era, advocates of bourgeois democracy were keen to stress the connection between ‘civil society’ and nation-building, none more so than modernisation theory, the then dominant non-Marxist paradigm in development studies.25 Equating citizenship with bourgeois democracy, and the latter with modernity as projected through national identity, this paradigm allocated a pivotal role to the diffusion of political knowledge via the mass media. As provider of material inputs contributing to accumulation in rural areas, moreover, the State was cast in a similarly

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positive role. For exponents of modernisation theory at that conjuncture, therefore, bourgeois democracy exercised in the context of a benign State apparatus, ‘civil society’ and nationalism were not just interchangeable concepts but also politically progressive ones. This despite the fact that nationalist discourses invoked cultural identities that were rural, subsis-tence-oriented, traditional and backward-looking; or the very ones to which modernisation theory was in principle opposed.

The problem confronting modernisation theory of the Cold War era is easily discerned. Keen to privilege capitalism so as to combat revolutionary socialism in Third World countries, it exhibited a willingness to endorse any/all anti-Marxist epistemologies, amongst which populism – with its deep roots in the agrarian myth – featured prominently.26 Signing up the historical enemies of Marxism and socialism in such circumstances is not without its long-term contradictions, since an anti-modern ideology pro-claiming the immutability of traditional cultural ‘otherness’ is usually also opposed to many aspects of bourgeois democracy itself.27 Although aware of this possibility, exponents of modernisation theory at that conjunc-ture were nevertheless unable to avoid this trap, given that their primary objective was to deploy any/all discourses opposed to socialism. That such anti-modern discourses emanating from nationalist ideology would then be turned on them was an outcome they did not address in any detail.28

The difficulties generated by the concept of a homogeneous peasantry structuring this kind of analytical framework emerge most clearly in rela-tion to the issue of political consciousness. Equating ‘civil society’ with plebeian culture, either in non-capitalist contexts or under capitalism, is for obvious reasons fraught with difficulty. Defending the existing plebeian culture against what is perceived as ‘from above’ condescension makes it difficult, if not impossible; simultaneously to espouse a concept of con-sciousness as false, or the view that plebeian culture is not just foisted on the masses but also operates to their disadvantage. This reached its apogee during the 1980s ‘cultural turn’, when positions held by those on the ‘Left’ became virtually indistinguishable from those historically associated earlier not just with the post-1789 counter-revolutionary Romanticism of Möser and Herder, the 1890s revisionism of Bernstein, Baüer and Sombart, but also, with the 1930s political Right. Many of those on the left seemed to have forgotten who its political opponents were and are, and thus how to fight them.

Forward to the PastIn doing so, many leftists overlooked both the fact and the political signif-icance of an emerging – or re-emerging – discourse in defence of the peas-antry, the focus of which was not on its economic viability, but rather on smallholding, as a form of cultural empowerment. Nowhere was this more evident than in the epistemological recuperation by the ‘new’ populist post-


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4 modernism of a specifically cultural dimension of ‘peasant-ness’.29 This was a discourse associated most powerfully with the Subaltern Studies project, formulated initially in the context of Asian historiography (Guha 1982–89), and latterly with regard to Latin American history (Beverley 1999; Beverley & Oviedo 1993; Rodríguez 2001). Reinstatement of the peasant voice as an undifferentiated/pristine subaltern ‘other’, tainted neither by class, by economic development nor by the wider capitalist system, was licensed by the de-materialisation of discourse, itself an effect of postmodern decon-struction. The many ironies informing this analytical re-essentialisation of peasant culture are difficult to miss.

At the root of the ‘cultural turn’ was the privileging by postmod-ern theory of language, and a corresponding de-privileging of socialism, materialism and class as illegitimate Enlightenment/Eurocentric forms of ‘foundationalism’ which was inapplicable to the Third World. Symp-tomatically, for postmodernism the central epistemological problem is to construct a model that subsumes all kinds/forms of narrative, a framework that accounts merely for the fact of narrative, not its purpose (Barthes 1977: p. 79ff). No significance is attached to the link between language and the material conditions that give rise to or sustain a particular narrative. Indeed, it is a link the very existence – let alone the efficacy – of which postmodern theory denies.

That the purpose of postmodern deconstruction is nothing other than a decoupling of language and meaning – a project entailing the negation of concepts such as class, class consciousness and class struggle – was made clear early on by its practitioners in what amounted to a manifesto (Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, Hillis Miller 1979: pp. vii–viii). However, this objective, together with its implications for Marxist theory/practice, was overlooked by many engaged in the study of Third World development who endorsed postmodernism (on which see Petras 1990; Brass 1995a; Brass 2007a). Consequently, they were unknowingly lured into the episte-mological terrain of the political Right, little realising that the re-essential-isation of the peasantry found in the ‘new’ populism strongly influenced by postmodern theory that colonised development studies throughout the 1980s, and 1990s was prefigured in 1890s revisionism and 1930s reaction-ary conservatism.

In the analytical framework of the ‘new’ postmodern populism – the revisionist variant that came to prominence during the 1980s – the mean-ing and object of contemporary rural grassroots agency has changed (Brass 2012). Instead of attempting to realise the economic fruits and benefits of development by capturing and exercising control of the state apparatus (as Marxists argue), poor peasants and workers in India and Latin Amer-ica eschew revolutionary agency.30 Rather, they are said to struggle on a quotidian basis (Scott 1976; 1985; 1990; 2009), as subalterns engaged in resistance (Bhagavani & Feldhaus 2008; Andolina, Laurie & Radcliffe 2009;

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Mahajan 2011; Scott 2012; Zene 2013), and generally only at a local level (Wankankar 2011; Mignolo 2012), merely to retain their existing cultural identity (‘difference’). It is the latter process and objective, and not class or economic development, which empowers the rural ‘other’, insists post-modern theory.31

The irony is unmistakable. Over the past twenty-five years, many of those writing about the undesirability of further economic development where peasant smallholders are concerned, have done so from a ‘new’ populist postmodern theoretical framework. In support of this view, they not only invoked the right of the rural ‘other’ to his/her own culture, but declared the latter identity innate, and thus, the ideological and organisa-tional basis for the construction of a local ‘civil’ society outside and against the neoliberal State. Accordingly, from the 1980s onwards, ‘new’ populist postmodernism unknowingly deployed the very same arguments against further economic development in the Third World countryside as had reformists and conservatives suggested earlier, in the case of Europe. It cannot be without significance, moreover, that ‘new’ populist postmodern-ism has been developed in relation to BRIC economies – India and Latin America – where a rising domestic bourgeoisie have an urgent need for such a discourse.

Not the least problematic aspect of the ‘new’ postmodern populism, therefore, is that its endorsement of ‘difference’/‘diversity’ fails to differen-tiate – as did 1890s revisionism – between two antithetical forms of anti-capitalism: one emanating from the political Left and another that has its origins in the discourse of the political Right. Whereas the former posits socialism as the transcendent ‘other’ of capitalism, reactionaries invoke a pre-capitalist rural order in which landlord and peasant (‘the people’) live in harmony. The centrality to the latter discourse of notions, of cultural innateness, rooted in nationhood is a matter of record, as is the fact that such epistemology is the same across time and space, to the degree that its core assumptions reappears everywhere, and consistently in the ideas of and claims made historically by conservativism.

Thus, for example, the discourse-for/discourse-against of postmodern theory and that of Herder have much in common. All the central and inter-related components (farming, tradition, culture, identity) of their shared epistemology exist outside historical time, unchanging and unchangeable in an eternal present. Each is antagonistic towards Enlightenment philoso-phy (‘Eurocentric’, ‘foundational’), progress, science, intellectuals (prefer-ring ‘good common sense’), and supportive of cultural ‘difference’, rural tradition (‘wild customs’), religion (‘respect for gods’), and pre-capitalist relations (equating serfdom with ‘happiness’ because it ‘provided occupa-tion for men’s hands’). Both subscribe to an idealised vision of primitive/natural (unspoiled) humanity, a central emplacement of the agrarian myth.

Prefiguring postmodernism in this manner is not difficult to under-


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4 stand. Having privileged the stories of childhood as a ‘pure’ and enduring influence on the nature of selfhood, it is but a short step for Herder to claim that indigenous groups in distant lands are emblematic of this pristine identity. Hence the overlap between the postmodern view of rural commu-nity in the so-called Third World as the locus of eternal and innate cultural ‘difference’, and Herder’s view that the ‘noble savage’, encountered in the course of travel, corresponds precisely to the same kind of ‘authenticity’ represented by kinship/youth.

Postmodernists such as Beverley (2004: p. 272ff.) compare the nation-alist discourse featuring subaltern identity to that developed in the first decade of the twentieth century by Baüer.32 This, it is suggested, is the way forward politically, and hence the model that the Left should incorporate into its theory and practice because in the present stage of capitalism, national difference and not class antagonism is the main contradiction. Against this, the crucial distinction informing the Marxist position on nationalism is best summed up by Lenin: ‘Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for ‘national culture’ in general? Of course not.’33 By contrast, and like the prefiguring discourse of Baüer, exponents of the subaltern studies project eschew this distinction. Consequently, they do indeed end up supporting ‘the [f]ight for any kind of national development, for ‘national culture’ in general’. All of them – Baüer then, and postmodernists now – regard indigenous peasant nationalism (‘the unheard voice from below’) as a politically desirable goal and historically innate, and as such a positive and an empowering identity.

Liveried Footmen of the BourgeoisieHow is one to explain not just this resurgent ‘cultural turn’ in the study of development, and its replacement of Marxist approaches to peasant econ-omy, but also, the ideological coincidence between counter-revolutionary German Romanticism, 1890s revisionism and 1980s ‘new’ populist post-modernism? Arguably, the nationalism of each epoch – that of Germany in the 1890s, and that of India from the 1980s onwards – can be seen as the outcome of dynamic capitalist accumulation (Bose 2013), and the resulting need on the part of an expanding middle class for a politically acceptable (non-radical) foundation myth. That is, one that replaced a hitherto dom-inant Marxist conceptual framework – based on class formation/struggle, modernity, working-class internationalism and a socialist transition – with nationalism and a concept of an undifferentiated peasant as an ‘authentic’ but unheard indigenous voice. The institutional locus of this search, and the transformation of consciousness from the sameness of class to the difference of cultural ‘otherness’, was in both periods the same: the intelli-gentsia in academia.

In a sense, it is – or should be – unsurprising that the academy as a bourgeois ideological institution should be the prime target of Marxist

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critiques (Brass 2009). Historically, those against whom Marxists have argued most strongly have been academics, seen rightly as the ideological defenders of the existing social order. For this reason, the most common arguments deployed by Marxism against those in the academy have been twofold. First, that they are part of a university system which – in a capital-ist context – is innately hostile to socialist ideas and practice. Second, even where socialists are employed by the academy, they are necessarily subject to institutional pressures that prevent or pre-empt a genuine commitment to revolution and/or systemic transformation.

Among most European socialists in the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth century – not just Marx himself but also Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, and Trotsky – there was a deep suspicion of combined with uniform hostility towards academia in general.34 This antagonism derived principally from the deleterious impact on revolutionary theory and practice of the reform-ism advocated by self-proclaimed socialists holding senior teaching posts in the bourgeois university system at that conjuncture, a political group belonging to what was identified as katheder-socialism. Significantly, nei-ther Lenin nor Trotsky was an academic, unlike Baüer, Sombart and the Austro-Marxists.

In the late 1870s, therefore, Marx expressed strong opposition to the increasing influence on leftist politics in Germany of katheder-socialism, describing its exponents as ‘counter-revolutionary windbags’ composed of ‘nonentities in theory and useless in practice [who] want to draw the teeth of socialism (which they have fixed up in accordance with the university recipes)’ in order to ‘make the [Social Democratic] Party respectable in the eyes of the petty bourgeoisie’.35 Engels took a similarly critical approach, noting in a letter to August Bebel (20 January 1886) that during the mid-1880s universities in France and England were increasingly appointing katheder-socialists in an attempt to rescue capitalism from its contradic-tions, notwithstanding the ‘rubbish’ propagated by such academic ‘social-ists’.

Lenin (1964a: p. 177), too, was critical of the deleterious influence exercised on the working-class movement by the reformist line advocated by katheder-socialism, dismissed by him as ‘professorial socialism’. When considering ‘the turn of progressive public opinion towards Marxism’ in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, moreover, Lenin (1961: p. 36) clearly delineated the element of opportunism – ‘jumping on the bandwag-gon’ – at work among the exponents of katheder-socialism. He was not, for a minute, taken in by this political ‘conversion’, however, accurately identi-fying its objective as being to dilute the element of struggle, turning thereby ‘the nascent working class movement into an appendage of the liberals’.36

A similar disdain for ‘professorial socialism’ was exhibited by Kautsky (1916: p. 4, pp. 45–46), who noted that ‘the academics are those among us who are least friendly to the idea of revolution’. Describing them as ‘par-


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4 lour socialists’, he regarded academics as ‘a very unreliable ally’, principally because of being members of a ‘new middle class’ located between ‘the proletariat and the ruling classes’. Although such elements were aware of the problems with capitalism, and consequently on occasion sympathetic towards working-class objectives, when it came to agency based on this, observed Kautsky, academics ‘seek to throw discredit on the idea of revolu-tion, and to represent it as a useless means’.37

A deep suspicion of academia generally, and in particular, of the true commitment of katheder-socialism to the transcendence of a socio-eco-nomic order at the apex of which they themselves were positioned, also informed most of what Trotsky said about those for and against Marxist theory/practice. In his survey of the pre-revolutionary social forces in Rus-sia during 1905, for example, he (Trotsky 1972: p. 53) presciently noted that intellectuals were only fair-weather friends who at the first sign of crisis would reveal their authentic political allegiance. That is, not to the transcendence of capitalism, let alone to its revolutionary overthrow, but rather to the preservation of the existing socio-economic order.

This opinion did not change, as is clear from the view about Aus-tro-Marxism he took when looking back on his life once in exile. Categoris-ing academic Marxists in 1907 Vienna ‘as far from revolutionary dialectics as the most conservative Egyptian pharaoh’, Trotsky (1930: p. 180–81) continued:

The psychological type of Marxist can develop only in an epoch of social cat-

aclysms, of a revolutionary break with traditions and habits; whereas an Aus-

trian Marxist too often revealed himself a philistine who had learned certain

parts of Marx’s theory as one might study law, and had lived on the interest

that Das Kapital yielded him. In the old imperial, hierarchic, vain and futile

Vienna, the academic Marxists would refer to each other with a sort of sensu-

ous delight as ‘Herr Doktor.’ Workers often called the academicians, ‘Genosse

Herr Doktor.’

Capitalist Academia and/as Socialist ExileDuring the first half of the twentieth century, when Marxist theory had an impact on the grassroots even in Britain, this occurred – significantly – out-side the university system. Because academics were regarded by many on the Left as hostile to a labour movement objective of socialism, therefore, workers’ education was perceived as correspondingly incompatible with a capitalist university system. Over the latter part of the twentieth century, however, orthodox Leftist views about the role of academic institutions underwent something of a reversal. Rather than being seen as bastions of bourgeois thought the main objective of which was to defend capitalism, universities were perceived as places from which to mount an ideological attack on the capitalist system. This development has to be linked to a wider

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process, the cultural struggle during the Cold War era between Stalinism and US imperialism, the object of which was to garner support among – and thus obtain legitimisation from – Western European intellectuals (Stonor Saunders 1999).

In an important sense, the expansion of higher education in the 1960s, channelled this process into the university system, by creating additional (and salaried) employment opportunities for intellectuals who would oth-erwise have remained outside academia. Once socialists were installed as professors – so the argument went – the teaching, and hence, the influence of universities would undergo a radical transformation. What actually happened was predictably different: in order to become and remain part of the academics, socialists were required to water down or even discard their political principles (Caute 1979; Chomsky et al. 1997; Wiener 2005; Caute 2013).

The political implications of postmodernism for Marxist theory/prac-tice in the academy are not difficult to discern. To begin with, those on the Left who abandoned Marxism for the ‘new’ populist postmodernism ended up fighting the wrong battle: for ethnic ‘otherness’ and national culture, rather than for class and internationalism. Consequently, populism became the theoretically dominant framework in the social sciences, and its coun-terpart – ‘resistance’ by individuals or by ‘new’ social movements – replaced revolution as the radical practice of choice. Hence, the de-politicisation of political discourse within the university system, as a result of what might be termed the institutional ‘domestication’ of Marxist theory and practice.

Accordingly, the situation is not so much an abandonment of first principles as not knowing any longer what these are or might be. The resulting focus on non-class identities (age, gender, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality) as ‘subversive’foci of resistance by ‘new’ social move-ments overlooks two crucial points. Where these contribute to the accumu-lation process, both resistance and empowerment based on identities other than class have been and are encouraged by capital. Consequently, in most instances empowerment/emancipation linked to non-class identity can be achieved as much under capitalism as under socialism. As has been pointed out elsewhere (Brass 1995b; Brass 2003), non-class forms of ideology cir-culating at the rural grassroots (‘popular culture’) in India and in Latin America are not necessarily progressive in political terms.

Concluding CommentsA century after 1914, the warning issued by Luxemburg about the choice being ultimately between ‘barbarism and socialism’ is if anything more, not less, relevant. Politically and ideologically, socialism is on the defensive; academia embraces much the same kind of revisionist theory that fuels a rising tide of nationalism; and just as after 1914, the far Right went on to


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4 make electoral gains in Italy, the Balkans, and Germany, so has its political counterpart more recently in India and currently in Europe.

Everywhere socialism has seemingly been expelled from the political agenda, even amongst those opposed to neoliberal capitalism, leaving ever larger amounts of space to be occupied by its other, barbarism. The kinds of reversal she identified as constitutive of barbarism have all re-emerged over the last fifty years. In an age full of ironies, one of the seemingly most inexplicable contradictions is the following. On the one hand, the political Left used to advocate economic development, progress, modernity and internationalism while opposing peasant economy, traditional culture and nationalism. On the other, exponents of imperialist ideology used the ‘oth-erness’ of ethnicity, to oppose democracy, national self-determination and international working-class solidarity and mobilisation.

These positions appear to have been reversed. Now, therefore, those who still regard themselves as part of the Left, or perhaps even Marxists, are enthusiastic supporters of peasant economy, cultural tradition and nation-alist politics (albeit a ‘from below’ variety), and opposed to economic development, progress and modernity. Exponents of a resurgent imperial-ism, by contrast, currently endorse the very discourses to which they were originally opposed: modernity, economic development and international-ism, albeit of a ‘top-down’ variety. The protagonists on either side of this newly aligned discourse face one another, as on the one hand supporters of globalisation/imperialism committed to the violent overturning of the rural status quo, and on the other new social movements committed to resistance against this, by defending the rural status quo where this involves smallholders. How did such a contradictory practice emerge, and what kind of theory underpinned it?

It is argued here that such contradiction stems historically from oppos-ing political views about the economic viability and cultural role of petty commodity production. The fate of the peasantry under capitalism was central to the attempts by Eduard Bernstein, Otto Bauer and Werner Som-bart to revise Marxism. Their revisionist logic possessed its own dynamic, not just epistemological, but also, more importantly, political. An effect of class differentiation accompanying capitalist penetration of agricul-ture, Marxism had argued, was the fragmentation of rural smallholding, a socio-economic disintegration amounting to de-peasantisation. In other words, the context most affected by the ‘demise of the middle strata’ was the countryside, and the category most at peril from the accumulation pro-cess was the peasantry. Insisting that smallholding economy was reproduc-ing itself, capitalist penetration notwithstanding, revisionists then argued that the political support of such units should be fostered, especially since the Left had replaced the revolutionary capture of the State with a strategy of electoral gain.

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Implicit in many writings about the peasantry that has appeared over the past two decades, especially in accounts originating from a ‘new’ pop-ulist subalternist perspective, is the same view of nationalism as a positive force. Hence, the prevailing assumption that any grassroots agency espous-ing an essentialist national/ethnic ideology cannot be anything other than a progressive form of mobilisation (a force for good). In this way, an ide-alised concept of plebeian national/ethnic ‘otherness’ has been smuggled back into the discourse of the political Left. This despite the fact that it is a form of discontent generated by alienation – a ‘from below’ nationalist philosophy (folkloric/völkish sentiment) in other words – that has been harnessed so successfully throughout history by conservatives and reac-tionaries.

Among the aspects common to pre-1914 and current nationalism and revisionist theory are the following. First, the attempted re-essentialisation of peasant economy, and claims that, because smallholding could not – and should not – be transcended. Marxist arguments about its transcendence could no longer be considered valid. A corollary was that, as small-scale enterprises flourished, the predicted industrial centralization/monopoly and with it a revolutionary transition to socialism was off the political agenda. Second, the economic consolidation of a particular national bour-geoisie – German in the pre-1914 era, and Indian in the years to 2014. The attempt to revise what for them both was a potentially threatening Marxism is linked in turn to the third point of similarity: the role of academia in depoliticizing Marxist theory. And fourth, both conjunctures are periods of acute class struggle, both at the national and international level.

This comparison is not just topical but also important politically. Class features centrally, since it, too, is absent from or downgraded by revisionist theory, in 2014 no less than in 1914. Just as there has been a switch from class to non-class identity and issues in academia, so in India itself Leftist parties still campaign on nationalist lines, seeking to unite peasantry and domestic (‘progressive’) bourgeoisie against the ‘foreign capitalist’. The exploiter is always abroad, never – or almost never – at home. An old story, and one that has failed to change in line with the development of India as a capitalist nation in its own right. A currently rising Asian bourgeoisie, it is argued, should therefore be put in the Imperialist frame, where it belongs nowadays, rather than the older and more familiar refrain – even on the Left – of undifferentiated Europe-as-exploiter versus undifferentiated Asia-as-victim.

The theme of reversals, and what these imply for socialists and social-ism, undermines the argument that, once achieved, any progress is irre-versible, a fallacy embedded in much development theory after 1960, and not by any means confined simply to bourgeois social science discourse. Luxemburg demonstrated that this kind of Panglossian optimism was at


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4 best misplaced, and at worst politically naïve. However, this is a lesson that academic Leftists have not always heeded, as Marxist theory has been aban-doned in favour of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism.

A central issue of the 1960s development debate, espoused by both modernisation theory and Marxism, was that rural society in so-called Third World countries had to change economically and politically. Moder-nisation theory sought the incorporation of peasants and workers into the bourgeois polity without, however, challenging existing rural culture. The latter, consequently, was left intact, and it was this component that was taken up in the 1980s by the ‘new’ populist postmodernism, which then used it to construct an innate concept of a locally-based peasant identity located outside and against the capitalist State. Resisting – but no longer attempting to capture or control – the State, this grassroots agency seeks merely to protect traditional farming practices, tenure, culture and hierar-chy as these have always existed at the rural grassroots. This replicates the historical project not of the Left but of conservatism and neoliberalism, and as such is politically disempowering for peasants and workers.

Past analysis of South Asia was in political terms radical, focussing as it did on the legacies of colonialism, particularly as this constituted an obsta-cle to economic development. However, as India has made the transition from an underdeveloped to a developed nation, so the object and the poli-tics of this analysis have changed. In a general sense, there has been a shift from advocacy of a socialist transition to a nationalist celebration of having achieved a capitalist one. Among other things, this entails resuscitating a self-validating discourse of the bourgeoisie: namely, the agrarian myth, and in particular a concept of peasant-as-backbone-of-the-nation.

By proclaiming – or stressing – a common rural identity that is ‘nat-ural’, based in Nature, and enduring, agrarian myth discourse permits indigenous capital to downplay or deny class struggle in the countryside. Struggle is deflected thereby, away from existing rural hierarchy and towards economic activity that is sectorally ‘other’ (industry, the urban) and an enemy that is nationally ‘other’ (‘foreign capital’). Politically, this ideological role is disempowering for ‘those below’, an outcome ignored by many different strands of development studies. It is an approach clearly evident in the subaltern studies project that emerged after 1980, with its discovery in an economically undifferentiated peasantry of an authentic grassroots voice that is empowering.

There are a number of inescapable political ironies confronting advo-cates of postmodern theory who endorse peasant cultural ‘otherness’. What Baüer failed to realize at the start of the twentieth century was that, rather than bring peasants into the present, nationalist discourse hitched the nation to a peasant past. One hundred years on, exponents of the subalter-nist framework make the same mistake. At the very conjuncture when poor peasants and agricultural labourers of different ethnicities and nationalities

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are becoming increasingly similar in terms of the class relation linking them to global capital, exponents of postmodernism and the subaltern studies approach enjoin us to shift our analytical gaze from the economic sameness of class to the cultural irreducibility of ‘otherness’ based on gender/ethnic/national identity.

In this, postmodernists and subalternists unknowingly mimic the political panaceas advocated historically by conservativism – starting from the reaction by German Romanticism to the Enlightenment and the 1789 revolution – which similarly privileges ethnic/national identity as a response to the global spread of capitalism. The argument now most often encountered, not just among those postmodernists who continue to regard themselves as on the Left, but more worryingly also from those on the contemporary political Right, is either for a more inclusive nationalism or for a plurality of nationalisms. Both these positions are ones against which socialists have long argued, and should argue still, by countering national-ism/nationalisms – which, however well intentioned, ultimately project (as epistemologically they must) a notion of exclusivity – with an internation-alism based on the increasing global ‘sameness’ of class that is in the end the only form of inclusiveness.

Notes 1 For details about Justus Möser (1720–94), see Epstein (1966: Chapter 6). Noting

the prefiguring influence of Möser’s views on German conservatives such as Adam MÖller and Novalis, Epstein (1966: pp. 324–25) observes that his ‘admiration for a society of peasants … has a Jeffersonian flavour; it did not, however, imply any bias towards egalitarianism. On the contrary, Möser explicitly favoured a hierarchic order of society where everybody knew and kept his place. Möser admired a society marked by a great diversity of status, where everybody was content to perform his traditional function for the common good. He looked upon inequality as a positive good, not a necessary evil…’ For his view of a golden age, self-sufficient peasantry as the authentic representatives of German national identity, see Epstein (1966: p. 329).

2 See Brass (2014: Chapter 6). Among the exponents of German Romanticism opposed to enlightenment philosophy and 1789 French Revolution was Frederick von Schlegel (1772–1829). Like Justus Möser and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), therefore, Schlegel (1848: pp. 248, 402, 450) blamed ‘the empty philosophy of Rationalism’ that emerged during ‘the atheistic and revolutionary period of the French philosophy, immediately prior to the French Revolution’ for what he saw as Enlightenment was ‘rationalist principles of freedom and equality’. Instead, he embraced an aesthetic philosophy of history that looked backwards to the Middle Ages, extolling an innate German character based on a ‘love of nature’ grounded in the landscape of Germany (Schlegel 1849: pp. 186, 193).

3 The argument of von Bülow (1915: pp. 136–37) was that there existed in Germany a direct link between the peasantry, the Prussian landowning class, and the Kaiser, all united by a common bond of national identity, history, and – by inference – economic and political interest. Not only does von Bülow (1915: p. 233) point with satisfaction to the rising number of peasant smallholdings, which he claims increased by some 180,000 in the period 1895–1907 directly as a result of his 1902


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4 Tariff Law protecting German agriculture, but he also makes clear the political advantage this process confers on Prussian landlordism: namely, to counter the dual political threat posed by a rapidly expanding and class conscious proletariat on the one hand, and the influence of the radical leftwing German Social Demo-crats on the other.

4 Nowhere is this view made more explicit than in the reasons advanced for the recu-peration of peasant cultural ‘otherness’ in the Austro-Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century (Holme 1911: p. 30).

5 According to Holme (1911: p. 36), therefore, ‘every one of us who travels through the country with open eyes feels convinced that there is a Hungarian national style, however much it may be furrowed and intersected by influences derived from other sources … this elemental living spirit we discern everywhere in the peasant art of Hungary at the present day’.

6 Hence the observation (Holme 1911: p. 31) that ‘[t]he mountains of Transylvania keep watch over many a craft in which the genuine artistic impulse of a healthy, simple people can be seen at work, and which has nothing in common with the wholesale production of the modern factory system’.

7 In a programmatic analysis that in many ways anticipates the position taken by Chayanov, the conservative politician and political economist Schäffle (1892: p. 275, original emphasis) argued as follows: ‘Propertied labour, at any rate in Ger-many and Austria, still forms by far the largest portion of the whole of productive labour. It includes the peasantry and the artisans, with almost all their families and belongings. Towards these the State has merely a positive protective task to fulfil, in furthering the private and associated organization of credit. The Social question par excellence is the question of the retention of the peasant-class’.

8 Writing in 1899, Bernstein (1961: p. 71) insisted that ‘there can be no doubt that in the whole of Western Europe, as also in the Eastern States of the United States, the small and medium agricultural holding is increasing everywhere, and the large and very large holding is decreasing … [t]he concentration of enterprises is not accomplished here in the form of annexing an ever greater portion of land to the farm, as Marx saw in his time’. This, as Gay (1952: p. 194) points out, was the crux of the matter: ‘Here, if anywhere, the difference between orthodox and Revisionist agrarian theory must be sought’.

9 See Bernstein (1961: p. 109ff., p. 185). However, as many different case studies confirm, in a capitalist system the agrarian co-operative does not slow but much rather accelerates peasant socio-economic differentiation. Noting that in Russia as early as 1906 capitalist farmers emerged from the peasantry as a result of pur-chasing or leasing holdings from landlords, Trotsky (1934: p. 68) added that ‘[r]eal power in the co-operatives belonged … only to rich peasants, whose interests in the last analysis they served.’ He continued:

The Narodnik [populist] intelligentsia, by concentrating its chief forces in peas-ant co-operation, finally succeeded in shifting its love for the people on to good solid bourgeois rails. In this way was prepared, partially at least, the political bloc of the ‘anti-capitalist’ party of the Social Revolutionaries with the Kadets, the capitalist party par excellence.

Decades later, much the same turned out to be true of cooperatives in India (Thor-ner 1964) and Latin America (Brass 2007b). This was because such units enable rich peasants to expand and/or consolidate landownership, to expel poor peasants from co-operative membership, and then to re-employ them as workers.

10 See Baüer (1919: pp. 78–88) and also Pollock (1984: p. 163ff.). According to the latter source, in his 1925 Austrian Social Democratic Agrarian Programme, Baüer

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‘takes over the doctrine of the ‘eternal peasant,’ previously rejected bluntly by [Marxist] theory’. Of this Pollock (1984: p. 168) asks the following two pertinent questions: ‘[H]ow can one possibly incorporate an explicitly anti-collectivist stratum of the population, which is attached to private property, into a classless society? Is not [the] conception of the small peasantry as an important stratum of the classless socialist society itself a contradiction?’

11 Because the ‘socialist’ programme of Baüer was based only on the taxation of exist-ing wealth, and not on the confiscation of property belonging to industrialists and landowners, it was dismissed by Lenin (1965: p. 361) in the following terms: ‘…he [Baüer] grew frightened and began to pour the oil of reformist phrase-mongering on the troubled waters of the revolution.’ (original emphasis) For the same kind of criticisms levelled at Austrian social democrats, see Trotsky (1934: p. 910ff.).

12 According to Baüer, therefore, ‘[t]he peasant was there before feudal society. He lived through feudal society as well. And in the framework of socialist society too, peasants will live on their own patch of land as a free proprietor’ (cited in Pollock, 1984: p. 165). It was precisely for this reason that he approved of the New Eco-nomic Policy in the Soviet Union, described by him as ‘a capitulation to capital-ism’, an endorsement that was condemned by Trotsky (1953: p. 250). By contrast, Baüer’s support for peasant economy was commended by populist writers such as Mitrany (1951: pp. 156–57), according to whom it ‘was the most realistic and constructive approach to the peasant problem made by a Socialist in that period’, and for whom the views of Baüer ‘almost echoed [those of] the Peasant writers [populists]’.

13 Employers continued to prefer the system of wages-in-kind linked to smallholding, even into the 1920s, since – as socialist trade unions pointed out – this enabled them to reproduce and reinforce unfree production relations (and with them low wages) in German agriculture (Wunderlich 1961).

14 At roughly the same conjuncture, Israel Zangwill, an avowed non-marxist, arrived at a similar definition of national identity. According to him (Zangwill 1917: p. 44) nationality ‘in its inner or concave aspect, being a form of feeling, can be explained only by psychology. It is – or should be – a section of ‘the psychology of crowds’ [and] springs from the operation of what I propose to call the law of contiguous co-operation’. For both Zangwill and Baüer, therefore, nationalism is a non-transcendent identity that possesses mainly a non-material referent. It is for them simply the accumulated and ever-present product largely of consciousness (history, psychology), an eternal and thus continuous form of being. This suggests two things. First, that the more a definition of identity is structured by non-ma-terial aspects (such as language, ethnicity, culture), the more the resulting element of ‘community’ is likely to be one of nationalism. Conversely, the more such a ‘community’ is defined in specifically economic terms, the less likely is it that the resulting identity will be one confined within the boundaries of nationhood. And second, that there is nothing particularly Marxist about the definition of national-ism used by Baüer.

15 That the concepts ‘nation’ and ‘nationhood’ are essentialised by Baüer (1978a: p. 109) is evident from his observation that ‘[f]or me, history no longer reflects the struggles of nations: instead the nation itself appears as the reflection of historical struggles.’ Although he starts out with a premise that is uncontentious – ‘The development of the nation reflects the history of the mode of production and of property’ – Baüer (1978a: p. 108) proceeds on the basis of this to elaborate a theory about nationalism that is problematic. Hence the view that:

Just as private ownership of the means of production and individual produc-


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4 tion develops out of the system of primitive communism, and from this, again, there develops co-operative production on the basis of social ownership, so the unitary nation divides into members of the nation and those who are excluded and become fragmented into small local circles; but with the development of social production these circles are again drawn together and will eventually be absorbed into the unitary socialist nation of the future.

16 According to Baüer (1978a: p. 109), ‘[t]he nation of the era of private property and individual production, which is divided into members and non-members, and into numerous circumscribed local groups, is the product of the disintegration of the communist nation of the past and the material for the socialist nation of the future.’

17 If nothing else, the ominous juxtaposition in Baüer’s analysis of the words ‘national’ and ‘socialism’ ought to have alerted Leftists to the presence of a political difficulty, an identical conflation, with similar political consequences, being made by Sombart (see below). The political dangers inherent in socialist attempts to annex a nationalist ideology are evident from the pronouncement by Mussolini (Delzell 1971: p. 9) when launching the Fascist Movement in Milan during 1919: ‘We declare war against socialism, not because it is socialist but because it has opposed nationalism’.

18 In the context of primitive communism and nomadism, ‘nation’ signified a com-munity based on descent. The sedentarization of agriculture, however, marked a disintegration of that old nationhood, as smallholding peasants became regional/local in terms of culture, while ruling classes maintained a culture that was dis-tinct to them. As capitalism developed, peasants and workers were still excluded, and according to Baüer (1978a: p. 108) it was only ‘when society divests social production of its capitalist integument’, under socialism, in other words, that ‘the unitary nation as a community of education, work and culture emerges again.’ His assumption (Baüer 1978b: p. 110) was that ‘only socialism will give the whole people a share in the national culture’.

19 With unintended irony, Baüer (1978b: pp. 110–11) celebrated the meeting between the peasantry and nationalism in the following manner:

The peasant masses are completely bound by tradition; the household posses-sions of their ancestors are dear to them, while everything new is hateful. Their love for the values of the past also has political consequences; it is the root of their attachment to the church, their local patriotism, their dynastic loyalty. We have seen the significance of this fact in our investigation of the forces which assure Austria’s stability; the peasants who cannot free themselves from the chains of centuries-old tradition are one of the supports of this state. If on the one hand the socialist mode of production integrates the masses for the first time into the national cultural community and thereby strengthens their national consciousness, so on the other hand it destroys their attachment to the ideologies of past centuries which is an obstacle to the full realisation of the nationality principle.

Whilst accurate as a description of a process, his concluding observation – ‘It not only increases the driving force of the nationality principle, but also clears away the obstacles from its course’ – was profoundly wrong in terms of its political direc-tion.

20 Pro-peasant views are not of themselves incompatible with a view of Nazism as a form of reactionary modernism bent on carrying through a project of capitalist development and industrialization. Accordingly, those linked to the Nazis, who

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espoused pro-peasant ideology – such as Walther Darré (Mosse 1966: pp. 148–50) and Konrad Meyer (1939) – perceived no incompatibility between these views on the one hand, and capitalist development and industrialisation on the other. And even where such a specifically material incompatibility may have existed, reactionary pro-peasant ideology fulfilled an important mobilizing role in the class struggle.

21 ‘To lead Germany out of the desert of the economic age’, writes Sombart (1937: p. 146)

is the task which German Socialism has set for itself. In so far as it denies the entire spirit of this age, it is far more radical than any other movement, includ-ing any other socialistic movement of our time, for example, even proletarian Socialism. The latter has fundamentally…accepted the values of the civilization in which we live and has merely demanded that the ‘blessings’ of this age be shared by all men, even the lowest classes. It is capitalism in an inverted form; German Socialism is anti-capitalism.

22 Hence, the view (Sombart 1937: pp. 140, 152) that the work of deliverance of German Socialism does not extend to any single class

or to any particular group of the population, but comprehends all in all their parts. Since peasants, wage-workers, land-owners and employers, merchants and manual labourers, officials and intellectuals, in short, all members of soci-ety were equally injured by the economic age, they all now must be delivered from these injuries. German Socialism is no proletarian, petit bourgeois, or other kind of part-Socialism, but popular Socialism. And, as it comprehends the entire people, it also includes ever branch of culture, not merely the field of economics: it is totalistic. . . . Since German Socialism is not doctrinaire, neither is it monistic or levelling in its tendencies; so far as possible it would preserve, and even intensify, the diversity of the picture which represents present society.

23 Subscribing to the 1893 Turner thesis about the origins of American democracy in its open frontier, Sombart (1976: p. 116) asserted ‘I fully believe that the fact supplying the principal reason for the characteristic peaceable mood of the Amer-ican worker is that many men . . . were able to turn themselves into independent farmers almost as they wished by colonising free land.’

24 What follows is drawn from Brass (2014: Chapter 3). 25 Modernization theory is associated with the work of mainly US political scientists,

the most influential of whom – Gabriel Almond, Edward Shils and Samuel Hunt-ingdon – were anti-communist cold warriors intent on formulating an alternative to socialist politics in the Third World (Leys 1996: pp. 9–11). It assumed a positive correlation between democracy and economic growth: either the former made the latter possible, or economic growth facilitated a ‘deepening’ of democracy.

26 That fear of a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, and its replacement with socialism, was uppermost in the minds of modernisation theorists during the 1960s is evident from a concern with what was termed ‘revolution and political instability’ in rural areas of the Third World (Rogers 1969: p. 23).

27 This is a lesson that the US is currently being taught yet again in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Characterised as ‘blowback’, it entails the recognition of the fact that traditional social forces and ideologies mobilised against socialism – armed, financed and supported politically by the US itself – frequently include in their condemnation of modernity (for eroding the cultural ‘otherness’ specific to a particular ethnicity or nationalism) not just socialism but also neoliberalism and bourgeois democracy.


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4 28 Some modernisation theorists (Rogers 1969: p. 378) were aware of a potential con-tradiction, but failed to consider the implications of this, let alone give it political importance.

29 The ‘new’ postmodern populism (on which see Brass 2000) covers a variety of currently still fashionable theoretical frameworks, including the subaltern studies project, everyday forms of resistance, new social movements, eco-feminism, and post-development. A characteristic of such theory is that it not only endorses petty commodity production and the ensemble of cultural forms linked to such peasant identity, but then counter-poses this to the class identity of the rural subject. Eth-nicity is perceived by postmodernism as part of peasant identity, and vice-versa.

30 Marxism confers political legitimacy only on revolutionary struggles for politi-cal power undertaken by class categories (a nascent bourgeoisie in the case of a dominant feudalism, a proletariat in the case of a dominant capitalism). Marxists argue that because the peasantry is not homogeneous, consequently resistance by rich, middle and poor peasants has a different class basis, meaning and objective. It is the exponents of postmodernism who maintain the fiction of a homogeneous peasantry confronting a non-class specific state (a binary opposition which struc-tures the discourse not of Marxism but of populism, the ‘other’ of Marxism).

31 The reason for this fusion between the subaltern/resistance framework on the one hand and the ‘new’ populist right on the other is not difficult to discern. In the epistemology shared by the latter, any/every form of resistance is declared to be legitimate (landlords as well as tenants, the rich as well as the poor). The difficulty with concepts such as ‘resistance’ and ‘power’ as deployed by the subaltern frame-work, therefore, is not so much its ubiquity as its politics. By eschewing a politics, resistance theory not only makes no distinction between resistance (by socialists) against fascism and (by fascists) against socialism but also – with typical postmod-ern aporia – denies the necessity any longer to have to make such a distinction.

32 Pace Beverley, in Austria a consequence of Baüer’s Popular Front reformist poli-tics during the late 1920s and early 1930s was not to strengthen but to demobilise working-class opposition to fascism, and thus in effect to make easier the taking of power by the far right (Kitchen 1987).

33 See Lenin (1964: p. 35) and also Trotsky (1934: p. 908ff.). Earlier, Marx warned that a working class divided along national and/or ethnic lines undermined the solidarity necessary for revolutionary agency. In the late 1860s and early 1870s he (Marx 1973: pp. 166–71) argued that in Britain ‘antagonism [between English and Irish industrial workers] is artificially sustained and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.’ Much the same point was made subsequently by Luxemburg (1976) with regard to peasants and agricultural workers in eastern Europe, and by Shachtman (2003) in the case of small farmers, tenants, and agricultural workers in the South-ern US.

34 It must be stressed that such hostility on the part of early Marxists was most emphatically not to the fact of intellectual practice, but rather to its confinement to and control by academia. This view does not constitute anti-intellectualism, which objects to intellectual activity per se, and is a form of ideological ‘primitivism’ that has been the historical preserve of those on the political Right.

35 These critical views about katheder-socialism, expressed by Marx in his corre-spondence, are cited approvingly by Lenin (1962: pp. 366–67). In the early 1890s (Tudor and Tudor 1988: p. 9), ‘Bernstein was indeed becoming increasingly aca-demic in his approach . . . [he] was more than ever inclined to see the element of

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truth on both sides of the question, and his political utterances were increasingly couched in the language of scholarly caution’.

36 Taking issue with the attempts by katheder-socialism to find common ground – and thus form political alliances – with the bourgeoisie, Lenin (1961: pp. 362–63) observed:

But an essential condition for such an alliance must be the full opportunity for the socialists to reveal to the working class that its interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie. However, the Bernsteinian and ‘critical’ trend, to which the majority of the legal Marxists turned, deprived the socialists of this opportunity and demoralised the socialist consciousness by vulgarising Marxism, by advocating the theory of the blunting of social contra-dictions, by declaring the idea of the social revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be absurd, by reducing the working class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade unionism and to a ‘realistic’ struggle for petty, gradual reforms . . . in practice it meant a striving to convert the nascent work-ing class movement into an appendage of the liberals.

37 Accepting that ‘professional scholars’ who have ‘a continually increasing sympathy for the proletariat’ are consequently ‘easiest won for our party’, Kautsky (1916: pp. 46–47) notes that ‘friendship for labour becomes popular among the cultured classes, until there is scarcely a parlour in which one does not stumble over one or more “Socialists”.’ However, he continues that (ibid),

Socialism has become a fad. It no longer demands any especial energy, and no break with capitalist society to assume the name of Socialist. It is no wonder then that more and more these new Socialists remain entangled in their previ-ous manner of thought and feeling. . . . They declare themselves ready to grant the proletariat their moral support, but only on condition that it renounces the idea of the application of force, and this not simply where force is hopeless – there the proletariat has already renounced it – but also in those places where it is still full of possibilities.

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Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, UK.

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Venturing to offer anything like a vision of a country as gigantic, as diverse and complex, as contradictory and mixed-up as India, more than three decades into the future, is a risky endeavour. It might also seem pointless, if you go by what economists want to call ‘the myth of the long run.’ Let me remind you of what one of the greatest of them, Lord Keynes, said in a 1923 tract on monetary reform about training your sights too far ahead: ‘But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set them-selves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.’

But then there are two extenuating factors that seem to argue in favour of pressing on with the constant, the permanent theme of the D.S. Borker Memorial Lecture series as it progresses relentlessly towards the target date. The first extenuating factor is obvious: 2047 is not quite the long run Lord Keynes had in mind. It depends of course on the age group you belong to. ‘In 2047’, Madhu Dandavate noted in his 2000 lecture, the second in the series, ‘our freedom will be 100 years old and my hypothetical age would be 123. I will fortunately not be there to confirm whether my vision of 2047 had proved to be wise or otherwise’. I too won’t be around to confirm the wisdom or oth-erwise of my projected vision for 2047 but many of you will be. The second extenuating factor is that we are not in a ‘tempestuous season’, although storms can’t be ruled out in the polity and society if certain deeply entrenched negative trends that have gathered force in recent times are not combated and reversed.

You can, if you like, speculate on the likely spread and effects of the Maoist insurgency – designated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as ‘the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country’ – in the next decade and perhaps even circa 2047. But let me cite something else, the socio-political processes that led to the horrors of Muzaffarnagar that shook North India in August–September 2013, claiming 63 lives and leaving 50,000 people homeless. Whether these riotswere deliberately staged as part of a political mobilisation strategy can be debated, but there can be no question that they formed the backdrop to the

My Vision of India: 2047 ad

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4 unprecedented communal polarisation that we witnessed in Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Here is Syeda Hameed writing in The Hindu, of her experience of visiting the area, as a member of the Planning Commission, in the wake of the riots:

What we heard from the victims were accounts of not only the killing, the burn-

ing and the maiming of people, but also about the redeployment of an age-old

weapon – women’s bodies, which were used as instruments for the redemption

of male honour. In the villages of Shamli and Muzaffarnagar, women quietly

recounted the horrors of the violation of their bodies which man after man had

forced himself on. Graphic accounts were recorded by brave journalists, which

are available in the public domain…

What is especially troubling is the continuing nature of the communal tensions and violence. According to newspaper reports, between 16 May 2014, when the Lok Sabha results were declared, and 25 July 2014, the Uttar Pradesh police recorded 605 incidents of localised communal clashes. This suggests that the problem has become structural in India’s most populous State, and that this has something to do with the fact that in the last general election, the BJP made light of the vote-share patterns in a supposedly frag-mented polity, taking 71 of the State’s 80 Lok Sabha seats, on the strength of a 42.30 percent share of the popular vote.

With these preliminary observations, let me venture to offer my vision of India in 2047, in memory of D.S. Borker, a dedicated public servant inspired by the vision of liberty, secularism, planned development, and a just and reasonably prosperous society free from age-old social ills and weaknesses. In doing so, I take guidance from a former President’s mixed approach, in the sixth lecture in this series, given in 2004. Raising the ques-tion whether the vision was expected to be ‘a futuristic projection of what India would be like in 2047 or a personal ideological projection of what one likes India to be’, K.R. Narayanan resolved the dilemma by assuming it to be a mixture of the two. I will do likewise, limiting myself, however, to two central challenges facing contemporary India.

The Challenge of Mass DeprivationThe big question before us today is whether, sixty-seven years on, India has kept its tryst with destiny. In trying to answer this question, let us apply Jawaharlal Nehru’s litmus test: ‘The service of India means the ser-vice of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and igno-rance and disease and inequality of opportunity.’ The path India took in 1947, was a brave experiment in trying to address underdevelopment and extreme deprivation in a large, highly populated, poor country, within the framework of parliamentary democracy. But the experiment largely failed Nehru’s litmus test – of ending poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality of opportunity. What is worse, there is no indication that policy-makers

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have lost much sleep over the palpable reality of India having a greater mass of basic deprivations today than any other country on earth. What makes this particularly inexcusable, is the failure of a relatively prolonged phase of high growth substantially to scale down mass poverty and deprivation.

There are endless debates on definitions of the poverty line, and esti-mates of the proportion of Indians below the poverty line, but no one doubts that the number runs into the hundreds of millions. It is well known that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially for countries like India that experienced high growth, were, to quote Professor Chan-drasekhar, ‘low on ambition and reflected a willingness to wait in the battle against deprivation’.

And even with this low ambition, India has done poorly on several indicators relative to similarly placed countries, as the latest India Country Report with reference to achieving MDGs makes clear. There is simply no argument left to explain why rising India has not been able completely to rid itself by now of the worst forms of deprivation, what a former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, used to refer to somewhat euphemistically as ‘the harsh edges of poverty’.

So let us look at a Stage 1 to 2047 that sets about eliminating the worst forms of deprivation in the next five to seven years. Can we take this for granted? The answer is ‘No’, for the simple reason that the task calls for a state that is willing to mobilise and put to use the surpluses that are avail-able to this end, in a determined and concentrated way. This implies a growth strategy very different from the one we are on now.

Let us now hear an economist, Jayati Ghosh, on how India’s much vaunted neo-liberal growth process has let down its working people:

An important failure [from a long run perspective] is the worrying absence of

structural change, in terms of the ability to shift the labour force out of low

productive activities, especially in agriculture, to higher productivity and bet-

ter remunerated activities. . . . In the past decade, agrarian crisis across many

parts of the country has impacted adversely on the livelihood of both cultiva-

tors and rural workers, yet the generation of more productive employment

outside this sector remains woefully inadequate. Other major failures, which

are directly reflective of the still poor status of human development in most

parts of the country, are in many ways related to this fundamental failure. They

include the persistence of widespread poverty; the sluggishness of employ-

ment, especially in the formal structure; the absence of basic food security (and

growing food insecurity) for a significant proportion of the population; the

inability to ensure basic needs of housing, sanitation, adequate health care to

the population as a whole; the continuing inability to ensure universal educa-

tion and the poor quality of much school education; the sluggish enlargement

of access to education and employment across different social groups and for

women in particular. In addition there are problems caused by the very pattern

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4 of economic growth: aggravated regional imbalances; greater inequalities in

the control over assets and in access to incomes; dispossession and displace-

ment of people from land and livelihood without adequate compensation and

rehabilitation.

So the key question is: Will the growth strategy change so that, as a national priority, we can bring an end to the state of multiple basic depri-vations in which hundreds of millions of our people live? There are no guarantees, but what we need to do is to work to build public opinion and undertake democratic and progressive public action towards bringing about a suitable strategy change. And that will mean figuring out what kind of institutional change is needed. You may have your own answers to this question but it will probably mean joining the global search for an institutional framework that can deliver a more egalitarian and sustainable development strategy, a strategy that can deliver development with much less of its adverse externalities.

The Challenge to Pluralist IndiaThe second big question I wish to address is probably at the top of the minds of most people who are here: What kind of society are we building today? What is our idea of India and has that idea changed for most Indi-ans?

This challenging question has come to the fore at a time the party of the Hindu Right, led by an RSS-pracharak-turned-charismatic, mass-polit-ical-leader, has come into power at the Centre. This party has a firm major-ity of its own, with flanking support from a family of militant Hindutva organisations that were regarded as belonging to the ‘fringe’. It is no secret that this new dispensation is armed with an ideology and a socio-political programme that are at odds with what we have been accustomed to, for most of India’s independent career. It is important to realise that when the RSS supremo, its sarsangchalak, Mohan Bhagwat, proclaims that India is a Hindu nation and Hindutva is its identity, striking a blow at the secular concept of Indian citizenship and at the Constitution itself, he speaks for the constellation as a whole. He speaks for the entire Sangh parivar, com-prising the party of government as well as the so-called fringe outfits, with the RSS acting as the ideological fulcrum. Let no one have any doubts about this.

Communalism as a political mobilisation strategy has made disturb-ing progress over the past few years, feeding on the weaknesses, the vices, the corruption, the anti-people policies, and growing incompetence of an akratic UPA government. What is clear from the history of India over the past century and a half, is that a wrong or unprincipled understanding of the problem of communalism in society and politics can lead to very tragic outcomes for a large number of people.

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Communalism in the South Asian sense is, according to the historian Sarvapalli Gopal, ‘unknown almost anywhere else in the world’, and of relatively recent origin. Determinedly combated through the active prac-tice of what the Constitution has mandated in independent India, it could have been marginalised. Yet it has been able, on account of a complexity of factors, to capture hearts and minds and occupy political centre stage in the second decade of the twenty first century. Let me quote from a recent char-acterisation of the underlying processes by a political journalist (Varghese K. George, The Hindu, 21 August 2014):

The RSS and affiliated bodies were described as ‘fringe groups’ primarily

because the idea of nationhood that they represented did not gain acceptance

as the mainstream of Indian politics until recently. Things have been changing

gradually, as more and more Hindus have begun to subscribe to the idea of

India being a Hindu nation. Combined with it, the Sangh propaganda that

Muslims are a pampered lot is finding more and more takers among Hindus.

The global rise of Islamism has added more impetus to the growth of Hindu

nationalism.

Assuming this characterisation to be true, at least in part, the ques-tion that arises is whether this process in society is temporary or is going to be long-lasting. At moments like the present, the apparent absence of capabilities within the political and constitutional system to keep religious majoritarianism at bay dispirits those who believe in secular democracy and modern civil society. But surely it won’t do to accept any assessment or conclusion that suggests the inevitability of the triumph of an authoritarian majoritarianism over the progressive values of our freedom struggle, values that are embedded in our democratic and secular Constitution. I would like to think that given the strengths of India’s composite culture, its civil-sational reserves, the wisdom of ordinary folk, the process being described above cannot be long lasting. It is certainly not irreversible.

It is fashionable today to decry secularism as a tired, formulaic, hack concept and even some liberal journalists and other members of a suppos-edly liberal intelligentsia seem to have embraced the fashion. I think now is the time to take a clear-sighted stand on this question. There are many things going for secularism in India, among them is our history, our free-dom struggle, and our Constitution. But very often when Indians debate secularism, at the intellectual or political level, the issue tends to get blurred or confused.

The typical definition on offer in the Indian debate on secularism is sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all faiths) or sarva dharma sadbhaava (good feelings towards all faiths). Over the time, various lead-ers including the philosopher–statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, have offered interpretations of secularism that suggest that in the Indian context it has a rather special, if not unique, meaning. Sometimes it is defined as

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4 religious tolerance and catholicity of outlook. Sometimes the famous state-ment of Swami Vivekananda in his Chicago address of 1893, ‘We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true’, is cited as the core of Indian secularism.

Such attempts at definition and clarification of a key concept in mod-ern Indian history may have their advantages and application in particular gatherings or contexts since they have the progressive effect of countering bigotry, intolerance, and fundamentalism in social life and communalism as a phenomenon. But intellectually and politically, they won’t do as an interpretation of secularism and what it demands.

To put it in a different way, sarva dharma samabhava or sadbhava is a necessary but insufficient condition for the flourishing of secularism in India. Let me suggest why:

Secularism as a concept that must be put to work all the time consists of two robust principles. The first is that people belonging to all faiths and social sections and to both sexes are absolutely equal before the Constitu-tion, the law, and the state. There shall be no discrimination against anyone on grounds of religion, caste, race, ethnicity, language, and gender. This is what the Constitution of India mandates through several provisions. The constitutional guarantee of the special rights of religious and linguistic minorities is an extension of this equality-and-fairness principle. The abo-lition of untouchability and the exceptions to the nondiscrimination rule made to safeguard compensatory discrimination in favour of the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and also the socially and educationally back-ward classes are meant as devices to secure the integration of historically disadvantaged groups of people and their access to fair equality of oppor-tunity.

Secularism as the equality-and-fairness principle must be based on justice if it is to survive and flourish. The unmet demand for justice in India has many dimensions – the constitutional-political, the social, the economic, gender, and so on. Discrimination and the denial of elementary justice in these dimensions weaken and saps the practice of secularism. Revivalism, traditionalist attitudes towards women, caste, and social hier-archy, belief in Sanatana Dharma and Manu Dharma work against secu-larism primarily by denying justice to the victim sections, the losers, in the population.

Hindu Rashtra ideology flagrantly denies this equality-fairness and-justice principle. It does this crudely through spraying anti-Muslim venom into society and, at a more sophisticated level, by advocating the value of ‘positive secularism’. Positive secularism as a political mobilisation strategy needs the disguise of nationalism, or rather pseudo-nationalism, in order to gain legitimacy. Defining many-hued Indian civilisation, and all Indians, as ‘Hindu’ (in a ‘cultural sense’), legitimising Hindutva, pushing the validity of majoritarianism as an imperative of electoral democracy, and calling for

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an authoritarian ‘national unity’ and ‘patriotism’ on this reactionary and deeply divisive basis is what pseudo-nationalism seeks to achieve for the communalists.

But the second principle of secularism is even more important in the present context. Although constitutionally and legally mandated, it is hon-oured flagrantly in the breach. This principle is that religion shall not be inducted into politics, that it shall not be exploited for political gain. The Constituent Assembly adopted a resolution in 1948 mandating this, and both the electoral and criminal laws have provisions in support of the prin-ciple. On 11 March 1994, a nine-member bench of the Supreme Court of India full-throatedly upheld the principle in its judgment in what has come to be known as the Bommai case.

It is important to recognise that communalism in India is of diverse origin and content; it is not the monopoly of any one community. There is majority communalism and minority communalism and they feed on each other. Jihadism, which used to be regarded as a fringe phenomenon, has come to centre stage from time to time in recent decades. Often employing terror as a weapon, it has taken a heavy toll of human lives, livelihood, and welfare. And what is more, it strengthens the ideology of the Hindu Right. But what is clear from the experience India has gathered over close to seven decades of Independence is that communalism can be contained provided it is not allowed to become a successful political mobilisation strategy – through establishing beach-heads in hospitable Stat es and regions and then developing, thanks to the poverty of alternatives, into a wider phenomenon.

In Praise of India’s Future National GameLet me now turn to a subject in which I have always been interested, which was close to the heart of the man in whose memory this lecture series is instituted. This subject, as far as I am aware, has not figured in earlier lec-tures but it is directly related to one of D.S. Borker’s passions, physical cul-ture and well-being for the masses. In his book, Physical Education for India, published by George Allen & Unwin, London in 1940, he framed the task of creating a fitter nation as a developmental priority. We know that one of his thoughtful proposals was creating ‘play-streets,’ that is, closing down certain streets for vehicular traffic during designated hours to enable chil-dren to play on these streets. And I don’t mean play cricket, although that’s the game I know best and have played myself at a fairly serious level. Let me not digress on the issue of what ails Indian cricket, particularly at the Test level, and what needs to be done to cure those ailments. The subject I wish to touch upon is the overall state of sport in India, and the relative status of different sports and games, in our somewhat skewed scheme of things. It is well known that in track and field events, India lags way, way behind many other countries, developed as well as developing, so much so that a single individual Olympic gold medal, in a 10 metre Air Rifle event, sends

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4 the nation into paroxysms of enthusiasm. It is true that besides cricket, we do have our sporting strengths, in areas such as wrestling, shooting, and women’s badminton. Popular attitudes to sport seem gradually to be changing in a healthy direction.

Going by the sponsorship, the live prime time television coverage, and the cult following the Pro Kabaddi League has been able to attract in its early days, it can be deemed to be a success. ‘From cities, from villages, from all walks of life, these men have emerged and made a name for themselves in this brutal sport.’ So runs the promo at prokabaddi.com. Why sport, in this case an indigenous contact sport involving speed, strength, stamina, and mental alertness, needs to be be depicted as ‘brutal’ beats me. But leav-ing that aside, the challenge for sports administrators, policymakers, and sponsors is to sustain organisational and resource support for, and popular interest in, such progressive sports initiatives.

But the game I’m advocating for top-priority development to a serious level over the next decade is the game the whole world plays, football. This is the ultimate total fitness game, requiring speed, ball sense, eye and limb coordination, positioning, every individual skill that any other sport might require. Above all, it is a totally democratic game, simple in its basics, involving very little investment at street level. And international experience, especially from South America but also from Africa, shows us that talented children from favelas, slums, can rise to the highest levels of the game, which more than any other prides itself in having no glass ceiling. Think of Garrincha ‘the joy of the people’. Think Pele, Maradona, Neymar, Suarez... the list is long and many-splendoured in its inclusiveness.

But why is it that India, perhaps along with China, remains ‘the sleep-ing giant’ of world football (to borrow FIFA chief Sepp Blatter’s phrase)? The paradox is that the game is hugely popular in India, with an estimated TV fan base of more than 80 million for international football. League football has at last begun to make news, although it seems a long way from take-off to where it really matters. Yuwa, which uses football as ‘a simple, safe and inexpensive ... platform to bring girls out of isolation and into a positive team environment’, which empowers talented young women from highly disadvantaged backgrounds by providing them ‘an outlet and forum for self-expression and self-improvement,’ shows the way to what can be achieved with some imagination and social sensitivity.

But because of skewed sporting priorities and the lack of opportunity at various levels, the overall football standards in India are abysmal, the talent is largely unspotted, the prowess is extremely underdeveloped. Cur-rently, India ties with Malta for the 150th spot in FIFA’s world rankings. For historical curiosity, we learn that the country qualified for the World Cup in 1950 but turned down the opportunity to participate because the mostly barefoot team would have to wear football boots. What is needed today is an intelligent system that has a keen eye for talent at the school and

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street level, which invests in scholarships, high-grade coaching, and foot-ball academies, and ensures quality competition in the domestic leagues by bringing in some top-flight foreign players and coaches. Unless such a sys-tem can be put in place and tested over at least a decade, it seems unlikely that India can qualify for the 2046 World Cup.

India’s football dream must be to reach a state where, as Eduardo Galeano writes in his wonder-filled book, Soccer in Sun and Shadow,

one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man – that mistreated,

scorned foot – and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw

crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball. From the

moment he learns to walk, he knows how to play. . . . His acrobatic art draws

multitudes.

I would like to think that D.S. Borker, that champion of national phys-ical fitness through scientific physical education, would have approved my choice of football as India’s future national game, truly the people’s game.

N. Ram was the Managing Director of The Hindu since 1977, and its Edi-tor-in-Chief since 27 June 2003 until 18 January 2012. He also headed the other publications of The Hindu Group such as Frontline, The Hindu Busi-ness Line and Sportstar.

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There is, understandably, widespread boredom with the topic of the ‘Humanities in Crisis’. In the Western world the crisis has been declared repeatedly for over half a century (perhaps from even much earlier – ever since the rise and consolidation of modern science). Anything so chronic cannot properly be described as a ‘crisis’. So, a new rhetoric is needed every decade or so to uplift us from the boredom the topic induces and to make it seem as if it is acute rather than chronic. The latest vocabulary speaks of STEM (an acronym for the subjects that fall within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), as the source of the crisis: we are in a brave new world (to use an earlier rhetoric) which is so over-whelmingly committed to promoting STEM in its patterns of research funding and the employment opportunities it goes on to offer university graduates, that the Humanities (to put it somewhat incoherently, but I want to suggest that incoherence seems to be built into the topic) contin-ues to have no future.

One kind of incoherence lies in the fact that even as the overwhelming domination of STEM is protested there is also a simultaneously voiced alarm that universities are not filling the seats in their Engineering schools because in the last quarter century or so the weight of emphasis in the economy has shifted from industrial capital to finance capital, so students are flocking to Business schools instead. That takes the E, possibly some of the T, out of STEM. And for a longer period than this, especially during the years of the dominance of computer science prior to the obsession with the finance industry, there has been protest about the neglect of the more purely theoretical aspects of Mathematics and Science. So there you have it – every letter in the acronym is in varying degrees both asserted and denied at the same time in describing our anxieties. Why, then, should we address this incoherently understood ‘crisis’ at all?

The more interesting question would be to look, not at the allegedly destructive neglect of the Humanities, but rather at the internal trajectories within the Humanities in the last many years, and ask: is there health in what we find?

If one steps back some distance to ask what large transformations have occurred in the Humanities in the last half century, one couldn’t help noticing something conspicuous roughly around the creative turmoil in universities in the 1960s.

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4 What many student activists were protesting in that period, apart from a criminally waged war in Vietnam, was really the capitulation both of the natural and the social sciences in their universities to an increasing link that had grown during the Cold War between the intellectual pursuits of these disciplines on the one hand and the interests of governments and the cor-porations that governments by and large serve in the United States, Europe and countries such as Canada and Australia. This subservience of the acad-emy had the effect not only of turning the most highly funded research in these fields towards profit-oriented ends, nor only of turning many schol-ars into aspiring advisers to the prince, but even when not worldly in this debased sense, the equally striking effect of almost completely evacuating in research and in the curriculum, the conceptual, the historical, and above all, the value-oriented aspects of the social and natural sciences. (The great excitement generated by the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in this period flowed from the fact that it reminded us just how many values, and politically and socially normative and institutional considerations in particular, affect the otherwise illusory appearance that science is a value-free form of inquiry.)

What all this did to the Humanities is of no small importance. One way to understand the very specific kind of centrality that English

and Comparative Literary studies came to have in the decades after the 1970s, is that they began to pick up the slack created by this abdication by the social sciences of the value-oriented aspects of their disciplines. Ques-tions of identity based on race and gender and sexual preference that came to dominate literary intellectual pursuits and the rise of politically driven ‘cultural studies’ were all symptoms of this recovery within ‘Criticism’, of what was being ignored by the social sciences.

Let me illustrate the point with a very specific and pertinent example. Something like this, I believe, explains the great interest generated in these recent decades by the work of Edward Said.

It should have been obvious to anyone that there is no understanding a vast variety of phenomena in modern and contemporary political econ-omy (and society, more broadly) without coming to serious grips with the fact and long history of colonialism and its effects. But no Economics department made central, or really even passing, reference to colonialism in its curricular or research agendas. Nor do they now, with only the rarest of exceptions.

It took an exiled Palestinian literary critic who was moved by one of the few persisting colonialisms of our own time in his own land to bring to the attention of the Western academy the general importance of imperialism in shaping a wide variety of phenomena that the social sciences should have taken within their stride.

Their refusal to do so put Said’s work on the map, a map perused by all of the Humanities and by many frustrated and marginalised social

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scientists imprisoned in the narrow strictures of their discipline. (I should not exaggerate the point since I think some of Said’s main ideas had – long before him – surfaced in the field of Anthropology, in the work of those who criticised some of anthropology’s assumptions when it travelled into distant fields for its research. But Anthropology has never had a central place in the social sciences in a way that English has in the humanities, and these critical attitudes needed that more conspicuous platform to catch fire.)

A further reason for the dominance of English in the Humanities is that it became a hospice for philosophical interests that went beyond the mostly arcane philosophical analysis that was done in Anglophone Philosophy departments. I don’t mean to suggest that what is done in these depart-ments should not be done. Nobody should be deprived of being interested in interesting things. It is the overwhelming dominance of these remote forms of analysis at the cost of excluding other broader philosophical pur-suits that I am lamenting.

For centuries, the subject of philosophy was entirely continuous with natural science and the study of political economy, politics, history, and intellectual history. But in the last many decades, ever since the subject has been turned into a profession in universities, the careerism that this generated had the effect of making philosophy stand apart as a site of jobs with its own self-standing topics done in independence from the knowl-edge pursued and provided in other departments in the university; as a result Philosophy self-consciously developed its own irrelevance to the point now that hardly anyone reads the work of the central fields of ana-lytic philosophy (metaphysics and epistemology, for instance), except for analytic philosophers. I don’t know of any subject in the Humanities and Social Sciences that are only read by their own practitioners. Historians read political scientists, sociologists read economists…, but it is rare that anyone reads most of analytic philosophy except for other analytic philos-ophers. (A few exceptions like Rawls simply serve to prove the rule.) This will no doubt ensure that the few jobs there are in analytic philosophy in Universities will be preserved for those pursuing that subject exclusively, uncontaminated by a knowledge of and interest in other disciplines; but this ‘professional’ development at the same time has ensured that this is a coterie discipline, with little reach of the sort it once had into public life and the variety of knowledges that ground public life. It is sometimes thought that Philosophy today does reach out to inform itself of psychology and cognitive science and natural science, and so there is, after all, intellectual traffic between these disciplines. But the sad fact is that the traffic is all one way (again with a very few exceptions that serve to prove the rule). Philos-ophers may read and know some of these sciences, but hardly any scientists in those areas read these philosophers.

Such efforts as there are to make philosophy extend itself to a range

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4 of issues of public concern, therefore, tends once again to be done in the thematic refuge that is provided by English Departments.

Now, of course, we all ought to be grateful that a subject like English has stepped in to, as I put it above, pick up the slack created by the narrow-ing turn taken in the social sciences and philosophy. But a question arises here as to whether this is an entirely healthy development since, at least prima facie, it would seem that it is not very likely that a subject’s wider rel-evance and its reflective concern for questions of value that affect its ideas, will be best pursued at a site so remote from its natural home.

Grateful as we must be to English, we cannot help noticing that the study of colonialism, to take one example, or of the issues of power and value as they affect our knowledge of society, would be better done if they were done rigorously by those more knowledgeable of political economy and politics and sociology, and more trained in philosophical analysis than literary scholars. Yet things have not turned out that way. Deprived of their natural home they are valiantly and generously, if often sloppily, pursued in a department, which is not their natural setting.

The dilemma here is vexing. On the one hand (horn) the social sciences and philosophy impoverish themselves and leave it to the Humanities and English and ‘cultural studies’, in particular, to pursue aspects of their dis-ciplines that reach wider than what is allowed by the quantitative and the arcanely analytical methods they have allowed to entirely dominate their subjects. And on the other hand, when these wider themes are taken up at a site so distant from their natural place, they are unsurprisingly very often pursued with a lack of rigour and a lack of full and knowledgeable under-standing of the detailed issues at stake.

It takes a little reflection to notice that this dilemma is a symptom of much larger tendencies of modernity in which science came to be under-stood in a dichotomous relation with the humanistic disciplines, to the det-riment of both. In a recent article protesting the critique of ‘scientism’ by humanists, Steven Pinker urges – sensibly enough – that humanists would do well to keep science, its methods and its results, constantly in mind as they address their own questions. There is no gainsaying that. It should be a banality. But the article shows little understanding of how much sci-entism in the social sciences was in fact responsible for the creation of the dichotomy he wants to rightly undermine. He describes those who think that there are no questions about the world (natural and social) that natural science cannot eventually tackle as ‘lunatic’.

But that position is not a lunatic fringe position of our time. It is a widespread outlook that has slowly congealed around both natural and social science (I emphasise that it is an outlook around science, not science itself), and it came to define ‘nature’ itself as ‘that which the natural sciences study’, thereby evacuating nature of all value properties. It is this outlook that is called ‘scientism’ and I daresay it is a superstition of modernity. By

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superstition, I mean that we take it on trust even though nobody knows when it was proved and certainly no one knows how it helps one to live better. So widespread is the superstition that the natural sciences have full coverage of nature (by full coverage of nature, I don’t mean that natural science has succeeded in explaining all the properties of nature, but rather that it is considered the business of natural science to seek to explain all the properties of nature) that if one were to deny it, one would often be described as ‘unscientific’.

But this is a grotesque non sequitur. One can only be unscientific if one contradicts some proposition in some science. And no science contains the proposition that science has full coverage of nature.

The outlook has had a tremendous effect on the nature of disciplinary pursuits in the academy as well as on public life generally – that is to say, on politics, political economy, and the environment. I won’t in a short opinion piece try and elaborate how this is so, but I will say this: it is smug and shallow to say that scientism is not all that bad on the grounds that humanistic concerns should be informing themselves of science. Of course humanistic concerns should be informed by science, but if they are not it is at least partly because natural and social scientific concerns came to be understood with an imperviousness to a wide range of properties of value, meaning, and power, which set up an abiding dichotomy between science and the Humanities –and whatever it is that resolves and removes this dichotomy, it will not be scientism, at least not the scientism that created the problem in the first place.

So to conclude and summarise these brief remarks: The literary Humanities and so-called ‘cultural studies’, today do far too much of what the Social Sciences and Philosophy should be doing, and were the Social Sciences and Philosophy to return to doing it in a broad and humane (rather than scientistic) re-configuration of their disciplines, the literary Humanities could return to being their intellectual partners in what might emerge as a coherent and rational disciplinary layout in our academic lives –exploring within their rightful domain the substantial issues that emerge in literature and art and culture, but informed, as Pinker advises, by the methods and results of the natural and social sciences, so reconfigured.

Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy and the Director of the South Asian Institute at Columbia University, USA.

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As a tribute to Javeed Alam and his exemplary life, some of his close friends and admirers have come together in this volume with reflections on the range of themes that he pursued in his work with such intelligence and relish for some four decades: the nature of capitalism and the various angles of a Marxist response to it, the nature of secularism and liberalism and the forms of modernity which they usher in, and Gandhi’s political ideas in the context of Indian society and India’s own unfolding modernity.

Akeel Bilgrami, the editor of the volume, is the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy and the Director of the South Asian Institute at Columbia University. The contributors to the volume include Irfan Habib, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Utsa Patnaik, Charles Taylor, Prabhat Patnaik, Aijaz Ahmad and Partha Chatterjee, among others.

Javeed Alam was born on 12 August 1943 to Khadija and Alam Khundmiri in what was then the State of Hyderabad, ruled by the Nizam. His first memories are of independence and the struggle of the Telangana peasantry in which his family was involved. His early thinking and his commitments were much influenced by his father who was a philosopher of high distinction, and his mother who along with her husband was a keen activist in Left politics in Hyderabad. He studied in Hyderabad’s Alia School and then completed his BA and MA degrees at Osmania University, getting a gold medal for standing first in the MA. He went to Delhi to do his PhD at the Indian School of International Studies, eventually getting his doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University with which the ISIS was merged. He started his career teaching at Delhi University’s Salwan College, where his stand against the administration, which had terminated his services for marrying a Hindu, led to a larger agitation that successfully defended the secular character of the University. From 1973 to 1999 he taught at Himachal Pradesh University. A popular teacher who inspired generations of students, he also played a vital role in building Left politics in that state. His writings on Indian politics, political theory, federalism, democracy, modernity and Left politics have helped to shape many of the academic and political debates of the past three decades. He returned to Hyderabad in the late 1990s and taught at the English and Foreign Languages University from which he retired in 2005. He was Chairman of the Indian Council for Social Science Research from 2008 to 2011. In his retirement, he lives in Hyderabad with his wife Jayanti.

To order copies of the book, please contact:Tulika Books, 35 A/1 (ground floor) Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110 049. Email: [email protected] Alternatives, 35 A/1, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110 049. Email: [email protected]

To buy copies online, please visit: www.amazon.in, www.swb.co.in, www.leftword.com

Marx, Gandhi and Modernity Essays presented to Javeed Alam

Edited by Akeel Bilgrami

July 2014

9.5 x 6.25 inches

xiv + 314 pages

Hardback

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New release from Tulika Books!

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Misogyny permeates the political and cultural landscape in India, from the

violence on the streets, to the ‘rape jokes’ in journalism offices, to the way in

which female politicians are subject to sexist commentary in the guise of crit-

icising the government (Priyanka Borpujari 2014).

IntroductionViolence against women is framed within discourses on gender justice, human rights, health and well-being, partner violence, intimate partner violence, battered women, gendered violence, sexual assault, woman abuse, wife abuse, rape, aggravated rape, marital rape, date rape, among others. So common is violence against women that it is referred to, in some echelons, simply as ‘VAW.’ There are research centres, monthly academic journals, websites, and blogs devoted to violence against women. There are inter-national organisations, such as the United Nations, regional organisations such as the European Union, sovereign states and provincial governments which have institutions to generate data and make policy to guarantee rights, freedoms, protection, and equal opportunities for women. There are international and local non-government organisations which access private and public funds with the mandate to construct safety nets for women.

Yet violence against women is a universal phenomenon. Regressive social codes are not unique to India and have been a social hurdle in all countries when it came to extending political, legal, and economic rights to women (John, Ahmad et al. 2013)

Making the ArgumentIn the context of contemporary, democratic India, I make the argument that violence against women is misogynistic and rooted in brahmanical patriarchy. To substantiate the claim I juxtapose brahmanical patriarchy and India’s widows. The organisation of this paper is: (i) defining the prob-lem, (ii) examining brahmanical patriarchy, and (iii) widows in order to demonstrate the power and performance of brahmanical patriarchy.

I am influenced by the work of Uma Chakravarthi, Sharmila Rege and Kumkum Roy in, by their capacity as feminist scholars drilling deep for causes of social phenomena, and I heed the advice of Scholar–Activist, Vina Mazumdar, to weave together scholarship and activism. I look at brahmanical patriarchy through a gender lens where gender is seen not

Violence against Women in Democratic India: Let’s Talk Misogyny

Jean Chapman

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4 as an additive category, but rather as, a structuring force given that brah-manical patriarchy maps every feature of an Indian’s social life. Gender is a method located within feminist theory. A gender analysis (Chapman 2010) expresses the near universal privileging of men over women and, when we speak of gender we also speak about hierarchy, power and inequality (Kim-mel and Holler 2011). The focus on women does not deny violence against male children and adults.

[W]ithin a violence against women framework, which is informed by feminist

theory, the gendered dimension of violence against women are different from

those of violence against men, because while men may certainly be exposed

to violence as a result of their socially determined gender roles and norms,

the violence they experience – or even perpetrate against other men – rarely

if ever contributes to or confirms the overall subjugation of men as an entire

subgroup of people(Read, Hamilton 2014: p. 7).

I make no claim that the topic is original. What this essay does is to draw together disparate domains of enquiry, namely, violence against women, brahmanical patriarchy, and widows, for insights that help further to theorise violence against women within feminism. To substantiate this feminist polemic I use secondary academic and on-line resources. The purpose of this essay is to talk down ‘dream-crushing’ feminism which strips feminists of any remnants of a transformatory vision (Batliwala 2013).

Defining the ProblemTo understand the problem it becomes imperative to define it, and then move beyond definition, shame it, and strategise to combat it. In general, violence against women has been problematised, naturalised, and trivia-lised. ‘What do women and men have in common?’, was posed to a British, female comedian on radio recently. She said, ‘very little, except that they both hate women’. The quip was followed by laughter. Sadly, the quip, the laughter, serves to trivialise misogyny.

The male counterpart of misogyny is misandry. Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of females. The overt kind is when women are hated simply because they are women. Less overt is prejudice against all women or those women who fail to fall into one or more acceptable categories, examples being the mother/whore dichotomy, and the wife/mother dichotomy. Misogyny manifests itself in diverse ways: sexual discrimination, objectifica-tion and commodification of women, and mental and physical violence and the threat of violence. What informs men’s actions do not play into policies on equality, and ‘[W]ithout a clear focus on how and why men perpetrate forms of dominance over women and how their thinking can be influenced, the process of ensuring gender equality or rather that daughters are equally valued as sons, is incomplete’ (Nanda, Gautam et al. 2013: p. 1).

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Mental abuse takes the form of withholding children, food, water and medication from a mother, and shunning, belittling, isolating, and degrading her. Mental abuse is pressure exerted on a young wife for gifts, through the mechanism of dowry, which her family is expected to provide for her new patrilocal unit before and after marriage. Trolling is fearsome when anonymous men sexually abuse women on Twitter and e-mail. Older women who have put themselves forward as authority figures are at risk, as are younger women who stake a claim to being independent. Trolling feeds into the upfront version of a culture of male sneering (Howell 2013, Vittal 2013). Unmarried women living alone are resented and women who wil-fully reject male protection are even more resented. Postpartum depression is endemic among women in India who rent their wombs (Arora 2012) to couples in the Global North.

Physical violence takes the form of wife-battering, and female gen-ital mutilation, euphemistically referred to as ‘cut your nose off’. Legal impunity for marital rape increases women’s vulnerability to sexually transmitted diseases which is a grave public health issue, with devastat-ing consequences on the reproductive, sexual, physical and psychological health of women in India (Bhat and Ullman 2014). Eighty-eight per cent of incidents of honour killing are perpetrated by family members. Women are forced into marriage, pregnancy, sterilization, prostitution, and por-nography. Dowry is associated with violence against brides by husbands and the bride’s in-laws either as punishment for not providing sufficient dowry at the time of marriage or failing to meet continued demands for dowry after marriage. Dowry is the causal link to female infanticide, neglect of the female child and sex-selection abortions, and missing women on account of sex-selection technology. Society’s justification for the practice of dowry is that it provides a wealthy woman the opportunity to marry into a higher caste; increases the groom’s wealth and status; and it could provide a less talented, plain-looking or less educated woman with the opportunity to marry which might otherwise be denied to her (Priya Banerjee 2014). Women who make choice marriages run the risk of their brothers and male relatives murdering them in the name of upholding family honour, or a khap panchayat, or the sub-caste police, murdering them for not marrying by the rules of endogamy (Dhar 2013).

Violence is perpetrated in the home: in 1999 a survey on incest was conducted with 348 upper- and middle class urban women in India. Nearly half admitted to being molested; a third were aged ten and younger when they experienced serious sexual abuse including rape, at the hands of family members and family friends (Anuja Gupta 1996). Women are sold, traf-ficked as brides, kept as slaves, raped by their husbands, and shared among brothers.

The women’s movement has a long history of fighting rape in India. Laws have been enacted, but the Gujarat genocide of 2002, and the ero-

Violence against Women in Democratic IndiaJean C

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4 ticisation of rape of Muslim women, took sexual violence to a new high of terror. Rape is not random. It is structured. It thrives on everyday impunity of sexual harassment and it thrives in the twisted logic of the acceptable and the forbidden (Geetha V. 2013: pp. 50–52). Despite the fight against rape culture, it is an ongoing problem. Rape in India has its own Wiki page. In 2012, 25,000 rape cases were reported, out of which 24,470 were committed by a relative or neighbour. In 2013, about 40 per cent of married women between the ages of 15 and 49 experienced physical or sexual violence committed by their husbands. A woman married to one man can be shared by his brothers the term for which is draupadi. A case was reported in 2005 of instances where between two and five brothers living in a house married the same woman (Hundall 2013).’Rape speaks to a pervasive, deeply embedded misogyny whose roots are bedrock deep and is directly proportional to the extent of our denial of this’ and elsewhere in the blog she laments that ‘roots of such hatred are deeply Indian. This is no imposition of foreign rule (Ray Chaudhuri 2013: pp. 1,2). The disposal and conviction rates for crimes against women are low. ‘At an all-India average, 58 per cent of rape cases are disposed of, with a conviction rate of 24 per cent and the disposal rate is only 0.6 per cent for dowry deaths with a conviction rate of 33 per cent (Delhi Policy Group 2013). Violence against women is cultivated and normalised in the home and is directly transposed into the public sphere.

Violence against women in public, protest spaces is political. Its pur-pose is to intimidate women and their families from joining movements against the status quo. Public spaces have historically been seen as male preserves. Violence in the public sphere takes the form of sexual harass-ment; verbal and physical abuse in the street and workplace; stalking; crim-inality around abduction, kidnapping, organ removal, infant sex change of unwanted girls; throwing acid on women’s faces and bodies; inappropriate touching; misogynist killings such as mutilation murder, rape murder, and rape and battery which escalates into murder. Sex trafficking takes place in the public domain too, and is a billion dollar industry in India that is aided and abetted by entrenched attitudes of patriarchy, gender discrimination, and a lax legal system (Ruchira Gupta 2013). Women became collateral damage during the anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 (Kalpana Sharma 2013) the term ‘collateral damage’ giving us a clue that brahmanical patriarchy is engaging in war with its women.

Under-theorised forms of public violence include denied or limited access to emergency state-sponsored infrastructure and services such as clean water, dry food rations or shelter compared to higher caste neigh-bours; withholding and reduced services leading to increased stress and workload for women; the absence of legislation to protect women from abuse, discrimination and equality before the law; and the absence of a

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guarantee of equal opportunities for all women and men in the workplace. Disconcerting too is the rampant discrimination against girls’ access to health and education, food and clothing.

Brahmanical Patriarchy: Its Secular and Religious RootsWriting on the oppression of women in India, the Johnson sisters assert that ‘[I]t is recognised that patriarchy and the control and dominance of women by men have significant roles to play in the violence perpetrated against women’(Johnson and Johnson 2001: pp. 1053). Also playing into violence against women is son preference which is deeply rooted in patri-archal cultural and religious beliefs, and women ‘experience intense societal and familial pressure to produce a son and failure to do so, often carries the threat and consequences of violence or abandonment’ (Nanda, Gautam et al. 2013: p. 1).

There is patriarchy and there is brahmanical patriarchy, which has weathered wave upon wave of invasions by tribes with origins in the Cau-casus, Greece, Iran and Mongolia. Some came to conquer, others came to trade along the Silk Route, and some settled in the Indian subcontinent. Brahmanical patriarchy made accommodation with the invading armies, tribes and traders, their horses and their marriage practices.

The ordering of Indian society developed into a stricter caste system in later Vedic times (second century BC) due to the influence of the priestly and ruling groups who desired to secure their dominant place in society. Caste is social status and the organisation of that status to enable the exploitation, domination, and stigmatisation of castes ascribed low status. Caste is the product of sustained endogamy, and manifests itself as discrete social groups which do not permit intermarriage. The caste system artic-ulates individual responsibilities. Endogamy is so peculiar to caste that it spawned or sustained a range of mechanisms in the development of caste. For example, brahmans were the first class to raise the walls of endogamy around themselves which served to keep some in, and to lock others out. Brahmans are the rock stars of the caste system as they have land, power, prestige and monopoly over religious ideology and ritual.The caste system hinges on the power to enforce caste-based obligations. Secular power is through the control by upper castes of land and social status.

Endogamy has been emulated by other castes. Endogamous groups regulate and maintain themselves through religious sanction and rituals validating and reinforcing the role of the priestly caste. It is relevant to note that higher castes often place more restrictions on, and assign lower status to women in general, and to widows in particular.

Within brahmanical patriarchy the ordering of society was based on the ownership of land. The parallel process of owning land by the upper castes, and creating vast pools of productive, landless labour, then justify-


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4 ing it on religious grounds is also a mechanism of brahmanical patriarchy. Caste has two hierarchies, religious and occupational, and two phenomena, ritual rigidity and occupational flexibility.

Scholarship from the Dalit’s perspective has done much to construct alternate knowledge to the dominant narrative traditionally penned by upper caste, middle class scholars. An alternative paradigm was first advanced by Dr B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), a jurist, historian and econ-omist. He looked for the origin of caste and characterised it as a system of graded inequality in which castes are arranged according to an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt. His periodisation is Brahmanic India, the barbarian phase of Aryan society of the Vedic period, then Buddhist India, which saw the rise of civilisation and the Buddhist Revolution of the Maurya Empires of Magadha (circa 600 BC), and the third period of Indian history is Hindu India, marked by counter revolu-tion, the triumph of caste, the subordination of women, and the writing of Manusmriti: Manu is the progenitor of man and the law giver.

As a feminist scholar and activist, Sharmila Rege’s focus in her 2013 work is to recover Ambedkar’s writings that link caste and gender, and reclaim them as feminist classics on brahmanical patriarchy. The secondary purpose of her work is to examine the rise and fall in the status of women over the centuries.

Using the brahmanical texts from the period BC 800 to BC 400, Kum-kum Roy demonstrates the links between stratification along the axis of caste/class and gender. Using rituals as the basis of her study she shows how control over production and reproduction is used by the king on one hand, and by the head of the household on the other. Thus in two parallel processes patriarchal control over production and reproduction and the subordination of women was established (quoted in Chakravarti 2003: pp. 45–46). The priests ritualised it. The kings implemented it. The patriarch brought it in through the front door.

Like the king of yesteryear, the duty of the head of the household is to control the sexuality of the women in the household. The sexual behaviour of certain categories of women is not only under male control, but also closely guarded in order to the keep the endogamous group pure.

Vital to brahmanical patriarchy is its acceptance by women. The underpinning of this acceptance is pativrata or wifely duties which are tied to prescriptive textual models which remain sacred. Pativrata is the total devotion of a wife to her husband, her lord: a woman’s career is her husband. Girls, then adolescents, and later, wives are schooled in pativrata which are internalised by them who attempt to live up to the idealised notions of a wife. This, in turn, becomes the ideology which woman accepts and aspires towards. Chastity and fidelity become the highest expression of selfhood and salvation, the release from the cycle of birth and rebirth to be one with the universe.

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Also vital to brahmanical patriarchy is acceptance of its ideology and practices by non-Hindu religious groups in India and abroad. Muslims, Sikhs and Christians have kept their caste identities within their new reli-gions and practice. Unlike racism, where its practitioners may experience guilt and conflict because the existential order does not live up to the ideal, in caste-stratified Indian society the real behaviour of upper castes in rela-tion to lower castes harmonises with the ideals laid out in ancient brahman-ical texts. The female-headed Minister of Human Resources has already announced that ancient Hindu texts will be introduced into the educational system, erasing any other perspective of history (Borpujari 2014).

A foretaste of refashioning India as a Hindu nation was the Gujarat pogrom in 2002 which is now known as ‘the night of the long swords’. It left 2,000 Muslims dead and 150,000 homeless and

rapist men in mobs came sometimes dressed in saffron underwear or khaki

shorts, the emblems of the Sangh, rape in this instance . . . was performed as

a religious and political duty in which Hindu male sexual organs functioned

as instruments of torture…. an invention of Hindu masculinity as a form of

bhakti or religious devotion…’1

which marks a change from a usually tolerant Hinduism to a violent one. The consequences were borne by Muslim women, men and children. Pregnant women and little girls were raped, their stomachs slashed open, and children burnt before the eyes of their parents (Jyotsna Kapur 2006: p. 336).Such acts of brutality cannot be ignored and such misogyny has to be ousted and shamed. Another type of misogyny is centuries old and meted out to widows.

Widows, the Achilles Heel of Indian SocietySharmila Rege’s reading of Ambedkar is that widows and widowers received differential treatment. Surplus women were disposed of in two ways, sati and enforced and degraded widowhood. Surplus men were permitted to lead a life of asceticism or marry someone from a not-yet marriageable age. A moral fence was scaled and girl child marriage institutionalised (Sharmila Rege 2013: p. 61), and it is upon the fragile shoulders of the girl child that brahmanical patriarchy rests (Jasodhara Bagchi 1993). Essential to brah-manical patriarchy the girl child may be, but she too is subject to abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, infanticide when newborns are smothered, poisoned, drowned, force fed grain husks to choke them to death, buried alive, or abandoned to the elements. Sex-selection technology ensures that she never sees the light of day thus perpetuating female foeticide, or ‘to put it bluntly, scientific advances have been utilized in India to encourage female infanti-cide’ (Vibhuthi Patel 1985: p. 2), and widen the gender gap. The all-India sex ratio is now 940 females to 1,000 males which translates into 34,874,113 missing women (Delhi Policy Group 2013: p. 2).


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4 Widows are sacrificed on the altar of misogyny. One fatal form of violence on which there has been social and religious sanction over the centuries is the ritual burning of women. Sati is a funeral practice, prosa-ically referred to as co-cremation, in which a wife immolates herself. She lay beside her dead husband. The priest lights the pyre. Shrines to the dead woman continue to be treated with reverence and worship. Brahmanical patriarchy lauded the practice of sati as required conduct for women, and differentiated between sati and suicide. The former was sanctioned and the latter banned by the sacred texts.

Ideologically, sati was deemed to be an act of piety able to purge the wife of her sins, release her from the cycle of birth and rebirth, and ensure salvation for her husband and the seven generations that followed her. In many cases all assets, including the wife, went to the husband’s family upon his death. A calculation which a sati, the chaste one, had to make was whether it was better to be dead and immortalised, or whether to leave her financial and emotional wellbeing in the hands of the patrilocal unit. She had to make a similar calculation on behalf of her children.

Sati was prohibited in 1829 but burning women is embedded in the practice of dowry.

The other method of winnowing surplus women is degraded wid-owhood. According to the 2011 Census, India has 34 million widows. By 2014 there are 40 million widows which represent 10 per cent of the female population (Radioaustralia 18 March 2014), ages ranging from 7 to 97. Widows are perceived to bring bad luck. Nay, it is taboo to look at a widow. Widows are expected to shed all physical adornments, including long hair, shave their heads, wear coarse white saris, and desist from wearing jewel-lery and make-up. There is a taboo for placing the red dot in the middle of the forehead denoting sexual energy. Widows are effectively de-sexualised, de-feminized, and uglified so that men are not tempted to become sexually engaged with them. With twisted logic, widows are also re-sexualised as sexually available, sexually experienced and sexual competition. Widows are routinely subjected to sexual harassment and abuse by men and women within the confines of the patrilocal unit.

Because of their perceived inauspiciousness, widows are excluded from marriage, conception, birth, and death rituals. Some are excluded from fes-tivals. They cannot be cremated on venerated sites, but for years their dead bodies could be put into a jute bag and thrown into a venerated river. Some flee the social stigma of widowhood and go to temple cities as pilgrims to devote their lives to praying for release from birth and rebirth cycle. The more famous temple cities are Bhubaneshwar and Puri in Odisha with over 600 temples; Kanchipuram with a thousand temples; 31 in Tirupati; and 920 in Shatrunjaya, Gujarat. Hindu and Jain temples are in Khajuraho. Other temple cities are Thanjavur, Madurai, Tiruchirappali, Amritsar, and Mathura. A strong belief exists, for example in upper-caste Hindu house-

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holds in rural West Bengal, that after the death of her husband, a widow can live with dignity only in religious towns (Mander 2012). Getting rid of widowed women in the guise of sending them away on a spiritual journey is an age-old Indian practice.

The plight of India’s widows in Varanasi was depicted in the 2005 movie ‘Water’ directed by Deepa Mehta. Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh is the site of Radha and Krishna worship, has over 5,000 temples, and 20,000 widows and abandoned women from across the country, especially Bengal. Some sing religious songs in temples in exchange for a meagre meal or cash. Most beg and scavenge for food and money. Most are under-nourished and in ill health. Street widows cannot afford board and lodging, and often spend their last days alone on roadsides.

Thousands of widowed women lead miserable lives in the dharmasha-las of Vrindavan. Living alone and having no one to protect them has made widows vulnerable. They reportedly suffer the worst form of exploitation. Also called sevadasis, the widows, especially the younger ones, perform ser-vices in whatever form for the owners of dharmashalas and bhajan ashrams, priests and generous donors. Services include sex. The paradox is if a widow admits to being sexually exploited she runs the risk of losing the support of her peer group (Tripathi 2005). Individuals and NGOs have moved into Vrindavan to make widows their bread and butter issue.

The source of marginalisation of India’s widows is patrilocal residence and patrilineal inheritance. Under the laws of patrilocality, an Indian wife becomes the property of her in-laws’ family, and when her husband dies, they can decide how to accommodate her emotional, religious and economic needs. Patrilineal inheritance denies widows inheritance rights over their father’s property, and their customary and legal rights over their husband’s share of family property.

As with the tribes and Silk Road traders of yesteryear, and the modes of production since, India’s neo-liberal project is shackled to brahmanical patriarchy and the descent from bride to widow can be rapid. Arranged marriages are the norm. Importance is given to marriage within the rules of the endogamous group. Also favoured are non-resident Indian green card holders with citizenship of a Western nation (Bajpai 2013), any nation. A new set of problems have emerged. Dowry is negotiated and given. Mar-riages are sanctified. Some brides are doused with kerosene and a lighted match is flicked in their direction. They may be burned to death, or scarred, maimed for life. The terminology has changed. No longer called sati, it is now called dowry death, and accidental death. It is not done by the hus-band alone but with his female and male relatives, and together, they will start negotiating dowry for the next bride. Survivors of dowry violence say they know their fate beforehand, and no matter what they do to appease the in-laws, they can do absolutely nothing to avert the inevitable. Brides from beyond the subcontinent’s borders formalise their marriages in India, and


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4 pack their bags to go on their honeymoon and end up, abandoned, without passports and money, family and friends, in a holy city with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Some become sex workers to the thousands of priests and pilgrims who flock to temple cities. The sex industry in temple cities is attracting urban women and women from the Global North.

Concluding RemarksMy assumption is that misogyny is rooted in brahmanical patriarchy. Some men see it as their birthright to traumatise women by injecting a pall of fear over their lives. If you can afford it you can avoid it. Upper caste, middle-class women opt for a car, a driver, a cell phone, and agitated community. Women in public places are fair game to be leered at, stalked and touched. Violence then moves along a continuum to the ultimate horror of multiple crimes of battery, mutilation, rape and murder on just one woman who hopped on a bus after a movie in Delhi in December 2012. Her male friend was brutalised and their naked bodies were tossed out of the bus on to the street.

Further illustrations of misogyny reside within the home. The only ritual women are permitted is to pray for their husband’s wellbeing and longevity. She might also implore her deities to stave off infertility and bear-ing female children. Misogyny is the underlying principle of patrilocality as women are sold into a family to bear sons for perpetuating her husband’s caste confident that she will reap benefits in her afterlife no matter how many sons she bears in the present one. The father/son relationship trumps the wife/husband relationship within brahmanical patriarchy.Misogyny is writ large in who is and who is not a son, there are 13 types and a classic case of misogyny, to my mind, is, according to Manu, a son born to a daughter: when a man has no son but a daughter he can have his daughter cohabit with a man selected or appointed by him. The man’s right to compel his daughter to submit to sexual intercourse with a man of his choice in order to get a son for himself continued to exist even after the daughter was married.

Misogyny born of brahmanical patriarchy is impunity to violate and discipline women; to contest their access to the public domain; to chal-lenge or subvert their determination to speak and act for themselves and to preserve male dominance. Nowhere is this clearer than the treatment of India’s widows. As wives they adhered to brahmanical patriarchy’s doc-trine of pativrata, or wifely duties, which Uma Chakravarti characterises as a masterstroke of genius. It was one of the most successful ideologies constructed by any patriarchal system. Within it women themselves control their own sexuality and believe that they gain power and respect through the codes they adopt. Pativrata is also the means by which the iniquitous and hierarchical structures are reproduced with the complicity of women. The actual mechanisms and institutions of control over women’s sexuality and the gendered subordination of women are completely masked: patri-

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archy can be firmly established as an ideology since it came to be ‘natura-lised’(Chakravarti 2003: p. 74).

Women who escape violence and abuse in their marital homes, and those who are turned out by their spouses, deserted and abandoned, have to survive the trauma of standing alone in a hostile patriarchal society, for which they were never socialised. They learn all too soon how ill-equipped they are to meet their own needs for survival, and even less equipped to address the needs of their children. The ideological underpinning that permits this constant abuse of widows has allowed their abusers to escape punishment. Impunity for those who commit violence against widows is widespread. Impunity contributes to the perpetuation of brahmanical patriarchy – now a mutation that is dangerous – the subordination of women, violence and the threat of violence against widows.

In conclusion, calling out violence against women is as depressing as it is challenging. Having defined what I mean by violence against women, I go beyond description, and attempt to forge a link between misogyny and brahmanical patriarchy. Future research, using a gender lens will explore misogyny and the devdasi system which became common in the sixth cen-tury CE in Vedic scripture (N. Vanamamalai 1974, David 2009, Colundalur 2011). Anil Chawla on devdasis notes, the temple institution’s sanction of the pursuit of feminine skills and the exercise of sex and child-bearing func-tions outside the conventional domestic context was evident.

...The insistence on the pre-pubertal status of the girl was an imitation of the

brahmanical custom which saw marriage as the only religious initiation per-

missible to women. . . . On this occasion the procreative and nuptial rites per-

formed at the time of actual consummation of a Brahmin marriage were also

carried out and auspicious wedding songs celebrating sexual union sung before

the ‘couple’. From then on the devdasi was a woman eternally free from wid-

owhood and in that auspicious capacity she performed for the first time her

ritual and artistic duties in the temple (Chawla n.d.: p. 12).

Another somewhat contentious issue on which one can usefully apply a gender lens is to contextualise misogyny within the narratives of out-sourcing surrogacy to poor women in India by the Global North (Markens 2010/2011, Arora 2012, Li 2014).

Armed with a narrative that challenges brahmanical patriarchy, we need committed allies to stop violence against women in what might turn out to be a rapidly changing political landscape. I propose two strategies, and promote a third. Number one: adopt a widow preferably one that lived in your neighbourhood. Strategy two: engage with knowledge construction on Indian masculinity and the links, if any, to the troubling notion that violence is one of the few things that can command respect among the lost generation of ill-educated, marginalised young men (Desai 2014), and the impact on males of the finding that the vast majority of missing women


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4 in India are adults and not girls (Anderson and Ray 2012). Strategy three: stop the practice of dowry. Let us make a public vow, with our female and male comrades and activists, friends, families, colleagues, our children and grandchildren, on what we hold most sacred, to neither take nor give dowry or participate in pre- and post-wedding ceremonies where, honouring the practice of dowry, daughters are sold by patriarchs so that their lineage continues.

Note 1 The Sangh is an abbreviated form of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, established in

1925. The recently elected Prime Minister cut his political teeth in the Sangh.

ReferencesAnderson, S. and D. Ray (2012), ‘The age distribution of missing women in India’,

Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XLVII, No. 47–48, pp. 87–95. Arora, I. (2012), ‘Wombs for rent: outsourcing surrogacy to India’; available at www.

prospectjournalucsd, accessed on 14 March 2014, pp. 1–7. Bagchi, J. (1993), ‘Socialising the girl child in colonial Bengal’, Economic & Political

Weekly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 41, 9 October 1993, Vol. 2214–19. Bajpai, A. (2013), ‘Across the high seas. Abuse, desertion, and violence in Transnational

marriages in India’, Violence Against Women, Vol. 20, No. 4. Banerjee, P.R. (2014), ‘Dowry in 21st-century India: the sociocultural face of

exploitation’, Trauma, Violence & Abuse, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 34–40. Batliwala, S. (2013), ‘Beyond individual stories: women have moved mountains’, 18

February 2013; available at www.opendemocracy.net, accessed on 14 March 41, pp. 1–4.

Bhat, M. and S.E. Ullman (2014), ‘Examining marital violence in India: review and recommendations for future research and practice’, Trauma, Violence & Abuse, January, Vol. 15, No. 1, 57–74.

Borpujari, P. (2014), ‘Dislike the new government? Attack the female minister’, 8 June 2014; available at www.openDemocracy.net/5050, accessed on 8 June 2014.

Chakravarti, U. (2003), Gendering Caste: Through A Feminist Lens, Mandira Sen for STREE, an imprint of Bhatkal and Sen, Calcutta.

Chapman, J. (2010), A Gender Perspective on Landmine Management in Kampuchea, Lambert Academic Publishing GmbH & Co, Staarbrucken, LAP.

Chawla, A. (n.d.), ‘Devdasis – sinners or sinned against?’; available at www.samarthb-harat.com, accessed on 31 December 2013, p. 52.

Colundalur, N. (2011), ‘Devdasis are a Cursed Community’, The Guardian, Guardian Media Group, London, pp. 1–3.

David, A.R. (2009), ‘Performing for the gods? Dance and embodied ritual in British Hindu temples’, South Asian Popular Culture, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 217–31.

Delhi Policy Group (2013), ‘Gender Scorecard 2013’; available at www.delhipolicy-group.com, accessed 9 April 2014.

Desai, K. (2014), ‘Behind India’s shocking gang rapes lies a deep crisis among young men’, The Guardian, Guardian Media Group, London, Vol. 1–3.

Dhar, R. L. (2013), ‘Intercaste marriage: a study from the Indian context’, Marriage & Family review, Vol. 49, pp. 1–25.

Geetha V. (2013), ‘Remembering Sharmila Rege’, Indian Association of Women’s Studies, Vol. III, Vol. 1, pp. 50–52.

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Gupta, A. (1996), Voices From The Silent Zone: Women’s Experiences of Incest and Child-hood Abuse, Recovering and Healing from Incest (RAHI), New Delhi, pp. 1–40.

Gupta, R. (2013), ‘India: examining the motivation for rape’, 8 January 2014; available at www.opendemocracy.net, accessed on 10 May 2014, pp. 1–4.

Howell, L. (2013), ‘The insidious effects of trolling women on TV and radio in the UK’, 1 August 2013; available at www.openDemocracy.net, accessed on 6 June 2014, pp. 1–4.

Hundall, S. (2013), ‘Why India is sitting on a social time-bomb of violence against women’; available at www.newstatesman.com, accessed on 16 December 2013.

John, D. et al. (2013), ‘India: violence against women. Current challenges and future trends’; available at www.freiheit.org/India-Violence-Against-Women-Cur-rent-Challenges-and-Furute-Trends/1804c27055i/index.html, accessed on 19 November 2013, Nr. 26/2013.

Johnson, P. S. and J.A. Johnson (2001), ‘The oppression of women in India’, Violence Against Women, Vol. 7, No. 9, 1051–68.

Kapur, J. (2006), ‘Love in the Midst of Fascism: Gender and Sexuality in the Contem-porary Indian Documentary’, Visual Anthropology, Vol. 19, pp. 335–46.

Kimmel, M. S. and J. Holler (2011), The Gendered Society, Don Mills, Ont., Oxford University Press, Canadian Edition.

Li, J. (2014), ‘Cornell professor speaks about surrogacy outsourcing’, The Ithacan, http://theithacan.org/news/cornell-professor-speaks-about-surrogacy-outsourc-ing/, 8 June, p. 1.

Mander, H. (2012), ‘Barefoot: lone warriors’, The Hindu, The Hindu Group, Chennai. Markens, S. (2010/2011), ‘Interrogating narratives about the global surrogacy market’,

The Scholar and Feminist Online, Double Issue 9, 1-9.2 Fall 2010/Spring 2011, N. Vanamamalai (1974), ‘State and religion in the Chola Empire: taxation for Thanja-

vur Temple’s music and dance’, Social Scientist, Vol. 27, October, pp. 26–42. Nanda, P., et al. (2013), ‘Masculinity, son preference and intimate partner violence’,

International Centre for Research on Women, New Delhi, pp. 1–8. Patel, V. (1985), ‘Women’s liberation in India’, New Left Review, Vol. 1, No. 153, Sep-

tember–October, pp. 2–9. Ray Chaudhuri, P. (2013), ‘Being female in India: a hate story’, Ms. Magazine blog;

available at http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/01/07/being-female-in-india-a-hate-story/, pp. 1–11.

Read-Hamilton, S. (2014), ‘Gender-based violence: a confused and contested term’, Humanitarian Practice Network, No. 60, February 2014.

Rege, S. (2013), Against The Madness Of Manu: B.R. Ambedkar’s Writings On Brahman-ical Patriarchy, Navayana, New Delhi.

Sharma, K. (2013), ‘The politics of violence’, The Hindu Sunday Magazine, The Hindu Group, Chennai, pp. 1–2.

Tripathi, P. (2005), ‘The living dead’, Frontline, The Hindu Group, Chennai. Vittal, V. (2013), ‘Why trolls have it easy’; available at www.Indiatogether.org/internet-

women-27July-2013, accessed on 14 March 2014.

Jean Chapman is a Research Associate, Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Can-cordia University, Montreal, Canada.

Violence Against Women in Democratic IndiaJean C

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4

The Review of Agrarian Studies is the peer-reviewed journal of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies(www.agrarianstudies.org), a charitable trust based in India and established in 2003. The major objectives of the Foundation are to facilitate and sponsor multi-disciplinary theoretical and empirical enquiry in the field of agrarian studies in India and elsewhere in less-developed countries. The Foundation does so in association with a wide section of people interested in the agrarian question, including persons associated with academic institutions, social and political activists, members of mass organizations working in the countryside, and other professionals and scholars.

Volume 4, Number 1, February–June, 2014

Research Articles

T. Jayaraman and Kamal Murari Climate Change and Agriculture: Current and Future Trends, and Implications for India

R. Ramakumar and Pallavi Chavan Bank Credit to Agriculture in India in the 2000s: Dissecting the Revival

Jacob John Homestead Farming in Kerala: A Multi-Faceted Land-Use System

A. Bheemeshwar Reddy and Madhura Swaminathan Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Rural India: Evidence from Ten Villages

Research Notes and Statistics

Brinda Karat and Vikas Rawal Scheduled Tribe Households: A Note on Issues of Livelihood

Book Reviews

Tejal Kanitkar Climate Change and Food Production Systems

www.ras.org.in

63

French travellers, during their travels in the Orient in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have always shown intense curiosity for diverse issues, besides pursuing political and commercial objectives. A theme that they were immensely interested in, and extensively wrote about in their travel-ogues is the inhuman practice of sati or widow burning in India. This issue has received much scholarly attention, yet a lacuna persists in the literature, as the varied observations and impressions of French travellers about the custom have not been properly explored. Using specifically the accounts of French travellers and adventurers (both translated and untranslated) about India, this article highlights the diverse and hitherto understudied percep-tions of these travellers about sati as practiced in Mughal India. With regard to sati, Gayatri Spivak’s essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’,1 raises a valid point that whatever details of the practice one gets, are from the accounts of the British colonial officials or upper-caste Hindu social reformers, as there was no written account on the narrative of sati –performing-widow herself. She elaborates her argument by showing that while the ban on sati by the colonial government was, in the colonial perception, an act of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, Indian nationalists emphasised on the heroism of ‘women [who] wanted to die’ through self-immolation. She comes to a conclusion that subaltern (as woman) were not allowed to speak.2 Lata Mani goes a step further to raise a question: ‘Can she (the woman immolating herself) be heard?’3 According to her, woman was nei-ther the subject nor even the primary object of concern in the contestations among the colonial rulers, Christian missionaries and the local elite.4 This argument has been questioned by Uma Narayan5 who argues that Mani disavows the woman’s desire to become a sati. In a similar vein, Catherine Weinberger-Thomas6 perceives sati as an act of devotional suicide, fidelity and heroism. This essay tries to show that the arguments of both Mani and Thomas were already mentioned by different French voyagers much before the establishment of colonial empire in India. These diverse facets recorded by French voyagers have enormous relevance in order to understand their opinion about sati of the ‘Oriental’ world.

The Sati SystemIn contemporary world, sati has become the contested symbol which appropriates to a symbol of female subordination and feminist resistance.7

Widow Immolation in Mughal India: Perceptions of French Travellers and Adventurers in the

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

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4 But we find that the practice of sati has not only been discussed by the sev-enteenth-century French travellers, but it also found a space in the mem-oirs of the eighteenth-century adventurers. All European travellers have given vivid descriptions of the practice. It appears that a French traveller’s account of the Orient was not given any credence by his audience unless it had some pages on this practice which could touch their hearts.8 Augustin Hiriart has mentioned that this Hindu custom, according to which after the death of the husband the wife was set to fire alive along with the corpse of her husband, was prevalent in India.9 This was a barbaric practice which annoyed every European voyager in India. Malherbe has criticised this ‘malicious’ practice performed by the Brahmins, mentioning the Mughal rulers’ efforts to prohibit it.10 He credited Akbar for following a policy of religious toleration and attempting to prohibit the burning of women on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands.11The word ‘sati’ connotes a ‘virtuous’ woman who adheres to the religious and social ideals of a dutiful wife not only throughout her life, but also in death by immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her husband. Colonel Polier has described the mythic rationale for the practice: the story of the marriage of sati with lord Shiva who immolated herself to save the honour of her husband, her re-incar-nation as Parvati and also her eternal love with Shiva.12 To this Joseph Tieffenthaler has added that Indians respected Sita, the wife of Rama as a goddess who proved her chastity by undergoing a trial by fire after being rescued by Rama from Ravana.13 On the public reception of this practice and those who practiced it, Modave has written, ‘Women are burnt alive, with the dead body of their husbands, to the great satisfaction of their chil-dren and to public acclaim. This honour was not given to all as it was the right enjoyed by only some privileged families even as there were rumours that they may have a dislike for it’.14 Challes Dellon remarks that ‘unless she wants to lose her reputation, [the widow] is obliged to burn herself in the same fire which consumes the pyre’.15 During his visit to Tibet, Law de Lauriston observed that while the majority of Hindus burnt their dead, some buried them along with their wives. In his words, ‘one makes a deep pit where one puts the dead and the alive woman over it, if she wants to follow her husband, people promptly throw sand on her so that she is soon chocked to death’. Thus the French travellers gave varied observations of the existence of this barbarous custom deriving its origin from mythical tales, religious implications and social pressure to prove the chastity of married women.

Tavernier has mentioned about this ‘brutal’ practice observed by the ‘idolaters’ in Vengurla, a province in the kingdom of Bijapur. According to him, the cruel mentality of men forced their womenfolk to undergo sati in all circumstances; there could be some delay in the immolation of a widow in certain disruptive circumstances, but this ‘barbaric’ custom was still mandatory for them. For instance, once the priests and the relatives of a

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childless widow, after obtaining permission of the governor ,were ready to burn her with the corpse of her husband after

... making three circuits which they are accustomed to make round the pit, sud-

denly such heavy rain fell that the priests, wishing to withdraw to shelter, threw

the women into the pit. But the rain was so heavy and lasted so long that it put

out the fire, and the women was not burnt. Rising at midnight, she knocked

at the house of one of her relatives, where several Dutchmen and the capuchin

Father Zenon went to see her. She was in a frightful condition, hideous and dis-

figured, but the pain she had already suffered did not prevent her from going,

attended by her relatives, be burnt two days later.16

Tavernier’s writing tries to reflect the patriarchal dominance to pres-surise womenfolk to commit mandatory self-immolation, to prove the male-superiority over the weaker section [women] of the society.

Reasons for the Sati SystemThe French travellers had a feeling that as the Indian patriarchal society wanted to protect the widow’s chastity, socio-emotional pressure was put on her to commit sati though in some instances women with children were exempted. They recognised that these notions of duty and faith had solidi-fied over the ages across the country and were not the products of a specific time and place. Narrating a myth on the origin of this custom, Mocquet has stated that it

... continued, as they say, ever since a certain Gentil [Hindu] king, who reigned

amongst them; who seeing how all the men of his kingdom died and knowing

that it was their wives who poisoned them, to have other husbands, and that

those who had children should continue to live in order to take care of them,

but without the right to ever marry again, instituted this: they observe this

very strictly and do nothing but groan, weep and lament during the rest of

their lives and at certain hours of the day and night, howl and lament in such a

strange manner that it’s a great pity to hear them.17

The French travellers also gave fresh approach to the reason for sati – in order to safeguard the men-women ratio in favour of men, by creating a fear in the mind of women never to poison their husbands, as thereafter, they would have to lead a pathetic life. Sonnerat gives reason that wives gives poison to their husband in order to get liberty or enjoy new amours.18

Corroborating Mocquet’s view, Challes Dellon has written that in

India, women often grew weary of their husbands, [and] made a common

practice of ridding their hands of them by poison. The many tragic instances

of this nature did oblige the Princes, who were not always exempt from the

cruel designs of women, to make a law that all women of what age and quality

forever, should be burnt with the dead carcasses of their husbands.19

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4 According to Ram Prasad Chandra, English travellers, too, have noted that the custom rose out of a need to prevent the dangerous consequences of women’s disloyalty to their husbands. Chandra sums up these travellers’ argument that Indian women

... in former times, by secret means, ultimately poisoned them [i.e., their hus-

bands], to enjoy their paramours: the Rajahs (kings), therefore, to restrain this

practice, procured the Brahmans to make it an act of religion to interdict sec-

ond marriages to the women, and also that after the death of their husbands,

the women should no longer survive. So that they might become more careful

of their acts.20

However, Abbe Dubois has squarely blamed the male suspicion that a woman might poison her husband to death. Criticising this male prejudice as the reason for the custom, Dubois has reasoned that

... a dying husband can entertain no jealousy of his wife surviving him, inas-

much as she is doomed, after his demise, to perpetual widowhood. The most

discontented wife would have more to gain by submitting to the severest hus-

band, than she could expect by becoming a widow, at the expense of such a

crime, which could lead to no hope of improving her situation by any new

engagement.21

According to Dellon, the custom was supported by the religious belief that those performing sati would be assured of getting pleasure in the other world. The imagination of procuring a halo to achieve a place in paradise for a sati was aberrant and unscientific in the rational mind of these trav-ellers. Dellon has also blamed the craftiness of the priests, who persuaded the women to perform this suicidal act courageously. He has further stated that if the women lacked courage to commit self-immolation, the Brah-mins, in order to prevent them from fleeing, would shut the door of the hut-like palanquin in which she was carried to the spot of cremation to perform this ‘barbarous’ custom. Thevenot has added that those who were afraid to perform sati were forced to live a life of contempt by their families which blamed them for their ‘cowardice’ to face a ‘heroic’ death.22 Dellon was surprised to find that sometimes ‘men of very advanced age marry a girl of seven to eight years of age, who, notwithstanding the innocence and tenderness of their age, were forced to conform themselves to the barba-rous custom of their country, if their husbands die before them’.23 These travellers were in a dilemma whether this custom was a social construction or did it have a religious relevance but the reason they derived was always impartial. As most of rational minded travellers such as Bernier, Dubois, and Tieffenthaler systematically analysed the Hindu society to raise ques-tions against its inhuman practice as sati.

While writing about the practice in Ajmer, Rajasthan, Joseph Tief-fenthaler has stated that ‘according to the custom of the country, to throw

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a great number of its women on pyre, making them burn in order to pre-vent them from falling in the hands of the enemy sometimes the women committed suicide by killing themselves’.24 Boigne, too, has mentioned of the custom of jauhar or ritual self-immolation by Rajput women to safeguard their honor from victorious invaders. He has also cited several historic instances of this practice. In 1537, when Bahadur Shah, ruler of Gujarat, attacked Chittor, capital of Rajput state Mewar which was under the regency of Rani Karnavati, the queen committed jauhar along with 13,000 women.25 In 1560, when Akbar defeated the Rajputs, nine queens, five princesses and more than 10,000 women performed jauhar joyfully while singing. In 1792, when Sindhias bombarded Chittor, all the women stabbed themselves in order to escape dishonor by the invaders.26 Occident travellers realised how much the Hindus women valued their chastity and to protect it, they were even ready to sacrifice their lives. Their observa-tion reflects that this sacrifice were grave mostly when the Muslim defeats Hindu raja rather than other way round.

Modave has narrated an account of the sati committed by Jat queens after the capture of Dig by the army of Najaf Khan27. When some wives in the seraglio of the deceased Raja had not been given the permission to commit self-immolation, one of the chief eunuchs of the seraglio told them, ‘You are going to pass into the hands of the enemy of your religion and of the family of the husband whom you have lost. You will be exposed to greatest indignities if you do not anticipate them by a voluntary death’.28 Eventually, he succeeded in persuading these unhappy women to commit the act, and they prayed to him to procure for them the means of ensuring a quick death. The eunuch spread a large carpet on the ground on which these women laid down, and he cut their heads one after another, complet-ing the ‘horrible massacre’.29

The French travellers perceived another reason for the observance of this custom which had nothing to do with the affection of widows towards their deceased husbands: the effect of certain deep-rooted beliefs about conjugal loyalty and devotion instilled early in and transmitted across gen-erations of women. In the words of Bernier:

Every girl is taught by her mother that it is virtuous and laudable for a wife to

mingle her ashes with those of her husband’s, and that no woman of honour

will refuse compliance with the established custom. These opinions were incul-

cated in men who used it as an instrument for keeping wives in subjection,

of securing their attention in times of sickness and of deterring them from

administering poison to their husbands.30

Francois Martin de Vitre, too, has observed that ‘when the Gentils die, their wives burn themselves with the body of their husband, as they throw themselves into the fire which reputed for the more virtue’.31 In a similar vein, Francois de la Boullaye le Gouz has observed that sati originated from


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4 the Hindu’s belief that lord Rama had ordained that women should take care of their husbands not only in this world, but also in the other world. He stated that after the death of the wives of Brahmins in some tribes,

... they (i.e., Brahmins) cannot tie a second knot with a virgin, otherwise they

would be squalid, because of the mixture of seeds, but if a Brahman or Banian

suddenly dies, his wife cannot remarry . . . in some places the living wives burn

themselves to be in his company in the other world as has been ordered by

Ram, since a wife is obliged to take care of the husband.32

Such a belief in the virtue of committing sati, when passed on from generation to generation, became easily acceptable to women and helped in strengthening male chauvinism, as has been highlighted by contemporary feminists. For countless centuries, women in India had been subordinated to men and been socially oppressed. The various religious practices, tra-ditions and personal laws supported this belief and consigned women to a status inferior to that of the men.33 Bernier has testified that when some widows resisted this crude custom, they were socially boycotted.34 Thus, it was the public opinion that compelled the widows to accept the irrational principle of honour. Commenting on the force of this severely negative societal attitude towards widows, Bernier has stated that ‘no individual or that nation will at any time, or under any circumstances, associate with the creature so degraded, who is accounted utterly infamous, and execrated because of the dishonor which her conduct has brought upon the religion of the country’.35 Then afterwards, she was exposed to ill-treatment by, her low and vulgar protectors. Bernier has concluded that,

the life of Gentil [Hindu] widow was really a tale of frustration and shame, and

even her appearance was considered inauspicious on many occasions. Thus, in

the majority of cases, the widows realised that it was better for them to become

sati than to lead a life of bitterness and continued agony.36

He showed his concern towards the horrifying state of a Hindu sati, who had no alternative than to be bound by the social construction in a Indian patriarchal world.

Describing sati as ‘an ancient custom among the idolaters [Hindus]’, Dubois noted that ‘the happiest death for a woman is that which overtakes her while she is still in a wedded state. Such a death is looked upon as the reward of goodness extending back for many generations; on the other hand, the greatest misfortune that can befall a wife is to survive her hus-band’.37According to some partisans of sati,

a woman does not immediately become a widow on the death of her husband,

but rather it is only after his cremation that the wife becomes a widow and if

she dies along with her husband by self-immolation, then she dies as a non

-widow woman (avidhava nari) . . . . This differentiates from European con-

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ception which assumes the practice of sati can only be undertaken by widows.38

Tavernier paints a picture of the sad plight of the widows who did not observe it:

The head of the widow is shaved off and she despoils herself of all the orna-

ments. She is submissive and remains the rest of her life without any consid-

eration that if she does not perform sati she lives a life which is worse than

that of a slave. This implies that widows who refused to burn themselves were

held in disgrace by the society; they were considered inauspicious and were not

allowed to take part in any religious ceremonies. Such miserable conditions

thus, forced women ‘to detest life and prefer to ascend a funeral pyre to be

consumed by fire alive with the body of her deceased husband’.39

According to Tavernier40 and Bernier,41 there was a certain belief in the transmigration of souls underlying the idea of burning or sacrificing oneself seven times for the deceased husband, and such an act could give her ‘a cer-tain reminiscence, or prophetic spirit, which had been imparted to her at that moment of her dissolution’. Bernier also witnessed multiple sacrifices of widows and their slaves. This reveals the rich symbolism of sati which became the basis of Thomas’ argument that sati was a mark of sacredness in religious tradition rather than mere subordination. Bernier has noted that in one instance, five women who were slaves ‘having deep affection to their mistress in consequence of the illness of her husband . . . were [so] moved with compassion that they entered into an engagement to perish by the same flames that consumed their beloved mistress’.42 Sonnerat goes one step further to show the loyalty of entire royal Indian families towards the head [man] of their family by sacrificing their lives as he narrated ‘at the death ceremony of king or princes, the entire family, father, mother, children, servants, all jumped into the flames to show their attachment and their remorse’.43 After witnessing the horrifying processions of sati and their miseries, Bernier has called this ceremony a ‘direful tragedy’. Dellon has noted that in some places of India, all the officers in the household of a prince were burnt with their dead master. Thevenot has remarked that the Brahmins believed in the metempsychosis of souls into new bodies in accordance with the merit of actions committed in their past lives, whereas other castes follow the theory of Pythagoras according to which every soul must undergo many transmigrations, and thus every being, whether human or animal, has a soul which could be transmigrated in rebirth.44

Significantly, while condemning widow-immolation, some French travellers have commended the marital fidelity of Indian women that com-pelled them to follow their husbands in death. For instance, Lauriston has stated that the Hindu girls were married in childhood and raised with their respective husbands. They did not get any chance to get acquainted with any man other than their husbands and thus, showered all their affection,


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4 love and devotion on their husbands. They strongly believed that upon committing self-immolation, they would be happy with him in the other world, whereas there were chances of their being maltreated in this world if they continued to live. Moreover, if they neglected to show this last mark of love they would run the risk to losing their husbands forever as the latter could remarry in their absence in the other world. Lauriston has further noted that many

Brahmans study the character of woman, her inclinations; the honour of the

family interests so that this woman burnt herself. Thus, issues of honour, fear,

and hope acted as powerful motives [for her self-immolation] and often she

is made to consume opium to pass this terrible inhuman test with courage.45

Dubois has mentioned a prevailing superstition:

[I]f a woman after taking that resolution voluntarily [to commit sati], shall

refuse to fulfill it, the whole country, in which she lives, shall be visited with

some dreadful calamity. To inspire her, therefore, with adequate courage, the

Brahmans and all her kindred visit her in turn, complimenting her on her

heroism, and the immortal glory which she will derive from a mode of dying

which must exalt her in dignity to the gods.46

Interestingly, Dubois has noted that if the deceased husband had many wives, as was the case with kings, often there were disputes among his wives each of whom claimed the honor of accompanying their common husband to the pyre. In this situation, the Brahmins who presided over the ceremony decided which of them would get the honor to undergo immolation.47 Sonnerat gave descriptive reference of sati where Brahmans tried to showcase sati’s sacrifice by which she would achieve glory after her death.48 He also narrated a tale of a sati, who was not a wife but a fille de joie or a prostitute, and claimed that this prostitute was rewarded with immortality for her devotion, since the man she had died for was really a god in her perception.49 The interest of Sonnerat’s rendition elicited was probably due to his emphasis that true love and devotion could be found in any woman no matter how low she had sunk.50 Travellers were surprised to observe how religious connotation was attached to create divine notion to justify this act.

The Culprits Enforcing Sati: Brahmins and the Barbaric Social Taboos

Lata Mani’s subaltern feminist approach based on late eighteenth and nineteenth century’s colonial and Indian records challenges the notion of sati being a voluntary and religious act of wifely devotion.51 According to her, the practice was rooted in the material, social and cultural contexts rather than the religion, and women were neither passive, nor willing nor silent participants. Rather they were compelled to immolate themselves,

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as they never submitted to the custom voluntarily. This argument of hers made in the context of colonial India has been somewhat anticipated by the French travellers in their accounts of sati much before the establishment of the British colonial rule. For instance, Tavernier blamed the Brahmins and the widows’ relatives for making the widows believe that by dying with their husbands they would live again with them in some other world with more glory and comfort than they had enjoyed in this world.52 He has also heavily condemned the Brahman’s right to search from the ashes of the burnt bodies, the bracelets, earrings and rings of gold, silver, copper or tin that she had worn.53 This information has been corroborated by Thevenot’s statement that the Brahmins always forced the widow to commit self-im-molation in their own selfish interest, as the widows were burnt wearing ornaments of gold and silver and they alone had the right to touch the ashes from where they picked up all that was precious.54 He has further stated the Hindu women were happy that the Muslims had become the masters of India to save them from the tyranny of the Brahmins. Highlighting the material basis of sati, Mani clearly visualises a close link between a sati and a widow’s right over her dead husband’s property. Further, she shows the introduction of private property rights by the Permanent Revenue Settle-ment in Bengal in the late eighteenth century and eventually the develop-ment of a land market further intensified sati.55 In her opinion, property relations and inheritance laws played a crucial role in giving rise to cases of sati in Bengal. Earlier, Hindu women expected to get relief from this inhu-man custom from the Muslims, and later from the British. Unfortunately, this gruesome practice persisted even after their departure from India. As late as in 1987, Roop Kanwar was forcibly made sati in Rajasthan and 37 men were accused and put on trial for aiding and abetting the crime, but after nine years of trials they were acquitted.56 French travellers proceeded to showcase the question of contestation to achieve material benefits in order to support this custom which was later raised by social reformers in nineteenth century and then by feminist group in next century.

The French travellers have noted that many a time sati was committed by several wives of a Raja. For instance, Tavernier has mentioned an inci-dent of self-immolation by thirteen women of the household of two Rajas. In his words,

dancing and leaping, . . . [they] forthwith encircled the funeral pyre, holding

one another by the hand mounted on it, and being immediately enveloped

in the smoke, which suffocated them, they all fell together into the fire. The

Brahmans then threw upon them a quantity of wood, pots of oil, and other

drugs, according to the custom, in order that the bodies should be quickly

consumed.57

Dubois has mentioned a rather unusual act committed by twelve Brah-mins at Kashi for making economic gains. The new king of Tanjore depos-


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4 ited with them the relics of two queens of the deceased former king who had committed sati.58 In Dubois’ words, ‘a small portion of the bone-ashes was pounded and swallowed by twelve Brahmans, who mixed it as an ingre-dient with some other food. This act so revolting to our [French] nature, was believed to be expiatory of the sins of the three parties deceased’.59 He has reasoned that this was committed by them probably to get reward from the new king, as each of twelve Brahmins got a house. In addition, the site where the deceased king and his two queens were burnt was made a sacred centre where ‘a round mausoleum has been built . . . terminated in a dome. Here the present Prince generally stops, when he happens to go out in that direction and prostrates himself before the tombs of his prede-cessors’.60 The site also attracted the common masses who offered prayers to the deceased-turned-divinities, imploring their help and protection in the vicissitudes of life.

Like other French travellers, Bernier has blamed the Brahmins and witches who provoked widows to take up the ‘unreasonable’ resolution to immolate themselves. According to him, ‘unhappy widows shrink at the sight of the piled wood; so as to leave no doubt on my mind that they would willingly have recanted, if recantation had been permitted by the merciless Brahmans; but those demons excite or astound the affrighted victims, and even thrust them into the fire’.61 Observation of the travellers that the wid-ow’s voice was totally unheard, later became the crux of Spivak’s argument who projects the same view. Bernier calls the Brahmins ‘murderous priests’ and describes them as self-interested instigators of sati, who acted as crafty agents of the religion that deluded widows into suicide. Bernier denies any heroism in the ancient custom of sati, but explains women were forced to die against their wishes by the demon like Brahmans. Sati was a frightened victim of devil-priests, not a self-sacrificing heroine.62 He mentions another atrocity of the Brahmans, i.e., their act of burying the widows alive, and expresses his desire to punish them.63 Mani has based her argument on the same lines as that of Bernier and Tavernier, to contest the depiction of her-oism in widow immolation. She also gave explicit and gruesome accounts of sati performed in the nineteenth century.64 In line with Bernier’s view, Dubois also perceives that these ‘voluntary’ deaths were not based on con-jugal affection. He saw during his voyage that no Hindu marriage closely united the hearts by a true and inviolable attachment.65

Attitudes of the Muslim Rulers Towards Sati According to Tavernier, every Hindu woman needed to take permission from the governor of the place where she dwelt, to commit sati, but the Muslim governors held this dreadful custom of self-destruction in horror and did not readily give permission in certain cases. In particular, during the reign of Shahjahan, widows with children were not allowed under any circumstance to burn themselves, and that in other cases governors did not

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readily give permission, but could be bribed to do so.66 Tavernier claims to have witnessed that the governor of Bijapur did not permit a group of women who wanted to commit sati to do so. In his words,

[E]leven women of the house Raja of Vellore who were affected by his death

. . . resolved to burn themselves with the body, but the General of the Bijapur

army gave orders to shut them up in a room. But these eleven women were so

resolved that they committed suicide in the room without giving the idea how

they hastened to death either by steel, rope or poison.67

Tavernier’s views and accounts on sati are corroborated by other French travellers. Mocquet noticed that though Muslims inhabiting the mainland of Goa did not allow this cruelty towards Hindu women, they poisoned themselves when they could not obtain the requisite permission.68 Abbe Carre has observed that ‘the principal wife of the husband is not obliged to be a sati, if she had children or had passed the age of thirty five years’.69 Modave, too, has stated that the Muslim rulers condemned this custom and made it mandatory for those wishing to observe it to take prior permission from the Souba or any other chief, but they knew that they would lose important ‘commercial gains’ for their states if they obstructed this Hindu custom.70 Thus, the Muslim rulers left enough space for this custom to thrive.

Both Dellon and Bernier share the views of the aforementioned trav-ellers on the abortive efforts of the Muslim rulers including Mughals to suppress the custom. Bernier has stated that the Mughals used ‘all in their power to suppress the barbarous custom’, but they did not ‘forbid it by a positive law, because it is a part of their policy to leave the idolatrous pop-ulation … free [to] exercise … its religion; but the practice was checked by indirect means’.71 Dellon has observed that the Muslims tried to restrain this ‘dreadful custom of forcing people to be their own executioners … [they ruled that] none should be constrained to sacrifice themselves at their husbands funerals, but that they should be left to their liberty, either to survive or die with them’.72 No woman sacrificed herself without the permission from the governor of the province. He never granted it until he had ascertained that she would not turn aside from her purpose. He also used indirect means73 to persuade her not to go for self-immolations.74 Dellon has further added that if an Indian woman persisted on her resolu-tion to commit sati, then the governors ‘had to give their consent but with all to keep them under strict guard, for fear that if they happen to change their mind, they may not be escape from their hands’, so that, later if the woman lacks courage, it becomes too late to repent for their rash vows.75 Bernier claims to have been sent by his Agah [Master], Danechmend Khan to dissuade a widow from being sati. He successfully did so by making her think of the terrible fate of her orphaned children in the event of her death. However, he has admitted that ‘notwithstanding these obstacles, the


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4 number of self-immolations is still considerable in the territories of Rajahs, where no Mahomedan governors are appointed’.76 Dellon, too, has claimed that in the territories of Hindu Rajas, that the ‘law [mandating sati] was put into execution with the utmost severity, [so that] the women who do not voluntarily offer themselves to be sacrificed . . . [were] constrained by force to enforce the cruel law of their native country’.77 It seems that Muslim gov-ernors’ non-interventionist approach towards curbing of sati practice was also followed by the British. Mani’s analysis shows that initially the British believed that the practice was sanctioned by Hindu scriptures, evidence from which were presented in its defense at the colonial courts. This belief, in turn, guided the official policy of non-interference in such indigenous customs.78 The Muslim and British being outsiders in India were bound by political necessities to keep themselves at a distance from such socio-reli-gious practices.

Boullaye le Gouz mentioned that the permission to commit sati was sometimes obtained from the ‘Nababs’ (nawabs) after giving them many presents, since this custom was universally condemned by them. In his words,

[T]he great Mogols and the Musulman princes permit them to burn publi-

cally the dead body, but not the alive women, they obtained it[permission]

sometimes from the Nabab by [offering him] present[s]. I did not witness this

ceremony during my stay in the Indies, and cannot speak about it. But I heard

from the Brahmans that the wife who is put on a cage of canes is put on the

pyre to burn along with dead husband.79

Here, Spivak’s choice of words — ‘white men [or Muslim governors under Mughals] are saving the brown women from brown men’ — has been criticised by Eleanor Ross who argues that by prohibiting sati, white men were not ‘saving brown women from brown men’ but, in fact, were depriving the women of their freedom of choice. Thus, Spivak’s statement, according to Ross, can be reworded as ‘brown women need to be saved from brown and white men alike’. 80 In the similar manner, Hindu widows in Mughal India needed to be saved from both Muslim governors and Hindu male proponents of this practice.

Modave has cited an instance of a woman’s firm resolve to burn herself alive with the corpse of her husband despite the inducements offered by a nawab to change her mind. After the death of a ‘Kashmiri writer named Mandaram Pandit, who was in service of the nabab, his wife had declared her wish to follow the religious rite [of committing sati] … [but] one had to obtain the permission from the nabab [for committing this act]’.81 The nawab (Shuja-ud-Daulah) then sent his chopdar to this woman to divert from her resolution so that she could continue to live in order to take care of her three children. He even offered her money and promised to reserve the appointment of her husband if she yielded to his wishes. But

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she ‘refused this kindness’ of the nawab and replied that ‘it was not the embarrassment of his subsistence which determined her to die, but she wanted to join her husband and was convinced that her children, under the supervision of their uncle, would be students with care without missing anything in their education’.82 General Perron claims to have rejected the plea for self-immolation by a woman in the memory of her long-deceased husband; the plea was made on the ground that she had not burnt herself nine years earlier when she was widowed, in order to discharge her respon-sibility to raise her adolescent son, but had continued to live unhappily, isolated, proscribed, and shamefully driven out by the society.83

From the testimonies of the French travellers, it can thus be surmised that attempts of Muslim rulers and governors to curb sati failed due to their inability and unwillingness to counter the resistance of those practicing it. As is well known, in the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the opposi-tion mounted by the conservative Hindus, the British Governor General William Bentinck successfully abolished this custom by Bengal sati Regu-lation of 1829. The colonial officials brought the issue of sati to the centre stage of cultural encounter between the East and the West. This is testified by the fact that by the year 1830, the House of Commons had ordered the printing of six volumes of parliamentary papers on the burning of Hindu widows.84 In spite of all these efforts, the practice continued in Bengal and Rajasthan, the last incidence of sati being witnessed in the year 1960.85 In Rajasthan, especially in Marwar, there exist several cult centres of sati Mata and such people who believe that women who burn themselves bring good fortune to their families and villages for seven generations and are thus keen on repealing or modifying the anti-sati legislation.86 Thus, the travellers’ observations show the restraining efforts of Mughal governors to constrain this custom for political limitations and the same was also evident in colonial rule under British.

Eyewitness Accounts of Sati Spectacles Firsthand records of French travellers of sati performances became an invaluable alternate source of history which is mostly unbiased giving objective description. Describing the practice of sati in Madras, Abbe Carre has written that

... the wretched corpse was accompanied by one of his wives to a cruel death.

She threw herself in the middle of the blazing flames, and while the two were

being burnt, all the caste mourners gave vent to howls and an appalling uproar

[rose] round the fire, with strange ceremonies and superstitions.87

Describing the widows who burnt themselves and those who feared such a violent death, Mocquet writes:

[W]hen the bodies of their dead husbands are burnt, they [the widows] plunge


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4 themselves into the funeral pyre and burn themselves, after being first adorned

with their richest ornaments and jewels, dancing with the sound of instru-

ments, and thus die with a wonderful constancy, speaking in the fire to the

very last: those who do not do this are held as infamous so long as they live,

not daring to show themselves before others, nor to appear before their friends

and kindred. Those lacking courage, poison themselves, seeing their husband

dead and are burnt together with him. Its remarkable that the body of woman

had such oily property, that one body will serve like oil and gresse [grease] to

consume the bodies of 5 or 6 men.88

His observations reflected huge adornment of widow while performing self-immolation as if she is blessed with divine guarantee to enter heaven to lead a life in paradise whereas if she refuses to perform it then she was forced to live where the world which becomes hell for her. Bernier, too, has narrated the horrifying scene of a beautiful young widow being forced to commit sati. He describes the girl as ‘bursting into a clamorous and unavailing rage’. In his emotive words:

[T]he poor little creature appeared more dead than alive when she approached

the dreadful pit; the agony of her mind cannot be described; she trembled and

wept bitterly; but three or four Brahmans, assisted by an old woman who held

her under the arm, forced the unwilling victim toward the fatal spot, seated her

on the wood, [and] tied her hands and feet, lest she should run away; in that

situation the innocent creature was burnt alive.89

Condemning the custom, Duperron has written,

I read and learned from people of the country the relative details of the Hindu

women who burn themselves, but I did not witness this barbarian ceremony

though religious, because that looks at the Hindu is only secondary in my plan.

I added this trait to be delivered of the thousand and one questions that one

made to me about the customs of the country; in that I missed the truth. The

traveller from return has seen all, ensures all, from fear of weaken his testimony

in that he knows really true. 90

Thus, all European travellers, and not just the French, have vividly described and severely condemned the horrors of sati and expressed sympathy for the victims. These observations must have morally touched the colonial officials in the nineteenth century who along with the social reformers of the time tried to come to common platform in order to pass anti-sati law in 1829.

Manners and the Procession of SatiThe French eyewitness records of the manner and the processions of sati are invaluable but they are mostly put aside while debating [through] Indian ancient, medieval and modern records. Although some plagiarism

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was evident yet despite this shortcoming, they present an objective and unbiased source of this custom performed in varied regions of India. Tav-ernier has described several ways of burning women that varied according to the customs of the different regions. For instance, regarding the practice in Gujarat, Agra and Delhi, he writes:

[O]n the margin of a river or tank, a kind of small hut, about 12 feet square [in

area], is built of reeds and all kinds of fagots, with which some pots of oil and

other drugs are placed in order to make it burn quickly. The woman is seated

in a half-reclining position in the middle of the hut, her head reposes on a kind

of pillow of wood, and she rests her back against a post, to which she is tied by

her waist by one of the Brahmans, for fear lest she should escape on feeling the

flame. In this position she holds the dead body of her husband on her knees.91

Brahmans and the relatives of the deceased forcefully burn her. Tav-ernier has further reported another surprising method of widow burning in Bengal. As this place lacks wood, fuel is collected by the poor women them-selves through charity for burning themselves. As soon as these miserable women are dead and half burnt, their bodies are thrown into the Ganges with those of their husbands, where they are eaten by the crocodiles.92 Sonnerat also shows that in Bengal the spectacle of sati was quite horrible as women of this region had the courage to get tied with their deceased husband whom they embrace patiently until they are burnt into ashes.93 In Surat, according to Dellon, the custom was observed close to a river and temple. In his words,

[T]he widow is brought thither in triumph on horseback, most magnificently

attired with a garland of flowers on her head. She is surrounded by several peo-

ple who play musical instruments and is followed by her kindred and friends,

who dance and sing with joy, to have such a heroine in their family, or to be

allied to her by friendship.94

In parts of Coromandel, as Tavernier informs, women did not burn themselves but were buried alive along with their deceased husbands. The burial happened in the following manner:

[T]he Brahmans dig [a hole] in the ground, about one foot deeper than the

height of the man or woman. They generally select a sandy spot, and when they

have placed the man and woman in the hole, each of their friends fills a basket

of sand, and throws it on the bodies until the hole is full and heaped over, half

a foot higher than the ground, after which they jump and dance upon it till they

are certain that the woman is smothered.95

Tavernier has further reported another form of widow-burial that he witnessed along the coast of Coromandel:

[A] hole, 9 or 10 feet deep and 25 or 30 feet square [in area], is dug, into which


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4 plenty of wood is thrown, with many drugs to make it burn quickly… [after

the procession of dance and women take three rounds of the hole] Brahmans

throw the body of the deceased into the fire and the woman, with her back

turned towards the hole, is pushed by the Brahmans, who falls in backwards.96

Dellon, too, has described a widow-burial:

[T]hey dig a deep hole in the ground, wherein they lay the dead corpse, they

make a great fire round about it, for three days consecutively; the widow is

led round about it, covered with a certain veil, made out of the leaves of the

banana-tree and after having taken her turns, to bid farewell to all her friends,

she throws herself into fire, to be consumed to ashes.97

Giving a painful evidence of the processions of sati, Tavernier said that:

[A]fter achieving the permission from the governor the procession goes with

all kind of music, drums, flutes and other instruments from the house of the

deceased up to the river or bank where the body is to be burned. All the rela-

tives and friends congratulate the widow for achieving the good fortune in the

next world. The woman dresses up in her wedding dress with the resolution,

and in order to remove the fear of the death she is given some kind of drink

that takes away her senses and removes all apprehension which the preparation

for her death might occasion.98

The first hand records of Modave are all the more valuable until now his views have not been fully revealed and analysed because they are not translated till now. He has given a detailed description of the preparation of funeral pyre of Mandaram Pandit’s widow:

[T]here were 3 to 4 Brahmans and five or six carpenters on that place who

made mortises from large pieces of wood, to plant the ankle there. The place

was wiped before the funeral pyre. The Brahman made there some mysterious

and kidding figures of formulas of prayers and scattered there a kind of white

power which I believe being cow dung burnt and reduced to ashes. . . . They

made six deep holes of two feet, four at the corners, one at the top and the

other at the foot of the funeral pyre. Then the woods were placed on these holes

which made a solid mass of large seasoned wood height of four and half feet of

8 to 9 feet of length and about 4 feet in width. On this solid mass, using some

cross pieces to support to the ankles of the six large parts, one formed a kind of

corner to place the body and the woman there. The corner was furnished above

the multitude of logs to mix wood menu and arranged in an arch. This kind

of dome was covered of bunch of straw; one also put a layer in the interior of

corner. All these workmen worked with an eagerness and ferocious joy which

surprised this adventurer.99

Modave describes widow-burning in the following manner:

[T]he eldest son of this unhappy woman, young boy of eight to nine years,

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was brought about six steps of funeral pyre and one made him make to do

some ceremonies of which I could not guess the reason; he threw on the right

and on the left of the logs of straw; he spread water on side and of other and

he repeated prayers that a brahman pronounced aloud. . . . Undoubtedly that

nature spoke to him with force and that the superstition was astonished.100

Bernier, Sonnerat, Modave and others gave descriptive narratives of funerary rituals. Modave goes on to explain the funerary rituals:

[T]he woman arrived followed by many a procession and seated on a small

horse. Her parents and those of her husband surrounded her like some play-

ers of instruments. She stopped herself under a tree where I considered her

attentively. She was in front funeral pyre. She spoke to those who were around

her. Near the funeral place was a pond where she had to make ablutions and

she was pushed from her horse to go there. Then one carried the corpse on the

stretcher decorated with small banners. . . . The son started again the ceremo-

nies of the funeral pyre with water and straw. . . .The woman returned from

the pond and approached herself to the funeral pyre on horse. …Then she

wanted to climb on the funeral pyre. Several people helped her come down the

horse and one carried her to the corner where she sat down beside the body of

her husband. One closed the entry of it by the wood and another put with the

packet of straws. Then they brought the child who was given a torch, who lit

on the side and where the straw was ablaze. When women wanted to enter the

funeral pyre, the choupdars of the nawab approached to speak to her, but the

Kashmiri pushed them back with great hootings. At once that to funeral pyre

was on fire all these Hindus reflect to turn around while some crying. 101

Modave severely condemned sati as did Bernier a century ago. Quite emotively, he goes on to say that this horrible spectacle so strongly occu-pied his mind for next two days that he could not think of any other thing. The image of the woman was engraved too deep in his memory to be erased ever. She neither showed disorder nor agitation, nor discharged all these dreadful ceremonies like the most indifferent actions of the world.102

Thus Modave and others French travellers picture of this scary practice must have motivated writers such as Spivak, Mani, Narayan and Thomas to formulate theories of sati in Indian prospective while Dorothy Figueira’s work states

[T]he French philosophies and the German romantics utilised sati in various

lights: such as a symbol of absolute passionate love; as a ground for metaphys-

ical speculation, particularly about metempsychosis and most importantly as a

powerful weapon in the ideological arsenal of those whose aim was to demolish

the claims of religion in their own societies. . . . Her discussions resemble later

European commentators on sati in respect that India serves as the source of

a rich array of images to be used as tools of European self-examination and

self-definition.103


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4 In the similar vein, Suddhassel Sen uses this custom in the European context as Aryan notions of heroism:

[A]lthough the ritual of sati was Hindu one, Europeans (especially German)

interest in the Aryan origins of the Caucasian people resulted in a more pos-

itive view of the ritual in the 19th century, when sati was seen as epitomising

an Aryan woman’s fidelity to her husband…[In] 19th-century development of

the notion that the Aryans moved outwards from the northern regions of the

Indian subcontinent and settled in Europe made it possible for Wager to tap

into the associations of such an [brave Aryan woman] image in his depiction

of Brünnhilde.104

Lastly, Paul Courtright says

in both Hindu myths . . . and European genre of eye-witness testimony, the

wife is frequently represented as young, nubile, and virginal. Within the Hindu

framework youth and innocence underscore the purity and effectiveness of the

sacrifice; while for the European representations the innocence of the young

wife, at the mercy of relatives, priests, and superstition, serves to stress the

theme of victimisation and heightens the role of the colonial as the heroic res-

cuer of the damsel in distress.105

Thus, the French traveller’s observations of the concern period became prominent sources and the base of further debates for future historians.

ConclusionThe foregoing discussion clearly shows that French travellers of pre-colo-nial India were much more than ordinary travellers; they were curious and inquisitive observers of Indian society and authors of detailed, insightful yet opinionated accounts of what they witnessed in India, as well as what they heard, learnt, assumed and thought about its customs and beliefs. They, among other things, have thus, thrown a good deal of light on aspects of gender relations in pre-colonial India, particularly the societal attitude towards and treatment of women. Their testimonies remained incomplete until the Occident readers got to know the issues relating to Oriental gen-der issues especially sati system. Spivak rightly points out the subalterns (women) were not allowed to speak. However, the reasons for sati cited by Mani and Thomas in their works, were already mentioned by several French travellers in their accounts that attributed the prevalence and continuance of the practice to the combined effect of the Muslim rulers’ political stance of non-interference in the Hindus’ religious affairs and the socio-economic compulsions of widows submitting to this custom. But at the same time, their testimonies reveal a paradox between the depictions of the sati as a victim and as a heroine. Nevertheless, while severely criticising the superstitions and religious beliefs underlying customs such as sati and oppression of widows, and expressing sympathy for the women affected

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by them, they rightly discerned that the patriarchal nature of the Indian society and the material interests of the Hindu priesthood were at work in patronising and enforcing practices that victimised women.

Notes 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak ?’, in Cary Nelson and

Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, London: Macmillan, 1988, p. 24

2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak ?’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Oxford: Rout-ledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 1995, pp. 28–37.

3 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998.

4 Anne Hardgrove, ‘The Problem of Sati: Two Critical Views on Widow Burning’, in Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, 2001, p. 455.

5 Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third-World Fem-inism, Routledge, New York, 1997, pp. 41–80. She contested against the British colonial officials and their Indian collaborators in a joint project of determining the legitimacy of a practice purely by scholarly interpretation of religious texts. She said ‘the participants in the debate jointly eclipsed the degree to which law and traditional practices in pre-colonial India were not determined exclusively by interpretations of religious texts, but had other bases for authority, such as the customary practices that varied widely across different Hindu communities, which were interpreted and enforced not by priests but by very localized community councils or caste sabhas’.

6 Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immorality: Widow-Burning in India, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999.

7 Werner Menski, ‘Sati: a review article’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 61, No. 1, 1998, p. 74.

8 Guy Deleury, Les Indes Florissantes : Anthologie des voyageurs français, 1750-1820, Paris : Laffont, 1991, p. 590.

9 M.de la Roncière, ‘Un artiste français à la cour du Grand Mogol’, Revue hebdomad-aire, March, 1905, p. 186.

10 Gregoire Holtz, ‘Pierre-Olivier Malherbe: The Journey of Manuscript from India to France’, in Vijaya Rao (ed.), Reaching the Great Moghul, Embassy of Switzerland, New Delhi, 2012, p. 36.

11 M.de la Ronciere, ‘Le premier voyageur francais autour du monde’, p. 27. 12 Deleury, Les Indes Florissantes, p. 700, Polier Mythologie des Indous, Paris, 1809,

p. 198 13 Joseph Tieffenthaler, Description historique et géographique de l’Inde, edited by Jean

Bernoulli, W. Faden, Berlin, London, 1786–1789, Vol. 2, p. 41. 14 Comte de Modave, Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave, 1773–1776, edited by Jean

Deloche, Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, 1971, p. 65. 15 Charles Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, 2 Vols, Veuve Biest-

kins, Paris, 1685, p. 292. 16 Tavernier, Travels in India, translated by V. Ball, 3 Vols., Oriental Books, New

Delhi, 1889; 1977. Vol. 1, p. 176. 17 Jean Mocquet, Voyages en Afriqve, Asie, Indes Orientales & Occidentales Divisez En

Six Livres, & enrichiz de Figures, Roven Berthelin: Jacques Caillove, 1645, p. 295. 18 Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, Vol. 1, p. 96. 19 Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 102.


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4 20 Ram Prasad Chandra, Early English Travellers in India, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1965, p. 78.

21 Abbe Dubois, Discription of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India and of their Institution, Religion and Civil, (Trans.), Longman, London, 1817, p. 238.

22 Jean Thevenot, Travels of Thevenot and Careri (ed.), S.N. Sen, National Archives of India, New Delhi, 1949, p. 119.

23 Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 110. 24 Tieffenthaler, La géographie de l’Indoustan, p. 341. 25 Victor de Saint-Génis, Une Page Inédite de l’histoire des Indes Le Général du Boigne,

Poitiers, 1873, p. 171. 26 Ibid., p. 171. 27 Military General at Mughal Court during Shah Alam II reign 28 Albert le Bail., Les Grandes vies Aventureuses: René Madec: Soldat de Fortune Nabab

et Roi Aux Indes, Paris: Berger Levrault, p. 174. 29 Comte de Modave, Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave 1773–1776, p. 386. 30 Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire AD 1656–1658, translated by Irving

Brock and edited by Archibald Constable, Low Price Publications, Delhi, 1934; 1994. p. 311.

31 Martin de Vitré, Description du premier voyage faict aux Indes Orientales par les Français, p. 82.

32 Francois de la Boullaye le Gouz, Les Voyages et Observations du Sieur de la Boullaye le Gouz, Paris : Francois Clousier, 1653; 1657, p. 147.

33 Sunita Zaidi, ‘Women suppressed through the ages’, in Diplomatic Magazine, 2005. 34 Bernier, Travels, pp. 310-311. Bernier mentions that ‘There is no Mogol [Mughal

emperor] who does not dread the consequences of contributing to the preservation of a woman devoted to the burning pile or who will venture to afford an asylum to one who escapes from the fangs of the brahmens’ (Bernier, Travels, p. 314).

35 Bernier, Travels, p. 314. 36 Ibid., pp. 310-311 37 Abbe Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, (trans.) Henry K.

Beauchamp, Cosimo Classics, New York, p. 350. 38 John Stratton Hawley Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in

India, New York: OUP, 1994, p. 13. 39 Tavernier, Travels in India, Vol. 2, Book III, p. 163. 40 Tavernier, Travels in India, pp. 209–10. 41 Bernier, Travels, p. 310. 42 Ibid., p. 310. 43 Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, Vol. 1, p. 96. 44 Thevenot, Travels of Thevenot and Careri, p. 91. 45 Lauriston, Mémoire sur Quelques Affaires de l’Empire Mogol: 1756–1761, p. 255. 46 Dubois, Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India,

p. 239. 47 Ibid., p. 239; Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, vol. 1, p. 94. 48 Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, Vol. 1, pp. 94-95. 49 Binita Mehta, Widows, Pariarchs, and Bayadères: India as Spectacle, Associated

University Presses, London, 2002, p. 70. 50 Dorothy Matilda Figueira, The Exotic: Decadent Quest, State University of New

York Press, New York, 1994, p. 32. 51 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, University

of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998.

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52 Tavernier, Travels in India, Vol.2, Book III, p. 163. 53 Ibid., Vol. 2, Book III, p. 165. Dubois, Description of the Character, Manners, and

Customs, p. 246. 54 Thevenot, Travels of Thevenot and Careri, p. 120. 55 Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,; Paul B.

Courtright’s ‘The Iconographies of Sati’, in Hawley Sati, the Blessing and the Curse : The Burning of Wives in India, OUP, New York, 1994, p. 42.

56 Francis Jarman, ‘Sati: From Exotic Custom to Relativist Controversy’, in Culture Scan, Vol. 2, No. 5, December 2002, p. 4.

57 Tavernier, Travels in India, Vol. 2, Book III, p. 171. 58 Dubois, Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs, p. 245. 59 Ibid., p. 245 60 Dubois, Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs, p. 246. 61 Bernier, Travels, p. 313. 62 Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed, European and British Writing on India. 1600-1800

(Delhi: OUP, 1995), p.54. 63 Bernier stated that ‘Brahmens bury them(sati women) alive, by slow degrees, up to

the throat; then two or three of them fall suddenly upon the victim, wring her neck, and when she has been effectually and completely choked, cover over the body with earth thrown upon it from successive baskets and tread upon the head.’ (Bernier, Travels, p. 315; Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 111).

64 Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, p. 177. 65 Dubois, Discription of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India,

p. 238. 66 Tavernier, Travels in India, Vol. 2, Book III, pp. 163–64. 67 Tavernier, Travels in India, Vol. 2, Book III, p. 170. 68 Mocquet, Voyages en Afriqve, Asie, Indes Orientales & Occidentales, p. 295. 69 Fawcett & Richard Burn (eds), The Travels of the Abbe Carre in India and the Near

East: Vol. 2, pp. 592–93. 70 Comte de Modave, Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave 1773–1776, p. 172. 71 Bernier, Travels, p. 306. 72 Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 103. 73 Indirect means refer to dissuading widows from getting burnt by offering her some

pension from the government (Tavernier, Vol. II, pp. 210–16 and Manucci, Vol. II, pp. 60–61, 65–66). Aurangzeb continued the practice of his predecessors of prohibiting the burning of unwilling satis.

74 Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 103. 75 Ibid., p. 104. 76 Bernier, Travels, p. 306. 77 Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 109. 78 Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, p. 20. 79 Boullaye le Gouz, Les Voyages et Observations du Sieur de la Boullaye le Gouz, p. 147. 80 Eleanor Ross, ‘In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak offers the sentence “White

men are saving the brown women from brown men” as one interpretation of rela-tionship between colonier and colonised…’”, in Innervate, Vol. 2, 2009–2010, p. 387.

81 Comte de Modave, Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave : 1773–1776, p. 172. 82 Ibid., p. 172. 83 Martineau, Le Géneral Perron, p. 72. 84 Jyoti Atwal, ‘Foul unhallow’d fires: Officiating Sati and the Colonial Hindu Widow

in the United Provinces’, Studies in History, Vol. 29, No. 2, August 2013, p. 231.


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4 85 Jean-Claude Carriere, Dictionnaire amoureux de l’Inde, Plon, 2001, p. 143. 86 Francis Jarman, ‘Sati:From exotic custom to relativist controversy’, in Culture

Scan, Vol. 2, No. 5, December 2002, p. 4. 87 Fawcett, The Travels of the Abbe Carre in India and the Near East, Vol. 2, pp.

592–93. 88 Mocquet, Voyages en Afriqve, Asie, Indes Orientales & Occidentales, p. 294. 89 Bernier, Travels, p. 314. 90 Duperron, Zend-Avesta, p. 229. 91 Tavernier, Travels in India, Vol. 2, Book III, p. 165 92 Ibid. 93 Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, vol. 1, p. 95. 94 Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 105. 95 Tavernier, Travels in India, Vol.2, Book III, p. 168. 96 Tavernier, Vol. 2, Book III, p. 168. 97 Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux indes Orientales, p. 111. 98 Ibid., Vol.2, Book III, p. 164. 99 Comte de Modave, Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave 1773–1776, pp. 173–74.100 Ibid., pp. 173–74.101 Ibid.102 Ibid., p. 174.103 Dorothy M. Figueira, ‘Die Flambierte Frau: Sati In European Culture’, in John

Stratton Hawley Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India, New York: OUP, 1994, p. 72.

104 Suddhaseel Sen, ‘Brünnhilde, the Aryan Sati: Wagner and German Orientalism’, in The Wagner Journal, Vol. 4, No. 3, p. 29.

105 Robert L. Hardgrave, ‘The Representation of Sati: Four Eighteenth Century Etch-ings by Baltazard Solvyns’, in Bengal Past and Present, Vol. 117, 1998, pp. 57–80.

Sakul Kundra teaches History in Motilal Nehru College (M), University of Delhi, Delhi.

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N. Manohar Reddy: You seem to be extraordinarily interested in the vernac-ular discourse. Your recent book, The World of Ideas in Modern Marathi, clearly shows that. Why is it so important?G.P. Deshpande: Because modernity in most parts of India came via the vernacular. You had modernist thinkers in these languages in the nineteenth century; in Bengal even earlier. Phule dominated in the nineteenth century. These people thought, talked and wrote in vernacular. Among the liberals, therefore, there was a gap between those who were more English-oriented, who went for the Mill and Spencer kind of liberalism, and those who came via the vernacular. The former is a pale variety of liberalism, however well-intentioned their moves. Their analysis had no revolutionary content and never really acquired a fighting spirit. The latter is more aggressive and far clearer in its thought. In the Marathi context, a multi-caste shudrati- shudra united front could be created only in the vernacular.

Can you elaborate more on how you distinguish between the vernacular mod-ernists and the English-oriented modernists?English-oriented modernists were well-intentioned people, good old liber-als, and tried to reform religion, get rid of sati practice and so on. They were essentially reformists, not revolutionaries. However, our writings in English treat those upper-caste and English-knowing liberals as revolutionaries, and reduce others to reformists! I’m not saying that whatever the liberals did was rubbish. Those were times when the societal forces were going upside down, so you required all these people. In fact, some of them were themselves conscious of it. For example, Tilak’s contemporary Agarkar, a very famous brahmin, took a very strong position against the brahmanical practices. Yet his appeal was limited to brahmins. He himself accepted it. He said, ‘What I’m saying is ekadesika (a nineteenth-century word). It doesn’t go beyond the brahmin reform.’ But, ‘I only hope that there is a sarvadesik meaning to it.’ And I think there is some sarvadesik meaning to it. Therefore, they should not be under-rated. But we must remember that they were not rev-olutionaries; they were at best reformers.

Vernacular Discourse as Politics of Liberation:An Interview with Professor G.P. Deshpande

N. Manohar Reddy

This interview was conducted in January 2011, when Professor G.P. Deshpande was Scholar in Residence in the Department of Cultural Studies, English and Foreign Languges University (EFL-U), Hyderabad.

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4 In your opinion, who were the revolutionaries and what was their contribu-tion?The first revolutionary was Phule, who talked about shudras and atish-udras. Before him, nobody had mentioned varna and jati. Moreover, he treated caste not as a descriptive feature of Indian society but as a basic contradiction of Indian society. He talked about the dvaivarnik system; there were two varnas. Phule was essentially defining the proletariat of the country, if one permits a little Marxist terminology. He identified correctly shudrati-shudras as a possible revolutionary force. Phule’s caste thinking is highly economical and production system-oriented. That is being forgot-ten. After Phule, you see this happening in Ambedkar. A lot of discussion about economic issues, labour issues, and so on. Now you don’t see even Mayawati talking about economics as much as Phule or Ambedkar did.

Do you see any connection between caste and language? Did Phule’s efforts to fight against caste inequality and so on require any kind of reform of the Marathi language?Phule didn’t think of the reform of language per se. His position on the language-literature question boils down to two terms which are quite often used in Marathi: one is pramana bhasha (standard language) and the other shuddha bhasha (pure or chaste language). Shuddha bhasha was brahmin-ical. Phule does not seem to have much of an objection to the pramana bhasha. But when he was invited by Justice Ranade for the first conference ever of Marathi writers, he declined the invitation and said, ‘Why should you and I waste our time?’ He had written a very forthright kind of a short paragraph and the last sentence that he wrote was not in pramana bhasha.

What are the implications of such a gesture?In the western districts of Maharashtra (I belong to this region from where Phule came – these districts are on the same Deccan plateau where Hyderabad is also located) we have a small Muslim population, apart from the Marathwada region where there are a lot more Muslims in places like Baravadi, for example; but it was not British-ruled territory at all. We have barely 4 to 5 per cent Muslims in the countryside. They speak a peculiar language. They speak Marathi and its verb forms are Urdu-Sadrush – some-thing similar to Urdu. So you may come across formations like ‘pasara avar ke rakh le’, a mother telling her son to tidy up the room. Pasara and avara are Marathi, and rakhna is obviously Urdu or Hindi. It is a peculiar com-bination. So the last sentence Phule wrote is in that kind of speech, simply and gently reminding these people (Ranade and his associates), ‘What lan-guage are you talking about?’

So can we say that it was Phule’s attempt to challenge the authority of stan-dard Marathi?

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Phule did all that essentially to provoke; he did not organise a language movement. That came much later. Phule’s discursive prose was very stan-dard Marathi. The only difficulty is his nineteenth-century words, which are fallen by the wayside now. As translators, we had to assess what could possibly be the meaning of a particular term. We also went around asking some old people but it did not yield any result. So the difficulty with his writings is not the difference of language but more a problem of time. However, Phule was responsible for a movement which generated two things. One, it generated the standard discursive writing in Marathi of the non-brahmin variety. His paper, Dinabhandu, became one of the vehicles of non-brahmin journalism. Now, the history of Marathi cannot be com-plete without taking into account the contribution of a whole range of non- brahmin journalists at that time. Phule also responded to Chiplunkar who was a major essayist and prose writer of some significance. He was a chitpa-van brahmin and believed that Phule took too much liberty with grammar. Phule took the liberty on purpose, just to provoke. Because his first job was to provoke and shake them off. And you have an extraordinary relationship between the two men: Chiplunkar attacked Phule in the worst language that you can think of, and yet you see a peculiar courtesy Phule always extended to him. So much so that when Chiplunkar died and there was a problem about his death certificate, Phule dispatched someone to get the certificate because, in his view, the man had to be given a proper funeral.

In Andhra Pradesh, some dalit scholars have argued that standard Telugu is nothing but the language of the upper castes. Is there a similar claim about standard Marathi?There is little doubt that the pramana bhasha, as it evolved over a period of time, was definitely the language used by the brahmins. But there is also the historical problem. Since the brahmins were the ones educated anyway, they were the ones who wrote on science. Thus standard language was actually in use as far as acquiring of knowledge was concerned. So you would require a language for the sciences’ sake which may not be as simple as any spoken language; it would be a little more difficult. And this happens in all languages: scientific English is not the same as the English spoken by the common English people. So, number one, you have one section which probably would not carry its opposition to pramana bhasha too far, apart from minor changes like which word should be used, etc. Number two, again talking impressionistically, my observation is that there is far greater opposition to pramana bhasha/brahminical bhasha from the Marathas than from the dalits. If you read, for example, Kasbe’s Marathi, and if you are not told that it was Mr Kasbe, you would think that some Shastri is talking chaste Marathi. I do not think he would actually take a position that you give this up. Because then, you have to start at the beginning. Whatever little you have acquired by way of sciences, history, will come through some standard

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4 language, so I don’t think dalits would say we have to throw away standard language, even while they argue that strong brahminical content must go. The demand for making Marathi a far more approachable language is very much there. At the same time, there is no clue what is to be done about sci-ence. It is easy enough to understand this question in terms of poetry or the language you might use in novels, but how do you write a book on physics if you do not have a pramana bhasha which will fulfil the needs of science? I don’t think there is such an effort made. There is of course the state govern-ment’s Marathi Bhasha Parishad, and they issue technical vocabulary – but all this cannot simply be wished away.

So you argue that standard language is very much necessary despite the diffi-culty faced by some sections of people?You have got to have pramana bhasha or you will be required to say, ‘I have a much simpler word for this. I would much rather translate nitrogen as this.’ But no such debates are happening as far as I know. There is only a vague awareness. Most people who are talking about pramana bhasha or the changing of pramana bhasha are essentially talking about literature, not science. And standard language relates to science no less than law and so on. You must also have a way of writing history, apart from what you say in that history.

In the Telugu context, there is this complaint that the mainstream Telugu literature written in the standard language often becomes the norm to assess the value of any literary text. Thus, literature written in Telangana Telugu is considered inferior by some Andhra people. There is also the question of stan-dard language becoming a disadvantage in schools for those children who don’t speak that variety of language at home. And yet it is used in the textbooks. So the argument is that standard Telugu becomes a form of discrimination against all children from the Telangana region, or dalit children from all over the state. For them, it amounts to learning almost two languages. Thus, it is argued that challenging standard language amounts to challenging the social power of the dominant castes or the dominant regional groups. Do you agree?I get an impression that the struggle over language is far stronger here than it is in Maharashtra. I don’t find the same strength in those movements as I find here. Much less in Bengal, where ‘bhadralok’ language has become the standard language without any questioning. Here at least some questioning is happening. To an extent, it is true of Marathi. The acceptance of standard Marathi is far stronger than it is, for example, in Telangana. If you write a novel in Vidarbha dialect, it would not be held against you at all. In fact, there are any number of fiction books of that kind which are written in local regional speech. Whether to call them dialect or language, I do not know. That is a linguistic science problem. But surely, if you have to write

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poetry in Varadhi (Marathi spoken in the Vidarbha region), it is still treated as Marathi. Thus these distinctions are not very sharp.

A lot of literature has come in Telangana Telugu, and also dalit literature written in a variety of Telugu spoken by dalits, which is more or less accepted now than before. But the credit for that must go to the Telangana and dalit writers. Their language is accepted today because of their persistent struggles. Acceptance was neither easy nor automatic.In the Marathi context, Phule made us aware of these kinds of distinctions. But it appears that he did not have a strong view on language. The kind of prose he wrote was very simple at one level, but it is not very far from the nineteenth-century pramana bhasha. It is definitely less sanskritic than Tilak’s Marathi. But there are limits to non-sanskritisation of Marathi lan-guage. The north Indian languages are far more sanskritic. We have three kinds of inputs in language in terms of vocabulary: Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. A lot of Marathi territory was under Muslim rule. Even in western Maharashtra, considerable Muslim power was exercised till the seventeenth century. So the Marathi of that time is far more Urdu-Arabic-Persian-ori-ented than we normally allow. There are many words in Marathi of that origin. People don’t know that they are in fact Arabic. We use a word for lamp, kandil, which comes directly from Arabia. For many people, it is nat-ural Marathi. So without people even knowing it, there is an intake of lan-guage. Then Savarkar started a movement towards what he called bhasha shuddhi. He wanted to get rid of all foreign words and purify the language. But it didn’t work. It worked in Hindi, which is now completely sanitised as far as Urdu and Persian words are concerned. That is not the case with Marathi at all. Thank heavens for it!

What are the conditions under which Marathi has not been sanskritised?It was not possible because most of the time people did not even know they were using foreign words. You cannot tell a peasant not to use the word kandil and use some Sanskrit word instead. It is ridiculous. This is not throwing Sanskrit out but keeping kandil in. Even Savarkar did not know that some of these words were of Arabic and Persian origin. So a complete bhasha shuddhi was never possible. One of the seven prohibitions in India that Savarkar talked about was bhasha bandi. He says that the medieval rulers pushed our languages/words out and theirs in. Now, some simple Marathi words which people easily understand are being pushed out, which did not happen either in Savarkar’s time or in Phule’s time.

Why do you think that is happening?It is happening because some Sanskrit words sound more attractive. It is some kind of what M.N. Srinivas calls sanskritisation, extended to


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4 language. Sometimes the words are being changed to give them totally different, communal meanings. For example, in the past, murder or assas-sination was called khoon in Marathi. When Gandhi was shot, the headline was ‘Mahatma Gandhi yancha khoon.’ Now, the word is used only for common people. Two new words, vadh and hatya, are being used. Vadh is used for the killing of a bad man, and hatya for the killing of a good man. For Ravan, vadh is used, and through it, his rakshasa character is established. But if somebody saintly is killed, then it is hatya. So you make a distinction between good and bad. When a Muslim gets killed, you use khoon, so you introduce a communal element in the name of improvement or changing language. Thus you have a situation where some simple words are being removed. For example, when there is a reception after a marriage, a much simpler word for ‘you are invited to’ was paan-supari – when you leave, you are given supari and paan. Now, they literally translate reception into swagat. It is not swagat. What is swagat about it? There is no swagat involved at all. You simply give them something to eat and then, since the betel-leaf and betel-nut are supposed to be auspicious, you give paan-supari to them. By making it ‘swagat’, it has become meaningless. But it is in use now. What can you do about it? Therefore, you have two alternatives. One is the Chiplunkar alternative. To say that in any colonial set-up let us first devise a (whatever) pramana bhasha that we’ve had over the last couple of hundred years and preserve that because that is one of the weapons of anti-imperialist struggle, which was really partially Tilak’s position. He wouldn’t understand the standard language controversy at all. Suppose someone was to tell him, ‘You are consolidating the brahminical language’, he would have said, ‘So what? They too are Indians as anybody else. Alright, if you want me to consolidate something else, give me a language. This is at least an instrument.’ That seems to be the logic of these people. Phule was clearly indicating a different kind of project. But, as I told you, the problem in Marathi seems to be far less complicated and perhaps less intractable than it is here in the Telugu language area.

I have heard that Phule used oral literature to spread his ideas or to mobilise particular social groups. How do we understand its implications?Phule composed akhandas, which are not meant for any particular audi-ence. They were done in a metre that Tukaram had used. Tukaram’s poetry is well known across castes. I cannot think of a brahmin who would not fold his hands when it comes to Tukaram. All kirtanas would use at least one abhanga of Tukaram. As part of his mobilisation, Phule used the power that Tukaram had over the society. He called them akhandas, whereas in the days of the Bhakti poets, this form was known as abhanga.

So Phule did not use the spoken language of the lower castes?I don’t think so. He used Tukaram’s language or the language of Bhakti

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literature. It is very difficult to say whether it was spoken by the lower castes in Tukaram’s time. Phule knew that the language of Bhakti literature was the closest to our people. Its message should be clear to all, not just a section of the people. It was to introduce an idea of alternative religious practice and theology for the Hindus, and take them away from brahminism which was no more than simple ritualism. The fiercest opponents of ritualism were the Bhakti poets, and Tukaram was the most famous of them. Thus, Phule seems to have made a conscious decision to use a metre that is similar or virtually the same metre (as Tukaram’s) to convey his kind of a position. We did not translate them in our Selected Writings of Phule, because it is very difficult to translate poetry. Discursive prose is relatively easy to trans-late. We just did not have the manpower to translate that part.

What distinction do you see between Tilak’s intervention in the Marathi lan-guage and that of Phule’s?Basically, as far as Tilak’s generation was concerned, the idea was to take the distinct pramana bhasha and use it for the anti-imperialist movement. Phule’s position was that let us first put our house in order before we ask the colonials to go away. There was that fundamental difference. But it was not at all about pramana bhasha. It is arguable that Phule was bothered about whether it was pramana bhasha or not. In a couple of those areas, I would differ from most others. This pramana and non-pramana bhasha contradiction in Marathi history is over now. The objective situation doesn’t warrant it. As it happens in most parts of India, that kind of a con-flict really was not there. There may be some dissatisfaction that it was so brahminical or sanskritised.

How do you understand Shiva Sena politics in relation to their use of the Mar-athi linguistic identity? The very first thing is about the vernacular. There is little doubt that part of the charisma that Bal Thackeray gained was because of his racy prose, his wit and of course his cartoons. One could in fact talk of two great orators in Marathi, belonging to two different streams. One was Dange of the CPI, one of the finest speakers of Marathi; and the other Bal Thackeray, whose popular appeal was due to his mastery of polemical prose. Most of it was rhetoric of a particular selection. By clever use of language, this gentleman and Dange created an appeal to the people. In that respect I do not know anyone who would match the skills their rhetoric required. Even now, for example, his nephew Raj Thackeray derives his popularity from his ‘Thackerayan’ language. He uses language remarkably well, the right kind of rhetoric and so on. Of course, there was a difference. I have always taken the view that the Shiva Sena has never been and will not be an identity group. It essentially understood at some point of time that two things had a political potential. Number one was the declining Marathi population of


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4 Mumbai, generally in the metropolitan areas. So he played upon the feeling that, ‘Look, it’s our land and our resources; and these are the outsiders who come and take away all the jobs’, and so on. It had, and still has, a tremen-dous appeal. He started this with his attack on the south Indian presence in Mumbai at one stage. That was the beginning of his career. Later on, he seems to have dropped it altogether and turned the battle against north Indian migrants. In other words, his understanding was that deprivation is business. Deprivation of jobs, deprivation of economic opportunities and deprivation of respect for the language, i.e. people are not able to speak in their own language. I suppose this is the picture quite commonly seen across all big cities in India today. He decided to make political use of it. That is how the Shiva Sena has grown. It has very little to do with Maratha nationalism. It is essentially related to lower middle-class Maharashtrians settled in big metropolitan cities in Maharashtra who have an instinctive sympathy for the Shiva Sena.

So do you say that the Hindutva forces use the vernaculars more successfully than others?We are in a realm in which certain kind of forces actually realised, before anyone else did, that here is a vast mass of people who are not at home with any other language. They probably have training up to SSC, so they have studied basically one language which they know and in which they can negotiate their problems. English doesn’t help. Hindi doesn’t quite reach them. They understand it in Hindi cinema, but nothing beyond that. So you have to make your presence felt in the vernacular. I do not think other political forces really woke up to the power of the vernacular.

Aren’t dalit writers all over India writing in the vernacular?But most of it goes the literary way – not the political way.

Can you elaborate on that?Dalit writing is mostly poetry. Not many dalit writers, except Kasbe, attempted writing in the social sciences or taking positions in it. When I say that the right wing used the vernacular better than most others, it means most others failed on this front. They did not really project their theory in the vernacular as much as they should have. They wrote in vernacular only in terms of their own group. For instance, you run a small magazine in Puna, Nagpur, etc. – there are people who wrote editorials, took political positions. I am not saying no political positions were taken. But, there was no great mobilisation going with it. In fact the decline of the dalit movement also followed. Whereas the other group – whether it is the BJP or Shiva Sena – did not have this kind of a problem, and certainly with Thackeray on the scene, another interesting thing happened. There was a peculiar shift from a brahminical base to a non-brahminical base. Thackeray himself is not a

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brahmin. His father was a major leader of the non-brahmin movement. He was an editor and a playwright. His son has published his collected works in five volumes. He wrote five plays – all attacking brahminism severely. Both father and the son made very strong use of rhetoric. They always used the vernacular. Raj Thackeray, for instance, never answers questions in any language except in Marathi, like Karunanidhi, who gives only Tamil replies to all questions. In addition to that, the Shiva Sena has marked its Hindu content in its propaganda and programme. Raj Thackeray doesn’t use the Hindu vision as much as his uncle does. Raj Thackeray’s group is far more language-oriented. But Bal Thackeray plays both these games.

How does Marathi linguistic nationalism fit into the larger pan-Indian national structure? Aren’t there tensions between these two imaginations?I wouldn’t use the word linguistic nationalism at all. I would call it nation-ality consciousness. It is not nationalism. It is not asking for a state with an army, navy and air force. Only then does it become nationalism. Otherwise, in the European sense, it is nationality consciousness. There is national-ity consciousness in India of a varying kind. For instance, in Bengal, it is strongest. There is no other identity to a Bengali except being a Bengali – the question of whether someone is a bhadralok Bengali or a dalit Bengali wouldn’t matter very much there. Similar is the example of an east Bengali or west Bengali, although the Muslim Bengali might be speaking a slightly different Bangla than the non-Muslim Bengali. Similarly, the Samyuktha Maharashtra Agitation demonstrated that. It was a big language movement. It included everybody, from dalits to upper castes and from the right to the left. All Marathi-speaking people appeared to be behind that movement.

How do you understand nationality consciousness in terms of religion?Nationality consciousness created by language is capable of going beyond religion. Muslims, Christians and Hindus speak the same language. All Bengalis opposed the partition of Bengal. This was the first movement opposing the partition of a state – one language state, split into two. In any case, most of the divisions in the north were not generated by people’s movements at all. They were divided for administrative reasons. For instance, Jharkhand was created without any political demand by the peo-ple. Whereas in the areas where there has been some kind of a history of nationality consciousness, it takes a different route, which is what you are witnessing in the Telugu-speaking area. These very people were totally one and united when Potti Sriramulu was dying. Until that time, there was no problem of language. It arises later. That is what we outsiders can see.

In any case, nationality to my mind is crucial, and that is where the role of the vernacular comes. And, if this nationality is the crucial thing in determining and in dividing and giving direction to a certain political force, then, obviously, those who deal in the vernacular are going to capture


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4 it. That is precisely what is happening in the entire Hindi belt. Mayawati speaks only Hindi or probably reads only Hindi. She is not only a successful dalit politician but also a successful Hindi politician. In fact, she has com-bined the two and gained strength. So you can see vernacular intervention like this everywhere; even here, the question you are dealing with – ‘Which Telugu?’ – is actually a question of going deep into the problem of the ver-nacular. This is a problem of the vernacular and in the vernacular.

Some people believe that linguistic identity in states like Andhra Pradesh is weak, or it hasn’t been able to establish its hegemony, and thus it leaves scope for identity movements like the dalit movement or the Telangana movement. How do you respond to that kind of a position?I take a slightly different view. As long as there is deprivation, you are forever thinking of strategies to fight it. So you end up putting something off the burner for a while. Supposing Telangana is created, hypothetically speaking, the Telangana logic and the contrary logic may not be as distant at that point of time than it is today. In fact, chances are that after the emergence of Telangana, nationality consciousness will grow. Germany and Austria have been two separate states for a number of years. Does an Austrian speak German? Yes – a different kind of German, nevertheless German. Or, the better example is East Germany and West Germany. I am not at all sure whether any demand for separation or unification can be ruled out in the Indian situation. There was a case of nationality conscious-ness in this part of the world at one point of time. That is why Andhra was created. That history cannot be sacrificed at the altar of the present. If you go back and read the newspapers of Hyderabad of that time, I am not quite sure what results would follow. Therefore, I don’t see any identity prob-lems. I take them to be problems of deprivation. All kinds of deprivation: social deprivation, cultural deprivation and economic deprivation. When you wake that up, it takes a very strong reaction.

Although the Telangana and dalit movements have challenged the authority of standard Telugu, some people still think that it is not a serious issue because, they argue, the story of standard language is the same all over the world. For instance, the complaint that the standard language suppresses dialects and so on is not new. They would say, take the French case. Once standard French started becoming popular, most dialects began to disappear. All these changes were brought in by the bourgeois revolution and the process of modernisation. Thus standardisation is not necessarily seen as a bad thing, but a productive and desirable one. For them, the question of power relations between those who use the standard language and those who use the non-standard forms does not seem to be that significant. However, the contention continues and is most visible in the fields of literature, media and education. Thus isn’t it a larger political problem?

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Sure. Over a period of time, that is what ultimately it would boil down to. It doesn’t sound as if it is imminent, but I get a feeling that it might well be the case. They will simply end up being two states speaking Telugu. Ambedkar has put it very clearly. He had thought of three Marathi-speaking states. So why can’t there be two Telugu-speaking states? It is not an identity ques-tion. Division of one linguistic state into two does not necessarily mean that identity is denied. It might appear to be a total break with the past. But that cannot happen.

What if one were to say that the Telangana movement has already created a sort of crisis in the Telugu identity?To start with, but things will settle down. Otherwise these languages would not have lasted this long. Imagine the situation of this language. How many years has it had political power? The political power for the last six to seven hundred years was in the charge of other languages. The dominant administrative or court language in Maharashtra was Persian and later on English. Then Hindi was made one of the compulsory subjects. Marathi acquired its ‘administrative set-up’ only with the creation of Maharashtra state as late as in 1960.

When Hindi was made a compulsory subject, was it easily accepted?Yes, it was. But when I went to school, Hindi was not compulsory. I passed my SSLC in 1954. It was introduced soon after, and part of the credit or discredit goes to Morarji Desai, a staunch Gandhian nationalist. It probably would not have been the case had the Congress were not in power. That is another issue. We are witness to the problems arising out of strengthening or weakening of nationality consciousness. Is it a case like East Germany and West Germany? I wonder.

The perception of the crisis in linguistic identity has been created through sym-bolic acts such as the desecration of statues of Telugu icons like Telugu Talli, Potti Sriramulu and many others on Tank Bund by the Telangana activists. Simultaneously, symbols representing Telangana identity are being created. For instance, TRS created Telanagana Talli. There is a demand that Telugu University should be renamed as Komaram Bheem University. Telugu literary icons such as Viresalingam and Gurajada are now viewed as representing Andhra upper castes alone. This trend is viewed as divisive and dangerous by those who are in favour of united Andhra Pradesh. Thus, the word Telugu itself has become a terrain of contestation.One has read that argument in Marathi about Telangana. There is also the apprehension that the division of Andhra Pradesh will instigate similar aspirations in the Marathi region. All that might happen. But I am not at all sure if things will remain the same some thirty or forty years from now. It is quite possible that there might be a return to the earlier position, or a situa-


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4 tion midway. I am not at all sure if the word Telugu will acquire a different weight and importance in various parts of the Telugu-speaking areas over a period of time. What is crucial is, whether the quarrel happens or not, in a nationality situation, there is really no immediate reading of the situation possible. You can only go along with what actually happens on the ground.

In most of the linguistic states in India, since the official language is the lan-guage of the majority, the minorities and the tribal people are worried that their languages are in danger. Is there a similar situation in Maharashtra? Is Marathi seen as an imposition by such groups?Of course, there is. But there is the other practical problem. The over-whelming population speaks Marathi or some variation of Marathi, and for all jobs and state administration, knowledge of Marathi becomes necessary. You can give them their language but then you are depriving them of jobs. Thus, there are economic factors for which they should probably learn this language, like we learn English. If I can take English as a burden for my job opportunities, why deny them the burden of Marathi for job opportunities? But this is a very genuine problem. It has happened to our Muslim students of the coastal area. The principal concern is well taken. All tongues of this country must have enough opportunity of life or survival. I don’t know what the answer to a problem like this is.

I am sure you are aware of the demand put forward by dalits that English must be taught as a compulsory subject in all government schools from the primary level, and also English must be made the medium of instruction for all subjects. But the guardians of Telugu are opposing this demand very strongly because they believe that such a move will be detrimental to the very survival of Telugu language, literature and culture. But dalits have been contesting them and saying, ‘You send all your children to English-medium schools but deny our children the same thing. Why should Telugu be taught only in government schools?’Surely. The same arguments are made in Marathi – that the upper castes send their children to English-medium schools, to the IT sector or Cyber-abad, and ultimately they land in California. Let us assume that you make all schools English-medium. But where will you find that many English teachers? English-medium schools in small towns are pathetic. We think of the English-medium schools in Hyderabad or Pune or Mumbai, but not in my place, Rahimatpur. The teacher there cannot speak one sentence in English correctly. What you learn in these schools is no learning at all. You are at least learning something when you are closer to the language. Moreover, language is also the memory of a social group – memory of the struggles of a social group. There will be a funny kind of memoryless equality coming to this society through English. You might say that it is a philosophical question which does not have an answer. Possibly! But the

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rapidity with which highly educated dalits are losing their social identity, more importantly, social memory, has to be taken into account. And once you have this situation, people like Phule are pushed back into the jungles of English. I have no answer to that.

Let us go back to the language purity question, since most Indian languages seem to be facing this problem. What is the present situation in Marathi?After the fall of Savarkar’s bhasha shuddhi movement, I don’t think we have that kind of feeling now. There was a time when they thought of Urdu, Persian and Arabic as corrupting languages. All those compulsions seem to have disappeared. The only complaint that one hears these days is the cor-rupting influence of Hindi. It comes inevitably in all media and language policy discussions.

Does this kind of a feeling feed into the Shiva Sena’s anti-Hindi politics?Definitely. But some of the complaints are correct. It is not as though they are entirely meaningless. A simple prakrit Marathi word will go away and a sanskritic Hindi word takes its place. So, the Hindi influence is doubly treacherous, in my opinion. Firstly, it removes very simple peasants’ words from the language. Partly, the media is doing it without knowing it. Then you begin to use it but end up using a big word. Here the argument is not against the foreigner as it was, but about defending the non-sanskritic Marathi word.

Your primary interest in the vernacular is related to historiography. You believe that the kind of history one could track from the vernacular would be very different from the kind of ‘Indian history’ that exists today in English. Can you say more on that?We shall not be telling the whole story or history, till we retrieve some of these things. For example, of all the grand books written on modern Indian history, how many would mention the anti-caste content of Bhakti litera-ture? How is modern India made? All this is missed out completely. I have seen a book, I forget its title, in which there is a reference to Savarkar but no reference to Phule. Whereas historically it is always a Phule that mat-ters more than a Savarkar. I could have understood this in the 1930s when people were still waking up. But to have a book in the twenty-first century which gives a certain status to Savarkar and ignores Phule – how can that book ever get the social movements of this country right? I am simply saying, rewrite this history from the vernacular sources for your own and our own good. Whether it is the same narrative or not, I don’t know. And my other favourite is this memory of the struggle. If your coverage is not vernacular enough, you will never get the struggle part of it right. And thus it will be an easy, conflictless narrative – simply moving from argument A to argument B. The struggle is forever missing from that narrative. I am


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4 giving you Phule’s example because that is the example I know; but one can imagine twenty-five illustrations of this kind where you would be missing the people’s part of the history. If you have no knowledge of the Satyashod-hak movement, what are you writing about modern Maharashtra history?

I’m sure you are aware of the book History in the Vernacular. In the intro-duction, Partha Chatterjee suggests that all history written in the vernacular is not necessarily the vernacular history. Would you comment?That is also true of English-language history. History written in English is not necessarily modern just because it is written in English. My argument is that you cannot write modern India’s history without tapping the vernac-ular sources. If vernacular sources were properly tapped, the Satyashodhak Samaj would have been discussed a long time ago. Why did we have to wait for Gail Omvedt to come on the horizon? That means the so-called sources in the vernacular are not sources in the vernacular. They are indicated to them by western scholars on South Asia. You cannot write a history of modern Indian awareness without reference to slavery, or without refer-ence to Tarabhai Shinde’s tract on inequality of man and woman. Most of the writing which claims to have touched some kind of vernacular sources is from secondary sources. What I am saying is that if one were writing on France, you would make sure that your French is right and you would con-sult French writings of whatever century you are working on. I don’t find the major historians taking that much of an academic care when it comes to Indian history. The only period for which it is happening, strangely, is the medieval period. There at least the Persian documents of the time are being consulted. Most medieval Indian history experts know their linguistic bag-gage very well. You do not see that when it comes to modern Indian history writing. We must retrieve a whole range of ideas deposited as it were in the vernacular strand and see what impact they make. If that were the practice really, Satyashodhak Samaj would not have been ignored for this long. I have come across many dalit students who want to work on dalit theatre without knowing Marathi or without reading the Marathi text. How do you work on a drama without reading the text? Whatever your language is, pick up dalit texts in that language, and you must analyse the text in the original. All that I want to say is, vernacular ideas are sources of history. No history is complete without vernacular sources. This argument is very different from the argument that Partha Chatterjee is making or responding to, as far as I can see.

N. Manohar Reddy taught English in India and Saudi Arabia for many years. He is currently working on a research project on ‘Modernity of Tel-ugu Language’ in the Department of Cultural Studies, EFL-U, Hyderabad.

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Professor Bipan Chandra, Emeritus Professor of the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who passed away on 30 August, was an outstanding historian, a major figure in the country’s intellectual life, and an indomitable fighter in the cause of secular anti-imperialism.

Born in Kangra in pre-independence Punjab (now in Himachal Pradesh), he had his education in Forman Christian College, Lahore, and later at Stanford University, California. Forced to leave Lahore during the Partition, he was, like many sensitive intellectuals of his generation, drawn to Marxism, which made him give up his pursuit of an Engineering degree, in favour of a study of Economics and History. While at Stanford, he attended the lectures of Paul Baran, the renowned Marxist economist and author of The Political Economy of Growth – a pioneering Marxist analysis of the genesis of ‘underdevelopment’. He also came into contact there with Communist activists. Because of his Communist associations he was forced to leave the United States, which was then gripped by the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunt.

Back in India, he was appointed to teach History at the Hindu College in the University of Delhi, where he completed his doctoral dissertation, subsequently published as The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India. In it he recovered the sophistication that had characterised the economic-theoretical thinking of the early nationalist writers like Dadabhai Naoroji, R.C. Dutt and G.V. Joshi. His work restored to the early national-ists, usually dismissed as ‘petition-wallahs’ who only appealed to the British government to treat its Indian ‘subjects’ better, the status of being the theo-retical pioneers of India’s anti-colonial struggle.

No struggle can take off until its basic theoretical foundations have been built, and the early nationalists, Bipan (as he was affectionately called) argued, not only provided that foundation, but also developed a theoretical corpus that was, notwithstanding the personal mildness and moderation of its individual authors, implacably opposed to the colonial regime in an objective sense. The ‘drain’ theory developed by Naoroji, for instance, showed the systemic exploitation of India under colonial rule, and led to the inescapable conclusion that the ‘drain’, which constituted the basis of the poverty of the Indian people, could come to an end only with the end of colonial rule.

While at the Hindu College, Bipan Chandra started a journal called

OBITUARYBipan Chandra (1928–2014)

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4 Enquiry which drew in several outstanding academics of the country of that time as authors, and where some of the most thought-provoking pieces of Professor Irfan Habib, Bipan’s long-standing friend, were first published. Among these were Habib’s critique of Karl Wittfogel’s theory of ‘Oriental Despotism’, his assessment of the potentialities for capitalist development in Mughal India, and his remarkable analysis of the agrarian causes of the downfall of the Mughal Empire. I recollect, as a student, the sheer excite-ment with which we used to await the forthcoming issue of Enquiry.

He also engaged in 1968, along with Tapan Raychaudhury and Toru Matsui, in a debate in the pages of The Indian Economic and Social History Review with Morris D. Morris over the latter’s attempt at a ‘reinterpretation ‘ of nineteenth century Indian history that sought to portray colonial rule in a more favourable light. Bipan’s rejoinder to Morris constitutes to this day in my view the most succinct and forthright indictment of the economic consequences of colonial rule in India that one can find in any academic article.

After his doctoral dissertation on the early nationalist writers, Bipan moved on to a study of the national movement at its apogee, and the role of leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, a task that was to occupy him for the rest of his life. In fact, he became the historian par excellence of the national move-ment. He not only studied it, but invested it with a meaning and historical significance that no other historian had done. In his view, the national movement and its culmination, India’s achievement of independence, was one of the three most significant historical events of the early twentieth century, the other two being the Bolshevik and the Chinese Revolutions. And he perceived the national movement in a manner that was different not only from the way that ‘imperialist ‘ and ‘subaltern ‘ historiographies do, but even from the understanding of the traditional Left with whom, notwithstanding all his differences and all his explicit criticisms of their conduct, he always had a close and non-antagonistic relationship.

Unlike the traditional Left that saw the national movement as being led by the bourgeoisie through the instrumentality of the Indian National Congress which it considered to be a bourgeois Party (because of which E.M.S. Namboodiripad had even characterised Gandhi, notwithstanding his outstanding personal qualities and unique philosophical positions, as a bourgeois leader, in his book The Mahatma and the Ism), Bipan came to view the Congress as an open-ended organisation that was potentially capa-ble of being changed in a socialist direction and was even actually moving Leftward.

He saw the national movement not as a ‘structured ‘ movement of different classes, each having its contradictions with imperialism, each standing on a different footing in terms of the degree of its antagonism vis-à-vis imperialism, and each occupying and maintaining, more or less, a particular position within the movement; he saw it rather as a movement

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of the nation as a whole that stood in an antagonistic relationship with imperialism, but with the relative strengths of the different classes within the movement having a degree of fluidity and malleability.

Whatever one may think of Bipan’s position, which will surely be a subject of much debate in the years to come, it was both sui generis and displayed enormous courage. Standing alone, remaining true to one’s con-victions, not only vis-à-vis the Cambridge School of historians of India, or the historians of the ‘Subaltern Studies ‘ School, but even vis-à-vis the tradi-tional Left which included most of his friends, required immense courage. Likewise, highlighting nationalism, even of the anti-imperialist variety, as a positive historical phenomenon, at a time when it is fashionable to frown on all nationalisms, including even anti-imperialist nationalism (and when the term itself is used in a portmanteau sense to cover both anti-imperialist secular nationalism and Hindu communalism), required immense cour-age. Bipan Chandra, however, was never lacking in courage.

His own views on the national movement underwent a change in the course of time. He had the courage to revise his views and admit his own earlier errors, as he saw them, without flinching. While he was closer, despite differences, to the traditional Left position of seeing the Congress as a predominantly bourgeois Party in his earlier writings, he came to the afore-mentioned understanding of a fluidity in that Party in his later writ-ings.

And what changed, along with this changed understanding of the national movement, is his perception of Left praxis itself, which moved increasingly in a Gramscian direction, away from what the Comintern under Stalin had come to inculcate. The fact that his changed understand-ing of the national movement paralleled a changed understanding of Left praxis, reveals in my view a very important facet of Bipan’s intellect.

Whenever Christopher Hill, the renowned Marxist historian of sev-enteenth century Britain whose theoretical endeavors had unearthed the ‘English Revolution ‘, was asked by eager young students in the radical days of the early seventies what he thought of Stalin or the Soviet Union or any such burning topic that attracted attention at the time, he would invariably reply: ‘Read my book on the seventeenth century ‘. Hill in other words had tried to develop a unified understanding in which his historical research, his politics, and his views on contemporary political issues, fig-ured together. Bipan sought to achieve a similar unity of understanding. It was not just a question of his politics informing his research, or his politics deriving its basis from his research; it was a question of unity between his general understanding of political praxis and his historical research. Very few historians seek to achieve the unity of thought that Bipan attempted.

He disseminated this understanding through his lectures and writings with enormous energy, passion and intensity. Never a person to shy away from controversy or debate, he simply overwhelmed one with the passion

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4 and vigour of his intellect and personality. Even when it was difficult to agree with him, it was even more difficult to disagree with him: such was the force of the argument with which he put across his position.

He was a charismatic teacher, whose lectures, whether one agreed with him or not, were always an intellectual treat. In his Delhi University days, he had, along with his friend and colleague in the Political Science Depart-ment, Randhir Singh, influenced generations of students. Students from diverse disciplines, not just young historians, would flock to hear him; most of them owed their radicalism, even their interest in a life of the intellect, to the hours they spent listening to his lectures.

And he continued to wield this charisma when he moved to the Jawaharlal Nehru University to set up the Centre of Historical Studies there, along with Sarvepalli Gopal, Romila Thapar and Satish Chandra. The faculty members of that Centre, notwithstanding their different areas of research and intellectual positions, were unified in their commitment to a secular anti-imperialist nationalism, one manifestation of which was a little pamphlet, but highly influential at the time, that was brought out by Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar and Harbans Mukhia, critiquing communalism in the study of Indian history. The Centre was to continue this struggle against communalism in its later years. It stood tall in its opposition not just to the communal act involved in the demolition of the Babri masjid, but, in particular, to the entire historiographical justification that was advanced in defence of that horrendous act of vandalism.

Bipan’s contribution to the building of that Centre, and to the Uni-versity within which it is located, did not come only from his academic work, or his organisational ability or his enthusiasm for collective praxis on academic projects. It came also from his extraordinary personal generosity towards students and colleagues, whom he unstintingly provided whatever help they needed, a fact I can vouch for from personal experience.

Bipan shunned ‘academicism’. He did not want to be read only by a handful of ‘experts’; he did not want the whiff of academic discourse to remain confined only to the cognoscenti. He wanted quality academic work to be accessible even to school children, which is why he exhorted all his colleagues and friends to write text books for children. As a result we had the remarkable spectacle of the most distinguished professors in some of the most outstanding institutions of higher learning in the country writing text books for school children, in a bid to raise the quality of school edu-cation.

Bipan carried both his immense energy and his passion for making quality academic work available to the wider public, to the National Book Trust when he became its executive head. He greatly expanded the publica-tion programme of the NBT, pored personally over papers and manuscripts despite failing eye-sight, and roped in some of the finest academics of the country such as Irfan Habib, Amit Bhaduri and others to write monographs

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for the NBT on subjects of their choice, which were then distributed at the extremely low NBT prices. It is a common presumption on the Left that making ideas available to the people is a necessary condition for progress, which is why Bertolt Brecht had written: ‘Hungry man, Reach for the book.’ Bipan completely shared this presumption.

The loss of his wife Usha some years ago had left him forlorn and he himself had been ailing for some time. Even so his passing away comes as a shock. It is difficult to believe that such a helpful, generous, intense, brilliant, passionate, and energetic person, such a tornado of a man, is no longer amongst us.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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Maya Tudor, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, xvi+240 pages, 2013, Rs 795.

What are the reasons that some developing countries, on deliverance from colonial rule, are able to usher in democratic systems, while many others face instability and an authoritarian structure of governance? Some studies on aspects of this vital question have been conducted by Western scholars interested in developments in the developing world. One such study is the one under review by Maya Tudor, currently a Fellow in Politics at St. John’s College, Oxford University, who has spent some time in the Indian subcontinent and studied the political trends in the area in a comprehen-sive manner. Predictably, she has chosen to compare the political transition after Indian independence and the partition of the country in 1947, based on the developments prior to independence. She seems to have found some convincing answers to the oft-repeated question why India developed into a working democracy while Pakistan had to experience autocracy soon after independence was won, even though the political parameters for social and political development seem similar on the surface in both countries.

According to Tudor’s analysis, in the decades preceding independence, political classes in both countries tried to gather mass support ‘as a means of instrumentally advancing their interests’. But the coalitions forged by the independence movements in the two countries differed significantly, ‘in distributive coherence and in organisational complexity’. This difference had direct effects on India’s and Pakistan’s democratic development on dramatically opposite lines.

In the decades before independence, the Indian freedom movement was led by an urban educated middle class. They perceived the value of electoral victories in the provinces and a concern for national sovereignty. To advance these objectives, the leaders of the independence movement led by Gandhi opted for an alliance with the rural middle class. And the party of this movement, the Congress, was seen as representing a class working for ‘the redistribution of economic and political power away from the colonial regime and its collaborators but also maintaining the hierarchical patronage-based economic and political order over which it presided’. Fol-lowing independence, the party took the shape of a ‘coherent distributive

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4 coalition’ as the distributive interests of its core coalition partners were considerably aligned. ‘This distributive coherence enabled the party to broker state-building and governing compromises with relative ease.’

The situation in what became Pakistan, argues Tudor, was absolutely different. The landed autocrats leading the Pakistani independence move-ment worked for the mobilisation of a mass base in the two Muslim major-ity provinces of Punjab and Bengal ‘in order to stay politically powerful’. The dominant groups in these two provinces had no common concern for distributive interests. Pakistan’s leading political party, the Muslim League, in a contradictory predicament, represented landed aristocrats in north-western British India who were understandably opposed to any type of economic or power redistribution along with peasants in north-eastern British India who stood to gain substantially from such redistribution. ‘This was a relatively incoherent distributive coalition because the distrib-utive interests of its core coalition partners were nearly in diametric oppo-sition to each other.’ When independence came this incoherence came in the way of equitable governance for the party because there was no scope for desirable compromises between its core support bases.

Following the formation of the Muslim League in 1906, it worked for the prevention of democratic reforms by the British government and expressed its colonial loyalty along with campaigning for extra-propor-tional Muslim representation in a government of the future. The colonial patronage led to gains for the Muslim League in the 1909 reforms. As Tudor points out, separate electorate not only allocated a set number of seats in the new Council for Muslims, but also allowed only Muslims the right to vote for those seats. Crucially, it guaranteed UP Muslims extra-pro-portional political representation.

In quest of their political advance, the leaders of the Congress Party in India built a robust and internally democratic party organisation, partly because the shared distributive interests of its coalition made it more possible to crate consensus around party platforms, and partly because a demonstrably non-violent and egalitarian nationalism encouraged property owners and landless peasants alike to join a broad anti-colonial movement. Following independence, because of its assets of a party with solid organisational apparatuses, the Indian government was in a position to face the challenges of governance and nation-building with assurance of stability of the system.

On the other hand, Tudor points out, the leaders of Pakistan’s inde-pendence party could not create a robust infrastructure like in India. This failure of Pakistan’s leading political party was largely due to the fact that doing so would have required working out power-sharing arrangements between organised groups with contradictory distributive interests. The resultant alliance between the powerful and dominant landed aristocracy and the military leadership in independent Pakistan, not unexpectedly,

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resulted in a military coup by the then Army chief, Ayub Khan, only a decade after independence (1958), and the undemocratic and autocratic tradition it gave rise to such take-overs by Army generals in the decades that followed. Democracy was trampled upon time and again.

The author has gone into the ushering in of political structures in the two countries to understand the root causes of the divergence from a demo-cratic trajectory in Pakistan and the smooth functioning of a democratic set-up in India. Even before India’s formal independence, the Constituent Assembly, dominated by members of the Congress Party, was of the view that independent India should follow the Westminster model of govern-ment in which the chief executive would be elected by the largest party in Parliament. The elected Parliament and the elected provincial legislatures were to be given the power to ‘appoint’ the President (as a figurehead). The system worked smoothly and continues till now with the powers of the Prime Minister and the President clearly defined in a democratic structure.

India’s adoption of a democratic system was not followed by Paki-stan. In Pakistan the position of an unelected Governor General / Pres-ident acquired primacy in governance. The undisputed leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah prior to independence assumed a more powerful dimension after independence. ‘By choosing to govern from the unelected position of Governor General rather than the elected position of Prime Minister, the leader of Pakistan’s dominant partly inaugurated a pattern of an unaccountable chief executive in Pakistan’, Tudor points out. The Constitution Assembly of Pakistan conferred upon Jinnah the position of Governor General (even though he had resigned as head of the Muslim League). Tudor points out that in a cabinet meeting on 30 December 1947, it was unanimously decided that Jinnah should formally preside over the cabinet and that ‘where the opinion of the majority of the cabinet conflicted with Jinnah’s opinion, Jinnah’s opinion should be final and binding’. Thus the seeds of divergence away from a democratic trajectory and towards autocracy were sown at the dawn of independence and what followed after Jinnah’s death is known history.

The haze over the concrete concept of Pakistan being the only issue before the Muslim League, as Jinnah himself described it, continued till the last days of the independence campaign. But he chose to never specify exactly what Pakistan stood for. Tudor writes:

Actually defining Pakistan in concrete terms could have fractured the fragile

Muslim unity which was so important to legitimizing the League as an equal

claimant in power-sharing arrangements at the Centre. The Lahore Resolution

of 1940, which first officially introduced the concept of Pakistan as a League

goal, called for fully independent ‘states’ rather than ‘state’, which left it possi-

ble for Bengali leaders to imagine that they would have their own independent

state within a United India.

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4 In fact the concept of Pakistan as envisioned by poet Iqbal too had talked of two territories to be governed by Muslims. He did not think that the two territories in the west and east of India would be governed by one single authority. While the Muslim League leader who became Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, also referred to Pakistan as ‘states’, Jin-nah was always vague about it and did not want to elaborate on the matter.

The discussion on the concept of Pakistan, in an otherwise compre-hensive account of the history of Pakistan, leaves something to be desired. Tudor does not make any mention of poet Iqbal who is supposed to be the inspirer of the Pakistan movement. The Cambridge students led by Chaud-hury Rehmat Ali, who actually coined the name ‘Pakistan’ in a pamphlet published in 1933, elucidating the features of a country of their dreams, too do not find a mention in the book.

Tudor has cogently described how the landed aristocrats in Punjab backed the Muslim League with the motivation of getting concessions in the emerging constitutional arrangements rather than any urge to organise a well-structured political party with belief in egalitarian principles. But she has chosen to ignore the factor that led to the advance of the Muslim League, despite its very poor performance in the provincial elections of 1937 in the Muslim majority areas, that, ironically, came to constitute Paki-stan on India’s partition. This crucial factor was the extremely heightened expression of a ‘Muslim homeland’ and the awesome role of Muslims of the United Provinces where, apart from the powerful landed aristocracy, large sections of other classes of Muslims and groups like the Aligarh con-tingent (that campaigned for Pakistan not only in UP but also in other areas) joined the movement for the ‘Muslim homeland.’ It mattered little to these campaigners that they were not likely to be a part of Pakistan if it was ultimately achieved.

An important instance of divergence from the democratic trajectory was the dominant leaders of the western wing of Pakistan manipulating constitutional provisions so that although Bengalis would have been a pop-ular majority of the lower House of People, the upper House of Units was vested with powers equal to the lower House. The voice of the majority of Pakistan’s population in Bengal could be reduced to a legislative minority in a joint session of the two houses. That this, along with many steps to keep the Bengalis, a majority in Pakistan, caused great consternation among the people of East Pakistan in most matters of governance is quite well known to students of Pakistan’s history. Overall this is a well-researched book on the comparative history of India and Pakistan, apart from its main theme of tracing the origins of democracy in India and autocracy in Pakistan. This review, however, is confined to the nature of the trajectories the two countries took with regard to the ushering in of democracy or autocracy.

Anees Chishti is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

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