The Politics of the Governed : Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World

The Politics of the Governed the leonard hastings schoff memorial lectures The Politics of the Governed Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World Partha Chatterjee columbia university press new york Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York, Chichester, West Sussex Copyright ᭧ 2004 Columbia University Press All rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chatterjee, Partha, 1947– The politics of the governed : reflections on popular politics in most of the world / Partha Chatterjee. p. cm. — (University seminars/Leonard Hastings Schoff memorial lectures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-13062-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Politics, Practical—India. 2. Political participation—India. 3. Democracy—India. 4. Equality—India. 5. Citizenship—India. I. Title. II. Series. JQ281.C48 2004 320.954—dc22 2003060821 A Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper Printed in the United States of America c 10987654321 References to Internet Web Sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the articles in this book were prepared. “The obstinate multitude yields last; others vacillate endlessly.” —Apocryphal (early modern) To Edward Said (1935–2003), scholar extraordinary university seminars Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures The University Seminars at Columbia University sponsor an annual series of lectures, with the support of the Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Fund. A member of the Columbia faculty is invited to deliver before a general audience three lectures on a topic of his or her choosing. Columbia University Press publishes the lectures. David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain 1993 Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy 1994 Saskia Sassen, Sovereignty Transformed: States and the New Transnational Actors 1995 Robert Pollack, The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Order, Meaning, and Free Will in Modern Medical Science 2000 Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After the Holocaust, Totalitarianism, and Total War 2003 Lisa Anderson, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century Contents Preface ix part i. the leonard hastings schoff memorial lectures 2001 one: The Nation in Heterogeneous Time 3 two: Populations and Political Society 27 three: The Politics of the Governed 53 part ii. global/local: before and after september 11 four: The World After the Great Peace 81 five: Battle Hymn 107 six: The Contradictions of Secularism 113 seven: Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois At Last? 131 Afterword 149 Notes 153 Bibliography 161 Index 167 Photographs appear as an insert following page 78 Preface The Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures were delivered in November 2001. I am grateful to the University Seminars committee of Columbia University, and Robert Belknap in particular, for inviting me to deliver them. It was indeed an honor to follow the distinguished members of the Columbia faculty who had delivered these lectures before me. I am especially grateful to Akeel Bilgrami, Nicholas Dirks, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for their warm and generous introductions to the lectures and to the members of the audience, including many of my students, for their enthusiastic participation in the discussions that followed. In preparing the lectures for publication, I have been mindful of many of the questions raised by my audience. I must confess that it was a little daunting to speak under the giant shadow of what had happened in New York,in the United States, and in our hapless world in the weeks preceding the lectures. I could not claim to offer any spectacular enlightenment, and certainly not any magic solution to the world’s intractable problems. What I did hope to bring to my audience then, and what I expect to present to my readers now, is a certain understanding—however hazy and in- determinate it may be—of what it is that is driving the energies and aspirations of numerous people in most of the world. This is not a world that is familiar to many of us, and I do not claim any privileged insider’s knowledge. I have been, for the most part, myself an observer from the outside, except that for the greater part of the year when I live and work away from Columbia and New York, this world intrudes x Preface into my consciousness and declares its presence in ways that I cannot ignore. This is the world of popular politics in most of the world— the place where, I believe, political modernity is being forged today. It is both foolish and irresponsible to dismiss it contemptuously as the third world slum or the Arab street. There is politics here that is often contrary to the civil etiquette of metropolitan life, but it is insistent in its claims because, first, politics is numerous, and second, it is open to purposeful mobilization and leadership. There is both a global and a local dimension to the politics of the governed. And there have been significant and interrelated changes along both dimensions in recent years. I have therefore decided to include in this volume four other lectures I have given in the last year that might help situate my understanding of political society in its larger global context as well as illustrate the possibilities and limits of political leadership in the present local context. These additional lectures may also provide an interesting change of perspective—from talking about politics in the Western academy to talking about it in “the East.” It is a shift to which I am now so habituated that I am no longer conscious of the precise modalities of transference. I leave it to my readers to draw their own inferences. I have been pursuing the idea of political society in most of the world for a few years now. Needless to say, I have benefited immensely from my discussions with many people at many places around the world. I began writing the present version of the lectures during a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2001. I have also dis- cussed with great profit earlier versions of these ideas in Bangalore, Calcutta, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Delhi, Hyderabad, Istanbul, Kathmandu, London, Paris, and Taipei. A small group consisting of Talal Asad, Carlos Forment, Mahmood Mamdani, and David Scott, with whom I would occasionally meet in New York to discuss each other’s work was greatly stimulating. My colleagues on the editorial group of Subaltern Studies have been my intellectual companions for many years; I thank them all. As always, I am grateful to my colleagues at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, which is my place of work for the greater part of the year, for their friendship and support. Preface xi I thank Peter Dimock, Anne Routon, and Leslie Bialler of Colum- bia University Press for their help and understanding in supervising the publication of these lectures. I am also grateful to Ahmed Ali, Dilip Banerjee, Bikash Bose, Sabuj Mukhopadhyay and Fr. P. J. Joseph of Chitrabani for granting me permission to use their photographs in this book. Abhijit Bhattacharya of the archives and the staff of the library of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, have been, as always, immensely helpful: I thank them all. Calcutta March 31, 2003 The Politics of the Governed part i the leonard hastings schoff memorial lectures 2001 one The Nation in Heterogeneous Time i My subject is popular politics in most of the world. When I say “popular,”I do not necessarily presume any particular institutional form or process of politics. I do, however, suggest that much of the politics I describe is conditioned by the functions and activities of modern governmental systems that have now become part of the expected functions of governments everywhere. These expectations and activities have produced, I will argue, certain relations between governments and populations. The popular politics I will describe grows upon and is shaped by those relations. What I mean by “most of world”will, I hope, become clearer as I proceed. I mean, in a general sense, those parts of the world that were not direct participants in the history of the evolution of the institutions of modern capitalist democracy. “Modern capitalist democracy”might, in a loose way, be taken to mean the modern West. But, as I will indicate, the modern West has a significant presence in many modern non-Western soci- eties, just as, indeed, there are large sectors of contemporary Western society that are not necessarily part of the historical entity known as the modern West. However, if I were to make a rough estimate of the number of people in the world who would be, in a conceptual sense, included within my description of popular politics, I would say that I am talking of the political life of well over three-fourths of contemporary humanity. The familiar concepts of social theory that I will need to revisit here are civil society and state, citizenship and rights, universal affil- 4 the schoff lectures iations and particular identities. Since I will look at popular politics, I must also consider the question of democracy. Many of these concepts will no longer look familiar after I position my lenses and per- suade you to look through them. Civil society, for instance, will appear as the closed association of modern elite groups, sequestered from the wider popular life of the communities, walled up within enclaves of civic freedom and rational law. Citizenship will take on two dif- ferent shapes—the formal and the real.

Load more