civil society and multiple publics

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Civil Society and the

Predicament of Multiple Publics

Vivek Bhandari

n a newspaper article published recently, Neera Chandhoke, someone who has written

extensively on the subject o civil society, lamented the emergence o global civil society

organizations. The organizations, she pointed out, frst became dramatically visible at

the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when about fteen hundred o them had assembled to collec-

tively chart out the worlds uture on matters ranging rom environmental reorm to human

rights. By 1995, this sector o nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy groups, and

social activists had reached enormous proportions, as thirty-fve thousand o them descended

on the Fourth World Conerence on Women in Beijing. In the article, Chandhoke argues that

ar rom signaling the advent o a new global civil society in which the organizations provide

an alternative to a nation-state-centric global order and the exploitative global economy, the

newly emerging consensus reects a moral vision determined predominantly by powerul

nations in the West. Her doubts on the subject have as much to do with the neoliberal ideo-

logical consensus emerging at these meetings as with the growing valorization oparticular

orms o civil society organizations at the expense o many others.

Given the validity o such concerns, especially as they pertain to the postcolonial world,there is a pressing need to move the dialogue urther. In the period ollowing the collapse o

the Soviet Union, it is true that considerable eorts are being devoted to rejuvenating institu-

tions o civil society. A concept that was largely moribund when models o state-led modern-

ization dominated both Marxist and liberal conceptions o social change and development,

it has made a dramatic comeback and is slowly beginning to percolate into a number o disci-

plinary arenas. Ongoing discussions approach it rom a range o vantage points, inormed by

shiting views on the nature o modernization, the growth o new social movements, and the

discourse o rights. In these debates, new ormulations on the nature o statehood and citizen-

ship are necessitating a reevaluation o the meanings o civil society. With a backward glance

at this literature, this essay attempts to identiy the parameters o civil society in countries that

were once colonized by addressing a very specifc question: In what ways has the emergenceo nation-statehood and modern notions o subjectivity shaped the relationship between civil

society and public culture in postcolonial societies? By ocusing on developments in India,

the essay argues that an understanding o the discursive felds and practices normatively

associated with civi l society and the public sphere in Western liberal thought, while useul, is

inadequate or explaining various orms o participatory politics, and indeed the nature o

political society itsel, in postcolonial contexts where the historical relationship between the

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1. Neera Chandhoke, Civil Society Hijacked, Hindu, January 16,

2002.


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C i v i l S o c i e t y a n d M u l t i p l e P u b l i c s

state and society (a alse duality in itsel) has

been one o stark inequality. The essay argues

that the peculiar circumstances o colonial rule

in India created a ractured, stratifed public

culture in which a normative bourgeois public

sphere coexists with multiple subaltern coun-

terpublics. Although colonial orms o knowl-

edge sought to discipline the sociocultural

landscape in the Raj rom the mid-nineteenth

century onward, the coexistence o multiple

publics demonstrates that numerous constitu-

encies resisted, indeed subverted, such reorder-

ing. Over time, this has had a proound eect

on the way people in India understand their

role as citizens and, in turn, their relationship

with existing institutions o civil society.

Locating the Public

In the voluminous scholarship on the subject,

the origins o civil society are generally attrib-

uted to G. W. F. Hegels nineteenth-century

theoretical ormulations. More recently, the

revival o the study o civil society, it is oten

suggested, is the outcome o debates in Eastern

Europe and the English translation o Jrgen

Habermass The Structural Transformation of the

Public Sphere. Partly because o the prominence

o Habermass ormulations on the public

sphere and modern institutions in general,

the concept o civil society has been particularly

important to political philosophers, who havebeen its primary explorers in recent times. In

his work on a theory o communicative action,

Habermas makes a clear distinction between

the lieworld and the system a distinction

that indicates a radical rupture between the

signifcance o everyday interaction and inter-

actions made possible by institutions and orga-

nizations. The latter, according to Habermas,

serve as the locus o the modern public sphere

and, in turn, the associational lie that ani-

mates civil society. As Ashutosh Varshney puts

it, or Habermas, everyday interaction makes

lie, but organized interaction makes history.

The emergence o new histories o the popu-

lar struggles o women, peasants, workers, and

minoritiesthose not ormally admitted to the

public sphere in much o nineteenth-century

Europe and Americasuggests the historical

inadequacy o Habermass distinction. Indeed,

in his more recent positions, Habermas has all

but dropped the radical distinction he drew

earlier, and, as Varshney points outs, i more

organized and institutional civ ic sites are not

available generally or to some specifc groups,

street-corner activity can now be viewed as a

serious civic orm as well.

How do these ormulations apply to India?

Christopher Pinney points out that the Haber-

masian conception o orthodox politics is prob-

lematic and peculiarly unsatisactory or the

study o public culture in the Indian subconti-

nent. The context or Habermass conceptual-

ization is the outcome o a particular European

history in which a public sphere emerges to rou-

tinize certain orms o communicative agency,

debate, and resolution. In Pinneys concise

synopsis, Habermass public sphere blossoms

within a cognitivized chronotope (archet ypi-

cally the coee house where one could read and

discuss The Tatler) within which a certain model

o cerebral rationality is privileged. The cultural

agency that Habermas embodies in this ormo politics is linguistically overdetermined and

is grounded in a notional dyadic interchange

between two discoursing (and immobily seated)

men. He goes on to point out that the theory

o political culture that emerges rom such con-

straints is structured by two absences, which

limit its powers o elucidation: the absence o

any consideration o the bodies that produce

these elocutions and o the perormative ele-

ment in these encounters (19).

Recent writings on the subject o public

2. For an intellectual history of the concept, see

Adam Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society(Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

3. Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation

of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of

Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Fred-

eric Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). For

a rich collection of essays on Habermass formula-

tion, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public

Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

4. See, e.g., Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Soci-

ety and Political Theory(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1992); Charles Taylor, Modes of Civil Society, Public

Culture 3, no. 1 (1990); and Michael Walzer, The Con-

cept of Civil Society, in Towards a Global Civil Soci-

ety, ed. M. Walzer (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books,

1998), 4168.

5. Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life:

Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2002), 45.

6. Jrgen Habermas, Further Reflections on the

Public Sphere, in Calhoun, Habermas and the Publi

Sphere, 42161.

7. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, 41.

8. Christopher Pinney, Introduction : Public, Popular

and Other Cultures, in Pleasure and the Nation: The

History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Culture in

India, ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (New

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1819.


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culture in India have tried to fll these absences.

Most o them are inextricably linked to new

media and varieties o print culture, within

larger discussions on the nature o national-

ism. This research inds that the circulation

o images and texts and the prolieration o

cultural ows are o long standing in India (2)

and have acilitated a rich culture o opposition

against dominant institutions. Stuart Hall has

in act suggested that the onlyviable defnition

o popular culture positions it in a continuing

tension (relationship, inuence, antagonism)

to the dominant culture. Such a position is

congruent with the model o subalternity that

has emerged in the pioneering work o Ranajit

Guha. Within South Asianist historiography,

the emergence o subaltern studies paralleled

the recognition that there were undamen-

tal problems with colonialist historiography.

Guhas pioneering ormulation sought to rectiy

what he perceived as the histor ical disciplines

blindness to mass politics by highlighting the

Indian bourgeoisies ailure to speak or the

nation. Subaltern culture works against

dominant groups by using a plethora o eclectic

signs and strategies o resistance in a search or

autonomy. In this context, Arjun Appadurai

and Carol Breckenridges claim that public cul-

ture is an ally o subaltern studies, extending

that perspective to India considered as a post-

colony, makes sense. Their model o publicculture defnes it as a zone o contestation. In

their remarkably rich interpretation, the term

publicis not a neutral or arbitrary substitute or

all these existing alternatives [popular, mass,

olk, consumer, national, or middle class].

Instead, Appadurai and Breckenridge use the

termpublic cultureto escape these by now con-

ventional hierarchies [like high and low cul-

ture] to generate an approach which is open to

the cultural nuances o cosmopolitanism and o

the modern in India.

This use o the term publ ic gains addi-

tional support rom revisionist historiography

o the public sphere. Commenting on this schol-

arship, Nancy Fraser argues that scholars like

Joan Landes and Geo Eley demonstrate the

degree to which Habermass account idealizes

the liberal public sphere because he ails to

study other, nonliberal, nonbourgeois, compet-

ing public spheres. These scholars argue that,

despite Habermass claims about the accessibil-

ity o the public domain, the ofcial public

sphere rested on, indeed was importantly con-

stituted by, a number o signifcant exclusions.

Fraser points out that or Landes, the key axis

o exclusion is gender; she argues that the ethos

o the new republican public sphere in France

was constructed in deliberate opposition to

that o a more woman-riendly salon culture

that the republicans stigmatized as artifcial,

eeminate, and aristocratic (11314). Con-

sequently, a new, austere style o public speech

and behavior was promoted, a style deemed

rational, v irtuous, and manly (113). Tak-

ing Landess argument urther, Eley demon-

strates the degree to which exclusionary opera-

tions were essential to maintaining the liberal

public sphere in countries like England, France,

and Germany, where gender exclusions were

linked to other exclusions rooted in processes

o class ormation. In these situations, he claims

that the soil that nourished the liberal publicsphere was civil society, the emerging new con-

geries o voluntary associations. As Jacqueline

Urla puts it, mechanisms o exclusion applied

most orceully to those citizens who did not or

will not speak the language o civi l society.

Clearly a number o the discussions hinge

on the question o whether or not the groups

participating in public discourse are in act act-

ing autonomously. In his eorts to ormulate

a more nuanced and textured view o publics

and counterpublics in the wake o the insight-

9. Stuart Hall, Notes on Deconstructing the Popu-

lar, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader,

ed. John Storey (New York: Prentice Hall, 1997), 462

(emphasis added).

10. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony:

History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1997), xii.

11. Ibid.

12. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, Why

Public Culture? Public Culture 1 (1988): 4.

13. Ibid., 6.

14. See Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere,

in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 115.

15. Ibid., 114. For Eleys detailed discussion, see Geoff

Eley, Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing

Habermas in the Nineteenth Century, in Calhoun,

Habermas and the Public Sphere, 289339.

16. Jacqueline Urla, Outlaw Language: Creating

Alternative Public Spheres in Basque Free Radio, in

The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed.

Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 1997), 280.


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ul revisionist public sphere literature, Michael

Warner argues that the existence o a public

is contingent on its members activity, however

notional or compromised, and not on its mem-

bers categorical classifcation, objectively deter-

mined position in social structure, or material

existence. In the sel-understanding that makes

them work, publics thus resemble the model o

voluntary association that is so important to civil

society. Warner goes on to point out, however,

that, unlike a voluntary association (and indeed

any civil society organization), a public is not

necessarily tied to any institutional being and

instead commences with the moment o atten-

tion o its participants. Publics thus continu-

ally predicate renewed attention, and cease to

exist when attention is no longer predicated

(6162). In this sense, they are virtual entities,

not voluntary associations, and become an

integral part o political society because they

act as organic points o convergence or social

constituencies. Warners ormulation orces us

to recognize that a public can be seen as an

expression o volitiono agencyon the part

o its members, and this allows us to under-

stand publics as scenes o sel-activity, o his-

torical rather than timeless belonging, as sites

o active participation rather than ascriptive

belonging (6263).

Virtually rom the beg inning, counter-

publics contested the exclusionary norms o thebourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles

o political behavior and alternative norms o

public speech, a pattern as true o European

nations as o colonial settings. As Eley puts it,

The emergence o a bourgeois public was never

defned solely by the struggle against absolut-

ism and traditional authority, but . . . addressed

the problem o popular containment as well.

The public sphere was always constituted by

conict. According to this view, members o

subordinated social groups repeatedly oundit advantageous to constitute alternative pub-

lics. Fraser calls these social groups subaltern

counterpublics in order to signal that they are

parallel discursive arenas where members o

subordinated social groups invent and circulate

counterdiscourses to ormulate oppositional

interpretations o their identities, interests, and

needs. The point, which was made persua-

sively by Fraser and can be applied to colonial

and postcolonial societies, is that subaltern

counterpublics have a dual character. On the

one hand, they unction as spaces o withdrawal

and regroupment; on the other hand, they

also unction as bases and t raining grounds

or agitational activities directed toward wider

publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between

these two unctions that their emancipatory

potential resides. This dialectic enables subal-

tern counterpublics to partially oset, although

not wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory

privileges enjoyed by members o dominant

social groups in stratiied societies. Argu-

ing against a singular, comprehensive public

sphere, Fraser opts or a more exible theoriza-

tion o the public that makes room or a plural-

ity o competing publics. This move away rom a

strong normative conception to a more histori-

cally grounded one has the virtue o expanding

our view o available and politically relevant dis-

cursive spaces by including subaltern counter-

publics as crucial alternative orms o publicity

that have an integral inuence on the activities

associated with civil society.

Revisionist conceptualizations o the

public open up ways o decentering our under-standing o the processes through which ideas

are produced and shared. Based on these writ-

ings, it would seem that the structural relation-

ship o public culture with civil society organi-

zations is clearly ar more complex than what is

described in Habermass early ormulations on

the subject. For the purposes here, it is more

useul to argue that the diversity o political

practices and publicsmany (though not all)

o which are constructed around collective, not

individual, notions o subjectivityrequires usto recognize that civil society in postcolonial

societies should be understood as a ragmented

space, one that has a symbiotic relationship with

the multiple publics that inorm it.

17. See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpub-

lics, Public Culture 14 (2002): 61.

18. Eley, Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures.

Cited in Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, 116.

19. Fraser coined this phrase by combining two

terms that other theorists have recently used. She

has taken subaltern from Gayatri Spivaks use of

the term and counterpublicfrom Rita Felski, Beyond

Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1989). See Fraser, Rethinking the Public

Sphere, 109 42.

20. Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, 124.


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The State and Civil Society

Most discussions o civil society derive suste-

nance rom diering interpretations o state-

hood and citizenship, concepts that have long

and distinguished lineages. Although there is

not enough space to delve into these in detail,

the inuence o Foucauldian insights on postco-

lonial literature, and how the latter has altered

our use o these concepts, needs to be acknowl-

edged. Beore moving on to the discussion o

the relationship between civil society and pub-

lic culture, our understanding o these concepts

should be clarifed.

In a seminal essay challenging Hegels

claim that the state is not mere mechanical

scaolding but a vital orce or realizing the

ethics o reedom, Timothy Mitchell argues

that the edges o the state are uncertain; soci-

etal elements seem to penetrate it on all sides,

and the resulting boundary between state and

society is di fcult to determine. In this, he

is building on the work o Philip Abrams, or

whom the state is not an institution, let a lone

a thing, but an ideological project, so that

the key to the problem is to acknowledge the

cogency o the idea o the state as an ideologi-

cal power and treat that as a compelling object

o analysis. For Mitchell, the state is impor-

tant because o its political strength as a mythic

or ideological construct. As C. J. Fuller points

out, Mitchells approach crucially depends onthe argument that a lthough there is no clear

boundary separating the state rom society, an

apparent boundary between them is produced

by the modern nation-state, so that the dis-

tinction between state and society . . . [is] the

defning characteristic o the modern political

order. For Mitchell, the state is to be analyzed

not as a structure but as a structural eect,

that is, as the eect o practices that make state

structures appear to exist. Signifcant among

these practices are Foucauldian disciplines help-ing to produce the armies, schools, bureaucra-

cies, and other distinctly modern institutions.

These structured eects o modern technolo-

gies o power tend to privilege static notions o

citizenship that are at odds with the historical

movement o peoples and ideas.

Such static notions o statehoodand the

ways in which they have become integral to ide-

ologies o nationalismhave had a detrimental

eect on democratic practices in postcolonial

societies. One way o understanding this better

is by exploring the intrinsic relationship between

civil society and citizenship in such societies, a

juxtaposit ion that also helps us to better com-

prehend some o the ways in which moderniza-

tion has gone wrong. The inherently patriarchal

and authoritarian (rather than participatory)

orm taken by modern institutions in such soci-

eties has undermined modernitys emancipatory

potential, in large part because the state, as a

structural eect, has ailed to protect the rights

ensured by citizenship or large segments o the

population. In India, or instance, the postcolo-

nial government is structurally not too dierent

rom its colonial predecessor. The situation is

compounded by the act that in this period, cap-

ital is monopolized by a dominant elite, one that

spearheaded what Partha Chatterjee (ollowing

Antonio Gramsci) describes as a passive revolu-

tion against Indias erstwhile colonial rulers.

This has created a situation in which the idea

o democracy as it is used by dominant groupsserves as little more than an ideological oil or

their sel-preservation. According to Dipankar

Gupta, When democracy no longer encourages

the well-being o citizens along the lines o civil

society, it is largely because the ethics o ree-

dom are being subverted by technological ratio-

nality, or by market principles, or by the majority

principle, or the pure and dogmatic assertions

o communal or group equality (as in caste-

based politics). I would like to argue that the

solution to this problem is or disenranchisedgroups not to abandon the notion o citizenship

21. Cited from G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right,

cited in Dipankar Gupta, Civil Society or the State:

What Happened to Citizenship? in Institutions

and Inequalities: Essays in Honour of Andre Beteille,

ed. Ramachandra Guha and Jonathan P. Parry (New


22. Timothy Mitchell, The Limits of the State:

Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,Ameri-

can Political Science Review, 85 (1991): 7796.

23. Philip Abrams, Some Notes on the Difficulty of

Studying the State,Journal o f Historic al Socio logy1

(1998): 79.

24. Mitchell, Limits of the State, 81.

25. C. J. Fuller and John Harriss, For an Anthropology

of the Modern Indian State, in The Everyday State

and Society in India, ed. C. J. Fuller and Veronique

Benei (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000), 34.

26. For Mitchells explanation of the phrase structural

effect, see Mitchell, Limits of the State, 94.

27. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the

Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? 2nd ed. (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). See

chapters 1, 2, and 5 for a detailed discussion of this

subject.

28. Gupta, Civil Society or the State, 253.


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altogether but to create viable spaces to engage

institutions that serve as the loci o power. This

was a point that Pier re Bourdieu made while

warning new social movement activists that a

rewriting o meaning is an eete exercise in and

o itsel; it must be supplemented with a direct

engagement with the state.

In India, defnitions o modern statehood

have historically been normalized to accommo-

date the imperatives o nation building. Partly as

an extension o this process, the concept o citi-

zenship has been made more parochial, render-

ing it virtually incapable o accommodating the

cosmopolitan impulses o mobile communities.

Historically, social groups resisting the postcolo-

nial states eorts at modernization have tended

to draw on a rich repertoire o resistance strat-

egies developed over a prolonged engagement

with colonial rule, indeed many precolonial

orms o disciplining. Although the constitu-

encies o these groups are usually local, their

repertoire is enriched by extranational cultural

images, narratives, and modes o representa-

tion. Such communities view liberal notions o

citizenship through a lens conditioned by deep,

and in many cases well-ounded, suspicion o

governmental e orts at ordering. In the pre-

colonial and colonial periods, migrant groups

and seasonal workers moved in large numbers

into trade, warare, manuacturing, building,

and hauling, all perennial options. Thesemovements have continued in the postcolonial

period, but they fnd themselves requently at

odds with an increasingly archaic notion o lib-

eral citizenship. Building on his argument that

nationalism in colonial societies was a deriva-

tive discourse that normalized the hegemony

o bourgeois groups, Chatterjee has recently

emphasized that in countries like India, civil

societythose institutions o modern associa-

tional li e that are based on equality, autonomy,

reedom o entry and exit, and other such prin-ciplesis accessible only to a small section o

the population whose rights are protected by

the legal-bureaucratic apparatus o the state.

This has not changed too much with Indias pas-

sage rom colonial rule to postcolonial nation-

hood because, in the latter, the discourses and

practices o civil society still emanate rom a

small group o citizens. These groups were

the nationalist elites in the era o colonial

modernity and have remained dominant in

the postcolonial period. However, despite the

prolieration o NGOs, citizens groups, and so

on in recent times, a large segment o Indian

society still remains outside the bounds o civil

society butand here is the catchwithin the

realm o political society. The emergent orms

o this political realm are still unclear, but Chat-

terjee tackles the problem by designating this

segment as the population, a descriptive and

empirical (not normative) characterization

ormulated to capture the material o society

that is not rationally explicable. Without say-

ing so, he seems to imply that the realm o sub-

altern agency is to be ound in sections o the

population whose lives are governed by alterna-

tive orms o knowledge and reason. Inhabiting

alternative modernities, these groups have an

uncomortable relationship with the appara-

tus and practices associated with the modern

nation-state.

Multiple Publics and Civil Society in India

I would like to take Chatterjees ormulation ur-

ther to argue that the relationship between civilsociety and what Chatterjee somewhat vaguely

describes as thepopulationcan be clarifed by

reassessing our understanding o public culture

in India. The process o state ormation in post-

colonial societiesshaped as it is by the violent

interaction o colonial and precolonial orms o

knowledgeis intertwined with the existence

o multiple publics and counterpublics, nor-

matively very dierent rom the Habermasian

public sphere. In this section, I examine three

small examples to illustrate the ways in whichpublics, in starkly di erent historical contexts,

played a critical role in animating political cul-

ture. The frst example is rom late-nineteenth-

29. Pierre Bourdieu, Social Space and the Genesis of

Groups, Theory and Society14 (1985): 72344; cited

in Gupta, Civil Society or the State, 253.

30. Dav id Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25,

21819.

31. Partha Chatterjee, On Civil and Political Societ-

ies in Postcolonial Democracies, in Civil Society: His-

tory and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Suni

Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

2001), 16578.

32. Ibid., 173.


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century Punjab (in northern India); the second

is rom the 1940s, the twilight o British rule

in India; and the third has strong resonance or

contemporary India.

Oratory, Publishing, and the Indian Ecumene

As one o the many colonial institut ions that

became entrenched in nineteenth-century Pun-

jab, the printing press became a major orce o

change in the region. A newly burgeoning print

culture, animated by the activities o prolifc

writers, inuential thinkers, and activists, came

to be supplemented by precolonial and colonial

channels o oral and perormative communi-

cation by the third quarter o the nineteenth

century. As the ordering o colonial society

under the Raj restructured social relations and

the cultural landscape o urban India, a new

class o public intellectuals increasingly ound

itsel going back and orth between the realm o

ideas and the sphere o practical political con-

cerns, between the circle o high politics and

the messy realities o local politics, between the

promise o Western learning and the timeworn

conventions o what Chris Bayly has described

as the Indian ecumene. In Baylys defnition,

the Indian ecumene was a orm o cultural

and political debate which was typical o North

India beore the emergence o the newspaper

and public association, yet persisted in conjunc-

tion with the press and new orms o publicityinto the age o nationalism. Many o the per-

sonalities who inhabited this world spoke rom

positions both w ithin and outside the bound-

aries o political rationality sanctioned by the

institutional structures o colonial society and

articulated their bold new demands or consti-

tutional reorm with age-old cultural reerences

whi le investing amiliar constructs with new,

oten oreign content. A key fgure o this gen-

eration was Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who played

a seminal role in tr ying to reconcile modern-

ist notions o science and rationality with tra -

ditional Islam. Although he is remembered or

his extensive writings and as the ounder o

the Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College in

Aligarh in 1875, he was also one o the most

public fgures o the nineteenth century, a per-

son who adjusted to the radical transorma-

tions o this turbulent period by redefning the

nature o public speaking and oratory.

By the time Punjab entered the 1860s,

new public settings and the emergence o town

halls, municipal committees, and other such

institutions restructured the way in which audi-

ences received the spoken word. This, in turn

shaped the idiom o public debate. By the mid-

dle o the nineteenth century, in addition to the

ulamaandpandits, lay spokesmen increasingly

began to share ideas and articulate opinions.

In Punjab, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan was among

the earliest fgures to play this role. The reason

or his success lay as much in the provocative

nature o his reormist ideas as in the incisive

ways in which he adjusted his oratorical sty le

to suit the requirements o new public spaces.

His biographer, Hali, claims that Sir Sayyid was

the frst person in British India to introduce

public speaking in a language other than En-

glish or Persian. Describing the oratorical styleo Sir Sayyid in a speech that he delivered in

Ludhiana in 1884, David Lelyveld says that he

modulate[d] skillully rom a brie expression

o Persianized politeness ormulas to bits o

Arabic piety, fnally to end in an intimate style

in which he addresse[d] his audience in the

amiliar tummode. The intimacy, inormal-

ity, and spontaneity o this style o public speak-

33. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence

Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780

1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),chap. 5.

34. A good example of this is the democratization

of the concept ofadab. Most of the urban publicists,

and various other public figures of late-nineteenth-

century Punjab, were familiar with the normative

directives laid down as adabiyat, defined by Barbara

Daly Metcalf as the proper discrimination of social

order, behavior, and taste; it espouses breeding and

nurture; and it is sustained by deference towards

those who embody its norms. Although originally

identified with an Islamic ideal, the content ofadab

was fundamentally cosmopolit an and shared by non-

Muslims as well. When adabinorms were carried

over into colonial settings, they were increasinglyadapted to new settings and forms of discourse. By

the late nineteenth century, a number of publicists

recognized the need to adapt their modes of articula-

tion to new contexts, not by denying the relevance of

adab norms, but by modifying them.Referring to the

relevance ofadab in colonial society, David Gilmartin

notes: The reformers in the modern period . . . are

less concerned with elites because it is not just the

elites who provide the cultural basis for the political

system; rather there are larger groups of people who

are now involved. This becomes par ticularly impor-

tant in the late nineteenth century . . . when the

political system itself . . . becomes more and more

democratic. Metcalfs definition is in Moral Con-

duct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South AsianIslam, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1984), 1213. Gilmartins quota-

tion is taken from the same book, 19.

35. Barbara Daly Metcalf, Polemical Debates in

Colonial India, in Religious Controversy in British

India, ed. K. Jones (Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1992), 232.

36. David Lelyveld, Fragments of a Public Sphere:

Urdu Oratory and Printing in the Nineteenth Cen-

tury (paper presented at the Association of Asian

Studies meeting, Chicago, 17 April 1990).


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ing marked a major break with the timeworn

conventions o the past. What is also apparent

rom a number o Sir Sayyids speeches all over

Punjab in 1884, at sites ranging rom railway

platorms to town halls, is that his audience cut

across class and religious lines. By attracting

the interest o such an audience he, in eect,

conceded the existence o a larger public as

enranchised in its own ate. Sir Sayyids activi-

ties also brought him into contact with several

groups at traditional arenas such as mushai-

ras, munazarah, and the recitation odastans,

which were historically limited to specifc social

constituencies such as the ashraf(notables or

nobility). Many o these settings became loci o

political debate and surveillance that subjected

both rulers and society to critique through

meetings, perormance, and poetry.

Ad mi ni st rat ive in r ast ructure set up

in the early decades o ormal colonial rule

created institutional spaces that altered the

parameters within which Punjabis expressed

themselves. Together with the emergence o

new economic opportunities, especially in com-

merce, the urban centers o Punjab witnessed

a rapid increase in the number o libraries,

schools, bookstores, and publishing institu-

tions. In sum, all o these changes transormed

the expression and circulation o knowledge in

radical ways, and together with institutions o

modern education and the colonial adminis-trative edifce, restructured the social habitus

o urban Punjab. Into this context emerged a

restless group that cut across kin ties, neighbor-

hood networks, and caste afliations by publicly

debating issues o social morality and political

reorm. This group represented itsel not as a

single collective united by ideology but through

individuals and organizations whose schemes

o perception shaped the way they classiied,

judged, and acted. The public speeches o men

like Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Lala Lajpat Rai

brought together the same social groups that

attended the public spectacle o the shastrar-

thas, where Christian missionaries, Muslim cler-

ics, and Hindu Brahmans debated the glories

o their religions. Punjabis who participated in

associational and civic li e requently engaged in

debates on issues o caste, religious, municipal,

educational, and literary reorm. The emer-

gence o a public culture, in which disparate

individuals speaking or specifc social constitu-

encies sought to inuence a large audience, was

a key component o this process. Public artic-

ulations were diverse and oten contentious,

generating emotional pronouncements and

counterassertions in the name o associations

representing a range o social constituencies.

Although not necessarily subaltern in nature,

the speeches o men like Sir Sayyid were eorts

at appealing to new audiences by developing

discursive strategies that relied on the creative

use o the new urban topography and the new

public arenas it created. Many o the publics

that converged around such spaces symbolized

the restlessness o a newly emerging class orma-

tion and went on to shape the channels through

which anticolonial sentiments were articulated

over the course o the next century.

Performing Politics, Staging ResistanceIn 1942, a group o progressive writers who

recognized the potential o popular theater as

an eective weapon in the fght against British

imperialism and ascism, and in the struggles o

peasants, workers, and other oppressed classes,

ormed an inormal organization called the

Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA).

According to the ounders o the IPTA, the

goal o the organization, as articulated in the

37. Sayyid Iqbal Ali, Sayyid Ahmad Khan ka Safar-

Namah-i-Panjab (The Travels of Sayyid Ahmad Khan

in Punjab) (Aligarh: Aligarh Institute Press, 1884).

38. Ibid.

39. Mushairas are poetry readings, normally con-

ducted in closed settings. Munazarah, according to

Bayly (Empire and Information, 190), refers to forms

of critical debate on religious subjects. On dastans,

see Frances W. Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in

Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

40. In a fascinating discussion on the impact of

colonial liberalism in India, David Scott argues that

the discourse on reform in colonial society has to be

understood as central to modern power, to mod-

ern forms of political rationality. In this sense, Scott

argues, reform is connected to the construction of

a specific kind of knowledge (a rationalist, universal-

ist knowledge), a certain kind of division of social-

institutional space (the secular/religious, state/civil

society division), a certain kind of historical under-

standing (a teleological and progressivist history),

and a certain kind of subject (a self-improving one).

The boundaries governing agendas for reform were

determined by the class configurations of colonia

society. As shall be seen, the specificity of the reform

ist space was (and continues to be) constantly chal

lenged by subaltern counterpublics that resisted the

political rationality embodied in re formist agendas

For a detailed discussion of these themes, see David

Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postco

loniality(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

1999), 8490.


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All Indian Peoples Theatre Conerence Drat

Resolution, was to mobilize a peoples theatre

movement throughout the whole o India as the

means o revitalizing the stage and the tradi-

tional arts and making them at once the expres-

sion and organizer o our peoples struggle or

reedom, cultural progress and economic jus-

tice. As Nandi Bhatia describes it, ounders o

the IPTA described the organization as neither

a movement which has been imposed rom

above but one which has its roots deep down in

the cultural awakening o the masses o India,

nor . . . a movement which discards our rich

cultural heritage, but one which seeks to revive

the lost in that heritage by interpreting, adopt-

ing and integrating it with the most signifcant

acts o the peoples lives and aspirations in the

peoples epoch (432).

The IPTAs activities, which creatively

blended ideas drawn partly rom Western and

Chinese practices, as well as orms o traditional

drama perormed at the local level in numerous

parts o the Indian subcontinent, were clearly

inspired by a Marxist utopian vision. In this

sense, the IPTA sought to challenge existing

hegemonic structures, both colonial and those

intrinsic to Indian society. Bhatia points out that

or many o the ounders o the IPTA, the Little

Theatre Groups in England, the 1930s Works

Progress Administration (WPA) theater project

in the United States, the Soviet theaters, and thestrolling players in China who staged antiascist

plays to protest Japanese exploitation exerted

immense inuence. Inspired by these groups

abroad, IPTA members turned to theater as a

political weapon amid the political turmoil at

home, created by the war in Europe, increasing

repression rom British imperialism, and deep-

ening nationalist sentiments maniested in the

Quit India movement o 1942.

What makes the IPTA interesting or this

discussion was that right rom its origin, it wasorced to adapt to a diverse range o public

spaces that, its ounders soon realized, were

critical or animating political discourse. To

seek the widest possible mass basis or its activi -

ties, the IPTA turned to indigenous popular

traditions o dierent regions such as thejatra

o Bengal, tamashao Maharashtra, and bur-

rakathao Andhra Pradesh (433). Given the lin-

guistic, cultural, and geographical diversity o

the Indian subcontinent, the IPTA was orced

to make tough decisions regarding language,

theatrical space, stylistic devices, viewership,

and audience in order to address the specifc

constituencies it sought to politicize and ener-

gize. To some degree, it succeeded in its aims

because o its ability to look beyond the assump-

tions o Western revolutionary theory and thus

inaugurated a theater o collective resistance

and liberation, yet was heterogeneous in its

constitution and var ied depending on the geo-

graphical, linguistic, and cultural dierences o

a diverse populace.

Although the plays peror med by the

IPTA requently drew on themes rom around

the world (as in the playRoar China), perhaps

its most successul play was Bijon Bhattacharyas

Nabanna, about the Bengal amine o 1943.

Under Shombhu Mitras direct ion, the Bengal

IPTA squad perormed the play in many parts

o the country as part o a estival called the

Voice o Bengal. Bhat ia says that the purpose

o the estival was to collect money or the relie

o amine victims in rural Bengal. Nabannapre-

sents the intensity o the amine through the

starving amily o a Bengali peasant, Pradhan

Samaddar. As the play progresses, it goes on to

critique the inherently exploitative nature ocolonial rule by demonstrating that the am-

ine was not a natural disaster but a man-made

calamity. Nabannnas challenge to imperialism,

according to Bhatia, also occurs in the plays

violation o the convent ions o high realism

presented in the well-made plays that domi-

nated metropolitan theater in India in the early

decades o the twentieth century (439). This

disruption occurs through the episodic struc-

ture o the play, which prevents the action rom

being resolved at the end, rustrating an inter-pretive closure. In so doing, Nabannapurports

to evoke recognition rom the audience as the

operative and critical political response (439).

The possibility o popular accessibility to

the IPTA productions was acilitated, in part, by

the IPTAs ability to move rom place to place

41. Nandi Bhatia, Staging Resistance : The Indian

Peoples Theater Association, in Lowe and Lloyd,

Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, 432.


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quite easily. Bhatia describes how its provincial

squads emerged out o the closed halls o city

theaters to stage plays ive or six times a day

under open skies, in public parks, on street cor-

ners, or in village and city courtyards. By travel-

ing to remote areas, villages, and working-class

settlements, the directors, producers, and play-

wrights came into direct contact with their audi-

ences. Citing James Cliord, Bhatia argues that

ethnographic stories simultaneously describe

real cultural events and make additional . . .

ideological statements (440). Dramatizing the

stories o the people in theirsettings provided

patterns or associations that pointed to coher-

ent meanings. Thus, the meanings would be

provided in two ways: by virtue o the spectators

amiliarity with a story, so that they could recog-

nize and understand the processes that caused

oppression, and through identifcation with the

popular traditions o speciic regions. While

the amiliarity o a story had the ability to elicit

audience participation in the political process,

the knowledge o the intimate cultural details

was useul or directors to engage in address-

ing the problems o a particular region. What

IPTA directors learned during their travels was

that the stories o imperialism and exploitation

made maximum sense when these were per-

ormed in settings that were closest to home

or the viewers. Decisions regarding the cor-

rect public space were o critical importancein determining the success o a perormance

and Bhatias research corroborates this.

Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags, and

Cultural Chauvinism

In postcolonial India, the RSS (Rashtriya Sway-

amsewak Sangh), an organization banned ater

its culpability in the assassination o Mohan-

das Gandhi was established, has maintained a

strong oothold in communities scattered across

parts o the country. This is because its shakhas(literally branches or training meetings) use

seemingly apolitical spaces such as public parks

and temples to recruit members and to build

enduring relationships with specifc communi-

ties. Although the RSS has its own unique his-

torical trajectory, the organizations strategy o

mobilization is similar to that o the Shiv Sena

in Bombay, which draws on the discourse o

Muslim demonization, Hindu militancy, politi-

cal nationalism, and the restitution or specifc

religious rituals relying on the public enactment

o religious spectacles such as the Ganapati es-

tival. The RSSs ideological position is based

on a dismissal o Nehruvian socialism and the

pseudo-secular pretensions o the postcolo-

nial state in India. Since the 1930s, Pune (in

western India) has been an important center

o RSS activities and has served as a point o

convergence or numerous other Hindu nation-

alist organizations. The driving orce behind

this cluster o organizationsalso called the

Sangha Parivaris the dense network o RSS

shakhasspread out across most parts o the city.

Over the past eighty years or so, the network

o RSS supporters has grown in size, embracing

a range o institutional spaces such as schools,

colleges, banking institutions, and merchant

guilds (some o which are caste based) and a

number o associations or youth, students,

women, children, and social serv ice organiza-

tions (working in slums). These are supple-

mented by the RSSs propaganda tools such as

newspapers and magazines. This alternativecivil societyas Thomas Blom Hansen calls

itplays an important role in the daily lie

o the RSS. However, the backbone o its orga-

nizational structure is a labyrinthine system o

inormal networks encompassing RSS-afliated

amilies who exert a high degree o surveillance

over their own constituencies.

Although the upper echelons o the RSS

have close ties with institutions o organized

politics like political parties, the RSSs bloated

sel-perception as the repository o high moraland cultural values fnds its most insidious man-

iestation in the activities o the shakhaswhose

42. Ibid. For an updated and more detailed assess-

ment of the relationship between nationalism, colo-

nialism, and the politics of theater in colonial and

postcolonial India, see Bhatias Act s o f Autho rit y/

Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and

Postcolonial India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 2004).

43. The four pillars of the Shiv Senas ideology

are described in detail by Mary F. Katzenstein, Uday

Mehta, and Usha Thakkar in The Rebirth o f Shiv

Sena in Maharashtra: The Symbiosis of Discursive

and Institutional Power, in Community Conflicts

and the State in India, ed. Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli

(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21538.

44. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democ

racy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (New



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leaders are recruited locally. The RSS shakhas

generally rope in young boys rom the age o

six onward and congregate in playgrounds and

open public spaces to conduct their activities.

These include games, religious rituals, physi-

cal training, and, in some cases, the singing o

patriotic songs. The boys are expected to wear

khaki shorts and conduct their activities under

a saron lag, which has come to symbolize

Hindu nationalism. Following the initiation o

the boys into the organization, a sense o cor-

porate belonging is inculcated through peer

mentoring in the shakha, in which the group

leader consciously makes an eort to establish

a relationship with a members amily, so that

over time the distinction between the individ-

ual members political mission and personal

lie is blurred. This not only makes it difcult

or a swayamsewak(individual member) to leave

the organization but also encourages a lielong

attachment o the amily to the organization.

In addition to the indoctrination that lies

at the heart oshakhaactivity, the RSSs reper-

toire also includes the use o public spectacle as

a means toward greater social integration and

vi sibi lit y. Six speciic est ivals punctuate the

annual calendar and play a pivotal role in pub-

licizing the dierent strands o RSS ideology.

The articulation o a hypermasculine patriotism

through the elevation o Shivajia Maratha

ruler who challenged Mogul authoritytothe status o a demigod serves to nationalize

this medieval fgure. This is done through the

public enactment o his ideas in plays. The RSS

also promotes the use o Sanskrit verses in all

o its public rituals (marching, exercising, etc.)

in order to project the idea o Hindu cultural

purity around the idea o dharma and the

timeless quality o Hindu civilizational identity.

For the purposes here, the point worth making

is that the durability o the RSSs network needs

to be understood as a unction o its success in

penetrating and controlling those public spaces

that are requently considered outside the realm

o organized political society.

The RSSs proselytizing mission has had

remarkable success through the strategic use

o public spaces to enhance its political goals.

The approach has allowed it to preserve a core

group o ollowers whose commitment to its ide-

ology has transormed the character o whole

neighborhoods and castes. An excellent exam-

ple o this kind o success is to be ound among

the Chitpavan Brahmans o Maharashtra. For

such groups, the other is always the Muslim

community, which is thoroughly demonized,

and the Anglicized establishment, rom which

these groups have been excluded. In this sense,

the RSSs alternative civil society draws suste-

nance rom its besieged mentality and is pit-

ted against the postcolonial state. Indeed, every

act o criticism and ridicule o the RSS by the

government has been used by the organiza-

tion to strengthen its core constituency and the

commitment o its members. In this sense, the

seemingly apolitical activity o the shakha, which

thrives on its use o precisely those local spaces

that lie outside the bounds o mainstream civil

society, continues unabated in its eorts o

Hindu ascist indoctrination.

The above examples, all o which are rooted in

completely dierent historical contexts, reveal

the complexity and texture o political culture

in modern India. The diversity o political prac-

tices, discursive strategies, and the multiplicity

o locations where these take shape demon-

strates that our understanding o civil society

in postcolonial settings needs to be broadened.

In a recent essay, Arjun Appadurai argues that,

45. The strategies used by the RSSshakhas have been

captured by Lalit Vachani in two documentary films,

which describe the subtle ways in which shakha

leaders are able to initiate and sustain contact with

young boys and indoctrinate them with ideolo gies of

Hindu nationalism. See The Boy in the Branch (New

Delhi: Wide Eye Films, 1993) and The Men in the Tree

(New Delhi: Wide Eye Films, 2002).

46. For a discussion of the RSSs history and its strat-

egies of mobilization, see Tapan Basu, Pradit Datta,

Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen,

Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (New Delhi: Orient

Longman, 1993).

47. Members of Shikshantar (also called the Peo-

ples Institute for Rethinking Education and Devel-

opment) based in Udaipur (in Rajasthan) told me in

April 2002 that in their efforts to energize local play-

grounds and public spaces as places for dialogue and

play, they were confronted with members of the RSS

who claimed these territories. Shikshantars goals,

which are geared toward creating open spaces for

dialogue among local communities, families, etc.,

came into direct conflict with the RSSs much more

chauvinistic agenda. Shikshantars own approach is

based on a sensitive appreciation of the interplay

between multiple publics, culture, and politics, and

over the past few years it has found itself in situa-

tions of conflict with the RSS.

48. For an in-depth discussion of the creative use

of public spaces by the RSS, see Hansen, The Saffron

Wave, chap. 3.


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semantically, deep democracy (as he describes

the orm taken by political practices in contem-

porary India) suggests roots, anchors, intimacy,

proximity, and locality. These terms also help

us to better grasp the morphology o the publics

that animate political culture. Multiple publics

thrive on intimacy and are remarkably mobile

and capable o cutting across social boundaries,

rather like those constituted by the speeches o

Sayyid Ahmad Khan and by the plays o the

IPTA. Research rom other parts o India cor-

roborates these patterns.

Veena Naregals recent study o colonial

western India shows how, over the past century

and a hal, new patterns o social stratifcation

have been shaped as much by the imperatives

o colonial rule as by the active participation

o the native intelligentsia, which was able

to achieve a position o ideological inuence

because o its ability to negotiate the arenas o

educational policy, the press, reorm organiza-

tions, and voluntary associations to advance its

interests. It shows how the English-educated

urban elite were completely dependent on

ground-level activists who used subaltern pub-

lic spaces to mobilize support. Such mobiliza-

tions played a critical role in shaping the dis-

course on issues o reorm, politics, and religion

as it was transormed by the interplay between

competing nationalisms in the early part o

the twentieth century. Naregals fndings andmy research are consistent on the position that

at no stage was colonial hegemony total. Even

though Indians were subject to the mechanisms

that preserve colonial states, the diverse orms

o associational activity that emerged in the

late nineteenth century reveal that subaltern

groups exercised their own agency in car ving

out autonomous spaces. Urban groups, aced

with the dilemma o reconciling Brit ish ideas

o justice, religious reorm, economic change,

and social identity with their own views thatrequently drew on precolonial orms o knowl-

edge, ormed associations and reorm groups.

Social groups requently challenged each other

in Punjab, whose urban spaces were animated

by multiple agonistic publics that had begun

to acquire an associational quality by the end

o the nineteenth century. Similar patterns are

discernible in dierent parts o colonial India,

although Bengal was the region that took the

lead. The emergence o regional identities in

dierent parts o India, voiced in religious,

linguistic, or cultural terms and shaped by

the institutions o colonial administration and

Western learning as well as the diverse orms o

associational civic activity, was inextricably tied

to the entrenchment o a distinct urban culture

characterized by these multiple publics.

An important aspect o these publics that

mark the political landscape o India is the

perormative element. In a remarkable set o

studies over the past decade, Sandria Freitags

work draws one toward what Pinney describes

as the centrally important corporal dimension

o perormance, the perormative space o the

procession, and the strangely neglected role o

visuality, as constituents o the nexus o what in

other contexts became the public sphere. In a

similar spirit, Ravi Vasudevan draws ones atten-

tion to the virtual inseparability o reception

and production in such situations. His research

shows how Bal Gangadhar Tilaks production

o a space or politicized Ganesh processions in

1890s Bombay mobilized Hindu participants in

ways where it would be impossible to separateproducers and consumers on opposite sides

o a semiotic exchange.

The role played by social movements in

animating these publics cannot be emphasized

enough. Indias long history o organizational

activism has ensured that in the postcolonial

period, NGOs, community groups, and social

movements have played a critical role in shap-

ing political society and in directing (in some

cases, resisting) the eorts o the government

to normalize its hegemony. O course, manyNGOs and citizens groups are incorporated

into the ofcial discourse o development ema-

nating rom a state increasingly committed to

49. Arjun Appadurai, Deep Democracy: Urban Gov-

ernmentality and the Horizon of Politics, Public Cul-

ture 14 (2002): 45.

50. See Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and

the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism

(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).

51. Pinney, Introduction, 19. For some of Sandria

Freitags writings on the subject of performative

publics in India, see her Culture and Power in Banaras

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and

her edited collection Collective Action and Commu-

nity: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communal-

ism in North India (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1989).

52. Pinney, Introduction, 24. See Ravi S. Vasudevan

Bombay and Its Public, in Dw yer and Pinney, Plea

sure and the Nation, 19.


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neoliberal economic reorm. Sangeeta Kamat

has recently demonstrated that they coexist with

numerous grassroots organizations that are part

o a vibrant democratic tradition. In the same

vein, Mary Katzenstein, Smitu Kothari, and

Uday Mehta argue that, although identity and

interest movements play a direct role in shaping

the political culture and civil society o India by

engaging the state in its electoral, judicial, and

bureaucratic domains, these movements coexist

with a vibrant civic discursive space. This pat-

tern is clearly not exclusive to India. Judith Adler

Hellman underscores the value o such a space

in her work on Mexico, and Sonia Alvarez points

out the importance o movements operating in

a third civil society. Regardless o political

ideology, it seems that movements around the

world operate in ways that are requently disen-

gaged rom the state but are remarkably public

and political in nature.

Activities out side o modern civi l soci-

ety can have the eect o laying the oundation

or the kind o organized politics that one wit-

nesses at the electoral level, or through advo-

cacy and citizens groups. Katzenstein, Kothari,

and Mehta point out, or instance, that the RSS

helped to nurture a Hindu identity in sections

o the Indian population that has now become

a secure oundation on which the Bharatiya

Janata Party (BJP) has been able to build elec-

toral power. Television, print, processions, andother creative uses o public spaces continue to

play a critical role in preserving this social base

or the BJP. Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta also

provide examples o a v ibrant civic discursive

space within the womens movements in India.

In addition to engaging the state and pressur-

ing or legal and institutional change, womens

organizations mobilize in order to challenge

patriarchal belies and practices through inno-

vat ive strategies in public domains. Marches

and demonstrations, street theater, plays, jour-nal stories and personal accounts, songs, and

poster exhibitions play a signifcant role in ani-

mating a discursive civic space in contemporary

India. A signifcant part o this movement activ-

ism walks, as Kothari has argued, on two legs

(267). He points out that many o these move-

ments use their energies not just to inuence

government policy and exercise critical surveil-

lance over the state but also to organize pro-

grams and to develop strategies that are aimed

at transorming attitudes and practices through

society at large. He points to examples rom the

anti-arrack mobilization o the late 1980s and

early 1990s in Andhra Pradesh (267).

In postcolonial settings, multiple publics

agonistic and associationalare not spaces in

any topographical or institutional sense. Since

the nineteenth century, they have appeared

where social groups gather to create, share, or

debate various orms o knowledge. Porous and

dynamic, these publics help in the creation o

newer orms o civil society that have the poten-

tial to exercise critical surveillance over the

state as well their own social constituencies. In

this sense it might make sense to speak o not

a singular normative civ il society but multiple

civil societies, which exert considerable inu-

ence on political lie at many levels without

being tied down to the normative practices o

modern liberal democracy. This exibility has

allowed subaltern groups to subvert those orces

o the liberal/capitalist order that sanction thecolonization o civil society as bourgeois inter-

ests gain control o mass media and commodiy

public culture on their own terms. In this con-

text, an appreciation o the role o subaltern

counterpublics has the potential to redraw the

conceptual geographies that are used to com-

prehend modernist orms o disciplining.

Conclusion

In a remarkable study o the rise o Hindu

nationalism in India, Thomas Blom Hansenattributes the saron wave o the past fteen

53. Sangeeta Kamat, Development Hegemony: NGOs

and the State in India (New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 2002).

54. Mary Katzenstein, Smitu Kothari, and Uday

Mehta, Social Movement Politics in India: Insti-

tutions, Interests, and Identities, in The Success of

Indias Democracy, ed. Atul Kohli (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2001), 24269.

55. Judith Adler Hellman, Mexican Popular Move-

ments, Clientelism, and the Process of Democratiza-

tion, Latin American Perspectives 21 (1994): 12442,

cited in Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta, Social

Movement Politics in India, 266; Sonia E. Alvarez,

Reweaving the Fabric of Collective Action: Social

Movements and Challenges to Actually Existing

Democracy in Brazil, in Between Resistance and

Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, ed.

Richard Fox and Orin Sarn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rut-

gers University Press, 1997).

56. Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta, Social Move-

ment Politics in India, 266.


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VivekBhandari


years not just to imaginative political strategies

or reserves o religious nationalism among

proponents o this ideology, but to the growth

o new public spaces in which Indian individu-

als and communities imagine, represent, and

recognize themselves through political dis-

course, commercial and cultural expressions,

and the representational strategies o state and

civic organizations. The discourses, expres-

sions, and organizations that Hansen describes

as constitutive o public space have strong moor-

ings in Indias long history o civic lie. Countless

samajs(societies or associations), sabhas(congre-

gations), and anjumans(gatherings)among

many other orms o civic liehave been an

integral part o public culture in India. The

existence o these multiple publics and civic

institutions makes it utile to talk o civil society

in narrow terms, as the other o the state, or in a

more acile sense, as inherently intertwined with

the neoliberal reorm process that was initiated

in India over a decade ago. It makes ar greater

sense to move beyond the narrow defnition o

civil society that Neera Chandhoke criticized in

her essay, especially as the movement o peoples

and ideas orces us to reevaluate our notions o

citizenship and subjectivity.

The growth o ethnic violence in dierent

parts o the world lends urgency to these issues.

In a detailed assessment o the cities in Gujarat,

which in early 2002 witnessed a pogrom againstMuslims by militant Hindu nationalist organiza-

tions, Ashutosh Varshney argues that the reason

or Gujarats history o communal violence was

that its cities had suered a steady and progres-

sive decline in civic li e. Varshney fnds that

there is an inverse relationship between the

amount o sectarian violence experienced by

a population and the quality o its civic lie.

Explaining urther, he uses the terms civil society

and civic lifeto mean that part o li e that exists

between the state on one hand and amilies on

the other, that allows people to come together

or a whole variety opublicactivities, and that

is relatively independent o the state. Civil soci-

ety is not a non-political but a non-state space

o collective lie. Varshney goes on to qualiy

this defnition in another crucial respect: I it

is crucial to civil society that amilies and indi-

viduals connect with others beyond their homes

and talk about matters o public relevance with-

out the intererence or sponsorship o the state,

then it seems ar too rigid to insist that this takes

place only in modern associations. . . . Cities

tend to have ormal associations, but villages

make do with inormal sites and meetings.

Varshneys timely book succeeds in large

part because o his use o a broadened defni-

tion o civil society and because he appreciates

the interplay between organized and inormal

orms o civil lie. The latter, as we have seen,

play a critical part in the political lie o post-

colonial societies where the emergence o the

nation-stateand together with it, modern

notions o subjectivityhas had a proound

inuence on political practices and attitudes.

Commentators, who have lauded the success o

Indias democracy in the ace o difcult odds

like ethnic diversity and poverty, have lookedavorably at the democratic-ederal-secular

quality o Indias political institutions. The

act remains, however, that the meanings o

these ideas have changed considerably over the

past century, and the institutions o postcolo-

nial governance in India, despite their avowed

claim to serve the interests o all Indians, are

57. Hansen, The Saffron Wave. For an in-depth study

of how xenophobic elements of Bombays culture

have been shaped by a long history of regional his-

tory and contested identities to produce unprece-

dented levels of urban violence in the past decade,

see Hansens Urban Violence in India: Identity Poli-

tics, Mumbai, and the Postcolonial City(New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 2001). His study of Hindu

nationalist groups use of public culture is particularly

useful for this discussion; see chap. 1, esp. 5356.

58. Amrita Basu argues persuasively that the success

of Hindu nationalism lies in the fact that it shares the

attributes of both a social movement and a political

party. For a detailed discussion of this argument, see

her essay Mass Movement or Elite Conspiracy? The

Puzzle of Hindu Nationalism, in Making India Hindu:

Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in

India, ed. David Ludden (New Delhi: O xford Univer-

sity Press, 1996), 5580.

59. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life.

60. Ibid., 4 (italics mine).

61. Ibid., 4445. Varshneys findings have import ant

ramifications for our understanding of ethnic vio-

lence. One wonders, however, whether he puts too

much faith in top-down initiatives. Although his defi-

nition of civic life accommodates a wide range of ini-

tiatives, Radha Kumar points out that he stays away

from the role played by religious organizations, or

the role played by governmental institutions like the

Human Rights Commission and the judiciary. As she

puts it, The greatest conundrum of all might well be

the role that religious organizations play in sparking

or dampening Hindu-Muslim tension. See Kumar

review essay, Indias House Divided: Understand

ing Communal Violence, Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4

(2002): 177. Hansens study of the saffron wave in

the 1990s in India might help to fill the gaps here. See

Hansen, The Saffron Wave. Also, in the aftermath o

the violence in Gujarat in 2002, i t is apparent that the

dynamics of civic life in India have a fairly direct rela

tionship with these governmental institutions, the

mainstream media, and the multiple public space

that are all a part of political culture.

62. Kohli, The Success of Indias Democracy.


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5 0

Comp

arative

Studie

sof

South

Asia,

Africa

andthe

MiddleE

ast

monopolized by a social elite. This has obvi-

ously not dampened the richness o political lie

in India, as the parallel coexistence o diverse

civic spaces demonstrates.

It is important to clariy that the purpose

o this discussion is not to valorize the ubiq-

uity o politics but to illustrate that the politi-

cal impulses o social groups draw on a much

wider repertoire o practices than has hitherto

been recognized. As seen in the case o the

movements promoting Hindu majoritarian

nationalism, some public spaces are used or

the promotion o religious extremism and cul-

tural chauvinism. The key is to recognize that

political practices (tolerant or not) are rooted in

ofcial as well as hidden cultures that serve as

sites o contestation and/or consensus around

questions o cultural politics. Although multiple

publics are requently subaltern in nature, oten

targeting the hegemony o dominant orms o

knowledge, they can also serve as the breeding

ground or intolerance and cultural chauvin-

ism, as the example o the RSS demonstrates.

It is air to say that the pervasiveness o pub-

lics signals the coexistence o diverse political

viewpoints, some 0 which are chauvinistic and

extremist in nature.

Chatterjees claim that postcolonial civil

society, defned in narrow, modernist terms, is

undamentally exclusivist and elitist should not

be read as a romantic appeal or the resurrec-tion o communitarian (dare I say, traditional?)

orms o organization. It should, instead, orce

us to take up the more difcult task o think-

ing undamentally against the normalization or

the epistemological and institutional orms o

our political modernity, such as it is in the pres-

ent. There is a pressing need to explore the

orms that political society has taken in India in

the postcolonial period, in order to appreciate

the diversity o social and political activities that

animate the subcontinent.

Hansen describesthis political complexity quite evocatively:

There is a certain irrepressible quality to politi-

cal lie in India, to the incessant transgression o

established languages o contention in the polit-

ical feld, the incessant recoding, sliding, and

reevaluation o virtually every identity and polit-

ical position. Indian society . . . is possibly one

o the most politicized societies in the world, . . .

not because its leaders wanted it to be so, but

because the democratic order that they oughtor and ultimately established released new,

assertive, and uncontrollable social identities

that produced a orm o modernitypluralist,

creative, chaotic, and brutal at the same time.

Research on Indias public culture demonstrates

that spaces or political articulation in India

ourish in all sorts o nooks and crannies. The

real challenge, o course, is to identiy these

spaces.

63. Sumit Sarkar, Indian Democracy : The Historical

Inheritance, in Kohli, The Success of Indias Democ-

racy, 46.

64. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 20. Scotts passion-

ate plea to force the development of critic al frame-

works that address the demands of the political

present is particularly timely at a juncture when

the arrival of economic liberalization in India is, in a

somewhat facile way, being mistaken for an era of

political liberalism. The situation, given Indias colo-

nial legacy, is far more complicated.

65. As I pointed out earlier in this essay, Arjun Appa-

durai has taken an important step in this direction

by drawing our attention to the ways in which glo-

balization is producing new geographies of govern-

mentality that, in turn, are behind the efforts of new

social movements to reconstitute citizenship. See

Appadurai, Deep Democracy, 2147.

66. Hansen, The Saffron Wave, 5859.

civil society and multiple publics

Documents