Strange Bedfellows: The Subaltern Turn And Hindutva – OpEd

In the early 1980s, a group of scholars led by Ranajit Guha made a brave intervention in the intellectual climate of India. Borrowing their theoretical insights from the famous Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, these scholars referred to their enterprise as Subaltern Studies. The first volume of Subaltern Studies opened with a categorical repudiation of the historiography hitherto practised by Indian historians: ‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has been for a long time dominated by elitism.’ According to Guha, the elitist historiographies — both colonial as well as bourgeois nationalist — failed to explain the emergence of Indian nationalism, for they conveniently overlooked the contribution made by the people independent of the elites.

Promising to combat the entrenched orthodoxies of Marxists, this school ascended to fame in a dissident-Left milieu. The early subalternists operated broadly within the materialist framework, even as they were opposed to class reification in vogue amongst preceding scholars. This new school sought to highlight the previously neglected dimensions of people’s autonomy in popular uprisings. However, over time, a discernible shift occurred. After the publication of the fourth volume, the rigorous materialist analysis was done away with, and domination came to be explained in cultural and discursive terms. Obfuscatory and pedantic prose was deployed which at times rendered the text nearly unreadable. Among the many changes that were observed, we are here concerned with the Subalternists’ engagement with the question of secularism.

Partha Chatterjee, influenced by the ‘colonial-power knowledge system’ paradigm proposed by Edward Said, had argued that the colonised intelligentsia was only capable of ‘derivative discourse’. In Chatterjee’s treatment of cultural domination, one finds a very conspicuous presence of ‘indigenism’; he assigns disproportionate significance to colonial domination, and absolves various forms of pre-colonial cultural domination that existed and operated either in conjunction with colonialism or independent of it. Paradoxically, driven by a persisting paranoia of economic reductionism, the later Subaltern Studies end up bolstering other forms of reification: colonial/indigenous; material/ spiritual; outer/inner; world/home etc.

It is from this crude indigenism that the disdain towards secularism emanates. Invoking the question of UCC, Chatterjee argues that the insistence of the Hindu right on a thoroughgoing Uniform Civil Code demonstrates the dilemma of the secular state. Theoretically, a secular state should implement UCC but wouldn’t doing so also be tantamount to encroaching on the liberties of the Muslims? For Chatterjee, this dilemma of the secular state is but a palpable manifestation of the inadequacy of the Enlightenment democracy to handle cultural diversity and freedom. In essence, democracy and secularism are colonial imports and therefore undesirable in a country like India.

The solution that Chatterjee proposes to this dilemma borders on extreme group relativism: legislative independence for diverse religious communities should naturally stem from principles of religious tolerance and state non-interference. The romanticisation of ‘community’ as inherently powerless, juxtaposed with the characterisation of the secular state as the source of all major power entails that the gross injustice — such as gender-based violence — within these communities is glossed over. Paradoxically, although Chatterjee claims to borrow his insights on this matter from Foucault, his formulation is incompatible with the Foucauldian paradigm as Sumit Sarkar aptly demonstrates. Unlike Chatterjee who fixated on the state, Foucault sought to locate multiple locations of power.

Here, the position of Late Subaltern Studies, as Sumit Sarkar astutely puts it, comes perilously close to neo-traditionalist anti-modernism. Secularism is deemed to be as unacceptable as Hindutva, for it is ‘inherently intolerant’. Ashis Nandy, another non-communal anti-secularist, argued that the way forward is ‘toleration’ which has to ‘ground itself on pre-modern religion-as-faith.’ This ‘religion-as-faith’ is defined as non-monolithic and operationally plural.

The formulations outlined above are quite seductive, however, they are also very dangerous. Along very similar lines, the most conservative elements of the society have not only begun to challenge secularism but to flamboyantly demand their Hindu Rashtra — a deeply communal fantasy. There is no contradiction between ‘decolonisation’ and ‘cultural chauvinism.’ All the woes that plague our society are conveniently ascribed to colonialism, and India is let off the hook. There is no dearth of books and articles putting forth patently preposterous claims, like suggesting that caste is a Western construct. Such a perspective is analytically stultifying; it ignores the complex interplay of various historical, social and economic factors that contribute to contemporary issues.

This crude nativism fosters a culture of victimhood and helps deflect attention from addressing internal issues. Oftentimes, it shamelessly defends the most regressive practices prevalent in the society under the garb of preserving the ‘culture’, asserting that they should remain untouched by any external intervention. To a certain extent, relativism is needed to avert the dangers of ethnocentrism. For instance, any sane person should defend the right of a Muslim woman to wear a particular dress that is preferred by the culture she belongs to. However, this relativism often tends to acquire monstrous proportions: the denial of basic civil rights is justified because they are a Western imposition. Needless to say, women and other marginalised communities suffer the most from this extreme form of group relativism. 

In its essentialisation of the categories of colonial and indigenous, the Late Subaltern Studies too — deliberately or inadvertently — tend to romanticise indigeneity and vilify all external influences. The complex issues that require dispassionate analysis are sometimes clouded by a certain nationalist revanchism that seeks to restore cultural sovereignty. Tempting as much as it sounds, politically, this approach is suicidal. Essentially, it precludes the possibility of an honest self-introspection by looking for a scapegoat in the form of colonialism. Furthermore, this very same theoretical foundation can also be used as a prop to sustain a bigoted, ethno-nationalist agenda, which is exactly what is happening today.

In conclusion, while indigenism may come across as a convenient method of cultural revival, blindly romanticising it has its perils; it atrophies societal growth. With its defence of regressive practices as ‘tradition’, it not only leads to a spiral of societal self-worship but also perpetuates bigotry. Genuine progress requires us to develop a nuanced understanding of history beyond the categories of colonial and indigenous to build an inclusive and progressive society.