The Nation and its Citizens is a timely intervention into many of the current and ongoing public debates around contentious issues. A close reading presents us with more questions than what the author answers. But putting in perspective relevant questions contributes much more to the collective civic culture than providing definitive answers. The tone of the book is relatively more suggestive than self-assured and can be read in more ways than one.
The Nation and Its Citizens: Tales of Bondage and Belonging
Rupa (2022)
Pages: 280
Price: Rs.395
The book is a mosaic of issues slung together with an overarching concern to foreground the question of civic solidarity and the search for possible answers as to what went wrong with the making of India’s nationhood. Much of the narrative is familiar, but it surprises readers with the range of sources it digs into, including long-forgotten commissions and reports during the colonial and postcolonial period.
The book has six chapters that are written in a lucid and accessible manner. A short introduction focusses on how nations come into being as historical constructs and what drives an overarching sense of political obligation structured by power and political economy.
The first chapter interrogates the interface between identity and loyalty. It explores the labyrinth between internal social conflicts and its expression in external aggression. Muralidharan asks: “Is there anything inherent in the logic of nationalism that impels a country into external conquest when it is unable to settle differences within?” (page 5). The chapter inquires into how the nation and nationalism promise universal inclusion, yet exclude certain social classes and still accommodate a sense of individual and specific identities.
The second chapter looks at the interface between nation and democracy. Here the author begins with debates centred on secularism and “constitutional patriotism” and ends with recent public mobilisations against the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.
Partition revisited
The third chapter looks at the interface between violence and forgetting. It revisits the role of Partition and its memory in crafting a particular sense of the present and the contemporary. It has a detailed narration of the complexities that emerged with the accession of Kashmir and the integration of Hyderabad under the Nizam. The broadbrush reasoning is to argue that “Partition had multiple and complex causes and it was not driven by any ultimate purpose” (page 76), yet it remains in popular memory as an act of design, betrayal, and instrumentally violent.
Even as popular memory and with the state weaponising memory, people managed to strike civic bonds for pragmatic reasons. The precariously perched bonds were often prone to violent mobilisations by various political formations. This chapter traces in great detail the changing fortunes of religious minorities right up to the current majoritarian impasse.
The fourth chapter takes us back into history to make a better historical sense of why Partition has remained an unresolved issue prone to get repeatedly hitched to nationalist overtures. This is an interesting read that draws similarity and “overlapping consensus” between Gandhi, the militant trio of “Lal, Bal, Pal”, and its later reincarnation in Savarkar. The overarching anxiety was what Swami Shraddhanand said: “If the untouchable castes become Muslims, then the Muslim party will become equal to that of the Hindu” (page 134).
Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi at a reception given by Rabindranath Tagore at the mango grove in Santiniketan during their visit on February 17, 1940. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
The demographic anxiety moderated and even corrupted the Indian National Congress’ civic nationalism from being a radical departure from Hindu nationalist mobilisation. Dr Ambedkar therefore felt that the inclusion of the depressed classes by the Congress “did not seem to reflect any manner of real concern with the values of human dignity or equality but rather about buttressing Congress claims to representing the seamless whole of the Indian nation” (page 135). Political representation was civic in rhetoric and ethnic in character.
Dr. B R Ambedkar. | Photo Credit: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Alongside Ambedkar, Muralidharan reminds us of Tagore as the other figure who offered an early critique of nationalism and the insularity and chauvinism it produced in repudiating all things Western. Indian nationalism was marked by a contradistinction of Gandhi’s scepticism towards the state, Tagore’s towards the nation, and Ambedkar’s towards the Hindu public sphere. As a follow-up, the next chapter is a textual enquiry into the interface between nation and civil society. It engages the readers on the familiar trajectory of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
The book concludes with the interface between the nation and the current populist upsurge. It roughly grounds populism in the economic crisis of 2008 and concludes with a reference to Hannah Arendt’s observation that the author finds relevant to the current populist strategies. “Truth and politics, Arendt conceded, had always been ‘on rather bad terms with each other’ and truthfulness was never counted among the political virtues” (page 235). The book can be approached as an open-ended text that provides an occasion to push harder on the framing of some of the questions on nation and civility that it introduces. We need further theorisation to make sense of our current impasse that seems to have turned many conventional assumptions made by historians and social scientists on their head.
The book offers a broad political economy interpretation of why violence erupts, pointing to shrinking economic opportunities, locked industrialisation and the organised violence of the state. However, culture is the elusive medium that escapes any easy resolution. If economic displacement and dispossession can explain communal riots, then we need to ask why migrants who walked thousands of kilometres during the pandemic did not get involved in food riots and protest against a non-responsive state. What can explain passivity in one context and uncivility in the other?
Sociologist Barrington Moore had explained the prevalence of the karma theory among peasants as a possible explanation as to why peasants in India were not rebellious. It was the Gandhian mode of protest that touched a chord with the Hindu way of life in articulating passive resistance. It is evident that elusive culture structures mediate the relation with centralised and congealed political economy.
The workings of the economy and its accompanying exploitation and expropriation become questions of justice only when they enter, as critical theorist Axel Honneth reminds us, the moral framing related to poverty and material deprivation. In other words, only when deprivation is experienced as issues of recognition and dignity does it produce vulnerability, agency and political subjectivity. What is the “moral economy” of religious violence in India?
A ‘cultural turn’
More recently, cultural sociologists have pushed the case for a “cultural turn” in making an argument for culture as a meaning-making exercise for political action. Culture structures produce “meaning from meaning” in a way that it cannot be immediately reduced to social structure/position, power and economic structures.
Meaning-making is an elusive category but an irreducible one. Culture does not exclusively influence but is always at work. Culture is driven by intangible pursuits of meaning, salvation, collective conscience, and also “collective sub-conscious” as Romila Thapar argues in her recent book on dissent in ancient India. Here, narrative and performance mediate strategies, instrumentality and manipulation of the elites.
In the “new” India, one needs to concede that the Right has managed to capture certain cultural codes to “successfully” build a narrative of historical injury of the majority Hindu community. As the book clearly demonstrates, the anxiety of being a Hindu under distress is not new and cuts across political formations, from Tilak to Gandhi to Savarkar. Even if one concedes that Hindu identity was manufactured through the 19th century enumeration of the colonial state, there is nothing to prevent “invention of tradition” that marks history making itself.
Further, Hindu identity was produced in certain cultural-historical registers in an excess of religiosity. Muralidharan rightly notes that Gandhi could claim “with little seeming contradiction that being an adherent of the sanatana dharma, he could be a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian at the same time”.
Though Muralidharan sees this as Gandhi’s way of providing an interpretation of sanatana dharma as an inclusive culture, it “always already” carried assimilationist tendencies that have today come in handy for a majoritarian project.
A recent Pew Research survey on religion noted that over 70 per cent of respondents that included Muslims and Christians believed in the karma philosophy.
The RSS routinely claims that a Muslim is also a Hindu and there is no Hindutva without Muslims! The porous interface between religion and culture allows the Indian right to invoke civilisational discourse as a project of decolonising discourse on the Indian way of democracy that was part of our collective ancient ethos. The Indian right has been working with the rhetoric of universal civil solidarity that has reduced secular claims and understanding by default to sectarian mobilisation.
Constitutionality has become exclusively legal and again, by default, elitist and the preserve of the privileged.
The question that should engage us is how to ground the imagination of civic nationalism in culture and in popular imagination, and how to align Gandhian experiments in self and ethics with Ambedkar’s emphasis on law and constitutionalism.
Cultural nationalism as Hindu nationalism has managed to offer a deep sense of belonging; secular-composite discourses need to provide an alternative sense of the self by combining welfare with culture. There is no returnig to old shibboleths. We need to see in it a new opportunity that is more inclusive and democratic rather than mourn the passing of a bygone era.
Ajay Gudavarthy is Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His forthcoming book is Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New India’ (Routledge, 2023).
The Crux
- The book’s narrative surprises readers with the range of sources it digs into.
- It has six chapters written in a lucid and accessible manner.
- One chapter revisits the role of Partition in crafting a particular sense of the present and the contemporary.
- Political representation was civic in rhetoric and ethnic in character.
- The author reminds us of Tagore as one who offered an early critique of nationalism.
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