Saw H Ney Indian Modern I Ties

Leïla
Choukroune · Parul Bhandari
Editors
Exploring
Indian
Modernities
Ideas and Practices
Exploring Indian Modernities
Leïla Choukroune Parul Bhandari
•
Editors
Exploring Indian Modernities

Ideas and Practices
123
Editors
Leïla Choukroune Parul Bhandari
Professor of International Law, Centre for Social Sciences and
Director of the Thematic Initiative Humanities (CSH)
in Democratic Citizenship New Delhi
University of Portsmouth India
Portsmouth
UK and
St. Edmund’s College

University of Cambridge
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
UK
ISBN 978-981-10-7556-8 ISBN 978-981-10-7557-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5
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Preface
This is the first book published under a publishing collaboration between the Centre
for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH, or Centre de Sciences Humaines) and
Springer. For the past 30 years, CSH, based in New Delhi, has produced cutting
edge multidisciplinary research in social sciences and humanities thereby
addressing many of the pressing issues faced in the Indian subcontinent. In col-
laboration with numerous prestigious research institutions in India, and all over the
world, CSH has created a vast network of leading academics and students of very
diverse disciplines. It has reached out to civil society, government and businesses
publicizing its research, while also generating new vocations and interest in the
study of South Asia at large.
It was an apt time for CSH researchers and the many members of its community
of scholars in India and abroad to be able to present their work in a rigorous
scientific publication with global ambitions. On the basis of previous successful
collaborations including the “International Law and the Global South” series edited
by Leïla Choukroune and “Exploring Urban Change in South Asia” series edited by
Marie Hélène Zerah (previously with CSH), Springer has now offered us this
invaluable opportunity. And so has started the journey of Exploring Indian
Modernities: Ideas and Practices.
Portsmouth, UK Prof. Leïla Choukroune
v
Acknowledgements
This book is a result of many conversations between the co-editors on the meanings
of ‘modern’, which also led to the organization of a CSH multidisciplinary con-
ference entitled ‘India in the Modern: Visions, Practices, and Imaginings’, held at
Alliance Française of Delhi in December 2015. The very positive reception of the
papers presented immediately made us believe that we could, and should, fill an
existing gap in contemporary scholarship: that of a volume on the many Indian
modernities. Novel and comprehensive, our approach differs from other recent or
less contemporary attempts in that it is not limited to one discipline or a given
period of time. The collection of 15 essays covering most of today’s India’s major
social and political realities provides the reader with a jargon-free yet precise
analysis of complex and essential issues across disciplines. It is accessible to
specialists and a more general readership as well.
This intellectual adventure would not have been possible without the enthusiasm
of all the contributors whom we would like to warmly thank. We would also like to
thank some of our esteemed colleagues more directly including Profs. Saurabh
Dube, Ishita-Banerjee-Dube, Upendra Baxi and Carlos Miguel Herrera.
Of course, Shinjini Chatterjee, Executive Editor, Springer, deserves very special
and warm thanks for her constant support and encouragement. We are equally
grateful to the whole Springer India team as well as to the CSH, and our assistant
Sneha Kapoor, in particular, who has now become fluent in all Indian modern
languages including that of the communication with social scientists.
Portsmouth, UK Prof. Leïla Choukroune

New Delhi, India Dr. Parul Bhandari
vii
Contents
1 Understanding the Modern in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Leïla Choukroune and Parul Bhandari
Part I Imagining the Modern: Ideas, Institutions, and Challenges

2 Transgressions, Demosprudence, and Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Upendra Baxi
3 From Without to Within: Indian International Law as
Modernizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Leïla Choukroune
4 The Political Economy of Being ‘Modern’ in
21st Century India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Jayati Ghosh
5 Political Innovation in the Working of Indian Democracy:
A Study of the Group of Ministers Device (1999–2014) . . . . . . . . . 81
Balveer Arora and K. K. Kailash
6 Three Languages of the Discourse of Modernity in India . . . . . . . . 107
Savita Singh
Part II Experiencing the Modern: Makings and Practices

7 Makings of Modern Marriage: Choice, Family, and the
Matchmakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Parul Bhandari
8 Modern Bombay: The Making of an Art Territory
from 1850s to 1950s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Christine Ithurbide
ix
x Contents
9 Modern Mixes: The Hybrid and the Authentic in

Indian Cuisine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
10 Ritual at the Cutting Edge: Everyday Animal Slaughter as
Practice and Symbol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Rita Brara
Part III Narrating the Modern: Texts and Travels

11 Religion and Hospitality in the Modern: Thinking with Abdul
Bismillah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Simona Sawhney
12 Modernity’s Nightmares: Narrating Sexuality in Kerala . . . . . . . . . 231
Navaneetha Mokkil
13 Exploring Modernism as Reflected in Post-partition
Hindi/Urdu Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Sukrita Paul Kumar
14 Latin American Travellers in Modern India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Minni Sawhney
15 Chinese and Indian Attitudes Towards the Past:
A Paradoxical Appropriation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Nicolas Idier
16 From ‘Savages’ to ‘Saviours’: Genealogy of Santal
Portrayal in Colonial Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Anshul Avijit
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Prof. Leïla Choukroune is Professor of International Law and Director of the

Thematic Initiative in Democratic Citizenship at the University of Portsmouth
(UK). Until recently, she was director of the Centre for Social Sciences and
Humanities (CSH), New Delhi, India, the French National Research Centre (CNRS)
Unit on South Asia. She is a visiting professor at the World Trade Institute (Bern),
the University Paris II Panthéon-Assas, the Trade Policy Training Centre in Africa
(Arusha, Tanzania), the China-EU School of Law (Beijing), and the University of
Geneva. When associate professor of International Economic Law with the Faculty
of Law of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, she was deputy director
of the Institute for Globalization and International Regulation (IGIR), and director
of the Advanced Master in International Economic Law. Her research focuses on
the interactions between trade, investment, and human rights and is applied to
emerging countries, China and India, in particular. She has published numerous
scientific articles and authored several books including Judging the State in
International Trade and Investment Law (Springer, 2016 http://www.springer.com/
la/book/9789811023583) and (with Sangeeta Khorana) Global Health and the
Emerging World: An Integrated International Trade Approach (Springer, forth-
coming 2018). She is the editor of the Springer book series ‘International Law and
the Global South’ (http://www.springer.com/series/13447) and member of the
Editorial Board of China Perspectives and Perspectives Chinoises.
Professor Choukroune is regularly solicited as an independent expert on inter-
national economic law and business and human rights issues. She is an independent
adviser to the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and a member
of the French National Books Commission (CNL). Before taking the responsibility
of the CSH directorship, she was associate professor with the Law Faculty of
Maastricht University, assistant professor with HEC Paris, consultant with the
OECD, lecturer with Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and researcher with the French
Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Hong Kong. She holds a
doctorate in international law (Summa cum laude—highest honour) from the
xi
xii Editors and Contributors
University Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and is a qualified lawyer to the Paris Bar. She
is fluent in French, English and Spanish, speaks Chinese and German and is
learning Hindi.
Dr. Parul Bhandari, Ph.D., is currently a visiting scholar at St. Edmund’s College
and the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge. She is
also affiliated to the Centre of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), the South
Asia research unit for the French National Centre for Research (CNRS), where she
previously was a postdoctoral fellow (2014–16). She has held guest faculty posi-
tions at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, and the Indian
Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD). Dr. Bhandari completed her Ph.D. in
Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. Her Ph.D. was supported by
the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. Her main research interests lie in the field of
social class, gender, marriage, and family. Her doctoral thesis explained the mak-
ings of middle-class identities through the processes of spouse selection. For her
postdoctoral research she has shifted attention to the study of elites, particularly the
rich housewives of Delhi, focusing on their relationship with money and exploring
the themes of honour and humiliation in their everyday lives. Dr. Bhandari has
published several academic articles and essays, book chapters, and has written
widely in newspapers and magazines. Most recently, she co-edited a special issue
Changing Family Realities in South Asia? (with Fritzi-Marie Titzmann) for SAMAJ,
issue 16, 2017, and authored an article ‘Towards a Sociology of Elites: Marriage
Alliances, Vulnerabilities, and Resistance’ in the journal Society and Culture in
South Asia (2017). Her upcoming publications include two books: one based on her
doctoral work on marriages in middle-class India, and the other on the lives of elite
Indian women.
Contributors
Balveer Arora Centre for Multilevel Federalism, Institute of Social Sciences, New
Delhi, India
Anshul Avijit Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK
Ishita Banerjee-Dube El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico
Upendra Baxi Department of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Rita Brara Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
Jayati Ghosh Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social
Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Nicolas Idier Institut Francais en Inde (IFI), CREOPS/Sorbonne-University, New
Delhi, India
Editors and Contributors xiii
Christine Ithurbide Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New
Delhi, India
K. K. Kailash Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad,
Hyderabad, India
Navaneetha Mokkil Centre for Women’s Studies, School of Social Sciences,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Sukrita Paul Kumar Aruna Asif Ali Chair, Cluster Innovation Centre, University
of Delhi, New Delhi, India
Minni Sawhney Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of
Delhi, New Delhi, India
Simona Sawhney Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute
of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
Savita Singh School of Gender and Development Studies, Indira Gandhi National
Open University, New Delhi, India
List of Figures
Chapter 8
Fig. 1 Bombay modern art territory between 1850 and 1950 . . . . . . . . . . 153
Chapter 12
Fig. 1 Sreenivasan watching Ragini in his house . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Fig. 2 Mid-shot—they watch each other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Fig. 3 Close-up. Close yet there is glass in between . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Fig. 4 A moment of possible intimacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Fig. 5 The kiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Fig. 6 The aftermath of the kiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Chapter 16
Fig. 1 Albrecht Dürer, Katharina, drawing on paper, 1521 . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
Fig. 2 Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, woodcut, 1515 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Fig. 3 Hans Burgkmair, King of Cochin, woodcut, 1509 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Fig. 4 Representation of sati in Abraham Rogerius’ descriptions of the
Coromandal coast, French edition, 1670 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
Fig. 5 Frontispiece of Henry Harkness’ monograph on the Todas of the
Nilgiri Hills, 1832; (right) detail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
Fig. 6 Human sacrifice of the Khonds, frontispiece from John Cambell’s
narratives on the Khond tribe of Odisha, 1864 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
Fig. 7 ‘Sonthal Dance by Moonlight’, based on a sketch by Walter
Sherwill, Illustrated London News, 7 June 1851 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Fig. 8 ‘Attack on 600 Santhals upon a Party of 50 Sepoys, 40th
regiment Native Infantry’, based on a sketch by Walter Sherwill,
Illustrated London News, 23 February 1856 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Fig. 9 Engraving of Sido based on Walter Sherwill’s sketch of the rebel
leader in Bhagalpur jail shortly after his capture on 19 August
1855, ILN, 23 February 1856 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 10 Article on the ‘Santhal Insurrection’ by Walter Sherwill featuring

captured rebels Sidu and Singra as well as confiscated Santal
weaponry, ILN, 23 February 1856 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
Fig. 11 Nandalal Bose, Santhal Dancers, watercolour on paper, 1947 . . . . 324
Fig. 12 Detail of the drummer from Nandalal Bose’s Santhal Dancers,
1947 (left); 5th century fresco of the Buddhist deity Padmapani
from Cave 1 at Ajanta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Fig. 13 Jamini Roy, Santhal Girl, tempera on card, 1930s (left); Santhal
Woman—Seated, gouache, 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Fig. 14 Jamini Roy, untitled works on the Santals, tempera on board,
1940s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
Fig. 15 Binode Bihari Mukherjee, Santhals Resting, oil on board,
1953 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Fig. 16 Haren Das, Moody Maid, woodcut, 1963 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Fig. 17 Ramkinkar Baij, The Santal Family, concrete, 1938,
Santiniketan, Bengal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
List of Tables
Chapter 5
Table 1 Party competition and fragmentation in parliament . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Table 2 Multiparty governments since 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Table 3 GoM chairperson by sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Table 4 Party wise representation in GoMs (2004–14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Table 5 Sectoral and federal representation in GoMs (2004–14) . . . . . . . . . 95
Table 6 The relative weight of national and state parties in the Lok Sabha
(1996–2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 97
xvii
Chapter 1
Understanding the Modern in India
Leïla Choukroune and Parul Bhandari
‘Modo’: just now. ‘Modus’: manner, mode, but also rhythm, measure, and even
bound or limit. ‘Modernus’: Modern. ‘Modernitas’: Modernity. The Latin origin of
the terms modern and modernity suggest various alternatives yet also additional and
complementing paths to approach a multifaceted reality. Why is it then as important
as fascinating to, once again, analyse Indian modernity in the plurality of its
expressions? Maybe because ‘just now’, India is confronted with a certain revival of
a past depicted by some of its proponents as a glorious yet lost epoch in which
social harmony prevailed to the benefit of a powerful and radiating State. Perhaps as
well because today, more than ever before, multiple modernities manifest them-
selves in many different spheres of the Indian society thus contributing not only to
the questioning, but also to the re-definition of the modern against the backdrop of
post-colonialism and globalization.
One of the most often used terms and concepts in grappling with and under-
standing Indian reality is indeed that of the ‘modern’. The ‘modern’ describes
experiences, outlooks, visions, and imaginations. It also comes to indicate a peri-
odization of time. It is used most generously to address practices and design future
ambitions and is viewed as a tool of critique, an instrument to gauge a reality
against another one. It is invoked in everyday lives, makings of institutions, and as
unintended consequences of interactions and intersections. As a simple example, a
cursory read of Indian newspapers, and in particular their matrimonial section,
brings out the way in which a woman’s status is defined by the ‘modern’ as
L. Choukroune (&)
Professor of International Law, Director of the Thematic Initiative in Democratic Citizenship,
University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
e-mail: Leila.choukroune@port.ac.uk
P. Bhandari
Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New Delhi, India
P. Bhandari
St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 1

L. Choukroune and P. Bhandari (eds.), Exploring Indian Modernities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_1
2 L. Choukroune and P. Bhandari
revealed in the desire for a ‘modern yet traditional’ bride; a walk through newly
constructed shopping malls allows us to experience the material manifestations of
the modern and processes of modernization, as do the ‘Modern Indian cuisines’
served in these malls and elsewhere. At a more conceptual and political level, the
discourse and legal projects supported by the Constitution position themselves in
achieving a modern India, one that is defined by progress and development and
social initiatives and welfare. There are, therefore, many finite and diverse appro-
priations and renditions of the modern, which though seemingly easy, are rather
difficult to comprehend in a single coherent manner for they do not allude only to a
monolithic progressive working of the society. Instead, the ‘modern’ is constructed
through an array of features that are also constantly contested, and constructed at
times from borrowing from patterns of development and cross-cultural engage-
ments and at other times by invoking a past to make a future.
It is precisely this variegated nature of the ‘modern’ in India that has apparently
made it difficult to produce one comprehensive work of scholarship that can
encompass the diverse renditions and interpretations of the modern. We therefore
find works that limit themselves to either a historical period or a conceptual
framework to explain the ‘modern’ of Indian realities.1 This book, however, is a
bold attempt to bring together the diverse interpretations of the modern that have
shaped the realities of Indian society. It undertakes not one, but multiple conceptual
frameworks to explain the journey of the making and experiencing of the modern as
it also points to the loopholes of the project of the modern, and describes the
innovations and adaptations and intended and unintended makings of the modern.
This volume therefore, takes on a multidisciplinary perspective and fosters an
expansive focus as it brings together works from different fields as that of political
science, international law and jurisprudence, sociology, anthropology, history,
economics, visual studies, history of art, social geography, and the specific lens
these fields use to unveil and analyse the ‘modern’ in Indian society. This is indeed
an ambitious project. Yet, as editors, we believe that one book that can bring
together contradictory and complementary visions and renditions of the modern, is
as timely as it is beneficial. Divided into three parts, this book is so structured that it
can be read cover to cover with a flow of conceptions and practices of the modern
and can also be approached as individual chapters allowing the readers considerable
freedom to chart their own trajectory of understanding the term ‘modern’.
1
Two more recent edited volumes that explain India’s encounter with modernity, though with
specific lens of history and democracy are Saurabh Dube’s Modern Makeovers: An Introduction
(2012) and Surinder Jodhka’s Interrogating India’s Modernity: Democracy, Identity, and
Citizenship (2013) respectively. See the selected references on Indian modernity listed at the end
of this introduction.
1 Understanding the Modern in India 3
1 Tracing the Modern
Many conceptions of the modern that explain and define its contours especially as
determined by time, space, practice, idea, and imagination, coexist. There is, for
instance, more than Enlightenment to the modern and its criticism did not start with
post-modern theories but rather the defenders of the ‘ancient regime’ and other
opponents to the French revolutionary project. While the main feature of the
transition to modernity is generally understood as a rupture with a medieval fixed
and unitary cosmic order in which the sources of law and power were reduced to the
will of an unchallenged ruler and not yet detached from their communal or religious
legacy or other popular customs, the modern manifested itself in a non-linear and
heterogeneous manner. It is, as Habermas had put it, ‘an incomplete project’ (1980).
A befitting starting point of a discussion of the modern could however be Max
Weber’s understanding of a modern society. According to Weber, the modern world
is characterized by processes of rationalization, leading to a disenchantment of the
world, where everything is calculable. Weber writes in Science as a Vocation:
It means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but
rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is
disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or
implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical
means and calculations perform the service. (Weber 1946: 294; quoted in Carroll 2011: 133)
With this framework of rationality, Weber traced the rise of western civilization,
and as this outlook of rationality progressed, the world was increasingly viewed in
the division between the rational and the irrational as also religion was shifted into
the realm of the irrational (Carroll 2011: 120). So in the modern world, actions,
social worlds, and everyday lives were determined by their extent of rationality.
Weber’s conception of modern society was based on features of rationality as that
of bureaucracy and law, and found ground later in the works of sociologist, Talcott
Parsons. Parsons furthered this Weberian conception, and a utopian envisioning
wherein interpersonal relationships are governed solely in legal terms, that is, on a
contract, as he proposed a modernization theory as a befitting paradigm to under-
stand the progress of societies. The aim of his modernization theory was to cate-
gorize societies in binaries of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’. In order to
determine the category to which a society would belong, Parsons proposed that
progress should be measured along five pattern variables: affectivity versus affective
neutrality; self-orientation versus collective-orientation; particularism versus uni-
versalism; ascription versus achievement; and diffuseness versus specificity. For
him the West, in particular the American society, had successfully laid a claim on
the modern as it had experienced industrialization, specialization of occupational
roles, urbanization (Parsons and Shils 1951) and other elements of Weberian
rationality.2
2
For further discussion see Gilman (2007: Chapter 3).
Parson’s modernization theory remains controversial (despite a short comeback

in the 1990s), whilst Weberian conception of the modern society is viewed as
persuasive, providing a thorough understanding of the modern times through the
well-developed concept of rationality, though this concept too is critiqued for
furthering a western hegemonic vision (Carroll 2011). Despite these differences in
reception and conception, both these works, and many subsequent others, for-
warded a vision of binaries to understand society: rational and irrational; modern
and traditional; progressive and savage. Works and analyses that made use of these
paradigms to map the modernity of society, in turn seemed to promote a neat
proposal of the modern, where the modern is determined by rationality, thought,
enlightenment, and progress. This paradigm furthermore, seemed most beneficial in
establishing the hegemony of western societies who were seen as modern and in
due process relegating other societies as ‘traditional’ (Wallerstein 2004).
1.1 Multiple and Contradictory Modernities
Subsequently, there emerged critiques to this unilinear understanding of the mod-

ern, which explained that there is not one idea of the modern but in fact
‘multiple-modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000). Eisenstadt argues that contrary to mod-
ernization theories, there will not be a convergence of ‘industrial societies’ towards
a homogeneous pattern of working. He argues that each society engenders its own
modernities emanating from its specific social and cultural contexts and pro-
grammes. The modern, therefore, did not have one singular interpretation but there
were in fact multiple ways of being modern, and those that were not specifically
dictated by western ideas of the modern.
A second important intervention in critically thinking through the western
hegemonic concept of the modern was brought about through works by Dube that
argued to not see the modern as a neat proposal (Dube 2012). In doing so, it is
crucial to recognize that the ‘modern’ is shaped by processes that might seem
contradictory. He states that the modern is of ‘processes of reason and science,
industry and technology, commerce and consumption, nation–state and citizen–
subject, public spheres and private spaces, and secularized religion(s) and disen-
chanted knowledge(s)’ as it is also about the ‘processes of empires and colonies,
race and genocide, resurgent faiths and reified traditions, disciplinary regimes and
subaltern subjects, and seductions of the state and enchantments of the modern’
(Dube 2012: 8–9). The modern therefore is constitutive of hierarchy, struggles, and
power violence, as it also shaped by desires and imaginings of equality, reason, and
progress. In that the modern is as much about contradictions and contentions, as it is
about futurity and neat envisioning of self and society.
1.2 Looking Back and Beyond
An important element of such an envisioning of the modern is when the modern is

not viewed as completely being time-bound, looking at a future, causing a sharp
break from its past. On the contrary, it is when the ‘modern’ is recognized to be
inextricably linked to its past. The past, at times might be even more incorporating
of contestations, differences, and factions, which the present ideals of ‘modern’
might overlook. Dube in his work Modern Makeovers specifies that the aim of his
book was to recognize that ‘modernity involves processes of the past and the
present’ (2012: 7), and this book too cannot emphasize enough the need to look at
the past to understand the present and the ideals of future. Consequently, many of
the contributors in this book, in order to explain the modern, shift their gaze to the
past, invoking memories, nostalgia, loss of freedom, egalitarianism, and dialogue,
which, as they argue, modern sensibilities might lack or taking an optimistic stance,
the modern can learn from. In doing so, this collection does not view the past as the
sphere of ‘tradition’, one that signifies a limiting and unfulfilling array of ideas and
practices. Instead, it recognizes a view that the past was able to provide a liberating
and empowering context, which lamentably has not been translated into the ‘now’;
the ‘modern’.
Equally, the modern is also to be viewed in its ability to construct and curate a
future, which often emerges out of a critique of the modern self and times. This book,
therefore, also includes chapters that place a critical lens on the ‘modern’, and in so
doing provide further conceptualizations and workings to experience and perhaps
improve the ‘modern’. Such an approach, then, also urges us to see the modern not as
a static a-temporal category; but one that changes with time, and in fact, is in a
constant state of making. It is an ideal that is desired and is also susceptible to change
and innovation. It is in these makings and practices then that the modern is constantly
evolving: subject to evaluation, criticism, and contradiction.
A critical element of being able to understand the modern as amenable to change
and revision is the ability to recognize the contradictions or dark sides of the
‘contradictions’. It is here that Foucault and Adorno’s critique of the modern
subject are most appropriate. For Foucault and Adorno the concept of rationality is
guided by the compassionate awareness of the sufferings of the human body
(Honneth and Roberts 1986: 53). For Foucault in particular, the rationalization of
society is nothing but ‘infliction of violence on human body’ (1986: 48). Both
scholars believe that the civilization processes, as furthered by the rationalization of
society, essentially control and direct the social life, to the extent that modern
societies are in principle totalitarian societies (1986: 55). To them, therefore, the
modern subject does not symbolize progress and development of body and society
but in fact signifies the acute disciplining and manipulation of the body, mind, and
self. The modern, in this sense, is marred by violence, control, colonization, sub-
jugation, and rejection. In this volume too, we bring attention to this dark side of the
modern, as some contributors discuss the violence on body and self that the modern
time produce, for example, by subjugating and controlling sexuality, friendship, and
commensuality. Furthermore, some contributors also explore the modern as an

inherently flawed concept, which therefore is in constant look for renewal or
revalidation. This book also takes the stand that the modern is in a constant state of
making, defined by its bright and dark side, enmeshed in the trajectories of its past
and envisions of a future, and practices of the ‘now’. It is thus tied in a web of time,
articulating and registering in differing spheres, but never in a state of complete
achievement. It is due to this dynamic nature of the modern that we chose to title the
volume as Exploring Indian Modernities: Ideas and Practices, alluding to the
multiple modernities that exist in India and also to emphasize the fact that
the makings of the modern are established in ideas as much as in practice.
1.3 Post-colonial Ambivalences of Modernity
Asking the very question of modernity in India—and what it can teach us—is
eventually also an interrogation of the post-colonial history and its conceptualiza-
tion. This includes other alternative histories of the newly independent State as
those proposed by the post-modern and post-colonial critiques and, maybe more
adequately, the ‘subaltern studies’. A number of chapters in this volume, for
instance, in shifting the gaze and proposing another temporality, allude directly or
indirectly to these essential approaches in a general context where post-modern,
post-colonial and post-structural critiques have found a remarkable echo in India,
perhaps because the very proponents of these approaches, from Fanon and Saïd to
Derrida or Lyotard and, to a lesser extent, Foucault, were ‘intimately connected
with the colony itself’ and could then easily question the universality of the
modernity project (Ahluwalia 2010: 14). The development, reception, legacy, and
later criticism of postmodernism and of course, ‘colonial and subaltern studies’
have been of prime importance in and for the subcontinent and so would require a
specific analysis (Guha 1983, 1997; Spivak 1998; Chibber 2013). This is not the
purpose of this introduction, but it is however necessary to briefly address some of
their main features as ‘the colonial condition characterized by the “civilizing mis-
sion” was indeed ‘linked inextricably to notions of modernity’ (Ahluwalia 2010:
10). The colonizer’s stance of superiority rested upon the idea of the betterment of
the inferior’s condition in providing the indigene with access to a new existence
characterized by material progress and the advent of reason. This promise of
development was never fulfilled for the colonial system would have collapsed under
the realization of equality. As a genre of contemporary history, post-colonialism
critically questions the ideas of culture and identities in challenging the narrative of
history in a conceptual rather than a temporal manner. At the intersection between
‘colonial’ and ‘subaltern studies’, Gayatri Spivak demonstrates how the subalterns’
proposal has deconstructed historiography in proposing at least ‘two things: first
that the moment(s) of change be pluralized and plotted as confrontations rather than
transition (they would thus be seen in relation to histories of domination and
exploitation rather than within the great mode of production narrative) and,
secondly, that such changes are signalled or marked by a functional change in

sign-systems’ (Spivak 1998: 270). Hence, the ‘subaltern studies’ project exempli-
fied by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s analysis, aimed at formulating another history of
modernity in provincializing or decentring Europe as ‘an imaginary figure that
remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits
of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address
questions of political modernity in South Asia’ (Chakrabarty 2001: 4). Could we
indeed even ask the question of modernity in India without first interrogating the
very concepts produced in Europe, which presuppose and support modernity? Yet,
as demonstrated throughout this volume, the legacy of Humanism, Enlightenment
or the Marxist critique of the same are now globalized and, even more interestingly,
(re)localized in many Indian variations embedding native histories, the past and the
present. After all, it is from those who ‘have suffered the sentence of history
subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement’ that we learn ‘our most enduring
lessons for living and thinking’ (Bhabha 1994: 172). Renewing the thought ‘from
and for the margins’ also implies, as alluded to by Chakrabarty, a redefinition of the
self and what it is to be human in a supposedly disenchanted world (Chakrabarty
2001: 16). Departing from Weber’s secular rationality, the realities of Indian
modernities propose a form of re-enchantment of the world, a sort of ‘secular
magic’ for the 21st century.3 Be it in literary forms, or the practice of everyday
lives, as shown in this very volume, gods and spirits are constantly present in
modern India, yet not necessarily as competing with or challenging the secular
order. As such, the Indian modernities envisaged in our edited book are also an
exemplification of the non-western and non-linear makings of the modern.
2 Modern India
We compile this book at a time when India is witnessing interesting social and
political transformations. A strong orientation towards these transformations can be
traced to the early 1990s when India opened its economy to crucial liberalizing
policies, which ushered in a host of professional opportunities for the burgeoning
young population as it also led to the onset of several shifts in social interactions,
redrawing of class boundaries, and rise of new identifications and reiteration of
certain older ones. As the economic policies interacted with global forces of finance,
economics, and politics, Indians debated the rise of a ‘new’ middle class and
appropriated the jargon of ‘change’, development, and progress. Yet, there also
emerged reports of growing inequalities that marked Indian modern reality, brushed
away to present the modern and developed face of India.
There was, for example, a visible shift in participation of women in the work-
force, promotion of government welfare programmes encouraging girls’ education,
3
In allusion to Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (2009).
and an increase, though marginal, in the age of marriage. As real as these devel-
opments in the sphere of women’s progress were, there equally emerged greater
reporting of crimes against women. Fighting for caste equality, especially by way of
caste reservation in government bodies—educational and administrative—was a
defining era named after the commission looking into these reforms—the Mandal
Commission, and the post-Mandal era (the 1990s and onwards) was marked by
caste violence and fight for equality and recognition by the so-called lower castes.
The political situation too underwent interesting changes from the relatively stable
rule of the Congress party in the 1990s, under the prime ministership of
P. V. Narasimha Rao (Sitapati 2018) to more coalition governments, and rise of an
anti-corruption wave which led to the emergence of a ‘people’s party’—the Aam
Aadmi Party (AAP), which went on to win crucial Delhi elections of 2014. Most
significant was the coming into power of the main opposition party, the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), in the general elections of 2014, which shares roots with the
right-wing organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The BJP had pre-
viously been in power in the late 1990s; however, in the 2014 general elections it
leading face a resounding victory, with the controversial Narendra Modi, previously
Chief Minister of Gujarat, as its leading face. The victory of the BJP brought back,
in direct and indirect ways, religion into Indian politics, in ways which was not
manifest in earlier times, though of course it was not completely latent either.
The juxtaposition of religion and politics in contemporary Indian reality, which
is curating the ‘modern’, then stands at odds with classical conceptions of the
modern that suggest a separation of these two spheres. Moreover, not simply in
politics but everyday Indian lives are also not far away from the practices of
religion, as evident in the increasing rise of religious gurus (saints), who do not
necessarily follow any strict tenets of Hinduism but instead, merge the practices and
teachings of various religions to propagate their own practices and understandings
of religion and spirituality. The other sphere that remains a dominant actor in
guiding social interaction in India is that of the family. Yet again, contrary to
modernization theories and theories on the rise of individualism, as well as use of
technology, we see that the family remains a significant force in dictating social ties
in Indian society (Bhandari and Titzmann 2017). Merging together the importance
of religion, family, and other communal identities is for example the space of
matchmaking and marriage, where whilst the desire for finding ‘love’ in marriage is
paramount, the young population is equally cognizant of respecting caste and
community boundaries and upholding family honour. Whilst these structures or
units of social life provide a firm communal anchorage to individuals, they also
coexist with processes of individualization, which are furthered by use of tech-
nology, rise of youth culture, and desire to write one’s own biography (Beck 1994;
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995).
It is these coexistences of seemingly contradictory or contesting values, patterns,
and cultures that motivated us to focus on what the ‘modern’ really means to and
for an Indian society, for clearly, we are experiencing a modern that does not fit the
western ideals, imaginings, or makings. Furthermore, the Indian history, political,
and cultural leanings are constantly making, questioning, and re-making the
‘modern’. The modern articulates itself in different forms in various fields of Indian
identities, and we think it is important to bring together these many narrative in one
volume to see for ourselves what the ‘modern’ in India truly entails, before we even
begin to explain what the non-modern or the post-modern is. In this volume,
therefore, we are keen to locate India’s conception of State, justice, law, economy,
practices of cultures of art, cuisine, hospitality, makings of cities, marriages, and
families, and traditions of oral and art history, as they interact with both Indian and
international cultures, people, and concepts. Such an endeavour in particular would
be pertinent in the current times of intense global flow of ideas and people and the
State’s increasing role and intervention in everyday lives of common Indians by
way of social welfare schemes or drastic economic decisions as of demonetization
of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 currency notes in November 2016. We have aimed to
include perspectives of several disciplines, adopting divergent methodologies—
archival work, ethnography, practice, and visual analysis—to present their varied
views on the modern in India. Some of these contributors adopt a
historical-genealogical lens to understand the construction or making of the modern
delineating the practices ‘then’ and ‘now’ and how these interacted to shape the
‘modern’. Some other contributors place a critical lens on the idea of the modern as
espoused by the State, for example, pointing to the loopholes in its economic
policies and treatment of science and welfare and certain others provide suggestions
to improve the project of the modern. Certain other contributors shift attention to
the makings of the modern as evident in practices and cultures of food, hospitality,
and spouse selection. This volume also brings out the constructions of gender roles
and expectations as we also review the vast array of sexualities that have dominated
Indian literature but which are controlled and curtailed in modern times. This
compilation is in no way exhaustive, as there remain several questions and spheres
that only challenge our conception of the modern. However, our aim is to not
provide a singular understanding of the modern but to let the experiences, texts, and
research of scholars speak for themselves, only reiterating that the making of
modern India is wrought with contestation and contradictions (Dube 2009, 2012),
going back and forth between ideas of progress and control, and the ‘modern’ in
India is in a continual state of making, challenging, and accepting the various
influences and forces from the past and the present.
3 Learning from a Multidisciplinary Path
Amidst these varied conceptualizations and approaches to the modern, and the
shifting realities of Indian society, it is only a mammoth task to be able to provide
one coherent understanding of the ‘modern’ that would appropriately capture the
lived and imagined realities of Indian society. However, we aim to put forth as far
as possible, a coherent perspective, and cover, as far as possible, the various per-
spectives of understanding the modern in India. In order to do so, we focus on five
thematic perspective to the ‘modern’, which we hope will help contextualize the
chapters and ideas presented in this volume.
3.1 Shifting the Gaze
The ‘modern’ is usually seen to signify the ‘now’, ‘present’ or ‘new’, signalling a
forward looking vision where the past is seen as distinct and different, perhaps also
uninvolved with the ‘now’. However, we query this unilinear progressive vision by
insisting that the ‘modern’ cannot be understood without a look at the past. In so
doing we are not simply making a point of continuity between ‘then’ and ‘now’, of
the present and the past. Instead, we look at the past as more befitting to ideas and
imaginings of the ‘modern’. The past, then, is not a regressive or ‘traditional’
repertoire of time and practices but in fact is a crucial constituent of a modern
present. Yet, often, the past is overlooked and presented as much different and less
desirable. Querying this image, we argue that the modern struggles in society could
in fact learn from the past by recognizing and incorporating the past in the mapping
of its future, and by viewing it not as a distant experience, the time of which has
come to an end and has little relevance to the practices of the present and future.
This dynamic view of time and its impact on the making of the modern, further-
more, crucially turns the binaries as that of modern/traditional, object/subject,
masculine/feminine on its head. It enables us to question which category is the
privileged gaze in the binaries? Which aspect of the binary indicates the ‘now’, the
‘better’, and the ‘progressive’?
Whilst most chapters in this contribution invoke the past to understand the
‘modern’, three papers specifically fall on this axis. Mokkil’s chapter (Chap. 12)
questions the heteronormative conception of masculinity and femininity as defined
by the discourse on reproductive family, by turning attention to novellas and
movies in Malayalam, which espouse a range of sexualities and non-
heteronormative takes on gender. By conducting an analysis of literary and
visual cultures of Kerala, Mokkil brings out the disjuncture in the modernist project
of taming and domesticating desires. The focus of her work is not simply on
feminine figures but the ‘unruly feminine figures’ as the mad woman and the witch,
as she also brings together the human and spirit (ghosts) to explain the varied
constructions of femininities as captured by regional literature. These stories and
movies based on vernacular literature, she argues, give shape and form to ‘trans-
gressive feminine desire’ which contests the modern heteronormative discourse on
sexuality and gender.
Turning the binaries of ‘colonizer/colonized’ on its head is the chapter by Avijit
(Chap. 16) who argues that colonial art in fact provided the Indian tribal with far
more agency especially in relation to the Indian painters of the Bengal School
(1920s–1950s). By undertaking an extensive and rigorous analysis of Santal tribal
art, Avijit argues that it was the Bengal school of Art that curated the image of the
tribal as the primitive by returning them to their forests, drums, dances, which they
believed were the true characters of the Indian primitive. He argues that the colo-
nizer was in fact cautious to not cage the tribals in the language of orientalism.
Avijit’s chapter seems most counterintuitive to the generalized conceptions of the
‘modern’ for he argues that the colonizer was in fact removed from the making of
the ‘primitive’. According to him, it is the colonized that made (curated) the
‘primitive’ images to chart the paths of a nationalist ‘modern’.
Simona Sawhney’s chapter (Chap. 11) focuses on the ideal of hospitality as
invoked in texts of the past to question if hospitality is really all about inclusion or
in fact exclusion. She asks if hospitality espouses equality or plays out hierarchies.
By drawing attention to two literary texts, she explains the asymmetrical relation
between the guest and the host through the lens of religion, caste, and class. In so
doing she turns the dichotomy of the guest and host on its head as she asks if it is in
fact the guest who does not belong, pushing us to re-think the position of power and
privilege of the guest, and also relating it to the modern policies of immigration.
3.2 The Governing Principles of Modernity
The Indian constitution was seen, as later unveiled by the Kesavananda Bharati v.
State of Kerala Supreme Court judgment, as the means to bring about a
‘non-violent social revolution’.4 ‘Workable’, ‘flexible’ and ‘strong enough’ to ‘hold
the country together both in peace and in war time’, the Constitution eventually
offered the promise of a nation-state and that of a political modernity.5 In this
context, several chapters of our volume address, in a critical perspective, this yet
unfulfilled—or perhaps failed—promise of modernity.
On the basis of the Indian constitutional project, Choukroune (Chap. 3) argues
that the normative ‘internationalization’, in which the national judge plays a central
role, brings even more promises in emerging economies like India where foreign
and international laws are not only domesticized but also held as powerful
instruments for empowering the national democratic process by shielding it from
internal pressure, yet sometimes at the risk of being rejected as a form of judicial
hyperactivism. She shows that this dynamic and incomplete process is all but
irreversible at a time Indian law is challenged by a form of revival of the past. As
such, she argues that it may well be that Indian law is not quite modern yet already
post-modern. But the post-modern character of Indian law does not rest upon a
frustrated reaction to the colonial ‘modernism’ and legal ‘positivism’ equally alien
to the national genius of the people of India. It is the expression of a plural, highly
diverse society, which evolves in multiple realities and thinks and acts in many
apparently irreconcilable ways. Indian legal modernity then has the capacity to
4
Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973), 4 SCC 225.
5
See Ambedkar’s introduction of the Draft Constitution in the Constituent Assembly on 4
November 1948, reproduced in Jadhav (2014: 466).
accommodate different de-territorialized legal spheres in one hybrid project testing

the limits of history. The ambiguity of the constitutional regime is equally exposed
by Baxi (Chap. 2) who argues that since the 1980s, the Supreme Court has become
the ‘co-governor of the nation’, which makes ‘laws’, ‘a large number of policies’
and invents ‘structures of enforcement’. In crafting a new concept of ‘demospru-
dence’, Baxi proposes to ‘devise, and think about, some more apt ways of under-
standing in which judges and lawyers think through the problems of maturation of a
democratic order with human rights assurances’. In so doing, he gauges the con-
trasts and contradictions between judicial action and democratic praxis and
explores, in the Indian context, a potentially new constitutional theory, which goes
beyond the accepted separation of powers and deeply questions the idea of norms.
Ghosh (Chap. 4), in her incisive analysis of the economic programmes of the
Indian government, makes a call for including both formal and informal economies
to realize the project of the modern. She remarks that the government’s inability to
recognize and address ‘traditional’ forms of social hierarchy, exclusion and dis-
crimination, has obstructed the realization of the modern project. She also questions
the role of ‘modern’ devices such as technology and increasing digitization, cau-
tioning that these may create further divisions and inequalities.
Providing a more positive analysis of the Indian State’s project of the modern is
the contribution by Arora and Kailash (Chap. 5) who bring out the relevance and
importance of the practice of ‘the Group of Ministers Device’. This practice,
according to the authors, completes and emboldens the constitutional project and
fills the gaps of a perfectible parliamentary democracy. They explain the ways in
which this practice bolsters the project of the modern, specifically as it allows
expression of diversities and promotes an Indian heritage of tolerance and
accommodation.
In interrogating a complex process of interactions with the West, Savitha Singh
meticulously deconstructs modernity as a theory of knowledge and shows that
beyond the apparent epistemological objective, a specific Indian interpretation is
emanating as the genuine project of being itself. This complexity has been grasped
on the basis of many different languages constructing a discourse on modernity, a
long conversation on its own, which is bringing out much more than the truth.
3.3 The Practice and Understanding of the Modern

in Everyday Lives
The modern is also experienced in the everyday practices of contemporary life and
is presented as an ideal that is strived for by structures and organs of society. This
understanding of the modern is most strongly manifest in everyday practices as
those related to food, social interaction, and marriage. The special focus of this
theme of the modern therefore, is in the externalization of the ‘now’, the ‘present’,
and it shifts our attention to the ways in which the modern is experienced,
externalized, and presented to make sense of the everyday realities of Indian

society. In pursuit of this approach, our emphasis is not simply on the uplifting or
empowering elements of the modern, instead we also draw attention to its critiques.
Furthermore, we do not envision the modern as a necessarily complete project but
as one that requires constant re-working and re-envisioning and therefore under-
stand the modern as in a constant state of making; requiring and desiring practice
and vision.
Several chapters of this volume particularly bring out this conception of the
modern that is in constant mode of making and experience and that is enabled by
practice. Shifting focus from the macro to the micro practices of everyday living are
papers by Bhandari and Brara (Chaps. 7 and 10). Both these chapters explain that
the practices of the modern are not based on the exclusion of certain aspects usually
associated with being pre-modern as that of religion and family, but in fact the
‘modern’ are crucially determined by their inclusion. Bhandari show that the pre-
sentation of the modern in marriages though articulated by experiences of love is
not defined only by the realization of individual love and will. In fact, it crucially
includes parental consent and authority such that these aspects are not viewed as
‘traditional’ or ‘non-modern’ but are able to transform themselves as the modern.
She argues that the modern choice in marriage is not about excluding the parents
but instead is of including them in the process of spouse-selection. Based on
ethnographic work she also explains that the processes of modernization, as the use
of technology in matchmaking, support this making of ‘modern’ choice in mar-
riages. Brara’s chapter focuses on the everyday practice of animal slaughter for
human consumption, specifically halal and jhatka. On the basis of ethnographic
work conducted in Hindu and Muslim animal slaughter houses, Brara argues that
religion is not the realm of the ‘pre-modern’, but continues to be an important
aspect of the public sphere and the makings of a modern nation-state.
3.4 Trajectories of the Makings
The fourth axis on which the understanding of the modern can be read is about the
mixing and amalgamation of ideas and practices, of ‘then’ and ‘now’. This thematic
approach assists us to view the modern as a creation of diverse forces working in
tandem with each other. It does not understand the modern in temporal categories of
past, present, and future, but as a flowing phenomenon that goes back and forth,
carries insignias and visions through every time and space it encounters. At times,
the resultant ‘modern’ is absolutely unintended, as it has been borrowed, incor-
porated, and appropriated from the many, however, soon the resultant ‘modern’
also comes to identify itself strongly with a particular origin or state of being. In this
volume, this approach is best captured in three chapters, one of which looks at the
making of the city of Bombay (Mumbai), the other focuses on the making of
‘modern’ Indian cuisine, and the third is on the rise of languages to understand the
‘modern’.
Ithurbide in her chapter (Chap. 8) explains the rise of Bombay as the centre of
art and culture. Undertaking a historical analysis, she traces the rise of Bombay as
an art territory, which was shaped by a spectrum of experiences of diverse classes,
communities, and individuals. She explains the ways in which the city transforms
into a cultural metropolis with circulations of idea, actors, and material culture. The
city, she lays out, is an amalgamation of modernity designed by the British colonial
administration, desires and styles of life of the Indian elites, and oppositions to the
concept of ‘moderntiy’ as voiced by several groups. All these aspects, she argues,
work together to create the cultural metropolis of Bombay that then became a potent
symbol of modern India.
Banerjee-Dube (Chap. 9) pays attention to the makings of ‘authentic fusion
food’ which has come to symbolize a modern Indian cuisine. Banerjee-Dube
unsettles the binaries on which the modern and traditional are supposed to be based
as she explains the blend of ‘authenticity’ and ‘hybridity’ as well as that of ‘tra-
dition’ and ‘innovation’ in the making of Indian food. She traces the making of
‘modern’ Bengali cuisine from the mixed heritage of Mughlai (derived from the
Mughals) and Anglo-Indian food as well as the crisscrossing paths of ‘curry’.
Banerjee-Dube’s research is crucial to recognize that the ‘modern’ is in fact
embedded in the mixes—as of hybridity and authenticity, of ‘then and now’ and
works towards producing such a conception which finds significance for all forms
and content and therefore is easily appropriated by the diverse Indian realities as its
own, as in this case, the notion of authentic Indian fusion cuisine.
Shifting attention to Indian literary field is the chapter by Paul Kumar (Chap. 13)
where she argues that modernism in Indian fiction has a distinct colour and shape,
born out of borrowing from the West and by also immersing in the cultural diversity
and linguistic plurality of its own country. In that sense, ‘modernist writing’ should
not be seen as a ‘cultural sell-out’ but as a result of cultural, political, and social
setting of India, especially in the context of post-Partition India. She explains the
ways in which creative expression can be viewed as the Indian brand of modernism,
as it develops due to an assimilation of the new philosophic and cultural temper,
caused in the cultural crisis created by Partition of the subcontinent in 1947.
Each of these chapters with its unique focus on making of a city, cuisine, and
literary tradition, explains to us that the modern is not conceptualized in neat
categories. Instead, it is a result of interaction with the diversities of Indian realities
as it is also shaped by definitive moments in history as that of influence of European
art in social and cultural spaces of a city or the Partition of the country in 1947. The
‘modern’ therefore, is a product of the mixes, of interactions, of specific contexts,
and changing realities.
3.5 Locating in Transnational Exchanges
An explanation of Indian modernity significantly takes into account the influence of

British colonialism, especially as propounded by post-colonial theories. From the
use of English language to the setting up of parliamentary democratic systems, to

cultures of food and social interaction, much of Indian modernity has emerged in
the context of its colonial history. However, in this volume, whilst in full cog-
nizance of this influence, we are also keen to bring out other significant forces of
international interactions that have shaped the notions, practices, and imagining of
the Indian modern. In unveiling these interactions, we are yet again not invoking a
linear version of the modern where these international forces shaped the modern of
India but are also interested in delineating the ways Indian experiences also
influenced notions of modernity of these other societies. In other words, in this
volume we also want to understand the modern in India not only as a final product
of makings but also a potent agent that influences the modern experiences of other
societies as well. Whilst most chapters do allude to the influence of British inter-
action on the shaping of realities of the modern in India, two shift attention to
international exchanges and interactions.
Minni Sawhney (Chap. 14) focuses on two Latin American writers’ encounter
with Indian modernity.’ She explains how these authors—Octavio Paz and Severo
Sarduy—in order to better understand Mexican identities, engaged with ideas in
and of India by, for example, looking for clues in ancient Hinduism and relating
them to the Iberian and Aztec civilizations. Paz also looked for analogies between
Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism, and offered comparisons between
Hinduism and Islam. Sawhney too delineates Sarduy’s encounter with India, as he
travelled extensively mainly as a tourist but providing nuanced understanding of
Indian selves, and engaging in a self-Orientalism that was highly reflexive.
Sawhney then tells us that these two Latin American writers punctured the
Orientalist discourse and in so doing engaged with non-western frameworks of
understanding modernity.
From Latin America, the chapter by Idier (Chap. 15) shifts our attention closer
home to India’s neighbour, China. Idier recognizes the significance of looking at the
past to understand the present in curating the experience of the modern for Indian
society and explains that this methodology is in fact also central to Chinese society.
Idier is particularly interested in noting the role of the past—as an ideological tool
—to build processes of political and national modernity. Whilst he observes many
differences, in this paper he is keen to unveil the similarities, especially as espoused
in fiction writings of these two cultures.
Providing a sound theoretical and ontological understanding of these
cross-cultural interactions is the contribution by Savita Singh (Chap. 6), who
explains that Indian modernity is certainly not a project of the European subject but
has developed through complex channels of interaction with the modern West. The
forces that shaped the modern were not dictated by an objective relationship,
instead they developed through a relationship of ‘interaction and interpretation’.
These, she argues, are best captured in what she describes as three languages of
modernity, namely, the traditionalist neo-conservative language, nationalist lan-
guage, and hermeneutical language.
The motivations to use these specific five approaches in this volume are mainly
two-fold: first, our aim is to include a wide array of theoretical perspectives that will
form the framework to understand the ‘modern’. In particular, we are keen to

unsettle the easy acceptance of binaries of ‘old’ and ‘new’, and ‘traditional’ and
‘modern’, each signalling a set of preconceived notions. Second, we are committed
to providing clear empirical arguments with sound theoretical underpinnings, and
have thus included papers that are based on extensive fieldwork from every aspect
of Indian life. The idea of a modern India is visible in the many manifestations of
being India, which include its formal structure of governance, constitutional
authority, legal systems, social practices, everyday lives, and written, oral, and,
other artistic traditions. In other words, the ‘modern’ in India is imagined and
articulated in its structures and principles, experiences in its everyday practices,
social rules, and rituals, and narrated through texts and oral traditions. Working
firmly on this idea of India, we divide our book in three sections, each presenting
empirically grounded works with strong theoretical underpinnings of the ‘modern’,
namely (a) Imagining the modern (b) Experiencing the modern and (c) Narrating
the modern.
With 15 contributors organized in three parts (ideas, institutions, and challenges;
makings and practices; texts and travels) Exploring Indian Modernities showcases
the multiple ways of being modern, without necessarily expressing the modern as
all rational, egalitarian, and neat. Instead, it highlights not simply the ideas of
progress and gain but also of nostalgia and loss that mark the practices of modern in
India. Most importantly, it explains that there is not one imagining, practice, or
vision of the modern for India, but that in fact the modern is constantly constructed,
practised, and lived in contradictory, changing, and contested spheres. It is, for
example, enshrined as one vision by the State and its organs but appropriated
differently by its citizens. Its origin might be based on a past that seemed
empowering for all but its contemporary forms of practice might challenge norms of
openness and progress. It also provides agency to curate experiences in structures
that might seem difficult to be contested. Indian modernities therefore exist in very
diverse forms brought together as different articulations in our volume.
What Exploring Indian Modernities then teaches us is how to feel a ‘richer and
wiser’ (wo)man in accepting and engaging with the multiple realities of one’s
space, time and self (Muller 2002).6 So that the lessons learnt largely cross the
boundaries of the Indian subcontinent to support the development of a new social
sciences scholarship both globalized in its vision and outreach, and localized in its
approach.
6
In allusion to Max Müller’s seminal Lectures to Indian Civil Service officers of Colonial Britain at
the University of Cambridge, which beyond a certain romanticism, indirect accusations against
“Mohammedan” invaders and his limited firsthand experience of India, testify of a genuine
endeavour to look at other histories to understand History.
References
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Beck, Ulrich. 1994. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern
Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. 1995. The Normal Chaos of Love. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. Routledge.
Bhandari, Parul, and Fritzi-Marie Titzmann. 2017. Changing Family Realities in South Asia. South
Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.
Carroll, Anthony. 2011. Disenchantment, Rationality and the Modernity of Max Weber. Forum
Philosophicum 16 (1): 117–137.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2001. Provincializing Europe, Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference. Oxford University Press.
Chibber, Vikek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Verso.
Dube, Saurabh. 2009. Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization. New Delhi:
Routledge.
Dube, Saurabh. 2012. Modern Makeovers: An Introduction. In Handbook of Modernity in South
Asia, ed. Saurabh Dube, 1–25. New Delhi: Sage.
Eisenstadt, Shumel. 2000. Multiple Modernities. Daedalus 1 (1): 1–29.
Gilman, Nils. 2007. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America.
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Guha, Ranajit. 1997. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995. University of Minnesota Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. Winter 1981. Modernity—An Incomplete Project. Lecture delivered in 1980
and later published under the title ‘Modernity versus Post-Modernity’, New German Critique
(22).
Honneth, Axel, and David Roberts. 1986. Foucault and Adorno: Two Forms of the Critique of
Modernity. Thesis Eleven 15 (1): 48–59.
Jodhka, Surinder. 2013. Interrogating India’s Modernity: Democracy, Identity, and Citizenship.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Landy, Joshua, and Saler Michael. 2009. The Re-enchantment of the World, Secular Magic in a
Rational Age. Stanford University Press.
Muller, Max. 2002. India, What can it Teach us. Rupa.
Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils. 1951. Towards a General Theory of Action. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Sitapati, Vinay. 2018. The Man Who Remade India: A Biography of P.V. Narasimha Rao. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1998. In Other Worlds. Routledge.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. London: Duke University
Press.
Weber, Max. 1946. Science as a Vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H.
Gerth, and Wright C. Mills, 129–156. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cases
Kesavnanda Bharathi v. State of Kerala. 1973. 4 S.C.C. 225.

Part I
Imagining the Modern: Ideas,
Institutions, and Challenges
Chapter 2
Transgressions, Demosprudence,
and Justice
Upendra Baxi
Underlying questions of transgression are questions of norms, if only because what

may call transgression is a willed departure from the established norms. When
transgression is linked not with the rationality of self-interest but with claims of
justice (what good life and society ought to be), its legitimation rests on ‘rhetorical
spaces’1 or ‘interpretive domains’2 available to social actors and epistemic agents.3
1
See, Loraine Code, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations, (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995).
2
This phrase is derived from Jane McConkey, note 33, infra.
3
Catherine Z. Elgin, ‘Epistemic Agency’, Theory and Research in Education, 11:2, 135–152
(2013); but see, Sasha Mudd, ‘Epistemic Autonomy: A criterion for Virtue?’ in the same issue at
153–165 (2013) concluding that we need ‘something transcending the inter-subjective endorse-
ment of particular communities to ground epistemic autonomy if that idea is to have plausible
authority for us’ (at. 164). See also, Christine M. Korsgaard. Creating the Kingdom of Ends
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
A major exception to not thinking about transgression even in radical juristic thinking stands
provide by Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick. Foucault’s Law (Routledge, New York, 2009).
Particularly crucial is their insistence that Foucault’s ‘modernity’ constitutes a transgressive
movement in the sense of an ‘illimitable response’. In other words, law far from being a monolithic
power to repress is rather (in the words of a review by Jim Taylor) a ‘moving response to what
escapes its immediate horizons.’ See, James Taylor, Cont Philos Rev, 43:569–574 (2010). Or, in
other words Foucault’s law may not be understood outside transgression: they say (in their book at
page 77) that: ‘For Foucault, law cannot simply exist in a determinate solidity, in the calibrated
expression of a rule or the imposition of an enduring order. Rather, law must necessarily assume a
labile existence, and this is what we have been calling the responsiveness of Foucault’s law’
(p. 77). See also, Ben Golder, ‘Foucault and the Incompletion of Law’, Leiden Journal of
International Law 21:747–763 (2008); Id., ‘Foucault and the unfinished Human of Rights’, Law,
and the Humanities 6:354–374 (2010); Nick Piska, ‘Radical Legal Theory Today, or How to Make
Foucault and Law Disappear Completely’, Leg Stud 19:251–263 (2011).
U. Baxi (&)
Department of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
e-mail: baxiupendra@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_2
22 U. Baxi
What may constitute a norm and what may we say about its transgression are
important questions for the masters of hegemony (or governance dedicated pri-
marily or only to economic growth), the subaltern agents or classes who aspire to be
hegemonic, and generally those who would dare to think thoughts in this heavily
globalized and increasingly darkening world landscapes. But these are even more
crucial questions for those who would dedicate their lives to an epistemic insub-
ordination and ethical insurrection against hegemony (that is, consent laced with
coercion to constitute subjection to a political decision, and domination).4
Resisting the temptation to ponder the notion of justified rule departure by the
rulers and the ruled, we explore in this essay the contrast and the contradiction
between judicial action and democratic praxis; and images of epistemic rights as
presented and promoted in the contexts of apex judicial behaviour and adjudicatory
conduct. We explore (principally in the Indian context) the logics of the familiar
indictment by the demosprudential adjudicatory leadership by the apex court, now
amounting to a judicial co-governance of the nation. This invites the logics of the
familiar indictment that: (a) judicial review (process and power) is subversive of
constitutional intent and schema, (b) it tramples upon the spirit of democracy, (c) is
guilty of breaching the separation of powers doctrine, or more aptly between
‘governance’ and ‘justicing’, and (d) remains insufficiently sensitive to coordinate
branches of governance. Similar indictments have been heard, from time to time, in
all democratic constitutionalisms,5 even in bicentennial ones.6
4
Upendra Baxi, ‘Reversing Gramsci: Notes on Optimism of the intellect and Pessimism of the
Will’: Valedictory Remarks, LASSNET, Delhi, December 10–12, 2016a.
5
See, e.g., Bernd J. Hartmann, ‘The Arrival of Judicial Review in Germany Under the Weimar
Constitution of 1919, 18 BYU J. Pub. L. 107 (2003); Anthony Arnull, ‘Judicial Review in the
European Union’, in Damian Chalmers and Anthony Arnull (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of
European Union Law www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199672646.001
(2015); Charles R. Epp, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in
Comparative Perspective (University of Chicago 1998); Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The
Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004); Thomas Spijkerboer, ‘Subsidiarity and ‘Arguability’: the European Court of Human
Rights’ Case Law on Judicial Review in Asylum Cases, www.eui.eu/…/UL2010/Spijkerboer/
SpijkerboerReading8.pdf; Aleck Stone Sweet and Jud Mathews, ‘Proportionality, Judicial Review,
and Global Constitutionalism’, www.academia.edu/8120788 (2008).
6
See, in particular, Alexander Bickel. The Least Dangerous Branch (Indianapolis, IN:
Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1962); Robert H. Bork, ‘Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment
Problems’, Ind. L. 7:1 (1971); Kathleen Doherty and Ryan Pevnick, ‘Are There Good Procedural
Objections to Judicial Review?’, http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/11429/judicialreview.pdf; John
Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1980); Samuel
Freeman, ‘Constitutional Democracy and the Legitimacy of Judicial Review’, Law and Philosophy
9: 4, 327–70 (1990); Mark Tushnet, Taking the Constitution Away From the Courts, (Princeton,
NJ, Princeton University Press, 1999); Id., ‘Democracy versus Judicial Review’ Dissent 52:2, 59–
63 (2005); Alec Walen, ‘Judicial review in review: A four-part defence of legal constitutionalism
A review essay on Political Constitutionalism, , by Richard Bellamy. Cambridge University Press,
2007’; Int J Constitutional Law 7:2, 329–354 (2009); Jeremy Waldron, ‘The Core of the Case
against Judicial Review’ Yale Law Review 115 (6): 1348–1406 (2006).
2 Transgressions, Demosprudence, and Justice 23
1 Normative Leadership
To do justice to these questionings, one needs to raise some threshold interrogation

concerning the complex nature of ‘norms’. While we do not concern ourselves with
the questions of theology, we need to recall that the crucial distinction between
theological voluntarism and theological rationalism. The former (Divine law)
consists in the belief that no pious interpretation may ever contest God’s will; the
latter comprises the belief (rational theocratic natural law) that in domains outside
God’s will, one may reason piously the leeway of permissible/prohibited injunc-
tions within a religious tradition since God has given the gift of reason to his
followers to interpret His commands. Both these traditions invoke a hermeneutical
being named ‘pious interpreter’ whose responsibility it remains to provide a correct
interpretation of God’s will and reason. In contrast, social origins of norms may be
traced only to human will and reason.
Norms, as posited by one group of human beings for the rest of other human
beings have been classified differently: as ‘basic’ or ‘core’ norms from which no
state (or even non-state actor may deny), ‘constitutive’ norms, ‘regulative’, ‘eval-
uative’ and ‘practical’ norms. Norms have been defined, long ago and since, Hans
Kelsen has a ‘schema for human conduct’.7 Searle has pioneered an allied notion of
‘constitutive norms’ that ‘create new actors, interests, or categories’ of ontic powers
of shared language and collective social action.8 Norms have also been identified as
‘battlegrounds for ideas’ through which actors develop ‘collective understanding of
the situation in which they act and of the moral values and norms guiding their
interactions’.9
Norms have also been described in terms of moral realism. Torbjörn Tännsjö,10
offers a sustained defence of moral realism this way: there exist ‘…objective nor-
mative reasons, existing independently of our conceptualization’ and ‘the claim is
that there exists only one source of normativity. There is, in each situation, one, and
only one, truth about what we ought to do, and our moral (normative) reasons
explain this obligation,’11 For the moment should suffice the following description
7
See, Jochen Von Bernstorff and Thomas Dunlap, The Public International Law Theory of Hans
Kelsen: Believing in Universal Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010).
8
See, John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2010); Id., Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press 1983).
9
Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink (ed.) The Power of Human Rights:
International Norms and Domestic Change at 7 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).
10
From Reasons to Norms: On the Basic Questions in Ethics (Dordrecht Heidelberg, Springer,
2010).
11
Id. at 9.
24 U. Baxi
by Frederick L. Ware where he says ‘the project of moral realism is to establish an

‘objective’ morality that all and negotiation of conflicting social interests’.12 Certain
underlying notions of human rights appeal precisely to this kind of universality and
universalism.13
Social ontologies of norms as ‘constitutive’ and as a ‘battleground of ideas’ have
a great appeal. The first refers to norms as finished products; the second refers to
processes by which norms are made and norms change. And norm conflicts pose
difficult questions about which norm is to be obeyed; usually, through processes of
socialization and internalization persons are obliged to regard as authoritative and
thus bypass the involved and complicated process of moral formation.
The proper choice of norms that resolve norm-conflict(s) is as important as it is
controversial where two apex governance agencies (the executive/legislative
combine on the one side and adjudicative interpretation and hermeneutic leader-
ship on the other) offer as constitutionally valid diverse norms or even norm sys-
tems. The Indian experience is especially instructive.14
Further, the term ‘norm entrepreneurship’ extends to civil society, the market
and the economy, the State, and ethically insurgent non-violent social actors and
groups. Different social groups tend to adopt different strategies of choice and
action. They also vary in their influence and impact. It may thus be hypothesized,
for example, that (a) the State and market institutions/forces would succeed in norm
entrepreneurship when they combine in pursuit of a common goal and (b) so would
social action groups when they have the support of mass media. On the other hand,
the State institutions generally claim (and almost succeed since they possess the
12
See his ‘Theology of Nature without Moral Realism: A Response of Jürgen Moltmann’ at 3;
www.andyrowell.net/…/ware_response_to_moltmann_theology_of_nature (accessed August 29,
2011).
13
Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, particularly Chapter V (Delhi, Oxford University
Press, Third Edition, 2013).
14
See, for recent reflections on the Indian constitutional situation, Sujith Choudhry, Madhav
Khosla, Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2016)
Also, one has to ask the further question: how does social learning (and unlearning of the
normative occur, See, Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘The Socialization of International
Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction’, in Thomas Risse, et al, (ed.), The
Power of Human Rights: International Norms & Domestic Change, (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Ryan Goodman, Derek Jinks, and Andrew Woods (ed.), Understanding
Social Action, Promoting Human Rights, (ed.), (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012);
Gerard A. Hauser, ‘The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse’, Philosophy and Rhetoric,
41:4, 440–466 (2008); Sally Engle Merry. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating
International Law into Local Justice (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005).
The situation of norm-conflict becomes acute in international law. See, Hans Kelsen,
‘Derogation’ in R. A. Newman (ed.), Essays in Jurisprudence in Honour of Roscoe Pound at 339–
361 (1962); Joost Pauwelyn, Conflict of Norms in Public International Law: How WTO Law
Relates to other Rules of International Law (2003); Erich Vranes, ‘The Definition of ‘Norm
Conflict’ in International Law and Legal Theory’, The European Journal of International Law,
17:2, 95–418 (2006).
power of implementation and enforcement) in the naturalization of norms as pos-

ited. Civil society non-violent ethical insurgent actors tend to take support from
international institutions and norms to articulate practices of movements of resis-
tance and change. Perhaps, then, norm entrepreneurship is the key that unlocks the
doors of performatives of norm making and norm change. Inherently,
entrepreneurship of any kind entails decision risk: risks, a troublesome notion, at
least entails decision-making under the conditions of uncertainty: Lon Fuller’s
imagery of law as an ‘enterprise’ subjecting behaviour to norms15 is most sum-
moning here.
India has a rich natural law and natural rights tradition, which was invoked by
Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership of the anti-colonial struggles. He succeeded in
making colonialism, and its Siamese twin imperialism, ethically incoherent by
questioning the Divine Right to an Empire; at the foundation of post-Westphalian
law and order law lay total illegality of the Euro-dominated, or as Michel Foucault
describes it (in another context) as the ‘mass illegalities’, or organized lawlessness
of a subordinated peoples.16
If ethical insurgency was the base of civil disobedience, legalism as moral
attitude of following rules because they are rules17 was its superstructure. India has
received a complex moral legacy through the insistence on rule following and
insurgency against the law as such in the making of the Constitution and consti-
tutional, social, and movements development. Put another way, legitimation of
transgression as justice confronted by legalism as justice are both writ large on the
experience of the making of late modernity.
2 Epistemic Injustice
Perhaps, the notions of epistemic injustice have been most provocatively installed
by Margaret Fricker,18 although there has been a good deal of literature on ‘epis-
temicide’, linking global North’s power to global South’s subordination, or even
15
Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law, 5, 28 (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, revised
edition; 1969).
16
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, Vintage Books,
1977); see also, Oliver Mendelsohn and Upendra Baxi (ed.), The Rights of Subordinated Peoples
(Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996).
17
Perhaps, the most important work here is: Judith Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political
Trials, https://books.google.co.in/books?isbn=0674523512.
18
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University
Press, 2007; ead, ‘Rational Authority and Social Power’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
159–177. (1998); ead., ‘Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege’, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, Supplementary,. 25:191–210 (1999).
The discourse about ‘epistemic community’ in international relations and law was generated by
Peter M. Haas: see his, ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy’,
International Organization 46:1, 1–35 (1992). Hass maintains that an:
26 U. Baxi
vassalage.19 She valuably focuses on testimonial injustice and hermeneutical

injustice, which consists ‘most fundamentally, in a wrong done to someone
specifically in their capacity as a knower’ describing power as ‘a socially situated
capacity to control others’ actions’.20 Thus arises ‘identity power’ the power to hurt
and harm those assigned subaltern spaces within ‘rhetorical space’; people are
‘prevented from becoming who they are’.21 Fricker specially draws our attention to
what she calls ‘tracker prejudices’ which are systematic in their capacity to ‘track’ a
person as a social type or kind over an entire range of activities, roles, and per-
formances—familial, sisterly, domestic, economic, educational, professional, sex-
ual, legal, political, religious, among others.22 Contesting such forms of epistemic
injustices and harms requires ‘collective social political change’ and the ‘political
depends upon the ethical’.23
Such social change, I submit, occurs at least normatively through a programme
of State and social rationality reform triggered by the collective aspiration, and
struggle, for human rights and justice. I name these here as ‘epistemic human
rights’ which arrest (to borrow a turn of the phrase from Fricker) the ‘undermining
them [people or subaltern classes] in their very humanity’.24 For such a programme
of transformation one will have to avoid, and eventually abandon, the common
tendency to divide human rights into civil and political rights on the one hand and
An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognized expertise and com-

petence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that
domain or issue-area.4 Although an epistemic community may consist of professionals from a
variety of disciplines and backgrounds, they have (1) a shared set of normative and principled
beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for the social action of community members;
(2) shared causal beliefs, which are derived from their analysis of practices leading or contributing
to a central set of problems in their domain and which then serve as the basis for elucidating the
multiple linkages between possible policy actions and desired outcomes; (3) shared notions of
validity- that is, intersubjective, internally defined criteria for weighing and validating knowledge
in the domain of their expertise; and (4) a common policy enterprise-that is, a set of common
practices associated with a set of problems to which their professional competence is directed,
presumably out of the conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a consequence’, at 3.
But see Bentley B. Allan, ‘Producing the Climate: States, Scientists, and the Constitution of
Global Governance Objects’, International Organization 71: 131–162 (2017).
19
See, for example, Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, (New York, Monthly Review Press,
2000; J. Pinkham, trans); Enrique Dussel, ‘World System and “Transmodernity”’, Nepantla. Views
from South, 3:2, 221–244. Available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/v003/3.2dussel.html
. (2002); Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide
(London: Taylor and Francis, 2014).
20
Epistemic Injustice…, note 18 supra, at 1, 4 respectively.
21
Ead. at 5.
22
Ead, at 27.
23
Ead. at 8. See also, Upendra Baxi, ‘Epilogue: Who May We Speak For, With, And After?:
Re-Silencing Human Rights’ in Gurminder K. Bhambhra and Robbie Shillam (Ed.), Silencing
Human Rights: Critical Engagements with a Contested Project (London: Palgrave, 2009).
24
Ead. at 44.
social, economic, cultural rights on the other, and make a fresh start envisaging
epistemic human rights as core human rights.
In the existing human rights law and jurisprudence throughout the democratic
world, epistemic human rights are not difficult to identify. The classical right to free
speech and expression is an epistemic human right since the basic human right to
dissent forms an integral core of such a right. Disagreement is considered to con-
stitute the essence of democracy and the right to ‘interrupt’ politics is a basic human
right.25 It has also been associated with the right of the people to know. One may
also further seek to develop the right in terms of epistemic human rights because the
right to development is pointedly made to include the right to participation in
governance.26 The right to information suggested by apex courts and often legis-
lated is also crucial to people’s participation and development.27
Theoretically, the question of epistemic human rights is whether these may be
subsumed under the right to liberty, autonomy, or dignity or good life or should find
25
See, Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, Politics, and Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press,
2004; Julie Rose trans), Hannah Arendt speaks to us all when she says that the notion of dignity
enshrined in the UDHR needs a ‘… new guarantee which can be found only in a new political
principle, in a new law on the earth, whose valid time must comprehend the whole of humanity
while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted and controlled by newly defined territorial
entities’. See her, The Origins of Totalitarianism, at ix (New York, Harcourt Bruce, 1973.) See
also, the much neglected, yet germinal, contribution by Jeffry C. Isaac, ‘A New Guarantee on
Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights,’ American Political
Science Review, 90:1, 61–73 (1996). On a different take, consult Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the
Subject of Human Rights,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 103: 2–3, p. 307 (a text that requires reit-
erated reading) and Slavoj Žižek, ‘Against Human Rights,’ New Left Review 34:115–131 (2005).
Andrew Schaap has recently argued that ‘Ranciere provides a more adequate basis for under-
standing the politics of human rights (such as that of the sans papiers) than is afforded by Arendt’s
conception of the political’: see his ‘Enacting the Right to Have Rights: Jacques Ranciere’s
Critique of Hannah Arendt’, European Journal of Political Theory 10:1, 22–45 (2011).
26
See, Upendra Baxi, Human Rights in a Posthuman World, Critical Essays, Chapters 4 and 5
(Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007).
27
The Indian Supreme Court, for example, suggested the right to information and monitored its
performance as well as delineated its scope. The landmark decisions include: People’s Union For
Civil Liberties (PUCL) v. Union of India, 2003(1) SCW 2353 SC; Union of India v. Association
for Democratic Reforms, With People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) v. Union of India, 2002
(5) SCC 0361 SC; Union Of India v Motion Picture Association 1999(6) SCC 0150 SC; Dinesh
Trivedi, M.P. and Others V. Union of India, 1997(4) SCC 0361SC; Tata Press Ltd., v. Mahanagar
Telephone Nigam Limited 1995(5) SCC 0139 SC; Secretary, Ministry Of Information &
Broadcasting, Govt. Of India, v. Cricket Association of Bengal, 1995(2) SCC 0161 SC; Life
Insurance Corporation of India, v.. Prof. Manubhai D. Shah, 1992(3) SCC 0637 SC; Reliance
Petrochemicals Ltd., V. Proprietors of Indian Express Newspapers, Bombay Pvt. Ltd., 1988(4)
SCC 0592 SC; Sheela Barse, V. State of Maharashtra, 1987(4) SCC 0373 SC; Indian Express
Newspapers (Bombay) Private Ltd. Union of India, 1985(1) SCC 0641 SC; S.P. Gupta v. Union of
India, AIR 1982 SC 149, 1981Supp(1) SCC87; The State of U. P. v. Raj Narain, 1975(4) SCC
0428 SC.
28 U. Baxi
a new and independent rubric under whose auspices these may be sheltered. One
such rubric stands offered by Rainer Forst who strives to justify positing an
underling human right to justification.28 Advancing a reflexive approach, Forst
insists on a ‘deeper normative grammar of human rights’, he says that
The moral basis for human rights, as I reconstruct it, is the respect for the human person as
an autonomous agent who possesses a right to justification, that is, a right to be recognized
as an agent who can demand acceptable reasons for any action that claims to be morally
justified and for any social or political structure or law that claims to be binding upon him
or her. Human rights secure the equal standing of persons in the political and social world,
based on a fundamental moral demand of respect…. This demand is not seen to depend on
the claim that it contributes to the good life of either the person showing or receiving
respect; rather, mutual respect is owed independently of that.29
It is important to note that Forst stresses both the individual and the collective: in
other words, there is a ‘human right’ to ‘acceptable reasons for any action that
claims to be morally justified’ and for obligation to render obedience to ‘any social
or political structure or law that claims to be binding upon him or her’. The human
right to justification, to reiterate, is the right to public reason and reasoning together.
And the right to reason is ‘the main point of this rights discourse’ which claims the
‘right to participate in the political structures that determine which rights and duties
those subjected to them have’.30 John Rawls was later to christen this right as
‘overlapping consensus’ in state and civil society.31
The right to participation in governance processes is therefore theoretically a
Siamese twin of epistemic rights, which seem to provide the only justification. This
human right can also be articulated as the human right to ‘rhetorical place’, where
the sites where the very possibility of an utterance counted as ‘true-or-false’ or of a
discussion ‘yielding insight is made manifest’.32 The repudiation of any kind of
‘cultural imperialism’33 (excluding the marginalized and impoverished classes) is in
itself a violation of epistemic human right that carries a human right to freedom of
knowledge-creation (as illustrated by the traditional knowledge category in intel-
lectual property rights, to cite but one example).
28
Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, (New
York, Columbia University Press; Jeffrey Flynn, trans., 2011). See Forst, ‘The Justification of
Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification: A Reflexive Approach’ Ethics, 120: 4, 711–740
(2010) at 716, and 719 respectively.
29
See Forst, ‘The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification: A Reflexive
Approach’, Ethics, 120: 4, 711–740 (2010) at 716, and 719 respectively.
30
Id. at 720.
31
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993).
32
See, Note1, supra at, ix–x.
33
A long forgotten but still vital category of Iris Marion Young (see, Young, Justice and the
Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) is put to a more general
anti-discriminatory and stereotyping misrecognition by Jane McConkey ‘Knowledge and
Acknowledgement ‘Epistemic Injustice’ as a Problem of Recognition’ POLITICS: 24:3, 198–205
(2004). See also, Santiago Castro-Gómez, ‘The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the
Problem of the “Invention of the Other”’, Nepantla: Views from South, 3,2, 269–285 (2002).
3 Three Prudences
Coming specifically to the Indian scenario, however, it is important to extend the

conception of rhetorical space to that of constitutionally mandated and provided
space. The final custodian of this rhetorical space is of course the Supreme Court of
India. It has structured that space under the auspices of three prudences: legis-
prudence, jurisprudence, and demosprudence.
In broad sketches, legisprudence is said to provide the theory and wisdom
animating the work of legislature.34 Jurisprudence (as distinct from legal theory and
philosophy) is usually thought of as a body of knowledge that takes seriously the
prudence of jurists—or the judge and the lawperson and is designated as the art and
science of judicial decision making based on certain principles distinctive to the
realm of law. In contrast, demosprudence35 is characterized by an era where justices
rediscover/remake/represent the suffering other. At times in their zeal to develop
‘democracy-reinforcing’ (to borrow a phrase from Lani Guinier) judicial activism,
justices and courts even reinvent the entire demos which ‘fabricates’36 constitu-
tionally sincere peoples.
34
Luc J. Wintgens, ‘Legitimacy and Legitimation in the Legisprudential Perspective’ in
Luc J. Wintgens (ed) Legislation in Context: Essays in Legisprudence (Ashgate, 2007) 3, 4. In
Wintgens’ view, as expanded and critiqued by Vlad Perju, social theory, especially contractarian
theory, makes stronger the ‘thereness’ of a legal system which then remains beyond the self-governing
citizens whose freedom it constrains and conflate construction and representation—Wintgens regards
this as central to modernity. ‘[P]rocedural theories of legitimation remain procedural in name only’.
‘One implication is that the requirement of justification applies to each and every law, rather than a set
of [Rawlsian] “constitutionals essentials”’: Vlad Perju, ‘A Comment on “Legisprudence”’ Boston
University Law Review 89: 427, 428 (2009).
35
A term that was first invoked by Professor Guinier in the contexed of oral dissents in the
Supreme Court of the United States but moved to the more general argument about ‘demospru-
dence’ as ‘a democracy-enhancing jurisprudence’ both for ‘law and social movements’: see Lani
Guinier. ‘Courting the People: Demosprudence and the Law/Politics Divide’ Boston University
Law Review 89:539 (2009); Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, ‘Changing the Wind: Notes Toward
a Demosprudence of Law and Social Movements’ 123 Yale Law Journal 274 (2014).
36
The term ‘fabrication’ suggests ‘modes of action which are lodged in rich, culturally-specific,
layers of texts, practices, instruments, technical devices, aesthetic forms, stylised gestures,
semantic artefacts, and bodily dispositions’: see, Alain Pottage, ‘Introduction: the Fabrication of
persons and things’ in Law, Anthropology, and the Construction of the Social: Making Things and
Persons 1 (2004; New York, Cambridge University Press; Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy, Ed.).
See also, Thomas J. Catlaw, Fabricating the People: Politics and Administration in the
Biopolitical State (University Alabama Press; 2nd e. Edition, 2015). Catlaw speaking, in effect of
societies of control; these maintain the recent shift from the ‘effort to create a stabilized and
homogenous “People” to one of control has made the idea of “the People” vulnerable (179),
government failure serves epistemologically ulterior ends: creating deep-rooted conflict throughout
society to the “politics of the subject”. The “politics of the subject” requires us to construct
regional ontologies, rather than universal one; recognize the movement away from the unity of the
singular return to a multitude; generate pluralism in all governance institutions; regard all citizens
as practitioners, thus seeking to remove rule e by experts; and, to ensure that “governing must be
good for those who have been reduced to nothing” (193–198). See also, Joseph S. Nye, Philip
30 U. Baxi
If jurisprudence is based basically on the view that law is an instrument of order

and serves the values of certainty and stability, demosprudence is anchored in the
judicial will and reason to accelerate constitutional social change. Jurisprudence
usually counsels judges to follow the ‘separation of powers’ doctrine, anointing the
three spheres of governance and law as distinct even when related: the executive,
the legislature, and the judiciary function in distinct realms and shall not interfere
with the prowess of each other. Demosprudence constitutes continuous adjudicative
transgression. It erases the discipline of stare decisis and the boundaries between
‘constitutional public reason’ and political reasoning seem sometimes blurred.
The doctrine of separation of powers and the rule of law made space for a neat
theoretical world in which state institutions were kept tidy in each of their places. In
real life of the State, things were lot less elegantly clear-cut and somewhat messy
everywhere. Maxims and principles that prescribe adjudicative boundaries for
executive action are relatively easy to enunciate but their translation into daily
behaviour and conduct is far more complex and difficult (as, for example, illustrated
by the beginning and burgeoning of administrative law).
Even so, it may be stated that all through the Indian experience, the Supreme
Court of India has ceded a large territory to executive law making and discretion,
even to the point of allowing for a long time re-promulgated ordinances. Despite the
expanding doctrine of the essential features of the basic structure, with and since
Kesavananda, the plenary powers of Parliament to amend the Constitution remain
still intact. And invalidation of legislative action is rare. The adjudicative pre-
sumption of constitutionality of all legislations survives the power of judicial
review and the processes of strict constitutional scrutiny. Delegated legislation is by
now the sovereign norm.
And yet the Supreme Court has developed vast powers of civic conversation and
dialogue37 with the executive and administration via social action litigation (SAL,
still miscalled PIL or public interest litigation). It has, over time, and in the name of
suffering peoples’ basic human rights, invented and elaborated: (a) new judicially
invented human rights; (b) new jurisdictions (such as epistolary and curative
petitions); (c) other powers, under Article 142, to do ‘complete justice’; (d) the
basic structure doctrine; (e) new policies, usually thought to be the domain of the
legislature and the executive (such as right to education, information, cleaning and
interlinking of rivers, black money); (f) new enforcement mechanisms. In other
words, the Supreme Court of India has now decided on a new role and function for
itself: it decides disputes, declares what the constitutional law is and requires, but
Zelikow, and David C. King, Why People Don’t Trust Government (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997); Claudio Ramos Zincke, ‘Poverty As Epistemic Object of Government:
State Cognitive Equipment And Social Science Operations’ Social Science Information, 54:1, 91–
114 (2014).
37
See, Upendra Baxi, ‘The Avatars of Judicial Activism: Explorations in the Geography of (In)
Justice’. in S. K. Verma and Kusum (ed,), Fifty Years of the Supreme Court of India: Its Grasp and
Reach, 156–209 (Delhi: Oxford University Press and Indian Law Institute).
also co-governs the nation. Put another way, it discovers both the law and the
sources of law, the juristic and the social meaning of the Constitution.
All the three branches of governance construct these meanings. No organ of the
State is declared constitutionally sovereign: but each is declared supreme within its
own domain or interpretive sphere. As seen earlier, the court respects the plenary
powers of Parliament even to change the Constitution but within its own inter-
pretive space, and institutional sphere, it proceeds to interpret the meaning of
constitutional scope and limits. In practising the demosprudential leadership, the
Supreme Court often manifestly makes mistakes, to correct which it has in 2012
added to a review jurisdiction provided by the constitution yet another ‘curative’
jurisdiction.38 But it remains applicable in the ‘rarest of rare’ cases, given the need
for certainty and stability. When acting within this jurisdiction, the Supreme Court
affirms its earlier decision, not merely the other branches of governance but also
citizens are obligated, unless the Constitution is fundamentally transformed by
executive authoritarianism or by revolution. So far, the supreme executive, despite
its litany of regular complaints of judicial overreach, and covert and not-so covert
attempts at court-packing, had the grudging good grace to accept what the Supreme
Court has ultimately decided.39
In the times of demosprudence, as earlier, there will occur backslidings and even
acts which look like, or reek of, judicial despotism.40 That judicial role and function
entails risks of discretion is well-known. It is trite to say that justices have the power
and will to decide the way as they please. The important distinction between the
38
Rupa Ashok Hurra vs Ashok Hurra (2002) 4 SCC 388. The Court was conflicted between
‘ensuring certainty and finality of a judgment of the Court of last resort’ and ‘dispensing justice on
reconsideration of a judgment on the ground that it is vitiated being in violation of the principles of
natural justice or giving scope for apprehension of bias due to a Judge who participated in the
decision-making process not disclosing his links with a party to the case, or on account of abuse of
the process of the court’. Such a judgment, said the Court, ‘far from ensuring finality, will always
remain under the cloud of uncertainty…’. Giving the matter an ‘anxious consideration’ held that
‘the duty to do justice in these rarest of rare cases shall have to prevail over the policy of certainty
of judgment as though it is essentially in the public interest that a final judgment of the final court
in the country should not be open to challenge, yet there may be circumstances, as mentioned
above, wherein declining to reconsider the judgment would be oppressive to judicial conscience
and would cause perpetuation’ (Para 44). The Court described three circumstances where the
interests of justice outweigh finality (in Para 49): ‘… this Court, to prevent abuse of its process and
to cure a gross miscarriage of justice, may reconsider its judgments in exercise of its inherent
power.’ The Court further clarified: ‘… we think that a petitioner is entitled to relief ex debito
justitiae if he establishes (1) violation of the principles of natural justice (2)… an apprehension of
bias” of irremediable injustice’ with the caveat that ‘[i]t is neither advisable nor possible to
enumerate all the grounds on which such a petition may be entertained’. See, for a comprehensive
critique, Aparna Chandra, Under the Banyan Tree: Article 142, Constitution of India and the
Contours of “Complete Justice” (forthcoming).
39
See, Upendra Baxi, ‘Demosprudence and Socially Responsible/Response-able Criticism:
The NJAC Decision and Beyond: The Ninth Durga Das Basu Memorial Lecture WBNAJS,
Kolkatta, NUJS Law Review, 9: 3–4 (2016b, 153–172).
40
See, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘Unconstitutional Patriotism’ Indian Express, December 3, 2016; see
also Baxi, Note 41 supra.
32 U. Baxi
adjudicative reason and will has always to be maintained. In practice one may still
draw a distinction between the forms of creative and uncreative judicial arbitrari-
ness. Surely, there is a difference between the idiosyncrasy, and dispositions, of
individual decisions of justices and an act of constitutional reasoning together. One
should draw a distinction, between the performance of individual justices and the
achievements (or shortfalls) of the courts as a whole.41 This can only be done best if
one were to be able to distinguish between the episodic and the structural.42
We (the commentariat in civil society) need a new basis for judging our justices:
the old ways of jurisprudence will no longer suffice. One needs to recognize the
limits of conversion of norms into realities. If dismissing demosprudence altogether
is no longer a constitutional alternative, ways have to be found to sculpt a new
discipline on judicial power, without violating the grundnorm of basic structure and
essential features. Romancing demosprudence presents the summit court as having
unlimited constitutional opportunities, but this does not historically signify that
these moments are also infinite.
One may criticize this or that decision as thoughtless (despite the evidence of
prima facie judicial reasoning) and even un-democratic (for mistaking an oppor-
tunity as a limit); in this lies the peril of social action litigation. Judicial power and
process may, on the other hand, proceed to give the kiss of life to constitutional and
internationally enunciated human rights in which case the social action litigation
becomes a constitutional promise.43 Betrayal is integral to the very idea of pro-
mise,44 and is therefore not exactly news. What matters is how betrayal/promise
dialectics work out in the short and median run where courts can serve as ‘catalysts’
of democracy, where justices can ‘energize’ the processes of governance, and when
they may ‘facilitate’ (rather than ‘substitute’) human rights-oriented governance.45
The accusation that the courts ‘overreach’ presupposes that we have a theory of
judicial role and if so we must lay it out clearly and well. If the theory is that judges
merely declare and not make the law, we need to think through that normative
premise. Is the distinction between ‘finding’ and ‘making’ viable theoretically?
Must the judicial decision maker not make the law as a first step in order to declare
it? May one to make a distinction in Roscoe Pound sense, between judicial
41
Upendra Baxi, ‘Unfair to Justices’ Indian Express, December 12, 2016c; Pratap Bhanu Mehta,
‘Prof Baxi versus St Baxi’, Indian Express, December 14, 2016; and Baxi, A Letter to the Editor’
Indian Express, 24 December 2016d.
42
Upendra Baxi, ‘Caste Census and Constitutional Justice’, Economic & Political Weekly (EPW),
19:37, 25–29 (September 11, 2010).
43
See, for illustrative listing of scholarly writing, footnote 55 in Basu Address cited note 40, supra.
44
J. Hillis Miller, ‘(In)Felicitous Speech Acts in Kafka’s The Trial’, www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/
tympanum/4/miller.html.
45
See, Sandra Fredman, Human Rights Transformed: Positive Rights and Positive Duties, 148–
149 (2008).
law-finding and law-saying?46 Ought justices, as Ronald Dworkin said, not ever be
‘deputy legislators’ but must they always remain ‘deputies to legislature’?47
The tasks of social critique of demosprudence are even harder than the tasks of
evaluation suggested by jurisprudence. If even as friendly critics of justicing want
our judges to listen to us, we should surely move beyond staid jurisprudential
prejudices. We should devise, and think about, some more apt ways of under-
standing in which judges and lawyers think through the problems of maturation of a
democratic order with human rights assurances. How then may the communities of
concern about ways in which judicial power is exercised may reorder their own
intellectual apparatuses in some uncharted directions? If justices are to use their
powers in a democracy-reinforcing mode, should not the critics of adjudicatory
leadership develop a more socially aware and responsible, more constitutionally
sincere approach to the task of judging the judges? Or, are there cultural universals
of judging justices which ought to be followed everywhere?
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Chapter 3
From Without to Within: Indian
International Law as Modernizer
Leïla Choukroune
The project of modernity formulated in the 18th century by the philosophers of the
Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and
law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic (…) The Enlightenment philoso-
phers wanted to utilize this accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of
everyday life —that is to say, for the rational organization of everyday life.
Jürgen Habermas, Modernity – An Incomplete Project
The Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles constitute the ‘conscience’ of our
Constitution. The purpose of the Fundamental Rights is to create an egalitarian society, to
free all citizens from coercion or restriction by society and to make liberty available for all.
The purpose of the Directive Principles is to fix certain social and economic goals for
Professor of International Law and Director of the Thematic Area in Democratic Citizenship,
University of Portsmouth, UK.
This chapter is building upon numerous previous researches on the internationalization of law in
emerging economies and its impact on the democratic process. In the course of these intellectual
journeys for which Indian travels play a central part, I have exchanged ideas and greatly
benefited from the invaluable insights of many academic colleagues and practitioners. In relation
to this very chapter, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to a few of them: Prof. Upendra
Baxi, Prof. B. S. Chimni, Prof. Mohan Gopal, Justice B. N. Srikrishna, Justice Madan Lokur,
Justice Bath, A. K. Ganguli, Anand Grover, The Indian Society of International Law (ISIL),
Prof. Manoj Kumar Sinha and Prof. Carlos Miguel Herrera. The below opinions, possible errors
and omissions, however, are entirely mine.
L. Choukroune (&)
Professor of International Law, Director of the Thematic Initiative in Democratic Citizenship,
University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
e-mail: leila.choukroune@port.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_3
38 L. Choukroune
immediate attainment by bringing about non-violent social revolution. Through such a

social revolution the Constitution seeks to fulfil the basic needs of the common man and to
change the structure of our society.
Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973), 4 SCC 225.1
1 Introduction
While the post-colonial legislator had tried to develop a robust set of norms suited
to the political aspirations of the new Indian Republic in the form of an evolutionary
constitutional project, this dynamic process has also been supported by a vibrant
judiciary, which has had recourse to foreign and international laws as engines for
social modernization.
Not so long ago, however, the overwhelming majority of national courts shared a
common reluctance to refer to foreign and international laws for these norms were
often envisaged as legally inappropriate and politically hazardous. As demonstrated
by a large variety of academic researches from the early 2000s, this situation has
clearly evolved in the direction of a greater, if not systematic, use of foreign and
international laws by the national judge.2 Jostled by globalization, as well as national
resistances, domestic laws are indeed faced with an unprecedented epistemological
revolution in which normative hybridization plays a central role. Although interested
in these changes in western democratic regimes, the international legal doctrine has
been unable—or unwilling—to truly engage in the study of this unprecedented
evolution within developing countries. This lack of curiosity, or perhaps implicit
disdain for the subaltern, is highly regrettable as these uncharted territories reveal a
rich land for comparison and a possible laboratory to better understand today’s legal
1
See Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973) 4 S.C.C. 225. This landmark decision
constitutes the basis for the Indian Supreme Court to review parliamentary constitutional
amendments. Dealing essentially with property right, this seminal case is key to Indian consti-
tutional history as it elaborates on the “basic structure” doctrine: while fundamental rights can be
amended, the Parliament cannot alter the “basic structure of the constitution”. The case, filed over
a land issue by Swami Kesavananda Bharathi Sripadagalvaru, the head of a Kerala math that
challenged the State’s attempt to impose restrictions on religious property, was settled in an
overcharged political atmosphere. See T.R. Andhyarujina, The Kesavananda Bharati Case: the
Untold Story of Struggle for Supremacy by Supreme Court and Parliament, Universal Law
Publishing, 2011. See, as well, Granville Austin, Working a democratic constitution: a history of
the Indian experience, Oxford University Press, 2003.
2
Anne-Marie Slaughter had probably set the tone with the concept of “cross-fertilization” of law,
see, for example, Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Judicial Globalization”, Virginia Journal of
International Law, (2000) 40 1103, pp. 1112–1123; while others have made remarked contribu-
tions, see Eyal Benvenisti, “Reclaiming Democracy: The Strategic Uses of Foreign and
International Law by National Courts”, American Journal of International Law, 2008, 102,
pp. 241–274; and some have tried to systematize the trend in an ambitious project, see André
Nollkaemper’s Oxford project on International Law in Domestic Courts: http://opil.ouplaw.com/
page/ILDC/oxford-reports-on-international-law-in-domestic-courts#Contributors.
3 From Without to Within: Indian International Law as Modernizer 39
modernities. As in India indeed, these legal journeys challenge modern western

conceptions of law, while the new metis norms meet with other legal systems still
invested by the West but on territories where globalization also happens without it.
As such, traditional sources and actors of law are deeply questioned by a global-
ization of knowledge and practices that is not only exported from one legal order to
another, but gradually de-territorialized in many singular spheres thus constituting
hybrid, plural and dynamic spaces, that is: a new modernity.
On the basis of the Indian constitutional project understood as a path towards
modernity (I), this contribution argues that the normative ‘internationalization’, in
which the national judge plays a central role, brings even more promises in emerging
economies like India where foreign and international laws are not only domestical-
ized, but also held as powerful instruments for empowering the national democratic
process by shielding it from internal pressure, yet sometimes at the risk of being
rejected as a form of judicial hyper activism (II). It shows, as well, that this dynamic
and incomplete process is all but irreversible at a time Indian law is challenged by a
form of revival of the past. As such, it may well be that Indian law is not quite modern
yet already post-modern hence shaping a new modernity in its capacity to accom-
modate different de-territorialized legal spheres in one hybrid project.
2 A Modern Law for India: The Constitutional Path
2.1 Modern Law
While approaching Indian legal internationalization as a path towards, and an

expression of modernity, the very definition of the paradigm of ‘modern law’ is first
required. What is modern law indeed? Is it a reaction to an oppressive feudal legal
regime incarnated by a despotic sovereign and of restricted applicability to the
subjects of his limited constituency? A displacement of the same traditions revisited
in a more acceptable political regime? A set of bourgeois norms provided for the
protection of private property and eventually the good functioning of capitalism? Or
is it the advent of rights empowering the individual in a democratic State keeping a
more daring utopia at bay?3 Political theory and jurisprudence have largely
addressed the question of modern law.4 This tentative definition is only thought to
3
In reference to a proposal put forward by Martin Loughlin, “The Constitutional Imagination”,
Modern Law Review, vol. 78, n°1, 2015, pp. 1–25.
4
For an introduction to modern law, see S. Goyard-Fabre, Les principes philosophiques du droit
politique moderne, Paris, P.U.F., 1997; on the role of the Constitution in crafting modern law and
the interactions between ideology and utopia, see Martin Loughlin, “The Constitutional
Imagination”, The Modern Law Review, op.cit. pp. 1–25; on modern law and the emergence of
capitalism in Europe, see, for the very least, Max Weber, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of
capitalism, OUP, 2010; and more generally the “Law and Development” scholarship on mod-
ernization with Marc Galanter, “The Modernization of Law” in M. Weiner (ed.), Modernization,
40 L. Choukroune
provide for some clarification in the more general context of our study and so gauge
Indian legal modernity (and modernization) against some generally accepted criteria
conceived and developed primarily in a European or ‘western’ context—if ever the
term ‘western’ was not in itself as reductive as confusing.
Modern law is first a rupture: a rupture with a medieval fixed and unitary cosmic
order in which the sources of law were reduced to the will of an unchallenged ruler
and not yet detached from their communal or religious legacy and other popular
customs. Modern law becomes general and abstract. It forms a complete and
coherent system able to perpetuate itself in the long term and rationally resist
arbitrary political changes. It puts the individual as a rights holder at its core. It so
implies the justiciability of rights and the consequent development of an inde-
pendent judiciary. It is institutionalized and professionalized. It is secular. It con-
tributes to the construction of the nation-state in formalizing the social contract in a
Constitution, which determines the legitimate exercise of powers together with the
hierarchy of norms, and defines fundamental individual rights. Lastly, modern law
supports sovereignty that is independence.
Of course, modern law is also understood from a historical perspective as well as
on the basis of a qualitative judgment to which an anti-modern reaction has
responded. Jean Bodin and his Republic might have been the precursor of
post-medieval law. Later, Machiavelli, in providing for the rational theory of a
centralized State, placed himself at a turning point and was then followed by Hobbes’
Leviathan’s conceptualization of sovereignty and the theorists of the social contract
with Rousseau to start with.5 There is more than Enlightenment to modern law indeed
and its criticism did not start with post-modern theories but rather the defenders of the
‘ancient regime’ and other opponents to the French revolutionary project like Burke.
A hundred years later, Marx’s ambitions to get rid of the law of the bourgeois State
struck a new blow to legal modernity while, in a form of continuity, XX century
critical legal theory, as radical legal scholarship, keep questioning the dominant
forces of law defined by an apparently consensual yet largely western modern model
exported to the world through international institutions and a non-universal inter-
national law.6 Of course, this fierce criticism is also a reaction to the valourization of
modern law as non-archaic, sophisticated, more civilized, in other words, ‘better’
than what existed before and its de facto superiority stance.
The Dynamics of Growth, New York, Basic books, 1966, pp. 153–165.; D. Trubek, “Max Weber
on Law and the Rise of Capitalism” (1972). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 4001: http://
digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/4001; D. Trubek et M. Galanter, “Scholars in
Self-Estrangement: Some Reflections on the Crisis in Law and Development Studies”, Wisconsin
Law Review, 1974, pp. 1062–1103.
5
See Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, Livre de poche, 1993; N. Machiavelli, The
Prince, Cambridge Texts in Historical Thought, CUP, 1988; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Penguin
Classic, 2002; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract and other Political Writings,
Penguin, 2012; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin, 1968; Karl
Marx, Capital, Penguin, 1990.
6
Alan Hunt, “The Theory of Critical Legal Studies,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 6,
No. 1 (1986), pp. 1–45.
2.2 An Indian Legal Modernity?
How to transpose the European legal modernity project into other territories where
law pre-existed but, as Max Weber believed, only on the basis of very distinct
conceptions of norms and the role of institutions and the State. In this regard, can
one even pose the question of legal modernity in India? Indeed, as exposed by
Trubek from Weber’s approach, it had long been accepted that:
The European legal system was distinct in all () dimensions. Unlike the legal systems of
other great civilizations, European legal organization was highly differentiated. The
European state separated law from other aspects of political activity. Specialized profes-
sional or ‘status’ groups of lawyers existed. Legal rules were consciously fashioned and
rulemaking was relatively free of direct interference from religious influences and from
other sources of traditional values. Concrete decisions were based on the application of
universal rules, and decision making was not subject to constant political intervention.7
This rather idealized perception of European political modernity was put to the
test of history in Europe itself by the ravages of Nazism, Fascism, and other
Stalinist approaches of the law, which entertained a much less depoliticized and
rational rapport with the norm, and finally ‘reincarnated’ society, as Claude Lefort
could put it, in the idea of the One-People.8 As such, legal modernity is not a linear
and irreversible construction. The temptation to challenge the modern is always
present as the project is not completed but constantly in motion. If on the move
then, legal modernity cannot be circumscribed to a given territory. It is polymor-
phous and, as the Indian reception will demonstrate, open to enrichment from other
experiments.
Indian modern law has been defined against the backdrop of native norms and
the various attempts by British scholars to rewrite this legacy as a ‘deliberate’ and
‘adaptive re-creation’, which culminated in the codification of an Anglo-Indian law
supporting the Raj’s ambitions.9 This transformation has attracted a considerable
amount of scholarship amongst which the work of Marc Galanter, for it is deeply
grounded in a profound knowledge of Indian legal practices, remains remarkable. In
analyzing Indian legal modernity indeed, Galanter proves the death of Hindu,
Muslim or customary ‘traditional law’ in its displacement by modern law and so
the aborted restauration of ‘indigenous’ practices as, today, the ‘dharmasastra
7
See D. Trubek, “Max Weber on Law and the Rise of Capitalism”, op.cit.
8
For an English language version of Claude Lefort’s work, see, for example, Claude Lefort,
Complications, Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, Columbia University Press, 2007.
9
See Rajeev Dhavan’s Introduction to the Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India, OUP,
1989, pp. xiii–xcixi.
42 L. Choukroune
component is almost completely obliterated’.10 There is no romantic fascination for

a glorious Indian past resting upon venerable ancient scriptures or an idealized
village structure, but a blunt observation: modern law exists and is asserted as a
distinct reality. There is indeed ‘an all India legal system’, which can be viewed as
‘an important unifying element’ and goes hand in hand with an ‘all India legal
culture’ rationally carried forward by the legal profession. Hence, argues Galanter:
The modern legal system provides both the personnel and the techniques for carrying on
public business in a way that is nationally intelligible and free of dependence on particular
religious or local authority. It thus provides one requisite for organizing Indian society into
a modern nation state.11
Indian modern law is plural in its practice and so distinct in its nature.12 In
blending the reception of foreign law with the present reality of a domestic legacy,
Indian law apparently met our previously defined criteria of the modern. Within that
dynamic process, the Constitution appeared as promise of a nation-state in which
the protection of individual rights and the principle of equality were—and remain—
the central objectives to achieve.
2.3 The Constitution as the Promise of a Modern

Nation-State
Largely detached from traditional and customary law, the Indian Constitution has
also deliberately distantiated itself from the Gandhian proposal of a village-based
structure. Despite a certain degree of opposition to the foreign nature of Indian law
and its inability to solve indigenous problems, the Constituent Assembly (1947–49)
was clearly not in favour of the restoration of local justice. The only concession
accorded by the Directive Principles of State Policy in their article 40 on the ‘or-
ganisation of village panchayats’ appeared as very minimal and revealed, over the
years, a rather limited mechanism for access to justice for the most vulnerable: a
‘bread for the poor’, which took a variety of expressions including in its latest
10
Ibid. Dharmasastra, in Hindu ancient scriptures, refers to the treatises on “dharma” (duties,
rights, law and, in sum, a right way of living). They address, in poetic verses, the questions of
duties, responsibilities, family and the self in society. The term “dharma” is itself subject to many
meanings and interpretations in different Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism). In
Hinduism, it is often associated with the idea of righteousness and equated to “satya” (truth). The
Laws of Manu is probably the most famous of these many Dharmasastra. First translated in 1794,
it has influenced many European thinkers including Nietzsche. Often mistranslated and poorly
understood, it remains an essential text to approach the development of Indian norms. See, Wendy
Doniger’s translation and presentation, The Laws of Manu, Penguin Classic, 2000.
11
Ibid., p. 28.
12
See Olivier Mendelsohn, “How Indian is Indian Law?” in Law and Social Transformation in
India, OUP, 2014, pp. 47–80.
incarnation in the ‘lok adalat’.13 This return to the past found very little support
amongst a legal profession, which eventually viewed Anglo-Indian law as a positive
development and a manifestation of hybridization. Not that colonial justice offered a
rosy picture to look at with its awful lot of ‘white violence’ that constituted an
‘intrinsic feature of imperial rule’ and was ‘endemic rather than ephemeral’.14 But
after all, British norms had more than a century of reception and blending with all
other norms that previously existed in India to develop on their own. Indianization
had already made its mark on the law and resulted in a syncretic regime and a
multitude of local practices of apparent foreign nature. Had it been oppressive and
unjust, the promise of law sustained the colonial regime as much as it liberated native
imagination for the possibility of freedom. According to Austin’s analysis of the
Nehru–Gandhi correspondence and his interpretation of the Constitution indeed: ‘the
Congress had never considered the Gandhian view of society (as exemplified in Hind
Swaraj), much less adopted it’.15 Ambedkar’s ferocious fight against Gandhi on the
issue of untouchability testified a profound distrust in what could result from a new
adherence to Hindu law for the depressed classes:
Mr Gandhi wants Hinduism and the Hindu Caste System to remain intact. Mr Gandhi also
wants the Untouchables to remain as Hindus. But as what? Not as partners but as poor
relations of the Hindus. Mr Gandhi is kind to the Untouchables. But for what? Only because
he wants to kill by kindness them and their movement for separation and independence from
Hindus. (…) Democracy and democratic life, justice and conscience, which are sustained by
a belief in democratic principle are foreign to the Hindu mind. To leave democracy and
freedom in such Tory hands would be the greatest mistake democrats could commit (…).16
Ambedkar’s highly symbolic decision to publicly burn a copy of the Manusmriti

(The Laws of Manu), during the second Mahad conference of 1927, demonstrated
the profound aversion to the ‘traditional’ model shared by many others of his fellow
congressmen at that time.17 Even though it was not so evident that the overall
majority of the Constituent Assembly was ready to embrace equality as later shown
13
With the absence of an appeal mechanism, the exclusion of lawyers and their unclear normative
basis, these « traditional » ways of settling justice do not participate to the project of equality and
indeed seem like a substitute of justice for the poorest, see Marc Galanter and Jayanth K. Krishnan,
“Bread for the Poor: Access to Justice and the Rights of the Needy in India”, Hastings Law
Journal, Vol. 55, 2004, pp. 789–834.
14
See Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, White Violence and the Rule of Law,
CUP, 2010, pp. 1–2.
15
See Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution, Cornerstone of a Nation, OUP, 2002, p. 39.
16
See Ambedkar August 1942 paper “The Problem of Untouchables of India”, prepared for a
Conference of the Canadian Institute of Pacific Relations and reproduced in Narendra Jadhav,
Ambedkar, op.cit., p. 363.
17
The « incident » is narrated in relation to Ambedkar later strong condemnation of Gandhi’s
reaction to the Mahad conference and mild support for the cause of untouchability in the intro-
duction of Arundhati Roy to the Annihilation of Caste, Navayana, 2013. See as well, Marendra
Jadhav, Ambedkar, Awakening India’s Social Conscience, Kornak Publishers, 2014. For an
interview of Ambedkar on Gandhi, take a listen to a 1955 BBC interview: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=XALsEguKumI.
44 L. Choukroune
by the very evolutionary structure of the Constitution, the attempt to revive a

mystical past was clearly not on the modernization agenda nor on that of conser-
vative Hindus:
I do not think that any one of us can transform the India of today into the India of the
Rigvedic times (…) We should adopt all that the modern world has to give to us to fulfil our
needs (…) Modern India should be so built up that we may be able to retain our culture and
civilization.18
The Constitution was then seen, as later unveiled by the Kesavananda Bharati v.
State of Kerala Supreme Court judgment, as the means to bring about a
‘non-violent social revolution’.19 This peaceful modernization, which de facto
equalled to a revolution, largely rested upon the innovative architecture of the
constitutional text and the interplay between the justiciable Fundamental Rights and
the guiding but not enforceable Directive Principles of State Policy. Borrowing
from many foreign systems of the Commonwealth countries (Australia and Ireland
notably) but also influenced by the civil law world (Germany) and the US, the
Indian Constitution is not the mere reproduction of alien norms. It forms a syncretic
synthesis, a metis law, based on an evolutionary structure, which can easily be
amended (Part XX) and so was designed to resist the attacks of time and politics.20
As to the Fundamental Rights (Part III), the Constitution provides for a step-by-step
approach in identifying the actors (the State and the rights holders), the applicable
law and all other inconsistent norms, the rights, and finally the remedies available
for breaches of these very rights. It is not by chance that the enumeration of rights
starts with ‘equality before the law’ (Article 14) soon followed by the ‘prohibition
of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth’ (Article
15). Then, in the Directive Principles of State Policy then (Part IV), the Constitution
clearly states:
The provisions contained in this Part shall not be enforceable by any court, but the prin-
ciples therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and
it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws.
Large in scope, the principles deal with the following questions understood as
policies to be legislated: securing a social order for the promotion of the welfare of
the people; policy principles to be followed by the State; equal justice and free legal
aid; organization the village panchayats; right to work, to education and to assis-
tance in certain cases; just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief;
living wages; participation of the workers in the management of industries; pro-
motion of co-operative societies; early childhood care; promotion of education and
economic interests of scheduled castes; scheduled tribes and other weaker sections;
18
Set Govind Das speech during the Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD), proceedings repro-
duced in Granville Austin, op.cit., p. 320 (CAD XI, 4, 611).
19
Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973), 4 SCC 225.
20
On the evolution of the Constitution and the series of amendments that followed its adoption, see
Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution, The Indian Experience, OUP, 1999.
nutrition; standard of living and public health; organization of agriculture and

animal husbandry; protection and improvement of environment and safeguarding of
forest and wild life; protection of monuments an places and objects of national
importance; separation of judiciary from the executive; promotion of international
peace and security. The topics are varied if not heteroclites, and the list is long but
important to bear in mind in gauging the success of the modernization project. The
later constitutional amendments, the role of the judiciary, and to a large extent the
recourse to foreign and international laws to further the constitutional project find
their very roots here.
‘Workable’, ‘flexible’ and ‘strong enough’ to ‘hold the country together both in
peace and in war time’, the Constitution eventually offered the promise of a
nation-state.21 This promise, together with the attainment of equality—a principle
absent in traditional Hindu law—had to be realized through ‘a Sovereign Socialist
Secular Democratic Republic’. Democracy and socialism were conceived as
compatible and mutually reinforcing the constitutional project. Indeed, one of the
most salient features of the Indian Constitution lies in its very ability to ‘accom-
modate’, to borrow a term coined by Austin, very different needs and realities.22 In
that capacity to adapt to the present without forgetting the past, the Indian
Constitution is truly modern.
3 Fostering the Constitutional Imagination Through

Indian International Law
Yet, the constitutional imagination had to be fostered to achieve the objectives of

equality and social justice.23 In this endeavour, the recourse to foreign and inter-
national law through the strategic will of the judge revealed instrumental.
3.1 International Law Domesticalized: Dualism Beyond

the Letter of the Law
Article 51 of the Directive Principles already provided an interesting image of the

Republic’s ambitions in matters of international peace and security and the use of
international law. Article 51 ‘Promotion of international peace and security’ states:
21
See Ambedkar’s introduction to the Draft Constitution in the Constituent Assembly on 4th
November 1948, reproduced in Narendra Jadhav, Ambedkar, Konark Publishers, 2014, p. 466.
22
See Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution, op.cit, p. 317.
23
In using the term “imagination” we refer implicitly to the article of Martin Loughlin, ‘The
Constitutional Imagination’, Modern Law Review, op.cit., pp. 1–25.
46 L. Choukroune
The State shall endeavour to

(a) promote international peace and security
(b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations
(c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organised
peoples with one another, and
(d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.
On this basis, as well as on the familiarity of the metis Indian law with borrowings
and other legal transfers, the recourse to foreign and international law has been quite
liberal if not yet systematic. So that some seem to disregard this large reception as a
simple tool to expand the courts ‘own power and discretion’ and eventually a body of
law, which ‘is incapable—given its lack of nuance and precision—of assisting the
creation, crystallization and further development of norms of international law’.24 As
we will argue below, this lack of systematization and coherence, as well as the
confusion in the separation of powers to the apparent detriment of the legislative, has
eventually revealed a modernizer and a catalyst for democracy. There is more to the
recourse to foreign and international law than judicial activism indeed.
The first difficulty to overcome is probably to understand the status accorded to
international law-making and implementation in the Constitution, which is rather
allusive on the matter, if not ambiguous, and so later, as well, in case law. As far as
treaty making power is concerned, the Article 253 (Legislation for giving effect to
international agreements) provides that the Parliament has ‘power to make any law
for the whole or any part of the territory of India for implementing any treaty,
agreement or convention with any other countries or any decision made at any
international conference, association or other body’. But this power of the
Parliament has to be read in conjunction with the Article 73 (Extent of executive
power of the Union), which supports the Executive’s treaty-making power:
Subject to the provisions of this Constitution, the executive power of the Union shall extend
(a) to the matters with respect to which Parliament has power to make laws; and
(b) to the exercise of such rights, authority and jurisdiction as are exercisable by the
Government of India by virtue of any treaty or agreement (…).
In addition, the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution (Article 246) in its List I
(Union List) enumerates the subject matters with respect to which the Parliament
has exclusive power to make law including ‘foreign affairs’, ‘diplomatic consular
and trade representation’ or ‘entering into treaties and agreements with foreign
countries and implementing of treaties, agreements and conventions with foreign
countries’. This dialogue between the various constitutional provisions does not
provide for a clear repartition of powers between the Executive and the Legislative
24
See Lavanya Rajamani, ‘International Law and the Constitution’, in Sujit Choudhry, Madhav
Khosla and Pratap Bhanu Metha, The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, OUP, 2016,
p. 145.
and, as demonstrated by Justice Shah in his concurring opinion in the Maganbha

Ishwar Bhai Patel v. Union of India, a case which dealt with the implementation of
an award that demarcated the frontier between India and Pakistan, the constitutional
architecture remains rather loose:
The effect of Article 253 is that if a treaty, agreement or convention with a foreign State
deals with a subject within the competence of the State legislature, the Parliament alone has,
notwithstanding Article 246(3) the power to make laws to implement the treaty, agreement
or convention or any decision made at any international conference, association or other
body. In terms, the Article deals with legislative power: thereby power is conferred upon
the Parliament, which it may not otherwise possess. But it does not seek to circumscribe the
extent of the power conferred by Article 73. If, in consequence of the exercise of executive
power, rights of the citizens of others are restricted or infringed, or laws are modified, the
exercise of power must be supported by legislation: where there is no such restriction,
infringement of the right or modification of the laws, the executive is competent to exercise
the power.25
To clarify all this, the Parliament could, in theory, easily legislate on the kind of
treaty the Executive can enter into. But this is yet to happen and the Legislative has
remained rather passive in this regard hence leaving a large margin of action to the
Executive and realm of appreciation to the court.26
In terms of treaty implementation then, the Parliament rests theoretically at the
centre of the constitutional edifice. It has the power to make law to implement
treaties obligations and, after all, the Indian system supposedly follows the dualist
tradition: treaties do not have force of law until enacted in municipal law as held by
the Supreme Court in Jolly Verghese v. Bank of Cochin: ‘International conventional
law must go through a process of transformation into the municipal law before the
international treaty can become internal law’.27 However, case law proved once
again rather ambiguous, as showed in the Maganbha Ishwar Bhai Patel v. Union of
India decision and Justice Shah’s views:
Our Constitution makes no provision making legislation a condition of the entry into an
international treaty in times either of war or peace (…). The power to legislate in respect of
treaties lies with the Parliament under Entries 10 and 14 of List I of the Seventh Schedule.
But making of law under that authority is necessary when the treaty or agreement operates
25
Maganbhai Ishwar Bhai Patel v. Union of India, 9 January, 1969, (1969) 3 SCR 254 by
Hidyatullah CJ, pp. 299–230, available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1310955/.
26
On the issues, see, in particular, Rajeev Dhavan, “Treaties and People: Indian Reflections”,
Journal of the Indian Law Institute, Vol. 39, 1, 1997; Rekha Saxena, “Treaty Making Powers; a
Case for Federalisation and Parliamentarisation”, Economic and Political Weekly, 2007, 42 (1), 24,
Amal K. Ganguli, “Interface between International and Municipal Law: Role of the Indian
Judiciary”, in Bimal N. Patel (ed.), India and International Law, Vol. 2, Brill, 2008, pp. 11–47;
VG Hedge, “Indian Courts and International Law”, Leiden Journal of International Law, Vol. 23,
Issue 1, 2010, pp. 53–77.
27
Jolly George Verghese & Anr vs The Bank Of Cochin on 4 February, 1980, 1980 AIR 470, 1980
SCR (2) 913, available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1741605/.
48 L. Choukroune
to restrict the rights of the citizens or others or modifies the laws of the State. If the rights of
the citizens or others which are justiciable are not affected, no legislative measure is needed
to give effect to the agreement or treaty.28
As long as the rights ‘of the citizens or others are not affected’ there is apparently
no need for the Parliament to legislate to give effect to a treaty and, indeed, it very
much refrained from doing so. In addition, the Supreme Court in Gramophone Co.
of India Ltd goes further than the apparently simple doctrine of transformation and
even direct incorporation of international law. As summarized by A. K. Ganguli
indeed, it ‘defies the view that domestic tribunals could not adjudicate disputes
involving application of international law’.29
It is then easy to understand why and how the Indian judge has played such a
proactive role in interpreting but also de facto incorporation foreign and international
laws into municipal law. The ambiguity of the constitutional regime and subsequent
case law left a gap, which could easily be filled. So that, since the early 1980s, the
Supreme Court has become, as demonstrated by Upendra Baxi, the ‘co-governor of
the nation’, which makes ‘laws’, ‘a large number of policies’ and invents ‘structures
of enforcement’. This equals, as Baxi explains in this very volume, to ‘adjudicatory
leadership’ and eventually ‘demosprundetial constitutional leadership that is demo-
cratic leadership, just as legisprudence (the legislative rationality) is.’30
3.2 Pushing the Limits of the Constitutional Frame

in Completing the Modernization Project
In this context, the Judiciary was free to have recourse to foreign and international
laws as a rights implementation engine. The domains in which it intervened are
very diverse and vary from boarder delimitation, to federalism, law of the sea,
refugee law or international trade and investment law including the impact and
possible direct effect of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) decisions in
municipal law.31 For instance, the case of WTO law is particularly interesting in
that it reflects the dialogues of national and international courts on matters of
incorporation. In the recent WTO Solar case indeed, India tried to win the legal
battle in putting forward the very arguments of its own Supreme Court showing that
a legislative act was not necessary to incorporate international norms, which were
28
MaganbhaiIshwar Bhai Patel v. Union of India, op.cit, p. 299.
29
See AK Ganguli, “Interface between International and Municipal Law: Role of the Indian
Judiciary” op.cit., p. 21.
30
See, as well, Upendra Baxi’s interview with The Caravan: “In this Democracy we Must not
Distrust or Suspect Dissent or Disagree with it”, 24 April 2016, available at: http://www.
caravanmagazine.in/vantage/democracy-must-not-distrust-suspect-dissent-disagree.
31
See Haridas Exports v. All India Float Glass Manufacturers Association, 22 July, 2002 available
at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/838587/; and M/S. S & S. Enterprise vs Designated Authority &
Ors, on 22 February, 2005, available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1868210/.
not affecting the rights of the citizens.32 While not accepted by the WTO adjudi-
cating body, these arguments prove, once again, the keen reception and later
re-exportation of international norms in and by India.
However, in comprehending the modernization process, our analysis will
deliberately focus on two limited fields of law, the environment and human rights,
in which the judicial endeavour to push the limits of the constitutional framework to
complete the constitutional project also echoes another Indian practice, that of the
Social Action Litigation (SAL) coined by Upendra Baxi as a PIL ‘à l’indienne’. The
implicit interaction between the SAL and the internationalization of Indian law
through judicial activism is indeed fascinating as it serves the same purpose: a
peaceful social revolution.
Public interest litigation emerged as a rights advocacy strategy in the United
States civil rights movement of the 1960s and has been broadly used worldwide to
describe the many ways general grievances relating to the enforcement of
socio-economic rights have been litigated by the courts and remedies awarded to
the victims of the State. It is probably in Asia, and precisely in India, that PIL has
achieved its most sophisticated, yet sometimes ambiguous variation.33 As con-
vincingly demonstrated at the time by Upendra Baxi in his 1985 article,34 a few
years after the end of the 1975–76 Emergency period and at a time ‘judicial
32
See DS 456 India—Certain Measures Relating to Solar Cells and Solar Modules, Panel and
Appellate Body Reports of 24 February 2016 and 16 September 2016 available at https://www.
wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds456_e.htm/.
33
See generally, J. Baghwati, “Judicial Activism and Public Interest Litigation”, Columbia Journal
of Transnational Law, Vol. 23, 1984, pp. 561, C. D. Cunningham, “Public Interest Litigation in
Indian Supreme Court: A Study in the Light of the American Experience”, Journal of Indian Law
Institute, Vol. 29, 1987, p. 494, “S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism in India, OUP, New Delhi, 2002,
Manta Rao, Public Interest Litigation in India: A Renaissance in Social Justice, Eastern Book Co;
2nd edition 2004, Videh Upadhyay, Public Interest Litigation in India, Concepts, Cases and
Concerns, Lexis Nexis, 2007, Modhurima Das Gupta, Courting Development: The Supreme
Court, Public Interest Litigation and Socio-Economic Development in India, VDM Verlag, 2009,
Jona Razzaque (ed.), Public Interest Environment Litigation in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh,
special issue of the Comparative and Environment Law Series, vol. 7, Kluwer Law, 2004, Surya
Deva, “Public Interest Litigation in India: A Critical Review”, Civil Justice Quarterly, vol. 28,
Issue 1, 2009, pp. 19–40, Parmanand Singh, “Promises and Perils of Public Interest Litigation in
India”, Journal of Indian Law Institute, vol. 52, 2010, pp. 172–188, Madhav Khosla, “Making
social rights conditional: lessons from India”, International Journal of Constitutional Law, vol. 8,
2010, pp. 739–765. For a general and recent overview: Po Yen Yap and Holning Lau (eds.),
Public Interest Litigation in Asia, Routledge Law in Asia, 2010, and Leïla Choukroune, “The
Paradox of Justiciability: Labour Rights Litigation and the Realization of Socio-Economic Rights
in China and India”, in Surya Deva (ed.), Socio-Economic Rights in Emerging Free Markets:
Comparative Insights from India and China, Routledge, 2016, pp. 147–165.
34
See Upendra Baxi, “Taking Suffering Seriously: Social Action Litigation in the Supreme Court
of India”, Third World Legal Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 1, 1985 pp. 107–132.
50 L. Choukroune
democracy’ was revolutionizing Indian politics, the ‘extraordinary remedies’ the

Indian population was seeking out differed from the PIL’s general significance.
They were indeed ‘transcending the received notions of separation of powers and
the inherited distinctions between adjudication and legislation on the one hand, and
administration and adjudication on the other’. Not to mention that they brought ‘a
new kind of lawyering and a novel kind of judging’.35 Oriented towards the ‘rural
poor’ and not, as it has progressively been the case in the US—and in India itself—
in the direction of ‘civic participation in governmental decision making’ and
eventually the representation of ‘interests without groups’,36 the Indian incarnation
of PIL was indeed first essentially social. This ‘SAL’,37 as conceived by Upendra
Baxi, was ‘primarily judge-led and even judge-induced’ and as such ‘elated to
juristic and judicial activism on the High Bench’.38 The Indian ‘SAL’ trend was not
deprived of populist rhetoric and judicial politics although putting forward
humanist aspirations. But as demonstrated in the seminal decision Kesavananda
Bharati,39 these ambitions were originally framed by the division of powers and the
inherent limitation of constitutional precedent:
These landmarks in the development of the law cannot be permitted to be transformed into
weapons for defeating the hopes and aspirations of our teeming millions, half-clad,
half-starved, half-educated. These hopes and aspirations representing the will of the people
can only become articulate through the voice of their elected representatives. If they fail the
people, the nation must face death and destruction. Then neither the Court nor the
Constitution will save the country.40
Whenever there is a public wrong or public injury caused by an act or omission of the State
or a public authority which is contrary to the Constitution or the law, any member of the
public acting bona fide and having sufficient interest can maintain an action for redressal of
such wrong or public injury. (…)
If public duties are to be enforced and social collective ‘diffused’ rights and interests are to
be protected, we have to utilize the initiative and zeal of public-minded persons and
organizations by allowing them to move the court and act for a general or group interest;
even though, they may not be directly injured in their own rights.41
35
Ibid., p. 108.
36
Ibid., p. 109.
37
Ibid., p. 108.
38
Ibid., p. 111.
39
See Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973) 4 S.C.C. 225.
40
See Justice Chandrachud in Kesavananda at 968 quoted by Upendra Baxi, p. 112.
41
See Justice Bhagwati’s fascinating reasoning in S.P. Gupta v. Union of India, AIR 1982 SC 149:
1981, at 190–194. This case is often contemplated as the precursor of the Indian PIL. PIL writ
petitions have been filed under article 226 (Power of High Courts to issue certain writs) or article
32 (remedies for enforcement of (fundamental) rights guaranteed by the Constitution) of the Indian
Constitution.
The parallel with the internationalization process, through what some would
analyse as the equally populist activism of zealous judges, is striking and largely
illustrated in India case law. The Indian higher courts not only made law but
legislated ‘exactly in the way in which a legislature legislates’ as S. P. Sathe
explained.42
In environmental law to start with, Indian courts have largely filled a constitu-
tional void. Indeed, the Constitution did not contain any provision for the protection
and preservation of the environment. But, once again, on the basis of the Directive
Principles, India ratified a number of international conventions as well as it
amended the constitutional text in incorporating the Article 48-A (Protection and
improvement of environment and safeguarding of forest and wildlife) and 51 A(g)
(Fundamental duties to protect and improve the natural environment including
forests, lakes, rivers and wild life and to have compassion for living creatures).
Further, in the Supreme Court landmark judgment Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum
v. Union of India, Justice Singh directly proposed the incorporation of customary
international law in reference to the ‘precautionary principle’ and the ‘polluters pay
principle’:
Even otherwise once these principles are accepted as part of the Customary International
Law there would be no difficulty in accepting them as part of the domestic law. It is almost
accepted proposition of law that the rule of Customary International Law if it is not contrary
to the municipal law shall be deemed to have been incorporated in the domestic law and
shall be followed by the Courts of law.43
The Court’s reasoning, in referring to a series of ‘soft law’ sources of envi-

ronmental law such as the Rio Declaration or the Agenda 21 supported the idea that
the Constitution Article 21 (Fundamental Rights), as well as all other relevant
constitutional provisions and the existing municipal law were sufficient to integrate
these principles into Indian law.44 Of course, such a daring approach can be
understood as too expansive if not in contradiction with a democratic legislative
process which had not yet adopted the same far-reaching principles of contempo-
rary customary international law. But as exposed above, the objective of the court is
rather to further the constitutional social revolution as a pillar of the Indian
democracy.
The same type of reasoning is found in international human rights law where the
court has even more clearly tried to fill the gap left by a rather passive legislature,
which has often been reluctant to advance the constitutional rights agenda. As a
matter of fact, until the adoption of the 1993 Protection of Human Rights Act and
the establishment of National Human Rights Commission, no specific text existed
42
See S. P. Sathe, Judicial Activism in India, Oxford India Paperbacks, 2003, p. 250.
43
See Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India & Ors on 28 August, 1996, available at:
https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1934103/.
44
See Jaydeepsinh G. Vaghela, “The Judiciary of India and Implementation of International
Environmental Law: Some Remarks”, in Bimal N. Patel (ed.), India and International Law, Vol. 2,
Brill, 2008, pp. 453–467.
52 L. Choukroune
in Indian law to give effect to the Part III (Fundamental Rights) of the Constitution.
Beyond the ‘basic structure’ doctrine and the Kesavananda Bharati v. State of
Kerala 1973 decision (while fundamental rights can be amended, the Parliament
cannot alter the ‘basic structure of the Constitution’), the courts have fostered and
furthered the rights of the most vulnerable and those of women in particular.45 In
2000, in the Chairman, Railway Board v. Chandrima Das, a case dealing with the
rape of a Bangladeshi woman by Railways officials and for which the Calcutta High
Court had directed the Railways to pay one million rupees in compensation for the
crime perpetuated by the company’s employees, the Supreme Court furthered the
interpretation of Fundamental Rights. In referring to a large number of international
human rights instruments including the Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights as well as a vast ensemble of foreign decisions on the same matter, it
concluded that fundamental rights apply to foreign nationals as well as Indian
citizens.46 In Visakha & ors v. State of Rajasthan, a case addressing the need to
protect women from sexual harassment at the work place, the Supreme Court
observed:
Any international convention not inconsistent with the fundamental rights and in harmony
with its spirit must be read into those provisions to enlarge the meaning and content thereof,
to promote the object of the Constitutional guarantee (…) Gender equality includes pro-
tection from sexual harassment and right to work with dignity, which is a universally
recognised basic human right. The common minimum requirement of this right has
received global acceptance. The international conventions and norms are, therefore, of great
significance in the formulation of the guidelines to achieve this purpose.47
Not many courts worldwide dare to give such an empowering effect to inter-
national law. In this case, international law does not serve as a shield against
globalization to reclaim the democratic process from foreign hands, but rather to
foster, further, and uphold the very constitutional project when confronted with
internal resistances. In the same vain, in the National Legal Services Authority vs
Union Of India & Ors of 15 April, 2014, better known as the transgender case, the
Supreme Court, once again, used international law to achieve the constitutional
objectives and so upheld the fundamental rights of equality and dignity.48 It stated:
45
See V.S. Elizabeth, “Feminism and International Law in India”, in Bimal N. Patel (ed.), India
and International Law, Vol. 2, Brill, 2008, pp. 381–411.; and B.C. Nirmal, “Taking Violence
Against Women Seriously: International and Domestic Human Rights Jurisprudence”, in Bimal N.
Patel (ed.), India and International Law, Vol. 2, Brill, 2008, pp. 413–453.
46
See The Chairman, Railway Board & Ors vs Mrs. Chandrima Das & Ors on 28 January, 2000,
available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/113663/.
47
See Vishaka & Ors vs State Of Rajasthan & Ors on 13 August, 1997, available at: https://
indiankanoon.org/doc/1031794/.
48
See National Legal Ser. Auth vs Union Of India & Ors on 15 April, 2014, available at: https://
indiankanoon.org/doc/193543132/.
The basic spirit of our Constitution is to provide each and every person of the nation equal
opportunity to grow as a human being, irrespective of race, caste, religion, community and
social status. Granville Austin while analyzing the functioning of Indian Constitution in
first 50 years has described three distinguished strands of Indian Constitution: (i) protecting
national unity and integrity, (ii) establishing the institution and spirit of democracy; and
(iii) fostering social reforms. The Strands are mutually dependent, and inextricably inter-
twined in what he elegantly describes as ‘a seamless web’. And there cannot be social
reforms till it is ensured that each and every citizen of this country is able to exploit his/her
potentials to the maximum.49
Of course, one could argue that the higher courts (high courts and the Supreme
Court) have not always been this liberal and certainly not consistent with, for
example, the infamous Supreme Court decision to (re)penalize Indian gays, while a
Delhi High Court judgment had precisely decriminalized homosexuality.50 One
could also put forward the difficulty to sustain such a large and heteroclite body of
case law without proper legislative support as exemplified by the impossibility to
adopt a uniform (and secular) civil code providing the same rights for all and all
women in particular.51 But the many efforts of the Indian judge to look at foreign
and international laws as guiding principles for the realization of the constitutional
project is nevertheless as remarkable as unique.52 As such, ‘judicial activism is not
an aberration’ but a ‘counter-majoritarian check on democracy’.53 Indeed, ‘the
struggle for custody of the Constitution’, as Austin put it, required innovative
interpretation and a non-traditional approach to the separation of powers. India’s
peaceful social revolution has yet to be completed, but the path taken by the judge
with the support of foreign and international laws, although often uncertain, goes in
the right direction.54
49
Ibid, at 91.
50
See Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr vs Naz Foundation & Ors on 11 December, 2013, available
at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/58730926/.
51
See Leila Seth, “A Uniform Civil Code towards Gender Justice”, in Talking of Justice, Aleph
Book Company, 2014, pp. 71–87.
52
Because of the familiarity of the Constitution with a number of common wealth countries
Constitutions, the Indian judge also often referred to, for example, Australian or Canadian law and
decisions. See, Michael Kirby, “The Supreme Court of India and Australian Law”, in Supreme but
not Infallible, Essays in Honour of the Supreme Court of India, OUP, 2000, pp. 66–84., and Claire
L’Heureux-Dubé, “Human Rights: A Worldwide Dialogue”, ibid, pp. 213–231.
53
See S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism in India, Transgressing Borders and Enforcing Limits, op.cit.,
p. 310.
54
See Granville Austin, “The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Custody of the Constitution”, in
Supreme but not Infallible: Essays in Honour of the Supreme Court of India, op.cit., pp. 1–15.
54 L. Choukroune
4 Conclusion: Not Quite Modern but yet Already

Post-modern?
Is today’s Indian law modern? Is there, as Marc Galanter put it: ‘a certain irre-
versibility in the process of forming a modern legal system (…)’. Is it true that ‘in
India where the proponents of indigenous law are less attached to dharmasastra
than nostalgic for the ‘simplicity’ of local customary law (…) any change (in the
direction of revivalism) is even more unlikely’?55 Or, on the contrary, and as
Menski recently argued, is there a sort of reformation of Hindu law at work in
today’s India?56 If so, is it based on the deliberate action of Indian courts to revive a
useful set of norms to solve everyday life conflicts or the result of a more political
strategy instrumentalizing a glorious past and a recreated common identity to serve
the ambitions of a highly nationalistic political agenda? Is it a resistance to
modernity or a parallel phenomenon living its existence at the margin of the modern
legal apparatus without affecting its core? Lastly, how to qualify this revival of the
past? Is it an anti-modern reaction or a post-modern plurality?
It might be indeed that Indian law is not quite modern but yet already
post-modern. This post-modernity is where Habermas meets Foucault for Indian
modern law is ‘an incomplete project’ but also, a relation to the present, ‘an
attitude’, an ‘êtnos’, a ‘philosophical life’ in which self-criticism is both a ‘his-
torical analysis of the limits imposed upon us’ and ‘the test of their possible
crossing’.57 In that sense, our analysis differs from that of Menski. The
post-modern character of Indian law does not rest upon a frustrated reaction to the
colonial ‘modernism’ and legal ‘positivism’ equally alien to the national genius of
the people of India. It is the expression of a plural, highly diverse society, which
evolves in multiple realities and thinks and acts in many apparently irreconcilable
ways. Indian legal modernity is the capacity to accommodate different
de-territorialized legal spheres in one hybrid project testing the limits of history. It
is the crafting of an Indian international law very much heteroclite in its sources
and not quite rigorous in its categorization of norms or systematic in its relation to
municipal law, but creative and adaptable to the needs of the present. It is the
appearance of the foreign against the reality of Indianness. From without to within:
it is a new legal modernity.
55
See Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India, op.cit., p. 35.
56
See Werner Menski, Hindu Law: Beyond Tradition and Modernity, Delhi, OUP, 2003.
57
See Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que les lumières, Breal, 2004 (texte), p. 85.
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Articles
Baxi, Upendra, 2016. Interview with The Caravan: ‘In this Democracy we Must not Distrust or
Suspect Dissent or Disagree with it’, 24th April 2016. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/
democracy-must-not-distrust-suspect-dissent-disagree.
Cases
Maganbhai Ishwar Bhai Patel v. Union of India, 9 January, 1969, (1969) 3 SCR 254 by
Hidyatullah CJ.
Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, 1973 4 S.C.C. 225.
Jolly George Verghese & Anr vs The Bank of Cochin on 4 February 1980, 1980 AIR 470, 1980
SCR (2) 913.
S.P. Gupta v. Union of India, AIR 1982 SC 149: 1981.
Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India & Ors on 28 August 1996.
Vishaka & Ors vs State of Rajasthan & Ors on 13 August 1997.
The Chairman, Railway Board & Ors vs Mrs. Chandrima Das & Ors on 28 January 2000.
Haridas Exports v. All India Float Glass Manufacturers Association, 22 July 2002.
M/S. S & S. Enterprise vs Designated Authority & Ors, on 22 February 2005.
Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr vs Naz Foundation & Ors on 11 December 2013.
National Legal Ser.Auth vs Union of India & Ors on 15 April 2014.
DS 456 India—Certain Measures Relating to Solar Cells and Solar Modules, Panel and Appellate
Body Reports of 24 February 2016 and 16 September 2016.
Chapter 4
The Political Economy of Being
‘Modern’ in 21st Century India
Jayati Ghosh
1 Introduction
What precisely does it mean to be ‘modern’ in 21st Century India? And how does
this interact with economy and society to create the unique forms of Indian capi-
talism that cannot really be understood using the ‘modernity’ framework of the
developed Northern society/economy? In this chapter I explore some aspects of
these questions, but with an important caveat. The famous English economist Joan
Robinson is credited with this pithy saying about India: ‘Whatever you can say
about India, the opposite is also true.’ This is patently the case when it comes to
descriptions like being ‘modern’. Given the immense variety across the subconti-
nent, it is obviously absurd to speak of one ‘Indian society’ or even one Indian
political economy. This is particularly true when it comes to attributes like being
‘modern’—a slippery concept at the best of times, but one rendered even more
baffling by the sheer complexity of its manifestations in India. Nevertheless, there
are some very broad features that may be said to be relevant at a very general level,
which I seek to identify in what follows.
To begin with, it is obviously important to clarify how the terms ‘modern’,
‘modernization’ and ‘modernity’ are used in this chapter. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines ‘modern’ as ‘of pertaining to the present and recent times, as
distinguished from the remote past; pertaining to or originating in the current age of
period’. The obvious synonym here is ‘contemporary’, which of course makes for a
rather unsatisfactory definition, as it would constantly change according to the
times. Nevertheless, the sense in which being ‘modern’ is commonly understood
today is precisely that of being abreast of and adjusting to current developments,
especially (but not exclusively) in technology. In consequence, ‘modernization’ is
J. Ghosh (&)
Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
e-mail: jayatijnu@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_4
60 J. Ghosh
regarded as a process of innovation and break from some aspects of the past,
characterized as ‘tradition’. The term ‘modernity’ has a more specific connotation,
and has been generally used in social science literature as referring to a specific
historical phase, one which was characterized by capitalist industrialization and the
emergence of a particular social and economic division of labour within and
between countries, and most recently reflected in a particular pattern of global-
ization. ‘Modernity’ has a specifically European provenance, and is therefore easily
used to describe European societies and similar capitalist countries of European
settlement, while it may not be as easily used to describe non-European societies
that are capitalist but nevertheless have different specific economic and social
features. Therefore, ‘modernity’ as applied to Europe, cannot be a useful descrip-
tion for India at any stage of its recent development; rather, Indian modernity is
based on a largely capitalist division of labour but circumscribed by various social
norms and practices that deliver very different outcomes. Despite this, notions of the
modern and of modernization remain central to understanding much recent social,
economic, and political change.
Given this, there are the varying notions of economic modernization that char-
acterize Indian economic policy making, the business and professional elites, the
aspirational ‘middle classes’ and youth, and peasants and informal workers in
different parts of India. I argue that notions of modernization that are common
among the first two categories are in some ways self-contradictory, because they are
based implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—on traditional structures of hierarchy
and discrimination, such as caste and gender, as well as on religious categories.
These ensure that notions of equality, rights, and democracy are seen as confined to
particular social groups, rather than being universally applicable; and this in turn
generates a society in which the elites do not recognize the need to ensure a life of
dignity with fundamental rights and access to basic needs for all the population.
In what follows, I consider the longevity and persistence of some of these
traditional societal structures, which would be considered as traditional to the point
of being ‘archaic’ in many other countries. I describe how these structures inter-
twine with economic processes such that the Indian accumulation and development
story cannot be understood without recognizing their role. This allows for a dis-
cussion of the implications of the varying interaction of exclusion and inclusion in
economic policies and of public service delivery in India, which constitutes a
peculiar, unique, and yet fundamental feature of the Indian modernization, and
therefore its very particular modernity. These are bound to come into conflict with
the demands posed by contemporary realities, whereby traditionally suppressed and
oppressed economic and social groups demand greater voice and power. Finally, I
take up the issue of ‘modern’ technology and its uses in India, which has assumed
particular significance because of the recent obsession with digitization that has
come to symbolize the goal of modernization among the ruling groups and the
aspirational middle classes.
4 The Political Economy of Being ‘Modern’ in 21st Century … 61
2 Social Categories in the Indian Growth Story
2.1 Exclusion as a Basis of Capitalist Accumulation
As I have argued elsewhere (Ghosh 2011, 2014) a basic feature of the process of
economic development in India thus far has been exclusion: exclusion from control
over assets; exclusion from the benefits of economic growth; exclusion from the
impact of physical and social infrastructure expansion; exclusion from education
and from income-generating opportunities. This exclusion has been along class or
income lines, by geographical location, by caste and community, and by gender.
However, exclusion from these benefits has not meant exclusion from the system as
such—rather, those who are supposedly marginalized or excluded have been
affected precisely because they have been incorporated into market systems. This
implies a process of exclusion through incorporation, a process that has actually
been typical of capitalist accumulation across the world, especially in its more
dynamic phases. Thus, peasants facing a crisis of viability of cultivation have been
integrated into a market system that has made them more reliant on purchased
inputs in deregulated markets while becoming more dependent upon volatile output
markets in which State protection is completely inadequate. The growing army of
‘self-employed’ workers, who now account for more than half of the Indian
workforce, has been excluded from paid employment because of the sheer difficulty
of finding jobs, but are nevertheless heavily involved in commercial activity and
exposed to market uncertainties in the search for livelihood. Those who have been
displaced by developmental projects or other processes, and subsequently have not
found adequate livelihood in other activities, are victims of the process of economic
integration, though excluded from the benefits. Women who are increasingly
excluded from the paid workforce nevertheless contribute hugely to the economy
through a wide variety of unpaid activities. And so on.
This combination of incorporation and exclusion can be traced to the Indian
strategy of accumulation and its location in certain social structures. An important
element of this is the reliance on growth strategies that did not seek to develop the
home market for mass consumption goods through asset redistribution and dis-
mantling of traditional monopolies. Indeed, the absence in post-Independence India
of comprehensive land reforms—which were so instrumental in dismantling tra-
ditional structures of economic control in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan China, as
noted by Amsden (2001) and Wade (2003)—has been a major underlying feature of
the continuing structural inequality that has prevented broad-based economic
growth. This was related to the (possibly resulting) persistent hold of gender, caste
and other forms of social discrimination, which in turn allowed segmented labour
markets to persist and even intensify. As a result, the project of capitalist mod-
ernization in India (and the broader development project) have been circumscribed
and shaped by pre-existing social and economic relations in very significant ways.
This is clearly expressed in features such as the persistence of informality in the
62 J. Ghosh
economy despite more than half a century of industrialization and the socially based
segmentation of land, labour, and product markets, as elaborated below.
2.2 The Dependence of the Formal Sector

on Informal Activities
While it is well known that informal activities dominate in the Indian economy, in
terms of sheer number of workers (estimated to be around 90%) and share of output
(slightly less than half), it is less easily recognized that the formal sector is critically
dependent on it in terms of both backward and forward linkages. As a result,
workers in the informal economy have not simply been excluded from formal
employment—they are deeply integrated into it both directly and indirectly. The
perception that the informal economy exists because low wages allow it to compete
with the formal sector in a host of non-agricultural activities is essentially misplaced
in much of the Indian economy. Rather, in many instances the informal economy is
not in competition with the formal sector, but interacts with it closely and services
its requirements. Low wages in the informal economy effectively subsidize the
formal sector and help to sustain its profits. Consider for example the software
industry, which is generally seen as a shining example of hyper-modernity, an
outlier of high productivity that is somehow separate from the vast sea of low
productivity work that surrounds it. In actual fact, the ability of this industry to be
competitive globally relies crucially on the very cheap supporting services in the
form of logistics, security, transportation, cleaning, and catering that are provided
by companies or individuals that use workers on informal contracts that are well
beyond the pale of labour protection. And these labour markets are both
market-driven (providing wages well below the legal minimum wages in most
cases) and socially-driven (operating with markets segmented by caste, community,
and gender to enable lower wages and maximum exploitation of workers).
Similarly, the ability to hire highly skilled professionals in this industry at what are
clearly salaries below global averages is dependent upon such workers’ ability to
access goods and services provided cheaply by India’s informal workers.
This is equally true of other formal sectors that are typically identified with
modernity. There is strong evidence of substantial increases in subcontracting by
the formal manufacturing industry to more informal production arrangements since
2001 (Bairagya 2010; Arora 2010). The value chains evident in a number of
important exporting industries in sectors as varied as readymade garments, gems
and jewellery, automotive components, leather and leather products and sports
goods, which are often co-ordinated by large and possibly multinational corporate
entities, provide evidence of the significant and increased contribution of informal
activities to what is seen as formal sector production (Damodaran 2010). These are
only some examples of a wide and pervasive process of extremely close inter-
twining of formal and informal sectors, and the effective subsidization of the formal
sector by low paid informal activities.
2.3 Accumulation and Informality
These tendencies persisted through the first stage of post-Independence industri-

alization, which was based on a more State-led pattern of investment and reliance
on the domestic market through import substitution. But they have been further
reinforced by the growth strategy adopted in India over the past three decades,
widely seen as the period of neoliberal economic reforms (Dasgupta 2016). The
focus of the Indian State (and of most state forces at the regional level) has been on
generating growth through various incentives designed to encourage the expansion
of private capital. It is now obvious that this can very quickly become prey to
corruption, crony capitalism and the like. But it is possibly less obvious that this
strategy in itself generates incentives for private players that effectively militate
against a more broad-based and egalitarian economic expansion. New forms of
capital certainly do emerge and proliferate as a result of this strategy, but they do so
in a wider context in which capitalist accumulation is based essentially on
extraction: of land and other natural resources, of the labour of differentiated
workers, of the products of peasant cultivators and small producers of goods and
services. This reduces the incentives for even the larger private players to focus on
productivity growth and innovation as routes to more rapid growth, since
State-aided primitive accumulation and socially determined extra-economic rela-
tionships provide easier and more reliable means of generating private surpluses.
All these tendencies were actually reinforced under globalization, rather than being
diminished by external competition.
The point is that these transactions in land, labour, and product markets are not
simply voluntary exchanges between equivalent parties. Instead, the game is played
with dice that are heavily loaded in favour of capital, especially large capital,
through various means: social institutions that allow for discriminatory labour
market practices; legal and regulatory institutions that can be and are mobilized to
enhance the bargaining power of capital; and political forces that actively engage in
supporting all of these. The process of capitalist accumulation in India has utilized
the agency of the State to further the project of primitive accumulation through
diverse means (including land use changes as well as substantial fiscal transfers)
and has also exploited specific socio-cultural features, such as caste, community,
and gender differences to enable greater labour exploitation and therefore higher
surplus generation. These are in turn associated with various other more ‘purely
economic’ patterns that pile on the imbalances: financial institutions, input and
product markets that do not provide reasonable credit access, and so on.
It has been argued (Harriss-White 2005) that the greater part of the modern
Indian economy is implicitly regulated or determined by social institutions derived
from ‘primordial identity’ such as gender, caste, and community. These interact
with political forces, generating forms of patronage, control, and clientelism that
vary across regions. This makes the outcomes of government strategies, including
those connected with liberalization, privatization, and deregulation, different from
those generally expected. Take the large bourgeoisie, for example, which is
64 J. Ghosh
dominated by diversified joint family enterprises extending across different eco-

nomic sectors. Even in the phase of globalization, caste, region, and linguistic
community have been crucial in shaping these groups, determining their behaviour
and influencing their interaction with each other as well as with global capital
(Damodaran 2008). The very emergence of such capital has often reflected social
forces: for example, there are no major business groups in the North and East that
are not from ‘traditional’ business communities, and nationally no Dalit business
group of significance. Existing practices, such as gender discrimination in property
ownership and control, have often been reinforced by corporate behaviour, such as
the ability to utilize the existence of legal forms (such as the Hindu Undivided
Family form of ownership) that deny any role to women (Das Gupta 2016). These
obviously added to the weight of socially discriminatory practices—and they
affected how business houses at large and medium levels dealt with more purely
economic forces, and their attitudes to investment, employment, and output.
Yet it could also be argued that these features of the Indian economic landscape
are precisely what have been crucial in generating the recent phase of rapid growth,
even as they have allowed the persistence of backwardness and accentuated
inequalities in the course of that expansion. In other words, ‘modernity’ as reflected
in rapid economic growth has been associated with—and to a significant extent
resulted from—the ability of the system to use very ‘un-modern’ traditional cus-
toms and practices to shape how markets function, what government policies are
chosen, and the economic processes that result. The complex nexus between pol-
itics and different levels of local, regional, and national businesses has allowed for
the appropriation of land and other natural resources that has been an integral part
of the accumulation story and fed into the way that Central and state governments
have aided the process of private surplus extraction. More overt economic policies
such as patterns of public spending and taxation are only one part of this—a
substantial part relates to laws, regulations, and their implementation (or lack of it)
that provide the contours for the expansion of private capital.
2.4 The Roles Played by Caste and Gender
These processes of direct and indirect underwriting of the costs of the corporate
sector have been greatly assisted by the ability of employers in India to utilize social
characteristics to ensure lower wages of certain categories of workers. Caste and
other forms of social discrimination have a long tradition in India, and they have
interacted with capitalist accumulation to generate peculiar forms of labour market
segmentation that are unique to Indian society. Studies (such as Thorat 2010) have
found that social categories are strongly correlated with the incidence of poverty
and that both occupation and wages differ dramatically across social categories. The
National Sample Surveys (NSS) reveal that the probability of being in a low wage
occupation is significantly higher for STs, SCs, Muslims, and OBCs (in that order)
compared to the general ‘caste Hindu’ population. This is only partly because of
differences in education and level of skill, which are also important and which in
turn reflect the differential provision of education across social categories.
While in many cases class and caste do overlap, the latter always supersedes the
former at least in socio-economic factors. Caste is an extra-economic factor that acts
in two forms: inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcome. Economic
well-being cannot always overturn the inequalities of caste distinction, and that is
reflected in the education levels, job opportunities, wage levels, access to social
benefits, and basic facilities, etc. that caste clearly affects family income, con-
sumption and other parameters like education, health, and so on.
Such caste-based discrimination has operated in both urban and rural labour
markets. There are several studies of urban labour markets that find significant
discrimination against Dalit workers, operating dominantly through the mecha-
nisms of recruitment and assignment to jobs, which lead to Dalit workers largely
entering poorly-paid ‘dead-end’ jobs that are essential but significantly lower paid,
which in turn is reflected in aggregate patterns of caste-based employment
(Madheswaran and Attewell 2007). Similarly, empirical studies of caste behaviour
in rural India (Shah et al. 2006; Thorat et al. 2009) have found that there are many
ways in which caste practices operate to reduce the access of the lower castes to
local resources as well as to income earning opportunities, thereby forcing them to
provide their labour at the cheapest possible rates to employers. In addition to the
well-known lack of assets, a large number of social practices effectively restrict the
economic activity of lower caste and Dalit groups and force them to supply very
low wage labour in harsh and usually precarious conditions. These practices in turn
can be used to keep wages of Dalit workers (who are extremely constrained in their
choice of occupation) low, even in a period of otherwise rising wages. The per-
sistence of such practices and their economic impact even during the period of the
Indian economy’s much-vaunted dynamic growth has been noted (Human Rights
Watch 2007).
Gender-based differences in labour markets and the social attitudes to women’s
paid and unpaid work are also reflections of this broader tendency. The much talked
about low workforce participation of women in India is really because so many
women work in unpaid activities within the household and the community, con-
tributing productively to the economy even when they are not recognized as doing
so. Indeed, if such work is included, women’s work participation rate goes up from
around 24% to around 86% (Ghosh 2016). Similarly, the decline in work force
participation of women is really a decline in recognized employment, not in actual
productive work—there has just been a shift from paid or recognized work by
women to more unpaid and unrecognized work. These activities include the entire
range of care activities, such as looking after the young, the old, the sick, and other
members of the household, cooking, cleaning and so on. They also include types of
work that have become even more important in the recent past: fetching water and
fuel wood for household use, growing food and vegetables in kitchen gardens,
poultry and livestock rearing, and other substitutes for purchased consumption
(Mukherjee 2012). Much of this unpaid work has increased because of the decline
in common property resources and inadequate access to basic amenities, which
66 J. Ghosh
force people (especially women) to spend more hours collecting water and fuel
wood, for example. But they also reflect inadequate provision of basic and
affordable social services in health, elderly care, early child education and so on.
Providing all of these socially essential activities in unpaid form obviously amounts
to a huge subsidy not only for the household in question, but for the economy as a
whole. This calls into question aggregate labour productivity estimates that do not
take into account the massive number of unpaid workers. Essentially, the Indian
economy—and within that, its ‘modern’ sector—is relying hugely and increasingly
on unpaid work, using patriarchy and traditional forms of discrimination to
underwrite the aggregate expansion of incomes, and it has been doing so to an
increasing extent in the period of globalization.
Even when women are employed in recognized and paid work, they tend to be
paid less than male workers, with a relatively high gender wage gap of around 60–
65% revealed by most surveys (Ghosh 2009). To begin with there is occupational
segregation, with women clustered in the low paying segments of wage employ-
ment. Then there is wage discrimination itself, resulting both from personal attri-
butes like education and skill and from pure discrimination. The widespread
perception that women’s work forms an ‘addition’ to household income, and
therefore commands a much lower reservation wage, is common to both private and
public employers, and extends across occupations and various social categories of
workers. As a result, even within Dalit or other discriminated groups, the NSS
Surveys reveal that women workers typically receive even lower wages for similar
work. In public employment, the use of underpaid women workers receiving well
below minimum wages as anganwadi workers or ASHAs has become institution-
alized in running several major flagship programmes that are designed to deliver
essential public services of health, nutrition, support for early child development,
and even education. Further, the role played by the unpaid labour of women in
contributing not only to social reproduction but to what would be recognized as
productive economic activities in most other societies has been absolutely crucial in
enabling this particular accumulation process.
2.5 The Implications of Tradition for the ‘Modern’
This persistence of traditional social tendencies, and their role in determining labour
markets and relative wage costs, has obviously affected the incentives for how
private economic activity is organized, even in the large scale, formal, ‘modern’
sector. That could be one important reason why private agents, even those in the
large formal modern sector, apparently find little value in accumulation strategies
that are designed to enable structural transformation. Indeed, such transformation
may even be of detriment to their short-term interests, if it reduces the bargaining
power of capital relative to labour or if it constrains their ability to rely on socially
segmented labour markets. The low tolerance levels of capitalists in India to any-
thing that would even slightly improve the bargaining power of workers is evident
in the growing impossibility of even forming workers’ unions in most activities

controlled by the private sector. It is indicated by the ferocious and orchestrated
backlash against something as limited as the MNREGA, only because it has pro-
vided some relief to rural workers who could at last begin to demand wages closer
to the legal minimum from employers.
It is not simply that such practices continue to exist; the significant point is that
they have become the base on which the economic accumulation process rests,
upon which material ‘modernity’ is sought to be achieved. In other words, capi-
talism in India, especially in its most recent globally integrated variant, has used
past and current modes of social discrimination and exclusion to its own benefit, to
facilitate the extraction of surplus and ensure greater flexibility and bargaining to
employers when dealing with workers. Social categories are not ‘independent’ of
the accumulation process—rather, they allow for more surplus extraction, because
they reinforce low employment generating (and therefore persistently low wage)
tendencies of growth. The ability of capital to benefit from socially segmented
labour markets in turn has created incentives for absolute surplus value extraction
on the basis of suppressing wages of some workers, rather than requiring a focus on
relative surplus value extraction resulting from productivity increases. High pro-
ductivity enclaves have not generated sufficient demand for additional workers to
force an extension of productivity improvement to other activities; instead the
accumulation process has relied indirectly on persistent low wages in supporting
activities or on unpaid labour to underwrite the expansion of value added. So, this
particular (possibly unique) pattern of Indian inequality has led to a long run growth
process that generates further and continued inequality and does not deliver the
expected structural change, creating a social and economic system on which a thin
oily slick of modernity rests on a giant sea of tradition and even derives sustenance
from it.
3 Exclusion, Indian Style
3.1 Talking Inclusive Policies
One of the standard policy tropes about modernity relates to ‘inclusion’. Possibly as
a result, there has been a lot of talk among policy-makers in India about ensuring
inclusion. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government talked about ‘in-
clusive growth’ and made it the headline for its Five Year Plan documents. The
National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has dispensed with planning but
still wants to jump on the inclusion bandwagon, so its various policies and schemes,
from ‘Smart Cities’ to ‘Make in India’, generally come with the tag of being
‘inclusive’. Despite all this talk, however, the evidence generally points to inten-
sification of inequalities and lack of inclusion in terms of most important social and
economic outcomes. This is not only because of lack of genuine political will
68 J. Ghosh
(although that is certainly a factor). It is also because the nature of inclusion—or

more importantly, its opposite, exclusion—is not adequately studied and under-
stood, so that even policies that are superficially well-intentioned can completely
miss the mark. There is, of course, the basic problem that economic policies and
processes continue to operate in ways that both rely upon and increase inequality
and lack of voice of major groups and social categories. But there is also genuine
lack of understanding of the complex yet intertwined nature of exclusion in its
various manifestations. Some of these are elaborated below.
3.2 Exclusion from Publicly Provided Goods and Services
Consider specifically the issue of exclusion from essential public services and
amenities, as just one example, and particularly the goods and services that should
be accessible to the public at large because of being essential for living a life with
dignity. The India Exclusion Report 2016 considers some of these indicators for
urban areas, such as health, water, and sanitation. This is relevant because urban
areas are generally considered as more amenable to ‘modernity’ in various ways
and also easier to organize public services for. But even this limited focus on a few
aspects of public delivery brings out the comprehensive and overlapping character
of exclusion, as it quickly becomes apparent that even in urban India, those who are
excluded in terms of health, water, and sanitation generally tend to be those who are
disadvantaged in other areas as well: women, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, persons
with disabilities, and persons with age-related vulnerabilities (children and the
elderly). The association with class-based indicators is also strong.
For example, while urban areas in general have more extensive health services
than rural areas, access to adequate health care is significantly lower for the urban
poor, while those in certain occupations with very poor conditions of work and
those in particularly poor housing conditions (and particularly the homeless) may
have hardly any access at all. They are also much more likely to have lower or no
access to basic drinking water and sanitation. Housing conditions affect exclusion in
other ways as well. Those who live in highly congested slums that have poor
infrastructure, lack space and amenities and have problematic or limited access to
drinking water and sanitation, and especially those who are forced to occupy places
such as open drains and the banks of effluent tanks, are much more exposed to
health hazards. There is also the associated exposure to atmospheric and other
pollution. The homeless obviously are not only the most destitute but also—be-
cause of the residence-based nature of all public service delivery—the most
deprived of access to minimum ‘public goods’. They—and among them especially
street children—are often completely excluded from any kind of health care. They
are more likely to be trapped in low-end jobs with unsafe, unhealthy, and debili-
tating working conditions. Their access to water and sanitation services is not only
hugely inadequate to ensure good health, but they are typically forced to drink
non-potable water, often fetched over long distances; to defecate in the open or use
poorly maintained public toilets without running water and with little privacy or
security. So, they live in conditions of extreme anti-modernity, at least in material
terms, but somehow remain invisible to the more privileged inhabitants of ‘modern’
India, who have developed a resilient capacity to look away.
3.3 Distorting the Idea of the Universal Basic Income
The inability to deliver good quality public services or amenities in a universal

fashion has increasingly led to greater focus on a cop-out proposed solution: that of
substituting cash transfers for physical public delivery. This, too, has a flavour of
‘modernity’: the demands for Universal Basic Income (UBI) that are gathering pace
across the world not only in many developed countries around Europe, but also in
some developing countries. Proponents of this see it as a broad, non-targeted
provision: a ‘periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an indi-
vidual basis, without means-test or work requirement’ (Standing 2015). The idea is
to ensure that every person in the society has the means to live with a modicum of
freedom and dignity, independent of capacity to earn or availability of employment.
It is therefore inherently redistributive and certainly attractive in that, if imple-
mented according to this norm, it would reduce both poverty and inequality.
Interestingly, this idea has proponents on all sides of the ideological spectrum, and
has gathered pace in the context of fears that technological change could soon
replace human labour with machine labour and automation in many productive
activities. Some have argued (such as Wright 2005) that this amounts to a project
for the reform of capitalism by removing its extremely unequal implications, since
it would empower labour relative to capital and, by decoupling income and work,
eventually de-commodify labour. Proponents of the ‘social economy’, see this as a
means of granting citizens the capacity to pursue activities that are socially
meaningful and desirable but do not yield strong financial returns. Feminist
responses to the idea are divided between those who view this as a means of
recognizing the unpaid work done by women and empowering them economically,
to those who fear that this would cement the unequal gender division of economic
roles and limit female participation in the paid workforce.
But across the world, most advocates of basic income do not see this in any way
as a substitute for the public provision of services, such as transport, health, edu-
cation, sanitation and so on. Indeed, they would be horrified if this were to be the
case, because the idea of the UBI is obviously to improve the material conditions of
citizens, not to force them to confront reduced access to worse quality public
services. Even the libertarians who argue that this would provide a more transparent
and direct alternative to the various welfare provisions of advanced economies, do
not argue for a cutback in essential public services. Rather, they suggest replacing
various different cash transfers with one that would be provided to all citizens.
But in India the opposite tendency seems to be gaining sway with respect to this
notion, thereby completely distorting the basic intent. The idea is to replace other
forms of government spending on social programmes. The specific vision on offer
70 J. Ghosh
in the Indian case implies an attack on what are classified as ‘wasteful subsidies’, as
well as even the food security programme and the employment guarantee pro-
gramme. The idea seems to be that money saved by reducing or even giving up on
these programmes can instead be used to put a bit of money into individual
accounts, using the government’s Holy Trinity of the JAM (Jan Dhan accounts,
Aadhaar or Unique Identity number and Mobile) interface. The Ministry of
Finance’s Economic Survey is explicit on this: ‘Rather than provide a UBI in
addition to current schemes, it may be useful to start off by offering UBI as a choice
to beneficiaries of existing programmes. In other words, beneficiaries are allowed to
choose the UBI in place of existing entitlements.’ (Ministry of Finance 2016: 192,
emphasis added.)
This is why a scheme that in other circumstances would not get the approval of
fiscal hawks and those who want to control government spending, has suddenly
become popular with many of them. The idea seems to be that the government can
cut not just subsidies but also a significant amount of spending that such analysts
find to be ‘unproductive’, and simply replace it with direct transfers into bank
accounts. Paradoxically, therefore, this shift to providing direct cash transfers in the
guise of ‘basic income’ would actually reduce public spending, not increase it!
Three concerns arise immediately. First, it is most likely that whatever basic
income is provided would be targeted, rather than universal. This would give rise to
the usual problems with targeting, such as unfair exclusion of the deserving and
unwarranted inclusion of the undeserving. Also, targeting based on static indicators
is a poor indicator of the material status of families, which keeps changing over time
especially among those near the so-called poverty line. In addition, the problem
with making such a transfer dependent upon the poverty of the recipient is that it
creates a disincentive to work if the wages would lead to the individual rising above
the threshold level of income (a problem that has been identified in China, for
example). Given that all poverty estimates are household based, this also does not
allow for unequal economic situations of individual household members, a real
problem in India where gender inequalities within families are so stark.
Second, even if so targeted, the costs associated with providing even this amount
to a significant proportion of the population are likely to be very high relative to
current government expenditures. The Economic Survey compares potential
spending on UBI to the totality of Centrally sponsored and Central subsector
schemes (including the food subsidy for the public distribution system, school
education, the Integrated Child Development Scheme, the MNREGA or rural
employment guarantee programme, the Mid-Day Meal Scheme for school children,
the National Health Mission, rural roads and rural and urban housing programmes,
the fertilizer subsidy for farmers, the sanitation mission Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
and many other schemes) which amounted to an estimated 5.2% of GDP in 2016–
17. It is obvious that these include many essential items of spending, ranging from
basic infrastructure and amenities to important social services that are considered
the responsibility of the government in all countries. Doing away with all of these to
provide cash transfers would be beyond the dreams of even the most libertarian of
thinkers, and that too especially when public provision in all of these areas is still so
inadequate and paltry. Yet even this would most certainly not be enough to meet the
most minimal requirements of an income sufficient for a basic existence. For
example, one rough estimate suggests that, if every person were to be assured a
basic income of Rs. 14,000 per year (or Rs. 1,200 per month) with a quarter of the
population therefore receiving the full amount and another quarter receiving half
that amount, the total spending on this would come to Rs. 693,000 crore per year,
or as much as 35% of the expenditure budget for 2016–17 (Chidamabaram 2017)!
Obviously, such an amount would not be possible to be borne by the government.
Indeed, even half that amount seems unlikely. Therefore, the chances are that the
amount provided would be much smaller, that it would be even more targeted, and
it would therefore not live up to the essential idea of the basic income at all. It could
well be that the amounts involved are so small as to be negligible in terms of
affecting real incomes, or are directed to such a tiny group that it has little impact on
the bulk of the population.
What is worse is that it is evident that the government would seek to provide this
by cutting down on other crucial expenditures like that on the employment guar-
antee and on food security. This could even end up reducing the real incomes of the
supposed beneficiaries, depending on how prices of food and other necessities
change. And it gives rise to the third important concern: that the government is
viewing cash transfers as a means of moving out of essential public service
delivery, essentially reneging on its constitutional obligation to ensure the social
and economic rights of the citizens. In the case of food security, the matter is
especially troubling because of the highly gendered access to food in most poor
Indian families. It is surely no accident that across India, women workers in
MNREGA sites are the ones asking for at least part wage payment in food, because
of the problem that money wages often get directed to other areas that men pri-
oritize and so leave women and girls disproportionately underfed. Shifting to small
amounts of cash payments by depriving people of both access to wages from public
works (and the dignity that comes from work) and basic affordable food would be
both damaging and disempowering.
This is not to say that the idea of basic income is wrong in essence—far from it.
It is very much part of the idea of a universal social protection floor, which is
something all societies must take seriously. But it cannot be seen as a substitute for
public provision of basic goods and services; rather it must be an addition to it. If
the government were truly serious about this, it could have begun, first of all, with a
universal pension scheme, something that it has been resisting. At present, despite
the demands of social movements like the Pension Parishad and others, access to a
non-contributory pension scheme is only available to Below Poverty Line families
and specially identified marginal groups like widows. And the Central government
provides only the entirely derisory amount of Rs. 200 per month as pension—so
that it often costs more even for the pensioner to be able to collect the money!
Despite repeated demands, the government has refused to raise the amount at all,
much less provide half of the minimum wage, which is the norm even in much
poorer countries like Nepal. If this government has not been willing even to provide
even minor amounts of universal pension to the now-elderly men and women who
72 J. Ghosh
have worked in paid and unpaid ways to create the base of economic activity in the
country, it is only reasonable to be sceptical of its intent and likely implementation
with respect to UBI.
So once again, what comes in the guise of modernity—in this case the UBI—
would end up becoming a reinforcement of traditional and structural inequalities,
stemming from the lack of universal access of reasonable levels of infrastructure
and amenities and good quality publics services.
4 Technology, Surveillance and the Rise

of Authoritarianism
4.1 The Push to Cashlessness
‘Plastic is the new khadi’ is the currently popular saying transmitted across social
media. Digitization of exchange transactions seems to have become the silver bullet
to deliver solutions to all problems, from fighting corruption, to ending poverty, to
modernizing society, even to ensuring sustainable development. The extraordinarily
violent demonetization move that caused so much damage to informal activities in
particular (as detailed in Ghosh et al. 2017) has been presented by the government
as a move to push India into becoming a cashless society. The exhortation to move
to e-payments has become the basis for the new definition of nationalism: the ability
to pay for something with a card or a mobile phone or internet account is now the
real proof of your love for your country and your desire for national progress. In the
minds of some, swiping a card or a phone now probably comes second only to
singing the national anthem as a signifier of patriotism, with the added aura of being
ultra-modern.
Exactly when and how digitization became such stuff of the dreams of
advancement in India is unclear. The simplistic belief in technology as the solution
to all sorts of problems, rather than a tool to assist social change, has been brewing
for some time: it was clearly incipient in the expansive hopes pinned on the Unique
Identification Number, or Aadhaar. But from there to the idea that cashless
exchange and e-commerce would automatically root out corrupt practices and lead
to a completely formal economy is another very large step.
At the moment, the Indian economy is certainly among the most cash-intensive
in the world: prior to demonetization around 98% of transactions were estimated to
be settled in cash (compared with 90% in China, 85% in Brazil and 55% in the
United States). But even this is not all that unusual: globally, around 85% of
transactions are cash-based, and many very advanced countries still rely heavily on
cash, driven by personal choices in a particular social environment. There is really
no relation between per capita income and the value of currency in circulation, or
between levels of corruption and cash in circulation. It is true that countries like
Sweden, which make extensive use of digital payments, have lower proportions of
cash in circulation relative to money GDP. But rich economies like Hong Kong SAR
and Japan have very high ratios, much higher than that of India. In fact, India’s
average ratio over the previous five years, at 12% of GDP, is not much higher than
countries in the Eurozone or Switzerland. E-banking and electronic transactions
have been increasing in India, but the shares are still very small, even after the
coercive pressure applied by demonetization.
It was apparently not enough to use sheer coercion—ensured by the physical
absence of currency because of demonetization of supposedly high-value notes—to
nudge the population into using electronic means of payment. The people also must
be ‘incentivized’ to move away from cash and adopt the newer electronic systems.
The Finance Ministry has provided various fiscal sops, which would naturally go to
the better off in the country who are already able to use cashless modes. These
included publicly subsidized discounts on petrol and diesel purchases made using
card payments, waiving of service taxes on card transactions of more than Rs.
2,000, discounts on suburban railway tickets purchased through digital modes and
discounts on general and life insurance for buying new policies or paying premiums
online! All these measures in fact transfer more benefits to the relatively rich in our
society, but seemingly contribute to the larger goal of moving towards
non-cash-based transactions. Some of the incentives could not have been dreamt up
by the most wicked of satirists: they could only have emerged in this weird new
political environment of delirious derangement. The NITI Aayog developed a
system of ‘lucky draws’ that were supposed to get citizens excited about
e-transactions, since now these would not only provide the bountiful benefits of
‘convenience’ but also periodically offer cash prizes, with weekly draws and the
first ‘mega draw’ of Rs. 1 crore on 14 April, Ambedkar Jayanti. Remarkably, there
was no irony in this choice of date; rather it was apparently chosen precisely ‘to
send out a political message with an eye on the deprived and the poor sections’,
according to a report quoting an official involved in the process.
The apparent unconcern in this digital drive for the unbanked in the country—
still around one-third of the adult population, by most estimates—is palpable. They
have been deprived of their own small holdings of cash without possibility of
exchange other than illicit means, and they are unlikely to be able to engage in
e-payments without a bank account either. So, what exactly are they supposed to
do? It is cruelly naïve to say they should simply open bank accounts, given the
many difficulties of those without various identity cards—which are incidentally
still not legally compulsory in India. There are many stories of even those who had
appropriate identity documents wishing to open accounts, being turned away by
banks because they were simply overburdened with the current work of distributing
cash (or trying to) and verifying and filling in all the necessary—and constantly
changing—forms. Many people were told to come back after 30 December 2016,
by which time their cash holdings would in any case have become worthless.
An important reason for the limited spread of e-commerce is that the infras-
tructure for such a payments system is so woefully lacking. It is true that there are a
billion mobile phone subscriptions in India, but less than one-third of all Indians use
smartphones. Only 7% of low income families have access to even one smartphone.
Around one-third of the population has internet access, but these are concentrated in
74 J. Ghosh
cities and towns, which make up 70% of all those with mobile internet access. Only
27% of Indians use the internet, and 87% of them live in urban areas, mostly the big
metros. Only 17% of Indian women use the internet (Pew Research Centre).
Connections are patchy and there is great disparity in connectivity. The average
time to load a page on a mobile phone is 5.5 s in India, compared to 2.6 s in China,
4.5 in Sri Lanka, 4.9 in Bangladesh and 5.8 in Pakistan, (Akamai Technologies
2016). In many rural and semi-urban areas, the connectivity levels are so low as to
make e-payments generally impossible.
Another huge constraint is the sheer lack of infrastructure like point-of-sale
machines and the associated telecom equipment that enable digital transactions. As
of 5 December 2016, there were an estimated 700 million debit cards and only
700,000 outlets that could accept them. With around 1.5 million point of sale
machines, the debit card machine to population ratio in India was of 1,785, com-
pared to 119 in Europe, 60 in China and 25 in the US. (Incidentally, despite the
high incidence of credit/debit cards and card acceptance machines in the US, more
than half of all transactions still occur in cash in that country.) The massive hike in
demand of such machines from vendors post-demonetization has been so large that
suppliers cannot cope. In addition to the physical supply of machines, the need for
approval and vetting by banks has further delayed the process of acquiring
machines. Significantly, a bigger bottleneck may well be the lack of associated
telecom equipment to ensure the security of these transactions: without enough of
these, the increasing volumes of transactions mean that systems would simply
become overloaded and collapse. Indeed, this is already evident even in the metros,
as previously simple e-transactions take longer and often require many attempts
before they are successful. There were reports of ministers visiting villages to sing
the praises of cashless transactions, being embarrassed by their own inability to
make a cashless transaction from their mobile phones in front of their audiences.
But these infrastructural and connectivity concerns may be only part of the
problem. Two issues that have been submerged in the enforced euphoria around
cashlessness deserve to be looked at more carefully. The first is that eventually this
shift to e-money would make all Indians pay for all their transactions, as compared
to transactions in cash that do not involve any cost. This amounts to a transfer of
income from all consumers and producers, including the poor who really cannot
afford it, to banks and a few ‘fin tech’ companies engaged in e-commerce and
mobile wallet services, who have already started raking in huge profits.
This is more than a general transfer of income from the population at large,
including the poor, to banks and companies. The crony capitalism element of this
measure should not be missed, since it is already clear that a few companies like
PayTM and Reliance Jio are disproportionate beneficiaries of this move. One single
company has emerged as the single biggest beneficiary in the mobile wallet market
—PayTM, whose subscriber base has apparently grown more than hundredfold to
160 million in this short month. The early bird had incumbency advantages, cou-
pled with massive advertising expenditure (it celebrated the demonetization drive in
full page newspaper ads in every major newspaper as well as on television, radio,
and internet) enabled by the deep pockets of its 40% owner, Alibaba of China.
In addition, there are huge concerns about cyber-security and privacy—all seen
as critically important in the advanced countries—that appear to have been all but
forgotten in the current rush to move to electronic platforms. India is among the five
nations in the world considered to be the most vulnerable to cyber-attacks,
according to a study by two US universities reported by PTI (2016a). It is not just
privacy concerns that are important here. Possibilities of cybercrime and identity
theft are even more important. A recent report noted that none of the e-wallet or
mobile payment and banking applications used in India have the hardware security
features necessary to make them secure (PTI 2016b). The danger from possible
hackers or of other abuse of data is real. A major security breach affecting about
2 million debit cards issued by 17 banks in October 2016 highlighted this threat,
but the mainstream media have either been restrained or have exercised
self-censorship in revealing the true implications of such attacks.
Protection of victims of cybercrime and unauthorized data sharing, is thus far a
very inadequately addressed concern in India. ‘Often, the first consumers come to
know of breaches is when their credit card numbers, passwords, or biometric
records are offered for sale on the digital black market, or in the worst case, where
their compromised accounts are misused’ (Krishnakumar 2016). Despite the gov-
ernment’s declared focus on creating ‘Digital India’, the past year has seen no new
legislation on data breach disclosures or privacy protection, which most policy
experts have long said is required. Banks are not required to reveal the extent of
compromise of their security systems, even to those affected by it. In fact, since the
liability laws are not very clear on this matter, a bank may or may not be liable for
any money that is stolen from an individual’s account because of hacking.
Similarly, if an online retailer’s system is breached and credit or debit card infor-
mation is taken, there is no compulsion on the retailer to report it, and every reason
for the retailer to hide such information that would adversely affect its brand. This
also means that the affected person whose card data has been stolen and used to
make unauthorized purchases, may not have any means of finding out how and
where such a breach occurred.
4.2 Technology-Enabled Surveillance and Control
Apart from the shift from cash to digital transactions, new technologies are trans-
forming social and political life in ways that can be potentially used by the State to
further their agenda and exercise control through acute surveillance. Three primary
ways of implementing such control by appropriation of technology are as follows:
The first is the widespread use of ‘enhancement’, or more correctly doctoring
and distorting of videographic material. This is now extraordinarily easy, yet the
public fallacy remains widespread that what is shown on a television screen is
always the truth, and indeed the full truth. The misuse and abuse of this techno-
logical capacity to present a false or at best partial representation of reality is now
sharply evident, especially in the infamous case of imprisonment of student union
76 J. Ghosh
leaders of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), who were booked on sedition

charges based on videographic evidence, which as it was later found out, was
morphed and tampered. New technologies have indeed made it easy to morph or
change pictures that appear to give the impression of verisimilitude. The speed with
which such images are circulated and the sheer volume of images that proliferate in
people’s consciousness means that by the time the falsities are discovered, the
damage may have been done and will be hard to undo. Furthermore, there is little or
no accountability or punishment for such deception, as laws against cybercrimes
remain weak and not as updated as the speed of technology upgradation. This can
generate both confusion, panic and havoc, and when these acts are supported by
organs or agents of the State, the dangers are obviously magnified.
Another popular misuse of technology is to use it to spread rumours, at first by
disseminating messages through text or WhatsApp. These rumours and lies are
multiplied and rapidly disseminated by television channels and social media, and
can spread divisive and destructive messages like wildfire, whip up sentiments on
completely false premises, insidiously incite and celebrate violence or threats of
violence. The same media can then be used to propagate a particular, highly par-
tisan, and incomplete version or interpretation of reality. This can also lead to veiled
and even direct incitement to violence. The spread of malicious poison of this sort is
effectively unchecked, and the most outrageous statements can be made without
any consideration for consequences—or perhaps even intending bad consequences
but without any fear of being brought to book. Typically, such impunity is heavily
one-sided: opponents of those in power can be brought to book and punished for the
most minor of offences, while those implicitly supported by ruling groups escape
unscathed. As a result, mobs and other violent forces can be brought into the service
of the rulers much more rapidly and with much greater geographical reach.
A third and important feature of the new technologies is that they facilitate State
surveillance over the activities of any potential dissenters, or even those who
demand that the rights of citizens be respected. Simple phone tapping is now old
hat. The new technologies—and the reliance of more and more citizens on them in
various ways—enable almost complete surveillance of a person’s life, including her
or his social interactions, professional dealings, geographical location, financial and
commercial transactions, and so on. This significantly aids the process of sup-
pressing any opposition and imposing authoritarian rule.
All this suggests that at one level, the new techniques of control and surveillance
of the 21st Century have the potential to be much more powerful in establishing
authoritarian control than similar tendencies in the past. But there is an important
sense in which such control may be fundamentally weaker, in all of the countries in
which it is sought to be imposed. This is in terms of the political economy con-
ditions within which authoritarianism can flourish and succeed. Today’s authori-
tarian governments are typically proponents of neoliberal economic thinking: they
espouse liberalized markets of goods, services, and most importantly, finance.
These economic strategies are fundamentally at odds with significantly increased
employment generation, not only because of their emphasis on fiscally austere
government policies but because the model of globalization that they were
associated with has itself run out of steam and is facing backlash even in the core
capitalist countries. Therefore, whether in Turkey or Egypt or India, such policies
cannot be associated with big increases in job creation, especially for the youth in
these countries who form the storm troopers of the associated movements and are
the most concerned with the lack of economic opportunities in the immediate
future. Even the wars that countries engage in (such as Turkey’s entry into the war
in Syria) generate relatively little employment.
The material conditions that create the initial disaffection with liberal political
orders and the support for authoritarianism are therefore unlikely to be reversed on
the basis of the economic strategies followed by such governments. If that is so,
then it is hard to see how broader political support for these tendencies can be
maintained for too long. In the Indian context, the ability of such forces to attain
hegemony is further complicated by the very complexity of Indian polity and
society, the federal structure, and various other fissures that the centralizing gov-
ernment seems unable to contain. Most of all, ultimately the democratic impulse
still seems deeply rooted among the citizenry, against all odds. This is expressed not
only in electoral verdicts, which can often reflect the ability of the State, the ‘leader’
and the media to influence and control a significant part of the population’s
behaviour, but also in greater awareness of the rights of the citizenry and the
ultimate obligations of the State to deliver on its promises and ensure the realization
of at least some of those rights. So however dark and depressing the current period
may be, we should remember that this too shall pass, and the creation of an
absurdist and unequal modernity would eventually be subsumed and overcome by
the institution of a more progressive, equal, and democratic vision.
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Chapter 5
Political Innovation in the Working
of Indian Democracy: A Study
of the Group of Ministers Device
(1999–2014)
Balveer Arora and K. K. Kailash
Given the conditions under which Indian democracy was born, political innovation
was an imperative necessity for survival. Conventional wisdom of the times stip-
ulated certain prerequisites for the success of democracies, largely derived from the
existing models of western democracies. These were far from being present at the
birth of Indian democracy, with its poor and largely illiterate electorate being
bestowed universal suffrage in one fell swoop. The literature on political mod-
ernization stressed mainly the development of differentiated institutional structures
based on the Rule of Law and robust structures for checks and balances on the
exercise of power.1
Institutional innovations that marked the foundations of the Indian Union
exhibited a remarkable recognition of the need for putting together, over time, the
requisites necessary for a successful democracy. These were grouped together as
1
Lucian Pye and David Apter were prominent proponents of this approach. The political devel-
opment literature of the 1970s was also accompanied by reflections on the possibility of political
decay by Samuel Huntington. In the contemporary context, political regression is very much a
concern in many regimes that were considered progressive and liberal earlier. See Pankaj Mishra,
Age of Anger: A History of the Present, (Juggernaut: 2017).
B. Arora
Centre for Multilevel Federalism, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, India
e-mail: balveerarora@gmail.com
K. K. Kailash (&)
Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
e-mail: kailashkk@uohyd.ac.in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_5
82 B. Arora and K. K. Kailash
objectives to be worked towards, in the section on directive principles of state

policy of the Constitution.2
The pursuit of the ideal and objective of political, economic, and social justice in
its various forms was manifest in the institutional devices provided for State
involvement in the achievement of equality. Notable among them was the recog-
nition of the asymmetry principle and the need for affirmative action.3 Inequality
was recognized and factored into State policies for achieving equality, by refusing
to treat unequals as equals. Special status and affirmative action principles were
innovated upon to reach these objectives.
The innovation imperative was thus a compelling one as India embarked upon
the task of building a modern secular republic. As the party system moved from
single-party dominance to multiparty competition, federal coalitions became the
norm. Decision-making in the cabinet system of parliamentary government needed
to be tweaked to adapt to the demands of a federalized party system where par-
ticipant parties had distinct territorial bases in the federation.
In this paper, we study one such innovation, which dominated governance at the
Centre during the 16 years which could be considered the heyday of federal
coalitions.4 Our study is premised on the idea that there are different cultures of
governance in different political systems. What are the features which permit an
innovative culture in matters of governance is the overarching question that we seek
to address through this study.
The culture of governance that is dominant and practised in India has evolved
over time. Flexibility and adaptability as values have been enshrined in the
Constitution. For example, the internal boundaries of the Indian Union could be
modified through a simple Act of Parliament without having recourse to a consti-
tutional amendment. The link between recognizing an issue and resolving it is a
tenuous one, but linguistic and cultural pluralism has helped in keeping the Indian
Union together by frontally accepting diversity as a legitimate principle for political
organization.
In this plural socio–political environment which got reflected in the party sys-
tem, the federalization of political parties presented a challenge to democratic
governance. The ultimate objective of these political innovations has been to evolve
a viable consensus. This required the participation of different political formations
2
Part IV of the Constitution enjoins upon the State to work towards these goals, which were
technically not enforceable as Rights in the courts of law. However, the Supreme Court gradually
read many of these objectives into the fundamental rights to life and liberty, considering the right
to life with dignity as being an inherent part of the right to life. See Ananya Vajpaeyi, Righteous
Republic: The political foundations of Modern India, (Harvard University Press, 2012).
3
Cf Gopal Guru, “India’s Liberal Democracy” in Arjun Appadurai and Arien Mack ed., India’s
World: The Politics of Creativity in a Globalised Society, (Rupa, 2012). See also Arjun Appadurai
on the widespread rejection of liberal democracy in Heinrich Geiselberger ed The Great
Regression, (Polity Press, 2017).
4
During the period from 1998 to 2014 there were two coalition experiments under AB Vajpayee
(1998–2004) and two under Manmohan Singh (2004–14). For a review of literature see KC Suri
ed Indian Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2013) Chap. 3.
5 Political Innovation in the Working of Indian Democracy … 83
in developing and implementing a coherent programme of governance. Flexibility

and adaptability have been the defining features of this political lexicon, and go
beyond good governance. They also encompass non-governance as an acceptable
variant of governance.
We explicate this argument through the study of an institutional device which
enabled Indian democracy to extricate itself from possible gridlocks and impasses
due to the coalitional nature of governments. It was first introduced by the NDA I
government of Atal Behari Vajpayee during the period 1999–2004 and came to be
known as the Group of Ministers (GoM). This device was further developed and
improved upon during the two successive spells of UPA rule from 2004 to 2014
under Manmohan Singh. As it developed, it went beyond the mere objective of
inter-ministerial coordination, which is fairly common in parliamentary systems. It
sought to also go beyond the majoritarian principle by incorporating the views and
interests of coalition partners represented in the government. In a multilevel elec-
toral system, their regional support bases made them valuable partners and required
an inclusive approach to policy making.
The GoM device provides concrete evidence of the capacity for institutional
innovation of the system to counter obstacles in governance. India has had to
innovate to survive as a democracy during the 70 years that have elapsed since its
inception. Its resilience is derived from this capacity to innovate. Innovation is most
in evidence during periods in which the diversity of the multiparty system is given
full expression, making it imperative to experiment with new ways of securing
national cohesion.
At this point it is important for us to underline that the capacity to innovate in
order to adapt to contemporary situations is for us one of the hallmarks of
modernity. Since there are no universal models of modernity and the contemporary
is conditioned by the context in which it develops,5 the unfolding of modernity in
the non-western world is different, for example, in Japan, Turkey or India.
Innovation involves inventiveness but is different from its jugaad version to the
extent that it improves upon the capacity of the existing system to cope with
contemporary political and social realities.6
The study that follows is divided into three sections. In the first section, we focus
on the salient features of the party system transformation. In the next section, we
develop the multiple reasons for the creation and the working of the GoM mech-
anism. We conclude the study with an assessment of its contribution to public
policy processes during this period and some reflections on the incidence of
regression from modernity. Since modernization is clearly not a unilinear and
5
See Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Harvard University Press, 1993) and also
Francois Laplantine, Tokyo, Ville Flottante ( Stock, 2010) on non-western modernities.
6
J. Prabhu, N. Radjou, S. Ahuja, Jugaad Innovation (Wiley 2012) denotes make-shift or impro-
vised solutions to tide over immediate problems. If digitization is taken as a measure of mod-
ernization, then India was very fast to adopt and adapt it. See Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, Cell
Phone Nation, (Hachette 2013).
irreversible process, we reflect on the institutional conditions necessary for systems

to survive phases of regression without succumbing to a retreat from liberalism
itself.7
1 Party System Transformation
The impetus for political innovation came primarily from the transformation of
India’s party system from a one-party dominant system to a federalized and frag-
mented competitive multiparty system (Arora 2003; Sridharan 2002; Hasan 2002;
Yadav and Palshikar 2003; Suri 2013). The Indian National Congress (henceforth
Congress), the dominant polity-wide party till around 1967, both at the Centre and
in most states, gradually ceded space to other political parties first at the state level
and subsequently at the Centre. In its dominant phase, the Congress did not nec-
essarily win absolute majorities, but the working of the first past the post system
enabled it to come out as the winner (Kailash 2014a). The lack of coordination
between the other political parties in the electoral fray fragmented the votes giving
the Congress a distinctive advantage.
This comes out when we examine the effective number of parties (ENP) index.
The ENP index measured at the level of votes and seats is often used to determine
the degree party system fragmentation. This measure highlights both the extent of
fragmentation as well as the relevance of parties in the competition for government.
As the indicator increases, the number of relevant parties and fragmentation goes
up. The Congress’ dominance in the Lok Sabha until 1967 is distinctly visible in
Table 1. First, while there were numerous parties in competition, their votes did not
necessarily translate into seats. While the ENP (votes) was more than three for the
first three general elections, the ENP (seats) was less than two. Second, the number
of relevant parties in the competition for government indicated by ENP (seats)
begins to increase after 1967. Finally, the transformation to a competitive multi-
party system since 1989 and the inauguration of coalition and/or minority gov-
ernments can also be identified. There is an increased number of parties in the
electoral fray since 1989. While the average number of parties contesting elections
till 1989 was less than 35, it goes up to more than 230 after 1989. Similarly, the
average number of parties finally represented in Parliament almost doubles after
1989. It is not surprising that the ENP both in terms of seats and votes shoots up
after 1989.
7
On the rule of law in the development of modernity see Alain Supiot, Homo Juridicus: On the
Anthropological Function of the Law, (Verso, 2007). See also his The Spirit of Philadelphia:
Social Justice vs The Total Market, (Verso 2012). It seems to us that the Rule of Law is a critical
element in the definition of modernity, even more than the conduct of elections, which has become
the base line for all regimes claiming democratic credentials.
Table 1 Party competition and fragmentation in parliament

Election Lok Sabha Parties contested Parties represented Effective
number of
parties
Seats Votes
1952 1 41 15 1.79 4.53
1957 2 15 13 1.76 3.97
1962 3 26 21 1.85 4.40
1967 4 24 19 3.16 5.19
1971 5 54 25 2.12 4.63
1976 6 35 19 2.63 3.39
1980 7 37 18 2.28 4.25
1984 8 36 18 1.69 3.99
1989 9 114 25 4.35 4.80
1991 10 147 25 3.70 5.10
1996 11 210 31 5.83 7.11
1998 12 177 40 5.28 6.91
1999 13 170 39 5.87 6.74
2004 14 231 39 6.50 7.60
2009 15 364 39 5.00 7.70
2014 16 444 36 3.50 7.00
Source For Effective Number of Parties (Parties and Votes) general elections, 1952–1999, Journal
of the Indian School of Political Economy, XV/1–2 (January–June 2003), Statistical Supplement,
Tables 1.1–1.13, pp. 293–307. For general elections, 2004–2014, Palshikar and Suri, India’s 2014
Lok Sabha Elections: critical shifts in the long term, caution in the short term, Economic and
Political Weekly, XLIX no. 39, Table 1, p. 40. For columns 3 and 4, parties contested and
represented, Election Commission of India election statistics see Kailash (2014a). All
independents are counted as one party for each election in this table
This proliferation of political parties and fragmentation according to Arora

(2003) is primarily because of the federalization of the party system. He argues that
federalism, as a principle of political organization, allows political parties to con-
centrate on specific regions and yet be federally competitive without having to
spread themselves across the polity. This has encouraged the formation and con-
tinuation of single state-based parties. As no two states have the same configuration
of parties in competition, the numbers and the diversity of parties getting repre-
sented at the national level automatically increases. This federal incentive in many
ways accounts for the fragmentation that shows up in the ENP indices.
Using the dimension of spread and concentration of political parties, Arora
(2003) distinguished three types of parties, polity-wide, multi-state and single-state
parties to explain coalition formation in India. Polity-wide and multi-state parties
were essentially coalition makers, and the single-state parties formed the pool of
coalitionable. It is only the two polity-wide parties that are returned from across the
four zones (North, East, West and South). At the same time, they too are not evenly
60 50 INC (Seats)
45
BJP (Seats)
50
40
Multi-state parties*
35
40 (Seats)
30 Single-State parties and
30 25 Independents (Seats)
INC (Votes)
20
20 BJP (Votes)
15
10 Multi-state parties*
10
5 (Votes)
Single-State parties and
0 0 Independents (Votes)
1996 1998 1999 2004 2009 2014
Chart 1 Seat and vote share of political parties (1996–2014). Source Kailash (2014c). Note The
chart is adapted from Arora (2000). *Multi-state parties are parties other than the two polity-wide
parties that are recognized as ‘national’ by the Election Commission on the basis of their
performance in the preceding election. (1) 1996: AIIC (T), CPI (M), CPI, Samata Party, Janata Dal
and Janata Party; (2) 1998: BSP, CPI (M), CPI, Samata Party, Janata Dal; (3) 1999: BSP, CPI (M),
CPI, Samata Party and Janata Dal (United); (4) 2004: CPI (M), CPI and NCP; (5) 2009: BSP, CPI
(M), CPI, NCP and RJD; (6) 2014: CPI (M), CPI, and NCP
spread out across the zones. The BJP, for instance, has always been weak in the
East and the South. Furthermore, it is in these two zones that the single-state parties
are more successful (Kailash 2014c) (Chart 1).
Notwithstanding the victory of the BJP in 2014 and the fact that it was the first
time in 30 years that a single party had a majority of its own, the rise of single
state-based parties has been the distinguishing feature of the post-Congress polity.
Since 1996, single-state parties have been important players at the federal level. The
federalization and/or fragmentation is reflected in the series of multiparty govern-
ments since 1989 (Arora and Kailash 2012) (see Table 2). While the first federal
Table 2 Multiparty governments since 1989

Year (Lok Government Parties in the governing Parties in the legislative coalition
Sabha) coalition
1989 (9th) National JD+ DMK+ TDP+ AGP+ BJP+ CPM+ CPI+ RSP+ AIFB+
Front Cong (S)
1989 (9th) Janata Dal SJP INC+ AIADMK+ BSP+ MUL+
(Samajwadi) JKN+ KCM+ SAD (M)+ IND
1991 (10th) Congress Congress AIADMK, MUL, KCM
1996 (11th) BJP+ BJP+ SHS+ SAD Samata
1996 (11th) United JD+ DMK+ SP+ TMC+ INC+ CPM+ RSP+ AIFB
Front-I TDP+ CPI+ AGP+ AIIC (T)
+ MGP
(continued)
Table 2 (continued)
Year (Lok Government Parties in the governing Parties in the legislative coalition
Sabha) coalition
1996 (11th) United JD+ DMK+ SP+ TMC+ INC+ CPM+ RSP+ AIFB
Front-II TDP+ CPI+ AGP+ AIIC (T)
+ MGP
1998 (12th) BJP BJP+ SHS+ SAD+ BJD+ JKN+ TDP+ SDF+ MSCP+
Alliance PMK+ LS+ AC+ AIADMK BSMC+ RJP+ HLD (R)+ AITC+
+ PMK MDMK+ HVP
1999 (13th) National BJP+ SHS+ SAD+ BJD+ TDP+ INLD+ MADMK+
Democratic IFDP+ DMK+ MDMK+ ABLTC+ INLD+ SDF+ HVC
Alliance-I PMK+ JKN+ MSCP+ RLD
2004 (14th) United INC+ DMK+ PMK+ NCP+ CPM+ CPI+ RSP+ AIFB+ SP+
Progressive IUML+ JKN+ RJD+ LJP+ BSP+ MIM+ SDF+ MDMK+
Alliance-I JMM KCM+ JKPDP
2009 (15th) United INC+ DMK+ NCP+ IUML+ SP+ BSP+ SDF+ RJD+ JD (S)+
Progressive JKN+ AITC+ RLD JVM (P)+ BVA+ AUDF+ NPF+
Alliance-II MIM+ BPF+ KCM+ VCK+ JMM
2014 (16th) National BJP+ SAD+ SHS+ TDP+ PMK+ AD+ RLSP+ NPP+ NPF+
Democratic LJP SWP+ AINRC
Alliance-II
Source Data for Lok Sabha till UPA-II has been drawn largely from Table 5 in Sridharan (2012).
However, the data in some of the above columns have been updated. Independents and splinter
parties have been excluded. The data for the NDA-II government is drawn from Table 1 in Kailash
(2014b)
coalitions did not last their full term, governments since 1999 have completed their
terms of office and one of them has even been re-elected.
2 Group of Ministers as Political Innovation
Innovation in governance and public policy processes can take different forms. It
can be in terms of new policies and programmes, practices and processes such as
the better use of existing resources, but also in redesigning and overhauling existing
institutions. Innovations could range from limited, simple, minor tweaks to major
alterations in the system. Like any other innovation, political innovation too is
essentially geared to meet changed circumstances and different challenges. The
‘new’ factor whether in terms of policy, process, resource or design aims to bring
about change in the existing pattern of working and equips the actor to meet
different political, administrative and policy-making necessities. In this chapter, we
focus on innovation in terms of new institutional arrangements and practices that

arose as a result of the party system transformation, concentrating specifically on
the GoM mechanism.
In an earlier study, we had examined the role of the National Advisory Council
(NAC). In that study, we noted that it played a major part in policy-making during
the tenure of the UPA government.8 We further observed that innovation usually
happens in crisis and ‘vulnerable’ situations when actors find the existing resources
inadequate to meet the demands of the situation. In this context, we argued that the
NAC was the result of the Congress party’s endeavour to reinvent itself after being
out of power for more than eight years. It ‘was an attempt to focus the attention of the
government on issues that mattered for the party’s electoral survival and renaissance,
even if the government viewed them as either secondary or even inimical to the
primary agenda of economic growth it had defined’ (Arora and Kailash 2014).
In the case of the GoM device, we enlarge the context in which political
innovation can take place. Innovation does not always have to happen only in crisis
situations. Political actors often innovate to improve their chances, even if the
objective is only to maintain the status-quo. The GoM mechanism, we demonstrate,
was not the result of any manifest crisis but an attempt to tweak the process of
decision-making under new circumstances. In doing so, it may have averted some
crises in intra-coalition management.
2.1 The Basic Features of the Group of Ministers Device
The GoM mechanism is an inter-ministerial panel of a special kind usually com-

posed of three to six or more cabinet ministers. Typically inter-ministerial coor-
dination panels are limited to the representatives of those ministries directly
involved or concerned by the issue under discussion. In the GoM the criteria for
inclusion are much broader. To meet these criteria, on many occasions, especially
during the UPA-II phase, ministers of state too have been involved as special
invitees. However, membership is not restricted to the council of ministers either, as
the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission and the Economic Advisor in
the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) have been notable members.9 Furthermore, on
certain issues that were state-specific, the GoM composition has been further
expanded to include state chief ministers or ministers and even the Lieutenant
Governor of Delhi in certain cases.
If one were to trace the institutional antecedents of this innovation, the first
reference to something similar goes back to the first federal coalition, namely the
8
“Strengthening Legislative Capabilities in India: The National Advisory Council”, pp. 189–230 in
Sudha Pai and Avinash Kumar ed. The Indian Parliament (Orient Blackswan: 2014).
9
The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission during this period was Montek Singh
Ahluwalia, a trusted advisor of the Prime Minister.
National Front (NF) government headed by V. P. Singh (1990–91). It set up min-

isterial panels on issues like price rise, Panchayati Raj, electronic media autonomy,
right to work, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, and the right to information.10 This
practice continued with the coalitions that succeeded the Narasimha Rao govern-
ment, namely the United Front government (UF) (1996–98) and the BJP+ govern-
ment (1998–99).11 However, it is with the NDA (1999–2004) that the device takes
off in a big way. As we noted earlier, it is with the NDA government (1999–2004)
that the device began to acquire some shape and salience in a real sense.12 Given the
limited availability of data on the GoMs for the early phase of federal coalitions, we
focus on the period of the Congress-led UPA governments (2004–14).
A few words on the methodology we used to collect data for this study would be
in order here. One of the landmark legislations during the UPA-I was the Right to
Information (RTI) Act 2005. The NAC played a key role in the framing of this Act,
and as we noted elsewhere, it paved the way for a ‘new public accountability
regime’ (Arora and Kailash 2014). Indeed, it is this new public accountability
regime that opened space for us to gather data for this paper. Initially, when we put
in an application to the Cabinet Secretariat asking for data on the GoMs, we were
asked to approach different ministries and collect the information ourselves, since a
centralized data pool was not available13. Our first appeal to the First Appellate
Authority (FAA) was also not successful. The FAA instructed the Cabinet
Secretariat to provide us a list of GoM/EGoMs along with their subject and ser-
vicing departments within one of the order dated July 30, 2009. We were then asked
to collect further information from the concerned department servicing the partic-
ular GoM. We did not receive any list and were forced to appeal to the Chief
Information Commission (CIC). It was on the instructions of the CIC that the
cabinet secretariat shared the GoM data, but not before putting up some resistance.
When it was pointed out in the hearing that much of the information had already
been presented in Parliament in response to questions and was therefore already in
10
The Hindu (Chennai), December 08, 1989.
11
The UF had set up GoMs on the pay panel recommendations and production sharing contracts
for oil exploration and production and the review of the 5th Pay Commission. The BJP+ gov-
ernment had set up GoMs on issues like IT, formation of new states, prices, tourism, telecom,
revamping the oil sector and national security among other issues. The data for the early phase of
federal coalitions is not readily available.
12
The NDA-I had set up more than 40 GoMs. However, details of this period are not available. In
response to a query under the Right to Information Act, we were informed that the matters
concerning GoMs were “secret”. They were constituted at the discretion of the Prime Minister and
they dissolved once the task assigned to them was completed. A newspaper report of that period
also highlights the secrecy factor behind the GoMs. The Statesman in a news report on the
constitution of a GoM on India Millennium Missions, 2002 quoted a “secret paper” that was
circulated among the GoM members as its source of information. The Statesman (New Delhi),
December 02, 2002, (New Delhi).
13
Our first RTI application to CPIO, Cabinet Secretariat was on February 17, 2009. We got a reply
on March 12, 2009.
the public domain, the Cabinet Secretariat relented and complied14. Subsequently, it
started putting out the information it had collated on GoMs and Empowered Groups
of Ministers (EGoMs) on its website.
In this paper, we examine data for both UPA I and UPA II. While most of the
data presented was obtained through the RTI application, some of the information
for the period not covered by our application was collected from the Press
Information Bureau and media sources. In this paper, we have combined GoMs and
the EGoMs, which constitute a variant of the original device except for the fact that
they were authorized to take a decision on behalf of the cabinet, whereas the regular
GoMs reported back with their recommendations for a decision. We do not dis-
tinguish between them in the analysis.
Our study of the GoMs reveals that they have been used for three categories of
issues. These include issues concerning the following domains: (a) economy and
finance, (b) social and cultural sector and (c) politics and governance. Our tabu-
lation into these three broad areas was primarily guided by the stated purpose or the
explicit terms of reference (where available), which led to the constitution of the
GoM.15 Between May 2004 and the last week of May 2014 more than 170 GoMs
were constituted. These included 80 in the economy and finance sectors, 20 in the
social and cultural sector and 72 in the politics and governance categories. Though
some of the GoMs were constituted more than once, in this study, we only count the
first instance they were constituted if the subjects dealt with were broadly the same.
Our study finds that GoMs broadly serve two purposes. First, in the language of
the ‘Principal–Agent’ (P–A) framework, GoMs are primarily transactional cost
reduction mechanisms.16 While we are aware of the limitations of the P–A
framework and the context in which it was developed, it is nevertheless useful to
understand delegation to institutional arrangements that support cabinet
decision-making. The Cabinet headed by the Prime Minister is the principal who
establishes the GoM. The GoM as the agent exercises the delegated powers and is
responsible to the principal. From the P–A framework, we know that principals
delegate to agents since the benefits of delegation outweigh the costs. The com-
monly acknowledged benefits of delegation apply to the GoM mechanism as well,
plus some additional benefits arising from the fact that India is a multilevel federal
system.
Second, GoMs also worked as federal representation devices. One of the
long-standing demands of state-based parties has been greater say in national level
decision-making (Arora et al. 2014). Their participation in the national government
through federal coalitions added a new dimension to decision-making at the
14
The final CIC order is available here: <Decision No. CIC/WB/A/2009/000994-SM dated
04-03-2011 on Appeal from Mr. KAILASH K K Vs Cabinet Secretariat (−1 )> (accessed March
12, 2018).
15
For a complete list of GoMs used during the UPA see Appendix to this chapter.
16
For the P-A framework see Shugart, M. S. (2006). Comparative Executive-Legislative Relations
in R. A. W. Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of
Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 343–365.
national level. This involvement forced innovation in the form of new processes
and mechanisms which moved beyond existing constitutional provisions and in the
process also transformed the working of Centre-state relations in India. The GoM
besides serving as a transactional cost-saving device is also a power-sharing device
that has enriched the federal idea.
As a cost-reduction mechanism, the GoM found multiple uses. First, it worked
as a coordination device minimizing differences of opinion and conflicts within the
cabinet. In a federal coalition with multiple parties, differences are to be expected,
and since GoMs are small bodies, it is easier for them to work out compromises,
iron out differences and reach a consensus. Second, as a public policy-making
arena, they play a valuable role since the mechanism not only allows for special-
ization but also enables agents to obtain detailed and even technical information
which is beneficial for making policy decisions or vetting policy and programme
recommendations. Third, it also provides space for challenging ‘unpopular’ deci-
sions and thus insulates the principal from directly taking the blame. At the same
time, it also makes it difficult for the actors involved to back out later, especially if
the decision turns out to be unpopular.
Therefore, besides insulation, GoMs also help bind or tie parties to a decision.
Thus, it takes care of the challenge of maintaining collective responsibility in a
parliamentary system. Finally, it is an important coalition-maintenance mechanism,
especially when used to look into matters of concerns to allies in the coalition. An
enquiry by an inter-ministerial committee like the GoM significantly enhances the
status of the issue and gives the impression that it is being considered at a very high
level.17 As a maintenance mechanism, it takes care of not only governmental
coordination but also the party-government interface at multiple levels.
We have shown elsewhere that ‘intra-coalition’ dynamics are a critical dimen-
sion of coalition politics (Kailash 2014b). Coalitions are characterized by both
‘cooperative and competitive tensions’ between partners (Tsebelis 1988). Partners
compete not only with other political parties outside the coalition but also with
partners in a coalition. Consequently, a coalition has to constantly balance the urges
of competition and cooperation that invariably arise. We find that GoMs play a
crucial role in balancing the demands of collaboration and competition and creating
a space for expression of interests across the spectrum represented.
The experience with coalition governments at the Centre has been that both the
coalition makers the BJP (1998–2004) and the Congress (2004–2014) came to
17
The SAD (Badal) had threatened to withdraw from the NDA I alliance if the Udham Singh
district was incorporated into the new state of Uttaranchal. A GoM on the issue helped pacify the
party as it felt sufficient importance had been given to the issue. This becomes more evident in the
case of another VIP ally the TDP. Rajasthan had been crying for drought relief probably every
single year. However, the government took extreme care when it came to dealing with a similar
problem in the state of Andhra Pradesh. A GoM on drought in Andhra Pradesh was constituted to
deal with the issue. This GoM was constituted in the year 2001 much before the country as a whole
was affected by the same problem in 2002. Significantly in 2002 there was no such group to deal
with the crisis. This is only an indication of possibilities of the GoM mechanism being used to
cater to allies’ concerns.
Table 3 GoM chairperson by sector

S. No. Chairperson Party Economic and Social and Politics and Total
finance cultural governance
1 Pranab INC 36 7 27 70
Mukherjee
2 A. K. Antony INC 3 2 7 12
3 Arjun Singh INC 1 7 4 12
4 P. Chidambaram INC 18 1 14 33
5 P. M. Sayeed INC 1 1
6 Sharad Pawar NCP 16 1 12 29
7 Shivraj Patil INC 1 2 5 8
8 Sushil Kumar INC 5 0 1 6
Shinde
9 Jaipal Reddy INC 0 0 2 2
81 20 72 173
Source Calculation by the authors from data collected through the RTI, press releases by the
Government of India and media reports
terms with the constraints and compulsions of power sharing and preferred to
operate within the strong-centre framework. Rather than reduce the role of the
Centre, both of them have sought to involve states in decision-making at the
national level. In this connection, the GoM fits snugly in the strong-centre frame-
work; it has acted as a federal representation device both in terms of issues con-
sidered and also representation in the decision-making apparatus. At the same time,
it is clearly an executive-centred device, which does not enhance the sphere of
federal coordination, and consultation in a formal sense as the primary mechanism
created for this purpose, the Inter-State Council, was hardly used for the purposes
for which it was intended.
Furthermore, contrary to popular perception, our study shows that
decision-making by the GoM does not indicate a dilution of the Prime Ministerial
office.18 It is a device that makes decision-making more responsive rather than
making the PMO powerless.19 While it does denote a reversal of the trend which
had made state leaders and representatives of special groups/interests ineffectual in
the federal policy-making process, there is clearly an intra-coalition competition
agenda that is visible in the setting up of the GoMs.
First, as can be seen in Table 3, the coalition maker dominated the GoM
mechanism. The Congress not only headed almost all the GoMs but was also
18
It is the Cabinet headed by the Prime Minister that constitutes a GoM. The Cabinet Secretariat
therefore has a key role in keeping track of them.
19
Pranab Mukherjee, in an interview to the Indian Express, noted that the GoM device enabled
involvement of a large number of ministers, allows an in-depth study, X-ray and analysis of an
issue from various angles. The GoM helped iron out differences and made decision-making easier
for the cabinet. The Indian Express (New Delhi), June 07, 2005.
Table 4 Party wise representation in GoMs (2004–14)

Economic and financial Social and cultural Politics and governance
INC 279 98 330
DMK 24 4 27
JKN 2 1 0
JMM 1 0 0
LJP 10 3 5
NCP 27 5 23
PMK 4 3 1
RJD 13 5 16
RLD 0 0 1
TMC 4 2 3
represented in larger numbers. Moreover, during the UPA-II (2009–14) regime,

even ministers of state from the Congress found place on GoMs, something which
was denied to the allies. Among the allies, only the Nationalist Congress Party
(NCP) had the privilege of heading a GoM. This composition pattern highlighted in
Table 4 underscores the competitive element and the fact that agents may have their
interests which are in conflict with that of the principal. To reduce agency losses as
a result of delegation and to reign in competition between allies, coalition-makers
have tailored the GoM to suit the interests of the principal.
We did an issue portfolio analysis of the GoMs with reference to the Congress
membership to check whether there is any justification for the overwhelming
dominance of the Congress in the GoMs. While the law ministry provides advice to
all ministries on all legal matters including interpretation of the Constitution and the
laws, the finance ministry provides advice on economic management.20 Hence the
presence of these two ministers in many of the GoMs can be justified. However, a
similar link cannot be discerned with reference to the defence ministry and the other
issues taken by the GoMs for instance, the Dabhol power plant, SMED bill,
Centre-state relations, and the Lok Pal Bill among others.
The chair of the GoM gives the principal/coalition maker agenda-setting powers,
and enables them to steer decisions to suit the principal’s interests. Furthermore, the
inclusion of the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission in around 30% of
the GoMs also indicates agenda control. The ‘technical’ voice of the Deputy
Chairman could be a critical factor in pushing decisions one way or the other.
Under UPA-II the Prime Minister kept track of the work being done by the GoMs
through the Minister of State in the PMO who was a special invitee on some of
them of particular interest.
20
The Second Schedule, (Rule 3), Distribution of Subjects among the Departments (vibhag),
source: <http://cabsec.nic.in/abr/abr_scnd.htm> (accessed March 16, 2006).
While the coalition partners called the shots during the UPA-I, there was a
marked change in the relationship between the coalition-maker and the coalition-
able after 2009. In the 2009 general elections, snubbed by some of its old allies the
Congress decided to go it alone without electoral adjustments in states like Bihar
and Uttar Pradesh (Kailash 2009). This gamble of ditching electoral alliances paid
off handsomely. The Congress not only emerged as the dominant coalition-maker,
but it also enhanced its intra-coalition position. This allowed the party to rewrite the
rules of engagement between the coalition-maker and the coalitionable (Kailash
2014b). This new engagement is also visible in the GoMs during the UPA-II
regime. We found that GoMs in which only the Congress was represented increased
substantially. Furthermore, as noted earlier, even junior ministers from the Congress
were involved in the GoMs under the UPA-II. This staffing pattern of the GoMs
underlines the control exercised by the Prime Minister and the coalition-maker.
3 Innovation in Federal Coordination and Representation
As a federal representation device, the GoM has given a new dimension to feder-
alism in India (Arora and Kailash 2007). It has enabled state-based representatives
to participate in national level decision-making and also introduced a local or
state-based flavour in national decision-making.21 Our analysis of GoMs as a
federal representation device was done at two levels, one, issue portfolio analysis
and, two, federal dimension analysis. In the issue portfolio analysis, we looked at
the composition of the GoM focusing on the portfolios and the subject under the
consideration of the GoM. First, we marked all GoMs, which had coalitionable
parties and then eliminated all the GoMs in which the portfolio of the coalitionable
party minister matched the subject under consideration. For example, the Minister
for Communication and IT in the GoM on uplinking and downlinking of TV
channels is a regular inter-ministerial panel. This elimination left us with GoMs
where the issue under consideration and the portfolio were unconnected. For
instance, the Minister of Chemicals, Steel and Fertilisers in the GoM on prevention
of child marriage or the presence of the Minister for Agriculture on the revamping
of the National Textiles Corporation. The portfolios of the coalition-maker were not
considered to identify the federal representation dimension (Table 5).
In the appendix which lists all the GoMs used by the UPA (2004–14), those that
served as a federal representation device are demarcated from the general GoMs.
The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the NCP were represented on almost
all significant GoMs in all the three categories though the ministers from these
parties held portfolios often unconnected with the issue under consideration. These
21
Formal channels for participation of states in national policy making have worked intermittently
or not at all. The Interstate Council is a notable example of a non-functioning forum. This
mechanism enables representation at the executive level of state parties which are members of the
ruling coalition.
Table 5 Sectoral and federal representation in GoMs (2004–14)

GoM type Economic and Social and Politics and Total
financial cultural governance
General purpose 49 5 31 85
Federal 31 15 41 87
representation
80 20 72 172
include the GoMs on the amendments to the patents bill, World Trade Organization
strategy, Special Economic Zones, national urban renewal mission, Foreign Direct
Investment norms, Employment Guarantee Scheme, Disaster Management,
Affirmative Action, Freedom of Information Bill 2004, Centre-State Relations,
Panchayati raj, one-rank-one-pension and the Lok Pal Bill 2004. Their inclusion in
these GoMs indicates reasons beyond pure operational logic.
We concluded that the frequency of coalitionable parties being represented in
GoMs often unconnected with the department of the member indicates a systematic
effort to represent and involve these interests in national decision-making. This
involvement is simply not limited to operational reasons like enabling/aiding the
cabinet in taking decisions. It recognizes the dual role these parties play in federal
coalitions. While they are members of the Central government, they also represent
certain specific interests. Their part in the GoM reflects the interplay of both these
roles.
In level two of the analysis, we attempted to match the issue and the composition
of the GoM. Our study reveals that when GoMs are set up on issues that are
specifically connected to a particular state or region, then its composition is also
tailored accordingly. A couple of GoMs involved state-specific issues. We found
that these GoMs not only had ministers from the Council but also had state-based
functionaries like the chief minister and even state ministers involved. For instance,
the GoM monitoring the distribution of funds to victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy
had almost all the ministers in the cabinet who hailed from the state of Madhya
Pradesh. Likewise, a Maharashtra connection is evident in the composition of the
GoM dealing with the monitoring of relief efforts of the Mumbai floods, the NTC
revamp and the Dabhol power plant. The overwhelming representation of all the
coalitionable parties from Tamil Nadu in the Tsunami GoM is another example of
the state connection in GoM formation.
We concluded that the federal dimension analysis has shown that on issues
concerning the states, attempts have been made to involve them from the policy
making stage itself. This involvement of states and special interests is a move away
from the earlier centre knows best policy where states were seen merely as
implementers of the policies and programmes that were conceived at the federal
level.
4 Conclusion
Federal coalitions represent an aggregation of interests in the absence of an over-

arching party. State-based and special group/interest parties carry with them a dual
role into the federal cabinet. While they may be called upon to represent different
interests as part of their membership of the national government, they also have a
federal role to perform, which devolves on them by virtue of their territorial alle-
giances. The GoM device has on occasion to combine the exigencies of both these
roles. The GoM device represents an interaction of both these roles. Our analysis of
GoMs at two levels showed that nearly half of the GoMs have acted as a vehicle for
federal representation. The GoM device met the challenges of accommodating the
necessities of coalition governance in an executive-centred federal system.
Our analysis of the GoMs shows that even while they act as a federal repre-
sentation device, the coalition-maker has ensured that they remained reasonably
under its control through a system of checks and balances. Government formation
also indicates a subtle balance between accommodating the demands of coopera-
tion, representation, and competition. If the coalition partners have had opportu-
nities to pick and choose departments/ministries and who sits at the cabinet table at
the time of government formation, the coalition-maker, through a balancing staffing
pattern, has been able to keep runaway ambitions in check. Competition has also
been regulated by the rules and procedures of conducting government business.
Federal coalitions represent an aggregation of interests in the absence of an
overarching dominant party. State-based and special group/interest parties carry
with them a dual role into the federal cabinet. While they may be called upon to
represent different interests as part of their membership of the national government,
they also have a federal role to perform, which devolves on them by virtue of their
territorial allegiances. The GoM device represents an interaction that has on
occasion had to combine the exigencies of both these roles. Our analysis of GoMs
at these two levels of representation shows that more than 53% of the GoMs have
also acted as a vehicle for federal representation. In a way the GoMs device has
been able to meet successfully the challenges of accommodating the necessities of
coalition governance in an executive-centred federal system.
The GoM device is thus the institutional articulation of the federal principle in
the changed contemporary context of federal coalitions. One of the problems of
federalism in India has been that ‘it has a strong social base but weak institutional
articulation’. The institutions that had been created for participation of states in
national decision-making did not fulfil their federal role. During the phase of
Congress hegemony, informal party mechanisms satisfied the needs for represen-
tation and participation. In the federal coalition era the GoM device represents an
institutional innovation to accomplish and satisfy these persistent demands. Though
this device is executive-centred, it does not carry the weaknesses of other
power-sharing arrangements have had, as the states, groups or interests are now part
of the executive. The GoM device is not only a structure of representation but more
Table 6 The relative weight of national and state parties in the Lok Sabha (1996–2014)
Polity-wide and state parties 1996 1998 1999 2004 2009 2014
INC (seats) 25.8 26 21 26.7 37.9 8.1
BJP (seats) 29.6 33.5 33.5 25.4 21.4 51.9
Multi-state partiesa (seats) 18.8 11.8 13.3 14.9 9.9 3
Single-State partiesb (seats) 25.8 28.7 32.2 33 30.8 37
INC (votes) 28.8 25.8 28.3 26.5 28.5 19.3
BJP (votes) 20.3 25.6 23.8 22.1 18.9 31
Multi-state partiesa (votes) 22.7 19.4 20.1 16.6 16.2 5.7
Single-State partiesb (votes) 28.2 29.2 27.8 34.8 36.4 44
Source Adapted from Election Commission of India election statistics
a
Includes other small national parties as defined by the Election Commission
b
Includes independent candidates
importantly reflects a ‘federal process’ that has made federalism more substantial in
the context of India.
The GoMs have simultaneously enabled coordination of inter ministerial
viewpoints, which are present in most government businesses. At the same time the
staffing pattern of the GoM indicates that, like the council of ministers, there has
been an attempt by the coalition-maker to keep matters under its overall control.
The popular perception that the advent of coalitions made government cohesion
problematic is only true in a limited sense. Our analysis of the UPA coalition has
shown that it managed to control coalition partners within a policy-making
framework that performed multiple functions. New devices were put in place to
ensure that the minimum control of outcomes necessary for the coherent public
policy was ensured.
The situation changed somewhat after the 2014 elections when the BJP led by
Narendra Modi captured a commanding majority in the Lok Sabha. The federal
character of the party system, however, remained intact with the persistence of
strong state parties, as the following Table 6 shows. The functioning of the cabinet
has undergone change due to the highly diminished role of coalition partners in
government and the active role of the PMO and the NITI Aayog in public-policy
formulation. The cabinet itself and its committees have a more formal ratification
role.22
What lessons can we draw from situations where coalition government is no
longer necessary at the Centre because of a sufficient parliamentary majority, while
the sway of single-state parties continues in the states? The strength of state parties
in the Lok Sabha remained roughly the same in the 2009 and 2014 elections, yet the
22
The importance of the party in policy making has increased with Amit Shah as BJP president and
Mohan Bhagwat as the RSS Chief. See http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/amit-shah-
meets-rss-chief-mohan-bhagwat-to-discuss-presidential-candidate/story-H04foISTLXV42tvOdS2NrL.
html.
system moved out from the phase where coalition government was inescapable.
The electoral system occasionally papers over the social realities that find expres-
sion in the party system, creating an illusion that the need for their involvement in
public policy-making is rendered redundant. However, a more nuanced reading of
the situation would make it obvious that the functions being performed by the GoM
device during the previous government remain relevant and would still need to be
performed through other means. If opposition and the state parties are not allowed
effective representation in the policy-making process within the institutional sys-
tem, the chances of their moving outside the institutional space and spilling over
into the streets is all the more higher. Our study shows that political innovations
respond to socio–political realities that prompt the search for new solutions to
durable features of the federal power equation.23 This constant effort to modernize
and refine the institutional instruments for sustaining a liberal democratic system
are not immune to phases of regression where regimes lapse into what Fareed
Zakaria terms ‘Illiberal Democracies’.24
Pure majoritarianism is one form of decision-making that is incompatible with
federal democracy. By shedding this narrow restrictive majoritarianism and opting
for a model based on the principles of a secular state, India sought to move towards
a modernity that would allow free reign to the expression of its diversities, true to its
cultural heritage of tolerance and accommodation. That India has survived as a
democracy is in large measure due to its skilful blend of secularism, tolerance, and
respect for the diversities of its federal system. Whether it has succeeded in
developing it as its own specific contribution to the development of alternative
modernities remains for history to decide.
Appendix: Complete List of GoMs and EGoMs 2004–2014

According to Spheres
Economic Social and cultural Political and governance

Exercise Futures options for Appropriate Location of Exemption of Central Police
import of Wheat National War Memorial Forces Personnel from the
(continued)
23
The promise of ‘cooperative federalism’ by the Modi government was designed to meet this
requirement. How far it has succeeded in innovating to achieve this objective would require a
separate study. For a preliminary assessment see MV Srinivasa Gowda, ed From Planning
Commission to NITI Aayog, Excel Publishers, 2017, pp. 43–51.
24
Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, (Viking,
2003).
(continued)
Purview of New Contributory
Pension System
Gas Pricing Law relating to Honour Rehabilitation-cum-Financial
Killing/Crimes Restructuring of Hindustan
Shipyard Limited
(HSL) Vishakapatnam
Labelling Beedi Bundles Establishment of Distance Setting up of Legislative
with warnings on injury to Education Council Assembly in Andaman and
health Nicobar
Issues relating to BALCO National Policy for One Rank Pension
Domestic workers
Review of Fertilizer Policy Amendments to Revamp Amendment to Press and
Immoral Traffic Registration Act, 1867
(Prevention) Act, 1986
Civil Aviation Sector National Rain fed Area
Authority-August 2006
Coal Mines Nationalisation Public Interest Disclosure and
Amendment Bill 2000 Protection of Persons Making
the Disclosures Bill-2009
Strategy for Implementation Amending the Representation
of the National Highways of People Act, 1950
Development Project
(NHDP)
Consider Termination of Reports of the High-Level
Contract relating to Main Committee on
Plant Package for Barh Commonwealth Games 2010
Super Thermal Power
Project
Proposals from Ministry of Superannuation of
Railways Non-Teaching and Public
Health Specialists of Central
Health Service General Duty
Medical Officers
Implementation of ethanol Appropriate Cadre structure
blended petrol Programme for the Indian Revenue
Service (Income Tax) and
other support systems
MoU in the field of Education Cess
technical assistance services
on Highway Management
and Development between
India and Malaysia
Consider draft Mines and Media
Minerals (Development and
Regulation bill 2010)
(continued)
(continued)
Provide Guidance in Terms and Conditions of
coordinating external Service of Chairpersons and
interface on energy security Members of quasi-judicial
matters Tribunals/Commissions/
Regulatory Bodies
Licensing methodology for Haj
FM Phase III
Sale of shareholding by Special Committee for
Cairn Energy Plc in Cairn Inter-Linking of Rivers
India Limited to Vedanta
Resources Plc
Petroleum and Natural Gas Independent Regulatory
Regulatory Bill Authority for Coal Sector—
Approval for introducing the
Coal Regulatory Authority
Bill 2012 in the Parliament
Amendments to Small and Revision of Income Criterion
Medium Enterprises to exclude Socially Advanced
Development Bill, 2005 and Persons/Sections (Creamy
enactment of Micro, Small Layer) from the list of Other
and Medium Enterprises Backward Classes (OBCs)
Development (MSMED)
Bill, 2005
Monitor restructuring of National Skill Development
Delhi and Mumbai Airports Authority
Tourism Industry and Trade Panel of Experts on Reforms
in Central Public Sector
Enterprises
Construction of Greenfield Criminal Law (Amendment)
Airport-Taj International Bill 2013 to replace the
Aviation Hub Criminal Law (Amendment)
Ordinance 2013
Policy for data sharing and Bharat Rural Livelihoods
accessibility Foundation (B.R.L.F.)
Amendments to Independence and functional
Anti-Hijacking Act-1982 autonomy of the Central
Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
Reviving and revitalizing Inclusion of the Jat
Bharat Sanchar Nigam community in the Central list
Limited (BSNL) and of OBCs
Mahanagar Telephone
Nigam Limited (MTNL)
Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Consider the issues relating to
Corridor (AKIC) and development of North Eastern
formation of AKIC Region
Development Corporation
(continued)
(continued)
Amend the Competition Act Integrated Strategy for Water
2002 Management
PSU: Purchase Preference Consider the Official
policy Amendments to the Land
Acquisition Rehabilitation
and Resettlement Bill 2011
Competition Commission of Consider matters relating to
India (CCI) damage to standing crops in
different States
Indian Airlines Fleet Plantation sector: Price
Acquisition Stabilisation Fund
Speed up Implementation of Bills to Amend Chartered
Power Projects Accountants Act, 1949, the
Cost and Works Accountants
Act, 1956 and the Company
Secretaries Act, 1980
Greater investment decision Bifurcation of the State of
making powers for Andhra Pradesh and
OIL-IOC while bidding for formation of a new State of
overseas exploration and Telangana
product assets
Aircraft purchase for Air
India
SPV to implement 22,000
crore Railway Freight
Corridors
Declaring LNG as a
‘declared goods’ status
Sustainable use of fertilizers
and Subsidy and Pricing
Issues
National Pharmaceuticals
Policy 2006
Issues relating to
restructuring of Price
Stabilisation Fund
Scheme for Coffee, Tea,
Rubber and Tobacco
Growers
Policy for existing urea
units beyond stage-III of
New Pricing Scheme (NPS)
Progress of Sale of Wheat in
2013–14 under Open
Market Sale
(continued)
(continued)
Scheme-Domestic
(OMSS-D)
Buffer norms of food grains
in the Central Pool
Pricing of bioethanol for
blending with Petrol and
other related issues
Cotton Distribution Policy
Food processing industry
Integrated Food Safety Law
Accelerated Irrigation
Benefit Programme (AIBP)
Uplinking and Downlinking
of TV channels
Ultra-Mega Power Projects
Issues relating to Waiver of
Custom duty on LNG and
granting status of declared
goods to LNG
Strategy for River
Conservation under the
National River
Conservation Directorate
GoMs used as a federal representation device
Special Economic Zones Dalit Affairs Collate two schemes—
National Population Register
and Unique Identification
Number
Issues relating to World Enumeration of Castes other Consider Recommendations
Trade Organisation than Scheduled Castes and of Administrative Reforms
Scheduled Tribes in Census Commission
2011
Auction of 3G Spectrum Women’s Reservation Bill: Whistle blowers and The
Seeks to add women to Public Interest Disclosure
legislative bodies through (Protection of Informers) Bill
political consensus 2004
Policy for Cluster The SC, ST, OBC Management of Food Grains
Development and its (Reservation of Posts and stocks and the Proposed Law
implementation Services) Bill, 2004 on Food Security
National Civil Aviation Quota issue—to work out a Effective Management of
Policy ‘mechanism’ for drought and related issues
implementing a quota
regime that would address
the concerns of all the
parties—May 2006
(continued)
(continued)
Legal Opinion on the Setting up of Equal Paid News
Survivability of the ‘call Opportunity Commission
Option’ Provisions of
Shareholders Agreements
entered into at the time
strategic sale of public
sector enterprises
Issues relating to Dabhol Pension and Measures to tackle
Power Project Post-Retirement Medical Corruption
Schemes as part of
superannuation benefits for
Employees of Food
Corporation of India
Mass Rapid Transit System Strategies for Speedy Environmental issues relating
for Delhi Socio-Economic to coal mining and other
Development and developmental projects
Empowerment of Women
Price band and final price of Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster Prices of Essential
sale of shares held by Commodities
Government of India in all
CPSEs
Agreement on Trade in AIDS/HIV: National Action Inclusion of cold wave/frost
Goods under the Plan to spread awareness as an eligible calamity for
comprehensive Economic and to develop a relief under NDRF/SDRF
Cooperation Agreement multi-sectoral approach
(CECA) between India and
ASEAN
Ratnagiri Gas and Power Prevention of Child Cess For Rural Roads
Private Limited (RGPPL) Marriage
Vacation of Spectrum and Celebrate Revolt of 1857 Review of National Urban
Auction of 3G Spectrum Renewal Mission
Under-Recoveries of Oil 350th year of Taj Mahal Employment Guarantee
Marketing Companies Celebrations Scheme
Problems of Coal Industry: Continued Implementation Monitoring Relief and
Coal Mines and Extension of Integrated Rehabilitation measures in the
(Nationalization) Act, 1973 Child Development wake of earthquake induced
Services (ICDS) Tsunami waves
Patent Law Equal Opportunities for Disaster Management
Differently-abled
E Minimum area for SEZ Finalization of the terms of
reference on the new
Commission on Centre–State
relations
Disinvestment Illegal migrants
(determination by Tribunals)
Act 1993
(continued)
(continued)
Revival Package for Indian Ministry of Overseas Indian
Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Affairs
Limited (IDPL)
Foreign Contribution Indian Medical Council
(Regulation) Bill 2006 (Amendment) Bill, 2005
Mass Rapid Transit System NDA Scams
(MRTS).
Modernization of transport Community Radio
system in Delhi
Allocation of 80 MGD Resident Identity Cards to all
water out of savings from usual residents—National
the construction of Concrete Population Register (NPR)
Lined Channel (CLC) from
Munak to Haiderpur
Progress in taking up Minimum Wages Act 1948
strategic and electricity
generation projects in
Arunachal Pradesh
Alternative decision-making Strengthening the Panchayati
process for public Raj Institutions
investments
Management of Surplus Salt Organization of
Pan Lands In Mumbai and Commonwealth Games in
other cities Delhi
National Textiles Panchayati Raj ministry and
Corporation Revamping rural projects
Review of foreign direct Issues pertaining to
investment (FDI) norms in functioning of Prasar Bharati
key sectors like retail, power
trading, airports and mining
Textile Export Scenario Special Recruitment Drive for
performance, prospects and Other Backward Classes
the way forward
Feasibility of Metro in other Review Progress of
cities Commonwealth Games
Settlement of dues of DESU Action Plan for sick
Period Subsidiaries of National
Textile Corporation Limited
Power Sector Issues Bill to provide establishment
of Educational Tribunals and
Bill to prohibit unfair
practices in Technical and
Medical Institutions
Judicial Standards and
Accountability Bill 2010
(continued)
(continued)
Erosion as an eligible
calamity for relief under
National Disaster Response
Fund (NDRF)/State Disaster
Response Fund (SDRF)
All India Council for
Technical Education
(Amendment) Act
Seamen’s PF trust Fraud in
2002
Bombay Floods: Monitoring
relief efforts, Circa: August
2005
Legislation of the Right to
Information Act, 2004
Integrate suggestions of the
NAC
Monitor Naxal Situation
Issues arising from the
ongoing sealing operations by
the Municipal Corporation of
Delhi
Approval of Tsunami
Rehabilitation Programme
Consider amendments in
proposed Lok Pal Bill 2004
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Chapter 6
Three Languages of the Discourse
of Modernity in India
Savita Singh
Since Indian modernity is not a project of the European Subject, constituted along
the same lines, born and evolved out of a self-sufficient and self-derivative
rationality, it came to us through a complex process of interaction with the modern
West. That is to say, it did not arrive epistemologically, in the sense of a subject,
amnesiac regarding its own history or context, obtaining itself by objectifying the
world and consequently dominating it in its own interest; rather ontologically and
contextually, by extending its own horizons to the other and bringing it closer to
itself producing a fusion of horizons-constituting part of the self understanding of
Indian modernity. Another way of putting the matter is to say, that modernity did
not arrive as a theory of knowledge with its philosophical foundations in Western
rationality, capable of objectifying the Indian context, but as an interpretation, a
project emanating from the project of being itself. In this sense, it is more a project
of being than of consciousness, that is, of reason alone.
Because it did not arrive epistemologically and, thus, not merely one correct and
objectively right way, but rather through a relationship of interaction and inter-
pretation, the complexity of its arrival has been grasped and articulated differently
by people of distinct intellectual and moral persuasions. Consequently, it has been
grasped in different languages, which constitute the ground of this discourse. It may
be said, therefore, that we may understand and participate in this discourse by
understanding the languages of its articulation. It may also be worth noting, that the
claim here is that Indian modernity in its difference from the West, has been
actualized, by the adequacy of the language of its articulation, which I call,
‘hermeneutical language’.
Perhaps, it is appropriate, in order to achieve a pictorial clarity of the terrain of
this discourse, to compare it with Wittgenstein’s description of language as a ‘city’
S. Singh (&)
School of Gender and Development Studies, Indira Gandhi National Open University,
New Delhi, India
e-mail: savita.singh6@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_6
108 S. Singh
with ‘numerous streets and corners’ to which a number of new vocabularies and
languages are added in time, without really radically altering its nature. In his
Philosophical Investigations, section 18, he pictures this city as a ‘maze of little
streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from
various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight,
regular streets and uniform houses’.1 Various languages, starting from the 19th
century, till today, constitute those different streets and boroughs with straight and
regular streets of this city, that is, of the discourse of modernity in India. Yet, none
of them provide a complete enough picture a total universe of knowledge and truth
in itself. At most, they are an interpretation of it, an addition to the extant city of
Indian modernity. Additionally, many more may be considered in the future, for
reinterpretations may always arise. In this sense, the discourse here is akin to a long
conversation, rather than a network of power and knowledge.
It is here that I wish to bring in Partha Chatterjee’s significant view on “Talking
about our Modernity in Two Languages”2 wherein he sees the discourse of Indian
modernity mired in the language of Western power, and its dichotomous effect on
it, producing a situation of its subjugation, and a precondition of participation in the
discourse. For example, he writes, “There must be something in the very process of
our becoming modern that continues to lead us, even in our acceptance of
modernity, to a certain scepticism about its values and consequences because the
way in which the history of modernity has been intertwined with the history of
colonialism, we have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal
domain of free discourse, unfettered by differences of race or nationality. Somehow
from the very beginning, we had made a shrewd guess that given the close com-
plicity between the modern knowledge and modern regime of power, we would
forever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would we be taken seri-
ously as its producers.”3
There is no gainsaying that Enlightenment modernity has been a matter of major
contention in the discourse of modernity in India. The Enlightenment construction of
rationality, dissolves other forms of knowledge represented by cultures other than
the western, in its own. In this sense, Martin Heidegger has already identified the
purpose as the ‘Europeanization of the Earth’ ‘and its fulfillment as the con-
cretization of metaphysics itself’,4 in other words, the self-realization of modernity
in its purest form. As the project of western self, radically autonomous and rationally
reflexive, it, no doubt, constituted the ultimate universal framework of
Eurocentricism. The charm and the attraction of its radical freedom attained by a
1
Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1988, Philosophical Investigations tr. G. E. M Anscombe, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell: 23, 570.
2
Partha Chatterjee, 1997, A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism, Delhi: Oxford University
Press: 280–281.
3
Chatterjee (1997: 280–281).
4
Martin Heidegger, 1978, “What is Metaphysics” in Basic Writings, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul: 95–112.
6 Three Languages of the Discourse of Modernity in India 109
self-reflexive rationality. Just as it spawned both approval and disapproval in

Europe, in India it resulted in replicative, interpretive and neoconservative responses
of acceptance, disapproval, and criticism.
The hermeneutical language of Indian discourse of modernity, however, with its
interpretive mode of understanding, neither disregards its own context of under-
standing, nor objectifies the object or the subject of understanding, and falls
between the two languages mentioned above. As a critique of the nationalist lan-
guage, it produces an alternative modernity to the Enlightenment original, and as a
critique of the traditionalist-neoconservative language, an expressivist version of it.5
It rejects the positivist position that modernity could have only one being, that of
the Enlightenment alone. It institutes the possibility of other modernities, which
developed in the non-European contexts, to the extent that it suggests a possibility
of going beyond modernity itself. In this sense, this language resists such claims or
understanding(s) which regard Indian modernity as a consequence or effect of the
colonizing pressure of (Western) modernity itself. It would rather assert Indian
modernity to be a project of self-defining agents who make sense of their world by
interpreting it. Within this language, modernity in India is understood and inter-
preted as a project of its own being. It is a discourse entangled in a network of
difference, rather than domination.
Since modernity is not a self-conscious project of the Indian subject, born and
evolved from Enlightenment rationalism as stated above, it came to us through a
complex process of interaction with the West. This complexity has been grasped
differently by people of different intellectual and moral persuasions. Depending on
which aspect of modernity or which of its features have been chosen for articula-
tion, relating it to the significance of Indian tradition and incipient and emerging
sub-discourses of modernity, it is this that has constituted the discourse of
modernity in India. The plurality of languages of this discourse only affirms that not
only the moment of the split between subject and object characteristic of Western
modernity has been bypassed, but that the birth of Cartesian method, which
guaranteed the objective and correct view of the object has not gained the prestige it
acquired in the western culture. The ground of this discourse in India has been
riddled with various multiplicities, from the beginning.6
As argued so far, that it is the multiplicity of languages that constitutes the
landscape of Indian modernity. I take up three languages, instead of two chosen by
Partha Chatterji, for articulation here, which would ensure my participation in it as
well. These three languages of the discourse of modernity, that constitute a
large portion of our modern world are: the traditionalist-neo-traditionalist,
5
See elaborated in Savita Singh, 1993, Discourse of Modernity in India: A Hermeneutical Study,
Montreal: CSDS, McGill University.
6
Singh, 1993: 1–4, also see for theoretical construction of multiple modernities, Charles Taylor
and Benjamin Lee, 1998, Multiple Modernity Project: Modernity and Difference, Writing Draft,
Chicago: Center for Transcultural Studies; S.N. Eisenstadt, 2000, Multiple Modernities, Daedalus,
Vol. 129, No. 1, Winter: 91–117.
110 S. Singh
nationalist-replicative, and the hermeneutical-interpretive. There would be other

languages, particularly Dalit and Feminist, not explored in this chapter. Obviously,
there would be a second part to this explorative discourse.
1 Three Languages of the Discourse of Modernity in India
1.1 The Traditionalist Neo-Conservative Language
Within the traditionalist, neo-conservative language, the discourse of modernity is

understood simply as a dichotomizing metaphysics of the western mind, bent on
deprecating and displacing other cultures as traditions. Within this language, Indian
modernity is seen as one with a troubled history and considered a torturous exer-
cise. There is a sense of grief, it is argued, which comes from the suffered expe-
rience of pain by the Indian self during the 200 years of its colonization during
which modernity entered, as a project of European Enlightenment and massively
tampered with the self-definition of this old civilization, altering both its moral and
cultural values. Modernity in this language is understood as an epistemology of the
colonial domination—at best as a bunch of sophisticated conceptual categories with
alien intentions of subjugation, of both its economy and psychology.7 In this lan-
guage modernity is nothing but a universalized framework of European rationality,
within which domination of other cultures take place whenever they form a rela-
tionship with it.
The traditionalist language, no doubt, understands its own culture in opposition
to that of modernity, and locates its position within an immanentalist, more
orthodox strand of Indian tradition. The traditionalist-neo-traditionalist language of
Indian tradition finds itself indulgingly self-sufficient, needing no other meta-
physical system of thought in any way to complete its own self-understanding. For
the articulators of this position in the 19th century, for example, like Radhakant
Deb, Mrytunjay Vidyalamkar, Phanibhushan Tarkavagish and others, all other
systems of thought, including that of modernity, were nothing but mere variations
of its own thought systems.8 For this reason, no openness, interpretive or episte-
mological is found to be intellectually useful or necessary; instead of modernity
dichotomizing the Indian tradition, the interlocutors of this language had Indian
tradition dichotomize modernity.
The traditionalist interlocutors of the 18th century and the 19th century saw no
need of engaging in dialogue with the West and its rationalism for which it was
7
Ashis Nandy, 1978, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self Under Colonialism, New
Delhi, OUP.
8
For a detailed discussion of the topic see, Wilhelm Halbfass, 1988, India and Europe: An Essay in
Understanding, Albany: State University of New York.
mainly recognized as a philosophical presence in the world of serious thinking.

Traditionalists like Radhakant Deb, Vidyalamkar Tarkavagish and Anandkumar
Bhattacharya articulated the aforementioned position mainly in their assessment of
Christianity as a religion of the rational West. To them the West remained a
mlechha, meaning an ‘Other’ intended to be kept outside the Hindu philosophical
discourse for the sake of this tradition’s purity. The alien status of the West was a
problem for forging a meaningful dialogue, notwithstanding its modern rationality.9
In the contemporary Indian discourse of modernity, apart from some others,
Ashis Nandy,10 Somraj Gupta11 and Nirmal Varma12 represent the traditionalist
position in their writings, which amounts to a critical rejection of modernity as a
constellation of ideas and practices emanating from the West, destructive of the
Indian tradition. Here, I would discuss more of Nandy’s writings for the paucity of
space, and relevantly so as he construes the discourse of modernity in terms of the
discourse of colonialism. He defines modernity “as the armed version of which
sometimes is called colonialism- a higher order of universalism.”13 To Nandy
modernity is epitomized in West’s understanding of history as an evolutionary
process in which, as the matter of its rational self-progression, it unfolds the history
of reason. Around the optimistic theme of the linear and causal history of
rationality, modernity constitutes itself as its mature moment. In view of this
temporal measurement of the progress of Western Civilization, it enabled itself, not
only to undermine its own tradition as less mature, but any tradition as such.
Tradition, he says, in comparison with modernity, represents only an infantile
image of its own past. On this view, the golden age of Hinduism became an ancient
version of the modern West. Acceptance of a linear view of history in Hinduism—
an internalized counterpart of the western theory of progress—became possible for
modernity to make progress in contexts (cultural) other than its own. Only in the
form of colonialism that it achieved, in concrete terms, what is called a neutrality of
the context in the business of understanding. The context was not problematic to be
dealt with as modernity represented the value of humanity in its most universal
form.
He criticizes the proselytizing goals of modernity, and argues that like science,
modernity will not settle for an attenuated status. From the beginning of its
encounter with Indian culture, colonialist ideology fed from the plates of the
Enlightenment rationalism, defined its relationship with India in terms of a paternal
domination; the West as the mature adult male was on its mission to help grow the
childlike, infantile tradition of India towards maturity, defined in terms of Protestant
worldview. This was done by, first, interfering with the self-definition of the Indian
9
Halbfass (1988).
10
Ashis Nandy (1978).
11
Somraj Gupta, 1991–99, The World Speaks to the Faustian Man, 3 Vols., New Deli: Motilal
Banarsidas.
12
Nirmal Verma 1991, Bharat aur Europe: Pratishruti ke Khetra, New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
13
Nandy, 1978, Introduction.
112 S. Singh
(Hindu) self. The imposition of the new definition resulted directly from its modern
imperial self-understanding in which the colonizer and the colonized shared the
same agenda—the agenda of inventing new subjectivity for both. Although, he
argues further, the pain that the Indian self-experienced in this process of being
‘made over’ imparted the wisdom to it which is clever insight to survive this
ontologically devastating onslaught and alter its self-understanding. He dives into a
psychological analysis of this process, and argues that the Indian self-suffered a
self-division as a result of this aggression, and split itself into two selves. While the
authentic self-suffered enormous pain, (he gives a telling view of this suffering
through the narrative of Aurobindo’s life)14 the other self was abstracted, and
floated to suffer the indignity of being colonized and modernized. In this sense, the
modernization of India is also a story of its humiliation. However, this strategy of
undergoing a contingent phase of the humiliation, of being modernized, also saved
it. The authentic Indian self laid low, for the tide of aggression to ebb and resurface
with its moral purity intact, and improved by its suffering, in Gandhi’s politics as
well as his critique of modernity (Gandhi is treated as a critical insider). Rammohan
Roy’s and Dayanand Saraswati’s reformation of Hindu thought, through strategic
incorporation of values of modernity, according to Nandy, were not necessarily the
result of hermeneutical responsibility that had to be carried out. Their move, rather,
must be seen as a way to survive, without having sustained much damage.
In Nandy’s view, the real Indian self never entered into any dialogue with the
modern West, but did all to avoid it. “The culture,” he says, “has protected its core
—by using the dialectic between the continuous attempt by small groups to define
Indian-ness and large groups to live their lives as if such definitions were irrele-
vant.”15 Further he writes, “The Hindus have traditionally felt burdened with the
responsibility of protecting their civilization not by being self-conscious, but by
securing a mythopoetic understanding and thus neutralizing the missionary zeal of
their conquerors. What looks like westernization is often only a means of domes-
ticating the West, sometimes by reducing it to the level of comic and trivial.”16 To
him India has always been a separate world, hard for any outsider to penetrate.
Talking about the Indian culture he writes, “Such a culture becomes a projective
test; it invites one not only to project on it one’s deepest fantasies, but also to reveal,
through such self-projection, the interpreter rather than the interpreted. All inter-
pretations of India are ultimately autobiographical.”17 Like Gandhi, Nandy reckons
that India and the West could meet only outside the boundaries of modernity.
14
Savita Singh, 2003, Aurobindo’s Life as a Tale of Painful Inauthenticity in the Fractured Modern
World of The Intimate Enemy, Either-Or: Gorakhpur; 5–15.
15
Nandy (1978: 15).
16
Nandy (1978: 102).
17
Nandy (1978: 80).
It is not surprising that the discourse of modernity has had a fractious history in
India, and it is still an open question. For example, neo-conservatives like Ramashray
Roy18 and Nirmal Verma cannot accept the progressive benevolence of modernity’s
arrival, at the doorstep of the Indian philosophical system. They still think that some
people within our tradition itself were bewitched by the lightness and ebullient spirit of
the Western modernity, and inaugurated the process of revision in the existing self-
understanding of this tradition. If the 19th century reformists, like Rammohan Roy,
Bamkin Chandra Chatterjee and, later Swami Vivekananda and Swami Dayanand
Saraswati, in their own ways had argued the ‘West in’ as a more valued aspect of their
own culture, it meant that they paved the way for a signature of Western modernity on
its unselfconscious self-consciousness. Critical of the modernists of the
liberal-Marxist-nationalists persuasions, who accepted the replication and duplication
of Western modernity as a valid project of human liberation, they blame them for
things going wrong in Indian society and politics today. Given this split within Indian
thinking, the dichotomizing power of Western modernity to dissolve Indian tradition
into some material of knowledge, and stash into the warehouse of antiquity, indeed
became a reality. According to Nandy, the West not only produced colonial moder-
nity, but also informed most of its interpretations. It even coloured the interpretations
of its interpretation. Modernity as colonialism, colonized the language of its own
discourse and took over all forms of self- definitions attempted in this language.19
1.2 The Nationalist Language
The nationalist language of the discourse of Indian Modernity is constituted around

the nationalist themes of Enlightenment thought. On the one hand, this discourse
focused its intellectual endeavours on the question of subjective freedom of the
individual, based on their rationality, the liberal view of the rights and obligations,
on the other it steered the discourse within the domain of state ideology, by rec-
ognizing the ‘reason of state,’ and its central autonomous and directing role in the
affairs of society. The interlocutors of this language argued that, only a sovereign
national state of India could use this state or itself to secure progress, and social
justice for its people.
A separation between the national sovereign state from the colonial state (as the
oppressor and the underdeveloper of Indian economy) was slowly and gradually
worked out, from within the Enlightenment framework of the modern West itself.20
The speakers of this language were many: liberals, Marxists as well as critics of
these positions, i.e., Dalits thinkers, including the voluminous writings of
18
Ramashray Roy, 1985, Self and the Society, New Delhi: Sage Publication.
19
Nandy (1978: 12).
20
Dadabhai Naoroji, 1901, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India London: Swan Sonnesehein;
Rajni Palm Dutt, 1949, India Today, New Delhi: Sterling Publishing House.
114 S. Singh
Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar can be read and understood as creators of a far more
modern state, compared to what the liberal-reformists wished for.21 What needs to be
emphasized here, is that all of them saw modernity as a theory of progress, mod-
ernization, and development inhering in the promise of rationalization and secu-
larization of this old society, with multiple layers of inequality built into it. They also
visualized a change in this society taking place as a result of the impact of modernity,
they were inclined to engage and accept some of the positive consequences of liberal
policies, followed by the British colonial regime in the sphere of politics and
economy. Political institutions such as the parliament, and the rule of law were
accepted, as their juridical underpinnings were quite influential in their own think-
ing. There is no doubt though, that they thought along these lines as a result of their
own western education. The rationalist liberal framework, however, was accepted by
problematizing the differences between the two contexts, that of India and Britain.
The argument was that the same standards and benchmarks of rationality were not
applied to India by the colonial administration, as a consequence India suffered
losses in all spheres of life. India was denied progress, sequentially.
Recognition of this malefic difference was articulated by Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee,22 one of the major theoretical interlocutors of the liberal nationalist
language. Despite being committed to the positivist rationalist framework of the
liberal thought, Chatterjee argued for the need of a sovereign nation state for India
governed by the rational principle of liberalism. He critiqued Western oriental
scholarship for distorting India’s history, and charged them with having a poor
sense of objectivity, in matters of understanding Indian society. From this, however,
he also deduced that Indian people themselves have to believe in the importance of
their history, as it is not only constitutive of rationality, but it also has an equal
claim to truth. Bankim generated a critique of colonialism, from within the
framework of Enlightenment modernity. He translated the liberal view of subjective
rational autonomy in terms of the autonomy of the Indian nation, and linked it to its
right of self-determination.
Once the theoretical clarity was attained at the level of conceptual understanding,
the Indian National Congress under the leadership of a number of prominent
nationalists starting with Surendra Nath Banerjee to Jawaharlal Nehru took up this
issue, and argued from a different position, that of the Indian nation state–a modern
rational location of self determination.23 The hallmark of the nationalist liberal
21
B. R. Ambedkar, 2013. Annihilation of Caste, Edited and annotated by S. Anand, Introduced
with the essay “The Doctor and the Saint by Arundhati Roy”; Eleanor Zelliot, 2013, Ambedkar’s
World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement, New Delhi: Navayana; G. Aloysius,
1977, Nationalism without a Nation, New Delhi: OUP.
22
Partha Chatterjee, 1986, National Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse,
London: Zed Books Ltd.; Sudipta Kaviraj, 1998, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay and the Foundation of the Nationalist Discourse in India, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
23
See for a detailed history, Sankar Ghose, 1975, Indian National Congress: Its History and
Heritage, New Delhi: All India Congress Committee.
position, was its faith in the universal emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment
modernity.
The Nationalist language of Indian Modernity thematized modernity, in terms of
its aspiration to secure a nation-state. With this State came the attendant notions of
rationality, progress, liberty, and democracy. Partha Chatterjee gives an account of
the nationalist language of Indian modernity, in its Enlightenment mode when he
writes, ‘This historiography accepted nationalism as an integral part of the story of
liberty; its origin coeval with the truth of universal history and its development as
part of the same historical process which saw the rise of industrialism and democ-
racy. In its essential aspects, therefore, nationalism represents the attempt to actu-
alize in political terms the universal urge for liberty and progress’.24 The argument is
that this language of modernity shares the material and intellectual premises of the
European Enlightenment, thought and hope(s) for a genuine unfolding and transition
more or less, without much alteration in the normative structures of Indian society.
The paradox of wanting modernity and rejecting its snares, though is something
Partha Chatterjee points out immediately. He sees the interlocutors of this language
as refusing to pose the question, of the lack of autonomy for the individual and the
nation in the discourse, as a theoretical problem. Indeed, in this language, the
Enlightenment view of rationality and progress and the historical values enshrined in
it, are shared by both sides in the debate.25 To realize modernity they preferred to
remove the shadows cast by the tradition upon their speech. Thus, the focus is more
on the process, than content. Chatterjee writes that the liberals ‘assert that these
irrational and regressive features are only a hangover from the past, the historical
task is that of modernization, and once the conditions which are detrimental to the
progress are removed, there is no reason why they should not also proceed to
approximate the values that have made the West what it is today.26
The Indian protagonists of this language of modernity, from the Derozians to the
more politically active, liberals like Surendranath Banerjee, Rana De, Gopal
Krishna Gokhle, C. R. Das and Pandit Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal
Nehru, had an able predecessor in Bankim Chand Chatterjee in analyzing the
prospects and terms of the inclusion of modernity within the Indian context. They
did not ask questions then, as it is posed today by the subaltern historians; our
indigenous post-colonial speakers in this discourse, for example, as Partha
Chatterjee, does, “Why is it that the non-European colonial countries have no
historical alternative… When that very possessive approximation means their
continued subjections…”.27
The Marxist interlocutors shared the liberal sense of dismay at the thought of
revitalizing Indian tradition by reinterpreting it. They too looked at the new world
which was unfolding, by fracturing the old feudal mode of production. They saw the
24
Partha Chatterjee (1986: 2).
25
Chatterjee (1986: 10).
26
27
Chatterjee, 1986: 10.
116 S. Singh
contradiction between Indian tradition and western modernity as a historical fact and
worked with this contradiction to hasten the pace of change. Their analysis was
accepted by the nationalist economists who established as colonial exploitation of the
Indian economy as matter of a fact and a result of colonial penetration, but they also
saw the class contradiction undergirding the whole process, and to that extent, to them,
it was not the nation that was exploited, rather its workers and peasants. In this sense
they differed in the way they opened themselves to the Enlightenment modernity from
the way liberals did, and organized through the Nationalist Congress Party. The
nation-state that liberals aspired to gain through a process of modernization was one
that the Marxists would overthrow. The Marxists ‘argued in’ modernity as a necessary
historical stage in its further movement towards establishing a socialist state of the
proletariat. Randhir Singh, a prominent Marxist theorist, in his analysis of Indian
nationalism brings in the historical analysis of this phenomenon thus,
As regards what happened in 1947, its essential character, we need to recognize that a
powerful socio-political and ideological force in modern India, nationalism (including
national movement or politics) is yet a historical phenomenon with class and society-
specific character, potentialities and limitations, and usefulness too. As such nationalism (or
nationalist politics) is one or the other, or anything better or worse, this is determined by its
specific character, its programme and leadership, and above all by the concrete historical
conjuncture. Thus nationalism in India before 1947 was indeed progressive; under a dif-
ferent, more advanced class leadership and programme, it could have been radical, even
revolutionary. It was progressive because it aimed at the basic structural contradictions of
Indian society, congealed in imperialism, whose resolution, against imperialism alone could
clear the path for the Indian people’s continuing struggle for a better future. But nationalism
need not be necessarily or entirely so in the post-1947 period28
It is obvious that Marxist language is supportive of a nationalist position on

modernity, but differently. As Randhir Singh and Bipan have argued, nationalism
could not necessarily be progressive and that national bourgeoisie support for a
secular State cannot be ensured. It would depend on their class interest, for along
with nationalism, communalism too achieved political articulation and became a
force in India. Explaining the real problem Marxists would face in speaking the
nationalist language of modernity, Randhir Singh writes “Nationalism is, by defi-
nition as it were, assumed to be secular, a view typically expressed in the daily
invocatory reference by anyone and everyone these days to ‘national and secular
forces’ in India. This error is born of a certain facile understanding of the pre-1947
history of Indian nationalism and is reinforced by an equally facile understanding of
what happened in India when it gained its Independence in 1947. Indian nation-
alism had to confront and oppose communalism as a divisive and anti-democratic
force, sought to be used by imperialism to divide the Indian people and undermine
their fight for freedom. Thus, it is often taken for granted that nationalism and
communalism are, by their very nature antithetical or mutually exclusive; to speak
up for nationalism is, ipso facto, to be secular, and even democratic. However, this
28
Randhir Singh, 1993, Five Lectures in Marxist Mode, New Delhi: Ajanta Publications: 39.
simply is not the case.”29 One can read in this analysis the historical unfolding of
Hindutva, a far-right agenda of communal nationalism realizing itself within the
nationalist language of Indian modernity.30
The Marxist grammar of the nationalist language, thus, maintains its skeptical
historical difference from the liberal position on the issue nation-state. To some
extent, it is interested in Nehru’s secularism, but critical of Gandhi, the tallest leader
of Indian nationalism, and of course, very critical of the outright communalist,
hyper-nationalism of the RSS variety. Singh analyses this as well in his ‘Five
Lectures’ as he writes, ‘A certain historical justification for this view notwith-
standing, even for the pre-1947 period it is today well recognized that Gandhi and
bourgeois led Indian nationalism, along with its other limitations, carried a great
deal of Hindu and other communal baggage with it, and that its ‘final triumph’ in
1947 was at the same time a compromise and settlement with imperialism which
portioned the country along communal lines, with disastrous long term conse-
quences for the people on both sides of the borders’.31 This trajectory being the
very condition of failure of a Marxist discourse of Indian modernity in its nationalist
language, it is a fact that the Marxist speakers were making sure that India moved
away from its communal and casteist future to a class conscious one. This is
precisely because they shared the rationalist agenda of Enlightenment modernity—
that progress in history is possible dialectically. It may be said, while the liberals
adopted the 18th century version of the Enlightenment, the Marxists shared the
post-Enlightenment framework of history, rationality and culture. Both believed
that an idea, though born in the West, could be universally applicable. Even though
some intellectual attempts have been made by Marxist scholarship in India to take
the contextual determinations a bit more seriously, it never became dominant
enough for it to chart out an entirely different articulation of Indian modernity.
Some Marxist historians and economists, for example, have argued that indigenous
forces would have developed Indian capitalism by way of developing its own forces
of production, and the impact of British economy in its imperialist phase is exag-
gerated.32 However, it went only this far in their discourse of modernity. Thus, the
criticism remains as Partha Chatterjee writes, that on the question of modernity and
nationalism, Marxists found it extremely hard to escape the liberal dilemma… “a
whole generation of Marxist historians in India, despite the many political differ-
ence among them, agreed that the intellectual history of India, as the 19th and 20th
century was a history of struggle between the forces of reaction, and those of
progress….”33 The Marxists “have adopted the same methods as those of the
liberals… i.e., fitting nationalism to certain universal and inescapable sociological
constant of the modern age or ultimately reducing it to a contending trend within
29
Singh (1993, Ajanta: 38).
30
Singh (1993: 3–50).
31
Singh (1993: 39.
32
Singh (1993).
33
118 S. Singh
nationalism, one traditional and conservative, and the other rational and
progressive”.34
It is clear to the Subaltern historians, that the problem with the Marxist under-
standing of Indian modernity is modernity itself, in its universal aspirations. Just as
for the liberals, for the Marxist as well, Indian Modernity is grasped not merely as a
project of the nation alone, but as one of universal rationality. They cannot possibly
escape the contradictory valence for their own discourse, for it is a language of
freedom which contradicts freedom in other contexts, particularly, colonial. No
matter how many faults nationalists find with Indian tradition or colonialism as
such, the fact of the matter is that Enlightenment modernity is an epistemology, in
its essence colonizing. Interestingly, however, even in their critique of the
‘Renaissance’ argument, the historians of the 1970’s did not relinquish the analogy
with European history as their basic structure of reference. Indeed, the critique was
made possible only by reference to that analogue. The point of critique was, in fact,
to show that if modern Europe is taken as a classic example of the progressive
significance of an intellectual revolution in the history of emergence of capitalist
economy, and modern state, then the intellectual history of the 19th century India
did not have this significance’.35
The Subaltern scholors, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakravarty
and Sudipta Kaviraj, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Spivak and others have come to the
nationalist language of Indian modernity as its critics and from a postcolonial
sceptical position, and find this language unredeemable for its acceptance of the
palpable lure of modernity. To them, the language of Enlightenment modernity is
constitutive of a grammar which dominates its speakers and fills national life with a
searing contradiction of its replicated form, in his early works itself; Chatterjee had
worked out the relationship between Enlightenment modernity and Indian nation-
alism, as one of the implausible replications. He reconstructed the narrative of
Indian nationalism and tried to create an alternative space for the Indian nation and
the historical moments of its own modernity. He figured out that the Indian State
was more a realm of replicated modernity—an outcome of the interests of the
liberal elites of India, whereas, the nation remained a realm of recreation for
nationhood, authentically Indian. It is with this prospective vision, that in his book
Nationalist Thought and Colonial World, he draws a linear and progressive story of
Indian nationalism which starts the moment of departure, manoeuver and arrival,
and finally arrives self-divided. Whereas nationalism as language of the Indian
state, results in the approximation of western modernity, as a language of the nation
it veers towards a complex realization of its difference from the western model. In
this sense, he argues that the Indian nation arrives much before the arrival of the
Indian state. The difference lies in the state securing itself by monopolizing the
political power, and nation still remaining in the process of self creation and
definition.
34
35
My criticism of Chatterjee’s positions on Indian modernity is that, instead of

understanding modernity as a hermeneutical project to be realized within an
interpretive language, he finds himself still perusing the nationalist language he
critiques. Between Western modernity and the large collectivities of Indian society,
there breathes another possibility, of the arrival of self-defining subjects of
modernity who, by their practice of interpretation, bring about the newer possi-
bilities of actualization. If we take subjects of modernity as beings, then they are
more in the process of becoming than being, as they are—the subjects of modernity
defined by Enlightenment modernity. This realization opens up a new region of
self-understanding for further interpretations. These embedded beings, as subjects
of self-definition and interpretation cannot but transform themselves and their
society through their understanding. It requires intellectual commitment to under-
take interpretation as an event in understanding. The point to understand, is that
these self-interpreting subjects become self-determining, precisely because of the
ontological condition of openness, to a future realizing the extraordinariness of its
newness. This realization through hermeneutical opening can be understood
through Johan Gottfried Herder’s conceptualization of expressivism,36 by which he
meant that the potentials of a society or a culture could be realized through
self-expression. Here the ends of one’s being are simultaneously invented and
redefined. If modernity has to realize itself as an alternative project of its own
metaphysical construction, it must pass through the historical moments of self-
interpretation and invention. In this sense, it can struggle out of the network of
power in which it is entangled. As an interpretation, modernity can be realized
within the Indian context, as an expression of its own plural self. It is this possibility
which hermeneutical language of Indian modernity seizes and through articulation,
spawns a discourse of alternative modernity.
1.3 The Hermeneutical Language
The hermeneutical language of modernity in India, begins by recognizing the

presence of another context of the modern West, and progresses by critiquing the
two languages analyzed above. The ground of this language is constituted by a
philosophical openness to this ‘other’. The argument is that, one does not under-
stand the other by either replicating it, or antithetically, rejecting it altogether. One
can hardly understand the other, if one considers it to be a ‘mlechha’. It is my
understanding that the discourse of modernity in India has progressed, in large
measure hermeneutically, in so far as the interlocutor, beginning from Raja
Rammohan Roy to Gandhi, have drawn rational content from their own tradition in
understanding and responding to modernity. They shifted their philosophical
ground from exclusivism to inclusivism towards this new ‘other’. They went, in
36
A good discussion on this can be found in Charles Taylor, 1991b, Malaise of Modernity,
Ontario: Anansi Press.
120 S. Singh
their efforts towards a fusion of the aforementioned two horizons, namely, India and
Britain to the extent that it assimilated the multiple strands of Indian tradition. This
approach suggests, unlike Nandy’s, that the Indian tradition was not split between
the modern and the traditional by the presence of modernity, neither was British
colonialism quite able to impose its own categories on Indian culture, leading to a
pervasive domination of its consciousness. The hermeneutical discourse of
modernity contested, challenged, and absorbed features of modernity by reinter-
preting its rational contents, and more than that, by extracting meaning from various
Indian philosophical texts, to re-establish a practical ethics, and to live out the
modern life–an ethics rooted in communitarian social relationships, as opposed to
individualistic ethical practices of the Enlightenment modernity. This particular
feature of the Indian discourse of modernity provides it, its distinctness as remains
bound to its own context, yet open to the suggestions of the other.
In recent years, some people have come to understand the importance of
hermeneutical language while figuring out modern India. From J. L. Mehta’s dense
hermeneutical work on Heidegger and India,37 V. R. Mehta’s38 disenchantment
with the liberal as well as with the Marxist approaches, a new view of the old
subject matter has emerged, attracting commentaries and analyses from scholars
like Thomas Pantham,39 Bhikhu Parekh40 and Arvind Sharma.41 Except J. L. Mehta
though, they have not carried out systematic interpretive work, in the modern sense
of Hans-Georg Gadamer42 or Charles Taylor,43 but they have come to appreciate
the hermeneutical structure of Indian thought and tradition. They are not tradi-
tionalists of Somraj Gupta or Nandy’s disposition, who take modernity as a
threatening incursive intellectual phenomenon. However, they also think that the
Indian tradition has admirably coped with the aggressive onslaught of western
rationalism by finding a place for it within itself, and is capable of even selecting a
new destiny for itself. However, they accept that the interaction with western
37
J.L. Mehta, 1990, Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation, 1990, New Delhi: Munshi
Ram Manoharlal Publishers and Indian Council of Philosophical Research; Mehta, Mehta 1967,
Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Varanasi: Banaras Hindu University.
38
V.R. Mehta, 1967, Beyond Marxism: Towards an Alternative Perspective. Delhi: Manohar
Publications.
39
Thomas Pantham, 1992, Some Dimensions of the Universality of Philosophical Hermeneutics: A
Conversation with Hans Georg Gadamer, Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research;
132.
40
Bhikhu Parekh, 1986, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political
Discourse, London: Sage Publication.
41
Sherma, Rita and Arvind Sharma, editors, 2008, Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought: Towards a
Fusion of Horizon, Springer.
42
Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1977, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Trans, David E. Linge, Berkley,
University of California Press.; H. G. Gadamer, 1975, Truth and Method, New York: Crossroad.
43
Taylor, Charles, 1979, Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge University Press; 1991b, Malaise
of Modernity, Ontario: Anansi Press.; 1989, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
rationalism has affected a change in its own self-understanding, without being

fractured deeply. They argue that this interaction has not led to its discontinuation.
Bhikhu Parekh’s, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s
Political Discourse, is a contemporary example of a hermeneutical sensitivity, uti-
lized to understand modernity, in terms of how traditional concepts can attain new
meaning in newer contexts, through a process of assimilation and interpretation. The
importance of Parekh’s voice is that it extends hermeneutical strands of Indian
tradition, in its analysis of Gandhi’s politics defining Indian modernity. Similarly,
Thomas Pantham in his paper on ‘Gandhi and Habermas’ has tried to reinterpret the
theme of fusion of horizon by bringing together their views on modernity. Though, it
may sound as if the arguments of these two thinkers have been overstretched to
produce a common ground of philosophical accord, the two thinkers, one from India
and the other coming from the West—it indeed is a hermeneutical exercise on
Pantham’s part, as he manages to work out the common communitarian ground of
these two thinkers. He shows, that an ontological basis exists for Indian modernity to
realize different strands of western modernity still. The fusion of horizons, is after all,
an ongoing process. A similar argument has been made by Wilhelm Halbfass in his
analysis of the interaction between Indian tradition, and western modernity. He
argues, that though early on, in the 19th century Indians themselves interpreted their
tradition to the West, and yet wonders ‘are the boundaries finally dissolving’? has
there been a genuine fusion of horizons? ‘have the errors and pre-concepts of the past
been replaced with openness and understanding.’44 Thomas Pantham’s contribution
to the present discourse of modernity, is an answer to this question, for until and
unless we begin using the hermeneutical language suited to the subject matter under
consideration, we are bound to suffer of inarticulacy, smudging our viewing of the
event of understanding.
The most comprehensive hermeneutical treatment that the discourse of moder-
nity in India obtained in its contemporary significance, is by a little-discussed
interpreter of modern India, J. L. Mehta, whose work on Heidegger has been
acclaimed as one of the best interpretive writings on the thinker. Mehta, not only
understands the need of remaining joined to his own tradition as its interpreter, but
recognizes the necessity of being well seeped into the Western hermeneutical tra-
dition as well. He knows this language well enough to articulate the problematic of
modernity, in its contemporary significance. He characterizes modernity
hermeneutically as ‘The one peril threatening man today comes neither from the
plurality of cultures nor from the diversity of religious traditions, but from that
following Heidegger, has been world civilization, the destiny of homelessness in
which men all over the world are caught today. This world destiny, in which alone
the world is now one, springs from the unthought and unarticulated foundation, of
the Greek experience of being and saying.’45
44
Halbfass (1988: 370).
45
J.L. Mehta, 1990, Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation, Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal and ICPHR:45
122 S. Singh
Mehta characterizes the hermeneuticality of the Indian situation, in the fast

emptying of the world by modernity as our placement with the Europeans in the
western worldwide phenomenon of technology. It is the social unfolding of its
technicity that envelops India, along with the world. He writes, ‘We in India live in
a largely science dominated, secularized world, in the midst of a process which has
been spreading over the globe from the Christian West. This process of desacral-
ization and disenchantment, the emptying of the quality of sacredness from our
world, the flight of the gods, has been welcomed by some as a mark of man’s
coming of age, as the hour of high noon in our history, and bemoaned by others as
an abysmal fall into the darkness of midnight’.46 Mehta puts himself in the category
of those who see the enframing of the world by technology as the darkening of the
world. He shares the same understanding of modernity as Heidegger does- that is,
modernity as epistemological globalization of the Wet itself, originating from the
Greek ‘quest’ of ‘being’, unfolding as a desacralising force that renders all the
questions of sacred in life as living truth, meaningless.
Mehta, however, has another hermeneutical agenda too, closer to Gadamer’s
perhaps, for unlike the traditionalists and conservatives, who see modernity as
disruptive of Indian tradition, and unlike the nationalists who see Indian tradition
posing an impediment in the path of modernity, he endeavours to understand
modernity’s claims on the language of interpretive tradition of India. Mehta pro-
ceeds to interpret his contemporary context, within which both modernity and
tradition are in an encounter, extending truth claims on each other—a fusion of
horizons being the distinct possibility of the circumstance, of being face to face with
each other. As a quintessential interpreter, he opens inward and outward, both,
simultaneously. As a concept and process, he sees modernity constituting a context
of self-understanding, and self-renewal for a tradition. He asks us to return to our
tradition, to its moral and intellectual sources, and to reinterpret it in the light of the
present need of understanding something new. He brings a rare complexity to this
language of understanding and deepens the meaning of interpretation as he already,
recognizably, stands within a hermeneutical tradition. Mehta presents an account of
India’s encounter with modernity in these words: ‘India opened itself to the West
around 1800, but hesitatingly and with reservations, mainly to the English speaking
West and without breaking, or wanting to break with its past. Modernization
without Westernisation, festina lente, has been the Indian way since Ram Mohan
Roy. The main reason for this is its large and daunting literature of the past, a
massive heritage, still waiting to be freely appropriated, and the Sanskrit language,
which continues to nourish its present. From this ‘house of Being,’ India cannot,
would not, want to be banished’.47
India, thus, begins its own discourse of modernity differently, that is,
hermeneutically, by recognizing the claims of tradition on the understanding of
46
Mehta, 1992, “Heidegger and Vedanta: Reflection on a Questionable Theme” in Heidegger and
Asian Thought, ed., Graham Parkes, 1992, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas.
47
Mehta (1990: 97).
modernity, by re-reading its tradition in the present context. This discourse began,
not as a replication of ‘modernity as western metaphysics’, but as an interpretation
of its sources in the modern context. Indian modernity remained homebound,
non-metaphysical and interpretive. Confirming the hermeneutical beginning of this
discourse, Mehta reflects on the hermeneutical practices of Raja Rammohan Roy, as
Roy began the discourse of modernity by interpreting the Upanishadic texts in the
19th century; ‘India’s entry into modernity, as a consequence of the impact of the
West, and its voluntary and creative reaching out to the modern ways of thought,
was symbolized in Ram Mohan’s letter in 1823 to Lord Amherst, the then Governor
General of India. He pleaded for the introduction of a moral liberal and enlightened
system of instruction in the country, and a simultaneous attempt to go back to the
origins of the Indian thought and seek in the Upanishads the spiritual basis for a
rehabilitation of Indian historical existence and renewal of its life’.48
Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Mehta thinks, could fearlessly enter into the complex
hermeneutical relationship between India and the western modernity as he was
already within a hermeneutical tradition of India in thought and philosophical
practice. Mehta argues that Indian tradition has been an intellectually interpreted
reservoir of understanding, to which one can go back. There are many beginnings
though here. Vedic texts, Mehta writes, ‘functioned as a source of other develop-
ments it inspired. The unique evidence of interpretive effort of the ancient date is
represented by the Nirukta of Yaksha (4th century B.C.) already separated from the
original by some eight centuries’.49 Explaining it further in more detail he elabo-
rates, ‘The Sanskrit religious and philosophical tradition of India has a long history
of hermeneutical reflection and much of it beyond this, a history of practice of
interpretation, we may pick out three focal points in the history of the practice of
this hermeneutical enterprise. The first is the ‘Rigveda Samhita’, the original text of
the Vedic corpus, including the Upanishads, much of the interpretive energy of
ancient scholars, however was spent on Brahman and Upanishad literature which
flowed out of the original text of the almost total neglect, until recent times of the
Samhita itself. The second is the epic tradition especially the Mahabharat which
needs an extensive hermeneutical inquiry, because it embodies in large measure, the
transposition, translation, and reinterpretation of the Vedic complex of myth,
symbol and thought content, as it also entered into the Puranic tradition. An entire
life-world had altered since Vedic times, and even creative thought and new modes
of expression in a refashioned language were needed to communicate new mean-
ings. The third focal point summing up and creatively interpreting the entire pre-
ceding tradition for an altered world, is again the ‘Bhagwadpurana’, composed in
about the 8th century, it is the central text of the Hindu religious life, and has
enjoyed canonical status in the various schools of Vedanta and its basic scripture of
Bhakti religiousness, in all its Vaishnava varieties. Its influence reached far beyond
48
Mehta (1990: 22).
49
Mehta (1990: 103).
124 S. Singh
the close of the Sanskritic age about the 15th century, penetrating deep into the
vernacular literature that developed since then and down to our own times’.50
Understanding modernity by keeping the claims of this interpretive tradition
alive is the crucial thing about the hermeneutical language of discourse of
modernity in India. It is this claim that fills Mehta’s hermeneutical world with the
depth it has. A similar claim can be made about Islam51, and other traditions of
thought. Mehta, however, takes up the non-Islamic, non-Buddhist or other ethical–
religious or moral traditions of thought in India, as his subject of exploration. In his
own journey of understanding, in which he mainly keeps the company of Heidegger
from the other side, Mehta presents more than one response to modernity. One, of
interpretation and arrival at a common new understanding in which, one flows into
the other; second, in which both transgress the at-hand situation together, or by
oneself, through mutual interaction. In the first, the gain is to return richer by having
travelled into each other’s region; free, by keeping company with one’s own self,
that is, going back to interpret modernity as part of the traditional
self-understanding; and, in the second going beyond it by returning to the origins to
begin all over again, as Heidegger wanted for the modern West as well. Obviously,
modernity for Mehta is not the cultural programme of reformation, an outcome of
the Enlightenment rationalism, resulting in bourgeois freedom (as the promise of
rationality), but a metaphysics arising from the forgetfulness of Being itself, bent
upon globalizing itself as technology. His view is that in India we have come to live
in the same world as the Europeans themselves, and face similar objects, that indeed
‘we are trapped in the western history and its fruit, world civilization, in the
nihilism, underlying the entire metaphysical tradition of the West and its fruit,
science, technology, in this Europeanization of the earth, whether we know it or
not’.52Mehta offers deeper analysis of replicative modernity in a way.
Although, the insight, for anyone interested in the hermeneutical language of the
discourse of modernity in India, would be to go to other forms of modernity, rather
towards modernities achieved within one’s own context. There are numerous
debates on this subject matter.53 In Mehta, the process of its arrival and trans-
gression has been revealed rather perspicuously. For him, this need of reaching
back to one’s own sources in understanding the other clearly arises from the need of
being oneself, of being given authentically to oneself which should be the basis of
the concept of ‘modernities’ as opposed to ‘one modernity’. It is this need that leads
one to the hermeneutical language of the discourse of modernity. It is in this that the
possibility of returning, going within oneself and ultimately to the language and
historically effective consciousness of one’s tradition lies, which Mehta explores
50
Mehta (1990: 249).
51
See, M.T. Ansari, 2001, Secularism, Islam and Modernity, New Delhi: Sage.; Gole Nilufer,
2000, Snapshots of Islamic Modernities, Daedalus, Vol, 129, Winter: 91–117.
52
Mehta (1990: 98).
53
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, ed., 2001, Alternative Modernities, Durham: Duke University
Press; Dirlik, Arif, 2013, “Thinking Modernity Historically: Is Alternative Modernity the
Answer?”, Asian Review of World Histories, 1:1, Jan: 5:44.
and articulates. It is here that all the density of his writings truly arrives as he writes,
‘We in India participate in the present world process but not without the living
memory of a tradition, from which we derive, might go back philosophically to the
still latent, untapped resources’,54 and to understand the contemporary situation.
In the significant hermeneutical moment of the fusion of horizons, Mehta does not
seek a fusion of the Indian tradition (however interpretative) and the western moder-
nity, but a fusion of two hermeneutical horizons. The Heideggerian agenda, or as he
says, an Indian agenda, to grapple with the worldly mission of modernity, and to go so
far from the desacralization of the sacred regions of human existence, that one goes
beyond modernity a different realm of human existing. The way to that different time
is, of course, through the interpretation of the texts that constitute our tradition, here, a
return to the origins of thought is indeed the pathway is finding an exit, to the region of
the new and the sacred for ‘it is the origin that is the mightiest and richest, that is never
depleted by all that has sprung from it.’55 This reaching for the origin, through the
traces of secularity, through interspersed texts, where he sees his hermeneutical task
reposed. A hermeneutical inquiry, according to him, involves finding that language in
which these texts may be made to speak meaningfully today. It should be pointed out
here, that this reaching back to the origin involving understanding everything that has
gone on so far, which has been Heidegger’s anticipatory way to experiencing a
breakthrough in thought, and which gives free access to hidden possibilities, previ-
ously unexplored in understanding the mysterious relationship between the language
and Being. Yet this theme of going back to one’s origin in each epochal thinking out of
which something different and original emerges, bringing together the thought and
unthought, leading to a retrieval of the meaning of the rare, unattainable yet
unavoidable, which lies at the heart of the matter of human experience, where Being is
transcendent, pure and simple, is also a theme central to the classical, more unorthodox
understanding of Upanishadic thought. One can find an interesting echo of these inner
concerns reverberating in Heidegger’s own explorations of new thinking. Impressed
with the notion of ‘repetition’ as an interpretive mode of understanding meaningfully,
Mehta brings his own hermeneutical skills, not so much to reinterpreting Indian tra-
dition as much as bringing the hermeneutical to the hermeneuticality of Indian tradition
itself. It is in the way of portraying Indian tradition, that an authentic response to
modernity can be made; and it is the interpretive practice that constitutes our mode of
being part of it in a meaningful sense, that we can comprehend in a freer sense, its
principles, and its ambition to become a world civilization.
Thus, unlike the traditionalists Mehta, along with Heidegger risks going beyond
orthodox understanding of traditions. It is the arrival of modernity at India’s
doorsteps that necessitates the task of reinterpreting our tradition, it eggs us on to
reach over to our beginning, to understand the significance of our present. It does
not foreclose our response, our discourse and ways of talking and relating to
ourselves as Nandy argues. Our response to modernity is not determined by the
54
Mehta (1990: 98).
55
Mehta (1990: 98).
126 S. Singh
pervasiveness of its ideology of domination. Mehta believes that interpretations are

not only the mark of our finitude but also of our freedom, they constitute our
openness to the world of which we are a constitutive part, and which we want to
understand and alter. From Ram Mohan Roy to Gandhi, one can see modernity
shaping up to actualize as an interpretation of itself and that of Indian tradition. Yet,
further interpretation of both awaits our continuing response to realize it.
In view of the presence of modernity on the horizon of Indian tradition, “the Indian
scholar seeking to interpret both horizons in free critical fashion have to make use of
terms and concepts derived from Western philosophy because they are unavoidably a
participant in the horizon of intelligibility, stemming from the West. As a participant,
they must learn to live within that horizon as an other, appropriate it for its own sake,
and so far as they can, wander around in their own terms, in ways that lead in the
direction of what is questionable and question worthy, and reach out to what is remote
and strange, knowing that in the last instance, this is not a vain adventure but a home
coming. For they must return enriched to the horizon with which they have set out
initially, that is, of their own tradition and see in it and receive from it a new meaning”.56
What is quite obvious and striking in Mehta’s gathering of modernity in India’s own
fold, is that unlike the traditionalists he wants this tradition to risk its self-
understanding, which is nothing less than asking to open one’s own understanding
to the other and to oneself for reinterpretation, to take place and this happens both
historically and linguistically. A new understanding is meaningful, in so far it is
achieved this way. This is the hermeneutical way of being contemporaneously modern.
In the end, it needs to be reiterated, just as traditions require reinterpretation to
continue being meaningful, modernity also cannot survive without being reinter-
preted, without being contextualised as the hermeneutical possibility of contexts
within which it must enter. It is the hermeneutical language of Indian modernity
which ensures the continued relevance of both the Indian tradition and modernity as
such, both in its western and Indian visages. We would need to interpret both
tradition and modernity for it to subsist in its realisable form. To the extent Indian
modernity is an interpretation of modernity, it is both itself and its other. It can still
be different though in other languages of its articulation.
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Part II
Experiencing the Modern:
Makings and Practices
Chapter 7
Makings of Modern Marriage: Choice,
Family, and the Matchmakers
Parul Bhandari
There is no better way of finding out what is modern and at the

same time Indian in our contemporary society and culture than
by examining the family….
(Béteille in Uberoi 1993, 451).
1 Introduction
In understanding marriages in India, the term ‘love marriage’ is immediately

associated with being ‘modern’, implying a certain progress in thought and action,
one that champions individual will over collective identities. The binary opposite of
‘love’ is ‘arranged’ marriage, which is viewed to follow parental guidelines and
choices, upholding collective values associated with caste, language, and religion.
These categories are popular understandings, routinely used in surveys, journalism,
and also by marrying individual themselves and their families.1 However, recent
scholarship has unpacked the use of these categories to conclude that middle class
marriages mostly lie somewhere in between the poles of ‘arranged’ and ‘love’,
popularly referred to as arranged-cum-love marriages (Uberoi and Singh 2006).
These works furthermore have also highlighted the significance of ‘love’ in the
narratives of marriage for a modern self-fashioning especially for the middle class
youth (Hirsch and Wardlaw 2006; Twamley 2014; Donner 2016). Motivating one’s
spousal search by feelings of ‘love’ and compatibility, they explain, allow the youth
to claim being modern. The expressions and desires of love and compatibility, in
turn, warrant and promote an element of ‘choice’; one that enables greater space for
individual will. Scholarship has also cautioned that individual choice may not be
1
Selected recent works that explain the use of these binaries include Donner (2002, 2016), Fuller
and Narasimhan (2014), Sharangpani (2010), Twamley (2014), Uberoi (2001).
P. Bhandari (&)
e-mail: bhandariparul@gmail.com
P. Bhandari
St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_7
132 P. Bhandari
exclusively exercised in the domain of ‘love’ marriages, as it is also present in

‘arranged’ marriages, as the work of Sharangapani’s (2010) amongst the young
professional women in Mumbai explains. Research works, therefore, approach the
binaries of ‘love’ and ‘arranged’ marriage as a spectrum where marriages fall
in-between the extreme poles of ‘love’ and ‘arranged’. Equally, they also point to
the need to further unpack the category of ‘choice’, which is mainly understood as
an expression of individual will and desire.
In this chapter, however, I provide another understanding to ‘choice’, which as I
argue, defines, enables, and culminates into the modern. I explain the seamless
ways in which ‘choice’ upholds family involvement in decisions on marriage
signifying such a rendition of the ‘modern’ that is best suited to being middle class
in India. I argue that the element of ‘choice’ in marriages crucially recognizes and
subsumes the role of the family, which, as I demonstrate below, is supported by
processes as well as affects of modernization. In other words, ‘choice’, as an
important claim to being modern signifies not exclusively the expressions of
individual will but a dialogical approach with the family to actualize the ‘individual
choice’. In this process the spaces of matchmaking as of internet and profession-
alized services of matrimonial agents play a significant role as does the middle class
values of morality and honour, which work together to curate a ‘modern choice.’
I put forth such an understanding of choice in two parts of the chapter. In the first
part I explain the enabling role of contemporary matchmaking services in curating
the modern choice by allowing ample space to the family in the process of
spouse-selection and fostering a dialogical approach with the individual to select a
suitable spouse. The second part shifts attention to narratives of exercising choice,
both by the individuals and their family. I explain that the individual is embedded in
the middle class values of morality and family honour, which in turn affirms a
secure place to the family’s choice in matchmaking.2
This discussion will furthermore, enable us to critically appraise the category of
the ‘modern’ as simply the ‘new’. Instead, this analysis of ‘choice’ in contemporary
marriages will lay out that the modernity of Indian marriages does not lie in a break
or rupture from the past, following a unilinear path to individualism which is
assumed as sign of progress. It, in fact, rests in the ability to appropriate aspects of
modernization and reconfigure elements of love, morality, and honour, in which the
family continues to play an important role. In that, the family is a constitutive
element of individual ‘choice’ and the ‘modern’. In other words, the ‘modern’ is not
based on a break from the tradition of the involvement of family in matchmaking,
but in fact, very well incorporates the family.3
2
Much literature exists on explaining the family and its various aspects as its structure, gendered
socialisation, class boundaries, and so on, a select few of which are mentioned here. For further
information on the role of family and class reproduction see Béteille (1993), Jodhka and Prakash
(2016); for gendered socialisation see Dube (1988), Kalpagam (2008); family and middle class values
see Kumar (2011), Minna (2010); kinship and family structure see Das (1976), Trawick (1990).
3
For further discussion on this understanding on the ‘modern’ particularly see Chakrabarty (2000)
and Dube and Banerjee-Dube (2006).
7 Makings of Modern Marriage: Choice, Family, and the Matchmakers 133
2 Fieldwork
This chapter is based on ethnographic research on the middle class youth of New
Delhi, which involved in-depth interviews with a 100 men and women aged
between 24 and 31 years, non-participant observation and participant observation
by registering on matrimonial websites, and interviews with matrimonial agents and
parents of marrying individuals. The fieldwork site was Delhi, and interviews
included those who were born and raised in Delhi as well as those who migrated to
Delhi from other cities including Jaipur, Ranchi, and Patna. Whilst there was no
restriction on the caste and religious composition the representation was mainly of
upper-caste Hindus, in line with the argument that the category of the middle class
is a skewed composition of the upper castes (Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2006;
Jodhka and Prakash 2016). Whilst the respondents belonged to diverse economic
and cultural backgrounds as it included families of senior bureaucrats to small town
businessmen, what brought them together was that they all self-identified as
belonging to middle class backgrounds. Furthermore, they aspired to and were
employed in high-paying jobs in the private sector, after achieving competitive
education and professional degrees, yet again putting them in a similar category.4
3 The Modernization and Modernity of Matchmaking

Spaces
The processes of modernization, which too crucially define the modern, have
greatly influenced the spaces of Indian matchmaking. More specifically, the internet
technology has intervened in matchmaking with the rise of matrimonial websites,
and urban India is also witnessing a burgeoning of matrimonial agencies, which are
increasingly professionalized. These new spaces open up debates and discussions
on any shifts that the matchmaking practices may undergo, for it has been argued,
by Majumdar (2009) that changes in spaces of matchmaking allow for development
of new parameters to adjudge suitability. Providing a historical analysis of colonial
Bengal, Majumdar lays out that the Bengali middle class, largely belonging to the
upper castes, referred to as the bhadralok, essentially used the services of ghataks
or middlemen, to look for suitable matches. The ghataks were most entrusted to
suggest suitable partners for they performed the tasks of social registers keeping a
record of each family’s genealogies, social status, and affinal relations, and in this
way became the ‘repositories of upper-caste social memory…’ (2004: 914). This
personalized and intimate role of the middleman, however, soon gave way to a
4
The middle class is a contentious category to define as much scholarship has provided different
perspectives to define it: economic, cultural, and moral. For further discussion on these diverse
aspects of middle class identifications see Baviskar and Ray (2011), Deshpande (2006), Fernandes
(2006), and Kapur and Vaishnav (2014).
134 P. Bhandari
non-human and more detached form of middleman, namely, newspaper adver-

tisements. A consequence of this shift of method of matchmaking, Majumdar
(2009) explains, was a change in the desirability of a suitable man. She argues that
whilst previously the kula (family), caste, and social status of the man were the
main criteria for adjudging his suitability, the newspaper matchmaking methods
introduced a new criterion whereby the groom began to be adjudged on the basis of
his involvement in civic and public life.
Though the medium of newspaper is still rather popular in Indian matchmaking,
matrimonial websites and matrimonial agencies have emerged as the other popular
medium of matchmaking. These two spaces of matchmaking play a significant role
in curating the modern notion of ‘choice’ for they ensure that far from being
displaced the family secures a safe and continuous presence in matters of match-
making, whilst also keeping up the rhetoric and space of individual will. They do
so, by enabling a dialogical approach between the family and the individual
throughout the process of spouse-selection. In this way, these spaces of match-
making curate a ‘modern’ understanding of matchmaking, which does not exclude
the family or champion only individual desire and choice, but incorporates both
aspects into a wider and modern concept of ‘choice’.
3.1 Matrimonial Agencies
Much like the ghataks in Bengal, Northern India too extensively uses the services
of matrimonial brokers (also called bicholiya in Punjabi), who continue to remain
popular amongst the middle class of Delhi. These matrimonial brokers usually cater
to a particular social class and often restrict their services to one or two caste or
communities, as that of Punjabis, Marwaris, or Sindhis. The brokers operate with a
more personal approach as they build familiarity with families and pride on
arranging match of not one but several members of the same family. In some sense
then, much like the ghataks of colonial Bengal, the brokers position themselves to
possess knowledge of social history of the family. It is this personal approach and
alleged deep knowledge about a family that makes the services of the brokers
popular with the middle class that seek guarantee or good social reputation for
prospective matches.
Whilst these services are indeed much appreciated and entrusted, the processes
of modernization that have gripped the everyday reality of urban Indians, has
fostered a professionalism in the services of matchmaking, as with the burgeoning
of matrimonial agencies. Unlike the matrimonial brokers, these agencies position
themselves as undertaking a more impersonal approach with matchmaking, not
claiming an in-depth knowledge of the family’s genealogy. Instead, they base their
efficiency in providing suitable alliances by matching social, financial, cultural
backgrounds and individual compatibility. By claiming to uniquely match the
individual and social desires of suitability, these agencies present themselves to
cater to a modern international appeal, which values professionalism and efficiency.
Their mode of operation is based on a language of professionalism undertaken by

companies as they operate upon signing of contracts which are legal undertakings
initiating spousal searches for their clients, design appropriate office space, ensure a
web-presence with an online enquiry portal, and set out written rules and regula-
tions for matching of profiles.
My first experience of visiting a matrimonial agency immediately transported me
to an imagery of a private firm. As I entered the first-floor office of Vishaka, a
leading matrimonial agency, I noted that the space was divided into cubicles, each
occupied with employees who were either attending to telephonic enquiries on the
matrimonial process or updating or matching their online database. From there, I
was ushered to the designated meeting room, to meet the head of the agency, Mrs.
Batra. This room had large comfortable sofas with a spread of wedding-related
magazines and photographs of weddings of their clients, nailed on walls as their
trophies for success. I was immediately transported to the aesthetic of a wedding
with the ethics of a professional company. Dressed in salwar kameez, Mrs. Batra
enters the room and apologizes for the slight delay in meeting me, for she had to
take an important call to pacify a ‘client’. I enquired further and she responded that
the client was worried about the suitability of a potential match, in whom her
daughter was showing much interest, but the family was not convinced. This served
as an appropriate entry point for me and I encouraged her to talk more about the
distinctiveness of their matrimonial agency especially with regard to matrimonial
websites. Mrs. Batra specified that the main aim of her matrimonial agency is to
cater to the desires of both parents and children and this is what distinguishes her
from matrimonial brokers, who are usually more inclined to fulfill parental desires
of suitable spouses. She said,
Nowadays children know what they want. They are no longer totally dictated by their parents.
They have their own choices and opinions… Back in our days we barely had any exposure,
we would do what parents would say and also get married early. But today’s generation is
working, going out… they have a good idea of what they want. So how can we only cater to
the parents’ needs? Here at Vishaka (matrimonial agency), we ensure that the criteria of both
the children and the parents are taken into account… we want a healthy balance…. At the end
of course, it is the individual’s choice, the parents are only guiding the process.
This invocation and distinction with the matrimonial brokers was indeed
poignant and there were in fact several noticeable differences between the two
matchmaking styles, beginning with the ways of addressing each. Whilst in order to
ascertain a more personal relationship and approach to matchmaking, a matrimonial
broker is called by kin names as behenji (sister), bhaisaab (brother), mama
(mother’s brother) masi (mother’s sister), the matrimonial agents are addressed
formally by their last names. The matrimonial agents unlike the matrimonial bro-
kers operate in a hierarchical order, where junior agents advise clients in their
searches, and the senior agents undertake an appraisal of each case after a period of
three months, to check if the junior agent has efficiently assisted in the spousal
search. Moreover, the matrimonial agents also differentiate their services on the
basis of the ‘package’ the clients opt for, each of which are priced differently.
Matrimonial brokers on the other hand, have no such system of appraisal of
136 P. Bhandari
regulated hierarchical order and operate mostly by themselves with one or more
junior employees who are at times their relatives whom they are training. The
brokers do not have a ‘package’ system but price their services according to the
financial and social standing of the families they match, and at times, also demand a
‘cut’ (percentage) in the dowry or amount of money spent on the wedding.
A significant, and in that distinguishing aspect of the appeal of the matrimonial
agencies over the matrimonial brokers lies in the way these agencies present their
ethos of matchmaking. Whilst the matrimonial brokers mainly uphold the desires of
the family in seeking a suitable spouse, the matrimonial agents self-fashion
themselves as ‘modern’ for they cater to the desires of both the individual and
family. This self-presentation is crucial to enable the ‘modern’ in marriages.
I met a senior matrimonial agent, Mrs. Shetty, of another popular agency at their
office in South Delhi, and she too explained the importance of being able to
‘balance’ between parents and the children. She said:
Look, it is the parents who contact us. So in some ways, agencies cater to the requirements
of the parents. I mean if kids want to find someone on their own they have other avenues
like matrimonial websites. However, we are not old-fashioned or like those brokers. We
absolutely understand that children are more vocal about their choices nowadays, they want
to be involved, and will not leave it entirely on the parents to choose [a spouse], so we
ensure that we have a good chat with the person who is to be married; understand their likes
and dislikes, and then proceed with suggesting matches.
Mrs. Shetty explained that in their ‘higher’ package offers, they send the mat-
rimonial agents to the house of the client so that s/he can interact with the individual
for whom the search is taking place and get to know her/his preferences. She said:
In our profile database there is an entire long section on the individual likes and dislikes–
food, hobbies, culture, values, which help us better understand the person and then match
them… In the end, it is the children who have to spend their entire lives together, so we do
cater to the individual’s choice as well as to the parents’, and in fact to be honest, these are
not too far apart.
The advertisement of Select Shaadi, a bespoke matchmaking service provided by

the popular matrimonial websites shaadi.com, makes the expansive framework of the
term ‘choice’ amply clear. The opening shot is of a father and daughter who are
having a conversation with each other over the phone whilst both are getting reading
for office. The father has a Bluetooth device on and the daughter is on her mobile
phone, as she packs her purse, throws over a scarf to match her western wear office
attire. While the mother, dressed in sari, is serving the father his breakfast, a domestic
help, in the far shot, is making food for the daughter, who clearly seems to be living
away from her parents, perhaps in another city. The father asks the daughter if she
had a chat with the two shortlisted candidates and if she liked anyone. The daughter
replies, ‘Like but not like like. You know what I mean?’ The father admits that he
understands what she said but looks visibly confused, and probes her further to which
she responds ‘I don’t know! We [prospective groom and her] should be like-minded
also.’ The father is all the more confused and after keeping the phone down,
immediately calls the Select Shaadi professional and narrates that though the previous
time the daughter had claimed that ‘opposites attract’, she is now looking for
‘like-minded’ prospects. The professional matchmaker smiles with confidence and
says, ‘Don’t worry, Sir! It is normal. I will look into it.’ The father seems reassured
and keeps the phone down and turns to the mother to ask if she understood what their
daughter implied, but the mother seems equally confused.
As evident with this advertisement, I noted that the matrimonial agencies present
themselves as being able to understand the desires and language of the younger
generation. They are also careful in not advertising themselves as only catering
to the individual, but also bringing the parents into the conversation of
spouse-selection; of reaching out to both parents and the marrying individuals, and
maintaining a ‘balance’, as Mrs. Batra explained. In so doing they are not depicting
the individual to be in some contradiction or opposition with the parents. In turn,
they enable a reconfiguration of the term ‘choice’ that is premised on a dialogue
between the parents and the children, whose choices, as the matrimonial agencies
reveal, are not always poles apart.
3.2 Matrimonial Websites
The space of matchmaking experienced a radical transformation with the adoption

of technology of the internet. Within a span of a few months, three pan-India
search based websites for matchmaking were launched: Shaadi.com (1996),
Bharatmatrimony.com (1997), and Jeevansathi.com (1998), with over 12 million
registered users.5 The use of internet to look for suitable spouses generated curiosity
amongst scholars who were keen to trace any changes that this space of match-
making may cause in gender dynamics, marriage, companionship, and love. An
aspect that caught immediate attention was that this medium was enabling greater
individual choice and control in matters of spouse-selection, as the individual had
more privacy and control to conduct searches from the web-data.
As appealing as these narratives of greater individual control allowed by the use
of matrimonial websites are, scholarly works also drew attention to the fact that the
websites also promote the inclusion of family in decisions on spouse-selection.
Titzmann (2011), for example, analysed the profiles of female users of matrimonial
websites and their self-presentation to conclude that this medium is used to promote
and curate the image of a ‘new Indian woman’, one who could combine seemingly
contradictory elements of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ (Titzmann 2011: 244). The
advertisements for these websites too cautiously included ‘symbols depicting tra-
ditional ‘Indianness’ and progressive, global technology, signifiers of medial
mobility’ (Titzmann 2011: 245). In this way, the matrimonial website as a forum of
matchmaking was appealing to both a family-conducive and an individual-oriented
clientele, promoting a ‘family oriented individualism’ (2013). Kaur and Dhanda
5
For further details on matrimonial websites see Titzmann (2011), Kaur and Dhanda (2014).
138 P. Bhandari
(2014) argue that these websites are a perfect portal to bridge the gap between
‘arranged’ and ‘love’ marriages, as parents ensure that the individuals make ‘in-
formed choices’ and not select partners from the ‘wrong’ caste, class, or community
background. Agrawal (2015) takes this argument further by stating that these
websites enable ‘doing kin work’, as profiles are shortlisted after analyzing
extensive details on the social background of the marrying individual, much like a
search undertaken by family and kin.
Furthermore, I found it most striking that the very procedure to use the website
too strongly invokes detailed information on the family. In other words, the very
structure of the website caters to embedding the individual in a social context that is
determined by information on the family. With this background, even if the indi-
vidual exerts more control in most aspects of the process, the presence of the family
remains, and in fact, might also determine the search. This is most evident in the
registration process of these websites that involves filling out detailed information
on the individual and the family, in order to generate a profile. This process can be
completed either by a family member (parents, sibling, or relative) or the
prospective bride/groom. The information that these questions seek and their
chronological order clearly signal the crucial role of the family in this matchmaking
process, irrespective of whether undertaken or controlled completely by the indi-
vidual. The first section, entitled ‘Basic’, seeks mandatory information on the name,
age, height, body type, skin colour, religion, and blood group and the religious and
community background of the individual for whom the profile is being created, and
detailed information on their sub-caste and community affiliation is mandatory.
The next two sections of the registration procedure seek detailed information on
the family, some of which is mandatory. The first question is on the occupation of
the father, followed by that of the mother; reifying the patriarchal lifeworld espe-
cially of North India.6 The options include: Employed’, ‘Business’, ‘Professional’,
‘Retired’, ‘Not-Employed’, ‘Passed-away’, with an added option of ‘Housewife’ for
the mother. Successive questions are on the number, gender, and marital status of
siblings. The questions following these, seek genealogical information on the
family including details of place of birth of the parents.
The questions then move from the professional status of the parents to the more
abstract conceptions of values and status which are made finite by providing
options of for example, ‘affluence levels’—middle class, upper middle class, lower
middle class, and ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ values. There is also a section devoted
exclusively to ‘Astrodetails’ that includes options of horoscope matchmaking. The
first question in this section is concerned with identifying whether an individual is a
manglik, that is, does an individual have an inauspicious line-up of stars that can
adversely affect their marriage. While there are options of ‘do not wish to specify’
and ‘does not matter’, it was widely upheld by my interviewees that these questions
6
Veena Das ‘Masks and Faces: An Essay on Punjabi Kinship’; Göran Therborn Between Sex and
Power (London: Routledge, 2004) and ‘Family Systems of the World: Are They Converging? in
J. Treas, J. Scott, and M Richards The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Families (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 2013); Patricia Uberoi Family, Kinship and Marriage in India.
were mostly to address the concerns of the parents, who believed in astrology, more
than the individuals. This was indeed a popular way for the marrying individuals to
lay a claim on being modern by relegating the family as custodians of ‘traditions’
and therefore comfortably take on the space of the ‘modern’. It is this form of
sharing and dialectics between the family and the marrying individuals that the
matchmaking space allows that, in turn, creates the narrative of being ‘modern’ in
contemporary India; a form of compartmentalization of attitudes that though
seemingly contradictory are in fact complementary.
The final segment of the registration process shifts focus to the individual. The
information in this section often forms the basis for individuals to claim greater
control and agency in the online spouse-selection process. However, it should be
noted that this information, too, is indicative of the familial and class background of
the individual. For example, the section begins with questions on ‘education and
employment’, requesting information not just on the educational degrees but also
the colleges attended. These questions are direct ways to gauge the ‘pedigree’ and
class background of the individuals; aspects that are borne out of their familial
position and status, yet these questions are often considered to solely represent
individual capabilities and success (Kumar 1985; Srivastava 1998).7
The order of the questions, as highlighted above, indicates that even if the
individual appropriates this space as dictated more strongly by their desires and
will, they have to begin the process by explicating their familial status and details.
Moreover, since the detailed information on the family is available on the profile, an
interest in the profile may also be highly determined by this information on family
status of the individual. Also, after the completion of the registration process, the
information on family appears before the information on individual, on the profile
page. Thus, we see that though the individual may very well be more in charge of
the process of selecting a spouse on the internet, the structure of the website itself
ensures that there is ample space and prominence to the family, without completely
dominating the process of matchmaking. In this way, the website promotes such a
notion of ‘choice’ that cannot exclude the family.
3.3 ‘About Me’
Once the registration process is complete, the profile as it appears on the website
begins with the section ‘Profile Description’. The space of ‘Profile Description’ is
mostly used to reiterate information on the family and individual that was gathered
during the registration process, with further details. It is the space where the
individual or family narrates the specific characteristics of their suitability as well as
7
See works of Nita Kumar ‘The Middle-Class Child: Ruminations on Failure’; and Sanjay
Srivastava, Constructing Post-colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (New
Delhi: Routledge, 1998).
140 P. Bhandari
delineates their preferences for a spouse. A striking aspect of these profile

descriptions is that irrespective of whether it is the individual or the family that has
written this section, the language that is always used is of ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘our’.
Posted by a Father:
‘Our daughter is a perfect match for someone who is looking for beautiful, homely,
well-mannered girl. She is loving, caring and concerned of others… Our family
includes my wife and our sons, a daughter in law and my daughter. The son is an
engineer… I am looking for a boy who is good looking, loving, caring, and has
good family values. Our daughter works as a manager at an MNC and we are
looking for a preferential match for her, preferably from North India, though rest are
welcome as well.’
Posted by Mother:
Our son is handsome, respectful, and well-placed. He completed his engineering
from a top college in India and MBA from top 10 schools in the UK. He is currently
living in the UK and has plans to return to India. His father is a retired government
officer and mother is a housewife. His younger sister is married and settled in the
US. His brother-in-law is an investment banker and they have a daughter.
We belong to an upper middle-class family and stay in Delhi. We are looking for
a nice well-educated girl from a well-to-do family preferably from North India…
I am handling this profile on behalf of my son. The main decisions will be made
by him.’
Posted by a relative:
‘Praveen Srivastava is a polite, down to earth, and responsible person. An IT
professional currently working in Bangalore. Born and brought up in Bhopal.
Having two elder sisters (both are married). Belongs to a joint family. Looking for a
girl having Indian morals and values, tradition and culture with a broader vision and
comfort level for modern life. A working girl of the same caste would be
preferable.’
Posted by an individual herself (a Prospective spouse)
‘Hi this is Neha Arora…God-fearing, religious and family oriented person. I am
understanding, thoughtful, easy to get along with, fun-loving, have moderate
values…
About the family—Father has a business, mother a home-maker, and brother an
MBA from the US and working with the father. Ours is an affluent, yet disciplined
and religious family…
Looking for a boy of pleasing personality, well to do family and decently
educated…’
These descriptions reveal that the aim of most profiles is to present a togeth-
erness in the process of spouse-selection. Those profiles that are written by the
parents also make it a point to emphasize that whilst they are involved in the
process of matchmaking, the final decision rests with their son/daughter. We can
therefore see that the matrimonial websites encourage a prominence of individual

control and choice in shortlisting candidates but these spaces are so structured that
they include parental involvement in the expression of ‘choice’. This is also ben-
eficial for the family, for they partake in a modern self-fashioning by claiming a
hands-off approach to the processes of spouse-selection, and championing the
prevalence of the individual’s choice. However, they have in face been able to
crucially place themselves in the process of spouse-selection without appearing to
dominate the process. This in turn aids in expanding a notion of ‘choice’ that does
not exclude parental approval and desires.
These new spaces of matchmaking, in this way enable such a definition of the
‘modern’ that bases itself on the interaction between the desires of the individual
and familial domination, without necessarily championing the cause of one over the
other. It brings together the seemingly contradictory, as especially espoused by the
simplistic binaries of ‘arranged’ and ‘love’, in the modern makings of
spouse-selection, ensuring that the term ‘choice’ does not only signal individual
desires and controls.
4 Makings of a ‘Right’ Choice
4.1 Family’s Hands-off Approach
The changes in the sphere of matchmaking, as we have seen above, are surely
important to understand the modern renditions of ‘choice’, however, equally
important is to recognize the role of the family in enabling these makings of modern
choice. Whilst the family claims to merely guide the process and support individual
choice, they also take pride in the moral values that they provided the individuals,
confident that these would be useful in making the ‘right’ choice. On an implicit
trust that family values of morality will be upheld by the children, the family
comfortably assumes a ‘hands off’ approach in the process of spouse-selection,
thereby laying a claim to a modern self-fashioning.
The insistence on moral values, according to Saavla (2010), is key to ascertain a
middle class identity for these values strengthen an ‘in-between’ position that the
middle class occupies. She explains that moral propriety is at the centre of a middle
class identity, which is created in ‘various fields of middle-class social practice’
(2009:6). It is thus, only expected that moral propriety governs the discourse of
middle class marriages.8 These proprieties are expressed in various spheres as of
being a dutiful and good wife, a providing husband, and in upholding the family’s
honour by, for example, not taking to elopement. In fact, elopement has come to
assume a significantly lower class characteristic, as such a decision it is argued by
8
For further discussion on morality and middle class identities see Dickey (2011), Kumar (2011),
Baviskar and Ray (2011).
142 P. Bhandari
the middle class informants, rests on an irrational, instant gratification emotion,

aspects that the middle class distances itself from. The middle class, on the other
hand, as Dickey (2002) notes, presents itself as abiding to values of moderation and
deliberation. The decisions on spouse-selection, too, therefore, need to be clearly
thought-out and rational and not be only based on feelings of lust, attraction, and
passion.
The family duly invokes a moral propriety as it takes a step back in the process
of spouse-selection, all the while expecting that the individual will exercise not
simply a ‘choice’, but indeed a ‘right’, or righteous, and appropriate choice. That is
to say, the individual’s choice, the family believes, will uphold its honour and status
and with this trust in the individual, the family assumes a less prominent role in
spouse-selection and in doing so it lays a claim to being modern.
I met Mrs. Khanna, a mother of a 28-year-old prospective bride at her south
Delhi apartment. The matrimonial agent assigned to assist Mrs. Khanna suggested
that I meet with her and Mrs. Khanna graciously agreed. I went to see her in her
posh south Delhi flat. Mrs. Khanna described in detail her decision to use the
services of matrimonial agencies and emphasized that since they were a ‘modern
family’ she emphasized, they had given full freedom and control to their daughter
to choose a suitable spouse. In that sense, the modernity of their family was
determined by their ability to provide space to individual choice. Her main job, as a
caring yet not interfering mother, was to initiate the process by registering her with
this agency. Beyond that, she claimed, it was her daughter’s decision and process,
who would receive two to three shortlisted profiles per week, and if she liked
anyone of these she would discuss them with her family. She reiterated enough
times and took great pride in exercising a hands-off approach, which was the main
route through which she lay a claim to being modern. She said:
Things are different now. Our daughter is smart and educated. We encouraged her to look
for someone on her own, from her circles of friends and office, but kids nowadays are so
busy. Their job takes up so much time. Plus, she hasn’t found anyone. So, since she is
hitting 30 [her age], my husband and I proposed to her that we should contact a matrimonial
agent. A friend of mine also used their services for her daughter and highly recommended
them….We have a modern outlook and do not want to dictate a choice to our daughter. Our
job is only to begin the process and guide her through it, the onus of a final decision is of
course on her.
I probed if, however, she had certain non-negotiable criteria that she would want
her daughter to follow, to which she replied:
Of course, our daughter already knows what are main criteria, which are not very long. We
just want her to marry someone who will keep her happy, someone who has a good job, and
is from a good family. We trust her to make the right choice as we have brought her up with
good values, sensibility, and the knowledge of what is right and wrong.
Throughout the interview Mrs. Khanna reiterated that they were a modern
family allowing ample space to their daughter to make individual decisions.
Their approach to formal matchmaking too was governed by giving more promi-
nence to their daughter’s preferences, and of not imposing their choice on her.
Interestingly, they downplayed their visit to the matrimonial agency for registration
as merely a bureaucratic procedure. Whereas the matrimonial agent in discussing
the Khannas mentioned to me that the Khannas were quite concerned about their
daughter’s marriage and had a long list of ‘inflexible criteria’, as she said, which
they definitely wanted to be fulfilled, such as of finding a match of a high social and
financial status and from within their community. The Khannas, however, were
presenting a narrative wherein their daughter had more choice and say in the
process, and they were not dictating any criteria, even of caste, community, or class.
Such a narrative was popular amongst other sets of parents as well, especially
those utilizing the services of matrimonial websites. These parents claimed that they
were involved in the process insofar as to create and manage the profile, responding
to queries and interests from others, whilst the final choice was of their children. As
parents of professionals who have a demanding work-life, they explained, they had
agreed to only be involved peripherally in the process of matchmaking, with a
strong confidence that their children would make the right choices. Their trust in the
discerning abilities of their children in choosing a spouse emanated from their
confidence in the morally sound upbringing that they provided to their children.
Mr. Bakshi is the father of a 29-year-old prospective groom, who lives in Mumbai
and works with a leading bank, said:
We are merely the connectors in this process. Our job is to simply push our children to
begin looking for a spouse because they are so busy in their work lives that they tend to
take things like marriage a bit lightly. So we just begin the process… Internet matchmaking
is really something that the children are comfortable with. They know how to use the
technology, they know how to conduct the searches…
I probed further on whether they had any preferences for a daughter-in-law or

feared that their son would marry someone who would not fit in with their family, to
which Mr. Bakshi replied:
We have faith in our upbringing. That is all you can do. You sow the seeds and hope that
the plant comes out well. You can’t control everything. These are modern times. We are a
typical middle class family, with all professionals. My wife and I have brought up both our
children with values of moderation, respect towards elders, and feelings of gratitude and
affection. We can only hope that our children have learnt well from us and make the right
choices.
The family therefore, invokes a strong sentiment of moral values in choosing an

appropriate partner, one who can fit well with their moral and social structure.
However, it does not do so by dominating the process, but by promoting the
discourse on ‘individual’ choice as in fact being synonymous with ‘right’ or a
righteous choice. The marrying individuals too reaffirms this discourse as they
invariably justify the need to uphold family honour and gain the family’s approval
in exercising their choice.
144 P. Bhandari
4.2 Individual’s Choice and Love
Recent works on the middle class assert that finding ‘love’ in marriage is crucial to
the modern self-fashioning of being middle class.9 The term ‘love’ in Indian culture
has various interpretations as of pyar, ishq, junoon, and does not indicate a
homogeneous emotion that the English term of ‘love’ might convey. Therefore,
instead of explaining all romantic affective modes of behaviour simply by the term
‘love marriage’, recent scholarship has emphasized on analyzing the ‘local’ expe-
riences and interpretations of ‘love’ or self-chosen marriages (de Neve 2016, 1249).
Through in-depth ethnographic research, these works note the rise of a language
that alludes to aspects of compassion, affection, and love in marriage, as the young
middle class communicates the importance of companionate marriage, interpersonal
connection, and more generally ‘choice’, to explain their ideals and desires for a
marriage (Lietchy 2003; Donner and Santos 2016; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008).
However, these experiences take place in a framework of middle class morality, one
that also gives due importance to other identifications of caste, for example, and
moral values of upkeep of the family’s honour. This was most clearly observed by
Fuller and Narasimhan (2007, 2014) in their research on the IT sector employees in
Tamil Nadu. They reveal that the young IT employees, who are settled in Chennai
away from their families, gain considerable ‘exposure’ due to their professional
choice and new urban ways of life, leading also to emphasize on compatibility in
marriage and achieving a form of companionate marriage. Whilst their desire for
companionship in marriage and ‘choice’ in the process of spouse-selection remains
strong, Fuller and Narasimhan also note that this young middle class are particular
about adhering to caste boundaries, as they choose a spouse from within their caste.
On an ethnography of the middle class in Kathmandu, Lietchy (2003) argues that
‘love’ is indeed crucial for experiencing and performing a modern subjectivity,
however, equally important is the parent’s approval of their choice. In this way, the
middle class desire to be not simply modern but ‘suitably modern’, as Lietchy
argues.
Following on from these works, my work too revealed that ‘choice’ is couched
in a language of family honour, values, and duty. This is most evident in the
narratives of the marrying individuals justifying their ‘choice’, which as they
expressed would fit well with the wishes and desires of the parents. At other times,
when the parents did not approve of their choice, the individuals were confident that
their parents would come around upon realizing that the chosen spouse in fact
appropriately fits the family’s desires and, specifically, middle class moralities and
identities.
Sneha, aged 26, works at a leading multinational company based in Gurugram,
and is in a relationship with her colleague who belongs to a different linguistic
9
The term ‘love’ in Indian culture has various interpretations as of pyar, ishq, junoon, and does not
indicate a homogeneous emotion that the English term of ‘love’ might convey. This also motivates
scholarship to focus on the local interpretations of ‘love’.
community though of a similar caste and class background. When Sneha informed
her parents that she had chosen a spouse from her work place her parents did not
approve of her choice. Their main concern was that the proposed marriage could
certainly not be a happy one, for Sneha would face many cultural differences that
would eventually affect their marriage. Sneha has been trying to convince her
parents for over a year now. I commented on her patience and perseverance and if at
all she truly believed that her parents would approve her choice, to which she
responded:
I respect my parents. They have brought me up and given me what I have today [referring
to her professional success]. I understand their fears. I will not be senseless to elope and
marry. My choice is a good choice, and they just need time to realize that… I am not
making some irrational choice, you know, and marrying someone who is not suitable for
me at all… yes, Sanjeev’s [her boyfriend] family speak a different language and have
different food than us but are individual preferences match and we understand each other…
We have similar work ambitions, have had a good-education, and this is what matters…
rest all are minor differences
Sneha’s explanation was poignant to further an understanding of middle class

morality for she combined the importance of parental respect and a good upbringing
in her decision of a spousal choice. Her choice of partner may not have matched all
the criteria that her parents thought appropriate, nonetheless, it did fulfil certain
main criteria as of good education and employment, which are seen crucial to a
middle class identity. In other words, Sneha introduced the element of ‘choice’ and
love in her narrative of spouse-selection whilst she also maintained the centrality of
moral values particularly of gaining the consent of parents on a chosen spouse,
thereby suitably performing her middle class identity.
A similar account was that of Yash, who, aged 29, fell in love with a fellow
student at the MBA institute. Yash and Shamita have been dating for two years and
have decided to get married soon. Whilst Yash’s parents have not disapproved of
his choice he is aware that they might not like Shamita very much for they have
different expectations from a daughter-in-law. He explained that he has always been
attracted to the ‘modern type of a woman’, who is professionally ambitious, ‘cool’,
outgoing, and is ‘with the times’. His parents, however, desire someone who also
has a ‘bit of a traditional outlook’, preferably someone who is not obsessed with her
career and is ready to take on family responsibilities. Despite these differences,
Yash is confident that his parents would accept his choice. When I asked what was
the driving force behind this confidence, he explained,
My parents love me and they have brought me up very sensibly. We come from a sorted
middle class family. They know that if I am making a choice, I would have thought it
through and I would not hurt their sentiments. I mean, I wouldn’t marry someone who will
wreck our family! There is a trust and understanding between us. Sure, our preferences
might be little different but that doesn’t mean that I will marry someone who is disrespectful
towards them or does not follow our values.
Yash was aware that his choice might not completely match his parents’,
nonetheless he was also confident that his choice was not too far apart from theirs.
The main factor that brought these two different articulations of choices, as he
146 P. Bhandari
pointed out, was the similar family values, and trust and love between him and his
parents. Yash’s pride of a middle class identity essentially signals to a moral
framework on which his family guides its actions, decisions, and practices. He
certainly desires and self-imagines himself as being ‘modern’ with his educational
and professional successes and his desire to marry an independent woman, one who
is sufficiently cosmopolitan in her outlook.10 However, this modernity is not sep-
arate or distant from a framework of family values, approval, and honour.
5 Conclusion
Following on with the observation that Béteille made two decades ago, with the
dawn of neoliberalization practices, Donner (2011, 2016), in her study of the
middle class of Bengal states that more than consumption, it is the family that
continues to shape the middle class identifications of modern India. In my paper as
well, I have attempted to explain the place of family in the rhetoric of ‘choice’,
which is the cornerstone of a modern subjectivity for middle class youth. I have
explained that the sentiment of ‘choice’ is not simplistically seen as championing
individual desires or will in the processes of spouse-selection but quite effortlessly
includes the family as well. Such a rendition of ‘choice’ is certainly enabled by
processes of modernization as the use of technology in matchmaking. Drawing
attention to matrimonial websites and matrimonial agencies, I highlighted the
specific ways in which these spaces include the family. Equally, I analyse the
narratives of individuals and parents, who take pride and have faith in their culti-
vated middle class identities that ensure that their choice is not far removed from a
respectable middle class choice. In these specific ways the ‘modern’ marriages
promote a language of ‘choice’ that is not detached from the family but in fact is
embedded in it.
Presenting a ‘choice’ in marriages is certainly central to claim a modern sub-
jectivity and enhances a modern self-fashioning. However, the ‘modern’ that is
signified here cannot be understood as the ‘new’ or a rupture from earlier practices
of matchmaking. Dube (2009, 2012) explains that the modern is not simply a
forceful idea marking a break or disjuncture from the past but is about heteroge-
neous histories and plural processes. In that, there is no neat proposal of the
modern. Following from this, my paper does not present a narrative of a singular
process of change to explain the ‘modern’ in marriages. Instead, I lay out the
multiple processes and actors that are reconfiguring the idea and practice of
modernity. There are struggles to establish the notion of companionship and
romance as central to marriage as there are attempts to continue to abide by norms
of familial respect and honour. At the same time, there are multiple actors in the
For further understanding on a ‘modern Indian woman’ see Munshi (2001), Thapan (2009), and
10
Uberoi (2009).
field: marrying individuals, family, technology, matchmakers, and desires of being

and performing middle class identities. This paper does not claim to explain all
these heterogeneous processes in their complex interaction with nuance yet, it
brings attention to a few aspects, particularly the notion and use of the term
‘choice’. It argues that the modernity of spouse-selection lies in the expansive
understanding of ‘choice’, one that seamlessly ties together parental consent with
the sentiments of morality and class identity. This process is not simply unfurled in
the self-fashioning of the individual but also articulates itself in the spaces of
matchmaking that are guided by the processes of modernization.
My understanding of the modern then is not in the temporal categories of ‘now’
and ‘then’, where I trace patterns of continuity or change. Nor do I explain the
modern using the framework of a modernization of traditions (Rudolph and
Rudolph 1967) or of historical methodology (Majumdar 2009). In other words, I do
not see the modern, as a chronological category, but as Adorno states a ‘qualitative
category’ (cited in Dube 2012, p 10).11 The modern is defined as the ‘new’, not
keeping in mind a chronological break, instead, it is more appropriately the ‘now’,
the contemporaneity of times, indicating as Adorno says the desire of the new. It is,
as Baudelaire reminds us, somewhere between the changing pasts and indetermi-
nate future (1995, 73).
I therefore, trace the ‘modern’ in Indian marriage not as continuity of traditions
and norms, nor as an epochal change in the attitude towards spouse-selection,
marking an end or beginning of an era. Instead, I delineate the multiple processes
and roles of actors that together espouse a certain idea of the modern, well suited to
middle class morality. On the basis of this research, I have explained that the middle
class youth is negotiating a space where it can make sense of the processes of
modernization (internet, professionalization, rationality), ideals and notions of
partnership, ambitions and romanticisms of a future, and traditions of a past. It is in
these processes, aspirations, histories, that the ‘modern’ lies, often seemingly
contradictory yet complementary. The attempt of this paper, therefore, has not been
to provide a chronological or temporal history of marriage, then and now. Instead, it
is a qualitative endeavour to map out the different spaces and actors in contem-
porary India that are working towards a certain idea of matchmaking—one that is
based on consensual choice between the family and the individuals to suit the
contemporaneity of their everyday realities, and in due course curates and experi-
ences the ‘modern’.
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Chapter 8
Modern Bombay: The Making of an Art
Territory from 1850s to 1950s
Christine Ithurbide
1 Introduction
Within a few decades, the Industrial Revolution transformed Bombay into one of
Asia’s major trading centres and India’s most modern city in terms of manufac-
turing, finance, culture and entertainment. Mercantile communities such as the
Parsis, Guajarati Baniyas, and Jews settled in the city and started their businesses in
ship construction, opium trade, and cotton industries. A growing population of
skilled-labourers migrated to the city including goldsmiths, ironsmiths, weavers,
potters, and construction workers. The collaboration between the British and Indian
entrepreneurial elites has been essential, not only to build Bombay’s prominent
economic position, but also to the emergence of the city as a modern cultural
metropolis. Indeed, it is in the particularly innovative and philanthropic atmosphere
of the second half of the 19th century that Bombay developed as a new centre for
photography, press, literature, theatre, film industry, and visual art. Established as a
window of modernity by the colonial power, Bombay becomes a theatre of
experiments for the art and architecture and a centre of the Indian avant-garde.
From the contribution of the city to the Eurasian Art Deco movement to the
emergence of the Progressive Artists’ Group and the shaping of a new visual
identity in the post-Independence era, the first half of the 20th century highlights the
evolution of the idea of modern India intimately linked with a context of redefi-
nition of a western-centred world of art.
This chapter is first and foremost about Bombay art territory and the idea of the
modern it embodies from the 1850s to the 1950s. The birth of Bombay modern art1
1
“Art” will designate in this paper the “fine arts” while other arts will be name after their speci-
ficities (music, theater etc.).
C. Ithurbide (&)
e-mail: Christine.ithurbide@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_8
152 C. Ithurbide
period is associated with the creation of the Victoria and Albert Museum (1855) and
the foundation of the Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art (1857), cradle of
modern Indian painting (Dalmia 1995). Although the transition from modern to
contemporary art period cannot be clearly traced, the first exhibition of the
Progressive Artists’ Group in the aftermath of Independence (1947) stands as one of
the landmarks of this transition. In the line of previous work assuming that the story
of modernism in India is the one of ‘connected histories’ (Subrahmanyan 1997) of
flexible and transnational syntax restaged in and through India (Zecchini 2014), I
propose to explore the geography of a modern art world shaped by regional and
transnational circulations of ideas, actors, and material culture and to highlight the
contested aspects of the modern. Torn between the project of window of modernity
designed by the British colonial administration, the desire of an Indian elite to make
Bombay a centre for modern life and the opposition of several groups to
western-associated form of modernity, the emerging cultural metropolis became a
crossroad and laboratory where different ideas of the modern encountered.
Those narratives will be explored through the particular lens of the shaping of
the Bombay modern art territory. The art territory is defined as a space within which
artistic dynamics are articulated. Besides encompassing a range of built structures
(museums, galleries, art schools), the art territory is crossed by both economic flows
and networks, ideas, goods, and people. It is part of the material, industrial, and
political reality but is not limited to it and has a subjective, appropriated dimension.
The historical construction of a specific urban, intellectual, and social environment,
the forms of patronage, the circulation and entrenchment of scales will be analysed
as essential dimensions of the construction of Bombay art territory. Far from being
a homogeneous experience, the modernization of Bombay was perceived as a
process of integration for some or marginalization for others. The whole experience
of the art territory varied according to class, community, caste, individuals, and
brought to light hierarchies and relation of power inherent to the art society. In this
chapter it is assumed that if the experience of the modern in India cannot be
separated from the historical experience of colonialism and struggle for
Independence, the Indian answer to a Euro-American approach of the modern in art
was plural from adoption and adaptation to alternatives and resistance.
After presenting how the cultural modernization of the territory was undertaken
in parallel to its technological modernization, we will focus on the colonial artistic
project and its appropriation by local artists through the cases of art societies and art
schools. Emphasizing the role of Bombay as a gateway and crossroad of artistic
modernity, we will then analyse how the city is taking part in international
experiments and their contested aspects. Ending with the years of Independence, we
will question to what extent those years challenged (or not) the colonial boundaries
of the art territory (Fig. 1).
8 Modern Bombay: The Making of an Art Territory … 153
Fig. 1 Bombay modern art territory between 1850 and 1950. Source Conception and design
C. Ithurbide, 2016
2 Shaping a Centre of Modern Life and Culture
Bombay modern art territory finds its origins in the context of the tremendous
changes brought by the Industrial Revolution and the particular socio-cultural
milieu that developed during the colonial period. Within a few decades, Bombay
became India’s most modern city in terms of manufacturing, finance but also for
culture and entertainment. The development of the city was based on its technical
progress and new influx of wealth. Parsis, Guajarati, and Jewish mercantile com-
munities settled in the city and started their businesses in ship construction, opium
154 C. Ithurbide
trade, and cotton industries. A growing population of skilled-labourers migrated to

the city including goldsmiths, ironsmiths, weavers, potters, and construction
workers (Dwivedi and Mehrotra 2001). The flourishing textile industry became one
of the specializations of the city and branches of Bombay textile companies opened
in Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Indian city emerged as one of the major trading
centres in Asia, closely linked to the global market. Pioneer in technology, the city
built the first Asian railway line in 1853, linking the south of Bombay to Thane.
The cultural modernization of the territory was undertaken in parallel to its
technological modernization. In 1855, the Government Central Economic Museum
of the Bombay Presidency approved the creation of the Victoria and Albert
Museum2 on Parel Road next to the new railway tracks. The colonial government
donated the site for the construction and Indian merchants and patrons contributed
to its financial support through a system of public subscriptions (Chopra 2011:
220). Apart from the contribution of three main Indian patron Jamshedji
Jeejeebhoy, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad and Jaganath Shunkerseth, funds were collected
from city’s patrons belonging to Parsi, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities.
This example of cultural cooperation between Indian upper-classes and the British
administration inaugurated an early form of public-private partnership in the pro-
duction of cultural spaces in the city. It also appeared as an expression of solidarity
between the dominant elites (Steggles 1997).
Two years later in 1857, the British Government decided to develop the first
entertainment district Pila House (Play House) on the east of Grand Road. A few
theatres already existed since the 1830s on Grant Road, opened by British and other
Europeans. Jaganath Shunkerseth was the first Indian patron to donate part of his
land for the construction of a theatre in this neighbourhood, soon followed by other
Parsi patrons who designed their theatres on the model of the Drury Lane and
Covent Garden Theatre in London (Orsini 2006). The Royal Opera House was built
a little further south, near Charni Road in 1908. Pila House became a symbol of
urbanization and urban entertainment in the early 20th century and embodied the
development of a new culture of leisure.
Hence, the colonial city was far from being the product of colonial rulers only
but was the result of a collaborative effort between British and Indian entrepre-
neurial elites to shape a new centre of modern life. Between 1822 and 1857, the
establishment of a great number of institutions in education (Bombay Native School
and School Society, the Engineer Institution, Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy School of
Art), geography (Bombay Geographical Society) or medicine (Bombay Medical
and Social Society) led the historian J. V. Naik to qualify Bombay as the
enlightenment urban centre (Naik 1995).
Benefiting from this singular cosmopolitan, innovative and philanthropic envi-
ronment, Bombay steadily developed as a new centre for press, photography,
theatre, film industry, and music throughout the second half of the 19th century.
2
Renamed Bhau Daji Lad Museum in 1975.
Indeed, Bombay started to represent one of the most important centres of modern
Gujarati literature in the mid-19th century where also dozens of magazines in
Gujarati and Marathi (Suvarnamala, Sharada, Prakash, Aaraam) were published
(Patel and Throner 2003). The city became one the epicentres of photography that
was spreading to the rest of the subcontinent. This technological revolution trans-
formed both urban public and private culture and led to the development of new
professions and spaces dedicated to this new-born image of industry. Many studios
opened in Bombay between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with
most of them located in the Fort neighbourhood, on Merewether Street or
Kalbadevi Road (Rahaab 2010: 75). While commercial photography was the main
activity (portraits, business cards), art photography developed at the end of the 19th
century in close link with the pictorial tradition. Bombay’s emerging photography
industry had early connections to national and international networks. Shapoor N.
Bedward, one of the first internationally recognized Bombay photographers,
exhibited at the Crystal Palace in London in 1889. The Parisian photography house,
Paris Marion & Co, teamed up with several Bombay studios for the production of
photographic montages with lithographic inscriptions (Rahaab 2010: 76). With
regard to the advancement of technologies, Bombay also had the new techniques of
engraving, particularly lithography and oleography.
But India’s first entertainment industry at the turn of the 20th century was
undoubtedly cinema. Once again, Bombay embodied the epicentre of modern
culture being slowly diffused to the rest of the subcontinent. The history of cinema
in India began, on July 7, 1886, when the first animated images produced by the
Lumières brothers were presented at Hotel Watson in Fort, south Bombay. Raja
Harishchandra, the first Indian silent film, was screened at the Coronation Cinema
in Bombay in the Girgaum district in 1913. Numerous large studios of cinemato-
graphic production were developed between 1913 and 1933 in Dadar neighbour-
hood, while in Pila House, six theatres were converted into movie theatres (Gangar
2003: 268). Following the growing popularity of the cinema industry, the Royal
Opera House also began to screen films from 1917, and in 1925 the Pathé group
rented the whole of the Opera for projections (Dwivedi and Mehrotra 2001: 228).
The success of this industry relied on the support of private patrons such as textile
tycoon Mayashankar Bhatt and other important Parsi merchants including
K. N. Kabraji, Kunverji Nazar and Dadabhai Thuthi. Moreover, the profits realized
by the film industry were systematically reinvested in new productions and the
creation of infrastructures (studios, laboratories, projection rooms, etc.), a strategy
that enabled Bombay to keep the lead of this industry. Migrations from the
countryside contributed to shape a new urban audience and from 1921 to 1927, the
number of cinemas increased from 148 to 346, and reached 1657 in 1938. Films
produced in Bombay started to be screened in Burma and Ceylon, but the Indian
film market remains largely national with 95% of its revenue coming from India.
From the 1920s, Bombay played a major role in the diffusion of non-Indian
musical styles in India and more particularly in jazz music. Jazz was associated with
the idea of modernity and freedom and embodied the emergence of a new and faster
way of life that goes hand in hand with the arrival of electricity, the automobile
156 C. Ithurbide
industry, trains and planes. Having jazz venues meant entering the circle of modern
musical metropolises (Dorin 2012). Performances of foreign, European, and
American orchestras constituted the first stage of the diffusion of jazz music in
India, although reduced to an exclusively colonial audience. Jazz groups travelled
to major hotels in Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, and Madras and throughout Asia
including Colombo, Singapore, Shanghai, and Bangkok. The Taj Hotel in Bombay
became one of the most important jazz venues in India.
The process of assimilation of western aesthetics into social and cultural customs
was also visible in the private sphere. Indian traders’ communities were again
essential agents in this cultural process. Parsis, Shetias, and rich Gujarati merchants
from the Kutch and Rajasthan region began to furnish their interiors with objects of
European styles (works of art, glasses, chandeliers), next to which they would
display porcelain pots from China and Persian carpets (Dwivedi 1997: 154). In
contrast, the prevailing masses lived on the margins of the society built by the
British-Indian elite, both spatially and culturally. In the case of theatre, namely
tin-shed theatres mushroomed outside of Pila House, breaking the upper-class
monopoly of theatre entertainment (Gangar 1995). The chawls (tenements), the
workers’ housing constructed by the Improvement Trust and the Development
Directorate, constituted an ideal setting for representations that were gradually
taking on a more political character and were aimed primarily at the working classes
such as the bharuds, bhajans, powadas and tamashas (Dwivedi and Mehrotra 2001:
229). Whereas the city was increasingly connected to a global modernity through a
limited number of spaces such as the examples of jazz or theatre illustrates, it
remained disconnected and inaccessible to the majority of its inhabitants. This
geography of power at stake in the rise of a modern entertainment society prevailed
also in the emerging Bombay art world.
3 From the Colonial Artistic Project to Local Artists’

Appropriation
The development of modern artistic spaces in Bombay had been conditioned on the
one hand by the overall colonial cultural policy, and on the other hand, by the urban
colonial project that aimed to transform the neighbourhood of Fort into the western
window of modernity of the Indian Empire.3 In parallel to the construction of the
railway lines and the establishment of new town halls, the British administration
ordered the creation of museums and art schools in the three major port cities of the
Indian Empire—Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, representing nodal point of this
system. By the end of the 19th century, a first network of modern art structures was
established in the Indian territory that extended to other cities such as Lahore,
3
Fort was developed in the line of its eastern model, Fort William in Calcutta. Calcutta was a
capital of the British Empire until 1911 when it is shifted to Delhi.
Lucknow, Nagpur. This cultural enterprise to promote art in India was not limited to
philanthropic interest, but as a response to a clear political and commercial agenda
at a time when the handicraft industry was booming.
This cultural agenda explained the projects of museums, art schools, and art
societies that were built in Bombay since the 1850s. Some of the art structures were
also taking part in an ambitious redevelopment plan of the Fort neighbourhood. Fort
represented an administrative, military and commercial centrality of the city since
the arrival of the British. Having lost their military function, fortifications were
demolished in the early 1860s by Governor Bartle Frere who proceeded to the
redevelop the zone (without changing its name). The old Fort neighbourhood
opened on the plain, offering a new public area for government offices and public
institutions. With land unifications, fortification dismantling, and ambitious archi-
tectural projects booming, the transformations of south Bombay was comparable to
Napoleon III’s rebuilding of Paris (Harris 2005).
The redevelopment of Fort was characterized by the division into specialized
sectors dedicated to trade (Ballard Estate), bank (Horniman Circle) and recreational
activities (Oval Maidan). The Apollo neighbourhood became the meeting place of
the international elite with the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Yacht Club as its land-
marks. The arrival of tourists during the inter-war period and the emergence of the
tourism industry accelerated the development of this area, with new hotels,
restaurants and craft shops around the prestigious Gateway of India (1924). The
transformation of Fort included ambitious architectural projects aimed to illustrate
the imperial splendor. The little Hornby Row where many influential Parsis lived
was metamorphosed into Hornby Road, a prestigious commercial avenue with
Gothic Victorian style architecture.
By the early 20th century, the Fort neighbourhood was not only the adminis-
trative and commercial centre of Bombay but also a cultural and artistic centrality
with the foundation of philanthropic societies, libraries, art schools and the orga-
nization of exhibitions at the Town Hall. There was no specific district for the arts at
this time but the major structures of the modern art system were founded in Fort: the
J.J. School of Art, the Prince of Wales Museum (1901–14), the first art and pho-
tography societies that symbolized the premises of the art market for exhibition,
trade, and the Cowasji Jehangir Hall (1911). The new artistic structures were
installed on public land, acquired or rented by these elites for a derisory price
(Harris 2005: 47).
Bombay urban history was also characterized by a strong segregation based on
community, religion, and caste. An order forbade any non-European to build
dwellings on the south of Churchgate Streetin other words in the Fort districtforcing
the Indians to settle outside the fortified ward in what is called the Black Town
(Rousselet 1877:10). This discriminating organization became reflected in the
shaping of the Bombay art territory with the concentration of major modern art
institutions in Fort clearly dominated by the British population.
158 C. Ithurbide
3.1 Artistic Societies: From Leisure Clubs for the European

and Indian Urban Elite to Artist-Run Exhibition
Societies
At the end of the 19th century, Bombay had several intellectual and philanthropic
societies founded by British orientalists. Three of them were devoted to art,
archaeology and heritage. The Asiatic Society (1804), second intellectual and
philanthropic society founded in India, contributed to the rediscovery and promo-
tion of Indian archaeology. The Bombay Photographic Society (1847) founded on
the model of the Calcutta Photographic Society was dominated by Europeans
whose activities consisted in doing the photographic inventory of antiquities and
archaeological sites; and the Bombay Art Society (1888) was created to encourage
artistic practices especially among amateurs and to offer an arts education to the
local population.4
Art societies were part of a larger colonial project to establish modern political,
scientific, and social institutions and leisure clubs for the British and Indian elite in
Bombay. Although more focused on archaeology than on the contemporary arts of
their time, the societies for the promotion of the arts favoured the introduction of
new debates on ‘Indianity’ among artists and intellectuals, a question that will
become essential in artistic revival movements in India.
The Bombay Art Society occupied a major place in the development of the
artistic milieu of the city. Besides organizing annual exhibitions in February or
March, it produced a new audience for the art and paved the way for a local art
market. Supported by the British administration it benefited from punctual financial
aid from the colonial government and requested an annual participation of Rs. 10 to
ensure its financial autonomy (Muller 1989). Most of the members of the Bombay
Art Society were English installed in India. It also received donations from the
Rajas of several districts of Maharashtra (of Kolhapur, Sangli and Satara among
others) and neighbouring states (Baroda, Gwalior, Bhavnagar) who would come to
the annual exhibitions to buy paintings and sculptures (Bhagwat 2011: 81).
Constructed as a ‘public space’, the Bombay Art Society was, in practice,
reserved for an urban elite that became increasingly ‘mixed’. The first exhibitions
were only open to members of the society. After 1899 they took place at the city
Town Hall with an entrance fee and did not begin to attract a lot of visitors until
1905. The audience was mainly composed of British officials, military, merchants,
and promising artists. From 710 visitors in 1905 the exhibition registered 2000
visitors two years later. The sales of paintings generated encouraging profits,
growing from barely Rs. 900 in 1905 to Rs. 5000 in 1908 (Sadwelkar 1989). Prizes
were given out by the society but Indian-origin artists remained rarely awarded.
Similarly, the presidency of the artistic society remained in the hands of British
4
The Gazette of Bombay and Islands, Vol III, Compiled by SM Edwardes, Bombay Time Press,
1910.
personalities until 1936 when, for the first time, it was given to Sir Cowasji Jehangir
Readymoney, a Parsi patron who would go on to play a central role in the estab-
lishment of other modern art spaces in Bombay. The opening of art exhibition to the
Indian population, mainly students of the J.J. School of Art, happened gradually
after the 1920s. In 1923, among the 192 artists at the annual exhibition, 136 were
Indian including 36 women. Thus, the Bombay Art Society symbolizes the gradual
adoption of fine art by the Indian elite even though the latter remained for a long
time on the margins, both in exhibitions and in the management of the structure.
Although relatively closed to the Indian artistic community, the Bombay Art
Society proved to be a stimulating tool for local creativity leading to the invention
of new structures. In 1918, the Art Society of India was created by renowned Indian
painters such as M. Parandekar, M. F. Pithawala, and the sculptor G. K. Mhatre as
president of the society. At the same time, the first society founded and reserved
exclusively for Bengalis, the Indian Association for the Promotion of Fine Arts and
National Gallery (1892), was founded in Calcutta (Nercam 2005). In a context
where artistic societies were socially closed clubs intended for European amateur
painters, these new associations founded both in Bombay and Calcutta represented
an important step in the evolution of the artistic community’s autonomy. Whether
art societies were first part of colonial control over artistic creation in India, they
were gradually assimilated and re-appropriated by Indian artists at the beginning of
the 20th century. Appropriation is a key term in the context of modern art expe-
rience. It demonstrates how societies seeking to emulate western modernity
reshaped the received western influences to create their own forms of modernity in
society (Chiu et al. 2013).
3.2 From the J.J. School of Art to the Institutes of Art,

the Development of Art Educational Structures
The other artistic structure that played an important role in the development of the
Bombay modern artistic milieu comprised the schools and institutes of art. As part
of the colonial enterprise, four schools of fine arts and industrial art were founded in
of India during the second half of the 19th century.5 The J.J. School of Art became
the most important western-oriented institute for training in fine art in Maharashtra.
The history of its construction attests to the role of the Parsi community played in
the modernization of the urban artistic landscape and the strong collaborations that
existed between British administrators and members of the Indian community. As
early as 1850, Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy businessman and philanthropist
Parsiaimed at showcasing art and preserve Indian craftsmanship. He proposed to
create a school intended to be a new ‘nursery of artists and craftsmen’ and founded
5
The Madras (School of Industrial Arts), Bombay (Sir JJ School of Art), Calcutta (Government
School of Art) and Lahore (Mayo School of Art).
160 C. Ithurbide
the J.J. School of Art on March 2, 1857. This project was financially supported by
George Buist, editor of the Bombay Times and Jaganath Shunkerseth belonging to
a major Brahmin family of Bombay. The school is also the result of pressures from
the local elite to improve the quality of industrial and artisanal products in the
region (Dalmia 1995). The India Company provided land for the construction and
for the venue of Professors from England.6 The school curriculum was developed
on the lines of the department of arts and sciences of South Kensington College of
Art. Handicrafts was the second most important economic resource in the country
after agriculture and represented a major challenge in the future development of
Indian society. Jeejeebhoy understood the urgency of reorganizing this class of
workers, many of whom were threatened by unemployment with the rise of
industrialization.7 He was confident in the originality and skill of Indian craftsmen
and was convinced that well-trained in this new school, they could compete with
any industrial product and appropriate new European techniques to improve the
quality of their products (Kelkar 1969). Hence, the initial art school project was
widely open to artisans but it seems that the school has actually benefited little from
them. The main reasons were the lack of basic access to education and information
about the school, and also difficulties with the language of teaching.
With new educational and exhibition spaces opened up, Bombay became a
particularly attractive city for young Indian artists and represented the gateway to
opportunities in European capitals widely perceived as places of consecration.
Samuel Rahamin, later renamed Fyzee Rahamin, studied at the Royal Academy of
London where he exhibited in 1906. Born in Surat, the portraitist Manchershaw F.
Pithawalla who studied in Bombay from 1888 to 1896 is known as the first Indian
artist who had his personal exhibition in London at the Dore Gallery in October
1911 (Mitter 1995). However, even after his experience in Bombay and London, it
remained very difficult for him to make a living out of his art. The two painters
N. N. Writer and Navroji who trained also in Europe around the same period
suffered a similar disillusionment. Indeed, because of a still extremely small art
market in India, artists returning from Europe looked for princely patronage in order
to make a living. Kundanlal Mistri who joined the J.J. School of Art in 1889 and
then went on to study at the Slade School in London endured such a trajectory.
Particularly appreciated at the court of the Maharana of Mewar, he continued his
career as a court painter on his return from Europe (Mitter 1995). During the 1930s,
an increasing number of artists who studied at the J.J. School obtained scholarship
to study in London and Paris. Gopal Damodar Deuskar, born in Ahmednagar and
awarded a scholarship by the Nizam of Hyderabad went to study in London, Paris,
Vienna, Madrid and Berlin. Vishwanath Govind Nageshkar received a scholarship
6
Lockwood Kipling and John Griffiths, two advocates of the British Art & Craft movement were
nominated as Professors of decorative architecture and Decorative Painting from 1865 to 1874.
7
Original quotation from J. Jeejeebhoy “Next to agriculture, artisans’ work and craft was the most
important agency of wealth production. So they felt the need of supplementing scholastic education
by a system of training apprentices during the actual process of manufacture” (Kelkar 1969).
from the state of Kolhapur and studied in Paris, Munich and Berlin during the same
years (Trouilloud 2016).8
The first half of the 20th century constitute also an important moment for the
development of several art institutes by senior India artists or group of artists. The
two first ones are the Haldankar’s Fine Art Institute founded by Sawlaram
Haldankar in 1908 in Dadar and the Ketar’s Art Institute in 1915 in Girgaum, which
prepare students for the J.J. School of Art entrance contest. In the 1930s, several
artists also joined forces to open the Nutan Kalamandir in 1931 and the Model Art
Institute in 1939 in Dadar (Bhagwat 2009). The location of these art institutes in the
Dadar district probably coincided with the development of what was then the
suburb of Bombay (Dadar, Matunga among others). Outside Bombay, former
graduates of J.J. School of Art opened their own schools in Nagpur (Nagpur School
of Art) and Kolhapur (Dalvi’s Art Institute). The multiplication of schools and
institutes managed by Indian artists themselves highlight the progressive appro-
priation of art educational structure by local artistic community.
The Bombay modern art territory was built in a context of both organizational
mutations (commercial and industrial capital) and technical mutations (industrial-
ization, photography). On the one hand, the British colonial administration pro-
vided land or financial support with the perspective to set up an all-India modern
cultural apparatus and enhance the position of this colony within the British
Empire. On the other hand, the Indian elite, mainly Jewish and Parsi merchants and
bankers were involved in this cultural enterprise primarily as the main beneficiaries
and audience. Together, they produced an elite art territory framed by institutional
and western oriented vision of the modern. A few artists managed to found artistic
societies and institutes apart from this institutional network, mainly located in the
suburb of the city. Because of this exceptional network of modern art space
compared with other Indian cities, Bombay attracted many artists who were looking
for both national and international careers in fine arts.
4 Bombay and International Modern Art Experiments
Bombay embodied a contested gateway and crossroads of artistic modernity. For

many artists, the city represented a gateway to international exhibition and recog-
nition. But their participation in universal exhibition severely framed by the colo-
nial context often led to a misinterpretation of the Indian experience of artistic
modernity. Bombay was also a high place of cultural syncretism, a process that
8
The names of S.G Mhatre, Shiavax Chavda, J. D. Gondhalekar, Ambika and M. V. Dhurandhar
are also mentioned by Julia Trouilloud in her research on mapping Indian artists’ circulation to
Paris in the early twentieth century (Trouilloud 2016).
162 C. Ithurbide
raised criticism on one side and could also be interpreted as an opportunity to take
part in global modernisms9 on the other.
The participation of Indian artists to universal exhibitions in Europe enabled the
exploration of the complexity of this situation. In the last decades of the 19th
century, students and artists from J.J. School of Art were often selected to be part of
international art events. At the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1888,
T. N. Mukharji described the success of Indian artistic and crafts production in
Europe and the increase in demand. He mentioned that a watercolour by a
J.J. School student sold for Rs. 25 (Mukharji 1888: 8). However, the art exhibited at
the universal exhibitions raised critical questions. E. B. Havel, former principal of
the Government School of Art of Calcutta (1896–1905) who has been one of the
most critical voice of the ill-effects of British colonialism and art educational policy
on Indian art, saw in such exhibitions the expression of a total failure of under-
standing the Indian creative potential. He denounced ‘Indian studio models posed
according to European academic rules, wholly un-Indian in thought and unnatural
in expression’ (Havell 1925).
In 1934, an exhibition of Modern Indian Art was held in London Burlington
Gallery organized by the India Society. It was the first time such an extensive
coverage of paintings and sculptures from the 20th century was assembled
including the artworks from Gaganendranath Tagore and Jamini Roy who excited
the greatest interest. The Bombay section presented naturalistic painters such as
Pestonji Bomanji and M. F. Pithawala that received mitigated reception for their
‘dull but colourful variation of well-known methods following European pattern’
(Parimoo 2011: 362). If the universal exhibitions contributed to the display of
Indian artists exploring different form of modernity and their access to an inter-
national market, they also remained strongly dominated by the imperial ideology
and nourished the common perception of derivative western modernism10 that will
keep Indian artists at the periphery of the global art history movement during most
of the 20th century. The experiences of artists such as M. F. Pithawalla previously
discussed demonstrated that other trajectories outside the colonial networks were
possible to reach the international scene and needed to be highlighted in the shaping
of a global modernism.
Bombay’s strategic, commercial, and economic situation also facilitated its
emergence as a centre of diffusion and adaptation of new architectural styles. Indian
leaders from different states discovering the city’s artistic and architectural trends
would reproduce them in their villas or on the public buildings of their city. The
redevelopment of the Fort neighbourhood had been an occasion to incorporate
many European and Indian styles. For the British architects collaborating with
Indian engineers, sculptors, artists and craftsmen, such syncretism aimed at
emphasizing Bombay as a metropolis of international standards. However, several
9
The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Edited by Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
10
See Partha Mitter and his critic of the «Picasso Manqué» syndrome (Mitter 2007).
voices were raised against this stylistic syncretism. In 1888, the magazine Builder
criticized this association of Indian sculptural details in a western setting as leading
to oriental aspect without oriental feeling. According to the magazine, this archi-
tectural production had indeed been instrumental in maintaining Bombay in a
provincial style considered inferior.11
The appropriation of the Art Deco style in Bombay in the years 1920–30s
represents a new episode of architecture cultural syncretism.12 For several histori-
ans, this new wave of international architecture marked the transition from the
Victorian city to the modern cosmopolitan city (Mehrotra 2001; Windower 2009).
While an increasing number of cinemas (Metro Cinema, Eros Cinema, Regal
Cinema), corporate offices (Air India) and private apartments (Marine Drive,
Cumballa Hill and Juhu villas) contributed to the emergence of an Indo-Deco or ‘art
dekho’ style, Bombay participated in the emergence of a Global South Art Deco
movement that was spreading in other metropolises of Asia and Latin America.
More particularly in Asia, Java in Indonesia and Shanghai in China experienced the
same technical and industrial innovations and recent economic growth that fostered
their modernization process. This context gave birth to distinctive Chinese and
Shanghai decorative styles: the Haipai or Shanghai Art Deco (Delalande 1995: 47)
and two Javanese deco styles known as Indo-Europeeschen Architectuur Stijl and
Nieuw-Zakelijk13 (Hamonic 2007: 73). The processes of singular appropriation at
work in these different metropolises revealed the cultural originality of each Asian
metropolis and contribution to the idea of global modernisms.
5 The Rise of the Art District in Kala Ghoda

Neighbourhood
At the end of the first half of the 20th century, Bombay, well inserted into inter-
national artistic network, is increasingly challenging Calcutta for the status of
epicentre of Indian art world. The arrival of intellectual and collectors who fled the
rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to new experiments at
a time when the historical neighborhood of Kala Ghoda was structuring as an early
institutional and editorial art district.
While it was still very difficult at this time for young Indian artists to travel
outside their country, the arrival of European intellectual and art collectors awak-
ened great interest and exchanges. Among those key actors was Rudolf von Leyden
(Rudy) geologist by training, collector, painter, caricaturist, photographer, and art
11
Original quotation in Builder, n°55, 14th July 1888.
12
Art Deco was a material style movement that developed during the 1920s and was prevalent until
the early 1950s. It was characterized by smooth lines, geometric shapes, streamlined forms and
bright, sometimes garish colors.
13
Those two styles are also called Art Deco first style and second style. See Hamonic (2007).
164 C. Ithurbide
critic who arrived in Bombay in 1933 with his younger brother A. R. Leyden, a
sculptor. Rudy would soon become an unavoidable art critic for the Times of India.
Emmanuel Schlesinger fled Denmark and arrived in Bombay around the same
period. A close friend of Oskar Kokoshka and Egon Schiele, he had to leave behind
his collection of more than a 1000 works including paintings by those masters of
abstract Expressionism, but his taste for gestural painting followed him to India. He
became an important patron and collector in the art scene, which emerged in the
1950s. Before coming to Bombay, Austrian Walter Langhammer was a Professor at
the Academy of Vienna. At his home on Nepean Sea Road in Malabar Hill, he
started workshops where artists could come to work and discuss. Most of today’s
renowned contemporary artists came to study with him and had long conversations
on the avantgarde in Europe and on abstract Expressionism. S. H. Raza remem-
bered Langhammer placing before them the reproductions of works of Raphael, El
Greco, Monet, and Cézanne alongside Rajput, Mongol and Persian miniatures in
order to expose them to various styles, to broaden their horizons. This experience
fostered a rethinking of the western modernity as integrating a long tradition of
style appropriations in Indian art. Benefiting from the intellectual and financial
support of this small community of European migrants, the Progressive Artists’
Group would then be founded in Bombay in the aftermath of Independence.
The network of modern art institutions developed in Bombay during the colonial
period became also the ground on which the post-Independence art scene expanded.
In Fort, the Kala Ghoda neighbourhood steadily established itself as an institutional,
commercial, and intellectual centrality, benefiting from the support of the local
artistic community as well as the dynamism of the financial, commercial, and tourist
districts that surrounded it. Far from being relocated, the artistic centrality of the
southern districts had been reinforced after Independence.
Kala Ghoda, where the Bombay Art society, the Prince of Wales Museum
(1901–14) and the Cowasji Jehangir Hall (1911) were already located, brought
together new spaces for art exhibition, press, and trade. The city’s first public art
gallery, the Jehangir Art Gallery, opened in 1952 next to the Prince of Wales
Museum. Founded by the Parsi art patron Cowasji Jehangir, this public gallery
became a pioneer space of a recognizably modern gallery system with its profes-
sional dealers and regularized exhibition spaces. It was also where the first exhi-
bition of the Progressive Artists’ Group happened. For Bombay artists, the Kala
Ghoda neighbourhood became a central place for work and sociability. Some of
them were living in Girgaon or Mandi Bazar, near the J.J. School of Art, and could
easily walk or cycle to Kala Ghoda. The price of land still allowed artists to reside
in these neighbourhoods. They worked at home or in the few collective studios
available, one of the most important of the time being the Bhulabhai Desai Hall in
Cumballa Hill. They would buy their material in shops nearby and come to meet
their friends, or even collectors at the Jehangir Art Gallery.
The opening of associations and places of gathering for artists along with
publishing houses and bookshops close to the Jehangir Art Gallery, transformed
Kala Ghoda into an early institutional and editorial art district. The Chetana Centre,
on Rampart Row, was the place where artists, musicians and writers gathered
around a café and had their first exhibitions. A few buildings away, still on Rampart
Row the Artists’ Aid Fund Centre14 founded in 1946, was another space for dis-
cussion and exhibition for young artists that received support from the Bombay Art
Society. The installation of the German cultural centre in this neighbourhood also
contributed to cultural exchanges and meetings with foreign artists in Bombay.
Marg, a publishing house, founded by Mulk Raj Anand settled in front of Rampart
Row in 1946. Although the Times of India was publishing articles devoted to the
arts, there were still very few reviews and journals dedicated to the arts.15 Mulk Raj
Anand became a pioneer art publisher in India and fostered new public debates on
museums, heritage, town planning and arts education. His project following a
resolutely modern and national ambition, with a rethinking of practices, objects and
places for the construction of a post-colonial society, also aimed at creating a
growing art-conscious public and encourage an international appreciation of the
Asian heritage. The oldest book wholesalers installed at Kitab Mahal, New Book
Co. well-known for its art books and foreign literature, started to offer discounts on
Museum of Modern Art publications that were often out of stock. The two first
private art galleries of the city Chemould and Pundole Gallery would only open a
few years later in Kala Ghoda, in 1962, announcing the rise of Bombay as the
capital of the art market in India in the second half of the 20th century.
6 Conclusion
The Bombay modern art territory that arises from this study is inscribed in
long-term socio-economic processes and continuously reworked by the evolutions
of the city and its opening to an environment increasingly wide. This approach
demonstrates how the dynamics of emergence of an art territory are far from being
phenomena without anchoring with specific histories and given local contexts. The
urban segregation at stake in the city was reflected in the art territory with an artistic
centrality formed in the neighbourhood of Fort originally reserved for the British
and the Indian elite. Facing the cosmopolitan culture of the British and Indian elites,
other spaces for creative expressions supported by the middle and poor layers of the
local population were developed. Although less documented, such spaces led to
thinking about the questions of hierarchies, relations of power and invisibility
within the modern art territory of Bombay. In the decades that followed
Independence it did not attempt to challenge the colonial boundaries of the art
territory, on the contrary, an increasing concentration of art spaces was observed in
Fort’s neighbourhood and more specifically in Kala Ghoda. This process highlights
14
Also named Artist’s Aid Society.
15
The Bombay art society published a journal from 1906 to 1910 and then experienced a 25-year
stoppage period for financial reasons. It resumed in 1935, stopped again in 1936 to reappear in the
early 1960s. Catalogues on annual exhibitions were published.
166 C. Ithurbide
a certain post-colonial failure to break the hierarchy and segregated structure of

Bombay modern art territory, while entering into the contemporary art decades.16
The writing of a cultural history of the city that would enhance the non-institutional
artistic spaces initiated by the less privileged social classes and emphasizing a plural
modernity still needs to be encouraged.
References
Bhagwat, Nalini. 2009. Art Schools, Art Collections, Art Societies, Individual Patrons and Art
Galleries in Maharashtra Before 1945. In Historical Development of Contemporary Indian Art,
ed. R. Parimoo, 1880–1947. India Lalit Kala Akademi: New Delhi.
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Mosaic of Modern Culture, edi. Sujata Patel, and Alice Thorner. Oxford University Press.
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1995. pp. 46–52.
Dorin, Stéphane. 2012. Jazz and Race in Colonial India: The Role of Anglo-Indian Musicians in
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Edition 1995).
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Transition, ed. Sujata Patel, and Jim Masselos. Oxford University Press.
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Mukharji, Trailokyanātha Mukhopadhyāya. 1888. Art-manufactures of India, specially compiled
for the Glasgow international exhibition, Calcutta: Government printing, India
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of Modern Culture, ed. Patel and Thorner. Oxford University Press.
Nercam, Nicolas. 2005. Peindre au Bengale (1939-1977). Contribution à une lecture plurielle de
la modernité. L’Harmattan, Paris.
16
Such situation does not only concern the former Indian colonial capital but was also observed in
European capitals such as Berlin. Boris Grésillon mentions that one of the major problems of the
city in the late 1930s was that it had not designed urban-scale planning and failed to break down
the segregated structure of the Berlin agglomeration. (Grésillon 2002: 88)
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Historicizing Modernism, Bloomsbury Academic.
Chapter 9
Modern Mixes: The Hybrid
and the Authentic in Indian Cuisine
Ishita Banerjee-Dube
The first section of the menu, titled ‘Chef’s signature Entrées’ of a hip and hap-
pening restaurant in south Kolkata owned by a cordon bleu-chef proudly proclaims:
Asian Heritages: French techniques. Unlike the so-called fusion (or confusion) Cuisine this
section is a Reflection of the Chef’s Style and Craft of Blending in the Fine Techniques and
Styling of French Cuisine, without compromising the Robustness and Authenticity of the
Ancient and Traditional Heritage Cuisines of Asia.
The restaurant, named Spice Kraft (and not Spice Craft) plays with the same
style of blending: is this (c)kraft with spices ‘authentic’, fusion, or confusion? Can a
blend be ‘authentic’?
This chapter will explore tales from the history of food and cooking not just to
spike up our perceptions of the modern and tradition (heritage), but to introduce
food and cooking as elements significant to the understanding of concept-categories
and historical processes that shape personhood, identity and belonging, status and
class, and discrimination and aspiration, all inflected by power. In the following
account, a heterogeneous modern will be matched by an equally plural ‘other’,
construed constantly in accordance with the needs of the changing modern. It will
also unravel how the enmeshment of the two together with the composite and
innovative nature of ‘tradition’, the ‘ethnic’ or the ‘regional’, relentlessly pushes the
modern to reiterate its claims to novelty and distinction. If food and cooking are the
results of confection—of species, ingredients, ideas and transcultural flows—
channelled by or irrespective of human intervention, on what does the authenticity
of the original (tradition), and the novelty of the modern rest?
I. Banerjee-Dube (&)
El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico
e-mail: ibanerje@colmex.mx

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_9
170 I. Banerjee-Dube
This chapter will track the concurrent blend of ‘authenticity’ and ‘hybridity’ as
well as that of ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ in the making of Indian food in order to
shake up the settled binaries on which the modern is supposed to be based.
‘Authentic’, according to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, has at least two
different connotations: a ‘true’ replica of or done the same way as the original, and
something ‘true to one’s personality, spirit or character’.1 This study will pay
attention to these distinct meanings of the ‘authentic’ to comment on their impact
on the multiple constructions of the cultured modern, and view their implications
for the recent stress on ‘authentic fusion food’ as a key element of the modern and
the cosmopolitan. Hybridity, on the other hand, is used in the straightforward sense
of combination, mix or blend—a composite of distinct elements—and not neces-
sarily as a critical concept of post-colonial theory as enunciated in the works of
Homi Bhabha or García Cancliny for instance.2
My analysis will proceed in four steps spread over five sections. First, a brief
comment on the absence of a ‘pan-Indian’ cuisine within India and the reasons
adduced for it—such as the importance of religious and ritual norms and the
vibrancy of varied regional cuisine—by scholars. This will be followed by an
exploration of a regional cuisine, namely that of Bengal through a focus on early
recipe books, manuals, and advertisements in Bangla. This focus will reveal the
mixed heritage of Mughlai (derived from the Mughals) and Anglo-Indian food that
went into the making of ‘modern’ Bengali cuisine in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Continuing the examination of intricate ‘mixes’, the third step
divided into two sections will analyse some relatively unknown early books on
‘curry’ as well as some highly successful ones produced in the diaspora in the late
twentieth and early twenty first centuries to track the meandering and crisscrossing
paths of ‘curry’ and Indian food between Britain and India and their diffusion across
the globe. Such tracking will underscore the perennial and reciprocal additions and
embellishments that curry undergoes in its circulation and constant recreation as
emblematic of Indian food, as well as its attempted dismissal as a sign of the
inauthentic and the philistine. This will lead to the fourth step (and the fifth section)
of a brief exploration of recent claims to distinction made by the modern-
cosmopolitan in opposition to the mongrel and the lowbrow to underscore the
continued anxiety and aspiration of the modern to affirm its superiority and
sophistication. The sixth and the concluding section will reflect on the social
practices and cultural meanings that constitute and reconstitute the modern through
mingled, mutating tastes and desires, and discrete configurations of identity and
belonging, pointing to a reconsideration of the modern in the light of cooking and
cuisine, simultaneously introducing them as key elements of human history.
1
https://www.merriam-webster.com, accessed on 25.02. 2017.
2
Bhabha, 1993; García Canclini, 1990.
9 Modern Mixes: The Hybrid and the Authentic in Indian Cuisine 171
1 A National Cuisine?
The absence of a pan-Indian cuisine within India has not gone unnoticed by
scholars. In an early suggestive article on cookbooks and ‘national’ cuisine pub-
lished in 1988, Arjun Appadurai had argued that ‘regional’ cuisines played a pivotal
role in the new ‘national’ cuisine that was emerging in India and that this national
cuisine did not hide ‘regional’ or ‘ethnic’ roots.3 Appadurai had focused on
cookbooks written in English by urban, middle-class Indian women that targeted
the same milieu. The division into several subspecies meant for specialized readers
that accompanied the great proliferation of cookbooks in the 1970s and 1980s,
indicated the emergence of an ‘authentic high cuisine’ that freed Indian food from
its moral and medical prescriptions. At the same time, the vitality of the ‘regional’
contributed to a reification of the ethnic ‘other’,4 which in a way tempered the
national. Regional cuisines, it bears pointing out, did not only vary in the grains and
vegetables and other ingredients, they also differed in modes of preparation as well
as in styles of eating.
In 2002, Ashis Nandy had stressed how regional cuisines made food from other
parts of India appear distinctly ‘strange’. The vitality of regional cuisines together
with their distance from the cuisine of other regions had hampered, in Nandy’s
terms, the development of a pan-Indian cuisine within India.5 This is possibly the
reason why the special number of the Indian International Quarterly on ‘India: A
National Culture?’ where Nandy’s article appeared and of which Nandy was a
co-editor, had desisted from including Indian food as an element of India’s ‘national
culture’, even while it interrogated the notion of ‘national culture’. Two years later,
however, Nandy mentioned in another article that although a national cuisine is yet
to take shape, rapid culinary changes tied to the emergence of fast food and the
appearance of a pan-Indian concept of ‘formal’ Indian food, as well as changes in
the ‘sociology of the Indian family’ were making some pan-Indian trends clearly
visible.6
In Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Lizzie Collingham offers a witty
anecdote about the distance (and distaste) that Indians of a particular region can
have for the food and eating habits of their counterparts from other regions. She
narrates how a Panjabi lady in Delhi was shocked and repulsed by the peculiar
eating habits of her madrassi (natives of Madras, now Chennai) neighbours. No
rotis or chapatis accompanied by dry vegetables and dal that is scooped up by the
chapati or a spoon for these madrassis. Her neighbour prepared and served rice and
watery dal and vegetables that were eaten by hand with the watery dal or gravy
often running down the arms to the elbow. Was she wrong, the Panjabi lady had
3
Arjun Appadurai, “How to make a national cuisine: cookbooks in contemporary India”,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30, 1 (1988), p. 5.
4
Appadurai 1988, p. 15.
5
Nandy 2002–2003, p. 246.
6
Nandy 2004, p. 15.
asked Collingham in wonder, in suggesting that her neighbours changeover to her

form of neat and tidy eating? She was incredulous that her friendly and practical
suggestion had evoked a frosty response.7
Let me cite another anecdote from the same text. In 2001, food critics took
Robin Cook, the then foreign minister of Great Britain, to serious task for declaring
chicken tikka masala to be ‘the new national dish’ of Britain. This eminently
popular dish, Cook felt, was representative of the pervasive multiculturalism of
Britain. Food critics, however, sneered at Cook’s lack of taste in food. Chicken
tikka masala, they stated contemptuously, was a mongrel creation, an ‘inauthen-
tic’—indeed unpalatable—British invention, and not an inspired invention of an
Indian chef. Alluding to this controversy and referring to the recent trend of new,
upmarket Indian restaurants in New York and London that serve specialized ‘au-
thentic’ regional food—Collingham poses two critical questions: first, what does
‘authenticity’ really mean? And second, is authenticity the right yardstick by which
to judge Indian cuisine?8
Taking these questions as a point of entry, I will examine the different conno-
tations of the ‘authentic’ in order to highlight how they come into play in the
confection, circulation, transformation, exchange and (re)appropriation of ‘modern’
cuisine in a distinct part of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and link them to the continuing blends and mixes that recurrently recreate and
conserve ‘novelty’ and ‘difference’ in modern, cosmopolitan food, marking out the
‘mongrel’ and the ‘inauthentic’ from the ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ craft of blending.
Perceptions and practices that hinder the confection of ‘Indian’ food within India as
a key element of ‘national’ culture, and yet make a standardized version of
Mughlai-Panjabi ‘curry’ emblematic of ‘Indian’ food in restaurants outside India. If
‘Indian food’ is yet to strike roots within India as an element that contributes to the
everyday, ‘banal’ flagging of the nation,9 ‘curried food’ is upheld as ‘the most
firmly and happily rooted’ legacy of the Raj in Britain.10 ‘Authentic’, in its dual
sense of a ‘true’ replica, and as something ‘true to one’s personality or spirit’,
enables the perpetration of two apparently contradictory claims: of being a true
reproduction of the original, and of a creative invention by an ‘authentic’ subject.
We will see the ramifications of these contrary ideas in the tales that follow.
7
Collingham, 2006, p. 4.
8
Collingham, 2006, p. 4.
9
For an incisive discussion of the everyday reproduction of the nation in banal, mundane arenas in
established nations, see Billig (1995). Igor Cusack has creatively extended this notion of banal
nationalism to the construction of a national cuisine in some African countries as a key element of
national culture that flags the nation in the quotidian arena. See Cusack, 2000, pp. 207–225.
10
Burton, 1995, p. vii.
2 Bengali Mughlai
The first recipe book in Bengali was titled Pakrajeswar (Lord of the King/s of
Culinary Arts). Written by Biseshwar Tarkalankar, a Brahmin, it was published in
1831 (reprinted by the Maharajas, landlords/princes, of Burdwan/Bardhaman in
1854). Byanjan Ratnakar (Mine of Gems of Cooking Ingredients)11 that succeeded
Pakrajeshwar, was also published by the Burdwan Raj in 1858. These books were
remarkable for the rich and extravagant recipes they proffered. Favoured by and
suited for kings and princes, such recipes required innumerable ingredients and
lavish use of saturated fats like ghee, which made them unfit for everyday cooking
in ordinary households. Indeed Sripantha, the complier and editor of the texts had
stated with a certain degree of pride in the ‘Preface’ that these books did not carry
everyday ‘Bengali’ recipes. Instead, the recipes were drawn from the Mughal period
and contained a strong Farsi influence. They ‘were mostly oriented towards
non-vegetarian dishes, especially fowl and mutton.’12
Mughlai food, royal cuisine of the Mughals, Appadurai tells us, had emerged out
of a combination of Turko-Afghan culinary traditions with the ‘peasant food of the
North Indian plain’.13 It had proliferated through royal courts to different parts of
northern India, including Bengal in the East, situated at a considerable distance
from Delhi. Different parts of Bengal had been under Afghan rule from the 14th
century and by the 17th, Bengal had become a subah (province) under Mughal
administration. The nawabs of Bengal, the Mughal subahdars (governors) who
gradually became autonomous in the 18th century, inflected royal Mughal food
with a regional touch. Mughlai food in Bengal therefore, has a colourful and
chequered career. It is not surprising that the Maharajas of Burdwan (Bardhaman),
who initially hailed from distant Lahore (now in Pakistan) and not Bengal, decided
to retrieve Mughal recipes and patronize their publication. At the same time, it is
fascinating that these ‘Mughal’ recipes lacked the use of onion and garlic making
them an ‘authentic’ reproduction with a difference.
This is because, argues, Utsa Ray, that ‘the readers of these books were Hindus
who were not very accustomed to having garlic and onion in their food as yet.’14 To
substantiate her point, she cites the author of Pakrajeswar who had made it clear
that since ‘most people hardly consumed onion’ he had refrained from listing it as
an essential ingredient of the recipes.15 This is also true of Byanjan-Ratnakar. Ray
takes this to be an instance of the ‘hybridization’ of ‘Mughal’ (or Mughlai) cuisine
through ‘regional’ Bengali influence. Although this is a valid point to make, it is
important to ask what ‘Bengali regional’ meant in a context where a large section of
11
My thanks go to Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Mazumdar for immediate help in translating
the titles of these early texts.
12
Ray, 2014, p. 63.
13
Appadurai, 1988, p. 13.
14
Ray, 2014, p. 63.
15
Ray, 2014, p. 63.
the population was Muslim and when large parts of Bengal had been under Islamic
rule for long periods of time. What kind of role had notions of Hindu (upper caste)
satwik (pure) food played in the domestication of ‘Mughlai’ food in Bengal? Why
had books written under the patronage of princes (landlords) and aimed at offering
lavish recipes fit for kings and princes taken care to omit onion and garlic?
To partly answer the question, let us look at the first book of recipes written by a
woman in Bengali. Titled Pakprabandha (Cooking-matter), and published in 1879,
the advertisement of the book described it as a Bengali book of ‘well-tried recipes
for the preparation of rare and delicate Mohamedan, Hindu, and other dishes’.16
The author of the book called herself ‘a Bengali lady’. We do not know why she
chose to remain anonymous. What stands out in the recipes is the ample use of
onion and garlic in the ‘Mahomedan’ dishes. While Ray reads in this ‘[i]ncrease in
the use of onion and garlic for recipes supposedly written for the Bengali
middle-class Hindus’, a change in diet patterns among the middle class in colonial
Bengal,17 for me the fact that ‘Mohamedan’ dishes appear first in the list of ‘del-
icate and well-tried’ dishes is significant. The ‘Bengali lady’ was possibly Muslim
with greater expertise over Mahomedan dishes. Did her ‘Mahomedan’ dishes
resemble the ‘Mughlai’ ones of Pakrajeswar and Byanjan Ratrankar, or were they
more modest, aimed at ordinary Muslim households that used onion and garlic?
At the same time, if the book had a wide market that included Hindu households,
a possibility indicated by the fact that it was edited and reprinted by Pyarimohan
Kabibhusan, we need to link the change in diet pattern among middle-class Hindus
with changes in the idea and notion of cuisine itself, that increasingly came to stand
for ‘modern’ cuisine with a rich array of dishes and distinct styles of preparing
them. In this modern cuisine, Mughal or Mahomedan recipes needed to be ‘au-
thentic’, that is, prepared with onion and garlic. In other words, we need to probe
the influence of Muslim or Mughlai cuisine in the evolution of a hybrid Bengali
cuisine and not just the Hindu influence on Mughlai food in Bengal. Was this,
perhaps, the beginning of a long process that would lead people of Bangladesh to
serve ‘Indian’ food in restaurants in the UK and other parts of the globe?
If the inclusion of ‘Mohamedan, Hindu, and other dishes’ in Pakprabandha
indicates the emergence of a ‘modern’, ‘cosmopolitan’18 cuisine between the 1850s
and the 1870s, that is, between the publication of the first two and the third book of
recipes, the fact becomes clearer in the later texts that came to include ‘colonial’
dishes and provided menus for feasts and banquets.
The first of its kind, Pak-pranali (The Process of Cooking) was written by a
Bengali Brahman, Bipradas Mukhopadhyay.19 It took the health of the family as its
central problematic and strove to train young wives in the art of cooking in a way
16
Borthwick, 1984, p. 213.
17
Ray, 2014, p. 63.
18
Cosmopolitan is used in the meaning provided in the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
‘sharing or interest in different, cultures, ideas’, in this case different dishes of different cultures.
19
Mukhopadhyay, 1987.
that would help the upkeep of a robust family. It also laid stress on the revival and
rejuvenation of authentic ancient cuisine that the contemporary mistresses of
Bengal had forgotten. This concern with the authentic was overlaid with a move to
rejuvenate it by adding new dishes and ingredients that would add finesse to food
and cooking, that is, introduction of dishes that carried the stamp of the ‘author’ and
were true to his spirit and personality. This was done with greater flourish by
Prajñasundari Devi, a member of the illustrious family of Tagores and an editor of
the family journal Punya, whose volumes of Amish o Niramish Ahar (Vegetarian
and Non-Vegetarian Food) were published between 1900 and 1907.20
Elsewhere, I have discussed the significance of Prajñasundari’s texts for per-
ceptions and apprehensions of the new role ascribed to women by the nationalist
discourse.21 Here, I will explore the significance of her texts in the constitution of a
novel (Bengali/Indian) cuisine. The first two volumes consisted only of vegetarian
recipes, a fact that testified to Prajñasundari’s accomplishment as a chef. The books
gave back to women recipes they had forgotten or could not prepare in a modern,
scientific way, and new recipes that the expert chef as a creative artist invented. The
volume on non-vegetarian cooking, however, stated in the ‘Advertisement’ written
by the author that since inhabitants of India were primarily vegetarian and
Europeans overwhelmingly non-vegetarian, she had been almost compelled to
include European recipes and styles of cooking in her book.
Before we go into European dishes and curries in the following section, it is
important to highlight another part of the ‘Advertisement’. With all her care for
precision and proper knowledge, Prajñasundari glosses over European and bad-
shahi food (food of the badshahs, Muslim rulers/Emperors), when she mentions that
although Indians are primarily vegetarians and Europeans primarily
non-vegetarians, there are Indians, with the gun (quality/temperament) of the raja/
king (rajasik) who like meat. She equates this rajasik food with badshahi food, a
possible result of Bengal’s long association with Islamic rule. The fact that even
Bengali Brahmins, members of the highest caste eat fish, like many other groups of
Brahmins from India’s coastal regions, is overlooked in her general statement that
Indians (Hindus) are primarily vegetarians, and Europeans and Muslims are con-
joined as connoisseurs of non-vegetarian food with some Indians (Hindus) fol-
lowing suit.
The acknowledgement of Islamic and European influence on Bengali food finds
a graphic illustration in the title of section 6 of the same book, where ‘kebab
(kabab) with gravy’ is equated with ‘stew’. Although kebab is the common use in
English, in India it is most widely spelt as kabab. Believed to have originated in
20
Amish of Niramish Ahar (Vegetarian and Non-vegetarian Food), Calcutta: Debendranath
Bhattacharya, 1900. I have used the new edition published by Ananda Publishers, Calcutta in 1995
that has one volume of vegetarian recipes and one of non-vegetarian ones. According to Ira Ghosh,
editor of the new edition and granddaughter of Prajñasundari, the two volumes of vegetarian
recipes were originally published in 1900 and 1904 and the third volume of non-vegetarian recipes
in 1907.
21
Banerjee-Dube, 2016, pp. 100–121.
Turkey (and the Middle East), ke(a)bab usually stands for ‘grilled’ meat. Stew on
the other hand, is associated with liquid gravy simmered over low heat for a long
time. Prajñasundari therefore, is not only mixing Mughal and European cooking,
she is also combining two different modes of preparing meat. The typical meat for
kebab is lamb (goat in Bengal) while that of stew is beef. Why did an accomplished
lady and a sophisticated chef do so? Isn’t there a prior history of the confection of
Islamic and European food?
If we recall Toby Peterson’s ground-breaking arguments, the coupling of food,
sensuousness, and gratification in this world depicted in Muslim theology had
occasioned an ‘upheaval’ in the food of the (Christian) European elite by 1300,
after the Quran was translated into Latin by the middle of the 12th century.22 While
clerics and theologians dedicated themselves to the task of discerning whether the
intimate link between food and pleasure in this world was real or allegorical,
European elites found a different use for this link: they made their food more spicy
and flavourful, food that tickled and gratified the senses. If we are to believe Jo
Monroe, the first recipe book produced in England by the palace cooks of
Richard II in 1390 indicate that English food was in no way as bland as it is widely
taken to be. Indeed, of the 200 or so recipes, many were ‘surprisingly spicy’.23
Rachel Laudan persuasively reminds us of the grand reach of the ‘high cuisine of
medieval Islam’ that had its origins in Baghdad.24 ‘One of the most sophisticated of
the world’, this adapted Persian cuisine had flourished since the 8th century, and
had spread to large parts of Europe (specially the Iberian peninsula), and other parts
of the globe with the diffusion of Islam. While it reached New Spain (or the
Americas) by means of Spanish conquest in the early 16th century, it reached South
Asia via the Mughals around the same time. No wonder then, comments Laudan,
that Ocatvio Paz, the leading Mexican writer and Nobel-Laureate, found Indian
‘curry’ to be similar to Mexican mole, when he reached Delhi as Mexican
Ambassador to India in 1962.25 While the close connections of ‘curry’ and ‘mole’
require further research, the influence of high Islamic cuisine on the food both of
Europe and of the Indian subcontinent appears to have solid basis. What kind of
legacy of this fusion of European and Islamic cuisine had reached Bengal by the
end of the 19th century?
Prajñasundari’s Non-Vegetarian Food underscores this interesting blend of
European and Mughlai (badshahi) cuisine: the seventh section on ‘kabab’ follows
the sixth section on stew or ‘kabab with gravy’. It opens with the introductory
statement on how the very name kabab evokes the ambience and aroma of the rich
and spicy food of the regime of the badshahs. The ‘richness’ of the kabab, which
22
Peterson, 1980, p. 317.
23
Monroe, p. 25.
24
Laudan, 2004, p. 33.
25
Laudan, p. 38.
makes it difficult to digest, she tells her readers immediately, is a misconception.26

There are ways of preparing the kabab that retain the flavour and spice to the full
and yet is easy on the stomach. The attempt here is to domesticate the rich and
lavish food of kings and badshahs for ordinary households, and for feasts and
banquets, an endeavour aimed at the creation of a ‘modern’ cuisine.
It is perhaps not surprising that ‘curry’ succeeds the section on kabab. Adding
further twist to melds, Prajñasundari regards ‘curry’ as an Indian dish that had
become a greater favourite with Europeans. This gives us a lot to ponder. Why is
‘curry’ taken to be an invention of the British in India? When, where, and how was
it invented? And who participated in this invention? It is time now to turn to this
beguiling tale.
3 Curry-Stuff
Hobson-Jobson, the classic lexicon of Anglo-Indian words, mentions that ‘cur-

rystuff’, a combination of spices to prepare ‘curry’ had become available in
England by 1784.27 Curry-stuff was accompanied by the paste to produce ‘mulli-
gatawny’ soup, another famous Anglo-Indian dish adapted from the tamil milagu
tanni, pepper water. Hindostanee Coffee-House, opened by Dean Mahomed in
London in 1809 for ‘English nobility and gentry’ claimed to serve ‘Indian dishes of
the highest perfection’, unmatched by any curry ever served in England.28 Curry, in
England, of course, was undoubtedly Indian and hence an Indian chef could
proudly proclaim to prepare and serve the most sophisticated curry to the English
aristocracy.
Who were Dean Mahomed’s rivals? They were British men and women who had
returned to England after spending a fair amount of time in India or who had
relatives in India. If the first ‘curry’ of dubious credentials was served at the Norris
Street Coffee House at Haymarket in London as early and 1733, as late as 1958
Thacker, Spink & Co. in Calcutta thought it fit to print the seventh edition of The
Indian Cookery Book written by ‘A Thirty-Five Years’ Resident’.29 This slim book
contained ‘Original and approved recipes in every department of Indian cookery’,
and ‘a variety of other things worth knowing’. Its section on curries mentioned how
the seal aur lurriah, or curry-stone and miller were essential for the preparation of
condiments for daily use. The condiments had to be carefully ground down
26
See Devi, 1995, p. 233. It is interesting that the word ‘rich’ is used in parenthesis after the word
gurupak in Bangla that signifies food difficult to digest.
27
Yule & Burnell, 1994, p. 595.
28
Fisher, 1996, p. 258.
29
The Indian Cookery Book: A Practical Handbook to the Kitchen in India, by A Thirty Five
Years’ Resident, 7th edition, Calcutta: Thacker Spink & Co. Ltd., 1958. First published 1933. My
sincere thanks to Sanjeet Chaudhuri for making this book available to me and for maintaining a
fullsome archive on materials related to food, cooking, cuisine.
separately into a nice paste with a little bit of water. The paste, of course, would not
stay for long. Hence, dry ground spices had to be carried on a journey. The
‘thirty-five years’ resident’ then proceeds to list the ‘curry condiments’ and hot
spice that were used in Indian homes almost every day. What is remarkable is that
in the curry recipes that follow, s/he uses different condiments, and not a mix of all
the ones listed at the beginning, demonstrating thereby a discerning knowledge of
the different spices used in different ‘curries with gravy’.30
Following the introduction of spices and the apparatus needed to prepare the
curry condiment, curries are divided into several categories: ‘Gravy curries’;
‘Country Captain’, ‘Hindostanee curries’, ‘Malay curries’, ‘Portuguese curry’ (or
Vindaloo or Bindaloo), ‘Madras Mullligatawny curry’ (‘usually served up and
partaken as “soup”’), ‘Egg curry’, ‘Chahkees’ (vegetable curries), ‘Saug curry’
(curry of saag or leafy greens), ‘Bhajees’ (Fried but listed in the section on curries),
and ‘Dal or Peas curries’.31 Apart from the inclusion of the ‘Bengali’ prawn
malaikari in the category of ‘Malay curry’, the contribution of the Portuguese is
dutifully acknowledged in the Vindaloo recipe. The separation of European and
Hindostanee curries bears testimony to the perceptive and comprehensive knowl-
edge of curries, of this ‘thirty-five years’ resident’.
These examples illustrate how ‘curry’ has retained its ubiquity as the essence of
‘Indian’ food not just in Britain and the world but also among certain sections in
India, while it is widely taken to be an ‘English concoction’ by many Indians. In
order to partly solve this puzzle, it is important to trace the appearance of ‘curry’ in
India and its distinct uses in the fashioning of a ‘modern Indian’ cuisine over the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Important works on ‘curry’ and ‘colonial cuisine’ in Malaysia and Singapore
have indicated how ‘curry’ was a joint invention of the English woman and the
domestic cooks they employed.32 Such curries, significantly, always had the orig-
inal Indian curry as their referent. If ‘curry’ entailed the combined, active partici-
pation of the ‘mem’ (memsahib, an Indian word for the white woman, wife of the
European master), and ‘cookie’ (derived from cook or domestic servant) in
Malaysia and Singapore, who participated in its elaboration in India? And here, I
would argue that we need to take the story beyond the last decades of the 18th
century when English wives finally started coming to India. As indicated before,
‘curry-stuff’ had found its way to London by the 1780s and some sort of ‘curry’
was being served in an English Coffee House from the 1730s.
Curry, which normally stands for a thick and spicy gravy with vegetables and
fish, fowl or meat, does not have a synonym in any of the Indian languages.
Significantly, the first English book of recipes was titled The Forme of Cury, and,
according to Jo Monroe, ‘cury’ probably derived from the French word cuire.33
30
The Indian Cookery Book, pp. 7–8.
31
The Indian Cookery Book, pp. 8–30.
32
Banerjee-Dube, 2016, pp. 79–99.
33
Monroe, pp. 25–26.
The online version of The Forme of Cury, however, relates ‘cury’ to the art of
medicine, the art ‘to dress victuals’. Arguably, it is difficult to establish a clear link
between ‘cury’ of the 14th century and ‘curry’ of the late seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries.
Is it, however, far-fetched to think that ‘curry’, which resembles a spicy ‘stew’—
a ‘stew’ with an Indian touch—was an easy way for resourceful Indian cooks of
serving Indian food that was ‘comfort food’ as well for the young Englishmen (and
Europeans) who had come thousands of miles away in the service of the East India
Company? Was it then, a reproduction of an authentic British dish by enterprising
Indian cooks who added their own personal touch? Instead of solely focusing on the
kitchens of the European officers (the sahib, white masters) who could afford
domestic servants and their wives (the memsahib), we need to explore the kind of
food that was served in the army and other official messes to the lower rung
employees who could not afford domestic help. It is highly probable that the origins
of ‘curry’, which some believe is derived from the kari patta (kari/curry leaves), a
distinctive leaf used in the cooking of the south, had its origins in the army mess of
Fort St. George and was later developed and refined by its multifarious uses by a
variety of actors. The subtitle of Collingham’s book, A Tale of Cooks and
Conquerors, acknowledges this joint investment of Indian cooks and British
employers.
Mulligatawny or curry soup, we need to remember, was, after all, derived from
the Tamil milagu tanni, pepper water, served initially as a digestive before and after
a spicy meal in sweltering Madras and its surroundings. It was taken by many
Englishmen to be a cure for ‘sick headaches’.34 In a total reverse of fortune, this
spicy pepper water not prepared properly had, Dr. Livingstone and other members
of the exploratory tour of Africa in 1859, held back for several days in ‘severe
suffering’. The cook had carried ‘mulligatawny paste’ and had used it ‘rashly’ to
prepare the soup. There was an overdose of the paste instead of ‘a couple of
spoonful’; the result was a soup that not only tasted ‘rather hot’, but made
Dr. Livingstone and others suffer for days.35 Tracing the distinct apprehensions and
changing fortunes of the soup that made it the ‘most celebrated of Anglo-Indian
dishes’ in David Burton’s words,36 Modhumita Roy recounts a history of ‘in-
ternecine skirmish’ within and among Anglo-Indians to define themselves’, and a
story of gender and class-struggle at the dinner table.37
My purpose here is to trace the composite nature and diverse apprehensions of
concocted dishes to interrogate the purity of the authentic and the traditionalism of
the tradition. Prajñasundari’s book makes it clear that by the end of the 19th
century, ‘curry’ had come to represent an Indian dish preferred by Europeans in
India. If we remember the advertisement to the volume of non-vegetarian recipes,
34
Roy, 2010, p. 66.
35
Roy, 2010, p. 66.
36
Burton, 1995, p. 94.
37
Roy, 2010, p. 67.
her categorization of Indians as principally vegetarian and Europeans as primarily

non-vegetarians, obliged her to include European recipes along with their cooking
styles and methods in her book. At the same time, she asserted that she had included
Indian recipes that have become ‘almost European’ on account of their hearty
reception by Europeans and their pride of place at European dinner tables.38
‘Curry’ distinguishes itself in the category of Indian dishes that had become a
great favourite of Europeans. In the volume of non-vegetarian food, the section on
curry runs into 50 pages, while the others, except the section on fish, cover roughly
20. Significantly, the section on ‘curry’ includes korma, a dish widely regarded as
typically ‘Mughlai’. Believed to have derived from the Urdu word kormah,
meaning braise, which in turn came from the Turkish kavuma, ‘cooked meat’,
korma in Persian traces its roots to the ‘Mughal cuisine’ of India and Pakistan. The
adept Prajñasundari proffers 100 curry recipes: curries made out of fish, mutton,
lobster and shrimp, tortoise, quail, and chicken. They include firingi curry, curry a
la firingi (foreigners/Europeans), and chingri malaikari, a shrimp dish of indeter-
minate origin made with coconut milk now paraded as the ‘signature dish’ of
Bengalis. There is free use of onion (and garlic) in the recipes. Prajñasundari does
not even feel it necessary to comment on their inclusion unlike her male counter-
parts of the preceding century. It is almost evident for her that onion and garlic
would feature prominently in Islamic and European non-vegetarian dishes and that
elite Bengali (Hindu) women—her targeted readers—would use them without any
qualm in following her recipes.
At the same time, she also provided pure ‘Bengali’ recipes where the sacrificial
goat offered to the goddess Kali and mutton in general is cooked without onion and
garlic, along with a variety of fish. In keeping with Bengal’s love for fresh-water
fish and acclaim as the region that prepares some of the best fish dishes, the section
on fish comes soon after the introductory one that offers ‘General comments’
followed by a section on the soup, ‘starter’ of any European meal. And here,
demonstrating her acute knowledge of European cooking, Prajñasundari divides the
soups into three categories, clear, heavy, and puré, giving precise instructions on
how to achieve the right consistency of each. She also teaches her readers to prepare
vegetable or meat (lamb/goat) stock, a key ingredient of any soup. Unsurprisingly,
three different recipes of mulligatawny feature in this section, with the word ren-
dered as ‘muluktani’ in Bengali.
The section on fish begins with a warning to her readers: they should watch out
against making ‘habja gobja’, an unsophisticated, disorderly hash that indiscrimi-
nately mixes distinct styles of cooking and spices.39 The Europeans, she affirms,
have four clearly marked out ways of preparing fish: boil, fry, grill, and roast and it
will be good if her judicious apprentices learnt such methods properly. That will
enable them to improve the taste and flavour of ‘Bengali’ fish dishes. Disorderliness
and lack of discipline in Bengali cooking, it bears pointing out, had in her own
Devi, ‘Bijñapan’ (Advertisement) to the first edition included in Devi, 1995.

38
39
Devi, 1995, vol. II, p. 49.
words, prompted Prajñasundari to publish her recipe books. In the ‘Advertisement’

to the first volume of vegetarian food she had lamented this lack of discipline and
order; and indicated how her tried and tested practical recipes were to restore the
‘backbone’ of Bengali food.
Prajñasundari’s care for precision and invention, taste and flavour through
appropriate fusions find reflection in the appendix where she lists appetizing and
well-balanced menus for feasts and banquets. Contrary to the sample menus offered
by her male predecessor Bipradas, a ‘hodgepodge’ of fish and milk-based desserts,
harmful for health and against scriptural norms, Prajñasundari provides delectable
and healthful menus. The hallmark of an accomplished mistress who marked the
contours of an attractive haute cuisine by blending modern/cosmopolitan and
Mughal/Anglo-Indian cooking styles, ingredients, measures, and recipes.
4 Curried Flavours
Let’s jump seven decades from 1900 and come to the 1970s. Madhur Jaffrey, a
household name in the UK, US, and India as a versatile author of Indian cookery
books and a television and film personality, publishes her first book of recipes titled
An Invitation to Indian Cooking in 1973. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, the
publishing house that had dared to publish Julia Child’s legendary book
Introducing the Art of French Cooking at a time when no one else did, Jaffrey’s
book also became a great success in the US among people not familiar with Indian
cooking. Indeed, it was included in the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall
of fame in 2006. Prior to this, Jaffrey had been teaching cooking at her Manhattan
apartment and at a school, and had been referred to as ‘an actress who cooks’ in a
New York Times article in 1966, following her award-winning performance in the
film Shakespeare Wallah (1965).
Born in Delhi into an aristocratic family of UP kayashths (a middle-ranking
Hindu caste with status and prestige in North India), Madhur had never cooked at
home. Nor did her mother and other women of the family; they supervised food
prepared by the cooks employed by the family. It was only when young Madhur
went to London to take a course in acting and despaired at the blandness of British
food that she wrote to her mother to ask for the flavourful and spicy recipes of
home-cooked food. Her mother noted them down on paper and sent them via
airmail to her daughter. They were to form the basis of Jaffrey’s numerous books on
Indian cookery. The point to note here is that Jaffrey was not enticed by the ‘curry’
served in British restaurants; and she abhorred the use of curry powder, a point she
makes in one of her early books. And yet, through her successful career as a food
writer and a presenter of food shows on television in London and New York, Jaffrey
came to accept the omnipresent significance of curry (and even the curry powder) as
representative of Indian food.
Beginning with An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), Jaffrey presented the
acclaimed show on British television Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery (1982), and
subsequently published Eastern Vegetarian Cooking (1983); A Taste of India

(1988), and some others to finally write The Ultimate Curry Bible (2003), Curry
Easy Vegetarian (2010) and Curry Easy by the end of 2014. This move between
‘home-cooked’ Indian food as opposed to the food served in Indian restaurants in
Britain, ‘second-class establishments’ that underplayed their own ‘regional’ dis-
tinctness in Jaffrey’s terms, and an acceptance of the necessity of opening out to
blends and fusion, was perhaps reflected in Madhur Jaffrey’s Cookbook: Easy East/
West Recipes for Family and Friends (1989).
As her early years in London lengthened into decades in New York, Jaffrey’s
nostalgia for ‘authentic’ flavours of home got transformed into a need to introduce
the intricacies of Indian cooking in an accessible and easily identifiable way that
bore the spirit of the author. No wonder that her early abhorrence of ‘curry powder’,
which lent a standardized flavour on the distinctive ‘Indian’ preparations, melted
into an acceptance of the use of curry powder for ‘easy’ cooking, as pragmatics
overtook the need for a true reproduction. The write-up of Curry Easy runs thus: ‘In
this delicious collection of recipes, Madhur Jaffrey shows us that Indian food need
not be complicated or involve hours in the kitchen.’ A ‘few well-chosen spices’ and
‘easily available ingredients’ would yield the most mouth-watering prawn curry
from Goa; hearty Sri Lankan beef with coconut milk; luscious chicken baked in an
almond and onion sauce; and scrumptious Swiss chard stir-fried with ginger and
garlic, in a few easy steps.’
Along with Jaffrey, we have come a long way from the ‘authentic’ home-cooked
and the ‘ethnic’ and ‘regional’ to end in a flavourful blend of ingredients, ideas, and
cooking techniques. A ‘fusion’ confected by Prajñasundari at the beginning of the
20th century, creatively construed by Jaffrey at the end of the 20th and the
beginning of the 21st, and reclaimed as ‘authentic fusion’ by a chef in Kolkata in
the second decade of the 21st century. All such endeavours poised on a delicate
construction by the modern of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’, purity and authenticity, and
affirmations of innovation and novelty.
Interestingly, such refinement has been accompanied and undercut by processes
such as the large-scale marketing of Patak’s products in the Indian metropolis from
the end of the 20th century as a sign of globalization and modernization.
Lakshmishanker Pathak, a Gujarati entrepreneur who moved from Kenya to Britain
in the 1950s with a large family and very little money, founded Patak’s in 1957.
Lakshmishanker successfully capitalized on the need of Indian ‘curry pastes’,
sauces and chutneys in Britain to start the brand, which deliberately dropped the ‘h’
from the surname Pathak to make it easy for the Britons to pronounce. Since then,
Patak’s had become a household brand in England. By the time it was sold to
Associated British Foods in 2007 by Lakshmisanker’s son Kirit, Patak’s supplied
75% of the 8,000 curry houses in Britain, and its curry paste, chutneys, ‘papadums’
and cooking sauces (including the one for ‘chicken tikka masala’) were sold in
all major supermarket chains.40 For many aspiring middle-class families in India,
“Founding family sells Patak’s”, The Guardian, 29 May 2007.

40
use of ready-made Patak’s products symbolized the modern and the cosmopolitan;
it enabled them to belong to a world that was British, British-Indian, and global.
Such a counter-narrative that has underlain affirmations of purity, authenticity, and
sophistication, has plagued claims of sophisticated purity with an anxiety, a point
we turn to now.
5 (Mongrel) Mixes and (Pedigreed) Fusions
In the tales narrated above, an anxiety besets the confident claims of the modern.
This has made it strive even more to underscore its superiority and distance and
difference from its constructed other—be it the unscientific disorderliness into
which ‘traditional’ Bengali food is taken to have fallen (Prajñasundari), the lack of
distinction of lowbrow ethnic food (Madhur Jaffrey), or the confusion resulting
from failed attempts at proper fusion (chef of Spice Kraft). This is because the
rupture, clear break of a fissured and continually constructed modern is perennially
constrained by its plural other. When heritage or tradition are mixed and inau-
thentic, and have continually undergone innovations, on what grounds can the
modern-cosmopolitan rest its claims of newness and distinction?
A true recovery of ‘tradition’ and its rejuvenation through precision of style and
technique often helps to mark this difference. And yet, the need for novelty prompts
the modern to be enticed by the ‘cosmopolitan’, used in the simple, straightforward
meaning—‘containing or having experience of things and people from many dif-
ferent parts of the world’—proffered in the Cambridge English Dictionary, or
‘sharing or interest in different cultures, ideas’ according to the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary. The meaning, of course, is amenable to different interpretations and
different parts of the world can also be reduced to different regions of the same
country, in particular a huge country with vibrant regional cuisines.
If we track the trajectory of cookery books within India over the second half of
the 20th century, they tell a tale similar to that of Jaffrey’s. Recourse to home and
the ‘mother’ for ‘authentic’ recipes is complemented by the demonstration of an
awareness and openness to the ‘ethnic’ or regional other. Appadurai, it bears
pointing out, had mentioned how the ‘modern-cosmopolitan’ in the 1980s was
represented by a (working) mistress who was adept at preparing the food of her own
region along with that of a few others,41 and, of course, a knowledge of some
Anglo-Indian/European dishes. This has widened now to include ‘authentic’ recipes
from different countries of Europe and other parts of the world. Gone are the days
of mongrel ‘continental’ food. What we now prepare are authentic Italian pasta and
lasagna with oregano or French bread with the correct ingredients following the
right technique. In tune with this, a woman chef who routinely gets invited to host
food shows on several television channels in Bangla (Bengali), wears the
41
Appadurai, 1988, p. 7.
‘traditional’ sari when she teaches her viewers ‘authentic’ Bengali recipes that
include reproducing some from Prajñasundari’s books, and changes into trousers or
skirt and a top when she decides to teach the risotto, for instance.42 Here, the notion
of pure or authentic reproduction is replicated in the attire of the chef, an act replete
with gender implications, which I will not be able to develop here.
Indian restaurants within and outside India seem to have followed the same trend
in fitting themselves into what has been called ‘consumption oriented’ and ‘con-
noisseur oriented’ restaurants.43 Increasingly from the beginning of the 21st cen-
tury, upmarket restaurants in New York and other cities of the US (as well as in
London) have concentrated on serving ‘authentic’ fare of a particular region of
India as opposed to their run-of-the-mill cheap counterparts that serve homogenized
‘inauthentic’ pan-national ‘Indian’ food. As indicated above, people from
Bangladesh feature prominently among the owners of such run-of-the-mill restau-
rants in England. And instead of serving ‘signature’ Bengali dishes, they offer a
standardized Mughlai-Punjabi ‘curry’. The new highbrow restaurants therefore
distance themselves from their lowbrow counterparts by insisting on quality ethnic
or regional food they serve. Undoubtedly, they would have joined hands with food
critics who sneered at Robin Cook’s upholding of the ‘mongrel’ chicken tikka
masala as the ‘national’ dish of Britain. While I am uneasy with the clear differ-
entiation of ‘consumption oriented’ and ‘connoisseur oriented’ restaurants since it
implies that food connoisseurs do not ‘consume’ food, I agree with Shan Lu and
Gary Alan Fine when the say that ‘authenticity is not an objective criterion’; it is
‘socially constructed and linked to expectations’.44 The expectation and aspiration
of being modern and cosmopolitan, possessing astute knowledge of the ‘original’
cuisine of a wide variety of regions and peoples, which in turn entails the projection
of a discerning, sophisticated self.
6 Food for Thought
The meandering and criss-crossing tales narrated above provide a panorama of

constant and perennial blends of ingredients and spices, cooking styles and tech-
niques, as well as ideas and innovation that underlie processes of cooking and
cuisine. Arguably, such processes are moulded by desire and aspiration shaped in
turn by notions of personhood and identity that vitally turn on the ‘modern’. And
yet, encounters and subjects that cannot be captured by any tidy definition of the
‘modern’ also orchestrate such processes. The melds of Perso-Islamic,
Eurochristian-Islamic and Islamic-Hindu spices and palate indicate radical changes
42
The chef in question is Sharmistha Ghosh and she appears on DD Bangla, Zee Banglar
Rannaghar (The Kitchen of Zee Bangla), and Radhuni (the cook) on Akaash Aath.
43
Lu & Fine, 1995, pp. 335–353.
44
Lu and Fine, 1995, 535).
in diet, taste, and attitude to food that began at the initial stage of what is now called
the ‘early modern’. Equally, Indian cooks and domestic servants in European
messes and households were active participants in elaborations of new dishes such
as ‘curry’ without being consciously modern subjects. It is, indeed, the conscious
modern subjects—the Bipradases, Prajñasundaris, Madhur Jaffreys and chefs of
current ‘authentic fusion’ restaurants—who construct frontiers in order to mark out
difference, producing their own ideas of the ‘authentic’, the ‘traditional’, and the
‘pure’ ethnic or regional, while at the same time upholding ‘proper fusion’ and
‘cultured cosmopolitan’ to stress their novelty and mark as the ‘authentic’ modern.
The endeavours of such subjects, apart from offering multiple perceptions and
appropriations of the modern in constructions of selves, cultures and identities,
underscore the porosity of boundaries between the self and the other that pushes the
modern to strive for ever newer ways of staging difference and authenticity. Such
endeavours, however, frequently undermine the idea of ‘difference’ on which the
modern marks its superior innovation.
In the high culture of international food, writes Nandy, ‘inauthentic’ usually has
two meanings: ‘compromises made with those who do not belong to the ethnic
cuisine’ on account of commercial or other reasons, and adjustments made to
recipes to cope with ‘the unavailability or paucity of ingredients.’45 Both meanings,
he states, presumes the existence of boundaries that are difficult to associate with
Indian food, since it has unabashedly borrowed from every corner of the globe and
transformed the ‘blatantly exogenous’ to the ‘prototypically authentic’.46 Nandy, of
course, is drawing upon the venerable food historian K. T. Achaya in commenting
on the innumerable borrowings and transformations that characterizes food from
different regions of India.47 While agreeing with Nandy, I would like to affirm that
the brief history of food and cuisine traced above indicate how borrowing, adap-
tation, transformation, and recreation have been constants in cooking across the
globe. Such a history draws attention to the simultaneous construction and dis-
ruption of boundaries, of the mutation of the pure through the inflection of the
impure.
Food, cooking, and cuisine are undoubtedly about power and discrimination, and
abundance and deprivation, but they are also about identities poised on the
in-between, the indeterminate, and the hybrid. And this indeterminacy allows for an
interrogation of the dualisms of western thought and post-Enlightenment traditions,
in particular the hierarchical binaries inherent in overarching constructions of the
modern and modernity, an interrogation that has been underway for over three
decades now.48 On the whole, the trend has been to scrutinize and question
45
Nandy, 2004, p. 11.
46
Nandy, 2004, p. 11.
47
Achaya, 1988.
48
The literature is too vast to be recounted here. Said, 1978; Asad 1993; Chakrabarty 2002, Dube
2017 offer very few representative examples.
‘essentialized representations of otherness’ and ‘abiding representations of pro-

gress’ that are tied to the ‘totalizing templates of universal history’ and ‘ideological
images of western modernity’.49
If the stories of food and cooking I have recounted here enable us to view
hybridization and innovation as constant, enduring, and intrinsic parts of human
lives and encounters, we would perhaps be able to understand the anxieties of the
modern and take a fresh look at the play of meaning and power that shore up and
hold in place rigid frontiers and frigid boundaries. ‘Authentic-fusion’ holds the
promise of opening up the ‘authentic’ and legitimizing the ‘fusion’, enabling
thereby a breaking down of borders through constant creation of blends and melds.
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Chapter 10
Ritual at the Cutting Edge: Everyday
Animal Slaughter as Practice
and Symbol
Rita Brara
One of the charms of social anthropology is to lend an ear to vernacular notions

over categories that loom large in global debates. Modernity and tradition constitute
two such grand, mega categories that are here not defined in the abstract but fleshed
out, somewhat literally, in relation to religion-phrased slaughter practices and their
local terms—halal and jhatka—which provide the meat for this discourse.
Do religious beliefs and practices in India override the secularizing moves of the
State? The slaughter practices that I encountered in the abattoirs of Delhi do not
divide categorically into the new, the secular or the progressive, what is ascribed to
the modern, on the one hand, in contradistinction to the pre-modern, the religious
and the repressive of the ‘traditional’, on the other. Rather, religious pasts are
imbricated in the new present and orient the futures of its citizens in ways that do
not exclude religion from the public sphere of the modern nation-state. In the social
context of India, we cannot speak, convincingly, of a ‘resurgence of religion’ or the
‘return of religion in the public square’ since it never went away (Derrida and
Vattimo 1998; Derrida 2002; Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2009).
My object of comment below is the everyday practice of animal flesh produced
for human consumption that is marked with signs of faith. While spectacular animal
sacrifices and meat-eating gods and goddesses have often been the subject of
anthropological attention in India (Dumont 1970), the religious overtones of
everyday meat production and consumption have scarcely been audible in the social
sciences. Yet considerable effort goes into the production of sanctified food. My
concern here is primarily with recounting and making sense of current and com-
monplace slaughter practices—known as halal and jhatka—and their cast as
symbolic objects that are imbued with religious significance. Such an exploration
enables me to bring aspects of the religious and the modern into a conversation
R. Brara (&)
Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
e-mail: ritabrara@yahoo.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_10
190 R. Brara
while mapping the faith-based character of meat production and consumption, in

the main.
This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part delineates halal and jhatka
as varying religious practices that are given shape through bodily disciplines or
habitus (Mauss 1979) at the point of animal slaughter in the interreligious milieu of
Delhi.1 The Muslim practice of making meat halal or lawful entails the espousal of
a distinctive technique (zabihah), which consists in slitting the throat of an animal
and allowing the blood to flow out, alongside the invocation of Allah. Sikhs and
Hindus practice the technique of jhatka, that is beheading the animal in one stroke
as their mode of slaughter. However, the consumption of religion-inflected meat
tells a story that does not fit neatly into the story from production because of
differences within the religious traditions of the city’s consumers, as I argue in the
second part of this chapter. The third part of the chapter presents halal and jhatka as
constituting outlying symbols within the differing religious traditions of Islam,
Sikhism and Hinduism. Here I spell out how these symbols, de- or re-centred over
the last century in the course of the city’s political, social and religious life, have not
lost their cutting edge in the present.
1 Halal and Jhatka: Embodying Faith-Based Practices

at the Slaughterhouse
The word ‘signify’, Wittgenstein (2001: 7e) remarks, ‘is perhaps used in the most
straightforward way when the object signified is marked with a sign.’ At the
Municipal Corporation’s authorized slaughterhouse and across the several ‘illegal’
slaughter sites of the city, animal bodies are inscribed with marks of faith. No
Muslim butcher will slaughter animals the Sikh/Hindu way and vice versa. It is a
matter of iman or mazhab (faith) as the Muslims put it or iman-dharma (in the Sikh/
Hindu expression). The Arabic term, halal, translates as permissible and in the
context of food, as permissible food. However, in the common language of meat
codes in the city, the word halal refers to the espousal of the distinctive slaughter
technique (zabihah) by Muslim butchers while jhatka or one-stroke slaughter that
severs the head of the animal is taken to be the Sikh and, less often, the Hindu
butcher’s practice.
I begin with the cast of halal and jhatka as words, bodily actions, signs,
memories and faiths at the government-run, century-old slaughterhouse and follow
it up with practices at the new slaughterhouse, officially called the ‘meat processing
1
According to the 2011 Census of Delhi, approximately 82% of its population is Hindu, about 13%
Muslim, 3.5% Sikh and the remaining 1.5% of its citizens belong to Buddhist, Jain and Christian
faiths.
10 Ritual at the Cutting Edge: Everyday Animal Slaughter … 191
centre’ in east Delhi.2 The old abattoir was closed down in 2009 to make way for a
hygienic, mechanized abattoir in the wake of a legal case won by environmentalists
and animal rights activists.3 I move from investigating halal and jhatka at these
abattoirs, where only certain species (sheep, goats, and buffaloes) were slaughtered,
to look into the killing of chickens and pigs (and infrequently goats) that was
carried out in dispersed and informal slaughter sites in the city. This latter move
highlighted the spatialization of animal slaughter in the city and brought out some
of the connections between religious, economic, and political practices.
The first slaughterhouse in the city, popularly known as the Butcher Khana, was
set up by the British in the Idgah area of north Delhi in 1914. The butchers at that
time in history were exclusively Muslims, as narrated in the oral accounts of Delhi’s
Muslim butchers. The demand for jhatka meat was first raised in the Punjab leg-
islature from 1927 onwards (Abid and Abid 2012). The Jhatka Meat Bill in Punjab,
passed in 1942, coincided approximately with the time when the Idgah slaughter-
house, in the recall of Sikh butchers, came to have a jhatka section as well.
In 2005, on my first visit to the Idgah slaughterhouse, religious differences in the
practices of halal and jhatka were clearly enshrined in the physical partition of
space within the Butcher Khana. The bare signs, halal and jhatka, that were
inscribed in words in the meat-shop hoardings of the city, were here encountered as
bodily regimens carried out in demarcated spaces within the slaughterhouse. The
divisions of butchering space and techniques into halal and jhatka at the slaugh-
terhouse pertained only to sheep, goats, and buffaloes. The halal enclosure for
sheep and goats at the old slaughterhouse was about five times larger than the
jhatka section and conveyed a visual idea of the dominance of Muslims in the
micro-world of butchering sheep and goats in the city. Buffaloes were slaughtered
in the abattoir only in the halal way.
Sheep and goats were brought into the abattoir after purchase. A government
staffer noted that the animal was alive. The sheep/goat was walked to either the
halal or the jhatka section depending on whether the animal was brought in by a
Muslim or a Sikh/Hindu. Accordingly, the animal would be slaughtered in the halal
or the jhatka mode on a payment of Rs. 5. It was at the cutting edge that the
practices of halal (as zabihah was commonly described) and jhatka actualized a
bodily regimen or habitus. The meaning of faith was given form through prayer,
muscle, and labour (cf. Mauss 1979). Tools were oriented and wielded to accord
with the slaughter practices of a faith.
The tool employed to slaughter in the halal way was called a chhuri (knife). The
craft of butchering was learned either as an apprenticeship with an ustad (maestro)
among the Muslims or by attaching oneself to an elder in the family, a practice
2
Fieldwork on this subject in Delhi was begun in 2005 and continues, albeit intermittently, to date.
The material in this paper is based on interviews with the staff of the slaughterhouses, vets and
butchers as well as documents originating from the Halal and Jhatka Meat Merchants’ associa-
tions, newspaper reports and the records of legal cases. The study of the new slaughterhouse at
Ghazipur and its environs was pursued from 2016 onwards.
3
Maneka Gandhi vs Union Territory of Delhi and Others on 27 January, 1995.
192 R. Brara
common to Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. What was imparted in this manner was the
simultaneous acquisition of moral and religious sensibilities and the mastery of
physical operations that in a common view took about six months.
The invocation ‘Bismillah-Allahu’, I was told, had to be said three times as the
knife went over each animal. This phrase, ‘Bismillah Allahu’, translates as ‘In the
name of Allah’. Al-Qaradawi (1990) notes that what is not said when killing an
animal is the full form, that is ‘Bismillah Allahu Akbar al-Rahman al-Raheem’ or
‘In the name of God: God is Great, The Compassionate, the Merciful’, as you might
at meal-time, recognizing that this was not a kind-hearted act. The butcher made a
slit in the throat of the sheep or goat to open up the wind pipe, the gullet and the
jugular veins and then the blood let out. Once the blood had drained out of the
animal, it was de-skinned and the carcass was readied for human consumption. The
carcass was stamped with the halal sign by an employee of the Municipal
Corporation and the buyer proceeded through the exit marked for halal animals
(like-wise, a jhatka sign was stamped on animals slaughtered in the latter mode).
The invocation, ‘Bismillah-Allahu’ was not audible to me the first time I visited
the old slaughterhouse. I was told that the invocation must have been said silently.
Another man remarked that if this were not done it would not constitute halal (what
is permitted)—it would be haram (what is proscribed). A third butcher informed me
that the invocation was made close to the ear of the animal and therefore it may not
have been audible. The idea behind this invocation, a fourth worker stated, was to
convey to the animal that his time had come and that the slaughterer was carrying
out Allah’s will. A fifth man held that the workers were so busy there that they
scarcely had time to say the invocation out loud but the throat was always slit in the
prescribed way and the blood was made to drain out fully. If a Muslim was
undertaking the slaughter, the workers assumed that it had been carried out cor-
rectly and it was halal, even as the Hadith understood it. The embodiment of halal
as the mode of slaughter held its own as the believer’s mark of faith.
Butchering in the slaughterhouse was evidently the task of men. The only
women I saw there were those selling entrails as by-products of the slaughter
process. The workers in the halal section of the slaughterhouse were primarily
Qureshis. They claimed that they descended from the same group (phirka) as
Prophet Mohammed. The Hindu butchers at the slaughterhouse described them-
selves as Valmiki and Khatiq or Bihari migrants.
In the jhatka section, sheep and goats were killed by an instrument known as the
toka. It looked more like an axe than a knife and enabled the beheading of the
animal in one stroke. If an animal did not die at the first stroke, the action had to be
repeated. There was no specific invocation to God in the course of the slaughter but
the tiles on the wall of the slaughterhouse in this section had an image of Kali. I was
told by a butcher here that Ma-Kali (Mother Kali) ‘eats’ goats. One of them
remarked that the head of the first goat that was slaughtered every morning was
offered to Kali. Alongside Kali, a picture of a cine-actress was pasted on the wall,
suggesting, I think, that the latter, too, was a personification of Shakti, or female
divine energy.
The difference between an ordained practice and its individual renditions were
thought of as subordinate to the matter of faith. Latour’s (2005) suggestion that a
tradition’s ‘formidable inertia’ is sustained by its ‘incredible fluidity’ is perhaps
pertinent here. However, it was as distinct bodily enactments of slaughter—
slaughter as habitus—that halal and jhatka radiated into the religious and social life
of shopkeepers and residents in the city (Brara 2017).
How did butchers relate to the distinct practices of slaughtering by halal or
jhatka? Most butchers averred that it was a matter of faith. Often, such statements
were followed by the emotional defence of one’s own slaughter practice. In this
frame, Hindu and Sikh butchers declared that as a technique, jhatka caused the
animal less pain and suffering than halal. The fear glands were not activated in its
swift beheading. On the other side, it was reasoned that the animal did not feel any
pain after the throat was slit in the halal mode. The muscular contractions that
followed were not regarded as evidence of life in this view. A butcher further
argued that halal meat had more vitamins and was tastier as well since Allah’s
name had been pronounced over it. Butchers held on to their religious positions on
the matter.
The discourse of halal and jhatka was also evaluated along veterinary lines.
Some butchers knew that since the technique of halal drained the blood from the
animal, the likelihood of blood as a medium for bacterial growth was minimized, in
accord with the majority view of veterinarians. A few vets I met at the slaughter-
house opined that if the animal flesh was consumed on the same day, jhatka meat
was as wholesome as halal. When I asked another vet which meat he ate, halal or
jhatka, he said that he was socialized as a Hindu before he became a vet and so he
preferred jhatka.
Did butchers come together qua butchers on common concerns? In the company
of vets, debates on the issue of pain spilled over to the scientific method of stunning
animals that was favoured by most vets. However, the wanton killing of animals
was precluded by the standardized practices of slaughter adopted by both halal and
jhatka practitioners. Further, the religious framing of slaughter was believed to
transform the action from being crudely coterminous with violence against animals.
Organizations of both halal and jhatka butchers jointly disputed and fought
court cases against animal welfare activists and environmental activists from the
1980s onwards. The NGO, PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals), had
drawn attention to the cruel treatment meted out to animals during transport and in
the process of slaughter at the butchery.4 Environmentalists had agitated against the
unhygienic and overcrowded conditions at the slaughterhouse and the air and water
pollution caused by dung, urine, and blood that spilled over into the neighbourhood.
The ‘modern’ technique of stunning animals by a pressure bolt (or an electric
shock) was considered as causing least pain and suffering, in contrast to both halal
and jhatka in the view of activists.
4
Campaign against animal rights violation. The Hindu Business Line, August 30, 2001.
194 R. Brara
The judicial decision to shift the slaughterhouse was finally taken in 1994.
Despite protests and strikes by the halal and the jhatka butchers’ associations,
several butchers had to accede to the shifting of the slaughter house to the new
mechanized facility in Ghazipur in 2009.5 Muslim butchers, especially, perceived
the shift as an unwarranted blow to their livelihoods.6 Some dissenting butchers
continued with unauthorized slaughtering in the vicinity of the old slaughterhouse
or in other locations in the city or outside its Municipal limits.7
The new butchery was described as a ‘meat processing centre’. Although the
nomenclature changed, this mechanized plant endowed with German equipment
and a ‘modern’ stunning facility, too, had separate halal and jhatka sections. The
three-Judge Bench of the Supreme Court was petitioned to ensure that there was a
separate entrance and exit for animals slaughtered in the halal and jhatka modes in
the new slaughter house as well. The secular modernity of the judges did not allow
them to pass such an order. The Bench declared: ‘What difference does it make
whether you slaughter an animal by this method or that method?’ (The Hindu, 7
September 20068). The judges, all Hindu, were surprised that after 60 years of
Independence these distinctions were still prevalent. It revealed a telling distance
from local, religious sensibilities and the ‘modern’ of their imagination.
The All-India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (2004), on the other hand, drew the
attention of the judges to the distinction between ‘religiosity’ and ‘communalism’.
The butchers insisted upon separate entries and exits for persons and animals
slaughtered in the halal and jhatka modes as matters of religious belief and practice.
These measures were intended to guard the points of possible contact with sub-
stances that were not halal or permitted for Muslims. If these measures were not
adopted, they noted, they ‘will have no option but to reject all meat produced by the
Ghazipur slaughterhouse’. Exclusive points of entrance and exit for halal and
jhatka animals, carcasses and people were later acceded in the new and ‘modern-
ized’ slaughterhouse. To the inmates of the new ‘meat processing centre’, the idea
of modernity was captured in the use of machines for slaughtering and relatively
clean surroundings against simple tools and less hygienic environs but it did not
negate the articulation of faith in the slaughterhouse.
The inscriptions of religion, of halal and jhatka, were clearly not erased by the
espousal of ‘modern’ techniques. As before, animal carcasses continued to be
marked by distinctive stamps that indicated the type of slaughter—halal or jhatka.
The certification of halal meat as halal, for export to the Middle-East from the new
slaughterhouse, was facilitated by the training imparted to the abattoir’s Muslim
workers by the religious organization, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind.
However, a section of Muslim butchers continued to protest the stunning tech-
niques employed at the ‘modern’ slaughterhouse. The most frequent complaint was
5
‘Halal Association refuses to move out of the Idgah slaughterhouse’, Times of India Oct. 3, 2009.
6
‘Ghazipur slaughterhouse and the butchering of livelihoods’, Hindustan Times Oct 22, 2009.
7
‘Illegal slaughter houses: Delhi HC seeks govt., police’s response’, DNA 12 August 2015.
8
‘Supreme Court takes umbrage at buffalo traders’ plea’, The Hindu, Sept 7, 2006.
that if the animal died prior to the slaughter, the blood did not drain out of the
animal completely, which rendered the practice unacceptable and prohibited or
haram. The manager at the new slaughterhouse averred that one of the reasons the
plant was not running at full capacity in 2016 was because a good number of
Muslim butchers and meat buyers refrained from associating with techniques that
were considered dubious or unauthorized by religion.
Compounding matters, the new butchery was in the vicinity of an insanitary
waste fill. Further, road connectivity between the plant and the highway was poor.
The cost of slaughtering, too, was higher at Rs. 75 per small animal against Rs. 5 at
the old slaughterhouse. And women vendors who sold the smaller meat entrails at
the old slaughterhouse were rendered redundant as unused flesh and bone was now
converted into animal feed at the ‘modern’ meat processing plant itself.
1.1 The Slaughter of Other Animals/Birds:

Pigs and Chickens
Pigs were not killed in the local abattoirs. Their slaughter was organized informally
in dispersed locations within the city. At Pratap Bagh, near the Delhi University, the
slaughter site was known as a bara—in common usage, a word for a courtyard
where animals are tethered and fodder is stored. On enquiring whether there was a
codified term for the technique of slaughtering pigs that could be compared to halal
or jhatka, I was told that it was simply called killing (maarna). Since pork was not
eaten by Muslims, the question of terming it halal did not arise. However, the
technique could not be termed jhatka either, I learned, because the pig has a thick
neck and a hard collar bone such that one-stroke slaughter did not kill it. The pig
seemed to constitute a boundary object for caste Hindus since its head could not be
severed by jhatka or in a single stroke. Pork in the city was, strikingly, consumed
largely by the lowest castes of Hindus and by a section of westernized, Sikh/Hindu
upper classes.
In contrast to pigs, chickens were permissible food for Muslims and nowadays
for increasing numbers of Sikhs/Hindus as well. These birds were slaughtered by
both the techniques of halal and jhatka. The one-stroke beheading was followed by
Sikh/Hindu butchers, while Muslim butchers practised the slitting of the throat that
let the blood flow out. However, since chickens were often slaughtered just outside
the shop or within its precincts (and in poultry farms) there was some room for
improvisation, away from surveillance. I recount three improvisations next:
One: A Hindu butcher who sold chickens in Malka Gunge showed me the two
instruments he kept in his shop—a knife for halal and an axe for jhatka. When a
Muslim client asked him to do a halal, (an occasional occurrence when the cus-
tomer was in a rush or when buyers swelled as at Id), the Muslim customer recited
‘Bismillah Allahu’ himself as the butcher slaughtered the chicken in the halal style
and with the halal knife. This was an uncommon de-centring.
196 R. Brara
Two: In Ghazipur, Muslim wholesalers supplied chicken to Sikh retailers on the

explicit understanding that Sikh/Hindu workers would be engaged to undertake
jhatka.
Three: I asked a local butcher for a chicken at a shop and whether he sold jhatka or
halal since I had noticed that his shop had not displayed either the halal or the
jhatka sign. He enquired what I might want, in turn, and then added that he
employed workers of both faiths so that the consumer’s faith was not compromised
and, of course, nor his own profit.
In the slaughter market, then, wage labour too was marked with a sign—Sikhs/
Hindus who carried out jhatka through a bodily enactment and Muslims who stood
in for their faith through the performance of halal. The market for the sale of meat
for everyday consumption, too, developed by keeping distinctive religious orien-
tations in view, including the specific combinations of animal flesh/fowl that could
be sold in the shop. While the sale of chicken and mutton could not accompany
pork in halal shops, the ban on beef was state-mandated. Again, chicken and
mutton were seldom found being sold alongside pork except in department stores.
By and large, the flesh of pigs and buffaloes was retailed by castes lower down the
caste and social hierarchy.
1.2 Butchering and Butchers: The Wider Social Context
At knifepoint, the Muslim butcher, imbued his specific labour with the sign of Allah
and slaughtered in accordance with the technique approved by the Hadith to pro-
duce halal food. Those who slaughtered animals the jhatka way, too, invested their
technique of beheading by a single stroke with religious significance. But everyday
language could also view the action of slaughtering animals as slipping into simply
slaughter.
In the semantic field of city-speech, halal and jhatka transformed from practices
embodying faith to signs connoting heartless butchery. The term halal could sug-
gest slaughter, and even, slow painful slaughter, while the term jhatka was reserved
for a sudden and quick death. A shopkeeper remarked, for instance, that if he
carried out the halal of a goat in his shop he would be halaled (slaughtered).
The local term for butcher in the everyday speech of the city, again, was kasai.
There were semantic slippages apparent in the language-in-use here as well. The
term for a butcher (kasai), easily doubled up for a slaughterer of human beings.
Wittgenstein (2001: 216e) observes that ‘it is only if the word has the primary sense
for you that you can use it in the secondary one.’ A kasai (butcher) denoted a killer
of animals but it could connote a human without a heart (a zalim). It highlighted the
social marginalization of butchers as killers even while the production of meat as a
disciplined service to Allah or a deity made the sustenance of believers possible.
Yet, on marked occasions the butcher’s everyday role of slaughtering animals
was re-centred in the wider social and religious context. At Bakr-Id (Id-ul-Azah or
Feast of the Sacrifice), the butcher was the much-sought-after ritual specialist who
carried out the actual qurbani (the slaughter of the sacrificial animal) while the
patron held the knife ceremoniously. The butcher’s ritual function was highlighted
by Hindu/Sikh residents who practised animal sacrifice as well, when a blessing
sought materialized (mannat).
While animal sacrifice was no longer carried out in the precincts of the Kali
temple that I visited, goats were still offered to the deity there, marked with ver-
milion by the priest and slaughtered by butchers in less-frequented arenas.
1.3 Inscribing Animals, Men, and Collective Bodies

with Religious Signs
At both the old and new slaughterhouses, slaughter practices associated with halal
and jhatka inscribed religious boundaries in the course of meat production. The
everyday production of meat embodied slaughter techniques as religious ‘codes’
that became the medium for forming and sustaining relationships within distinct
religious groupings in this interreligious context (cf. Douglas 1982). While butchers
were regarded as belonging to the bottom social strata, associated with the bodily
and lower signs of faith (Bakhtin 1984), they were indispensable as producers of
sanctified meat and, on occasion, as ritual specialists.
Within religious collectives, there were further groupings, depending upon
whether the members butchered sheep, goats, and chickens, on the one hand or
buffaloes or pigs, on the other. Symbolic codes and practices interrelated pro-
scriptions on eating animals (such as pigs and buffaloes), slaughter modes,
slaughter sites and caste rankings. However, the consumption of different types of
flesh in the city did not always mirror its religion-inflected production, a subject I
explore in the next section.
2 The Reinscriptions of Consumption
The terrain on which halal and jhatka were repeated as practices of production,
embodying distinct slaughter techniques and imprinted on flesh as signs of faith,
was reworked by consumers. What came to the fore in conversations with
meat-eaters and shopkeepers was not a drowning of religious difference but again
faith-based manifestations, including differences within and between religious tra-
ditions in this regard.
At one extreme, there were customers described by a meat-seller as katarpanthis
—that is those who believed in the orthodox path, among all three faiths.
198 R. Brara
Meat bought for daily consumption in Muslim homes was routinely purchased
from Muslim butchers. I came across a Muslim buyer who averred that just
believing the word ‘halal’ inscribed on a meat shop was not enough. He asked to be
shown a kalima, a written statement of faith, which some shopkeepers kept at hand.
Another preferred to remain vegetarian when he was unsure if the meat on offer was
halal or possibly tainted by the proximity of pork or even the fat of pork in a
cooking vessel. Before dining at a five-star hotel, an elderly gentleman checked on
whether the mutton was halal or not through informal Muslim channels. While
travelling or eating in a Hindu/Sikh home, meat items were discreetly avoided by
members of three families I met. Only sweetmeats were shared.
Very infrequently, I encountered Muslims who bought meat from upper-end
department stores because they were certain of its quality, even though these outlets
sold pork as well. These customers were considered unorthodox in the common
reckoning.
The orthodox among the Sikhs, again, invariably bought jhatka meat. There was
a preponderance of jhatka shops in neighbourhoods inhabited by Punjabi refugees
in Delhi. Both customers and shopkeepers confirmed that meat sold as jhatka was
preferred here since it was the practice recommended by Guru Gobind Singh. In
one instance, a Sikh butcher in an upper-class neighbourhood remarked that ‘this
jhatka–halal talk belongs to a bygone era. Sikhs in this neighbourhood do not care
for such distinctions’.
Orthodox Hindus refrained from anything to do with what was termed
‘non-vegetarian’ food and religiously avoided the visceral sights and smells of
animal flesh. Yet, butchers across faiths agreed that Hindus, who constituted 82%
of the city’s population, constituted the bulk of meat-consumers in the city as well.
A Muslim butcher described the Hindus as ‘all-rounders’ since they bought meat
from both halal and jhatka shops.9 The Hindus I queried procured their meat from
Muslims for a variety of reasons: one claimed that Muslim butchers knew their
meat and what portions to recommend for different dishes. Another said that the
convenience of the butcher-shop in the neighbourhood was what mattered to her.
A long-time resident of the city commented that ‘this new jhatka shopkeeper is a
refugee from Punjab. Delhi had no jhatka meat shops in the past.’ A fourth Hindu
argued that ‘once you take to meat-eating, you might as well procure it from a
Muslim shop’. Still another buyer said that he opted for halal because he preferred
to patronize the minority.
However, Hindu butcher-immigrants who had moved to Delhi in the last decade
were seeking the market among newer Hindu migrants in the city by emphasizing
regional affiliations as well—Bihari, Bijnori, Chattisgarhi—and underscoring a
9
The term ‘all-rounder’ derived from the game of cricket and referred to cricketers who could bowl
and bat (Brara 2017).
desire for an emergent jhatka-Hindi-Hindu connection. A few of them complained

that Hindu residents of the city continued to buy their meat from Muslim butchers.
The discourse of halal and jhatka meat also traversed the many eateries in town
where consumers did not know for certain whether they were consuming halal or
jhatka meat. At one end, eateries declared that they were ‘Muslim’ hotels, espe-
cially in the vicinity of mosques or had often incorporated a Muslim proper name in
their hoardings (Karim’s; Al-Kauser). At the other extreme, Nirula’s and Mc
Donald’s were examples of fast-food joints where Muslim youngsters, too, con-
sumed non-vegetarian fare. A Muslim student told me that the act of consuming
halal meat was not how he perceived the values of being a good Muslim. Another
suggested that since the majority of butchers in the city were Muslims, it was more
likely than not that what he ate there was halal.
It was among the Sikhs and the recent Hindu immigrants to the city that the
preference for jhatka was strongly expressed. In 2003, Mc Donald’s was asked to
display whether it sold jhatka or halal meat by the Sikh organization—the SGPC
(Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee)—since the multinational fast-food
company expressly displayed that it sold halal meat in the Middle-East.10 But at
Nirula’s—another fast-food chain—I learned that their market survey indicated that
halal meat was acceptable to their Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim customers. Pork was
not considered desirable by customers of the three faiths. And so Nirula’s served
chicken pepperoni and halal meat.
That Hindus, by and large, consumed halal meat sold by Muslim butchers
consituted an in-between space where Hindu meat-eaters and Muslim sellers related
through the historical specificities of long-standing halal meat-shops in the city and
religious attitudes that tolerated such consumption.11 However, the consumption of
halal meat by Hindus was no evidence of their tolerance for other meaty matters.
Each religious tradition, in practice, revealed negotiable and non-negotiable aspects
of the sacred that were temporally and politically delimited. The taboo on beef
consumption, for instance, was defined by Hindus in the present in a totalizing way,
by contrast with the acceptance of halal meat.
While from an economic point of view, meat production may appear as a
stand-in for consumption, the meaning of religious differences for animal slaughter
practices at the point of production did not have the same significance in matters of
consumption. Further, since different animal species were prohibited for con-
sumption, both between and within the religious traditions of its residents, the
becoming of unitary religious publics was fractured within the realm of meat
consumption.
10
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/ accessed on 19/2/17.
11
Madan (1970) notes that Brahmins in Kashmir have consumed halal meat for centuries.
200 R. Brara
3 Halal and Jhatka as Symbols
I turn to the consideration of halal and jhatka as symbols of different religious

traditions, next. Here I draw on and re-work aspects of Deleuze’s method in
‘Difference and Repetition’ (1994) for making sense of the repetition of religious
signs and symbols in the context of this ethnography. Deleuze (1994) constructs his
reflections within the practice of philosophy but difference and repetition in the
realm of symbols, signs, and concepts have a quotidian presence as well. While
Deleuze advances our understanding of repetition and difference as a contemporary
philosopher of the post-Christian age, Delhi’s everyday life, by contrast, is shot
through with signs of religiousness. And so, I relate to Deleuze’s work by engaging
with his views from the stand-point of an anthropologist animated by a particular
ethnographic context where daily life is marked by signs of faith.
The study of difference, Deleuze (1994) declares, has been subordinated by the
‘four iron collars’ of representation that subsume difference under oppositions,
analogies, overarching identities and similarities, overlooking the powers of dif-
ference to decentre and diversify. Philosophically speaking, Deleuze (1994) argues
that the concept of difference was never allowed full play. At the same time,
Deleuze (1994) attempts to work out a link between difference and repetition. The
striking feature of repetition for him is that it always appears as a repetition of the
same because ‘…everything which causes repetition to vary seems to us to cover or
hide it at the same time.’ Displacement and disguise, are then, the powers of
repetition.
What I take from Deleuze for this enquiry is that I would be reducing difference
by regarding (a) halal and jhatka in this account as simply signs of two varieties of
slaughter practices (overarching identity); (b) or, if I were to focus on the opposition
between meat-wholesalers and workers in the slaughterhouse (major opposition)
without acknowledging the significance of the different signs of faith; (c) or by
thinking, for instance, that halal and jhatka are similar signs without bringing out
how they are different (overall similarity); or (d) by assuming that the Muslim halal
is like the Hindu jhatka (argument by analogy). On the other hand, what I proffer is
the sense of halal and jhatka as ongoing difference that was generated in conver-
sations with butchers.
The ‘excess’ of difference, that is not contained within ‘representations’ of
difference, finds an expression in the continuing power of difference to decentre and
diversify the meanings of halal and jhatka, evident here in the unfolding of time
and memory. The powers of repetition, in Deleuze’s understanding, would include
displacement and disguise of religious symbols and practices as well. These sym-
bols seem to crystallize in relation to the political context within which they grow or
are eclipsed. I discuss this aspect next.
3.1 The Intertwinement of Religious and Political

Difference: North Indian Memories
An exploration of this subject may take me too far afield but I do want to undertake
a brief genealogy of halal and jhatka as slaughter practices that intertwine in the
subcontinental history of Delhi and Punjab at this juncture. As historically enacted
sacred practices, halal and jhatka were oriented not only to faith but to the space
and time of pitched battles over the sacred. Religious practices and symbols, too,
are articulated or muted in a context of ongoing politics. Rituals, Geertz (1973),
remarks are ‘affirmations of political allegiance as well as a homage to God.’
Articulations of halal and jhatka in Delhi drew their sustenance from what Allah
willed, Guru Gobind Singh resisted and Hindus preferred, deriving their power from
both embodied practice and the recesses of memory. With the onset of Muslim rule,
the political spilled over into the religious, and in Punjab created pockets of resistance
and the emergence of a new faith—Sikhism. The insistence on the practice of halal
by Muslims as an element vital to the profession of their faith during the period of
Muslim rule, while Hindu butchers were denied the right to slaughter in their way,
did not go uncontested once Muslim rule began to wane in Punjab.
Guru Gobind Singh enjoined the Sikhs to refrain from consuming what was
understood to be animals slaughtered according to the prescribed Muslim practice
—the term for such meat was kuttha. In an oblique reference to Islam, Guru Gobind
Singh argued that just invoking God’s name over an animal would not reduce its
suffering. If Sikhs had to have meat, he observed, they should opt for the technique
that caused least pain to the animal. The discourse of pain and suffering still
reverberates in popular discussions of halal and jhatka.
But the practice of jhatka that may appear as an inaugural act from the per-
spective of Guru Gobind Singh and the Sikhs, is from another perspective, an echo
or repetition of what Prophet Muhammed laid down for his followers: ‘Do not have
the meat of animals slaughtered other than in the mode approved for you’. From
this point, it was a small step to inventing a name for the distinctive bodily action or
slaughter practice.
It was only after British rule was established that Sikh and Hindu butchers in
Punjab raised the demand for animal slaughter that conformed to the Sikh/Hindu
technique. It was gradually endowed with a name—jhatka (literally, it means a
jerk). While the word does not have a Sanskritic lineage or textual depth, it con-
forms to the practice of beheading that was followed in the traditions of animal
sacrifice to a deity. The new slaughterhouses that were constructed by the British
were partitioned into jhatka and halal enclosures acceding to a long-standing
demand of the Sikhs. Abid and Abid (2012) note that the go-ahead for the legal and
public practice of jhatka was made by the colonial administrators as a concession to
the Sikhs for their contribution in the building of the British Empire. Jhatka meat
was referred to as ‘Sikh meat’ in the British documents (Abid and Abid 2012).
Again, while cow slaughter in Delhi was carried out during the colonial and
pre-colonial eras, diverse castes in rural and urban areas came together on this
202 R. Brara
sacralized issue to oppose what was treated as a Muslim practice from the middle of
the 19th century onwards.12 Cow protection and the ban on cow slaughter was one
of the rallying points of the freedom movement well before a secular nation-state
was constituted. Its mobilization marked a new low for Hindu-Muslim relations in
north India, a precursor of communalism that finally led to the Partition of the
subcontinent in 1947 (Freitag 1980). The history of partitions in the slaughterhouse,
too, were reminiscent of the Partition of India into India and Pakistan but even that
Partition did not put an end to the partitioning of religious difference in the city.
To talk of the cow is to talk of how a secular State is influenced by the religious
practices of the majority, an aspect to which Asad (2003) has drawn our attention in
the contemporary context. The slaughter of cows has been banned in Delhi (and in
other provinces, with a few exceptions) by the post-Independence legislations of a
secular nation-state, bringing out how symbols that start out as sacred permeate
political life. Cow slaughter is now illegal but riots over the issue surface in the
contemporary period as well.13
The Sikhs, under Guru Gobind Singh, had questioned the right of Muslims to
impose their slaughter practice on adherents of other faiths. In response to the ban
on cow-slaughter in 1967, a Muslim quoted by Batra (1981) noted that ‘the cow is
sacred for Hindus but this sacredness cannot be imposed on other communities.
Pigs are despised by all Muslims but Muslims have never forced Hindus to stop
eating the flesh of pigs.’
A ban on the rearing of pigs is imposed in Pakistan but, so far as I know, even
the demand for it has not been articulated in Delhi. On the contrary, in a neigh-
bourhood that I studied, the owner of a pork shop that faced a mosque paid no heed
to requests that he should not display his wares so prominently.
Religion, Asad (2015: 201) avers, ‘was always involved in the world of power’.
In a plural milieu, the differences between religious traditions lead to a continuous
defining and redefining of symbols and their place in social and political life. What
is striking is the political engagement with religious symbols and ritual practices,
such as halal and jhatka, across long-range temporalities.
A repetition of the idea—‘do what is proclaimed as your group’s way and resist
the others’—seems to occupy the protagonists of both halal and jhatka, conjoining
times past and present, albeit along distinctive cosmologies. In the language of
non-believers, the past of religious elements and traditions that are brought to bear
on the present could be cast as the pre-modern or post-modern—at the cutting
edges, as it were, of the city’s modernity. But how might we interpret halal and
jhatka within the frame of a sociology of religion?
12
To cite just three accounts, see Robb (1986), Bayly (1986), Freitag (1980).
13
‘Holy men stir up riots in Delhi’, The Guardian 1966, 8 December; ‘Angry East Delhi residents
stop trucks carrying cattle, pelt stones at drivers’, Indian Express August 31, 2015.
3.2 Halal and Jhatka as Outlying Symbols of Distinctive

Religious Traditions
Durkheim’s (1915) study of religion, strikingly, focuses on symbols and enacted

practices which reinforce social solidarity. In his analysis, he dwells on the different
degrees of sacredness that is invested in symbols as well. His remarkable study of
totemism, as an exemplar of religion, draws attention to a discernible chain that
links men to totemic plants/animals which, in turn, serve as signifiers of the most
sacred object, that is the emblem or churinga of the group, tying animate and
inanimate objects together.
Approaching this subject in the light of Durkheim’s study, albeit in an interre-
ligious context, halal and jhatka can be regarded as symbols which embody dis-
tinctive beliefs and practices that stand for identifiable socio–religious groupings in
Delhi. As sacred emblems, halal and jhatka are stamped, attested, and signified on
the bodies of animals that, in turn, become the signifiers of food that is permissible
for Muslims or Sikhs/Hindus to eat and which is, again, the signifier of the Muslim
or Sikh (and less often the Hindu) collective.
However, in an interreligious context, halal and jhatka as symbols and ritual
practices create social solidarity within sub-groups, rather than right through the
society, in contrast with the totemic religion that Durkheim analyses. And yet, since
halal and jhatka form a means of communication within the larger food and social
network, patterns that express interreligious relationships also materialize. For
instance, the connections forged between Sikh and Hindu butchers, evident in the
images of Kali and Guru Gobind Singh on display in jhatka shops, grows out of the
shared symbolic slaughter technique—jhatka—as well as the proscription on the
consumption of beef. Again, as mentioned above, meat-eating Hindus are often
consumers of halal meat, and this practice forms a bridge that reaches across to the
Muslim minority. Muslims in the city, too, make do without beef since cow
slaughter in Delhi is banned by the state.14
Studies in the sociological arena of complex world religions have scarcely
regarded slaughter practices and food proscriptions as central symbols. For
example, if I take the reading of the kalima, zakat, salat, the keeping of the rozas
and the pilgrimage to the Haj as the five ‘pillars’ of Islam, the slaughter practice of
halal and the taboo on pork do not appear as central features. Again, the five
symbols of Sikhism are well-known (kara, kachha, kirpan, kesh, and kangha) and
studied (Uberoi 1991) but the significance of jhatka has not been a dominant
concern until recently.15 The sociological study of Hinduism accords a predominant
value to the hierarchical patterning of castes and here who eats meat and indeed,
what meat, is understood in the idiom of purity and pollution. Yet, primarily the
14
For details, see The Delhi Agricultural Cattle Preservation Act, 1994. Illegally, beef can still be
procured with some difficulty in the city.
15
The Sikh Rehat Maryada (Code of Conduct) brought out by the Shiromani Gurdwara
Parbhandak Committee in 1945 states that Sikhs should consume only jhatka meat.
204 R. Brara
figures of the king, the Brahmin and the renouncer are considered to be the pivots of
its structure (Dumont 1970) while food prescriptions and proscriptions are accorded
a lesser significance.
However, drawing on the ethnographic context delineated above, I argue that
slaughter practices and symbols pertaining to animals as food form part of the
contemporary stock of religious symbols, even if these are interpreted as what I
term the ‘outlying’ symbols of the concerned religion by its elite or literati. Further,
the centrality and nature of slaughter practices and also prescriptions and pro-
scriptions vis-a-vis animals, vary between religious traditions as well and are
articulated in everyday life (cf. Zellelew 2015).
From this angle, the concept of halal as all that is lawful has a remarkable depth
that is developed in the textual traditions of Islam, of which the slaughtering of
animals by a prescribed technique (zabihah) and the prohibition on pork is only one
facet. The idea of halal refers to all that Allah has made permissible or lawful both
in the Quran and the Hadith. Haram, by contrast, is concerned with what is pro-
hibited. All that is not haram is permissible though there is an intermediate clas-
sification of mushbooh (or ‘doubtful’). For the Muslim, the concepts of halal and
haram pertain to the domain of food and drink, clothing and adornment, work and
livelihood as well as marriage and family life (Al-Qaradawi 1990).
All food is permitted (halal) except the flesh of dead animals, flowing blood, the
flesh of swine and animals dedicated to anyone other than Allah. The pronouncing
of Allah’s name over an animal before slaughter was intended to counter the
invocations to gods other than Allah in the pre-Islamic traditions of animal sacrifice
to deities in Mecca—that is to say during, the time referred to by Muslims as the
Age of Ignorance or Jahillyyah (Bearman et al. 2002). Accepting the flesh of
animals slaughtered by those who did not offer it to Allah ran against the spirit
which had led to Islam’s institutionalization.
The symbol of halal, further, assumes a specific importance when approached
from the angle of butchering. Halal, which incorporates the approved slaughtering
technique (zabihah), is significant for all Muslims but for butchers halal becomes a
major symbol, alongside the other central symbols being a practice executed daily.
Again, the significance of Id-ul-Azah lies in the commemoration of Ibrahim’s
sacrifice, but this is also the occasion marked by an animal sacrifice that relies upon
the services of the butcher. The festival is incarnated as Bakr-Id (the Id or Feast of
the Goat) in the definitions of popular Islam and meat comes to inscribe its car-
nivalesque aspect (Bakhtin 1984).
By contrast with the centrality of halal as a symbol for Muslims, the textual
import of jhatka as a slaughter practice is minor in the Sikh tradition. The prohi-
bition on the consumption of ‘kuttha’ (the meat of an animal slaughtered the
Muslim way) is said to have been introduced by Guru Gobind Singh in the late 17th
century.16 The practice of jhatka was included as a tenet of the Sikh Rehat Maryada
16
http://sikhs.org/meat.htm. Accessed on 16 July 2016.
or code of conduct drawn up for Sikhs from 1931 onwards.17 It now forms part of
the Sikh initiation rite.
Hindu texts, such as Manu-Samhita (2004), place a premium on vegetarianism.
The centrality accorded to ritual purity along vegetarian lines places butchers, as
dealers in flesh, among the lowest castes in the Hindu ritual hierarchy. But the
procedure of animal sacrifice (bali) by beheading the animal in a single stroke,
practised by Hindu butchers, is said to have a venerable Vedic lineage. The goddess
Kali, I was told, assumed a dominant place in the deities encountered in jhatka
butcher-shops because of her association with animal sacrifice and her acceptance
of meat as food. Predictably, she is marginalized in the textual repertoire of north
India (cf. Caldwell 2003). In the orthodox imagination of the city, jhatka smacks of
Sikh butchers and lower-caste Hindus who espouse traditions of animal sacrifice
and meat-eating.
Among Hindus, the veneration of the cow and its sacredness is noteworthy in
both popular and textual interpretations of Hinduism (Batra 1981). She is symbolic
of a Hindu body that has been seeking to overcome the internal differentiation into
castes. Certain scheduled castes that had a tradition of beef-eating have given up the
practice (Batra 1981) promoting such a vision of Hindu solidarity in north India.
What comes across convincingly is that religious symbols and practices ‘signify’
the local production and consumption of flesh across faiths in the city. These
symbols carve out and organize a larger domain that spells out which animals can
be consumed, and practices that sanctify everyday food production and consump-
tion for believers. At a deeper plane, such symbols and practices connect with
cosmological beliefs and sustain sectarian/religious bodies. These networked and
sacralized practices form part of the repertoire of ‘world religions’ including Islam,
Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Christianity (Douglas 1972, 1982; Zellelew
2015). Although such symbols and practices may be eclipsed, these can erupt at
other times. For instance, recently in the United Kingdom, a section of Christians,
including representatives of the House of Lords, protested and interrogated why
British citizens were being served ‘halal’ meat which had ‘been prayed over in the
name of Allah’ and was inimical to Christian beliefs.18 Contemporarily, then,
animal slaughter practices have the power to inscribe subjects and distribute them in
religious groupings.
The relationship of religion to modernity and secularisation is evidently com-
plex. It differs in different periods and places and varies with religious traditions. As
outlined above, it is possible to distinguish aspects which are presently considered
most sacred within a faith and those which may not have been regarded as sacred to
the same degree by its practitioners or its literati at other historical moments.
17
Ibid.
‘Science of Meat’, Times of India, 2012, March 27. See also http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/
18
212168/MPs-anger-after-they-are-secretly-served-halal-meat, Nov. 18, 2010. Accessed on January

31, 2017.a.
206 R. Brara
Religious symbols can lie dormant and then suddenly be brought alive rendering
linear trajectories uncertain.
4 Conclusion
Will we see an ungrounding of halal and jhatka as religious inscriptions by new

sign-values or will these religious symbols gain intensity? Will the ‘truths’ about
religion be countered by the irreligious or the asymbolic acts of consumers? While
it is still difficult to tell which way the wind will blow, the disappearance of these
inscriptions is not in sight.
The meanings of faith are ascribed to the practices of halal and jhatka. The
production of meat in north India, taking Delhi as an exemplar, is carried out in the
idiom of the religious. Regimens of halal and jhatka are performed alongside
secularizing, industrial–scientific practices in ‘modern’ abattoirs and aspects of the
mechanized, modern arena of a meat processing centre are debated in religious
terms. As contemporary practices and symbols, halal and jhatka rework religious
traditions to sustain or reform religious bodies and groupings. Religious traditions
may challenge or be challenged by secular mores but there is scarce evidence of
their demise in this sphere.
As I traversed the space of the abattoirs, signs of halal and jhatka radiated
connections that made for becoming-Muslim and becoming-Sikh/Hindu bodies.
However, moving beyond the slaughterhouse, showed up how boundaries formed
by the religious production of sanctified flesh were limited to certain types of
animals (sheep and goats). The practices of halal and jhatka did not carry over to
the pig as a species, evidently outcast by Hindus/Sikhs and prohibited for the
Muslims. With chickens, too, religious boundaries were amicably negotiated by
wholesale dealers and retailers. Tracking the significance of difference between
halal and jhatka for the city’s consumers, underscored re-inscriptions by the con-
sumer and highlighted present differences between religious traditions on this issue.
Layers of interreligious capacity and complexity formed the city’s second skin.
As practices, halal and jhatka, undoubtedly, enabled the delineation of symbolic
boundaries between religious groups that were relevant to the regimens of meat
production. However, these symbols did not ipso facto produce distinct Muslim,
Hindu, and Sikh social bodies because of differences in the significance of halal and
jhatka within these religious traditions, such that crossing over was not precluded in
this domain. Turning to the domain of consumption in the city, it was primarily
Hindus who were the buyers of halal meat, since local Muslims comprised less than
one-seventh of Delhi’s residents. Here the specificities of local difference in this
aspect of Hindu practice afforded a bridge along which Muslim butchers were able
to market the halal produce. This difference, in my view, did not stem from a
stand-point of tolerance among Hindus but grew out of an internal hierarchy of the
sacred such that the taboo on beef consumption, for instance, presently had
pre-eminence over the mode of slaughter. These religious differences and com-
monalities were deployed by the city’s economy.
In a nutshell, our understanding of religious traditions, symbols and practices
cannot be fathomed as time to be surpassed or outdated; rather these currents run
alongside the modern. The new of meaty matters is interpreted along lines of faith
and the tides of contemporaneous, interreligious, and democratic politics (cf. Asad
2015). Such ongoing inscriptions and re-inscriptions of faith, which negotiate the
present of the scientific–industrial and the contemporary nation-state, re-make and
re-mark the ‘modern’ in the city.
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Part III
Narrating the Modern: Texts and Travels
Chapter 11
Religion and Hospitality in the Modern:
Thinking with Abdul Bismillah
Simona Sawhney
1 Introduction: Atithi Devo Bhava
Abdul Bismillah’s Hindi story Atithi Devo Bhava (1985) has been translated as
‘Guest is God.’ Written in a most quiet, understated style, the story recounts an
incident in the life of Mohammad Salman, a Muslim, who by virtue of the quirks of
educational policy in India, ended up studying Sanskrit and becoming, in fact, a
scholar of Sanskrit. However, unable to find a job as a lecturer of Sanskrit, he starts
teaching history in an Islamiya school in his town. The narrative simply tells us that
he had believed he would find a job as a lecturer of Sanskrit somewhere after
finishing his Masters, but that didn’t happen. We are left to surmise that Muslim
teachers of Sanskrit may not have been welcome in the colleges and universities of
independent India.
In his private capacity, however, he does teach Sanskrit to a Hindu student of his
town, Mishrilal Gupta, who is preparing for his college exams. Mishrilal thus thinks
of Salman as his ‘Guru’ and would touch his feet in the traditional gesture of
respect. But in other ways, Mishrilal is far from traditional. He is described as an
unusual student with revolutionary ideas, the only Hindu in the kasba, the small
town where he and Salman live, who eats meat, eats at Muslim restaurants, and so
on. At the time when the central incident in the story takes place, he is preparing for
a competitive exam and living in the city. In response to his student’s ardent wish,
Salman decides to visit him, but he plans the visit as a surprise and does not notify
Mishrilal in advance. Of course, on the day that Salman arrives, Mishrilal happens
not to be at home. It is a dreadfully hot summer day; Bismillah describes the heat
with the skilled patience of a familiar sufferer. The Hindu woman in the flat next to
Mishrilal’s invites Salman to rest while he waits for Mishrilal. She is most kind and
S. Sawhney (&)
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi,
New Delhi, India
e-mail: ssawhney@iitd.ac.in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_11
212 S. Sawhney
hospitable in a kind of habitual, shy way, quietly insisting that he eat at their place
instead of going to a hotel, and serving him fresh hot chapatis in her kitchen.
Salman, though extremely uneasy about entering the kitchen of a Brahmin, is
unsure about city norms, and can’t find a way to refuse. The denouement comes
soon after the husband’s arrival. Not as warm as the wife—the text repeatedly
draws attention to the dryness of his tone—the husband finally asks about the
guest’s relation to Mishrilal Gupta:
‘Are you his brother?’ Again that dry tone.

Salman felt pained.
‘No, he is my student.’
‘Are you a teacher?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where do you teach?’
‘In my own town.’
‘Are you also a Gupta?’
‘No.’
‘A Brahmin?’
‘No, I’m Musalmaan, my name is Mohammad Salman.’
He introduced himself fully and began to fold his vegetables in the last piece of
roti. When Pandeyji raised his eyes toward his wife, he found that she herself was
looking at him. It seemed that both were saying something to each other, but were
unable to say it clearly.
Salman was waiting for the next roti, but the woman got up from the stove, went
inside, and started looking for something.
Salman started eating his mango.
When the woman emerged there was a glass tumbler in her hand and fear in her
eyes.
She picked up the steel tumbler next to Salman’s plate and placed the glass
tumbler in its stead (Bismillah 2007 [1985]: 146–147; my translation).
What happens here is nothing spectacular or momentous. Salman is not thrown out
or abused; he is not even denied water. It is simply that the hospitality earlier offered is
now fearfully withdrawn, the other is marked as other, the steel tumbler (traditionally
considered more pure) is replaced with a glass one. The final few lines of the story
leave us with a tableau: Mohammad Salman, accepting the withdrawal of hospitality
in a resigned and outwardly unperturbed manner, washing his dishes silently at the
tap; the Brahmin wife looking at him with fear; the husband still in surprise, perhaps
anger; and the young revolutionary Hindu, Mishrilal Gupta, still absent.
Let me briefly take note of some aspects of the story before attempting to think
more carefully about its engagement of the idea of hospitality. First, it seems that
the story is set in the 1980s. We may surmise this from a few details. We are told
that when Salman was growing up, there was only one school in his small town,
and Sanskrit was taught there, so that is what he learnt. The father of his student
Mishrilal, on the other hand, had only been able to learn Urdu when he was a
student. This is perhaps an indication that Salman, unlike Mishrilal’s father, grew
11 Religion and Hospitality in the Modern … 213
up in independent India, but is just one generation away from those who grew up
when Urdu was still the medium of instruction in much of north India.
The only direct reference to a political event is in a fragment of conversation that
Salman hears as he searches for Mishrilal’s home. Two women are sitting on a cot
in the street and chatting about the ‘Punjab problem.’ One says, ‘O Mother of
Bittan, consider yourself fortunate that we are in Hindustan… had we been in
Punjab, who knows what we would have suffered.’ The sentence catches one’s
attention because of the way it positions Punjab outside Hindustan. Although the
reference to the ‘Punjab Problem’ indicates that we are in the 1980s, the opposition
between Punjab and Hindustan seems to echo an earlier scene of violence, that of
the Partition. This may be the narrative’s way of succinctly indicating that the
events of the 1980s (when a violent separatist movement in Punjab was met with
gigantic and overwhelming State force) were haunted by memories of the partition
of India and the creation of Pakistan.
Perhaps it is the distant but palpable heat of what has come to be called
‘communal violence;’ a heat that, in north India, invariably and repeatedly stokes
embers of the fire that raged across the subcontinent in 1947, that appears in this
story transformed as intense summer heat. The narrative focuses from the very
beginning on this oppressive heat. In one instance, we read that the economic and
social state of the town was entirely at the mercy of this heat. Though ostensibly
free, says the narrator in a mocking tone, people were still enslaved by it.
Is it this enslavement—not just to the heat of summer, but to the heat of
inter-communal hatred and distrust—that lies at the centre of the story?
But obviously, such enslavement has its limits. In fact, it is powerfully thrown
into question by the central character of the story, Mohammad Salman. Salman is a
Muslim who does not seem to be anxiously attached to his own religious identity.
He identifies himself as Muslim when asked, but several details in the story draw
attention to his openness and ease with the non-Muslim. We are told, for example,
that not only did he study Sanskrit when it was the only option available but he also
chose to study it later at the university (and hence he notices the incorrect Sanskrit
pronunciation of the Brahmin at his prayers). Moreover, his affection for his student
Mishrilal Gupta is evident, as is the ease with which he addresses the Brahmin
woman he encounters as ‘bhabhi’ (brother’s wife). During the brief nap he takes in
the veranda of the Brahmin home, he has a dream that gives us a quick glimpse of
his solidarity with a Yadav teacher in his Islamiya school. All these details show us
the texture of a pliable identity, forming itself gradually in associative, rather than
oppositional stances. There is no hint of ferociousness. But such a Muslim is
forcefully made a Muslim, put in place and marked as Muslim, by the Brahmin. In
this sense the story seems to be saying: as long as the Brahmin is a Brahmin, the
Muslim must be a Muslim. Indeed, we could even go so far as to say that today
(the story was published just two years before the destruction of the Babri Masjid),
the Brahmin can only be a Brahmin if the Muslim is a Muslim. One entrenched
identity calls forth, indeed interpellates the other, to the extent that it might itself
become, at a certain knotted depth, nothing but the repudiation, the refusal, and the
ostracizing of the other.
214 S. Sawhney
Two aspects of the story, interrelated, give it its weight, its irony, and pathos.
First, the detail that Salman is a teacher of Sanskrit, and second, the title, itself a
Sanskrit phrase, ‘atithi devo bhava.’ In thinking of the story, we are forced to ask:
why must Salman be a teacher of Sanskrit? Why is that essential for the story? Is it
to indicate Salman’s own ecumenical stance and thus to contrast him with his host,
Pandeyji? Is it to bring to the reader’s attention the figure of the ‘good Muslim,’ the
almost-Brahminical Muslim, the Muslim who is very far from the rapacious figure
often imagined by Hindutva narratives? Perhaps. But it seems to me that we should
go further. By presenting us with the figure of the Muslim as teacher of Sanskrit, the
story indicates that in not being hospitable to the Muslim, the Brahmin is also not
hospitable to Sanskrit. I would therefore propose that the story’s most significant
move, its singular throw, lies in coupling the two: the hospitality accorded to the
Muslim, and the hospitality accorded to Sanskrit. How should we receive this
throw?
Pandeyji, of course, misses it entirely. His wife, more attuned by gender and
training to the role of the host, is from the beginning more welcoming than her
husband. But at the end she is fearful—either of the Muslim stranger, or of her
husband’s displeasure, or both. As for Pandeyji, whose walls are filled with pictures
of Hindu gods, and whose recitation of verses from the Gita is marred by mis-
pronunciation: it is his deafness the story highlights. For evidently the title of the
story, stuck by the author like a placard on a wall—atithi devo bhava—is some-
thing Pandeyji is not capable of hearing, certainly not of hearing clearly or atten-
tively, despite his attachment to Brahminhood. Thus, the title mocks Pandeyji, an
assistant telephone operator by profession, for his distressing inability to receive
long distance communication.
Rather than pitting the Muslim against Sanskrit, as one might expect, Abdul
Bismillah’s story links the two. I would like to make three remarks about this
linking. The first and the most obvious: the story suggests, through this link, that the
hospitality due to the Muslim in the Brahmin home is enjoined not just by the ideals
of modern secularism, but by the Brahmin’s own (forgotten, or misremembered)
patrimony, Sanskrit—or at least by a certain reading of Sanskrit texts. At stake then,
is how to receive this tradition, how to receive ‘atithi devo bhava.’ Taken from the
Shikshavalli of the Taittiriya Upanisad, the phrase occurs in the following context:
‘maatri devo bhava pitri devo bhava/aachaarya devo bhava atithi devo bhava’: Be
one for whom the mother is divine, be one for whom the father is divine, be one for
whom the teacher is divine, be one for whom the guest is divine (TU 1.11.2). It is
part of the teacher’s admonition to the student who has finished his Vedic studies.
Read in its own context, the phrase atithi devo bhava cannot be understood as
calling for the kind of hospitality that the story seems to call for. For its own context
makes it quite clear that the phrase is to be received as part of a general code of
conduct; one based on Brahminical and patriarchal authority. The very next passage
of the text goes like this: ‘You should perform only those rites that are irre-
proachable, and never other types of rites. You should hold in high esteem only
those good practices you have observed in me, and never other types of practices.
You should greet with honour any Brahmin who is superior to us by offering him a
seat.’ (Olivelle 299). Given its context, one might surmise that the atithi of the
Taittiriya Upanisad must refer only to a Brahmin. We might also recall here that the
Manusmriti, for example, in one instance defines the atithi specifically as a Brahmin
who stays for a single night and in general refers to the atithi in terms of his or her
social status.1
But though the phrase atithi devo bhava is doubtless related to what precedes it,
and to its context, it cannot remain limited to that context. To do so would be to
ignore the very significance of the a-tithi as the undated or the untimely; it would
mean, in a perverse fashion, entirely binding with historicist fetters the very word,
the very tremor, that reaches for the irruptive, the date-less, the untimely.
Bismillah’s story provokes us to read the atithi not as the authoritarian and nar-
cissistic patriarch of a hierarchical society—that is to say, not as a figure like
Shakuntala’s Durvasa—but instead as an essentially strange and untimely figure, a
figure that evokes reverence precisely because s/he makes a claim to a home that is
not hers, and hence perhaps reminds us, not of our own belonging, but instead of
our own analogous but infinitely more profound un-belonging. In so far as the
unknown guest who arrives without warning is above all a figure for death, the
guest thus envisaged is perhaps also a reminder of mortality. Both the nationalist
fantasy of a land in which one may be rooted, and to which one has a primordial
and essential claim, and the casteist fantasy of a space untouched by the other, the
outsider, the corruptive or unclean one—in a word, by death itself—may thus be
seen, at a certain level, as elaborate ruses for disavowing the truth of mortality. The
word ‘atithi’ may be read today as the sign and the repository of strands of thought
that cannot be accommodated or contained within the context of the Taittiriya
Upanisad. In other words, does not reading the atithi also mean that we insist on
reading it precisely as atithi: as untimely, irruptive, and unassimilable even in its
‘own’ textual context?
Second, the link between Sanskrit and the Muslim thwarts our familiar notions
about identity. It is not that the Sanskrit speaking Muslim presents us merely with
an oddity or with a multicultural icon spawned by a Hinduized liberalism. (That
could perhaps be one way of reading the story, but in doing so, I think we would
ignore its more substantial work). In fact, in the Indian educational system, there are
probably many Muslim students who learn Sanskrit, but we rarely pause to consider
this. Drawing attention to this link undoes the thick, tiresome knot between religion,
language, and identity that has assumed a certain commonsensical legitimacy, at
1
Manu derives the etymology of the ‘atithi’ from ‘sthita’ (to stay); in 3.102 he says that a Brahmin
who stays even for one night is regarded as a guest, since he does not stay forever. Manu’s
discussion of the guest in this section makes clear the hierarchical, caste-age-gender stratification
that completely infuses this notion of hospitality. At the same time, as always with Manu, things
are more complicated than one first suspects: the discussion indeed seems to be a kind of debate
between the virtues of hospitality and the abuses to which it might be susceptible. Thus, Manu’s
rules are not only for hosts but also for guests; at different instances, both are cautioned that greed
in the guest-host context, eating too often, or eating without feeding the other, will result in oneself
becoming the food of others after death. (Sharma 1998) (Manusmŗti 3.99-119)
216 S. Sawhney
least in north India. It reminds us that Sanskrit is, before all else, a language, and
hence, in principle, a language that may be learnt and spoken by anyone, at least in
a democratic modernity.2 Would it be too much to glimpse, in the Muslim-Sanskrit
link, a momentary vision, a glimmer perhaps, of a moment of translation—the kind
of translation and translatability that the logic of nationalism (and of the two-nation
theory) has always tried to foreclose?
My third remark is about the allegorical dimension of the story itself. There
seems little doubt that the story presents itself as allegorical. But how to read this
allegory? By presenting the Muslim as a guest, a visitor, albeit an uninvited one, in
the Brahmin’s home, is the story also implying that Muslims are guests, visitors in
India? Is it then implicitly positioning India as the home of Hindus? That seems
unlikely. Is it then only drawing attention to the restricted hospitality of the
Brahmin—a hospitality so restricted, so unambiguously reserved for its own kind,
that it ceases, in fact, to be hospitality? Read in this way, the story could be
understood as drawing attention to a certain kind of everyday sociality and its
continuing exclusions. It might then be read as suggesting that unless we find ways
of moving past entrenched identities in the social realm, the equality promised by
the public sphere will remain ephemeral—perhaps even cruel. Hospitality would
become, in this reading, a site for the staging of the social itself—the social being
the space where equality is not simply claimed or denied in an abstract juridical
language, but practiced, enacted, played out, in a language of intimacy and
idiosyncracy, of the domestic, the quotidian, and the kitchenly.
Following on my second remark, however, I also want to suggest another
allegorical dimension for this story. In short, it seems to me that that atithi in the
story may not be only Salman, or the Muslim, but also, perhaps Sanskrit itself. For
it is not the Muslim, but in fact Sanskrit that is, in a certain way, ‘untimely’ in the
time of the modern nation. To recognize Sanskrit as the atithi would also mean to
recognize it as the stranger. Thus, the story provokes us to think about this: Sanskrit
should be welcomed, but as a stranger, an atithi, that is to say, by questioning its
own naturalized bind to the Brahmin, the land, the nation. Today, while on the one
hand this naturalized bind is constantly celebrated, for example, by the increasing
use of Sanskritized terms in public space as a sign of national pride and by the vocal
resentment against non-Indian scholars of Sanskrit, on the other hand, there is no
real interest in fostering the study of Sanskrit texts in an open, intellectually
unrestricted manner.3
2
Needless to say, that has not been the case. Kumud Pawde’s remarkable essay, “The Story of my
‘Sanskrit’”, from her autobiography Antasphot fiercely critiques the fortress-like inaccessibility of
Sanskrit from another position—that of the Dalit woman.
3
Ravish Kumar’s detailed report on his television show Prime Time on NDTV India about the state
of Sanskrit Universities and Sanskrit departments in India has recently brought to light a dismal
picture of neglect of students, low wages, abysmal student-teacher ratios, and, underlying it all, a
profound lack of interest in Sanskrit studies among most students. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fwGhLzKCE_k.
2 A Nation for Hindus
In Urvashi Butalia’s remarkable book The Other Side of Silence, one of the Hindu
survivors of Partition violence makes an arresting observation:
Such good relations we had that if there was any function that we had, then we used to call
Musalmaans to our homes, they would eat in our houses, but we would not eat in theirs and
this is a bad thing, which I realize now. If they would come to our houses we would have
two utensils in one corner of the house, and we would tell them, pick these up and eat in
them; they would then wash them and keep them aside and this was such a terrible thing.
This was the reason Pakistan was created. (Butalia 2000, 31, emphasis added)
The Partition of India occurred, he says, because Hindus and Sikhs were not
hospitable to Muslims. Had they been hospitable—had they been able to break out
of caste-thinking to eat together, to touch, to share, perhaps none of the horrific
violence would have taken place. Religion, past history, customs, political visions
or insecurities—none of this is important in this account. What is important is the
aversion to touch. At the root of the Partition, this Hindu-casteist aversion to touch,
which spawned in turn a brutal, monstrous touch-invasion, a long nightmare of
mass rape and violation that has become the most enduring memory of the Partition.
Is inhospitality the indelible mark of the nation? In an often-cited and curious
remark, Ambedkar once described nationalism as the ‘longing not to belong.’ In the
context of the partition of India and Pakistan it perhaps seemed obvious that the
longing to belong to one place was simultaneously a longing not to belong to the
other.4 Nationalism becomes first a severance. It is this severance that continues to
seethe: a resentful inhospitality.
Here it may not be quite accurate to say that the nation-state as a form is
intrinsically inhospitable in so far as it makes birth the criterion for belonging. For
despite the emphasis on natality and nativity inscribed in the concept of the nation,
the nation has never been about birth tout court. That is to say, in the nationalist
imagination it is rarely if ever birth alone that legitimizes one’s claim to the
homeland.5 Indeed, one could even go so far as to say that bare birth, the birth of
the human, is inimical to the nation, which must immediately attempt to categorize
the birth and frame it in religio–national–patriarchy.6
No doubt this is part of a larger web of problems in which ancient languages, languages (and
language) in general, the humanities, and education find themselves enmeshed today. But that does
not take away from the fact that the condition of Sanskrit is particularly fragile.
4
B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan, or the Partition of India, 1945, Part I, Chapter 2.
5
For example, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the nation, as seen through the popular-revolutionary
point of view, was not about birth, but precisely about contesting and abolishing the privilege of
birth in the name of shared political interests and the common good. The force of the new
identification with the nation, in this view, derives from its ability to render secondary, or indeed,
unstable, unreal, the more obviously natal-driven affiliations: affiliations by region, language,
religion, and caste.
6
Urvashi Butalia’s chapter on children (Butalia 2000, 197–232) vividly brings this out, as does
Veena Das’s landmark work on the figure of the abducted woman. See Das (2007: 18–37).
218 S. Sawhney
The narrative of Hindu nationalism has, in its own way, attempted to answer the
question: what gives the Hindu claim to India its privilege and priority, when
people of other faiths, and most notably of the Muslim faith, have also been living
in the land for many centuries? The question appears in its most stark form in
Savarkar’s 1922 text, Essentials of Hindutva. Savarkar’s response to this question
goes through a protracted argument. He famously argues that the Hindus of India
are the most well-positioned, not only to make a prior claim to the land, but also to
make a claim to nationalism itself, to nationalism as an ideology. This he does by
contrasting Hindus with Buddhists on the one hand, and Muslims on the other. But
an eerie perversion stalks the argument as it progresses. By the end of the text, it
seems that Savarkar has transformed the very terms of Hindu nationalism. The
Hindu, it seems, is no longer a Hindu, and nationalism is no longer nationalism, but
imperialism. Hindutva, by the end, emerges as an imperial project that seeks to
transcend precisely the identity from which it draws its source-strength—the
identity of the Hindu.
Let me try to illustrate this strange perversion by citing the closing lines of the
text. All the antinomies that structure the text: classical/vernacular; global/local;
universal/particular come to the fore in a stunning line when Savarkar writes, ‘A
Hindu is most intensely so, when he ceases to be Hindu.’ In order to gauge the
impact of this line, we must think about how Savarkar reached here. He has been
occupied, through most of the text, with the particular relation to land that is the
hallmark of Hindutva. Hindutva, as he famously argues, is about both a historical
and a spiritual relation to the land. The true and indeed the only claimants of the
land are those whose own family ghosts, whose revered family ghosts, have tra-
versed it. The land belongs essentially to those for whom, as he succinctly puts it, it
is both pitribhumi (fatherland) and devabhumi (holy land). For those not familiar
with the text, let me cite an extended passage:
A Hindu, therefore, to sum up the conclusions arrived at, is he who looks upon the land that
extends from Sindu to Sindu—from the Indus to the Seas—as the land of his forefathers—
his Fatherland (Pitribhu), who inherits the blood of that race whose first discernible source
could be traced to the Vedic Saptasindhus and which on its onward march, assimilating
much that was incorporated and ennobling much that was assimilated, has come to be
known as the Hindu people, who has inherited and claims as his own the culture of that race
as expressed chiefly in their common classical language Sanskrit and represented by a
common history, a common literature, art and architecture, law and jurisprudence, rites and
rituals, ceremonies and sacraments, fairs and festivals; and who above all, addresses this
land, this Sindhusthan as his Holyland (Punyabhu), as the land of his prophets and seers, of
his godmen and gurus, the land of piety and pilgrimage. These are the essentials of
Hindutva—a common nation (Rashtra) a common race (Jati) and a common civilization
(Sanskriti). All these essentials could best be summed up by stating in brief that he is a
Hindu to whom Sindhusthan is not only a Pitribhu but also a Punyabhu. For the first two
essentials of Hindutva—nation and Jati—are clearly denoted and connoted by the word
Pitrubhu while the third essential of Sanskriti is pre-eminently implied by the word
Punyabhu, as it is precisely Sanskriti including sanskaras i.e. rites and rituals, ceremonies
and sacraments, that makes a land a Holy land. To make the definition more handy, we may
be allowed to compress it in a couplet — A Sindu Sindhu paryanta, Yasya Bharatbhumika
Pitribhuh Punyabhushchaiva sa vai Hinduriti smrita (Savarkar 43–44)
In the course of arriving here, two outsiders are explicitly named and discussed
by the text: the Buddhist and the Muslim, each for a distinct reason. The Buddhist
because Buddhism is, in Savarkar’s own formulation, too universalist. Buddhism
cannot advance nationalist commitments, because it regards everyone as its own
and looks upon all with equal kindness. Under the influence of Buddhism, Indians
became unable to resist others, even their enemies—that is to say, those who were
still engaged in advancing their own particular interests. Buddhism must be revered,
says Savarkar, but as we read on, it seems quite clear that it must be revered in
much the same way as Gandhi was revered by Savarkar and his followers. (And this
is not an accidental analogy—for Gandhi is certainly one, if not the main target of
Savarkar’s attack in the criticism of Buddhism.) According to Savarkar’s narrative,
Indians became, indeed, the dupes of a certain Buddhism—they swallowed whole
its message of ahimsa and universal love, so that other Buddhists, more canny or
more shrewd Buddhists from other parts of Asia, could profit from this gullible
passivity to further their own aggression.
The point I wish to underscore is that it is precisely Buddhism’s universalism
that is troubling for Savarkar. The nation is by definition based on particularity and
distinction. And though Savarkar enumerates several elements of this distinction,
what is paramount is the relation to the land. To reiterate, this is a relation in which
the land appears not just as land, but as a stage, or better still, as a movie theatre, in
which living inhabitants perpetually recognize, with wonder and awe, their own
ancestors in endless reruns of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
If Buddhism is an unfit vessel for nationalism because it has no place for
attachment to land, or indeed, for attachment itself, Islam, on the other hand, is unfit
because its attachment is not to the particular land of India, but to another land—
namely, to Mecca, the holy land of the Muslims. This is the familiar trope that runs
through an entire discourse which renders the Muslim forever suspect, forever
unable to claim the essential, and essentially reverent link to the land required by a
certain nationalism.
Why then, does a text which has built its arguments around the specificity of the
Hindu, and moreover, the specificity of the Hindu, not in terms of religion, but in
terms of a claim to the land, suddenly announce that the Hindu is most intensely so
when he ceases to be one? What could such a line mean? It seems to me that this
line has to be read in conjunction with an earlier passage, where Savarkar
encourages Hindus to be ‘colonists’ and to live and work in other lands. Let me cite
a small section of that passage:
Let our colonists continue unabated their labours of founding a Greater India, a Mahabharat
to the best of their capacities and contribute all that is best in our civilization to the
upbuilding of humanity. Let them enrich the people that inhabit the earth from Pole to Pole
with their virtues and let them in return enrich their own country and race by imbibing all
that is healthy and true wherever found. Hindutva does not clip the wings of the Himalayan
eagles but only adds to their urge.
220 S. Sawhney
So long as ye, O Hindus! look upon Hindusthan as the land of your forefathers and as the
land of your prophets, and cherish the priceless heritage of their culture and their blood, so
long nothing can stand in the way of your desire to expand. The only geographical limits of
Hindutva are the limits of our earth! (Savarkar 45)
Savarkar’s line, ‘A Hindu is most intensely so when he ceases to be one’ should

be read in light of this drive toward expansion and universalization. Having begun
by emphasizing the particularity of the Hindu, the text ends with a call for the
Hinduization of the world. Perversely read, the line could perhaps be translated
thus: A Hindu is most intensely so when he becomes both Buddhist and Muslim.
That is to say, when he adopts as his own, first, another version of the universalism
that had seemed so troubling in Buddhism, and second, the diasporic relation to the
holy land that, for Savarkar, is the special, and specially reviled, trait of the Muslim.
In principle, then, we might surmise, Savarkar was troubled neither by a dias-
poric relation to one’s homeland/holy land, nor indeed by colonialism. He was
troubled specifically by Muslim diasporic loyalty, and by British colonialism. In so
far as nationalism is perhaps always an exceptionalism, it is unable to tolerate
plurality or to think equivalence. It is this which makes it inhospitable.
3 Washing the Stain of Caste
In another one of his stories, the very first story of the collection titled Atithi Devo
Bhava, Abdul Bismillah engages the theme of hospitality from a different angle.
Once again, it is a question of the relation between equality and hospitality: the rites
and codes of hospitality, which are in India so closely connected to distinctions of
status and caste, themselves become in this delicious story the means of a creative
and spectacular revenge. If Atithi Devo Bhava makes an unexpected connection
between the strangeness hidden in Sanskrit and the familiarity hidden in the
Muslim, leaving us at the end simply with the perplexed, hurt, but quiet figure of
Salman, Aliya the Washerman and a Quarter of Meat shows us in a more forceful
manner how the equality promised by religion must be rethought, reworked and
mobilized to challenge the hierarchy of social institutions.
The story begins with the scene of a festive gathering. The gathering or milad is
organized by a wealthy landlord of the village, Laik Alam. The Prophet’s birth story
is narrated and alms-food (sinni) is distributed. The gathering is held to mark the
engagement ceremony of the landlord’s elder son, and we are told that he was in
the habit of organizing such gatherings on auspicious occasions. The highlight of
the gathering occurs when a relative of Laik Alam, a young man studying English
in the city, first sings a naat in a most melodious voice, and then briefly addresses
the gathering. His subject is ‘masaavat’—equality. ‘Friends!’ he says, ‘Islam is the
religion that every Muslim follows. And Islam teaches us masaavat. Masaavat—
meaning equality (baraabari). Each person is equal. None is big or small. But
friends! We see that in practice it is not so. The Sheikhs, Sayyads, Siddiquis, and
Khans hate the barbers, washermen, and weavers. Just as in another era the
Brahmins and Kshatriyas hated the Shudras. Friends! The Shudras of this country
adopted Islam so that they could find equal status. But that did not happen. Equality
is confined to the Mosque. Outside, in social life, the same high-low continues to
this day. There are so many washermen in our village. Doubtless they are Muslims,
they have read the Kalma. But they cannot sit on our cots. We cannot eat at their
homes. Just consider, what stupendous cruelty! Is this what the Prophet has taught
us?’
Laik Alam hastily puts an end to such nonsense, and the gathering is abruptly
brought to an end. But the young man’s words have left Aliya the washerman,
himself just coming of age, deeply agitated. Like a spear, the narrative says, each
word that had been spoken penetrated his interior. ‘He remembered all those feasts
when he had been treated like a Chamar.’ (Bismillah 11).
This is how the story takes off. Both Muslims and Hindus live in the village. In
fact, the story begins by noting that members of both communities were present at
Laik Alam’s gathering, and that Hindus regularly attended the milad gatherings,
whether or not Muslims attended the Satyanarayana pujas. The Muslims might have
some compunction about eating Hindu parsad (sacralized food), perhaps consid-
ering it a form of idolatry, but the Hindus had no compunction about eating the
alms-food distributed during milad.
After hearing these revolutionary words about equality, Aliya starts remem-
bering various feasts he has attended, especially during his childhood when they
often didn’t have enough to eat at home. He recalls that it was the Hindu feasts that
were invariably more satisfying. Though he and his father had to sit with the
chamars of the village, and take their own tumblers for water, they were fed well
and generously. At the homes of the well-born Muslims, they were treated much
worse. All the low-caste people were seated apart and served in a miserly manner:
small portions, and just two morsels of meat.
Their poverty forced Aliya’s father to abandon his work as a daily wage labourer
and take up again his ancestral profession of a washerman. Now he began to earn
well and they ate much better at home. When it came time to arrange the wedding
of his only daughter Rukhsana, Aliya’s father did something that had never been
done before in the village: he invited all the high-caste Muslims to his feast. This
threw the Shaikhs and Sayyads in a quandary. They could not refuse the invitation
outright, in case they were seen as avoiding the bride gift—but how could they
possibly eat at a washerman’s home? Finally, it was Laik Alam who came up with a
perfect solution: if the washerman wanted them to partake of his feast, he should
send a quarter-kilo of meat to their homes. If he so wished, he may also send along
quarter-kilos of rice and wheat. The food would be cooked in their own kitchens
and they would send over their bride-gift through a servant. Aliya’s father agreed,
and from then on, every washerman in the village followed suit.
All this goes through Aliya’s mind now and he decides he is no longer going to
live like an untouchable. He wants izzat (honour), and it occurs to him that it is
because the washermen lack unity that they have lost their honour. From now on, he
starts talking to the other washermen about these matters and they gradually start to
think of him as their leader. Aliya’s moment of triumph comes when Laik Alam’s
222 S. Sawhney
son is to be married and, as is customary, the barber is deployed to go around the

village with invitations to the feast for everyone. Aliya accepts the piece of gur
(jaggery) that accompanies the invitation and, acting in the traditional manner,
touches it to his forehead. Then he lights a bidi for himself and another for Ramzan,
the barber. ‘Make sure to tell the Khan sahib that we people, I mean the washermen,
will not be able to come to his place to eat. Please have him send us each a
quarter-kilo of meat. If he wishes, he may also send us a quarter-kilo of rice and
wheat’ (18).
Two aspects of the parting shot stand out. First, the claim to unity: ‘We people.’
Now the washermen had earlier also acted as a group, when they all followed the
precedent established by Aliya’s father. But in that case they acted in a manner that
kept them in their subordinate position. It seems, indeed, that when Aliya’s father
invites his upper caste neighbours to his daughter’s wedding, it is not from a wish to
establish an equal relation with them, but primarily from a wish to honour them—
and perhaps to increase his own prestige through honouring them. His stance is
evident at another instance when Aliya forbids his mother from washing the soiled
childbirth clothes at Laik Alam’s place, but his father intervenes and insists that the
mother follow through with her customary duties. That is why, far from being
affronted when the rich folks make their strange demand that he send a certain
quantity of meat to their homes, the father willingly accepts the demand. This
quantity, of course, is much greater than what he himself has been fed for many
years at the weddings of the upper castes; we are meant to notice this discrepancy.
The last scene, however, is a scene of revolt. Could we then say that collectivity
assumes its political form, its substance and meaning, only when it acts in such a
way as to transform the conditions that have earlier constituted it as a group? When
Aliya says, ‘Hum log, yaani dhobiyane ke log (we, the washermen)’ the washermen
are paradoxically no longer defined by their caste, as they have been all along.
Instead they are defined now by their capacity to challenge the status quo, that is to
say, by their assumption of a collective political role.
Second, the demand itself. Again, in making this demand, not only has Aliya, in
one swift leap, claimed equality with Laik Alam, he has also indicated that he is no
longer willing to accept the position accorded to him within the traditional hier-
archy: a position that relegates him to the margins of the feast and offers him
nothing but a miserly portion of its richness.
The story reminds me of the Tamil writer Bama’s story Pongal published in
English in the collection Harum-Scarum Saar and Other Stories. Here as well, we
see a son who questions his father’s adherence to caste-based customs of celebration
and hospitality, who intervenes with a logic of calculation, and who ultimately carries
the day. Exasperated by his family’s annual gifts to the upper caste landlord on the
festival of Pongal, Esakkimuthu, the son, asks: ‘For a small measure of pongal
(festival rice) and a towel worth just Rs. 10, are we so wretched that we have to give
them a bird worth Rs. 78, a huge pumpkin, sugar-cane worth Rs. 10, a whole bunch of
bananas and four measures of rice? Ei, if we ourselves cooked and consumed all this,
wouldn’t it be enough for us for four or five days?’ (Bama 4). Initially his parents
think he is crazy to be spouting these outlandish ideas, and the father regrets having
sent him to school. But when the family returns humiliated from the landlord’s home,
the father begins to ponder upon the son’s words. These words now find their mark;
the father decides to dump the pongal rice he just brought from the landlord’s home in
the cows’ trough, and to boil some ragi instead.
In both Bama’s and Abdul Bismillah’s stories, the idea of challenging customary
rites comes first from young men who have had some access to education.
Education becomes here, as in many instances of modern Indian literature, an agent
of estrangement, a force that allows one to look critically at traditions and customs
that appear irrevocable to an earlier generation. One must also note the unmis-
takable thread of male rivalry and the son’s triumph over the father. These are
stories in which the mother can only be left behind, and so she remains in both
stories a mere pawn, an uncomprehending mute witness, untouched by the ignition
of egalitarian thought. From the silence of her marginality, she tells the sorry story
of that which even the rebel-against-hierarchy has not been able to think in India.
The two stories by Abdul Bismillah around which this essay developed both turn
to texts that would today be considered ‘religious’ as a source for rethinking
equality and hospitality—invoking, in the former case, a line from the Taittiriya
Upanisad, and the latter case, a tenet of Islam. Perhaps only a religious orientation
—which may essentially mean, at the most elemental level, neither a xenophobia
nor a xenophilia, but something like a xenothauma, a wonder at that which is
strange, different, untimely—perhaps only such an orientation can enable us to
think equality through the rites and stances of hospitality. This religion is very far
from the nationalized religion whose violence daily threatens to uproot so-called
secular states from their moorings. I do not mean to suggest that nationalized
religion is always a ‘perversion’ of something we would consider ‘true’ religion.
Instead, thinking about the work that Bismillah’s stories perform, I would say that
the ‘timely’ equality claimed by nationalist thought—that is to say, an equality
promised and, at least in a certain way, delivered by history—itself becomes in
these stories the force, the catalyst, that allows the power of the equality promised
by religion to emerge. If both stories draw on religious ideas to provoke a ques-
tioning of everyday hierarchies, exclusions, and brutalities, they do so only because
at their source lies a fierce dialectic between the nationalist quest for equality and
the religious affirmation of equality. It is only this dialectic which allows equality to
emerge as untimely and explosive—as it does, for example, when the phrase atithi
devo bhava is wrenched out of its own textual context and made to stand on its own
feet on an earth slashed by border-scars.
4 Postscript: Hospitality, the Religious, the Social
In his 1936 response to B. R. Ambedkar’s powerful manifesto The Annihilation of

Caste, Gandhi argues that not everything found in the canonical texts of Hinduism
—in the Vedas, Upanishads, Smritis and Puranas—can be considered scripture, the
word of God. Many of the texts cited by Ambedkar in his devastating indictment of
224 S. Sawhney
Hinduism as fundamentally a sacralization of hierarchy, Gandhi argues, cannot be

accepted as authentic. He then goes on to make a complex argument:
The Smritis, for instance, contain much that can never be accepted as the word of God.
Thus, many of the texts that Dr. Ambedkar quotes from the Smritis cannot be accepted as
authentic. The scriptures, properly so-called, can only be concerned with eternal verities
and must appeal to any conscience, i.e. any heart whose eyes of understanding are opened.
Nothing can be accepted as the word of God which cannot be tested by reason or be capable
of being spiritually experienced. And even when you have an expurgated edition of the
scriptures, you will need their interpretation. Who is the best interpreter? Not learned men
surely. Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it. It lives in the experiences of
its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentators of
the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will
abide and be an inspiration for ages to come (Gandhi 325–326)
One must accept as the word of God only that which has been accepted by those
whom, presumably, God himself has blessed—those ‘whose eyes of understanding
are opened.’ The distinction Gandhi seems to be making is between a learned reading
of the scriptures, and an experience of them. Both are modes of receiving the
scriptures; however, Gandhi clearly privileges, above the mastery of discursive
knowledge, the obscurity of the intimate as it breaks and re-forms the habitual. Such a
privilege is often invoked in the service of overturning social hierarchies: for
example, when the learned Pandit is mocked, and the faith of the naïve ‘idiot’ exalted,
as in many literary and religious parables. In this case, however, it seems that the
‘learned’ man being mocked is Ambedkar himself—the man of learning who fails the
test of experience. In the very gesture of asserting Hinduism’s inclusivity, Gandhi
invokes the most exclusive—in the sense of the most uncontestable, intimate, and
inscrutable parameter—that of experience. Privileging experience seems to be in the
service of privileging the unlearned and hence, the outsider, but the very secrecy of
experience—or what we might call the essential intimacy, illegibility and incon-
testability of its authority—may, in effect, reaffirm older hierarchies.
Ambedkar’s response is to bring the social dimension squarely into the picture.
His saints are not idealized selfless figures, but empirical figures from history. None
of the saints, he says, ever attacked the caste system. Instead, most of them
remained attached to their caste status all through their lives. Even when they broke
caste rules, their transgression was not received as an example, but rather as the
mark of the exceptional. It was understood as proclaiming that one had to be a saint
to break caste; that only a saint could do so. Ambedkar thus asks that we consider
how the experience of the saints was socially coded and read, how it was deci-
phered and disseminated. In the course of this brief argument, he makes an
observation that was perhaps, in part, indebted to his reading of Karl Marx. He
writes, ‘The saints have never, according to my study, carried on a campaign
against Caste and Untouchability. They were not concerned with the struggle
between men. They were concerned with the relation between man and God. They
did not preach that all men were equal. They preached that all men were equal in the
eyes of God—a very different and a very innocuous proposition, which nobody can
find difficult to preach or dangerous to believe in’ (Ambedkar 337).
Ambedkar’s perception of the saints diverges sharply from Gandhi’s. One might
even say that this very divergence paradoxically affirms a central aspect of Gandhi’s
argument—namely, his privileging of experience. For, in the last instance, is it not
that indelible ravage of history called experience that enables Ambedkar to view the
saints from an angle inaccessible to Gandhi? We could perhaps then note that it is
only by corroborating, in a different way, Gandhi’s argument, that Ambedkar
demolishes it.
Let us try, again, to think about the difference at the crux of Ambedkar’s
argument. If the equality of men in the eyes of God has no meaning in the social
sphere, in the actual lives of humans on earth, it can only be because God himself
has been rendered entirely irrelevant to the social sphere. To be sure, religion as a
social institution thrives—it may even be, in India, the institution that governs the
realm of sociality, in so far as social life is, to a great extent, organized on the basis
of religious and caste differences. But God does not touch the social sphere, and
men do not conduct themselves in this sphere as though they lived under the divine
gaze. What Ambedkar presumes here may in fact be called the essential profanity of
the social sphere—a profanity that can always endanger religion itself as a social
institution.
Bereft of God, what hope can there be for equality in the social sphere? How
should we think of this equality? Hannah Arendt has famously argued that just as
equality is the principle structuring the political sphere, it is discrimination that
structures the social sphere, and exclusiveness the personal sphere. In her
provocative essay ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ she writes, ‘In any event, discrim-
ination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right. The question
is not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it confined within the social
sphere, where it is legitimate, and prevent it trespassing on the political and the
personal sphere, where it is destructive’ (Arendt 1959: 51). At some point, I would
like to think through the premises of this essay more carefully, especially in its
relation to some of Arendt’s other writings on ‘the social.’7 For now, let me just
point to two aspects that make this essay relevant in this instance.
7
In The Human Condition, published just a year before the Little Rock essay, it is the social that is
characterized by a kind of debased equality, i.e. by conformity, and the public realm by ‘dis-
tinction’—that is to say, by the striving of individual actors to distinguish themselves. But here too
we find the underlying theme that ‘action’ is not possible in the social realm (40–41). In a similar
vein, in On Revolution (1963), Arendt equates what she calls ‘the social question’ with a distinctly
non-political response to mass poverty and misery, the response of pity. This becomes in her
analysis the principle means of distinguishing between the American and the French Revolutions
and provides the basis of her critique of the French Revolution, and of Lenin, whom she considers
its last heir. ‘The direction of the American Revolution remained committed to the foundation of
freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction
nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the
French revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through
the immediacy of suffering; it was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but
from necessity, and it was actuated by the limitless immensity of both the people’s misery and the
pity this misery inspired’. (Arendt 1990 [1963] 92)
226 S. Sawhney
First, though Arendt distinguishes so emphatically between the equality that is

necessary for the political sphere and the discrimination that constitutes the social
sphere, in effect her discussion of discrimination cannot entirely disentangle itself
from the assumption of a prior equality. According to her, differences of race, class,
and ethnic origin legitimately structure the social sphere; she wishes to preserve the
‘right’ to discriminate in this sphere and hence to safeguard the right to free asso-
ciation and group formation. Indeed, her argument against enforced integration in
public schools draws its force precisely from her investment in the right to free
association. But in order for association to be ‘free’ would we not need to assume a
prior equality? How could I grasp the opportunity to associate freely with others if I
did not already relate to them in a fundamentally egalitarian manner? That might be
why her example jars. ‘It is common knowledge,’ she writes, ‘that vacation resorts in
this country are frequently ‘restricted’ according to ethnic origin. There are many
people who object to this practice; nevertheless it is only an extension of the right to
free association. If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of
Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so; just as I see no
reason why other resorts should not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews
while on a holiday’ (52). Not only does this example imply that all groups or classes
are equally capable of choosing ‘resorts,’ and moreover, that all resorts are essentially
equal (in practice, the best are of course always reserved for the most privileged class,
caste, race), but even more oddly, it implies that those who may have an aversion
even to seeing Jews while on holiday would nevertheless be ready to be governed by
a Jew should s/he assume political office. It is as if the political citizen whose life is
founded on equality her/himself goes ‘on holiday’ as soon as s/he steps into the social
sphere.8 Indeed, there is a strange evacuation of the very significance of the social that
runs through the essay, even though its concern is precisely with keeping this sphere
as free as possible of government control. This evacuation is most powerfully con-
veyed by the following striking statement: ‘From the viewpoint of the human person,
none of these discriminatory practices make sense; but then it is doubtful whether the
human person as such ever appears in the social realm’ (51). What appears, one may
surmise, is only a class, a category. But what is a social class evacuated of political
8
My use of the gender neutral pronoun will perhaps act as an irritant on the body of Arendtian
discourse, classical in its fidelity to sexual difference. Linda Zerilli has proposed an insightful
reading of sexual difference and the body in Arendt’s work, and commented, in particular, on
Arendt’s analogy between the putative world citizen and the hermaphrodite. ‘It would appear,’
Zerilli writes, ‘that this binary conception of naturalized sexual difference is to safeguard us against
the monstrous hermaphroditic body that presumably looms on the horizon of global society and
threatens to engulf the Arendtian subject of action.’ (Zerilli 1995, 185).
significance?9 Indeed, perhaps the Negro belongs to that peculiar class whose
political status Arendt could see, but not comprehend.10
The second aspect of the essay that draws my attention is its brief evocation of a
sphere that is neither public, nor private, nor social. Having argued forcefully that
the government cannot take steps to curtail social discrimination (since this would
interfere with the freedom of the social sphere), Arendt writes, ‘The only public
force that can fight social prejudice is the churches, and they can do so in the name
of the uniqueness of the person, for it is on the principle of the uniqueness of souls
that religion (and especially the Christian faith) is based. The churches are indeed
the only communal and public place where appearances do not count, and if dis-
crimination creeps into the houses of worship, this is an infallible sign of their
religious failing. They then have become social and are no longer religious insti-
tutions’ (240, emphasis added).
If, according to Arendt, the relation between the private and the public realms is
of a necessary bond, the private being the hidden ground that enables and preserves
one for manifest action,11 the relation between the social and the spiritual is, on the
contrary, a relation of rivalry and mutual antagonism and exclusion. The church is
the only public space, according to Arendt, that can legitimately contest the prin-
ciple of discrimination that founds the social realm.
Ambedkar also finally turned to the spiritual realm in his search for a space that
would contest, not only the discrimination of the social, but also of a religion,
Hinduism, that had, in his view, internalized and sacralized discrimination. But for
him, the force of the spiritual, of the realm of Buddhism, was perhaps greater than it
was for Arendt—perhaps, because for Arendt as well, there is a complex relation
between the central categories of (Augustinian) love, natality and action. Ambedkar
saw the realm of religion as closely aligned with the political and legal realm
precisely in so far as both were enjoined to make the unequal equal.
9
This is obviously an essay that has drawn considerable commentary. See, for instance, Sayla
Benhabib. “At the root of Arendt’s vacillations as to what is and what is not an appropriate matter
to be discussed in the public realm, lies another more important problem, namely her ‘phe-
nomenological essentialism.’ By this I mean her belief that each type of human activity has its
proper ‘place’ in the world, and that this place is the only authentic space in which this kind of
activity can truly unfold” (Benhabib 1993, 104).
10
For example, Arendt recognizes that the “absence of the social question from the American scene
was, after all, quite deceptive, and that abject and degrading misery was present everywhere in the
form of slavery and Negro labour” (1990 [1963], 70), yet once acknowledged, the slave simply
vanishes from her analysis; the unseen misery of the slave ultimately has no bearing on her
foundational distinction between the American and the French revolutions.
11
The home, the private, darkness, the heart: this series is essentially linked to one’s ability to act
in the public realm. “Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm” (The
Human Condition 64). Similarly, writing about the heart, she says, “And not only is the human
heart a place of darkness which, with certainty, no human eye can penetrate; the qualities of the
heart need darkness and protection against the light of the public to grow and to remain what they
are meant to be, innermost motives which are not for public display.” (Arendt 1990 [1963] 96).
228 S. Sawhney
Ambedkar’s and Arendt’s differing assessments of the social (Ambedkar privi-

leging it as an arena of necessary activism, indeed as a kind of precursor of the
political) and Arendt wary of conflating it with the political, deserve more attention.
These differing assessments are no doubt related to their contrasting stances towards
modernity itself, in so far as the social is a modern phenomenon: Ambedkar cer-
tainly did not share Arendt’s admiration for the ancient world and its political
categories, and hence did not share either, her vision of a supposedly ‘depoliticized’
social: a kind of locker room where I may display all the prejudicial baggage I can’t
take to the political realm.
Though hospitality is in many ways an instance of sociality, it is also a concept
that cuts across, intervenes, and as we increasingly see today, produces a crisis, in
both the private and political realm. Hospitality is the entry of something akin to
religiosity—or even more strongly, divinity as xenothauma—into social life. From
Arendt’s brief mention of the Church in the ‘Little Rock’ essay, we may surmise
that for her two factors distinguish the Church from all other public spaces: namely,
that appearances do not count here, and that the person who enters is recognized in
her or his uniqueness. In other words, what enters is recognized not as a body at all
—for it is bodies that carry marks of categories and classes—but as a soul, free of
all class marks, and unique in the gaze of the divine host (just as, one might say, the
beloved in the private sphere is unique in the gaze of the lover). In the case of
hospitality—and I am especially thinking here of some of the threads woven in,
entangled with, or circling around the Sanskrit phrase atithi devo bhava (be one for
whom the guest is divine)—these positions are inverted. It is the one who enters,
the guest, who carries, inscribed within her/his alterity and strangeness, the trace of
the divine. In this way, at least in so far as we are thinking of the scene opened up
by that Sanskrit adage, the scene of hospitality is removed from the sphere of
everyday sociality and brought closer to the realm of worship.
There are some obvious reasons why we are forced to think about hospitality
today, when the crisis of statelessness, of racism, xenophobia and nationalist
aversion to immigrants is exploding with new and unnerving velocity. But, of
course, the concept of hospitality shares, while also reframing, some of the tensions
that pulsate in Arendt’s thinking of the social. This becomes evident, for instance,
when we notice how Jacques Derrida’s ruminations about hospitality, at least
partially, resonate with Arendt’s discussion of the social. For as Derrida recognizes,
hospitality, at least in its Kantian form, like sociality, also must discriminate, it must
exclude some and privilege others. Thus, Derrida writes, ‘No hospitality, in the
classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home, but since there is
also no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering,
choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence’ (Derrida 2000: 55). This
brings to mind a central concern of Arendt’s discussion of the social: the concern to
preserve a sphere where one makes free choices, where the state cannot or should
not intrude too forcefully precisely on the citizen’s right to discriminate and hence
to choose.
But there are also significant differences between Derrida’s discussion of hos-
pitality and Arendt’s discussion of the social. The most salient of these, in my view,
lies in Derrida’s insistence that this discrimination, which is on the one hand
necessary for hospitality, is also at the same time that against which hospitality
must constantly struggle, in order to remain true to its innermost essence. That is
why, in describing the heterogeneity between the absolute hospitality that grounds
the concept, and the conditional hospitality that can, in fact, be practiced in the legal
or social realm, Derrida writes, ‘To put it in different terms, absolute hospitality
requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided
with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.) but to the
absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them
come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking
of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of
absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice
as rights’ (Derrida 2000: 25).
Abdul Bismillah’s stories ignore that break. They draw simultaneously on reli-
gious ideas of equality and hospitality as well as secular ideas about claiming
equality/hospitality. In doing so, they perhaps suggest, first, that the secular claim to
rights must reinvigorate its link to the prior, a-secular, and absolute equality given by
religious texts. And second, that the religious texts themselves should be read in such
a way as to seize the strange and the foreign in them. In order to fully grasp what atithi
devo bhava means, one must in fact mark a break between the atithi and the maternal,
paternal or reverential. One must read atithi as if it truly marked, not another date or
another time, but that which unmoors us from identity-in-historicity.
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of_hindutva.v001.pdf. Accessed 2 Feb 2014.
Sharma, R. N. ed. 1998. Manusmŗti. Delhi: Chaukhamba Sanskrit Pratisthan.
Zerilli, Linda M.G. 1995. The Arendtian Body. In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed.
Bonnie Honig, 167–194. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Chapter 12
Modernity’s Nightmares: Narrating
Sexuality in Kerala
Navaneetha Mokkil
1 Introduction
What is the need to tell stories and then tell them again? Why do some bodies never
rest in peace? What is the space of the uncanny and the supernatural within modern
forms of narrativization such as the novel, cinema or the short story in India? What
do they tell us about the ruptured regional histories of gender, sexuality, and nar-
rative forms? In this chapter, I engage with a selection of literary and cinematic
texts from Kerala, which take us to thrilling and sensational worlds that present an
interplay between humans and mythical beings, science and magic, and sanity and
madness. I analyse how these narrative forms of excess flesh out the fantasies,
anxieties, and fears that are intrinsic to the modern project of fashioning gendered
subjects.
Scholars have demonstrated that modernity has been invested in the ordering of
gender regimes and the production of sexual difference through the discursive
workings of language, imagery and narrative (Laqueur 1990; Najmabadi 2005).
Thus, the ordering of the field of sexuality plays a crucial role in the engendering of
modern subjects in different parts of the world. The hierarchical binaries that
undergird the project of colonialism such as rationality/superstition, order/disorder
and civilization/backwardness are mapped on to pervasive processes of producing
modern individuals ensconced within the universalized architecture of heterosexual
domesticity. The shaping of a singular model of procreative heterosexuality as the
legitimate social practice of desiring, intimacy and cohabitation is tied to the
choreography of masculinity and femininity in an oppositional grid. Scholars have
analysed how, print culture in late nineteenth and early 20th century Kerala func-
tions as a crucial site to locate ‘the discursive conditions and practices under which
N. Mokkil (&)
Centre for Women’s Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi, India
e-mail: navaneetha@jnu.ac.in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_12
232 N. Mokkil
it became possible to speak of such categories as ‘men’ and ‘women’’ (Devika

2007: 18) who perform distinct roles in the public and private. Modern literary
forms such as the novel, poetry and autobiography play a formative role in the
fashioning of gender as ‘a matter of interiority’ (Kumar 2016: 86) linked to prac-
tices of intimacy and romance. For example, romantic love and the choice of
marital partners were central to the shaping of new subject positions projected in
early Malayalam novels (Kumar 2016: 36).
In order to explore the workings of gender and sexuality in the formation of
modernity in India literary, and cinematic practices from Kerala is an important area
to investigate. This is a state that is often projected as a site of ‘progress’ and
‘development’ in India. Scholars link the ‘present-pervasive modernity’ (Sreekumar
2009: 3) of Kerala to its history of benign monarchies, the Christian missionaries,
the Left movements and social reform movements of late 19th and early twentieth
centuries. Recent scholarship argues that we need to complicate the story of ‘Kerala
modernity’ and its easy linkages to social reform and developmental narratives in
order to resist ‘fixed genealogies and identities and bring multiple entryways into it’
(Bose and Varughese 2015: 12). Moving away from the dominant frameworks of
Kerala as a ‘progressive’ region that is invested in science, rationality, and the
corresponding literary form of realism, I analyse how and why sensational and
fantastic texts become the feverish bedrock of Kerala’s modernity. The narratives I
analyse are marked by modes of excess and populated by uncanny bodies that slip
out of the paradigms of the ‘human’. I argue that modern forms of cultural
expression deploy the realm of the uncanny to stage the precarity of gender and
sexual norms. In feminist literary criticism, we see an investment in retrieving
unruly feminine figures, whether the mad woman or the witch, as figures that
threaten the organization of gender and sexuality (Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Bose
2002; Gupta 2002). Rather than project eccentric feminine figures that emerge in
these texts as emblems of resistance, I analyse why modern narrative forms are
obsessed with mutating feminine bodies that cannot be contained within the
framework of rationality. How do these texts, that muddy the plot of domestic
fiction, throw open for investigation the theatre of masculinity and femininity? The
formal strategies and world-making capacities of these texts are my primary con-
cern. The bewildering worlds they conjure up project a relational, chaotic, and
disruptive vision of the making of masculine and feminine subjects.
Regional cultural practices offer a wide range of visual and literary forms in
which the ‘strategies of modernity are renegotiated, its binary oppositions dis-
placed, and its apparently fixed and overarching identities disturbed’ (Mitchell
2000). While scholars have underlined the contradictions and contingencies of
global trajectories of modernity (Kaviraj 2005; Dube 2009), my aim is to think
further about what implications such disjunctures have for analyzing the politics of
gender and sexuality. Complicating the ‘grand narrative’ of modernity as a neat
break with irrationality and the production of the human situated in ‘a frame of
singular and secular historical time’ Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that we need to
‘think from the assumption that the question of being human involves the question
of being with gods and spirits’ (2000: 16). Bruno Latour observes that modernity is
12 Modernity’s Nightmares: Narrating Sexuality in Kerala 233
often defined in terms of humanism, but this habit ‘overlooks the simultaneous birth
of ‘nonhumanity’—things, objects, or beasts’ (1991: 13). The dichotomies between
the mind and the body, the animate and the inanimate, human and spirit, thinking
from ‘what is called sensing, from desire, passion, sexuality and relations of
dependency’ (Butler 2015: 15) are troubled in literary and filmic forms such as
horror and fantasy. I argue that these enchanting and thrilling forms of regional
cultural production produce a field where the tensions and anxieties regarding the
dichotomy between masculinity and femininity, the rational and the affective are
played out.
I will open the chapter with a reading of a short story by Kamala Surayya titled
Stree (Woman 1947). Then, I will move on to a detailed analysis of Malayattoor
Ramakrishnan’s novel Yakshi (1967). The latter part of the paper will also briefly
engage with two films based on Malayattoor’s novel—Yakshi (1968, directed by
K. S. Sethumadhavan) and Akam (Inside, 2013, directed by Shalini Usha Nair).
Written in the year of India’s Independence Stree is a short story that undertakes
formal experiments in order to sketch the figure of a woman who goes against
social norms to pursue her desire for another woman. Both the literary texts are by
writers who play an important role in shaping the field of modern Malayalam
literature. But, because of the sensational and supernatural elements these texts fit
rather uneasily within the oeuvres of these writers. The publication history of
Surayya’s story shows how it was an occluded text that returned only after the
writer’s death. Yakshi has a far more prominent position in the cultural history of
Kerala—its wide readership grants it the status of a popular novel. Yet, it is
positioned as an atypical novel that veered away from the dominant conventions of
modern Malayalam literature through its investment in sensuality, spectacle, and
supernatural elements. The film based on this novel, Yakshi (1968), played a
pioneering role in establishing the genre of horror cinema in Malayalam. Akam
(2013), a recent film based on Yakshi, demonstrates that even in the present this
novel provides an entry-point to explore the terrain of heterosexual intimacy. These
texts show that sensational genres of fiction and cinema such as horror1, which are
often delegitimized, have historically functioned as a vehicle to stage the unstable
dynamics of gender and sexuality.
2 ‘She Was an Unusual One’
The above subtitle is the opening sentence of the story Stree, published in 1947 in
Mathrubhumi Weekly, under the name Kamala. Moving away from familiar practice
of Malayalam language usage, the writer employs the word ‘asadharana’ (unusual
one) as a noun here. She coins a category to call into being a strange figure—
1
See Williams (1984), Clover (1992), Creed (1993) for a discussion on the ‘monstrous-feminine’
and questions of spectatorship in horror cinema.
234 N. Mokkil
marked as extraordinary by the narrator. This is a story written by a young writer

who later garners fame and attention as the noted author Kamala Surayya (aka
Kamala Das).2 Stree was not included in the first anthology of her short stories
Mathilukal (Walls 1955), published under the pseudonym Madhavikkutty. This
story was effaced from Malayalam literary history and returned only after the
writer’s death in 2009. The story was republished in 2009 in the literary journal
Bashaposhini under the sub-title ‘the first lesbian story in Malayalam.’ A short
write-up about the history of this story speculates on how norms of respectability
might have been one of the reasons why this story was exorcised from her oeuvre
(Premkumar 2009). The liminal presence of this story in Surayya’s body of literary
work is also linked to how it deploys the conventions of ‘low’ cultural forms such
as sentimental romance, horror, and ghost stories.
The narrative welds together the modern form of a short story with other popular
traditions of storytelling such as yakshi katha3 and pretha katha (ghost stories) in
which the human world is an enchanted one, populated by ghosts, spirits and other
mythical creatures. This is a triangular love story that unfolds from the point of
view of the male narrator Ravi, whose love for Prasanna is thwarted by the presence
of her college friend and hostel mate Ramani. Ramani, is repeatedly described as an
‘unusual one’ (2009: 34), a ‘magical creation’ (2009: 35) and an ‘extraordinary
creature’ (2009: 34). She appears in climactic moments in the story like an
apparition, without any prior warning. After the first embrace between Prasanna and
Ravi, as they soak in the ‘beautiful silence’ (2009: 34) of their happiness, there is a
rustling movement behind them and Ramani appears with flying hair and burning
eyes. In sharp contrast to the aesthetic harmony and charm of Prasanna’s
well-adorned body, Ramani’s body and clothing is marked by a sense of disarray
and lack of control.
The primly arranged world of romance between Ravi and Prasanna, comes
undone because of the presence of Ramani’s disorderly desires, marked as threat-
ening by the narrator. Ravi’s most disturbing encounter with Ramani is in the dead
2
Kamala Surayya (1934–2009), one of the best-known bilingual writers from India in the twentieth
century, consistently pushed the boundaries of what could be represented in literature through her
poetry in English, autobiographical writings and novellas in English and Malayalam, and a large
body of short stories in Malayalam. Through the conscious deployment of the confessional voice
in her poetry and life writings and the intricate entanglement of the public and the private in her
fictional worlds, Das carved a space for the explorations of the affective realm in modern Indian
literature.
3
The writer here uses the tropes of a yakshi story, in which the yakshi is presented as a mythical
figure that is the manifestation of uncontrolled, threatening female sexuality. Tapati
Guha-Thakurta describes the ‘yakshi’ as a primordial goddess associated with wealth, abundance
and fertility (2002). She observes: “figures of male ‘yakshas’ and female ‘yakshis’ abound in early
Indian sculpture. They have been identified as tutelary guardian dieties or as beneficiary spirits
who rule over nature and whose cult can be traced back to pre-buddhist times” (2002: 71). The
common imagination of the ‘yakshi’ in Kerala today as bloodthirsty feminine creatures, who prey
on men, is clearly a product of a wide array of popular cultural representations since the 1950s. Its
links to dense and varied local histories of legends, oral narratives, iconography, rituals, and
practices have to be further investigated.
of the night after his marriage is fixed with Prasanna. She appears as ‘a female
figure whose head is covered in a white sari,’ ‘her eyes glow like embers’, ‘she has
a monstrous laugh’ and ‘her face has an iridescent glow because of the full moon’
(2009: 35). Ravi hopes that this encounter ‘was a nightmare’ (2009: 35). It is the
reality of that nightmare that fills him with fear. Ramani professes her love for
Prasanna and warns him against the marriage: ‘You do not understand anything,
right? Then comprehend things now. She is mine. I have loved her. I have kept
awake for her day and night. I have sacrificed my comforts for her sake. I might be
a woman. But my brother, is there a rule that one woman cannot love another
woman?’ (2009: 35). This is the resounding statement of the story that is indelibly
inked in the narrator’s mind.
In the narrator’s point of view the very category of ‘woman’ comes undone
because of this confession that pushes against the norms of gender and sexual
desire. Ramani’s impact on the narrator leaves him with a bone-chilling sense of
fear: ‘I felt afraid not just of her, but of all women, an indescribable fear’ (2009:
35). He pulls out of the marriage with Prasanna and is determined from then on to
avoid all contact with women: ‘I felt afraid of women. They are extraordinary
creatures. One should fear them’. ‘The misrecognition at the heart of the scene of
address’ (Butler 2015: 12), that is Ravi’s confrontation with a ‘woman’ whose
desire for another woman undoes the edifices of the category itself, and leads to a
breakdown of his own sense of the self. Twenty-five years after his first encounter
with Ramani, after the tragic deaths of both the women, Ravi is a mad man and his
mind has become like ‘soot-covered glass’ (2009: 35). The allusion here to tech-
nologies of vision, the mind like a speckled spectacle that can no longer guarantee
clarity of vision but also as a distorted mirror that cannot reflect properly, points to
how the story produces a feeling of horror by manipulating the ‘instability in the
self-and-image relationship that might lead to catastrophe and self-annihilation’
(Varughese 2013: 319). Thus, even as we recover and celebrate, Stree as one of the
first stories in Malayalam to explore the terrain of lesbian desire, it needs to be read
alongside other fictional texts in Malayalam in which fantasy and romance are
forms that are melded together to explore the unstable terrains of modern
subjectivity.
3 Colliding Worlds
I am writing this in a mental asylum. It’s been a week since I came here. The hospital
superintendent tells me that I have suffered a huge ‘mental shock’ and that it was best for
me to stay here for many days.
Does he think I am mad? Is it because he is reluctant to use that term that he is referring to
my condition as ‘mental shock’? It could be that. We are the ones who do conjuring tricks
with words. We desire to wrap festering wounds with glittering paper. We name leprosy
‘Hanson’s Disease.’ So ‘mental shock’ could well be a synonym for raving madness.
236 N. Mokkil
I am not mad. But I am afraid to say that out loud. There are many people who live here
who are mad beyond a doubt. They all say they are not mad. Saying that itself is a sign of
madness it seems. It’s best to remain silent. (Ramakrishnan 1967)
These are the opening lines of Yakshi (1967) an immensely popular Malayalam
novel by Malayattoor Ramakrishnan,4 often described by critics as a ‘psychological
thriller’. This is an unprecedented novel in the history of modern Malayalam lit-
erature in which the separation between chemistry and alchemy, the wife and the
yakshi, and the scientist and the sorcerer come undone. It firmly moves away from
the form of social realism that dominates modern Malayalam literature, and invites
the viewer to indulge in the thrills and excesses of a range of powerful emotions
such as fear, sexual desire, hatred, and disgust. It populates the orderly world of
modern science and domesticity with ghosts and demons. From the heady smell of
pala flowers to the stench of a decaying corpse—the sensory highs and lows of this
novel places it alongside ‘lowbrow’ genres of Malayalam literature such painkili
novels.5 In spite of its wide circulation and acceptance by readers,6 this novel has
received less critical acclaim and attention than Malayattoor’s realist novels such as
Verukal (Roots 1966) and Yanthram (Machine 1976). The film Yakshi (1968),
based on Malayattoor’s novel, starring some of the most noted actors in Malayalam
cinema, was an instant hit and has a prominent position in the history of Indian
cinema. Bhargaveenilayam (1964) and Yakshi (1968), which are both adaptations
of literary works, inaugurated the genre of horror cinema in Kerala.
This novel is a journey into the feverish mind of Sreenivasan (Sreeni), a college
Professor of chemistry. It’s a meta-narrative in which all the events are framed
through his point of view and the readers are pushed into intimate contact with the
narrator’s experiences, fantasies, and anxieties. The conversational tone, direct
address to the reader, and free indirect discourse produces the effect of pulling the
reader into the narrator’s world. In the film, this effect is produced by the use of
4
Malayattoor Ramakrishnan (1927–1997) is a prominent writer in the history of modern
Malayalam literature. He was a Tamil Brahmin who grew up in Palakkad, Kerala. He worked in
the fields of law and journalism before entering the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) in 1959.
He was also well known as a cartoonist. He published 13 short story collections, 19 novels,
memoirs based on his experiences in the bureaucracy, scripts for Malayalam films and translations
of detective fiction. His novel Verukal won the Sahithya Akademi Award and Yanthram received
the Vayalar award.
5
Painkili is a term used to denote a highly popular form of romantic writing, but through repeated
usage it has come to mean a set of attitudes that is excessively sentimental. The term literally
means a singing bird and some critics suggest that it entered into circulation in reference to the
melodramatic aesthetics of the immensely popular love story Padatha Painkili (The Beautiful Bird
That Does Not Sing) by Mutathu Varkey, published in 1955. Painkili writings circulated widely in
Kerala, often in the form of serialized novels that appeared in low-priced, Malayalam weeklies
since the mid 1950s.
6
The first edition of the book came out in 1967. Five new editions in 1970, 1974, 1981, 1985, 1989
followed this – and this is indeed a sign of the immense popularity of the book. The novel was
translated into Tamil, Hindi and English and in 1993 BBC World Service broadcast it in 12
episodes in its ‘Off the Shelf’ programme.
subjective camera and also by giving a visual and aural form to the fantasies and
dreams of the central character, primarily through the song sequences.
In the novel as he pens down his story Sreenivasan is under observation in a
psychiatric hospital and there is an ongoing police investigation connected to the
death of his wife Ragini, in which he seems to be the prime suspect. Thus, the
unreliability of the narrator is established at the onset as the opening lines draw us
into a tantalizing play between reality and appearances; sanity and madness. If this
novel can be read as a relentless speech in the scene of madness, it pushes us into an
‘uncomfortable region’ (Foucault 1965: ix) where ‘madness and non-madness, rea-
son and non-reason are inextricably involved’ (Foucault 1965: x). Instead of
bracketing off ‘madness’ as a zone of incomprehensibility which only the expert can
decode, the formal innovations of the novel compel us to inhabit a shadow world in
which the mysterious, the monstrous and the uncanny are at the heart of reason. It is
important to note that the oppositions between the rational and the irrational are
blurred within the worldview of the ‘modern man’. This is clearly reflected in the
starcast of Yakshi (1968). Sathyan, one of the stalwarts of the Malayalam film
industry, whose ‘oeuvre moulded the image of the hero in Malayalam cinema,’7 well
known for his portrayal of strong male characters who are the harbingers of
modernity, plays the role of Sreenivasan. His body language, clothing (throughout
the film he wears western clothes such as suit and trousers and even his night dress is
a striped shirt and pajama), frequent use of English language, and association with
spaces of modern scientific education marks him as a quintessential modern man.
The readers have a vivid picture of a yakshi in this film and novel through the
point of view of the central character—a man who is in the vortex of a crisis
because his sense of being comes undone after his face is terribly disfigured in an
accident in a laboratory. The novel begins with the chapter ‘Ente Mukham’ (my
face) in which the narrator mourns the loss of his face that has now robbed him of
his human status:
I drew an extremely monstrous face. A terrifying, horrific (bheebhatasam) face. Can it even
be called a face? Maybe it can be called the ghost of a face… a skull that moves.
Underneath it I wrote:
‘Self-portrait’
Why? Because face that has taken shape on paper is mine. (p. 8)
In this act of self-portraiture, we see the failed enterprise of producing a

self-image. The narrator cannot recognize and possess the sketch he produces of his
own face. He enunciates the likeness in words and yet there is a sense of recoil and
distancing from this reflection. The chemistry Professor who does research on
yakshis, a man who visits libraries to read about dream theory and goes in search of
taaliola granthangal (palm leaf books) to decipher the characteristics of a yakshi,
an enthusiast of crime fiction and a believer in the power of witchcraft—there are
7
“The Indomitable Sathyan” C.S. Venkiteswaran. Nov. 8, 2012. http://www.thehindu.com/
features/cinema/the-indomitable-sathyan/article4077870.ece. Accessed on Jan 4, 2017.
238 N. Mokkil
many worlds that collide and come together in the schema of this novel. While the
narrator gathers evidence to prove that his wife is a yakshi, he himself is precari-
ously perched in relation to the human. Hollowed out, with a scarred face, he is met
with fear and disgust by most people. This narrative was first titled ‘Mukham’
(Face) and published as a serialized novel in a popular Malayalam weekly.8 It was
renamed as Yakshi when it was published in the form of a book. The initial title
captures the central problem of the novel, which is the question of subjectivity. One
of the primary questions this novel poses is: how do you narrativize the ‘failure’ of
the modern masculine subject?
4 Fantasies that Fail: Again and Again
While in Stree the masculine narrator comes undone because of his proximity to
‘unnatural’ bodies and desires, in Yakshi the scene of heterosexuality is a theatre
propelled by anxieties and nightmares. The uncanny and the supernatural are not
placed outside the realm of modernity, but on the other hand it is in the heart of the
modern man’s world. The representation of the woman who bears markers of
undomesticated sexuality as a yakshi is a trope that is often used in Malayalam
literature and cinema.9
Since the early 20th century in Kerala, we see the attempts to codify oral
narratives and myths about magic and witchcraft. Biographical articles about
Malayattoor mention that he read books that collected myths and legends from
Kerala such as Kottarathil Sankunni’s Ithihyamala (Garland of Legends 1909)
when he was in primary school. The story about the writing of this novel itself
shows how the concept of the yakshi is put into circulation by cultural forms and
practices that exist within the public sphere of Kerala in the mid-20th century.
Malayattoor went with a group of male friends to see a play staged by the drama
troupe Kalanilayam10 called Kadamatathu Kathanaar.11 His friends are fascinated
8
“Yakshi”, B. Vijayakumar. Sept 22, 2013. http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/radio-
and-tv/yakshi-1968/article5153979.ece. Accessed on January 2, 2017.
9
S. Sanjeev analyzes the popular Malayalam film Manichithrathazhu (The Ornate Lock 1993) in
which a dancer from the past possesses the body of the heroine and is projected as the negative
disorderly, aspects of her femininity (Sanjeev 1995).
10
“Kalanilayam” was a theater group established in 1962. They are most noted for the multiple
performances of the landmark play “Rakthararakhas” that transported spectacular visual effects
from cinema to theater and awed audiences because of the miracles they witnessed on stage
(Sajeesh 2007).
11
This play is based on the legend about a Christian priest with supernatural powers who is called
upon to cure the ills faced by a Hindu family that is haunted by a yakshi. The continuing popularity
of this story is seen in the fact that Kadamattathu Kathanar is the title of a Malayalam supernatural
drama television series that was originally aired on Asianet from 2004 to 2006. The series was an
instant hit amongst Malayali TV audience. Due to repeated requests Asianet decided to retelecast
the series on Asianet Plus channel from March 2016.
by the yakshi in the play—and one of them jokes about marrying a yakshi. This
collective experience of watching the play is said to have inspired him to write the
novel using the ‘technique of a horror story’ (Binukumar 2012: 87).
While the yakshi as a concept is usually connected to mythology and folklore in
this novel the production of Ragini as a yakshi is within the schema of modern
regimes of organization of sexuality. The first encounter between Ragini and
Sreenivasan is on a busy public junction. Sreenivasan stares at a gigantic film poster
in front of his college that features a hero and heroine in a seductive embrace.
Sreenivasan stares at the image for so long and with such intensity that he feels the
hero’s head has pierced the heroine’s breast and come out into the open. It is when
he is thus immersed in a communion with this poster, imagining an image turn into
flesh, that he hears the lilting voice of a woman and turns around to witness the
mesmerizing beauty of Ragini. The terms used to convey Ragini’s sexual attrac-
tiveness are often drawn from the world of popular culture and cinema. The array of
metaphors assembled together gives us a window into the world of sexualized
images that inhabit the narrator’s every day. She reminds him of Borticelli’s
painting The Birth of Venus, she is more beautiful than Rossanna Podesta who
starred as Helen in Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy, her breasts were so impressive that
it would make the pin-up model Terri Higgins leap out of a picture frame in his
room and commit suicide (p. 33). The second accidental meeting between Ragini
and Sreenivasan is in a cinema hall. Thus, the conception of the yakshi is placed
within modern spaces and practices of consumption and desire in which the mas-
culine subject is positioned as spectator.
While in Kamala Surayya’s Stree Ramani becomes an unusual figure because of
her desire for another woman, in Yakshi the crisis is triggered by a loss of masculine
beauty and desirability. Sreenivasan is an eligible bachelor, who is the object of
attraction of all the young women on the college campus until he meets with a
debilitating accident. While his friends reassure him that: ‘beauty is only skin deep,
especially for a man’ (p. 13), he is horrified by the face that he now sees in the
mirror. The left eyebrow was lost forever, the eye was bulging from the face, the
left cheek protruded with no flesh and the flesh that remained reminded him of a
melted candle. His girlfriend Vijayalakshmi also abandons him after his accident
leading to a disturbing loss of selfhood. In the film Yakshi (1968) the rejection by
his girlfriend is followed by a song sequence in which the hero is shot in such a way
that he is rendered faceless. The camera fragments his body and focuses on his
hands and feet. There are multiple back-shots of Sathyan’s head that are intercut
with sequences in which the camera follows his shadow. In his reincarnation after
the accident, once the bandages are removed from his face, he remains haunted and
hollowed out—literally a shadow of his former self. With this disfiguration, he is
convinced that what he has lost is ‘romance, conjugality. The door that opens up to
a world were dreamy-eyed butterflies flutter—was eternally closed to me’ (p. 17).
‘If any girl comes in search of me, I will bend my neck for the marriage garland
(p. 57),’ he says, positioning himself as a supplicant whose identity is tied to being
sexually desired and accepted by a woman. When Ragini unexpectedly enters his
life, and shows her affection by kissing him, he is overwhelmed with confidence.
240 N. Mokkil
He feels that by being accepted by a beautiful woman his face has been returned to
him (p. 44). Thus, Sreenivasan’s subjectivity is anchored in the scene of sexual
desire. Countering familiar conventions of representation, here the interiority of the
masculine subject is channelized through an overwhelming preoccupation with the
body and physical appearance. Sreenivasan is positioned as the one who looks at
women, but also, more often as someone who is acutely conscious of how others
are looking at him. The masculine body is not erased or transmuted in this narrative;
it functions as a spectacle that attracts the public gaze and evokes a range of
affective responses.
Prior to the accident Sreenivasan is a man who safeguards his celibacy zealously.
Yet, after the accident he is filled with sexual longings: ‘after leaving the hospital
my mind swam through gutters. When I saw women, I was overtly excited. I moved
into the territory of corporeal hungers (p. 23).’ Convinced that no woman would
willingly enter a sexual union with him, Sreenivasan decides to go to a prostitute.
The custodians in the prostitute’s house are terrified by his looks and ask for
additional money for the transaction. They tell him not to take a lamp into the room
for the girl might get scared and run away if she sees him.
This is first scene of sex in the novel and is set in a dimly lit room in the
prostitute’s house:
My heart beat loudly. For the first time in my life I was going to embrace a woman. Here,
pleasure awaits me. She is a fat woman. I have not seen her face properly. But she is a
woman. I have come in search of flesh. I touched her. I bent down to kiss her. Hot blood
coursed through my veins. I kissed her on her cheeks. Something stinks in here. The scent
of soap-nut powder. Suddenly I sweated. I lost all my strength. I got up. I was in a hurry to
get out of there. I rushed out of the room, without losing my virginity [brahmacharyam].
(p. 26)
The short terse sentences relay the immediate sensory feelings from the narra-
tor’s point of view. There is a play of sensations at work here—the vision of the
woman’s body, the tactility of the kiss, the pounding of blood through the veins
followed by a sudden stench, perspiration, and the loss of strength. The field of
heterosexual sex is repeatedly narrativized in this novel as a scene of crisis for the
masculine subject where he is agonizingly aware of his physical appearance.
This encounter with the prostitute is a prelude to repeated sequences of sexual
‘failure’ after Sreenivasan’s marriage with the seductive and blindingly beautiful
Ragini. In a desperate turn in one of the final chapters of the book, titled
‘Experiment’ the narrator returns to the prostitute’s house. His singular aim is to
prove his masculinity by ‘conquering’ any woman. In the absence of the young
prostitute he demands to have sex with the old woman who is the caretaker of the
house. What follows is a repetition of the first sequence but the sensory metaphors
of decay and disintegration are more overpowering:
The old hag grabbed my body.
Then I thought of the mummies in Egypt.
We went inside.
My nose flared. Funeral caskets have been opened up. Bodies of mummies are being taken
out. The cloth that draped them is being stripped. A foul smell spreads everywhere.
I was sweating. I am a worm. I am trying to mate with decaying flesh. (p. 159)
This scene also ends in his hurried flight from the horrifying scene of decay,
conveyed primarily in olfactory terms. In a repeated dream sequence, he runs up a
white staircase on the top of which an enticing naked woman awaits him. He
reaches the top of the staircase loses his balance and starts tumbling down. These
dream sequences are entwined with repeated scenes of attempted sexual intercourse
between Sreenivasan and Ragini that invariable end in his ‘failure’.
The honeymoon night in a seaside hotel, in the bedroom back home, in the
bathroom while she finishes her shower—the spaces of possible sexual intercourse
shift, but the pattern is repetitive: ‘I have failed… Do I have some sickness?’
(p. 65); ‘Today I am taking her into the bedroom with the authority of a husband.
If I am not strong today she will never forgive me. […] Tonight, if I win I can lay
the foundation of an enjoyable family life. If I lose?’ (p. 71); ‘I am strong. My
muscles are firm. Ragini reclines in my hand like a wet feather […] I have failed yet
again’ (p. 117). There is a climactic build-up and the bedroom is propped up as a
possible scene of masculine conquest. The woman is poised in a state of expectation
—waiting like a wet feather to be swept away by masculine power. Yet the mas-
culine anticipation of possession is overturned by loss of strength and inability to
perform the penetrative sexual act. He pants, faints, perspires—there is a physical
meltdown of the body that catapults him into crisis and convinces him that she is a
yakshi. The final confrontation between Ragini and Sreenivasan that leads him to
violently assault her is when she tells him the ‘bitter truth’: ‘You don’t have that
ability! You don’t have the ability to conquer a woman’ (p. 139).
When he discusses his sexual problems with his friends they categorize it as
‘disfunctionality’—sexual impotence caused by inferiority complex. The disturbing
dreams and experiences makes him turn to explanations in The Handbook of Dream
Analysis that he borrows from the public library and he reads the entries under
‘sexual impotence’, ‘impotence in male bodies’ (p. 92). He hides and listens to his
friends clinically dissecting his sexual problems like he is a ‘laboratory specimen’, a
‘eunuch with no power’ (p. 155). This clinical speech on sexual behaviour, in
which clear measures are set for masculine and feminine conduct, is placed in
proximity to the enchanted world of yakshis in the novel. In the logic of a universe
where humans, animals, plants, and spirits are intertwined and can influence each
other Sreenivasan is a man protecting himself from the vampire-like yakshi. Sexual
union with her would lead to his death—so his body develops an armour that debars
him from having sex with her. The reader is confronted with one possible narrative
that fits into the framework of science, rationality, law, and psychology in which
Sreenivasan is a deranged man who masks his sexual failure by turning his wife
into a monster. On the other hand, the novel keeps alive the possibility of a
tantalizing yakshi katha in which Ragini is finally recognized as a loving yakshi, not
a bloodthirsty one, who still encircles the earth like a swirl of smoke. It is in the
242 N. Mokkil
oscillation between opposing narrative possibilities that Yakshi performs the anxi-
eties engendered by the rigid ordering of gender and sexuality and offers glimpses
of other possibilities.
5 Sensory Visions
This is a novel that draws attention to the process of writing and reflects on the need
to tell different stories about sexuality and subjectivity. It references modern forms
of speech and writing that produce a proliferating discourse on sexuality. One
quintessential modern form linked to surveillance, deductive reasoning, and the
disciplining of sexuality is that of detective fiction.12 Sreenivasan observes the
movements of the police inspector and suggests a name for a possible detective
novel he could write: ‘A college Professor has killed his wife! If he writes that
novel I could suggest a first-rate title for it. Red litmus! We use the litmus paper to
detect an acid and an alkali. The hero teaches chemistry. Red litmus! What an
excellent title’ (p. 127). He first expresses his desire to write his story to the doctor
in the mental hospital. He presents it as an exercise to disclose all that is in his mind
and to produce a self-portrait. Thus, the narrative is staged both as a confession and
an investigative report, written for the benefit of the doctor and the detective. Yet, it
overturns the protocols of both these forms.
The other form that is referenced in the novel is that of diary writing. The
narrator is literally in the dark about Ragini’s past and present preoccupations until
he discovers her diary. Yet, this form of ‘truth-telling’ that chronologically maps the
interiority of a subject does not convince Sreenivasan about Ragini’s human status.
He reads the jottings in the diary—its ordinary anxieties, joys, and fears—as a mere
ploy to hide her supernatural powers and mislead him. The narrative partakes in the
incitement to speak about sex because it repeatedly stages sexual scenes both
through dreams and real-life situations and there is a detailed exposition of sexual
desires and feelings. Yet it teases the reader by pushing these sexual scenes into the
realms of sensual excess and fantasy. If modernity is premised on the production of
subjects, who are called upon to routinely participate in the ‘scheme of transforming
sex into discourse’ (Foucault 1978: 20) in which psychiatry plays an important role,
Yakshi infuses this discursive universe with the enchanted world of yakshis and
gandharvas (heavenly beings). Thus, the narrative brings together a range of
modern forms of unveiling the secret of sex and staging it for a public eye—and
yet all these forms pales in comparison to the yakshi katha. Whether it is the diary,
the detective novel or the confession—there is a sense of irony and distancing at
work regarding these forms of ‘truth-telling’ in this novel.
12
The writer had an abiding interest in this form. Malayatoor’s first two published novels, Rathri
(Night, 1948) and Visha Beejam (Poisonous Seed, 1957) were detective novels and he also
translated Sherlock Holmes’s stories into Malayalam in the 1950s.
In the earlier part of the narrative Sreenivasan does research on witchcraft and
yakshis and he uses classificatory rules gleaned from books in order to identify
them. Even when he suspects that Ragini is a yakshi he chides himself and tries to
use his scientific training to dismiss such irrational thoughts. Yet, as the narrative
progresses the descriptions of the world of the yakshis becomes fleshed out in
detail. In a delirious state, after he violently attacks his wife, he slips into a vision of
the world of yakshis. Mascara from an azure sun and star dust as rouge;
magic-carpets made from the glistening skin of gold fishes and a ceaseless orchestra
of divine music; carefree sexual play between yakshis and gansharvas—the
description of this enchanted world is filled with an infinite flourish of sensory
details (p. 164). Waking up from this vision he tells his friend: ‘I have not only read
about the world of yakshis… I have seen that world. Do you know they circle the
solar system on the tail of a falling star! Like we traipse through the city in a double
decker bus!’ (p. 165) In sharp contrast to the description of scenes of sexual
intercourse that results in a deep sense of failure, alienation and crisis, this journey
into the world of the yakshis becomes a source of release and sensory pleasure.
The other equally heightened sequence in the novel is the sight of a luminous
flame that emanates from the pala tree, takes the form of a body and dances to the
unearthly music of a thousand anklets. The dazzling movements of the invisible
dancer crush the grass and flowering plants. The tinkling of bells, the jingling of
anklets, an orchestra of musical instruments—this auditory overflow is accompa-
nied by the haunted dance of a flame. A dance without a body. An orchestra without
songs. The scene reaches a crescendo as Ragini steps out of the house and enters
into an embrace with this luminous beam. Much like the scenes of failed sexual
intercourse, this vision leaves the narrator drenched in sweat, immobile, and drained
of all strength. But in terms of the reader, these sequences are the high points of the
novel that enthrall us and make possible a vision of sensory pleasures that exceeds
the limits of the modern world, mapped through the grid of masculine conquest or
failure.
Discussing the significance of the popular Malayalam film Bhargaveenilayam
(1964), based on a short story Neelavelicham (The Blue Light) by Vaikom
Mohammed Basheer, Jenson Joseph argues that this film brings together elements
of suspense thrillers and horror cinema in order to reject the rationalist notions
propagated by the Left as well as the modern nation state (Joseph 2012: 192). In
this film the tale of the love-lorn ghost, Bhargavi, is uncovered through the
investigation of a writer who develops an intimate relationship with the ghost.
Joseph observes that:
While the film offers all the pleasures of truth-seeking, the meaningfulness of this exercise
lays not in reiterating the dominant rationalist, positivist notions by explaining away the
mysterious or the fantastic, nor in indulging in the constant pursuit of the uncanny, but in
striving to evolve a radically different worldview that envisions legitimate spaces for the
excesses and energies of faith, romance, sentiment, fantasy and sensual desires. (Joseph
2012: 208)
244 N. Mokkil
Arguing in similar lines one could suggest that Yakshi retains the pleasures and
possibilities of romance and sensuality by fleshing out the uncanny and irrational as
a sensory world that unfolds in front of the reader in a tantalizing fashion. In sharp
contrast to the clinical terminology through which Sreenivasan is criminalized and
pathologized by public opinion, law and psychology, the yakshi katha retains the
utopic potential of the love story between a scarred man and a beautiful woman.
Scholars have argued that the popularity of the conception of the yakshi reflects the
gender dynamics of contemporary Kerala in which women who are agential, mobile,
and expressive about their sexual desires are perceived as a threat and therefore
rendered monstrous. Thus, the circulation of the figure of the yakshi is seen as ges-
turing towards the fear offeminine power and the attempts to control it (Schulze 2003).
In Yakshi the mobility of Ragini, her capacity to appear and disappear on her own
accord without leaving any trials or giving a clear address, adds to the threat she poses.
The narrator encounters her in places such as a cinema theatre and a lonely street at
night—where an unaccompanied, young woman’s presence becomes a cause of
surprise and concern.13 Similar to the threat posed by ‘the unusual one’ in Stree in
Yakshi Ragini functions as a threatening figure that the narrator cannot possess in his
waking state. The narrator’s intimate encounters with this feminine figure of excess
renders the masculine subject chaotic, dispossessed, and literally bleeding. The
modern scientist is rendered as a leaky and disjointed body horrified by his own
reflection. Thus, the primary emphasis of the novel is about the relational dynamics
between masculinity and femininity, rationality and irrationality, the body and the
mind. Veena Das analyses the production of male and female subjects under the
conditions of modernity in one of the early supernatural suspense films made after
Independence, Mahal (1949), in order to argue that Kamini, the ghost who inhabits the
screen is the ‘the materialization of a male wish—the wish for an unfettered relation to
the past, the wish to encounter the woman never as a creature offlesh and blood but as a
haunting spirit’ (2000: 176). Thus, her analysis of the ‘disappearance’ of the female in
the medium of Indian cinema, points not only to the ‘loss of the woman’s voice but
also that of the man’s feminine voice’ (2000: 176). While this reading offers signif-
icant insights about the making and remaking of men and women within the cinematic
medium, the interpretation stabilizes the masculine and feminine positionalities in the
oppositional grid of presence/absence and voice/silence. My analysis suggests that the
very form of a haunted text, where vision and voice is poised between the shadow
zones of presence and absence, sets up a singular theatre to stage the relational
dynamics between masculinity and femininity. We need to think further about how the
13
This underlying thread in the novel is developed more explicitly in a recent film based on Yakshi
titled Akam. In this film after running into Ragini in the theater Sreenivas asks her: “Did you watch
the film alone?”. Poking fun at the gendered presumptions that frame this question she replies: “no,
they were lots of people in the theater.” The image of the cinema theater as a disreputable space of
sexual excess is developed further in Akam when Sreenivas later goes to watch a soft-porn film. In
the toilet, in the theater, he voyeuristically lingers outside a stall where a man and woman have sex
and takes down the phone number scribbled on the wall under the message – ‘call for sex’.
sensational worlds set up by literary and cinematic texts bring to the surface the
mutually constitutive formations of masculinity and femininity.
The relational drama between the subject and its other, ‘I’ and ‘you’, modernity
and the uncanny, leads us to a complex problem posed by Judith Butler: ‘consti-
tuting relations have a certain pattern of breakage in them, that they actually
constitute and break us at the same time. This makes for a tentative or more
definitive form of madness, to be sure. What does it mean to require what breaks
you?’ (Butler 2015: 9). The yakshi becomes a necessary prop that supports the
architecture of the narrator’s subjectivity; robbed off this support the ‘I’ cannot
survive. After the yakshi dissipates Sreenivasan remains a cracked subject—a ghost
of a face. The novel is a powerful one not because it tells a realist tale of masculine
control, sexual failure and resulting violence against women. This is a familiar tale,
told many a time—but often in ways that do not question the essentialized and
oppositional conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Yakshi raises disturbing
questions because it presents masculinity as a fraught scene of violence and vul-
nerability. If we stick to the dichotomies between the body and the mind, the
rational and the irrational, the beautiful and the ugly, the masculine and the femi-
nine—complex stories about sexuality and subjectivity cannot be told. Sensational
narrative forms take us into a bewildering world of excess and pushes us to confront
the affective, entwined and porous formations of the subject. The power of a novel
like Yakshi, and the reasons why it takes on new forms even in the present, might lie
in its disturbing capacity to call forth and embody the festering wounds that are at
the heart of modernity. In the play of mirrors, as the face seeks another face for
recognition—the modern subject is in a perilous dance. Yakshi enacts the utopian
and dystopian dynamics of romance and intimacy.
6 Akam: A Retake
Shalini Usha Nair’s Akam (2013) is a retake on Malayatoor’s Yakshi set in con-
temporary Trivandrum. The film explores the tense relationship between the
architect Sreenivasan, whose face is disfigured after a car accident, and his wife
Ragini. Moving away from the familiar tropes of a horror film, Akam injects horror
into the space of the modern home and conjugality by dwelling on spatial tropes—
both exterior and interior. With new iterations, the tenor of Yakshi undergoes
significant changes, and yet it continues to focus on the subject for whom sexual
desire functions as both utopic possibility and a project doomed to failure. The
annihilation of the subject and the breakdown of intersubjective relations are
entangled in this film. The opening sequence of Akam signals this. We see foot-
prints on an empty seashore. Brown sand, grey skies—it is clearly dusk. There is
the sound of sea gulls, the sound of waves. The camera follows moving feet that
carefully takes each step in such a way that every new impression on the sand
matches the existing footprints. An exercise of matchmaking that cannot succeed.
We hear a male voice cry out: ‘Ragini, Ragini’. The camera moves up, pans the
246 N. Mokkil
surroundings—we see the orange-tinged sky, trees and rocks. No human presence
responds to the call.
The film repeatedly stages the gaps that cannot be bridged between Sreenivasan
and Ragini, even as they are drawn to each other. After their first accidental meeting
Sreenivasan invites Ragini to his home. The camera shows him watch her through a
glass door. In a series of subjective shots we see him following her movements. We
have the blurred shot of his face and the back of her curvaceous body—making the
spectator aware of his gaze on her body. Then there is a mid-angle shot when both
of them move into the same frame—she is watching him as he watches her. The
film posters that adorn the wall of his house, and other display surfaces such as the
television and computer place these acts of seeing in the history of cinema, and the
erotics of vision. The camera zooms in and we have a close-up frame of both their
faces looking at each other intensely. The reflection of her face falls on his face. The
glass pane separates them even at this point of visual union (Figs. 1, 2 and 3).
In the narrative progression of Akam we see how the unravelling of Sreenivasan
leads him to violently persecute his wife as a yakshi. Unlike the novel Yakshi and
even the earlier filmic adaptation, where the narrative does not completely dispel
the possibility of the existence of yakshis, in Akam the narrative places faith in
modern psychiatry and gives credence to the diagnosis of Sreenivasan as a violent
and deranged man, who suffers from a personal history of abandonment. Yet, there
is a residue of the unexplainable—a disturbing excess that haunts this world. In
Akam the uncanny makes its presence felt primarily through the way spaces are
framed. It does so by dwelling on the eerie elements of ordinary settings—the still
shots of dead bugs in a living room; chairs that brood at nightfall as an office
empties out. It also does this by framing intimacy in ways that remind us of
supernatural sequences in the history of cinema. For example, the progression of
Fig. 1 Sreenivasan watching Ragini in his house

Fig. 2 Mid-shot—they watch each other
Fig. 3 Close-up. Close yet there is glass in between
shots in a scene involving a kiss is as follows. We have a mid-shot of both of them

in the backdrop of the setting sun. We see him lying with his head on her lap. This
is followed by the back shot of Ragini bending down to kiss Sreenivas. This quickly
cuts to a close-up of his face that has lost consciousness and we can see that his lips
are bleeding. The framing, lighting, and the positioning of the camera triggers
echoes of vampire sequences and thus injects the presence of the yakshi into the
scene (Figs. 4, 5 and 6).
248 N. Mokkil
Fig. 4 A moment of possible intimacy
Fig. 5 The kiss
A more detailed analysis of Akam is beyond the scope of this chapter. I merely
signal towards some of the cinematic techniques in this film to open up the pos-
sibilities of how and why the elements of the uncanny, the grotesque and the
ghostly become an important device through which we can narrate sexuality in
ways that push against the dominant order of domesticity.
Fig. 6 The aftermath of the kiss
7 Conclusion
This chapter argues that literary and cinematic expressions in vernacular languages,
which produce sensory worlds that can both disturb and possess us should not be
dismissed as minor genres. They coin narrative and cinematic strategies in which
modern forms are amalgamated with older forms of storytelling in order to explore
the tensions and instabilities in the project of modernity. The formal strategies of
Stree, Yakshi, and Akam, such as the deployment of the form of the ghost story,
dream sequences that merge with real life, the use of the masculine narrative voice
and perspective that breaks down as the narrative develops, and the ironic com-
mentary about modern forms of ‘truth-telling’, point to how cultural forms that
cross-fertilize the rational and the irrational fleshes out the impossibility of the
ordering of gender and sexuality. Stree, Yakshi and Akam defamiliarize the drama
of heterosexuality and point to the violence perpetuated through the rigid demands
on masculine and feminine actors in the scene of sex and desire. The shared formal
strategies allow me to read these texts in juxtaposition with each other. I also
suggest that instead of fixing our attention on figures of excess as emblems of
resistance we need to see how modernity in regional contexts in India activates the
sensory world-making capacity of popular cultural forms in order to break the rigid
binaries of masculinity and femininity. These texts have a significant place in
literary and cinematic history because they capture the persistent disjuncture in
modernity’s project of domesticating bodies and desires.
250 N. Mokkil
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Filmography
Akam (Inside). 2013. Shalini Usha Nair. Colour.

Bhargaveenilayam (The Haunted House). 1964. A. Vincent. B&W.
Yakshi. 1968. K. S. Sethumadhavan. B&W.
Chapter 13
Exploring Modernism as Reflected
in Post-partition Hindi/Urdu Fiction
Sukrita Paul Kumar
The rather resilient Indian society, when confronted with the onslaughts of mod-
ernization, seems to project an uncanny capacity to enter into various modes of
apprehending the world which is what is the responsibility of the writer or the artist
as much as the social scientist. Because of the people’s strong adherence to the
long-standing traditional identity, there is no evidence of a dramatic avant-garde
tendency in Hindi or Urdu fiction which may actually have diverted the new writer
into a completely new direction, taking thus him/her away from cultural rooting.
The writer needed to confront the challenge of creating a modern sensibility from
the immense cultural diversity and linguistic plurality in the country. While this
necessitated the need to retain heterogeneity of creative expression, there was also
an emergence of a new common sensibility in defiance of the hold of tradition in the
subcontinent. Ramesh Chander Shah, the eminent Hindi litterateur refers to the
signs of conflict in the Indian psyche when it was compelled to confront the
powerful wave of the Modernist movement, seductively flowing from the West in
the middle of the 20th century. He calls it a marriage of incompatibles (Shah 1990).
The Modernist movement had captured the writer’s imagination on a global scale
and it did, of course, also find a suitable climate on the Indian soil, immediately
after the 1947 Partition-related turmoil of the Indian subcontinent.
Rather than dismissing ‘modernistic writing’ as a ‘cultural sell-out’, perhaps a
much greater critical attention should be directed at examining the conceptual and
philosophical framework from which modernism evolved in India, within its socio–
political and cultural ethos in the middle of the 20th century. Modernism in Indian
fiction acquired its own distinct colour and shape. Modernity in all times may be
perceived as a meaningful regeneration of the human soul and civilization, as also, a
S. Paul Kumar (&)

Aruna Asif Ali Chair, Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
e-mail: sukrita.paulkumar@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_13
254 S. Paul Kumar
regeneration of the capacities of a people; it is a response to new challenges of life

in philosophy, in the arts and in the sciences; a ‘reaching out’ across mental,
physical, and political boundaries. On the one hand, there may be a strong sense of
traditionalism and on the other, the spirit of modernity and change. Creative
expression which may be referred to as the Indian brand of modernism evidenced in
the modern Hindi and Urdu short fiction reveals a process of assimilation of the
new philosophic and cultural temper within the framework of the tradition-bound
society. The cultural crisis created by the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent led to
cultural reorientations which in turn also led to a regenerative spirit articulated in
Indian literature as ‘modernism’.
This chapter will endeavour to situate literary modernism in the context of
Partition and the re-building of a sensibility with fresh dispensations. This will
include a study of modern short stories in Hindi and Urdu from the point of view of
a clear resurgence of spirit in form, gender, culture, and mythology.
1 Tradition and the Modernist Temper
First, in order to explore the concept or the notion of ‘modernity’, it would be

pertinent to attempt to define the term in a general way. It would be apt here to
remark that human consciousness is seen to be a perpetually changing landscape,
sometimes with abrupt earthquake-like movements and at times, almost imper-
ceptibly; the continuous mutative process may get recorded in the changing
physical features and the movement of the evolving consciousness gets charted
through the creative articulation of this awareness in art and literature. Human
intelligence takes cognizance of the new contemporary situation which affects,
modifies, and nourishes the human sensibility, relationships and life itself.
Alongside, there may be a realization that the past is not only alive in the present,
but that it has actually created the contours of the present; and that, the present
actually demonstrates the whole significance of life by simultaneously reflecting the
outposts of existence in the past. This in fact can be termed as the ‘sense of
tradition’, which is not merely the retaining in mechanical memory of what hap-
pened in the past, it is a memory that vibrates the significance and the meaning of
the past experience in the ‘now’ itself. The essential experience of tradition then is
the realization of the continuum rather than a cessation of the past. An important
feature of modernity, however, was the awareness of ‘all time’ within the present,
something that can actually be realized by a human being. In that, the very per-
ception of reality underwent a transformation with such triumphs of human
exploration.
In order to identify the nature of literary modernism as it emerges in Indian
writing, it is significant to understand the way it evolved in the West. Modernists
such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot of the Bloomsbury group of writers in England,
while stressing on ‘the impersonal and objective side of human experience in
aesthetic articulation’, they also highlighted how the concept of time stood
13 Exploring Modernism as Reflected in Post-partition Hindi/Urdu … 255
modified. The high aesthetic self-consciousness witnessed in England and Europe

over the turn of the last century cannot be dismissed as a mere break away from the
familiar functions of language and convention of form. The heightened con-
sciousness of the crisis of traditional aesthetic styles in itself explains the shift to
modern thought and sensibility. This had to then lead to a resurgence of spirit and
the exploration of new modes of expression. Experimental techniques and forms
rather than a realistic representation of life in modern fiction, took the writer’s
attention to deeper levels of human consciousness. Awakened by the World War I
and its consequences, the writer’s existential sense of being reacted strongly to
fixed notions of life and literature. Moreover, society and human existence had been
re-interpreted differently by such thinkers as Marx, Freud, and Darwin in modern
times. Industrial acceleration too brought radical changes in human values and
perspectives.
Modernism thus, cannot be perceived as a sort of licentiousness or an instant
realization of artistic freedom; it was in fact art’s necessity. The principles of
variability, novelty, and change characterized the new sensibility. Though the past
may have caused the change, its pastness needed to be at once recognizable. The
artist needed to confront the risks and hopes of the impermanence of environment.
That is to say that the heightened consciousness of the mutability of life is typically
a modernist feature. All inter-personal relationships were suddenly perceived as
transient. The juxtapositions to be worked out with the changing reality have
always been the concern of the artist down the lanes of history. But, the under-
standing of the process of modernization is not merely dependent on abstract his-
torical logic. The accelerating pace of development, industrialization, and scientific
progress involved new forms of consciousness in its new kinds of expectations and
aspirations. In that the conventional pattern of thinking and the old frames of
reference became irrelevant. ‘The immense panorama of futility and anarchy’ that
Eliot saw in Ulysses (Bradbury and James1976) or Yeats’s ‘Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold’ indicate a complete disorientation and a total collapse of the old
and the traditional. It is understandable then that the modernist should strive and
search for a reconciliation between the temporal and the timeless, ‘the dancer and
the dance’. Relativism and scepticism having got injected into the human psyche in
the modern times, the artist could not but feel the strange pressures of the new times
and manifest them in new ways. The forces that emerge from the present had to be
accommodated with those of the past.
The post-World War I literary output is crucial to modernism in its manifestation
of the mood of transition from the old to the new. In The Sense of an Ending, Frank
Kermode suggests how the turning of a century itself has as strongly a ‘chiliastic
effect’ in the reflection on history as revolution, to consider the question of endings
and beginnings, ‘the going and coming of the world’ (Kermode 1966). The attempt
to discern the moment of transition in itself becomes a feature of the modernist
sensibility. In 1915 D. H. Lawrence said ‘our idea of time as a continuity in an
eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly’ (Lawrence 1932). The
sequence of historical time preserved in ‘realistic and naturalistic literature’ seemed
therefore to stand at cross purposes with the awareness of the immateriality of
256 S. Paul Kumar
superficial reality. The urgency and the expansiveness with which the feeling for the
‘modern’ spread afar, was of course due to the new, effective, and fast ways of
communication.
Distant cultures received modernist ideas very easily thanks to their exposure to
western civilization and knowledge through the English language. In India, the
momentum for the turn of the historical wheel that suggests the ushering of a new
era, built up alongside the struggle for Independence from the British. And, the
people here were ready for an explosion of fresh social forces. Modernist ideas from
the West had already been arriving on the Indian soil. The 1947 Partition of the
country led to traumatic experiences for a large number of people living in the
northern regions of India. The context of crisis and rupture matched with the
war-borne climate of the early 20th century Europe, though the circumstantial
determinants here were indeed quite different. However, the emergence of the
modernist temper and its manifestation in Indian literature around this time can be
correlated easily with what was witnessed as distinctive modernism in the West 30
or 40 years earlier.
The shocking reality of the division of the subcontinent in 1947 and the mass
exodus of panic-stricken people from one side of the country to the other were a
fall-out of what Radcliffe’s Boundary Commission directed. The boundaries
demarcated between India and Pakistan evoked immense disappointment to both,
the Hindus as well as Muslims. With the announcement of the Radcliffe award, the
province of the Punjab went totally berserk with one of the greatest migrations in all
human history. Strangely an irrational savagery was demonstrated by the very same
people who had set to prove to the world how ‘colonialism’ could be defeated by
non-violent Gandhian means. Indeed, such historical contradictions offer tremen-
dous creative potentialities and possibilities. Whether it be in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi
or even English or Bengali, the aesthetic distillation of the horrendous experiences
of the Partition is found in abundance in Indian fiction. An account of the same in
history can perhaps be summed up in objective terms in just one or two volumes.
But the scope of exploration of the range of experiences in creative arts seems to be
almost unending. The new mental landscape of the countries was now characterized
by hatred, mutual suspicion, arson, loot, abduction of women, a scenario of mass
hysteria, homelessness, and insecurity. In but a few years, the sheer primitive
bestiality demonstrated by people ripped the very social fabric firmly woven by
traditional values, religious faith, and a steady sense of protection yielded by
commitment to one’s mohalla (neighbourhood). It is perhaps the sheer incompre-
hensibility of the situation that has been a constant source of energizing the creative
sensibility here. Ironically, in 1947 though the long awaited ‘freedom’ brought to a
whole people exhilarating political freedom, Partition at the same time caused a
tragic rupture from the composite roots grown over centuries amongst the people
existing within common geographical, cultural, and social boundaries.
The writer in India had to evolve new strategies to confront and express the
reality of the historical and cultural ‘accident’ of Partition. Human relationships
were re-evaluated, values were re-examined, and a new modern sensibility gave rise
to Nai Kahani in mid-1950s in Hindi and Naya Afsana in Urdu around the same
time. Many of the ‘modern’ themes dealing with the sense of misery in the civilized
world, desperation, loneliness, and sacrifice of self and society to irrational forces
began to show themselves as serious concerns of the Indian writer who now
experientially went through a sense of crisis similar to that of the post-War West.
In order to understand the rather easy receptivity of modernism in the Indian
situation, it should be worthwhile to consider the famous Hindi literary critic,
Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s approach to ‘Modernity and Indian Religions’ (Dinkar
1973). A detailed attention to the historical, philosophical, and scientific milieu had
led to a comprehension of modernism as vital expression of the new culture. What
is crucial to note is that modernism had erstwhile been analysed essentially as a
western phenomenon. Thus, the social context in focus had been either European or
American. The East did not ever figure as a subject for the intellectual apprehension
of ‘modernism’. When a similar sensibility appeared in the Indian context three
decades or so later, it was bound to emerge with a difference, if only for the
obviously different cultural contexts. As Dinkar rightly points out, the modernist
temper can be compared with that of the Buddhist Age in India from many points of
view. Buddha’s revolutionary ideas and rather ‘modern’ approach to the caste
system, to the status of woman, his agnosticism, scepticism, and humanistic values
and his essential faith in self-teaching and learning all of this had a great impact on
the mainstream of Indian culture and intellectual tradition (Dinkar1973; p. 6).
Dinkar sees two main traditions in the base of Indian culture, the source of one
being in the Vedic system and the other in the Buddhist teachings revolving around
humanistic concerns. While there is the tradition of Tulsidas, there is also that of
Kabeer, one is related to Manu and the other to Buddha. The 100-year-long contact
and exposure to the European culture and religion, according to him did something
very significant to the two diverse traditions of India. In one way, as Dinkar’s thesis
upholds, this contact brought the two streams together. The lives and teachings of
such Indians as Parmahansa Ramkrishan, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and
Gandhi indicate the evolution of Indian thought towards modern living. Pursuit of
truth, irrespective of caste, religion or any other kind of bias is the major feature of
the ‘new’ spirit. The upsurge of science and technology is, in fact, the result of such
an intellectual mood. The intellectual climate attempted to weed out the bigoted and
the superstitious.
The modern artist had tended to work with a different consciousness and per-
spective even in England. Marlow, the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, for instance, projects the modernist’s enriched awareness of time. ‘The
mind of man’, he says ‘is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past
as well as all the future. What was there, after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion,
valour, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time (Conrad
1883). For the new sensibility, the real basis of communication lay in the awareness
of the shared, common, and continuing human condition even within diverse
environments, irrespective of the chronicity of time. Stephen Spender spells out this
phenomenon very well in his book The Struggle of the Modern. Indeed, the artist
then takes a God-like position of being isolated within his own creative Universe
and ‘all time’ becomes available to him all at once (Spender 1963).
258 S. Paul Kumar
It is, in fact, in the capturing of such an apocalyptic moment that the writer
triumphs, the moment in which an inter-relation with nature and ‘the other’ is
perceived, while the traditional concepts and beliefs are shed and linguistic cate-
gories are transcended. A novel kind of coherence and logic of the mind and its way
of communicating complex and subtle ideas was discovered. The ‘dream’ came to
enjoy a special status, as it were, and the uncertainties of ‘probability’ upset the
sovereignty of precise knowledge. The new concepts of ‘a-logicality’ and
‘a-causality’ created a climate for the questioning of absolutes. All this did not
merely stop at a mere intellectual readjustment; the quickened, alert and ‘multi-
plied’ consciousness, in fact, endowed a spirit of ‘exile’ and strangeness on the
artist’s sensitive sensibility. The writer felt distanced from local origins or class
allegiances and acquired the perspective of an expatriate, an outsider. But even
though modernism asserted a consciousness detached from traditional sequences, it
made full creative use of the loss of contact with linear historicity. What is inter-
esting to note is that the awareness of this in itself became the premise for inno-
vation. It lent a confident autonomy to the artist’s imagination and self-expression.
A definite faith in the creative act invested ‘technique’ with the power and capa-
bility of controlling the rather chaotic reality.
Absorbed in finding unique forms to express acutely subjective perceptions, the
modernists were isolated from one another as well as from their readers. The
reaction against the rhetoric of the past was an obvious consequence when the
writer regarded subjective experience increasingly the only valid material for fic-
tion. Literature became confessional and at times rather obscure. However,
‘specificity’ of experience and subjective perceptions on the one hand and on the
other, virtuosity in the structure and style of the art product, combined subtly to
keep the modernist’s concern for the imperative of impersonality. In that the
classical approach to art, which maintains ‘universality’ as the foremost appeal of
art and literature, is taken care of. Success, therefore, lay in the simultaneous
process of the defining of the self on the one hand and on the other, transcending it
or reaching the ‘essential’ through it. With that an effective communicability too
was established. Steven Helmling in his essay on the prominent modernist, James
Joyce, makes a similar point when he says ‘personal’ was only a more extreme form
of Joyce’s earlier aim to be both ‘impersonal’ and ‘autobiographical’ (Helmling
1986). To recognize the internal dynamism within the artefact and the artist’s
self-conscious effort to achieve it is in fact characteristically a modernistic feature.
Modernity meant a synthesis of values employing free activity of the mind as
well as a tolerance of divergent views. Matei Calinescu’s definition of modernist,
on the other hand, clearly refers to a culture of rupture and crisis (Calinescu 1987).
What is suggested, in fact, is that the sense of the modern is indicated through the
internal signalling of a culture and is a significant aspect of human consciousness
itself. In the early 20th century literature, the idea of the modern as an imperative
and a predicament manifests itself in the technical and emotional extremities. This
feature of course conforms with Calinescu’s concept of the modern which is related
to a situation of cultural crisis. Thus, the writer’s sense of reality transformed his
very approach to language and form which is an organic part of an art-product.
The availability to the modern writer of new areas of the unconscious through
extensive research in psychology provided him with perceptions into human
behaviour hitherto unacknowledged. Alongside, the shared values of a ‘unified
culture’ in which the meanings of life derived from communal symbols and beliefs,
were fast crumbling.
The phenomenon of modernism which captured the western psyche and pro-
jected itself in various artistic media meant a deliberate break from the dominant
modes of 19th century literary forms and content. But that does not imply that it
signified a total break with the past. In fact, as mentioned earlier, modernists like
T. S. Eliot emphasized greatly on a sense of tradition. However, the insistence on
‘change’ and a search for new kinds of order was the major call of the ‘modern’
litterateur.
It may be noted here that both, the World Wars in the West and the traumatic
Partition of the Indian subcontinent brought to surface people’s acute consciousness
regarding their proximity to death, as also the realization that a human being is
himself greatly responsible for those grotesque horrors of violence. Partition, in
fact, did not merely mean two new geographical dominions but as the examination
of the subsequent imaginative literature proves, it gave birth to a new psychic
dominion as well. A new chapter of development and progress had commenced
earlier under the banner of the Progressive Movement. Urdu writers such as Krishan
Chander, Ismat Chughtai, and Rajinder Singh Bedi were writing fiction committed
to social realism. But as the critic Qazi Abdul Sattar rightly points out in his essay
on ‘Contemporary Urdu Fiction’, the Progressive writers failed to respond aes-
thetically to some of the radical changes in the country then (Sattar 1972). The
abolition of zamindari changed the social and economic structures of 85% of the
population of the country living in villages. The Chinese aggression on India shook
people’s faith in dogmatic socialism just as the Soviet power received a shock with
the Cuban crisis. But, perhaps, it was precisely through this rather disturbed phase
that the balance was struck between a rigid ideological commitment and a totally
free and open-ended modernity. Qurratulain Hyder, Joginder Paul, Gyas Ahmed
Gaddi, Rattan Singh, Ram Lal and some others in Urdu, and in Hindi such writers
as Rajendra Yadav, Bhisham Sahni, Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar, in their short
stories reflected the ‘modified’ point of view. These writers are referred to as
‘Neo-progressive’ by some, and others regard them as ‘modernists’; since the props
of modernism had already been received from the West, it was not difficult for the
Indian sensibility to realize and be aware of the ‘change’ to be able to venture new
modes of aesthetic expression as soon as the milieu of the country offered the
opportunity.
The unprecedented dislocation and misery caused by the communal fury at the
time resulted in an acute sense of uprootedness. What John Orr assiduously traces
as ‘absence’ inhabiting the characters in the 20th century fiction, gets illustrated in
the stories written around this time in Hindi as well as Urdu (Orr 1987). This
experience of a ‘peculiar loss’ or an absence is derived from the alienated members
260 S. Paul Kumar
of the community. Orr describes how this absence is caused within: ‘The absence of
the other can be seen as a mirror of the absence of the subject within his or her own
world’ (Orr 1987). The void created by the ‘absence’ and the rather de-centred self
is the legacy of modernism which gets a fertile ground in India in the mid-20th
century. The rootlessness, the trauma of the displacement, and the consequent
refugee spirit injected in the new individual made him appear an outsider. Rajender
Singh Bedi, Bhisham Sahni, and Saadat Hasan Manto wrote a number of stories on
the theme of the division of the country. The decentred and sometimes paranoid
characters grope desperately for recuperation. For example, the experience of
uprootment led Munir Ahmed Sheikh’s main character in his story Apni Shakl
(One’s own face) to ask ‘Who am I? Where have I have come from? Where did I
start from? Where do I have to go? Such philosophic stirrings were indeed a
consequence of sudden physical displacement causing a paralyzed dread, an acute
apprehension of what was to come, an uncertainty and total incomprehensibility of
the situation in relation to one’s self.
The absence of a stable society actually caused the fragmentation of the psyche
which could no longer be presented through traditional fiction wherein the image of
order and harmony was maintained consistently. The communal hate, terror, and
massacre seemed to have scooped the Indian society of its compassion. Whether it
is Manto’s story The Dog of Tithwal, Ageyya’s No Revenge, Krishan Chander’s
The Peshawar Express or Bedi’s Lajwanti, they are stories in which the author
attempts to reconstitute stability in an estranged world. It is at this point of history
that in Hindi as in Urdu short story, the seeds of modernism sprout well.
The mood of resurgence, renewal, and change set in. While the avant-garde
literature in the West implied a sharp sense of militancy, progress and protest
compellingly, in Hindi and Urdu it is not as radical. A category of Indian writers,
however, did display an extraordinary sensitivity to the crisis in the nation then.
What evolved out of the new awareness, were such themes as the shifting man–
woman relationships, liberation of women, the protagonist as ‘outsider’, alienation
and ironic questioning of the existent traditional values. It was in the late 50s and
60s that such Hindi writers as Nirmal Verma, Phanishwar Renu, Krishna Sobti and
in Urdu, writers such as Qurratulain Hyder and Joginder Paul were gripped by new
concerns. The characteristically ‘modernist’ stance of their writings is a direct
outcome of the synthesis of the indigenous and the alien cultures affected by the
technologically progressive world. Sophisticated methods of communication
brought diverse cultures together through a free flow of cross-cultural streams.
Stephen Spender points out that it is not scientific knowledge but its effects
which become part of the experience of modern life (Spender 1963; p. 59). The idea
of progress and scientific culture laid an emphasis on material prosperity in the
western modernist world. This is evident amply from the reactions of poets such as
Eliot and others whose works draw attention to the setting in of a spiritual crisis.
The following passage from Spencer’s The Struggle of the Modern spells this out
very well:
If the literary intellectuals seem sceptical of the benefits produced by science, one reason
may be that so many scientific advances seem to result in a deadening of consciousness.
I mean by this, they destroy life-memory, which is not mechanical memory, but is memory
of the kind that can retain significant experiences; can cultivate awareness of consciousness
before our day. Such judging and comparing and savouring memory is the essential quality
of full and complex consciousness. Instead of our living in an extremely complex present
moment, packed as it were with experiences of the past related to immediate ones, tech-
nology enables more and more people to live in a single-strand moment, receiving the latest
sensation, which obliterates previous impressions. The literary intellectuals are, it is hoped,
those who have attained the greatest degree of that subjective or self-awareness which is
also awareness of the potentiality of such mental and spiritual living in others, so that in
being most individual it is most representative of human consciousness. (Spender 1963;
60–61).
The predicament of the literary modernist seems to revolve around the inability
to sever himself from tradition or the vital sense of the past; and, nor is he able to
ignore his commitment to the present. The gulf between the two had to be bridged.
Whether it was Picasso and his creation Guernica, or Joyce and his novel Ulysses,
the modernist seems to somehow bring about a fusion between the past and the
present by closely interpreting the classical imagery and myths in contemporary
terms.
For the modernist then, the ‘present’ carried within itself a vast ocean of ‘new
knowledge’ which had to be accommodated and adjusted with the past. It is at such
a crucial juncture that the emergence of the existentialists became inevitable and
relevant. The existentialists thought intensely of the expansive capacities of human
consciousness and the scope of the experience of the self in space as well as time.
The Delphic maxim ‘know thyself’ upheld even by the remotest forbearers of
existentialism such as Socrates, K. Guru Dutt remarks in Existentialism and Indian
Thought, is also the keynote of all Indian Philosophy, including the Buddhist and
Jaina Darsana (Guru Dutt 1953). The urge towards inwardness, which was fully
manifest in St. Augustine, marks all existential thought from Pascal to Sartre. It is
pertinent to point out here that the same has also been seen as the main stream of
Indian thought. Though affinities between existentialism and Indian thought are not
to be simplistically comprehended, they cannot be dismissed either. Emerging out
of diametrically diverse cultures, the gaps between the two call for attention but in
their concern for the inwardness of human consciousness, they come reasonably
close for us to establish the proximity of the western and Indian modernist philo-
sophic stance in this context. K. Guru Dutt’s close and comparative scrutiny brings
out some common concerns such as ‘authenticity of experience’, ‘freedom of the
self’ and ‘detachment’. The forlornness, the aloneness of the self, and the experi-
ence of anguish and despair much discussed as prominent features of the human
condition in existential literature, are conditions precedent to any spiritual journey
of self-realization in Vedanta as well as in Buddhism. The European
thought-current of the early twentieth century really found an already established
kindred temper on the Indian sub-continent.
In the post-Independence Indian context, the rupture with the past created space
for the acceptance of the ‘new’ and the ‘different’. People were in a way prepared to
262 S. Paul Kumar
receive fresh ideas. The cataclysmic effects caused by Partition and the cultural
crisis created a climate that matched the Eliotesque philosophic mood of the
three-decades-earlier West. The hopefulness and ebullience that the hard-earned
freedom from the British rule should have brought was subordinated totally by the
Partition trauma. The unfortunate assassination of Mahatma Gandhi added to an
utter disillusionment of the few idealists.
Not having a sense of belonging and being blown about by political ill-winds
caused a ruffle amongst ordinary people and brought around a historical turning
point in the Indian sensibility and ethos. In Writings on India’s Partition, the
editors, Ramesh Mathur and Mahendra Kulasrestha have collected samples of
creative writing produced at that time, most of them Hindi and Urdu short stories
translated into English. Rajinder Singh Bedi’s story Lajwanti (‘touch-me-not’, the
plant whose leaves fold up if touched) deals with the theme of rehabilitation of
women abducted during the riots of 1947. In fact, what the story sensitively sug-
gests is that though these women may have been rehabilitated physically through
intensive campaigns of ‘rehabilitating them in your hearts’, it was almost impos-
sible for the men to accept them for normal relationship. To quote from the story:
‘She looked at her own body which has, since the Partition, become the body of a
goddess. It no longer belonged to her (Bedi 1976).’ Thanks to the zealous propa-
ganda of the ‘Rehabilitation of Hearts Committee’, Lajwanti does get rehabilitated,
even back into the heart of her husband Sunder Lal, but ironically, not as a woman
and a wife, but as a goddess; while ‘she wanted him to be the same old Sunder Lal
with whom she quarrelled over a carrot and who appeased her with a radish. Now
there was no chance of a quarrel (Bedi 1976).’
Lajwanti would gaze for hours at herself in the mirror but she could no longer
recognize the ‘Lajo’ she had known. Bedi’s depiction of Lajwanti’s experience of
alienation from her own self, the radically modified attitude of Sunder Lal and the
shifting man–woman relationship when nothing could be taken for granted now,
projects a change in the writer’s perception of reality. Bhisham Sahni, Mohan
Rakesh, Manto, Agyeya, K. A. Abbas, Upendranath Ashk, are a few writers who
responded creatively to the scene of absurd killings and the holocaust of the
Partition riots. They portrayed the indignity of human behaviour and in doing that,
they in fact salvaged some human dignity in their delicate depiction of emotion and
the need for human relatedness. The insignificance of human life, the meaning-
lessness of human action, the utter lack of respect for life, aroused the writer to deal
with some fundamental questions pertaining to man’s existence and his relationship
with the universe. The aesthetic expression and articulation of the changing social
context surfaced quite obviously about a decade later in the ‘New Story’. There was
—as it were—a benumbing of the sensibility of the writer till the psychic situation
was taken stock of with the arrival of the New Story (Nai Kahani in Hindi and Naya
Afsana in Urdu) wherein seems to have crystallized the need to re-examine and
re-evaluate human existence and relationships in the context of the evolving new
reality. The fragmentation and dispersal of domestic, social as well as cultural
identity caused by the division of the country made the earlier modes of aesthetic
articulations appear inadequate.
The process of change and modernization could no longer be manifested in only

the mode of social realism. New literary grounds were broken under the influence
of new philosophic thought emerging from new socio–political contexts. That also
vouches for the popularity of Camus, Sartre, and Kafka from outside India wherein
the preoccupation with ‘absurdity’, guilt, anguish, failure to communicate and
revolt was demonstrated. Such writers as Mohan Rakesh, Krishan Baldev Vaid,
Gyanranjan, Kashinath Singh, Krishna Sobti in Hindi; and Balraj Manra, Surendra
Prakash, Intizar Husain, Joginder Paul, Qurratulain Hyder in Urdu, wrote stories in
which the breakdown of the family, impermanence of homes, the absurdity of the
human, ‘civilized’, world and the exploration for a vital human existence were the
themes that dominated. The Kafkasque realization of man as a non-hero who
becomes an insect in Kafka’s story Metamorphosis sat well with the new
sensibility.
From a deep sense of wreckage, gradually a new order was sought by the writer.
The beautiful merger of the past with the present and a fine treatment of human
history with a private sentiment in the centre are revealed through the fresh and new
sensibility of Qurratulain Hyder in Urdu in her stories such as Patjhar ki Awaz (The
sound of the falling leaves) or Saint Flora of Georgia ke Etrafaat (Confessions of
Saint Flora of Georgia). The educated young woman of Patjhar ki Awaz becomes a
monument of indifference. There are subtle hints of the effect of the Partition on her
relationships, her approach to her men, her aspirations, slowly levelling out all her
lively concerns. To her everything concerning life now seems absolutely colourless,
insignificant, purposeless, and unnecessary (Mohan 1984). The modern Urdu writer
interrogated contemporary mode of living and relationships sensitively.
The new realties had not only to be confronted, they had also to be accepted. No
matter what Mohan (a character in Joginder Paul’s Urdu story, Those Who Stayed
Behind), might have felt for nearly three and a half decades till after the Partition, he
has to confront the new reality at some point. A Hindu migrant from Pakistan, his
‘Sialkot’ had been safely lodged in his very being and then he visits this city of his
birth 36 years after having left it. He carries along within himself his well-preserved
dreams and old memories intact. When he actually visits his birth place Sialkot and
goes to his earlier haunts steadily, one by one, his warm associations with them
demolish. He does not feel like himself when he knocks at the door of his old
house. Ironically, no one opens the door since the ‘inmates are out’. He has a vision
of his own old self opening the door for him, his present self is thus only an
outsider! But then, it is the outsider whom he has to accept as his self now. The
‘inmate-turned-exile’ has come face to face with that truth, the actuality. If the
uprooted plant fails to take root in the new soil, the writer tells us that would be the
end of it (Paul 1983). Sialkot gradually exposes its alien spirit to his psyche. After
the Partition, his friend Jamal occupied a house that was originally a Krishna
temple. While Mohan is mentally involved in that past with images of Krishna
festivals floating in his mind, the awareness of the changed present records and
expresses itself in his Muslim mode of greeting Aslama-ulaikum, extended to a
cockroach crawling in the wash-basin. This does not sound ‘absurd’ at all! Towards
the end of the story, he grieves for Lord Krishna who seems to stand in front of him
264 S. Paul Kumar
stripped of his flute and crown, and of his glory, looking lonely and strange.
Surprisingly, all at once the Hindu God rushes for Namaz (Muslim prayers) as
though demonstrating the total surrender and conversion demanded by the changed
ethos. This too does not sound absurd… this is merely an announcement about the
changed history of his times!
The pre-Partition Sialkot had survived in Mohan and he had earlier drawn
sustenance from it for inter-community amity. Now, the post-Partition Sialkot has
made him conscious of his own religious identity which makes him shed his earlier
identity. Partition then, it is suggested, did not merely draw new geographical
boundaries, it cut across a common cultural heritage and focused on communal
separatism. Indeed, there was a need for the cognition of the emergent identities
through a separation from the comfortable past. Or else, the individual would no
longer be able to relate to the present.
When the cogently constructed plot of the traditional story failed to express the
new reality, new language and form for the new content had to be developed for
aesthetic articulation. The long shadow of modernism gradually flourished with
fresh themes and fresh styles to give expression to new realities in Hindi and Urdu
short story in the mid-20th century.
Even though ‘modernism’ is an elusive concept, it clearly reflects the new
dynamics of human consciousness in literature and designates a distinctive kind of
imagination expressed in different themes and literary forms. Literary modernism is
marked in both Hindi and Urdu short story through a conceptual grasp of the new
shift in the writer’s sensibility grown out of the changing social and cultural con-
texts. While ‘modernity’ is change and novelty manifest in socio–political or
economic terms and is an indication of progress, ‘modernism’ refers to the process
of assimilation of the ‘new’ into the evolving of a modern outlook which may
destabilize the tradition-bound secure human psyche. It may be emphasized that
modernization may be imitative of the western models, literary modernism cannot
be seen as mere westernization of creative expression here. The emergence of the
Modernist aesthetic in India is situated within the context of the country’s own
socio–political and cultural history. As the examination of the modern short story
suggests, the network of modern literary attitudes consolidated themselves some-
time in the 60s of the 20th century as a consequence of primarily the changing ethos
of the country with some impact of the literary and philosophical Modernist
movements in the West. An analysis of some powerful Hindi and Urdu short stories
indicates that ‘modernism’ is not a borrowed commodity, that it is indigenous and a
synthesis between ‘modernist ideas’ from within and without the country. The
modern temper in Indian literature also demonstrates an acute awareness of the
dynamism of tradition and cultural heritage.
References
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. 1976. Modernism 1890–1930, 26. Penguin Books.
Bedi, Rajinder Singh. 1976. Lajwanti. In Writings on India’s Partition, ed. Ramesh Mathur, and
Mahendra Kulsreshtha, 135. India: Simant Publications.
Calinescu, Matei. 1987. Five Faces of Modernity, 91. Durham: Duke University Press.
Conrad, Joseph. 1883. The Heart of Darkness, 69. Penguin Edition.
Dinkar, Ramdhari Singh. 1973. Aadhunik Bodh, 5–19. Hindi Book Centre.
Dutt, K.Guru. 1953. Existentialism and Indian Thought, 60. Bangalore: The Indian Institute of
World Culture.
Helmling, Steven. 1986. Joyce the Irresponsible. The Sewanee Review 94 (3): 450–470.
Kermode, Frank. 1966. The Sense of an Ending. London and New York.
Lawrence, D.H. 1932. Apocalypse, 97–98. London.
Mohan, Narendra (ed.). 1984. Urdu Ki Shresht Kahaniyan, Bharat Vibhajan, 133. Delhi:
Satsahitya Prakashan.
Orr, John. 1987. Making of the Twentieth Century Novel: Lawrence, Joyce, Faulkner and Beyond,
13. New York: Mark’s Press.
Paul, Joginder. 1983. Those Who Stayed Behind. Indian Literature 26 (6): 26–37.
Sattar, Qazi Abdul. 1972. Contemporary Urdu Fiction. In Seminar on Creative Writing in Indian
Languages, 70. Aurangabad: Marathwada University.
Shah, Ramesh Chandra. 1990. The Hindi Short Story and the Modern. In Conversations on
Modernism, ed. Sukrita Paul Kumar, 93. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
Spender, Stephen. 1963. The Struggle of the Modern, 17. University Paperbacks, Methuen & Co.
Ltd.
Chapter 14
Latin American Travellers
in Modern India
Minni Sawhney
1 Introduction
The task of this chapter is to analyse the writings of two Latin American writers—
Octavio Paz and Severo Sarduy—and their encounter with Indian modernity.
Though India had been under imperial sway since 1857, its modernity was not in
tandem with that of Latin America where early independence had led to a positivist
model of development by the turn of the century and modernization programmes
were underway. Modernity cannot be considered as congruent with modernization.
Both modernity and modernization are ongoing processes in India where the first
pioneers of modernity like Raja Ram Mohan Roy in the 19th century welcomed
modernity to reform Hindu tradition. The Indian version of modernity was different
and yet not completely alien as certain indigenous residues persisted in Latin
America and their intellectuals established connections with Indian traditions
keeping in mind their own pre-Hispanic civilizations. Their choices over what
traditions and places to privilege in their writing were often guided by the subtext of
their own cultures and hence their writings offer uncommon glimpses of contem-
porary India. The writings of these authors bring into sharper relief the hybrid
nature of Indian society where tradition uniquely adapts to modernity. In Latin
America, the uprooting of indigenous customs started with Spanish colonialism in
its early modern period in the 15th century. Alberto Moreiras has studied the
disjunction of Latin American culture with modernity and the paths taken to resolve
it. Commenting on Charles Taylor’s ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, he writes:
M. Sawhney (&)
Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
e-mail: minnisawhney@yahoo.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_14
268 M. Sawhney
(…) the world system, in its imperial expansion, determines modernity, (…) there is not one
modernity but many alternative ones and it is the task of reflection in the humanities to
understand them all in their historical specificities. (…) the history of capital and the history
of social power—understood as the constitutive state of the symbolic sphere in any given
social formation—are not the same thing. (Moreiras 2001: 4)
1.1 Framing Western Knowledge
Latin American writers attempting transcultural negotiations fell squarely within the
western framework even though their situation was problematic as the history of
capital had affected them differently. Being integrally western, the ideas in Latin
America were of European vintage. Within this context however, some writers
looked for extra disciplinary heterogeneity.1
The reception of these texts has had to pass inevitably through the sieve of the
influential theories of Edward Said and Ronald Inden, the dominant paradigm of
evaluation for writers who wrote about the East and the discourse that came to be
termed Orientalism. In Sect. 3, I discuss the Orientalist perspective and its (in)
adequacy for any appraisal of this work. Octavio Paz has been possibly the most
famous Latin American intellectual who engaged with India. As a cultural attaché
in 1952 and then ambassador from 1962–1968 in India, Paz’s oeuvre became a
landmark reference in western scholarship on India. Though his writings often
generated acrimonious debate in India and Mexico, he steadfastly maintained that
he offered a transcendent criticism or global explanations of phenomena and did not
want to get mired in partisan politics. His works involved the study of Hinduism
and Buddhism and included discussions on caste, while the Cuban Severo Sarduy
residing in Paris, his friend and close intellectual associate, sprinkled his prose
poems and interviews with references to millenarian Indian deities as well as sacred
Indian cities. This has tempted Indian scholars to view them from the Orientalist
rather than subaltern or post-colonial prism since they did not classify the Indian
themes and subjects in their works on the basis of marginality and deprivation. On
the other hand, it has to be stated Hispanic Orientalism had a tradition of plurality
and openness and an inclusive past with antecedents in the Arab cultures of North
Africa and our writers were seeped in these traditions. Their own continent and its
modernity had been subject to the racist interpretations of European thinkers in the
half century before their independence and it had made Latin American writers
sensitive to the disjunctions of other modernities. Their inspiration and methodol-
ogy consisting of comparisons, analogies, fusions, and repetitions came from the
European movement of Surrealism studied in Sect. 4. In this way they tried to build
bridges between Indian modernity and that of their own countries finding in the
latter viable points of reference for contemporary life. In Sect. 5 ‘Octavio Paz and
1
These ideas have been explored by Julia Kushigian in writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio
Paz, and Severo Sarduy. See Kushigian (1991).
14 Latin American Travellers in Modern India 269
India’, I have tried to detail the methodology Paz used in his analysis of India and
its imagery to show his very personal connections to this land. As I elucidate in this
section and in the next on Severo Sarduy, the analyses of Latin Americans did not
form part of a discourse. Millenarian cultures attracted them because, unlike the
Orientalists, they found similarities and not dichotomies to their own cultures. They
saw themselves in the light of the other (Kushigian 2016: 100).
2 The Latin American Gaze: Antecedents
The fascination of Latin American literati with the Orient began with the Modernist
movement at the dawn of the 20th century and its most well-known pioneer Rubén
Dario who tried to transcend the prosaic world view of 19th century Realism. This
cosmopolitan desire made him fill his works with images taken from the cultures of
an East considered exotic.2 The stylistics of Dario’s texts owe much to the tendencies
of French literary movements like Paranassianism that thrived on inspiration from
overseas. Darío never came to India, the Orient of his texts was imaginary, populated
with idyllic scenes of princesses, Bengal tigers, and fantasy flora and fauna. Other
Latin American diplomats posted to the subcontinent imbibed these tendencies and
the Chilean consul to British India in 1907, Augusto D’Halmar wrote the suggestive
travelogue Nirvana in 1918. The Chilean ambassador Miguel Serrano posted to
India during 1953–1962 would delve deep into Hindu mysticism. He had been the
follower of an esoteric cult group that claimed allegiance to a ‘Brahmin elite’ in the
Himalayas. Though his search for the Holy Grail would be thwarted by the inac-
cessibility of Mount Kailash in Chinese occupied Tibet, he nevertheless attempted a
synthesis based on the alleged affinities between Tantrism and Nazism. His writings
may smack of fascism but as a diplomat he befriended Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira
Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. In the predilections of these writers we can sense the
influence of the European literary movement Surrealism. A disgust with materialism
and dehumanizing mass technocracy, the valourization of cultures considered out-
side the pale of western civilization underlay the writing of these travelling intel-
lectuals who doubled their bureaucratic duties with philosophy.
3 The Orientalist Paradigm and Writings on India
According to Edward Said, western engagement with knowledge of the Orient can
never be considered as shorn of imperial power domination. In Orientalism (1978)
Said deconstructs western scholarship of the Arab world along the power/
In collections like “Medallones”, Darío talks about fakirs, the rajas and elephants and makes
2
mention of the Ramayana.

270 M. Sawhney
knowledge axis laying bare the biases that elevate Europe at the cost of the Middle
East. In Imagining India, in line with the Saidian framework, Ronald Inden focuses
specifically on western writing on the subcontinent. Inden has pointed out three
kinds of texts on South Asia: the descriptive, commentative, and the explanatory.
Retracing Indology to William Jones and the Asiatic Society and then analyzing
seminal texts on India such as those of J. S. Mill, Percival Spear, and A. L. Basham,
Inden declared that the propensity of these writers to reduce exuberant reality to
stereotypes was a constant. Human agency amongst the Indologists is transferred
onto caste, which is responsible for all the particularities of Indians. Political
institutions find no place in this typology as texts filled with ‘inexplicable’
descriptions are interspersed with commentary and explanations which have the
function of distorting Indian reality. According to Inden, Indologists distort reality
in much the same way as it is distorted in dreams (a la Freud) through the processes
of displacement and condensation. In his words:
The Indian classification of rituals as Renou construes it is not a scientific, rational one. The
product of a mind that leaps between the extremes of an occult mysticism and a finicky
scholasticism, it is characterized by both of the forms of distortion described by Freud.
(Inden 1986: 414)
Inden concludes that:

The result of the discursive work within Indology and the affiliated human sciences is first
to present the reader in a descriptive passage with some ‘facts’ on the Other. The account
then (or concurrently) represent the Other in commentative terms as radically different from
the Self. (…) But these threatening differences are not allowed to remain. The Indological
text also goes on to provide (or evoke) an explanation for the differences. These expla-
nations or interpretations are almost always naturalistic (…) It is necessary for the Other to
be the way he/she is because of its environment, its racial composition, or its (inferior) place
on the evolutionary scale. (Inden 1986: 416)
These naturalist ideas would have been familiar to our writers as they formed the
stuff of debates in Europe in the late 18th century on the unsuitability of Latin
America for independence due its climate, the simplicity of the indigenous Indian
population, and the laziness of Spanish Americans born in America. In his
three-volume The History of America (1799) Henry Robertson wrote about ‘the
enervating influence of a suffocating climate and the desperation of their cause for
nationalism had totally destroyed their minds’.3 For this reason I contend that
although Orientalist writers might have been read by Paz, they would not have
found the latter’s methodology viable or attractive as these ideas had been notorious
in America.
3
Brading writes. Robertson escribió de los criollos: […] por la influencia enervante de un clima
sofocante, por el rigor de un gobierno celoso y por la desesperación de alcanzar esa distinction a la
que aspira naturalmente la humanidad, el vigor de su mente está tan totalmente destruido que gran
parte de ellos pasa la vida en satisfacciones lujuriosas mezcladas dentro de una superstición vulgar
todavía más degradante” (Brading 1973).
3.1 Paz and Orientalism
Paz’s categories of analysis differed considerably from the authors of the Orientalist
rubric that Said or Inden had studied. Unlike the Indologists, he did not study only
ancient India and when he did there was no rushed idealization. Nor did he con-
centrate only on Hinduism but also on Buddhism and when he contemplated
modern India the outward sheen of cosmopolitanism did not distract him. He never
positioned the East as directly opposed to the West and neither did he view the
Orient as a homogenous mass. His interest in cultures like the Japanese is well
known. There was no reification of the national character in Mexico or in India as
he always emphasized that the Mexican character was a result of his history and
circumstances. India attracted him because he immediately recognized its singu-
larity because Mexico was also like that. In his words:
The fact of being Mexican helped me to see the difference of being Indian—from the
difference of being Mexican (…) To a certain extent, I can understand what it means to be
Indian because I am Mexican. (Paz 1995)
In The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) Paz dwelt on the subject of Mexican reserve
and dissimulation and the masks people used to hide their real self. He attributed
these traits to the alienation which was characteristic of a society that had entered
modernity with too much haste. The remedy he had suggested was a dialogue with
the world in order to recover the past.
In In Light of India (1997) Paz drew an analogy with this reserve and the caste
system that also acted as a defence mechanism to keep away the outside world.
According to Paz, India had devised a homegrown ingenious method that was
based on nature. It revolved around purity and food habits. In Hindi the word meant
jati or species that originated in the natural world. Each species fit into a structure
and labour was accordingly divided. What was sought was not a melting pot of
races as in the United States, but the integration of each species in a wider system.
One of the unfortunate consequences, however, was the superiority of one over the
other. It was also a way of fitting the flow of life in an atemporal structure. In the
Indian caste system, Paz found a reflection of the Oedipus myth because the need to
search for difference in the external world was nullified. There was no need for
diversity because everything remained within the family. The caste system was like
the mother’s womb because it offered protection against change. On the other hand,
contemporary western societies valourized change and the individual. However, in
this context Paz also added that though he was far from being a defender of the
caste system yet it was hypocritical for capitalist societies to judge this system as
they had created uniformity but not equality. He also blamed modern societies and
capitalism for the lack of equality (Paz 1995). Paz’s ideas on caste and nationalism
in India and his assertion that caste stratification was not conducive to nationalism
raised hackles in certain circles. His assessment, however, was based on the idea
272 M. Sawhney
that the ideology of nationalism, at least in its European avatar, was exclusivist and
the Hindu religion absorbed communities and tribes.4
4 Surrealism and Latin America
Many Latin Americanists considered surrealism with its emphasis on automatism,

privileging of anarchy, valourization of dream images and, of course, its anti
imperialism in literature and the arts, as a movement after their own hearts. Indeed,
the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s magical realism was initially
considered a kind of native surrealism by critics till he averred that his language
was not beyond realism but part of Latin American reality. Techniques of dis-
placement, metonymy, and collage are endemic to Latin American art and literature
and we have only to recall expressions like ‘banana republics’ and the United Fruit
Company which became a metonym of imperialism etc. Surrealists were guided by
unconscious motives beyond rationality. If the tendencies enumerated above are
characteristic of the writings of Paz and Sarduy, we can see how the critics of
Orientalism found in them the same condensation and displacement techniques that
Freud had identified in dreams. However, the Latin Americans never attempted to
appear factual or empirical or offer authoritative commentary on India as they saw
or read it. They alighted on the phenomena that caught their attention in order to
find common ground with the real or onirical in their own countries.
4.1 Surrealism and Octavio Paz
In The Bow and Lyre, (El arco y la lira) Paz lays down his ideas about poets and
how poetry, through its use of cyclical time and myths, does not ignore history or
politics but transcends it. Though written in historical time, poetry transcends
history because it connects with a mythic time. With his capacity to investigate and
discover the roots of language, the poet finds archetypes hidden in the collective
consciousness and with his intuitive knowledge he perceives the correspondences
and irregular time of history. As Hugo J. Verani has pointed out, this was a way of
connecting with other times and circumstances and of enhancing perceptions of
4
According to Paz: “The opposition between history and caste turns into open hostility when
history takes the form of progress and modernity. I am referring not only to democratic liberalism
and socialism, but also to their rival nationalism. Castes constitute a reality that is indifferent to the
idea of the nation. Modern Hindu nationalism, as we will see, is a threat to caste because it replaces
the specific differences of each caste with an ideological reality that encompasses all. Nationalism
erodes the differences among the castes, which are their essential reason for being, as democracy
erodes the hierarchical system. Modernity, in its two directions, is incompatible with the caste
system (Paz 1995).
Otherness. Paz was the poet–flâneur, the wandering observer of modernity disen-
chanted with capitalism and its attendant greed, who through his travels connected
with different consciousness (Verani 2009: 38–68). Paz never reneged in his
commitment to history or politics when he wrote poetry. Surrealism would be one
of the pillars he would rely on to sustain his thesis that there was no contradiction
for him between his political beliefs and poetry. As he wrote:
La diferencia con las otras tendencias o, más bien, la superioridad del surrealismo sobre
ellas, es de orden espiritual (…) el surrealismo guardó intactos sus poderes de indignación
moral. Fue un foco secreto de pasión poética en nuestra época vil.
The difference with other tendencies, or, actually the superiority of surrealism over them, is
of a spiritual nature (…) surrealism kept intact their powers of moral indignation. It was a
secret focus of poetic passion in our vile era.5
The influence of Surrealism is evident in Paz’s writings: curious juxtapositions,

unusual images, and artistic conflations that he would draw to compare phenomena
in Mexico and India or Hinduism and Christianity.6 Paz had in mind a ‘universal
syntax of civilizations’ a la Levi Strauss. The pairs he made in India he structured
under body and non-body. He thus began a series of comparisons. In Tantric
Buddhism and Protestantism, he found similarities as both were reform movements
but while Buddhism was a compromise with Hinduism, Protestantism was a break
with Christianity. While Tantric Buddhism signified fusion, Protestantism was a
break and signified separatism and nowhere was this reflected as clearly as in food
habits. The Tantric banquet was marked by excess, while the Protestant meal was
frugal. In Figures and Figurations, a compilation of poems, sketches and pho-
tographs by Paz and his wife Marie Jose we come across the poem ‘India’. Paz
refers to ‘the thousands of candles, burning and shining, that the faithful launch
each night’ (Paz and Paz 1999: 34).
To those familiar with the imagery of India, the candles on the river hearken to
the holy city of Varanasi. In The Monkey Grammarian, a book of 29 chapters, often
considered a long poem, the hamlet of Galta is the setting for this work but the
narrative veers from Churchill College, Cambridge to Aztec markets in historical
Mexico City and back to the crumbling ruins of an old fort in a village on a side
road from Agra to Jaipur.
In a poem like ‘Himachal Pradesh’ various historical periods, places, and situ-
ations coexist. The tone is mildly critical of the world order: ‘The legal johnnie
from Nagpur hooks the foreigner on the verandah of the dak bungalow and offers
him, in a honeyed English, a tiff, a basket of plums from his garden, a map a bite of
5
These lines have been quoted from the work of Hugo Verani by Enrico Mario Santí in Stanton
Anthony (2009).
6
In Letras Libres the Mexican poet and critic Adolfo Castañon has compared a passage on women
from Sundarakunda in the Ramayana (translated into Spanish by Juan B. Bergua) with a passage
from Octavio Paz’ The Monkey Grammarian on the same subject. Castañon’s objective is to
illustrate the poetic reworking that Paz effected in his readings of Indian life and classical literature
(Castañon 2014: 43).
274 M. Sawhney
curry, reliable news of the region, (…) his wife observes him obliquely muttering
insults in Hindustani’ (Paz: 1935–1955).7
4.2 The Discontents of Surrealism
Paz was heavily influenced by the writings of the French sociologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss and as can be seen through their intellectual and life trajectories, the
two intellectuals never had it easy. They were friends of Andre Bretón, the author of
the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. Breton had travelled to Mexico which he called the
most surrealist country in the world and though he met Paz in France only after the
World War II, he considered him to be the poet who most embodied the spirit of
Surrealism in Mexico. At the time and in its afterlife, Surrealism faced much flak
especially because it reached out to the Other, to Oceania and Africa in search of
inspiration. French ethnographers like Lévi-Strauss were also targeted. Both had a
belief in cultural relativism and Paz had been interested in other cultures since his
visit to Japan in 1952. (Paz was also profoundly interested in modern art. His work
on Marcel Duchamp reveals his inclination for ideas that questioned the premises of
the western world and resulted in the invention of an experimental poetry without
rules) Lévi-Strauss’s refusal to rank cultures hierarchically had come in for serious
criticism among his contemporaries in France. The attack was veiled and Roger
Caillois brought in the question of methodology in the work of ethnographers that,
he alleged, sprang from a personal unscientific and arbitrary eccentricity. According
to these critics, scholars like Lévi-Strauss were not just anti-Europe, but their work
displayed a reverse Eurocentrism because they elevated other cultures in order to
degrade Europe, that is, they did not study cultures for their own sake but in order to
find unfavourable points of comparison against Europe. The ethnographers of the
1950s like Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, Alfred Métraux Georges-Henri Rivière had
been surrealists in the 1930s and their work according to their detractors, more than
a study of other cultures, was in fact an experimentation and relied on anti-western
prejudice. In Caillois’ words,
Those whose names I have just given did not love the masks from the New Hebrides, the
Negro rhythms, and the trances of voodoo because their professional activities led them to
recognize their cultural worth; on the contrary, they chose ethnography because a relentless
need for defiance drove them to prefer primitive sculpture over the portal of Chartres, jazz
over Mozart, and the spasm of possession by spirits in which they do not believe over the
cult of a God in which they probably believe even less. But one who is guilty of being the
God of their father and which they are ashamed of having once believed in.8
I have cited these critics not to revisit an essentially European debate but to
underscore the value of the work of ethnographers and scholars who had ventured
7
Qtd. in Charles Tomlinson (1979).
Caillois, Roger. ‘Illusions à rebours’ [pt. 2], 67. qtd in Denis Hollier, 2007.
8
to write about other countries and had drawn them into the field of discourse. They
were taken seriously in their time as intellectuals who were too pro-East and were
endangering the western sense of self. Ruben Darío’s use of eastern imagery had
been theoretically subsumed by the Modernist movement but Paz, Lévi-Strauss and
others did try an epistemic solidarity with the cultures they studied. They sought to
draw other cultures into the orbit of global discourse.
The attacks demonstrate the non-mainstream character of Surrealism as a
movement and the vagaries in the life of a scholar of other cultures and modernities.
After 9/11, the attack on Surrealism was resuscitated. Jean Clair director of the Paris
Picasso Museum wrote on the 21 September 2001 in the French newspaper Le
Monde,’ Le surréalisme et la démoralisation de l’Occident’, (Surrealism and the
demoralization of the West) that the surrealist ideology had never stopped longing
for the death of an America seen as materialist and sterile and for the triumph of an
East which was seen as the depository of the values of the spirit. For the surrealists
the fight would only end when the Orient emerged the victor. But three generations
of French intellectuals had been milked on the surrealists according to Clair. The
last lines of Surrealism and demoralization are:
Nous avons tous appris à lire chez Eluard et chez Aragon. Comment tuer nos pères?
Héritiers du surréalisme, comment le condamner? Nous restons donc sans voix quand nous
voyons prendre corps sous nos yeux – et de quelle horrible façon! – les textes que nous
avons vénérés dans notre adolescence. (Clair 2001)
(We have learned to read with Eluard and Aragon. How can we kill our fathers? Inheritors
of Surrealism how can we condemn it? We are left speechless then when we see before our
eyes and in such horrible fashion, the texts that we venerated in our adolescence.)
The deeper narrative in these haunting and words would undo, if heeded, a
whole generation of bridges across cultures. Paz and Sarduy, adherents of
Surrealism, had gone beyond mere negativity as writers against the dominant logic
of the West, instead they had tried to carve out a space for a possibility of singular
thought and alternative presents.
5 Octavio Paz and India
Paz’s primary goal was always the investigation of Mexican identity and he looked
to India for ideas to understand it better. As can be seen from his works such as El
ogro filantrópico (1979) and Posdata (1970), Paz was disappointed and appre-
hensive about the bureaucratic state in Mexico as well as in the USSR. But sig-
nificantly he also lamented the abdication of European powers during the Cold War
when they had let the United States take all the decisions as concerned their
security. The paranoia in the diatribes against him by the critics of Surrealism as
well as within Mexico, India, and France were misdirected as what Lévi-Strauss
and Paz had tried to do was open up a space for other ideas and actors within the
western framework. ‘Dreamed alternative singularizations of thinking; a different
276 M. Sawhney
kind of global dream but not an alternative to it’, just micro discourses that chal-
lenged homogeneities.9
In his writing on Mexico starting with The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), Paz had
harked back to the pre-Colombian era to find the answers to contemporary Mexican
conundrums. In his encounter with Indian modernity, Paz used the same
methodology.
His interest in Hinduism and Buddhism led him to write Alternating Current
(1967), The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Conjunctions and Disjunctions (1969)
and In Light of India (1995). He became a comparativist looking for clues in ancient
Hinduism and relating them to the Iberian and Aztec civilizations. His work was
sociological and literary and relied heavily on that of Lévi-Strauss whose Tristes
Tropiques (1955) formed the basis of the study for Paz’s Claude Lévi-Strauss o el
nuevo festín de Esopo (1967). In the latter, Paz had laid down the methodology he
used to make these transfers and analogies between one culture and another. Like
his mentor Lévi-Strauss, Paz used myths from different cultures and by applying the
anthropologist’s theories, Paz formed a corpus of ideas, an interpretative grid
through which truth became mutually convertible from one civilization to another
and thus a universal structure is discerned. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss had
confessed to something similar.
In proposing the study of mankind, anthropology frees me from doubt, since it examines
those differences and changes in mankind which have a meaning for all men, and excludes
those peculiar to a single civilization, which dissolve into nothingness under the gaze of the
outside observer. (Lévi-Strauss 1955/1992: 58)
In his book on the French thinker, Paz explains the ideas of various anthro-
pologists that he had found particularly useful. Dwelling at length on Lévi-Strauss’s
The Raw and the Cooked but also referring to Elementary Structures of Kinship and
The Present by Marcel Mauss, Paz described how Lévi-Strauss, through his use of
geology, Marxism, and Freud, had viewed a landscape as being made up of a
variety of elements: rocks, valleys, trees, ravines that seemed disordered but pos-
sessed a hidden structure. It was a meeting place of different times and spaces. Like
language, a landscape was also diachronic and synchronic, the condensed history of
different ages and a network of relations (Paz 1967: 11). The invisible layers gave
sense to the visible structure. Similarly, each culture and each language had an
internal coherence made up of forms of kinship and myths, and every system
possessed its own rationality which could be compared to other systems. Myths
across cultures had certain common features and were also universal.
9
“Dreamed alternative singularizations of thinking; a different kind of “global dream”, to mimic
Richard Barnett’s expression, but not an alternative to it. Those singularizing dreams today
orchestrate the panoply of antiglobal discourses within global discourse. They are more and more
thought of as microdiscourses, places where a singularity is enacted and an intensity is affirmed,
sites of a resistance that is also a withdrawal, a monadic pulsion, a punctual, discardable identity,
or a customized difference: in any case, whatever can be salvaged as the sheer possibility of an
alternative articulation of experience outside global homogenization” (Moreiras 2001, p. 69).
In this manner, the anthropologist showed the way from the visible to the hidden
layers and the relation between feelings and rationality. The myths of a culture were
also diachronic and synchronic: myths were speech they referred to past times but
they lived anew each time they were told (Paz 1967: 28). The language of myths
was nevertheless a para language because it said something other than what its
words said.
The permutations and combinations of words from the myths of one civilization
to another is done through mediation between oppositions. A word like agriculture
in one civilization becomes life force in another. Through mediation, the word
‘war’ a synonym for death becomes hunting. The work of the mediator is to resolve
contradictions which he manages by transcending oppositions. No element has a
meaning by itself. Meaning comes through the context and a symbol only becomes
a symbol through its translation into another context. The social group that elab-
orates a myth is unaware of the reason of its existence, he merely repeats a fragment
of a discourse like repeating a verse of a poem whose beginning and end he does
not know (Paz 1967: 37). The same happens to the listeners. No one knows that the
story is part of an immense poem. Myths pass from person to person though they
might be unaware of it. One has to be far from this orchestra and symphony to
gauge the nature of the myths. Thus, civilizations communicate with each other
without it being known by those who are entrenched in these civilizations. The
mediator between civilizations can be an anthropologist, a diplomat or even the
flâneur, the itinerant writer and observer, an emblematic figure of modernity. They
were the representatives of a particular culture who converted oppositions into
reconciliations through permutations and combinations. Like Lévi-Strauss, Paz
would also use analogies in order to compare civilizations and his essays and poems
are sprinkled with references to India.
Paz’s affinities with the models of Lévi-Strauss would be in line with the poet’s
own choice of later themes because Lévi-Strauss with his study of Bororo and Ge
myths had overcome the estrangement of non-western societies and had brought
them at par with the West by maintaining that primitive societies also classified and
made connections. As Lévi-Strauss says in the chapter, ‘A little glass of rum’ in
Tristes Tropiques,
We must accept the fact that each society has made a certain choice within the range of
existing human possibilities and that the various choices cannot be compared with each
other: they are all equally valid. (Lévi-Strauss 1955/1992: 385)
Summarizing Lévi-Strauss, Paz affirmed that the thinking of the societies of the
past or non-western societies might be atemporal yet they were not outside history,
the history of yesterday flowed into that of today. The end was like the beginning.
Myths thus offered a solution by doing away with single causal explanations. Like
poetry they also offered the idea of a future past. Paz referred his readers to the
chapter ‘Taxila’ in Tristes Tropiques, where three of the greatest spiritual traditions
according to Lévi-Strauss—Hellenism, Hinduism, and Buddhism lived side by side:
278 M. Sawhney
Distant springs have mingled in their waters. I myself a European visitor meditating on the
ruins represent the missing tradition. Where better than on this site, which offers him a
microcosm of his culture, could an inhabitant of the Old World, renewing the links with his
past, meditate on his destiny. (Lévi-Strauss 1955/1992: 396)
Paz drew analogies between myths and poems and myths and music. Both music
and poems transcended the historical epochs they were written in and both were
intelligible though not translatable because their translation created other poems
(Paz 1967/1993: 54–55).
Paradox and metaphor were Paz’s twin instruments that he used in his com-
parison of different civilizations. In Conjunctions and Disjunctions (1969), he
explained pairs of contrasting concepts the repressive versus the explosive and
eroticism versus indifference that were manifested in different civilizations at dif-
ferent times. In his words:
Cyclic time is another way toward absorption, transformation, and sublimation. The date
that recurs is a return to previous time, an immersion in a past which is at once that of each
individual and that of the group. As the wheel of time revolves, it allows the society to
recover buried, or repressed, psychic structures so as to reincorporate them in a present that
is also a past. (Paz 1969/1990: 10)
Lévi-Strauss had said something similar when contemplating Asia:

It is tempting to imagine that after four or five thousand years of history, the wheel has
come full circle—that the urban industrial bourgeois civilization first begun in the towns of
the Indus valley was not so very different in its underlying inspiration from that which was
destined to reach its peak on the other side of the Atlantic, after a prolonged period of
involution in the European chrysalis. When the Old world was still young it was already
anticipating the features of the New. I therefore mistrust superficial contrasts or the
apparently picturesque; they may not be lasting. (Lévi-Strauss 1955/1992: 130)
However, in Conjunctions… Paz also made clear that he was far from positing a
time lag suffered by the East as concerned its progress and evolution.
For the moment we can merely repeat that soul and body, face and sex organs, life and
death are different realities that have different names in each civilization, and therefore,
different meanings. This is not all: it is impossible to translate the central terms of culture
into those of another: mukti is not really liberation, nor is nirvana extinction. The moment
we examine this difficulty carefully, we see that we are faced not so much with a diversity
of realities as a plurality of meanings. (Paz 1969/1990: 34)
As we can see Paz’s analytical categories were not Orientalist: he did not think
that India was at an earlier stage of development, rather he felt that the past always
impinged on the present in Mexico and India. Significantly, he always looked for
analogies between Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism and offered pene-
trating comparisons of Hinduism and Islam.
6 Severo Sarduy and India
The Cuban, Severo Sarduy, who maintained a lifelong conversation with Paz both
in person and through his work is also a figure associated with India. Nurtured in
the Paris of the late 1960s and a member of the Tel Quel group10 he travelled to
India in 1971 and 1978 spending time in places that ranged from Mysore during the
first trip, to Kulu in the Himalayas in the second, as well as Varanasi and Kolkata.
He felt especially attracted to Mahayana Buddhism. Like the early Paz, the Indian
experience for Sarduy was also a means to better understand his own culture. The
critic Francois Wahl has remarked on how the asphyxiation Sarduy felt in the West
was cured with the overwhelming vitality of India where no homogenization ever
seemed possible (Wahl 2008: 94). His eclectic interests ranged from masks, dis-
guises, paintings in museums architecture and landscapes with an emphasis always
on alterity. France was his adoptive land and he soaked up the reigning hippie
ambience, an atmosphere that ranged from being openly anti-western and Judeo
Christian to a reflection on the possible role that the East could play during this
crisis of values in the West.
Much before his journeys into South Asia, Sarduy had been a seeker of
hybridization and mestizaje in his own country and had researched the Chinese
presence in Cuba. Familiar with the writings of Juan Goytisolo, he had investigated
Turkey and the Maghreb and was immersed in the history of Al Andalus and the
Arabic language. As in Paz, the notion of ‘immigrant imaginary’ in Latin
Americanism, can be seen in his work and trajectory. His writings of different
locales and experiences within his own country was a counter imagining of Latin
America in which the Iberian and European population played centre stage (See
Masiello 2001: 144–145).
Unsurprisingly, he then moved on towards the rest of the world. In his discovery
of India, Sarduy fled from stereotypes. Instead he approached it in a ludic fashion
with the sense of play that had also characterized his earlier work even though he had
been acquiring knowledge of Buddhism through his journeys in the countries where
it had been disseminated, like Indonesia and Sri Lanka. He began an intense study of
Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism after his journeys to Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim.
Gustavo Guerrero avers that Sarduy’s love for Buddhism is palpable in the red colour
of his paintings, in the theme of some of his poems and also his fascination for the
repetitive quality of mantras (Guerrero 2008: 26). The ludic element though never
faltered even amidst the serenity of the appropriation of Buddhist philosophy. In El
Cristo de la Rue Jacob we read his self-confessed admiration for the mantra in these
terms: he is purported to have said that his life was structured by four kinds of
repetitions: writing, beer drinking, flirting, and painting (Gallo 2008: 61).
10
His interests were different from those of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes or Julia Kristeva who
looked to China and Maoism as an antidote for the disappointment they felt after what had
happened in the Soviet Union. See Ruben Gallo (2008: 99) “Notas sobre el Oriente de Severo
Sarduy”.
280 M. Sawhney
From my vantage point in India I think his amalgamation of Buddhist and

Baroque thought can be traced to an early text, ‘El barroco y el neobarroco’ where
there is a glimmer of his later evaluations of the Orient. The Baroque in his view
was destined from the beginning to be ambiguous and semantically dispersed with
an uncontrollable economy of expression. The Latin American Neo Baroque was its
progeny and referring to its ‘proliferation’ he wrote:
Otro mecanismo de artificialización del barroco es el que consiste en obliterar el signifi-
cante de un significado dado pero no remplazándolo por otro, por distante que éste se
encuentre del primero, sino por una cadena de significantes que progresa metonímicamente
y que termina circunscribiendo al signficante ausente, trazando una órbita alrededor de él
(…) (Sarduy 1972: 170)
Another mechanism of the Baroque consists in obliterating the signifier of a given signified
but not by replacing it with another, however distant it might be from the first, but through a
chain of signifiers that progresses metonymically and ends up circumscribing the absent
signifier, tracing an orbit around it. (…)
(…) lenguaje que, por demasiado abundante, no designa ya cosas, sino otros designantes de
cosas, significantes que envuelven otros significantes en un mecanismo de significación que
termina designándose a sí mismo, mostrando su propia gramática, los modelos de esa
gramática y su generación en el universo de las palabras. (Sarduy 1972: 176)
(…) language that howsoever abundant, does not designate things but other indicators of
things, signifiers that envelop other signifiers in a mechanism of signification that ends up
designating itself, showing its own grammar, the models of this grammar and its generation
in the universe of words.
When writing about the Latin American Baroque he talked about its break with
homogeneity its stridency and chaos, its repulsion of logocentrism and its
metaphorization of the Order or any order under discussion. This was the real
revolutionary Baroque he concluded.
The excess and overflow of signification and the dissolution of oppositions was
what Sarduy had admitted Paz had opened his eyes to. This was conjoined with a
critique of the subject and the idea of impermanence. In the poem, ‘Palabras del
Buda en Sarnath’ (1991) (‘Buddha’s words at Sarnath’) we can read these ideas.
No hay nada permanente ni veraz (There is nothing permanent nor true)
(…_El sujeto no es uno, sino un haz (The subject is not one but a mesh of dispersed
fragments) (Translations mine)
The ephemeral and tenuous idea of the subject in this poem is in line with
Sarduy’s earlier ideas of the Neobaroque and ‘the obliteration of the signified’ and
the ‘disappearance of a single centre’. Transposing these ideas on to Buddhism he
would write:
En Occidente escribe todo el que tiene – o cree tener – algo que comunicar y que de cierto
modo esgrime esa experiencia y la considera como un modelo; en el Tíbet, junto al techo
azul y nevado del mundo, el sujeto que escribe, escrutador de la tinta y del vacío, sólo
pretende borrarse, desaparecer en la noche de las enormes letras, llegar a través de la
paciente escritura a esa disolución del yo que es uno de los posibles rostros del budismo.
(Sarduy 1989: 236)
(In the West, he who writes has—or feels he has something to communicate and in a certain
way he uses this experience and considers it a model; in Tibet, under the blue snowy roof of
the world, the subject who writes, searcher of ink and emptiness, only tries to erase himself,
disappear in the night of the enormous letters, arrive through patient writing to the dis-
solution of the I which is one of the possible faces of Buddhism. Translations author’s)
Sarduy’s novel Cobra analysed from a plethora of perspectives has been

described as post-modern, a term used probably to account for its decentredness, the
numerous scattered allusions to India in the fabric and life of the ‘double’ trans-
vestite principal protagonist and the playfulness associated with the lack of a central
idea and fixed agenda. The bricolage, the bits and pieces of lives, texts, dispersed
objects, as well as the transvestism is another attempt to break binaries. Cobra is
originally a doll in a house of pleasure girls or courtesans who have suggestive
names like Sontag, Cadillac, and Dior. She becomes human with the administra-
tions of an Indian discovered by the Madam of the house in the steam of a Turkish
bath in a Marseille suburb.
She was so amazed when, despite the prevailing vapor, she distinguished the proportions
with which Vishnu had graced him—all those hieroglyphs inscribed there, used by destiny
to astonish us without revealing their nature—that, without knowing why, she thought of
Ganesa, the elephant god. (Sarduy 1972/1995: 9)
This ‘geographical–historical’ fantasy devised by Sarduy culminates in Cobra

changing her sex in the middle of the novel and joining a teddy boy gang in
Amsterdam. A realist reading of this kind of literature seems impossible so perhaps
it is more reasonable to follow Sarduy’s own injunctions at the beginning of each
paragraph that introduce us to these characters and their origins.
Writing is the art of digression. Let us speak then of a smell of hashish and of curry of a
stumbling basic English and of a tingling trinket music. (Sarduy 1972/1995: 6)
And a paragraph later, ‘Writing is the art of recreating reality’. ‘No. Writing is
the art of restoring History’.
I realize how a novel like this could lend itself to charges of being a purveyor of
Orientalist images a la Said. Cobra has been described by James McCourt who
introduces the text as the narrative of the Latin American subconscious. (James
McCourt, ‘Introduction’: xiv) In the latter there existed no negative or opposites and
according to him writing is ‘shriveled when drenched in politics’. The differential
power equation theory of Orientalism, of writing from the West inevitably relying
on stereotypical images to bolster the western sense of self is inapplicable to Sarduy
and Paz. Instead all landscapes are prone to change. The ‘pleasure dome of the
Orient’ can exist in Marseille in a Turkish bath as well as in Amsterdam where
Cobra transforms into a man.
Throughout the novel, however, there is a parody of the New Age spiritualism of
the credulous West as well as its consumerism and narcissism. Cobra’s guru travels
in a jet and after seducing a lover who is the most blonde amongst all his followers,
he pronounces ‘Barbarism your name is the Western World’ (Sarduy 1972: 101).
282 M. Sawhney
The Madam of the house of dolls returns after a trip to India laden with the usual
trinkets and goodies. Her trip is thus described by the narrator:
There wasn’t an inflatable Buddha, nor a life-sized celluloid elephant with two archers on its
back, no silk, sari, satin, wash and wear Indian silk that the Madam, (…) did not haggle, pillage
and carry off at auctions, (…) For the Féerie Orientale, the dream of every doll in the Theater,
she returned to the West bent under a mound of Indian junk where each piece of tripe claimed
fantastical adjective which the diligent metteur en scène pronounced with ornamental pho-
netic relish, spattering it with sickening Brahmanic references. (Sarduy 1972/1995: 31)
In a recent study, Julia Kushigian has differentiated the Orientalism described by

Said from that of Sarduy and others by stating that the latter ‘elects to
self-Orientalize through critical self-reflection’. As she says, ‘My theory of
self-Orientalism is not, primarily, a marker of difference or essentialisms, but is a
reflection of the self in light of the Other (Kushigian 2016: 99, 100). In her view
Hispanic Orientalists like Paz and Sarduy have opened up a liberatory space from
which they contest the static discursive framework of the West. Through the above
examples from Cobra, we can see how Sarduy deconstructs the melodramatic and
false consciousness and the almost caricaturesque mode in which the West
understood India in the Paris of the 1970s.
Francois Wahl, Sarduy’s lifelong companion, has commented that the writer was
nothing more than a tourist in India, who joyfully found confirmation of all the
readings he had made about the subcontinent. In an interview Sarduy also averred
the following:
We are not talking about a transcendental, metaphysical or profound India but on the
contrary, about an exaltation of the surface and I would say costume jewelry India. I believe
[and I would have liked it if Octavio Paz agreed—and I think he does] that the only
decoding Westerners can do, that the only unneurotic reading that is possible from our
logocentric point of view, is that which India’s surface offers. The rest is Christianizing
translation, syncretism, real superficiality. (Sarduy 1972/1995: ix)
In Cobra, the Buddhist religion in which all the oppositions dissolved, is

privileged. Here sin and grace coexisted, the yin reception and negativity lived with
the yang or negative energy.
7 Conclusion: Latin American Interest in Indian

Modernity
Despite his assertions on the ‘imperial agents’ of Orientalism, Said never really
discounted the movement of ideas and intellectuals. In The World, the Text, and the
Critic (1981), he lauded Raymond Schwab’s The Oriental Renaissance (1950)
describing him as an orienteur rather than orientaliste in these words, ‘Dualities,
opposition, polarities—as between Orient and Occident, one writer and another, one
time and another—are converted in his writings into lines that are crisscrossing, it is
true, but also drawing a vast human portrait’ (Said 1983: 251).
Indeed, a blanket rejection of all Orientalists would gratuitously forestall the

possibility of dialogues and bridges with the West in Indian modernity. The pre-
mises of Orientalism were in any case a western critique of itself, no less fascinating
for us as onlookers in the East. But since it continues to be an influential method of
appraisal for western writing on ancient India, I have been compelled to include my
reasons for discarding notions of Orientalist prejudice in Paz and Sarduy. Their
surrealist techniques of condensation and displacement were sometimes used by
Orientalists but as I have tried to show the surrealist approach is irreverent, spon-
taneous, and ironic. Surrealism privileged the recondite as opposed to the main-
stream and since the whole world was its arena, it was accused in Europe for
valourizing the enemies of the West.
This was so because alternative realities long represented in the European or
western imagination were being investigated and so the writer’s gaze could not be
innocent, it was socially interpellated—shot through by the hierarchies and conflicts
of the culture of the representing subject but in India the objective of Latin
American writers was a desire to transcend the hermeneutic circle of their own
cultures that were imbricated with the nation state and widen their own discursive
space. Transcultural exchange took place because two systems of thought came
together leaving open the possibility of the emergence of a new mutant from this
encounter.
Both Paz and Sarduy perceived that their forays into Indian modernity were a
counter to the hegemonic perspective of their own spaces. They had stepped out of
traditional Latin Americanism in which they felt discomfited because though it had
been born of difference, it had homogenized difference. Entrenched in Latin
American modernity like their continental forebears they had branched out to India
in the throes of its own multi-faceted modernity. With their incongruous surrealist
approach they threw light on hidden facets of Indian culture, history, and archae-
ology. Their images of Varanasi, Galta, Sarnath, Madurai, and the Humayun’s tomb
in their poems and essays had the effect of creating new myths of Indian sites rather
like those of Paris in France. In effect, through unusual comparisons (Tantric
Buddhism and Protestantism, Eve and Prajnaparamita the Mother in Buddhism) Paz
gave arcane rituals the status of the universal when he compared them to those in
Europe and America. They punctured Orientalist discourse by discarding
dichotomies and always aiming for common ground. India’s modernity attracted
them because Paz saw therein a millennia of history, and Sarduy the reconciliation
of binaries he so missed in the West.
References
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Mexico D.F.: Ediciones Era.
Caillois. 2007. ‘Illusions à rebours’ [pt. 2], 67. qtd in Denis Hollier, Papers of Surrealism Issue 7,
2007: The Use-Value of Documents, p. 2.
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Castañon, Adolfo. 2014. El mono gramático: Cima y Testamento. Letras Libres 183: 42–45.
Clair, Jean. 2001. Le surréalisme et la démoralisation de l’Occident. Le Monde.
Gallo, Rubén. 2008. Notas sobre el Oriente de Severo Sarduy. El Oriente de Severo Sarduy
Madrid: Instituto Cervantes.
Guerrero, Gustavo. 2008. El Oriente de Severo Sarduy. In El Oriente de Severo Sarduy. Madrid:
Instituto Cervantes.
Inden, Ronald. 1986. Orientalist Constructions of India. Modern Asian Studies 20 (3): 401–446.
Kushigian, Julia. 1991. Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press.
Kushigian, Julia. 2016. The Politics of Orientalism and Self-Orientalism in a South-South
Dialogue: Revisiting Hispanic Orientalism from Said to Sarduy. In Sur South, Poetics and
Politics of Thinking Latin America/Indian, ed. Susanne Klengel, et al. Madrid, Frankfurt:
Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955/1992. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin.
Masiello, Francine. 2001. The Art of Transition. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moreiras, Alberto. 2001. The Exhaustion of Difference. The Politics of Latin American Cultural
Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Paz, Octavio, and Marie Jose Paz. 1999. Figures and Figurations. New York: New Directions.
Paz, Octavio. 1969/1990. Conjunctions and Disjunctions. New York: Arcade Publishing.
Paz, Octavio. 1974. The Monkey Grammarian. New York: Arcade Publishing.
Paz, Octavio. 1967. Claude Levi Strauss o el Nuevo festín de Esopo. Barcelona: Seix Barral.
Paz, Octavio. 1995. In Light of India. London: Harvill Press.
Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sarduy, Severo. 1972/1995. Cobra, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. Illinois State University, Dalkey
Archive Press.
Sarduy, Severo. 1972. El barroco y el neobarroco. In América latina en su literatura, ed. César
Fernandez Moreno. México: Siglo Veintiuno.
Sarduy, Severo. 1989/2008. Para recibir la aurora. La fabricación de los manuscritos sagrados en el
Tíbet. In El Oriente de Severo Sarduy. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes.
Sarduy, Severo. 1991. Palabras del Buda en Sarnath. cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/escritores/sarduy/
antologia/palabras.htm. Accessed 26 Jan 2017.
Verani, Hugo J. 2009. Octavio Paz: El poeta como caminata. In Octavio Paz Entre poética y
política, ed. Anthony Stanton. México: El Colegio de México.
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Madrid: Instituto Cervantes.
Chapter 15
Chinese and Indian Attitudes Towards
the Past: A Paradoxical Appropriation
Nicolas Idier
1 Introduction: From Modernity to Post-modernity
To compare two phenomena1 is an appealing methodology, which must yet be

handled with great care. The extensive application of the concept of modernity is
one of the main characteristics of the two largest rising economies whose power has
constantly risen through the past revolutions and independence movements of the
last century. One of the main characteristics of these two largest rising economies,
one which gained impetus in the last century through various revolutions and the
other through its independence movements, is the extensive application of the
concept of modernity. Japanese Meiji revolution (1868)2 is an example of that
which marks the turn in modern Asian times where modernity as a concept is linked
with the progress of sciences and, more extensively, to a scientific worldview with
impacts on culture debates. The question of modernity is related to dynamics of rise
1
According to Immanuel Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the
Sensible and Intelligible World (1770), phenomena are described as the appearances, which
constitute the our experience; noumena are the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute
reality. It is a major assertion in the cultural studies: All of our synthetic a priori judgments apply
only to the phenomenal realm, not the noumenal. As the question of essentializing can only be a
phenomena, this essentialization is not linked to any reality (Ding an sich) still one can approach it,
thanks to comparison. Hence, our attempt to compare Chinese and Indian attitudes towards the
Past.
2
Meiji Restoration, in Japanese history, the political revolution in 1868 that brought about the final
demise of the Tokugawa military government – thus ending Edo period (1603–1867) – and, at
least nominally, returned control of the country to direct imperial rule under Mutsuhito. In a wider
context, however, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 came to be identified with the subsequent era of
major political, economic, and social change – the Meiji period (1868–1912) – that brought about
the modernization of the country, and Westernization in many extents.
N. Idier (&)
Institut Francais en Inde (IFI), CREOPS/Sorbonne-University, New Delhi, India
e-mail: nid@ifindia.in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_15
286 N. Idier
or decline: birth, rise, decline, end, and eventually, post-modernity, as if modernity

was a living concept and history, a body where modernity would attain maturity.
1.1 An Intricate Link Between Modernity, Democracy,

and Revolution
Chinese intellectuals have used modernity extensively during the first period of the
Revolution, as a leitmotif to become ‘civilized men’. With the modern comes the
desire of individualism, political freedom of choice, equality. In a nutshell:
modernity becomes the synonym for revolution. These objectives, if not ideals, are
at the core of the new aesthetics of modernity in China during the first three decades
of 20th century.3 The famous poet-turned-politician Guo Moruo proclaims in a
poem published in 1920, Heavenly Dog: ‘I worship myself; I am an iconoclast.’
Modernity seems to have never left Chinese intellectuals and politics. For instance,
the Four Modernizations were goals first set forth by Zhou Enlai4 in 1963, and
enacted by Deng Xiaoping5 starting in 1978, to strengthen the fields of agriculture,
industry, national defense and science and technology.6 The most emblematic text
of the Democracy movement during the post-Mao era has been The Fifth
Modernization, which began as a wall poster by Wei Jingshen7 in Beijing’ Xidan,
3
As Perry Link, Chancellorial Chair at the University of California (Riverside), is writing in a
recent article: “Guo Moruo was extreme in several ways, but his career describes a general pattern
in twentieth-century Chinese letters. In the early decades of the century there was a sense of
challenge, adventure, and openness in the Chinese literary world. Break with the past! Explore
Western literature! Investigate society! Plunge into the future! Build a better China! Few writers in
those days saw any reason to set limits on their imaginations or submit to constraints on their
writing. But in the 1930s, Japanese attacks on China began to bring a change of mood. The threat
of invasion seemed to warrant a concentration on resistance, and this in turn was taken to require
coordination of national efforts in order to defeat the enemy. Writers began to accept, indeed to
embrace, limits on what they published.», in The New York Review of Book, 16 November 2016.
4
First Premier of the People’s Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in
January 1976.
5
cf. Vogel, Ezra. 2011. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Cambridge, MA,
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
6
Evans, Richard 1995. Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China (2nd ed.). London:
Penguin Books.
7
Wei Jingsheng, born in 1950, was in many ways typical of his generation. Growing up in the
“new China,” he was well instructed in Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought. During the Cultural
Revolution Wei, like many young Chinese, took advantage of the chaotic times to travel widely
around the country. Like many of his generation, he was “sent down” to the countryside during the
latter part of the Cultural Revolution. After doing some time as a soldier in the People’s Liberation
Army, Wei returned to Beijing, where he was working as an electrician in the Beijing Zoo in the
late 1970s. Wei Jingsheng was particularly active in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978–
1979. Like other activists, he wrote posters expressing his ideas and pasted them onto the
“Democracy Wall” on a street corner in Beijing. The poster calling for China to pursue a “Fifth
15 Chinese and Indian Attitudes Towards the Past: A Paradoxical … 287
the 5 December 1978.8 To a certain extent in China, modernity and revolution have
been so bound to each other that many intellectuals in the 90s preferred to jump to
the post-ism9 to end the revolution.10 Post-modernity is not only opening a path to
hostility towards modernity, enlightenment, and democracy as proxies for western
hegemony, it is corresponding with an obsession with Chinese and national iden-
tity.11 Young academics at Beijing University claimed that in the 1990s, China had
entered a ‘new post-era’ (hou xin shi qi) linked, on the one hand, to global
post-modernity, and freed, on the other, from western historicity and
meta-narratives.12 Interestingly enough, this post-modernity shaped by theories
borrowed once again from the West, while they performed a critical role in the
contemporary Europe or United States, paradoxically served the conservative aim
of subverting the revolutionary radicalism that had dominated past decades.13 The
two main questions raised, if not answered, in this chapter are a direct consequence
Modernization” was written in response to the Communist Party’s emphasis on building the “Four
Modernizations” (i.e., agriculture, national defense, industry, and science/technology). In an
unusual gesture, Wei signed the poster with his name and address. His activities — including this
poster, co-editing an unofficial magazine, and another poster in which he suggested that Deng
Xiaoping was becoming a new dictator — earned Wei Jingsheng serious attention from the
authorities. He was arrested in 1979, charged with passing “military secrets” to a foreigner, and
sentenced to 15 years in prison. Released in 1993, Wei was arrested after six months and sentenced
to another 14 years on charges of “counter-revolution.” He was released in 1997 and exiled to the
United States.
8
“I would like to ask everyone: What do we want modernization for? After all, some men feel that
the age of The Dream of the Red Chamber must have been perfectly all right, because men were
free to read, write poetry, and fool around with women. One needed only to open his mouth and
food would be provided, only raise an arm to be dressed. Well, today’s privileged class get to see
foreign movies and live like gods. Such a life-style is quite inaccessible to ordinary folk. What the
people want are the happy days which they can truly enjoy and which are not worse than those
enjoyed by foreigners. All want prosperity, the kind of prosperity which is universal and which can
only result from increased social productive forces. This is obvious to everyone. However, there is
still something overlooked by somebody. Can people enjoy good living when social productive
forces have been increased? Now the questions of authority, of domination, of distribution, and of
exploitation arise.» in Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century,
compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 497–500.
9
Wang, Hui and Yu, Guolian (eds), 90 niandai de houxue lunzheng (Post-ism in the 90s), Hong
Kong, Chinese University Press, 1998.
10
Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution. China and the limits of modernity, Verso, London, 2009.
11
These last two summed up in the title of the 1994 « manifesto », « From Modernity to
Chineseness » (Cong xiandaixing dao zhonghuaxing) by Zhang Fa, Fang Yiwu and Wang
Yichuan.
12
cf. Chen Jianhua in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, edited by Edward L. Davis,
Routledge, 2005: “While Wang Ning elaborated his postmodern criticism in the context of
Chinese literature, Zhang Yiwu extended its use in broadly cultural terms, prasing the recent
flowering of popular culture in urban China for its democratic power, while denouncing Chinese
modernity in the twentieth century as created and represented by the May Fourth iconoclasts. »
13
Zhao Yigeng, « Post-ism and Chinese New Conservatism », in Ershiyishiji (Twenty-First
Century), 27: 4–15, Hong Kong, 1995.
288 N. Idier
of this conceptual paradox: is modernity inevitably defining itself in opposition with

the past? Or is what is called tradition merely a way to be modern in a more
nationalist way?
1.2 Modernity as a Revolt Against the Past
In his poem titled A Season in Hell, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)
wrote:
One must be absolutely modern.
The vision of modernity he has is a violent process, a revolt against the past:
No hymns! Hold the ground gained. Arduous night! The dried blood smokes on my face,
and I have nothing behind me but that horrible bush.14
Does this ‘horrible bush’ depicted in Rimbaud’s chef-d’oeuvre refers to the past,
the days before, therefore tradition? There is many an example in art history of this
rebellious mindset, and the 19th century in Europe has been, with Romantic and
post-Romantic painting, literature, poetry, music and philosophy, a period of time
where modernity has been a constant struggle. Modernity is a permanent quest.
There is nothing as idealistic as modernity or more subjective as being modern. If
one tries to find a definition to the concept of modernity, a good way to begin would
be to consider its opposite. And there, a question: what is the contrary of modernity
if not tradition?
The paradox is: What is modernity if not the projection of something experi-
mented in the past? Does the logic of this projection differ from one country to
another? One cannot understand the nature of modernity and its political and cul-
tural acceptances without glancing at the past. In India, history writing and, more
widely, the Indian attitude towards the past, is per se a vivid and impassioned genre,
sometimes referring to some mythical aspects, sometimes looking nostalgically to
time periods on the edge of modernity.
Historians should never ignore the specificity of any cultural space, and com-
parative studies can lead to many interpretative blurring assertions. But still, when
the US magazine Time titled its November 2011 issue ‘India vs. China—Which
Economy Will Rule the World? A Time Debate’, it induces a comparison, which
may be, in many ways—if not in the economic sense—relevant.
The elephant and the dragon are two symbols directly coming from imperial
times both in India and in China, and it is interesting to notice how the use of
archetypes is still needed to depict these modern countries. Modernity not only has
a strong relationship to tradition, but also may be unable to step outside it.
14
Translation from French by Louis Varèse, in Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson (ed.),
Poems for the Millenium, Volume Three, University of California Press, 2009, p. 795.
1.3 Quest for the Past: A Common Goal in Young Countries

with Ancient History
For better enquiry into the difficult subject of modernity, one must follow in the
footsteps of sinologist Pierre Ryckmans, alias Simon Leys15 who, in 1986, pre-
sented in an essay16 that explores the Chinese attitude towards the past, and the
possibilities of comparison between India and China.
China is the oldest living civilization on Earth. Such a unique continuity naturally implies a
very complex relation between a people and their past. It seems that there is a paradox at the
heart of this remarkable cultural longevity: cultivation of the moral and spiritual values of
the Ancients appears to have most often combined with a curious neglect or indifference
(even at times downright iconoclasm) towards the material heritage of the past.
This attitude towards the past cannot be farther from the Indian one. Yet, many
common points are observable in both countries’ quest for modernity, one of the
most important being the daily presence of the past through various practices:
reading of the Classics, religiosity and identity, physical training and medicine, and
even the production of cultural goods within the past is often depicted as a Golden
Age.
In his essay, Leys stresses the parallel phenomena of spiritual preservation and
material destruction. Leys organizes his essay into several chapters: art collections;
ideological background: the cult of the past in Chinese thought; a case study: the
‘Preface to the Orchid Pavilion’.17 Each of these chapters may be relevant to make a
15
Simon Leys is the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans (1935–2014), born in Belgium and settled in
Australia in 1970. He has witnessed the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and he is considered as
one of the first Sinologist to have understood and expressed the reality of Chinese politics during
the Maoist era. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was
Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. Trained as an Art
historian, he translated and commented on the Treatise on Paintingby Shitao and is a great
Classical studies specialist and expert analyst of contemporary culture, and a writer and literary
critic who has brought attention to some of the most important treasures of Chinese culture, and
instilled a strong sense of justice towards politics. Cf. Idier, Nicolas. 2011. Pierre Ryckmans (alias
Simon Leys): Mise en perspective disciplinaire et apport méthodologique en histoire de l’art et
sinologie, Paris IV-Sorbonne.
16
Originally delivered as the Forty-seventh Morrison Lecture on 16 July 1986, at Australian
National University.
17
Arch-famous calligraphic work by Wang Xizhi (307–365), the greatest calligrapher of all ages. It
had been here that, during the late spring of the Ninth Year of the Everlasting Harmony (Yonghe)
reign period of the Eastern Jin dynasty (i.e., 353 CE), Wang Xizhi had gathered forty-one of his
friends and relatives in order to undertake the Spring Lustration Ceremony, one whereby the evil
vapors of the winter past were washed away in the eastward flowing waters. Twenty-six of the men
named as being present produced between them a total of thirty-seven poems, and towards the end
of the day, we are told, Wang Xizhi, formerly employed in the Imperial Library but then serving in
in Guiji as the General of the Army on the Right, wrote his immortal preface to this collection, on
‘cocoon paper’ with a ‘weasel-whisker brush’, in 324 characters and 28 columns. This text has
become the most famous and praised piece of calligraphy ever, as much for the beauty of the
290 N. Idier
key-analysis of India: Art collections mean a lot in a country with a constant

importance of privately-owned collections; ideological background would show the
extent to which the Indian identity is built on a sense of narrative fiction; and the
case study in India would naturally differ from the one in China, but still can be
useful, as India is cultivating some very deeply rooted feelings towards some
artifacts or, as in China, textual corpus.
Written in 1986 and in spite of the many changes induced by the economic
growth and sociological transformation of China, Ley’s essay is still very accurate
in its essence. What may surprise us more is its accuracy towards the India of the
two first decades of the 21st century, as if the path to modernity has to go through a
process of physical elimination of the past all together with a renewal of a more
mental and even psychological present of the past in everyday life, including in
politics. The use of a recomposed ‘Hindutva’ since the 2014 Indian elections may
be related to this very same logic: the more a government enhances its modern-
ization process (such as the process of making cities ‘smart’), the more it roots its
ideology in a traditionally built-in identity. Some ideologists and professional
politicians have even linked it with the idea of an Indian renaissance, the last step of
decolonization.18
A common point in Chinese and Indian attitudes towards the past would be
antiquarianism which in both cases is restricted to a narrow category of objects
(mainly, objects of rituals in China, of religion in India, the court and palatial
treasures, and paintings). As Leys is pointing out, ‘what is remarkable is that in
China the development of antiquarianism actually reflected a highly abnormal sit-
uation. It resulted from a spiritual crisis and represented a new desire to define and
affirm a Chinese cultural identity.’19 Would it be a similar process in India?
In the building process of political and national modernity, both in China and
India, the past is often used as an ideological tool. Many Indian novels are
exploring the so-called tradition, like the bestselling mythological fictions by Amish
Tripathi, and sometimes linking them with very current trends, such as environ-
mental issues. Science fiction is not the only genre digging into the past to get some
modern and futurist insights. The popularity of Devdutt Pattanaik is also a sign of
this connection between the past and the building process of modernity, even more
so as a genre coming straight from a very westernized trend: the use of traditional
philosophy in the world of management and business. The globalized publishing
content as for the subtlety of its form. Cf. Campbell, Duncan. 2009. Orchid Pavilion: An
Anthology of Literary Representations. China Heritage Quarterly 17.
18
To give one single example: Subramanian Swamy, Indian politician and economist, renown
specialist of China, author of numerous books including the influential Hindutva and National
Renaissance, Har Anand Publication, 2010.
19
Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness. Collected Essays, New York Review Books Classics,
2011–2013, p. 290.
industry has produced huge numbers of management books inspired from The Art
of the War by Sunzi,20 and it is interesting to witness the same kind of books
coming from Indian philosophy by Indian writers.
2 Fiction: Literature as an Open Field of Reinterpretation
Literature must be at the core of any research about tradition and modernity both in
India and in China, because they are two countries of great literary corpus and
receptive continuity from ancient times to the present. As literature is in many ways
a very new concept incorporating various trends of written and oral production in
both the countries, this chapter will focus on the way ancient texts are reinterpreted
in a context of identity seeking.
2.1 Writing Systems and National Unity
In the case of China, there is much specificity, the most important being the unity of
the written language. The Chinese scripts constitute an independent ‘graphic lan-
guage’ rather than the written transcription of any spoken tongue.21 The main
consequence is the uniqueness of this graphic language and the so-called classical
Chinese, therefore the homogeneity of the written tradition in China, using the same
‘graphic language’ despite the regional variations of the colloquial Chinese. This
normalization of the language is linked to many historical factors, none of which
can be found in India. The profusion of literary traditions in regional languages has
produced in India a diversity even for the most classical and even sacred texts as the
Mahabaratha and many Hindu canons. The existence of various continuing tra-
ditions of the same text between north and south India, for instance, is not a subject
of debate. Lately, a mechanism of cultural revitalization is occurring in India and
abroad, where Sanskrit becomes an ideological tool. The polemic around Sanskrit
scholars like Wendy Doniger or Sheldon Pollock has even gone viral. Doniger’s
The Hindus: An Alternative History, despite many positive reviews22 was recalled
by its publisher in 2014 for alleged inaccuracies and bias, and for allegedly not
being respectful towards the Hindu tradition, as a result of a campaign launched by
20
Reputed author (flourished 5th century bc), of the Chinese classic Bingfa (The Art of War), the
earliest known treatise on war and military science.
21
Léon Vandermeersch, « La langue graphique chinoise », in Etudes sinologiques, Paris, Presses
universitaires de France, 1994, p. 241–247.
22
Library Journal, Times Literary Supplement, New York Reviews of Books, The New York Times,
The Hindu.
292 N. Idier
the Hindu American Foundation since 2009.23 Pollock has been directly criticized
by a non-institutional expert for the same reasons, one of them being an ‘outsider’
unable to understand fully the holiness of Sanskrit tradition.24 Hinduism itself has
become the religion of Sanskrit that any regional, non-Sanskrit practice is shrugged
off as subaltern and false Hinduism. In some cases, these so-called ‘subaltern’
traditions are seen as an insult to the fundamentalist of Sanskrit scriptures. In a
post-colonial context, this acute sensitivity underlines the will to promote a national
identity. An important divergence between China and India is this attitude towards
the western study of their classics: neither the Chinese State administration nor
university feels concerned by classical Chinese studies abroad, because even though
the nationalism in post-Mao China is largely based on a reinvention of the ‘National
Studies’ (Guoxue) and the promotion of a ‘Chinese essence’ (Guocui), the most
important texts of this tradition do not have the status of holy texts. On the other
hand, Indian classical corpus’ aura of sacredness brings suspicion on any secular
way of studying these texts. Blasphemy may become a term of literary studies.
2.2 Fictionalization of the Tradition as a Marketing Strategy
While scholars are advised to be respectful of the integrity of the sacred texts, the
paradox of this sensibility is that many Indian writers can use the deities and ancient
text to build entirely new stories, which gain a very large readership, as if there
were a greater tolerance to fictionalization. As Romila Thapar points out: ‘Epics,
23
The Hindu American Foundation sent the following letter to the President of the National Book
Critics Circle (NBCC), Jane Ciabattari, expressing its disappointment of the short-listing of
Professor Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative Historyand urging NBCC not bestow the
2009 nonfiction award to it : “Unfortunately, instead of answering her many Hindu critics, Prof.
Doniger sweepingly labels her Hindu critics as Hindu fundamentalists, never bothering to analyze
the legitimacy of arguments stemming from adherents of the faith in which she claims
scholarship. In her well-received piece, “Oh, But You Do Get It Wrong”, Aditi Banerjee, Esq.,
points out that “Doniger ignores the prolific response to her work by the American Hindu com-
munity, including dozens of published articles, countless public conferences, and repeated calls for
debate and dialogue between the academy and the Hindu-American community.” To add to Ms.
Banerjee’s last point, Prof. Doniger represents what many believe to be a fundamental flaw in the
academic study of Hinduism: that Hindu studies is too often the last refuge of biased non-Hindu
academics presenting themselves as “experts” on a faith that they study without the insight,
recognition or reverence that a practicing Hindu or non-Hindu striving to study Hinduism from the
insider’s perspective would offer. While the Foundation believes in the freedom of expression, it
takes issue with Prof. Doniger’s skewed and superficial analyses and the value, or lack thereof,
they bring to the study of Hinduism. A Freudian true-believer, Prof. Doniger may believe that sex,
desire and repressed urges animate the human condition, but modern/humanistic psychology has
challenged this school of thought as limited and limiting. Using Freudian analysis, then, to
retrospectively find psychosexual motivations of Hindu deities seems egregiously inappropriate
and deliberately provocative.
24
Rajiv Malhotra, Battle for Sanskrit: Dead or Alive, Oppressive or Liberating, Political or
Sacred?, Harper Collins India, 2016.
when not composed as a formal literary genre, carry by their very nature an element
of embedded history.’25 This nature of the epics explains a very specific attitude
towards the past. A writer can use the tradition in the same way the epic itself has
been composed: picking some elements of a tradition and bringing them again to
the attention of a new audience. One such writer to have gained the status of
bestseller is Amish Tripathi.
Tripathi is the author of the Shiva Trilogy, the fastest selling book series in
Indian publishing history. With a fourth book, Scion of Ikshvaku, the series has sold
over 3.5 million copies in the Indian subcontinent since 2010. Forbes India has
ranked Tripathi among the top 100 celebrities in India. This kind of achievement is
not usually attributed to fiction writers.26 The very large community of readers
following Tripathi’s novels is young and urban, as is clearly shown by the
numerous book events organized in bookshops and festivals all across the country.
The concept behind Tripathi’s fictions is the one rooted in the Hindu concept of
Karma: writing about Shiva, one of the Hindu Gods, he bases the whole story on
the ideal that all Gods were once human beings. They have attained the ‘God’ status
thanks to their deeds and actions as humans. Therefore one can understand how this
concept encourages the readers to consider the importance of individualism.
Personal identification with gods, especially Shiva, is empowering to the young
readership, who consider themselves as the new potential heroes, if not gods. The
second use of tradition is strongly rooted in morality. Good and evil, strength and
weakness, truth and untruth, right and wrong.27 This may be one very important
meaning of tradition: a strategy to impulse morality into modernity. Fiction is used
as a vector of morality, which may be the common point between the numerous
followers of Tripathi’s novels. The inherent strong belief of people in mythologies
and legends has spawned several Indian fantasy novels: Samit Basu’s The Simoqin
Prophecies, The Manticore’s Secret and The Unwaba Revelations; The Devourers
by Indira Das; Shweta Taneja’s Cult of Chaos: An Anantya Tantrist Mystery to
name some recent examples.
25
« Epics, when not composed as a formal literary genre, carry by their very nature an element of
embedded history. These are not histories per se, but they incorporate fragments of narratives
pertaining to what was believed to have happened. Initially, and thereafter for some time, they are
after oral compositions, until they are collated and connected through a narrative. They therefore
tend to be compositions later in time from the events described, among their functions being the
recalling and reconstruction of earlier events. There is in their evocation of the heroic glories of
earlier times an almost nostalgic view of the past. Neither the events nor the personalities are
necessarily historical; nevertheless, the assumptions of an earlier society are evident in them. » in
THAPAR, Romila, The Past Before Us. Historical Traditions of Early North India, Permanent
Black, 2013, p. 144.
26
Lopex, Rachel, « How Amish Tripathi changed Indian publishing », in Hindustan Time, 27 April
2013.
27
The examples are numerous. Every page or so has a moral note as “Strong people stick to their
morals, no matter what the trials and tribulations, Weak people, many a times, do not even realize
how low they have sunk.”, in The Secret of the Nagas, Westland, 2011.
294 N. Idier
2.3 Subaltern Fiction: Reinventing Tradition to Fight

Inequalities of the Past
Indian tradition not only inspires fantasy fiction but also poetry, fiction, illustrated
books, children books. It may even be crossed with subaltern theories, as in the
celebrated Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, by the French-Indian
author Kartika Naïr.28 This book of poetry proceeds as a retelling of the epics from
the point of view of its hitherto minor female characters, creating a seminal feminist
text. Another author made a similar attempt: Amruta Patil, born in India and based
in France, is the author of graphic novels Kari (2008), Adi Parva: Churning of the
Ocean (2012) and Sauptik: Blood and Flowers (2016). Adi Parva is based on the
Mahabharata and the tradition of oral storytellers and its sutradhaar (narrator) is the
river goddess Ganga. Comic book historian, Paul Gravett, selected it as one of
2012s best graphic novels. After Adi Parva, Patil returns with a revisionist retelling
of an epic lore. In Sauptik, the Kurukshetra war is long over. Ashwatthama, warrior
with the unhealing wound, looks upon the world he once knew. The narrative is an
ecological tale as much as it is a mythological one—emphasizing our forgotten
connection with the elements, rivers, forests, and soil.
Shashi Tharoor, another pre-eminent Indian writer, whose many novels are
translated abroad, has himself created a breach in 1989 with the publication of The
Great Indian Novel. This fictional work takes the story of the Mahabharata and
recasts it in the context of the Indian independence movement and the first three
decades post-Independence. In this satirical novel, figures from Indian history are
transformed into characters from mythology.
Tripathi, Tharoor, Naïr have, of course, very different perspectives of the re-use
of Mahabharata and ancient intertextuality, but clearly they are using the so-called
roots of Indian identity to create a modern sense of Indian identity. A sentence from
Naïr’s epic summarizes this process of creation of a modern identity and building of
an entirely new tradition: ‘I am writing to you from tomorrow’.29
2.4 Tradition and Popular Culture for Children: The Case

of Chhota Bheem
This strategy can even be found on TV, for example, with the series Chhota Bheem,
meant for a young audience, which was created in 2008 and remained as recently as in
2016, one of the greatest hits on Indian TV and the internet. Chhota Bheem is an Indian
animated comedy adventure series created by Rajiv Chilaka, initially trained as a
software engineer, who later went on to study animation at the Academy of Art, San
28
Naïr, Kartika, Until the Lions. Echoes from the Mahabharata, HarperCollins Publishers India,
2015.
29
Idid, p. 156.
Francisco University. Chilaka was conferred with an honorary doctorate of humane

letters by the San Francisco University in 2016. Premiered in 2008, Chhota Bheem
focuses on adventures of a boy named Bheem and his friends in the fictional kingdom
of Dholakpur. In this series, Bheem and his friends are usually involved in protecting
Raja Indravarma, the king of Dholakpur and his kingdom from various evil forces.
Sometimes they also help other kingdoms. It is one of the most popular animated
series for children in India. The very creative way of interpreting Indian mythology
made this series a success.30 Chilaka had conceived his adventurous young hero with
the strength and attributes of Bhima, from—once again—the Mahabharata.
A comparison point can be found with Chinese trends to wuxia (martial arts) ani-
mation such as the very significant Kung fu Panda, which has been part of the
hit-parade of Chinese theatres, without being a Chinese production.31 The success of
such audiovisual production can also be measured with the merchandizing strategy,
which overflows the marketplace. Under the umbrella of Green Gold Animation Pvt.
Ltd., established in 2001 by Chilaka, Chhota Bheem is the only show that has suc-
cessfully evolved as a licensing and merchandizing brand with a huge range of
products such as comics, DVDs, apparels, gifts/novelties, back to school items,
puzzles, games, stationeries, home décor etc. Fictionalizing tradition is therefore very
profitable, in both a capitalist and symbolic way. To conclude, the Mahabharata plays
the same function in defining the Indian cultural identity as the ‘Preface to the Orchid
Pavilion’: not so much as a religious text—which is proven by the very large literary
freedom a writer can take with it—but as a referential stone mark, even if contro-
versially diverse.
3 Non-fiction and Debating Tradition
Emeritus Professor of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, awarded by the Kluge

Prize of the US Library of Congress in 2003, Romila Thapar questions this identity
process, and the way tradition is being reinterpreted. Her recent essays are dedicated
to the role of intellectuals and the question of patriotism, which reminds us of some
Chinese debates, including the one about the origins of Chinese civilization.
In the nation-building process, archaeology is usually used as a legitimization
tool. The question of antiquarianism32 is fundamental to prove one’s identity. In
30
Balakrishnan, Ravi, « How homegrown hero Chhota Bheem took on Mickey, Spidey, Oggy, and
won », The Economic Times, 25 May 2016.
31
Brzeski, Patrick, “Kungfu Panda 3 becomes China’s biggest Animated Film Ever”, The
Hollywood Reporter, 28 February 2016.
32
“By “antiquarianism” I mean not only the taste and passion for all things antique but also their
various corollaries: the development of archaeology, the activities of art collectors, dealers and
forgers, the aesthetics of archaism (“ancient is beautiful”, the poetry of the past, meditation over
ancient ruins as a literary games, etc. etc.). in Leys, Simon, Notes to “The Chinese Attitude Towards
the Past”, The Hall of Uselessness. Collected Essays, New York Review of Books, 2013, p. 549.
296 N. Idier
many ways, modernity is not enough to build a complete identity. As said in the
poem by Arthur Rimbaud, modernity needs to be fed with some past, some history,
even if the goal is to get rid of this past.
3.1 The Political Challenge of Origins
In China, the historiographical debate about the ‘origins of the Chinese civilization’
was very hectic during the nation-building process of 20th century. In his article,
‘Archaeological Research on the Origins of Chinese Civilization’, the archaeologist
Xu Pingfang evaluated the evolution of research in the origins of Chinese civi-
lization. From the end of the 18th century to the 1940s, he believed that capitalism
and western colonialism led historians to believe that Chinese culture drew its
origins from the West. Archaeological research carried out since the founding of the
People’s Republic of China contradicted this theory, but until 1960, there was a
lack of factual evidence. It was not until 1976 that the Russian archaeologist
L. S. Vasilev explained that the origins of Chinese civilization lay in the cultures of
the Middle East and Central Asia. During the years 1980–1990, discussions on the
exact circumstances of the origin of Chinese civilization continued, but all histo-
rians agreed on the combination of cultures specific to Chinese territory itself and
external influences. In 1989 and 1991, symposia were organized to redefine the
terms of the problem and to assimilate all current research. Until now, the question
remains unresolved. The reason is simple: the question of origins is more psy-
chological than historical, and ends mostly with ideological perspectives.
3.2 Crisis of Acculturation, Crisis of Civilization
Thapar points out that the biggest difference between Indian and Chinese civi-
lizations is not such an established fact: written Chinese history versus unwritten in
Indian one.33 History and archaeology of early India, as it is for early China, is part
of what constitutes the modern:
The ordering of the past as history becomes all the more necessary when there is a crisis of
acculturation with new groups having to be adjusted in existing society, but with the
probability that new identities will have to be forged. There is therefore a need to be
inclusive in periods of historical change. The justification for setting aside social codes, or
33
« Generalizations about the nature of a society or civilization, when they take root, spread
adventitiously. A couple of hundred years ago it was stated that Indian civilization was unique in
that it lacked historical writing and, implicitly therefore, a sense of history. With rare exceptions,
there has been little attempt since to examine this generalization. So entrenched is the idea now
that one almost hesitates to argue for a denial of this denial of history. », « Searching for Early
Indian Historical Writing » in The Past Before Us. Historical Traditions of Early North India, p. 3.
reiterating other codes, often comes from a reading of the past, as for instance in the form of
examples. Given the range of non-conformity in those times, it might have been useful to
keep the past a trifle vague so that innovations could be more easily accommodated.34
The very intense trend of antiquarianism in both India and China can find a
factor of explanation in these lines by Thapar. The double movement of global-
ization and nationalism blooming in most of the countries, including European
Union member states and the US, can be defined as a ‘crisis of acculturation’, which
results in some extreme reactions. In the essay On Nationalism, a compilation of
three pieces by Thapar, A. G. Noorani and Sadanand Menon,35 an attempt is made
to rethink the question of nationalism and culture, which is the core of Indian quest
to identity. Menon, a public intellectual from Chennai, draws a line between
national culture and cultural nationalism: ‘Incipient, amorphous, contradictory and
always-in-formation, national consciousness or nationalism precedes the emergence
of all nations’.36 Using Rabindranath Tagore’s famous quote, ‘the nation is the
greatest evil’, from the essay Nationalism, first published in 1917 in the aftermath
of the World War I, which later emerged as the acme for nationalistic tendencies,
and also Albert Camus’ metaphor of the plague being roused for the edification of
mankind conceived in the aftermath of the World War II (from The Plague coin-
cidentally published in 1947), Menon argues that ‘cultural nationalism, by any
definition, is a rogue version of nationalism, which is already present in concepts of
the nation state’.37 Five aspects pertaining to the phenomenon of cultural nation-
alism are touched upon by Menon: engagement with the past, politics, issues of
gender, constructions of culture, and its fascination with violence. Here comes the
very topicality of the question, related to the concept of modern identity.
3.3 Imperial Amnesia and Nationalist Feelings
Ancient History is not the only one to be concerned by this process. Colonial times
are also under the spectrum. In May 2015, Tharoor was invited by the Oxford
Union to speak on the proposition, ‘Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former
Colonies’. The debate was posted on the web by the union and, as written by
Tharoor in the preface to An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India,38 it went
34
Thapar, op.cit., p. 700.
35
Aleph, 2016.
36
op.cit., p. 110
37
op. cit., p.112.
38
Aleph, 2016 .
298 N. Idier
viral in a very short span of time.39 The virulence of the debate shows the extent to
which post-colonial India is still struggling with its identity. In the meantime, some
other books have gained popularity by praising the richness of colonial times. This
is therefore a second dimension in the attitude of Indians towards the past: an
ambiguous attitude. The many attempts to reinforce the use of the Hindi language
and even Sanskrit studies in schools is linked to this definition of a new Indian
identity. Tharoor is writing about this ‘Imperial amnesia’. The relationship to
globalization cannot be ignored either. ‘The East India Company has collapsed, but
globalization has ensured that its modern-day successors in the former imperial
states remain the predominant instruments of capitalism’. Pankaj Mishra, author of
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, suggested in 2012
that the liberalist-capitalist ‘rise of Asia’ of which India is a contemporary epitome
is also ‘the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of western modernity, which
turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous’. Ending his idea
with a typical Tharoor twist of cleverness and humour, he says: ‘the Indian devil
wears Prada too’.40
3.4 Soft Power to a Better Projection of Tradition
Modern identity is built on tradition for a very specific purpose, but which tradi-
tion? Chinese modernity, from the Nationalist revolution in 1911 and the end of
Empire, through the May-1919 Movement of Modernity, to the Communist era, has
been constantly built against the idea of tradition and so-called feudal past,
including in the last part of Cultural Revolution with the Criticize Lin, Criticize
Confucius campaign.41 Confucius has been throughout 20th century history a nodal
question of ideology, but, since the 90s, the philosopher has been coming back and
has even given its name to Chinese public diplomacy, with the ‘Confucius
Institutes’ all over the world, which began in 2004 and is overseen by Hanban
(officially the Office of Chinese Language Council International). In India, attri-
butes defining modern sensibilities have long been discoursed as being imported
from post-Enlightenment Europe in the 19th century. Concepts such as nation,
39
« Within hours it was being downloaded and replicated on hundreds of sites, sent out on
WhatsApp and forwarded by email. One site swiftly crossed over three million views; others did
not keep track, but reported record numbers of hits. Right-wing critics of mine suspended their «
trolling » of me on social media to hail my speech. » in preface, p. xvii.
40
An Era of Darkness. The British Empire in India, p. 278.
41
The Criticize Lin (Biao), Criticize Confucius Campaign (also called the Anti-Lin Biao,
Anti-Confucius campaign) was a political propaganda campaign started by Mao Zedong and the
Gang of Four around him. It lasted from 1973 until the end of the Cultural, in 1976. The campaign
produced detailed Maoist interpretations of Chinese history, and was used as a tool by the Gang of
Four to attack their enemies.
secularism, development, etc., were criticized as ‘imported’ metaphors,42 despite

their acceptance by the founding fathers of the modern nation such as Jawaharlal
Nehru. This can be analysed, just as the post-modernity concept has been in China:
a critical posture to resist what the new nationalists perceive as western hegemony
and to reinforce the specificity of the Nation. One may deduce that the use of
tradition, which has been very different in India and China during the 20th century,
looks pretty much alike at the beginning of the 21st century. If China is widely
using Confucius and classical culture to project abroad, India has been using similar
strategy with the inception of the International Yoga Day, a concept first proposed
by the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an official speech at the
United Nations General Assembly, in September 2014.43
3.5 Traditional Modernity: Medicine, Management

and Spirituality
Modern is not only the definition of an enlightened mindset, but also of a com-
petitive one. In the era of intense marketing and active capitalism, to be competitive
means to be healthy, productive at work, happy at home. Tradition has been called
back to fulfill these domains. In China, the reinvention of traditional Chinese
medicine and the interpretations of ancient texts such as the military treaties or
Taoist corpus for business strategies purposes can be considered as a manipulative
way of using tradition. Looking at school pedagogy with the development of
so-called Confucianism, or at the art market which is increasingly led by tradi-
tionalist painters, the trend is clearly and increasingly around the revitalization of
‘traditional’ ways of life. Most probably, this process is the parallel consequence of
the globalized economy where China is more included than ever.
Two recent essays by the very prolific physician-turned-mythologist Devdutt
Pattanaik are titled Business Sutra: An Indian Approach to Management (2013) and
The Leadership Sutra: An Indian Approach to Power (2013). An interpretation of
Hinduism is brought out by Pattanaik to encourage an Indianization of the capitalist
modernity: ‘The Leadership Sutra, a work derived from my book on the Indian
approach to business and management, Business Sutra, focuses on sutras related to
the human quest of significance, the importance of property to prop-up self-worth,
the power of rules to strip people of self-esteem, and the need of stability at the cost
42
« The Nationalist Roots of a Modern University », in Batabyal, Rakesh, JNU The Making of a
University, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2014, p. 44.
43
« Yoga is an invaluable gift of India’s ancient tradition. It embodies unity of mind and body;
thought and action; restraint and fulfilment; harmony between man and nature; a holistic approach
to health and well-being. It is not about exercise but to discover the sense of oneness with yourself,
the world and the nature. By changing our lifestyle and creating consciousness, it can help in
well-being. Let us work towards adopting an International Yoga Day. », in United Nations
Information Center, press release 233-2014.
300 N. Idier
of freedom’. An interesting parallel can easily be drawn with the Chinese use of
very liberally interpreted ancient philosophy for economic efficiency. Taoism and
the Art of War are the two main sources of this trend.
As exposed in the introduction, post-modernity has been used in many senses as
an appropriation of national past to build a more local modernity. The use of a
tradition to build a ‘traditional modernity’ can consequently be driven by ideo-
logical interests, locally and internationally, and be bound with a quest of
hegemony.
Pattanaik has the ambition to be universal: ‘These sutras are ‘made in India’ but
are ‘for the world’.’44 This leads to one last interrogation: universality of the idea of
modernity built on traditional identity.
4 Conclusion: Universal Modernity Versus Local Identity
In an Indian perspective, it is absolutely necessary to take into account the principle

of Empire to better understand the very question of identity.
China and India have two different conceptions of Empire. In China, Empire is
clearly designing China itself. The concept of ‘Tianxia’, developed recently by
some scholars is the collateral to the Chinese imperialism: ‘Under the Sky’, which
refers to some ancient Confucian philosophy. In India, Empire is not a world of
trust, but there is clearly in it a reaction, which is both, to use the Freudian terms,
attraction and repulsion. Attraction, when you see how many books are published
about the time when India was ‘the jewel on the Crown’; repulsion, which is an
observable phenomenon described, for instance, in Tharoor’s essay, An Era of
Darkness and its success.
It may be important to take into account this both national and international
concept of Empire, and to understand the extent of its nodality when tradition
defines modernity.
There are many ways to define imperialism and universality. While the ‘Tianxia
System’ refers to classical Chinese thought and can be found as an idiomatic
expression in some ancient texts as Sunzi Bingfa for instance, it has been newly
conceptualized by the philosopher Zhao Tingyang, from the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, as a strong system of international relationships, attributed to the
vision of a very central Chinese State.45 Unlike China, India has never conceived
itself as a central empire, and Indian intellectuals to cut themselves off from any
assumption of a hegemonic identity have used the denomination of ‘subcontinent’.
One can find an explanation in the modern history of this country which has been a
44
Devdutt Pattanaik, The Leadership Sutra. An Indian Approach to Power, Aleph, 2016, p. XI.
45
Zhao Tingyang, ‘A Political World Philosophy in terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia)’,
Diogenes 2009, 221: 5–18; and Zhao, ‘Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept of
‘All-under-Heaven (Tian-xia)’, Social Identities, vol.12, no.1 (January 2006): 29–41.
victim of western imperialism. Author and politically engaged intellectual

Arundhati Roy, for instance, has been constantly waging a war against imperialism
and the side effects of a globalized private-owned economy.46 This can lead to a
redefinition of modernity, as a more localized concept towards a global economy.
One can assert there is no modernity with continuity, but this continuity is only a
process of creation of something which in many ways is new, just as it can be said
that the traditional Chinese medicine is mainly a modern reinvention.47 Traditions
have been qualified, in another context, as ‘mainly fictional’.48
At the end of this literary and historical investigation which has raised more
questions than it has brought answers, the next questions to be asked would
therefore be: is fictionalizing modernity the organic parallel? Is India about to go
from an invented tradition to an alternative modernity? It may be too soon to know.
In the age of globalization, modernity may refer to a more local or regional culture,
and therefore both China and India may be seeking their own new modernity,
which will not be without tensions, paradoxes, and fragility.
References
Batabyal, R. 2014. JNU: The Making of a University. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India.
Campbell, D. 2009. Orchid Pavilion: An Anthology of Literary Representations. Canberra: China
Heritage Quarterly 17.
Chen, Jianhua. 2005. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture. In Davis, ed. L. Edward.
London: Routledge.
Evans, R. 1995. Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China, 2nd ed. London: Penguin
Books.
Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press.
Leys, S. 2013. The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. New York: New York Review Books.
Naïr, K. 2015. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers
India.
Pattanaik, Devdutt. 2016. The Leadership Sutra: An Indian Approach to Power. New Delhi:
Aleph.
Roy, Arundhati. 2005. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. London: Penguin.
Thapar, Romila. 2013. The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India. New
Delhi: Permanent Black.
Vandermeersch, L. 1994. La langue graphique chinoise. Etudes sinologiques, 241–247. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France.
Vogel, E. 2011. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Cambridge, MA, London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
46
For example in her essay entitled An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Penguin, 2005.
47
Elisabeth Hsu, « La médecine chinoise traditionnelle en République populaire de Chine : d’une «
tradition inventée » à une « modernité alternative » », in Anne Cheng, La pensée en Chine
aujourd’hui, Folio Essais, Gallimard, 2007, pp. 214–240.
48
Eric Hobsbawm, « Introduction: Inventing Traditions », in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
(ed.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 1–14.
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Wang, Hui, and Guolian Yu. 1998. 90 niandai de houxue lunzheng (Post-ism in the 90s). Hong
Kong: Chinese University Press.
Wang, Hui. 2009. The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. London: Verso.
Zhao, Yigeng. 1995. Post-ism and Chinese New Conservatism. Ershiyishiji (Twenty-First
Century) 27: 4–15. (Hong Kong).
Zhao, Tingyang. 2006. Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept of ‘All-Under-Heaven
(Tian-xia)’. Social Identities 12 (1): 29–41. (London: Routledge).
Zhao, Tingyang. 2009. A Political World Philosophy in Terms of All-Under-Heaven (Tian-xia).
Diogenes 221: 5–18 (University of Birmingham).
Chapter 16
From ‘Savages’ to ‘Saviours’:
Genealogy of Santal Portrayal
in Colonial Modernity
Anshul Avijit
1 Introduction
This chapter explores the reception of the indigenous or tribal groups1 in India through
visual practices of colonial modernity. Here ‘colonial modernity’ refers to the tropes
established by post-colonial historiography—that is, the asymmetrical self-fashioning
by the colonizer through instruments of power and knowledge, a practice loosely
embodied in the popular Saidian meta-tag, Orientalism.2 This approach, over the
years, has much to expose the contradictions under which European modernity mir-
rored itself, and continuously redrafted its notions of progress and transition at the cost
of other cultures and traditions. But this analysis has also had its limitations, reducing
colonized autochthones to a ‘savage’, or at best a ‘noble savage’, fetishized and
emasculated, while elevating the colonizer to the position of ethnographic choreog-
raphers and scriptwriters. This chapter argues that the Indian tribal, as mediated
through colonial art, was given far more agency and strength than generally believed.
It also points out that the Indian painters of the Bengal School (1920s–1950s), rather
than valourizing the tribal, actually imprisoned them in an Arcadian past and robbed
them of the temporal imperatives to act in the present.
While the stranglehold of ‘power and knowledge’ cannot be undermined, the
methodology of ‘temporality’ may be more useful in contextualizing the tribal
1
I use the term ‘tribal’ here in an analytic sense. It has been problematized and defined during the
course of the article.
2
The broad genealogy of the discourse can be seen through Fanon (1952), Foucault (1977), Said
(1978), Cohn (1996) and Dirks (2001).
A. Avijit (&)
Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: anshulavijit@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_16
304 A. Avijit
world of the colonized.3 This forms the underlying principle of the chapter.
Temporal approaches consider additional variables of political and cultural
modernity, outside the commonly understood historical facts and contingencies.
Furthermore, the site of the visual—paintings, portrayals, and propaganda—also
tells us more about the temporal negotiations that prose and text have left out,
revealing that reality can lie in the very opposite of what has been assumed. For
example, a closer look at Victorian etchings through the paradigm of ‘time’ can
possibly obscure the classic dichotomy between self/other, colonialized/colonizer,
modern/ancient, tribal/non-tribal. Or the influence of European historicism in the
construction of Santals by the Bengal painters could inform us of their prejudices
and preferences, and how it was actually in conflict with Santal ideas of the past,
present, and future. In this chapter, these temporal concepts are examined through
select European woodcuts and images from the academy of Santiniketan.
2 The Narratives of Power and the Place of Time
Power has become the standard tool to explain colonialism. This process looks at
the epistemologies of domination, panoptical strategies, surveillance, governmen-
tality, and mechanisms of rule used in colonial modernity. For Foucault, power
becomes the instrument of ordering and difference-making and establishing abso-
lutist regimes of control (1977: 215). Edward Said argues that during colonialism,
power was actually the power of knowledge, and knowledge then became a form of
violence—what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called ‘epistemic violence’ (Said
1978; Spivak 1998: 282–283). The vocabulary of Foucault, Said, and Spivak is not
only considered the standard language of post-coloniality but also its very critique.
In the context of the subcontinent, the revisionism of Bernard Cohn and
Nicholas Dirks establishes colonial epistemology as the primary instrument of
rupture (Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001). According to the argument, the process involved
the prescriptive re-assembling of historically complex identities into simple, legal
groups, like caste. These groups were then hierarchically arranged and racially
indexed. British officials, administrators, and scholars sat down with Brahman
collaborators and arbitrated the rights and entitlements of the categories, honouring
some groups while emasculating or de-historicizing others. It was through this
method that the category of the ‘tribe’ was also formulated. The authority of the
scriptures was thus given primacy over cultural memory and local practice, and
India was coerced into mirroring the pseudo-society of an Indo-British bureaucratic
venture. In other words, India was re-imagined as an immutable social space that
needed to be governed only by a generalized set of rules and ideologies. This is
3
In negotiating time in relation to social processes I am grateful to Adeel Hussain for his incisive
comments and interventions. This analysis has developed on the arguments of White (1973),
Kosselleck (2004), Hartog (2015), and specific to colonialism and the subcontinent, of
Chakrabarty (2007), Sarkar (1992) and Banerjee (2006).
16 From ‘Savages’ to ‘Saviours’: Genealogy of Santal … 305
basically what I call ‘social choreography’, where, in a sense, the music sheet of
stereotypes was composed and played through the hands of the colonizing con-
ductor. Indian society was rebuilt on, according to this view, falsified rites through
epistemic wrongs.
The argument of Cohn and Dirks was built on prevailing European notions of
‘historicism’. So, from the rubric of power we are now debating ideas of time and
temporality. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his highly influential book Provincializing
Europe, has rightly noted that European historicism ‘posited historical time as a
measure of the cultural distance assumed to exist between the West and the
non-West’ (Chakrabarty 2007: 7). This, he claims, allowed for the European
domination of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the
historicist framework, colonial subjects were ‘not civilized’ and needed historical
time before forms of political sovereignty could be handed over to them. And
therefore, Chakrabarty famously concludes, the Indians, Africans, and other ‘rude’
nations ‘were consigned to an imaginary waiting room of history’ (2007: 7). This
critique of historicism is, in part, premised on John Stuart Mill’s temporal paradigm
that India was inherently barbaric and could only be governed by a system based on
the Utilitarian liberalism (Chakrabarty 2007: 7). A good term to describe this
governance is ‘temporal ethnocentrism’, a condition where time itself is used as an
instrument of prejudice.
In the mid-19th century, this project of Utilitarianism collaborated with the
merging discipline of anthropology and scientific racism and synthesised the ideas
of Darwinian evolution. So, as Lorimer has pointed out, it wasn’t biological
determinism alone that explained racial inequality; politics, philosophy, and biol-
ogy met conveniently together to formulate the barbarism of the colonized East and
distance itself from the modernity of the West (1997: 213). It was also common for
the colonized people to also be paternalistically stereotyped as children or as sav-
ages through which the binaries of good and bad were peddled through the epi-
dermal allegories of black and white (Lorimer 1997: 213). This propaganda reached
its finest form in serialized juvenile literature that first appeared in the 1860s and
endured for well over a century (Lorimer 1997: 213). These were stories of
adventure and exploration, in high seas and deep jungles, where malevolence and
brutality always had a dark, non-European face, always threatening the forces of
virtue. The stories also promoted the idea of the ‘noble savage’, the faithful servant
of the Empire, inherently pure and docile, who could be relied to come to the
defence of the moral crusaders.
3 The Birth of the ‘Tribe’ in India
How was the Indian primitive or the ‘tribe’ discovered in India? How did
Utilitarianism establish their temporal position? The answer has its roots in the
administrative policy of the British that saw a marked shift in the middle of the 19th
century. The late 18th century had been noted for ideological supremacy of the
306 A. Avijit
‘Orientalists’—the men who sympathized with India’s customary laws and tradi-
tions and advocated policies aligned with local practices. But by the early 19th
century Utilitarian liberalism, with its paradoxical emphasis on equality as well as
reform of the colonized peoples, became the new code.4 Uday Mehta argues that by
the 1830s, liberalism became ‘paternalistic … an odd mix of maturity, familial
concern and the awareness of the capacity to direct, and if need be, coerce’ (1999:
11). This new instinct, Mehta suggests, saw the focus shift from military conquest
to governance and administration (1999: 11). However, the shift in focus was not so
easy to implement. One obstacle, particularly in the regions central and eastern
India, was a series of rebellions by restive indigenous communities from the 1830s–
1850s. These included the Santals.
These rebellions were a result of British interference in agrarian and customary
forest practices and the resettlement of non-tribals on the frontiers. What followed
was monetization and usurious abuse of the disrupted communities. The forest
dwellers, living outside the dynamic of caste India, were thought to have the classic
attributes of civilizational infancy—they were largely hunters and gatherers, they
lived in relative isolation, and they were pre-literate with no written or codified laws
(Skaria 1997: 730–31). These characteristics distinguished these groups from the
Hindu eco-system whose complex caste hierarchies controlled a large part of col-
onized India. Though the resistance was put down with great force (in line with the
Utilitarian liberalism), the rebels were still imagined as spirited autochthones
protesting the modernity of outsiders. Earlier, ‘tribe’, ‘band’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘primi-
tive’ and ‘caste’ were used interchangeably to describe these communities. As the
project of social choreography took shape, a single, telling word became admin-
istrative parlance—tribe (Paidipaty 2010: 6–9).
European historicism thus concluded that India was ‘less civilized’ and therefore
required the teleological modernity of colonialism. But, by all accounts, the sub-
continent was not a monolithic entity, a land of uniform attributes, behaviour, and
responses. All prevalent cultures and diversity could not be accommodated into a
single temporal bracket. Ajay Skaria rightly argues that the colonial state had to
distinguish between the various gradations or existing scales of evolution, what he
calls ‘shades of wildness’. The category of the ‘tribe’ had to be distinguished from
more the ubiquitous grouping of ‘caste’, a system whose constituent attributes came
closer to the civilizational ideal that was believed to be Europe (1997: 727–728).
But though Skaria is right on the temporal calibrations that assigned the tribe to
the ‘bottom of the civilizational heap’ (1997: 728), this chapter suggests that the
visual representation of the tribe by the colonialists reveals a less obvious
counter-narrative—while the tribe may have been considered to be temporally
distant, they were also thought to be epistemologically closer. In other words, the
discovery of the ‘tribe’, during what was the high noon of neo-classicism in Europe,
was marked by a subtle and subliminal acknowledgement of their perceived attri-
butes—not just masculinity, nobility, and courage, as Skaria points out—but also
4
For more on early colonial ideologies and their impact see Thapar (1992) and Metcalf (1995).
their apparently elusive knowledge of the proto-modern. The idea of time plays a
curiously inconsistent role here—one of detachment and other of great affinity. This
tension, of enlightened people holding powerful and transcendent cultural memo-
ries while still remaining behaviourally ‘uncivil’ was, this piece argues, negotiated
fully in their visual reconstruction.
4 Pre-colonial Encounters: The Imperatives of Curiosity
The confluence of ‘power’ and ‘temporality’ help us unpack the nature of the
colonial modernity and the emergence of the tribe in 19th century India. But how
do we contextualize these approaches in the early phases of contact with the East?
The European view of India did not commence with the Orientalist curriculum;
there was pre-history of the Indic connection during the medieval ages which was
discursively distinct and whose influence continued during the colonial period.
These connections were marked by the ‘imperatives of curiosity’—an eagerness to
push the frontiers of the recognizable world and mediate new discoveries through
images and plots, both real and imagined. The early ‘voyages of discovery’, an
euphemism for the search for trade routes to the East, opened an Aladdin’s cave of
treasures ranging from ethnography to conchology, inspiring volumes of powerful,
quasi-fanciful images that, in many ways, set the templates for succeeding centuries
of portrayal. Among the pioneers of this depiction were Albrecht Dürer and Hans
Burgkmair (see Massing 1991: 115–19, 1995: 46).
Dürer presents a critical link in our understanding of tribal pictography. In 1521,
he made the first portrait of a Moorish lady named Katharina (Fig. 1), and was
struck by the distinctly different nature of aesthetics and beauty, viewed through the
European filter (Koerner 2010: 89). Katharina is important for our argument
because in the age of the artist, spatial miscellany had not collapsed into the
historicist temporality of the later centuries. For Dürer, Katharina, the slave of an
Antwerp agent of the King of Portugal, may have been ethnically exotic, but the
exoticism was based on a sensitive applause of human diversity. That was the
critical difference—Durer was underscoring spatial diversity, not temporal differ-
ence (see Koerner 2010: 81–87; Bhabha 1994:14).5
In 1515, Dürer also did a study of an Indian rhino, shipped from Gujarat to
Lisbon by the Portuguese governor of Goa (Fig. 2). It was the first rhino to be seen
in Europe since Roman times. Dürer, unlike in the case of Katharina, didn’t copy
the rhino from life; it was based on a description of the animal in a letter, and
through another sketch by an anonymous artist (Massing 2007: 361–362). The
result was an extravagant display of morphological inaccuracies in which a
5
See also Koerner on Dürer’s concept of ‘diversity’. With regard to cultural encounters in general,
Bhabha outlines a distinction between cultural diversity (“recognition of pre-given cultural con-
tents and customs”) and cultural difference (“significatory boundaries of culture”).
308 A. Avijit
Fig. 1 Albrecht Dürer,

Katharina, drawing on paper,
1521
somewhat forlorn rhino appears girdled in medieval armour, anticipating a battle

ahead with an elephant (Massing 2007: 62). Despite the fabrications, Dürer’s
woodcut was popularly understood as a realistic portrayal of this rare eastern
curiosity till almost the late 18th century. Again, the picture is instructive, as it
became an early model through which fringe encounters between Europe and the
rest of the world began to be imagined and codified. The rhino rises like a spectral
figure in its mutated afterlife, inciting the European audience with its furtive blend
of illusion and actuality. Pure mercantilism, the engine of initial exploration, was
now imbued with the imperatives of curiosity—about peoples, plants, and creatures
with strange contours.
Burgkmair’s woodcuts of Indians and Africans were also remarkable, as
Massing notes, because they were ‘based on visual information rather than mere
literary testimony’ (Massing 1995: 39). They represented German merchant
Balthazar Springer’s account of his journey into the heart of the eastern spice route
in 1505–1506 on board the fleet of Portuguese general, Francisco d’Almeida
(Massing 1995: 41). The monumental, 2-m-long frieze (Fig. 3) becomes a veritable
narrative of ‘exotic’ nationalities where Arabs, Africans, and Malabar Indians come
Fig. 2 Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, woodcut, 1515
Fig. 3 Hans Burgkmair, King of Cochin, woodcut, 1509

310 A. Avijit
together in a pioneering performance of visual ethnography. The scenes are richly

annotated with details of costumes and customs supplied by Springer, and the final
woodcut is the triumphal procession of the king of Cochin, seated elegantly on a
roofless litter. This information made the images more credible than Dürer’s rhino,
though both can be said to have imaginatively utilized the gap between description
and depiction, producing a representational canon worthy of being recycled in the
coming centuries.
The Dürer-Burgkmair canon, guided by what Massing calls ‘the quest for the
exotic’, changed by the late 17th century (Massing 2007: 359). This was the age of
trade, territoriality, and the possibilities of empire, when power and temporal dif-
ference began to inform the culture contact. Abraham Rogerius, a servant of the
Dutch East Indian Company stationed in Pulicat in the early 1600s has left an
account of the religious life of Tamil country including valuable descriptions of
local practices and customs. His book, published in 1651 in Dutch (and reprinted in
German and French), is notable for six pages of eight copper engravings including
three foldouts and a dramatic frontispiece of the practice of sati, probably the first
ever depicted in a European visual (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4 Representation of sati

in Abraham Rogerius’
descriptions of the
Coromandal coast, French
edition, 1670
The visual condemnation in the frontispiece is prophetic in both its ideology and
temporal negotiation. The image could not be more Utilitarian—India is viewed
through an outraged lens, temporality immobilized and needing redemption, or at
best to be condemned but avoided. The neo-Roman rendering of the perpetrators of
the crime (presumably the Brahmins) and the anachronous outfits of the others
suggest that the depiction was compiled only through the text, like Durer’s rhino or
Burgkmair’s King of Cochin. Classical Greco-Roman physiognomy was to become
a standard embodiment of the diverse ethnicities of the East, a familiarity through
which Europe could make a global connection. It was as if India could only be
understood through the anatomies and attires formalized during the foundational
moments of European knowledge production. This formulation would find itself
repeated in image of the Indian ‘primitive’ as well, and at one point, to the
exclusion of most others.
5 The Visual History of the Indian Primitive
The early western portraits of Indian people, as generic prototypes, were of the
nobility, primarily of the ‘Mogols’ or Mughals.6 In the late 18th century and early
19th century, as trade proceeded to colonialism, more diverse portfolios of Indian
‘types’, including occupational categories, were visually secured.7 In this period,
the social taxonomy of colonialism had still not been formalized, and these early
visuals can be considered more faithful representations of pre-colonial traditions.
Dirks concludes that ‘castes’ and ‘tribes’ as social markers were yet absent;
occupation, region, costume, lineage, and a host of other diverse factors determined
social dynamics and interaction (Dirks 1992: 59).
The European encounter with the Indian ‘savage’ and the formulation of civi-
lizational stereotypes has a complex history. The ‘savage’ could both be ‘noble’ and
‘ignoble’, as Skaria’s ‘shades of wildness’ would suggest, but the epithets were not
mutually exclusive and contingent on shifting perceptions, habitat, and behaviour.
The ‘savage’ could either be a transgressive scourge from the fringe that needed
disciplining and domestication, or the noble embodiment of the infantile purity of
human existence, a temporal antithesis of the modern man. A famous example of
the latter, impressing every colonial traveller and observer, was the Toda of hilly
south India who not only became the archetypal resident of an Edenic setting, but
went on to become an enduring ethnographic curiosity of the 19th century (see
Kennedy 1996). Captain Henry Harkness, who wrote the first ever monograph of an
Indian tribe in 1832, was certainly beholden to Toda physiognomy. He notes their
6
For instance, see Mallet’s 1683 survey with portraits of monarchs (including the Mughal ruler
Jahangir), and Indian manners, religions and customs. Also revealing was Dutch engraver Pieter
van der Aa’s travel narratives to Asia, 1725.
7
Two notable examples are the series of etchings by Balthazar Solvyns’ of Calcutta (1796) and
Colin Mackenzie’s survey of Mysore peoples and monuments (see Howes 2010).
312 A. Avijit
‘large, full, and speaking eye, Roman nose, fine teeth, and pleasing contour’ and the
fact they were ‘perfectly free from the menial-like timidity’ of the Indians of the
‘low country’ (Harkness 1832: 7–8). Harkness, like other Europeans after him, is
vexed by the apparent racial non-Indianness of the Toda type, and his representa-
tion on the frontispiece of his monograph is significant in the visual development of
the Indian primitive.
In the Toda image, European classicism—the ringlets, Homeric beards and toga
styling—were superimposed on hills men to emphasize their racial and cultural
proximity to the colonizer’s stock (Fig. 5). For the British, the Todas even tran-
scended the notion of the ‘noble savage’, becoming almost an uber-savage, the
antique cousin of the European who, for inexplicable reasons, found his way into
the mountains of a distant land. The southern mountaineer became not so much the
‘primitive’ as much as the epistemological ideal, embodying the purity and
knowledge of a detached time, a time that needed to be revered as well as repro-
duced. And this basically reverses the post-colonial discourse of power, at least
with regard to indigenous groups, so we may not be talking about ‘epistemic
violence’ but some sort of epistemic negotiation or acknowledgement. The repre-
sentations of docility, weakness, and entrapment can thus be easily seen as mir-
roring the very opposite—agency in the form of knowledge. As we shall see later,
the Bengal artists of Santiniketan used a similar visual ideology to imprison the
Santals, empowering them with a great tradition, but unlike the Todas, simulta-
neously deactivating them from the technologies needed to inspire modernity.
The indigenes of the lowlands, however, suffered brutal visual typecasting. This
included a vast number of groups including Bhils, Gonds, Kolis, Khonds, and
Pahariyas as well as the tribes of northeast India, the region that ethnologist James
Prichard in 1830s called the ‘Indo-Chinese peninsula’ (Prichard 1855: 243).
Particularly concerted was the attack on the Khonds of Orissa who came into
contact with the British in 1835 and were discovered to be practitioners of ritualized
human sacrifice (see Campbell 1864). The woodcut on the depiction of sacrifice
(Fig. 6) seems to capture the key colonial moment when the biographies of
Utilitarianism intersect with scientific racism and bureaucratic cataloguing of the
Indian ‘primitive’. But in its attempt to incite primal fear among the Victorian
bourgeoisie, the picture curiously mimics the violent impulses of the colonial State
itself, exposing its fragilities and anxieties while also conflating the historicism of
‘primitive’ and ‘modern’. Both performances, of the Todas and Khonds, one pas-
sive and the other provocative, appear to be implicated in the deep fault lines that
mark colonial self-fashioning.
It was Pahariyas of the Rajmahal Hills, the neighbours of the Santals, who were
the first autochthonous group to fall victim to the racial rebukes when they rebelled
against the British in 1784 and took the life of the district collector Bhagalpur,
Augustus Cleveland (Bradley-Birt 1905, 111–112). In Cleveland’s epitaph, the
Pahariyas are referred to as a ‘savage race of mountaineers who for ages had existed
in the state of barbarism and eluded every attempt that had been practiced against
Fig. 5 Frontispiece of Henry Harkness’ monograph on the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills, 1832;
(right) detail
them to suppress their depredations, and reduce them to obedience’.8 Significantly,

they were also set apart from the Santals, the people who had been co-opted into the
colonial story through an invitation to tame the region of ‘junglettery’ (Yule and
Burnell 1903: 471)9 and re-claim it from those troublesome hills men.
By the early 19th century, the Santal was an intermediary agent of the State,
clearing land for cultivation and establishing order for revenue extraction (Datta
1940; Guha 1983). This was also to be the Santal passage into capitalist tempo-
rality, into the displaced everydayness of money, debt, interest, and payment. So in
a sense, the colonial mediation with the Santal, before their momentous rebellion of
1855, was predicated on their cognitive obedience and gratitude and an inadvertent
journey into colonial modernity. Even the rebellion was judged in terms of Santal
rationality and Newtonian logic: the Santals were merely responding to extractive
8
Augustus Cleveland’s epitaph, Plot 1484, South Park Cemetery, Calcutta.
9
An Anglicized form of jungle-terai or the Himalayan foothills.
314 A. Avijit
Fig. 6 Human sacrifice of the Khonds, frontispiece from John Cambell’s narratives on the Khond
tribe of Odisha, 1864
compulsions of the moneylenders and the feudal lords (Man 1867: 109–110; Hunter
1868: 237–238). If the Todas were the archetype of the ‘noble savage’ in the
subcontinent, the Santals, despite their insurrectionist fire, would certainly have the
qualities to be an aspirant. The Santal rebellion, though it took the British officials
by surprise, was on a site cleared and domesticated under colonial sponsorship. On
the eve of the rebellion, in the 1850s, the Santal was still the nobleman of the
jungle, an arm of the Empire deployed to bring order to wild terrain.
6 Sherwill and Santals: The Temptations of Intimacy
Walter Sherwill’s Sonthal Dance by Moonlight (Fig. 7) is an important intervention

in tribal portrayal and obscures the stereotype of the Indian ‘savage’. The engraving
is unlike anything preceding it, full of movement and showmanship, a lush and
layered display of tribal revelry. It was printed in The Illustrated London News
(ILN) on June 7, 1851 as a part of Sherwill’s serialized travelogue, ‘Sketches of
India: Railway from Calcutta to Delhi’. Sherwill was the classic surveyor-soldier,
criss-crossing the Santal countryside with theodolite and sketchpad, and recording
the first known illustrations of Santal life. Apart from being an officer in the Bengal
Native Infantry he was also an accomplished geologist, regularly surveying mineral
Fig. 7 ‘Sonthal Dance by Moonlight’, based on a sketch by Walter Sherwill, Illustrated London
News, 7 June 1851
sites and collecting specimens (Rycroft 2006a, b: 19; Gardner 2016: 27).10 Since
Victorian science was an aggregate of many disciples including ethnography and
zoology, Sherwill was attentive to all the composite resources of the region.
The drawing was recorded during his journey through Birbhum in April 1850 at
the time of the annual Santal baha or flower festival. Multiple sets of encircling
dancers merge into the topography, locating the Santals as its ancient occupants,
and also suggesting the ageless immutability of the baha ritual. These ‘technologies
of observation’, as Rycroft has called them (2006a, b: 96), signal a foundational
moment in Santal representation, the creation of a visual inter-subjectivity through
which artists and photographers would henceforth portray the Santal world. This
ethnographic frame would develop, as we shall see, into a kind of romantic
reductionism, particularly by the Bengal school—the indigenes dancing, with their
bodies interlocked, in the valleys and sal (shorea robusta) forests that lie beyond
the frontiers of a complex, monetized world.
Sherwill’s moonlight celebration also foregrounds an ominous presence: the
landholders and merchants from the plains, appearing as visual mediators between
the invisible colonialist (Sherwill) and the busy, self-contained Santals. By allowing
the zamindars (landlords) to take the ringside view, Sherwill also keeps a
10
Rycroft is a rich source of information on Sherwill’s life and his representation of the Santals.
Ngaire Gardner, the great great granddaughter of Sherwill, has included many unpublished
sketches in a recent book on her ancestor.
316 A. Avijit
metaphorical and civilizational distance between what he calls the ‘shouting,

screaming madmen’, the curiosities of the Empire, that if possible, could be
sequestered in mahogany case in a Victorian drawing room. As he watches from a
distance, Sherwill also alienates himself from the group, though his intention might
be precisely the reverse—to get close to the Santals and perhaps initiate a con-
versation with them, though on his own terms. The picture underscores themes of
‘alienation and familiarity’, the twin binaries of the Anglicist idealogy, and as we
have seen in the images before, these binaries form a recurring axis in the tension
outlining colonial temporality.
The presence of the ‘landholders’ (fully-clothed in contrast to the Santals who
are ‘not overburdened with clothes’) is also quite prophetic (ILN, 7 June 1856). Five
years from the making of the picture, the Santals would rise together in rebellion
against the colonial state, exhausted by the extractive severity of the merchants, and
disillusioned with the colonial officials who patronized them. Sherwill’s festive
visual certainly displays the discordant constituents of tribal life in colonial Bengal.
The Santal rebellion and counter-insurgency stretched between July 1855 and
March 1855, but its details are not significant for our purpose. After the bloodletting
of moneylenders and other non-tribals and officials in the first three months of the
outbreak, the British commenced counter-operations with help from rich
landowners; the rebels and their leaders were either killed in village raids or cap-
tured and hanged (see Datta 1940).
‘Attack by 600 Santhals upon a party of 50 Sepoys, 40th Native Infantry’
(Fig. 8) was the caption of a dramatic half-page engraving by Sherwill that
appeared in the ILN on February, 1856. This engraving can be viewed almost as an
ideological reversal of the ‘Sonthal Dance’. Sherwill establishes a form of pictorial
familiarity or intimacy with the subject—there are no mediators, no agents.
Arbitrated voyeurism has been cast aside for a direct visual intervention into an
angry, distraught world. Sherwill is no longer eavesdropping into their universe,
rather he is attempting to, one could say, break time and enter their world. Perhaps
this temporal passage of entry could only be created in the event of great vulner-
ability, or in the event of great violence—that liminal moment of freedom when
time capitulates and the past and future congeal. On the other side, for the Santals,
the rebellion becomes a dehistoricized event that stakes a claim to sovereignty. But
the sovereignty is not about the future, it appears to represent the present, an
overwhelming immediacy that can only be realized in the moment of violence itself.
This Santal idea of time is discussed further in the chapter.
In the engraving the Santals are foregrounded in clear, crisp tones, their antique
muscularity seemingly weakened by colonial-capitalist encounter. There is
fetishization of the tribal anatomy, glamorously framed with the clichés of sculp-
tural neo-classicism. The sexualization, in fact, works at many levels—in the
bloodletting and violence, in the sculpted sinews of the Santals, and even in the
commiseration of the fallen fighters. Satadru Sen, in his reference to the Andaman
Islanders, calls the sexualization of the Indian tribal as creating ‘the possibilities as
well as the limits of desire’ (Sen 2010: 207). For Sen, the eroticism ‘constitutes a
technique of power that locates the deviant/eccentric within a larger colonial
Fig. 8 ‘Attack on 600 Santhals upon a Party of 50 Sepoys, 40th regiment Native Infantry’, based
on a sketch by Walter Sherwill, Illustrated London News, 23 February 1856
experience’ (2010: 207). Similarly, for Rycroft the ‘gallant anti-heroism’ of the
fighting Santals represents the colonial episteme of control as presented to the
bourgeois consciousness of London (2006a, b: 255).
The picture, I would argue, is more complex than the representation of an
uneven power dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized. For the Santal, the
rebellion was clearly a site for negotiating a new sovereignty. But for Sherwill the
rebellion was also chance to get as close to the Santals as possible, an immediacy
that was self-consciously denied to him in his tours of 1850 and 1851 (Sherwill
1851). This intimacy, when the sinews of Santal fighters obscure the men who
would tear into it, was only possible through an episode of participative violence.
The frame is empathetically powered by the wounded bodies of the Santals and
disengages with their eventual killers, the sepoys, who are visually undercut behind
plumes of gunfire smoke. But both Sherwill and the viewers are always conscious
that they are firmly there, breaking the back of the rebellion. In fact, it is only
through this confidence of their ultimate defeat that Sherwill is able to get closer to
his study. But this was equally true of the Santals.
Between September 1855 and October 1856, the ILN printed 18 Sherwill
engravings connected with the Santal rebellion, though most of them appeared on
23 February 1856 (nine) and on 9 August 1856 (five). Apart from the ‘Attack on
600 Santhals’, ILS also had illustrations of Santal prisoners being taken to jails,
burning of Santal villages, searching for rebels and general vignettes of the Santal
318 A. Avijit
country and village hutments. More remarkable, however, were the real-life sket-
ches of some jailed prisoners, including the now-iconic sketch of captured rebel
Sido from 23 February 1856 (Figs. 9 and 10).
7 Sidu and the Santal Notion of Time
This idea of the depoliticized subject, or the pre-political Santal, suddenly turning
rogue was a fundamental problematic for colonialism (Guha 1983: 5).11 Tribal
revolts, beginning from Pahariya chief Tilka Manjhi’s challenge in the 1780s, were
still considered by the British as law and order concerns and not contestations of
sovereignty. The decades between 1830 and 1860 were intense years of indigenous
struggle as historical and generational claims to forested tracts, the sources of
culture and livelihood, met with increasing colonial injunctions and non-tribal
tyranny. The colonial response was the creation of a ‘task force’ and the dispatching
of the paratroopers to quell the outbursts, as in the case of the Santals. The British
had indeed solicited the Santals to deforest a frontier region, but this promise of a
homeland was double-edged.
The Santal rebellion was launched when two brothers, Sido and Kano Manjhi,
announced that divine sanction had been given to commence anti-diku12 operations
and establish Santal rule in their region (WBSA, JP 1855: 98).13 They claimed that
Thakur, the supreme spirit, had directed them to henceforth collect revenue (now
re-numerated and subsidized) and hand it over directly to the sircar, or government,
without any intermediaries (WBSA, JP 1855: 98). They claimed that Thakur had
also given them 16 pieces of paper that were to be distributed throughout Santal
country as symbols of forthcoming justice (‘Examination of Kanoo Sonthal’
WBSA, JP 1855: 150, 154). Soon, it was believed, evil would be supplanted with
good and the tribe would be free from debt and deprivation (Fuchs 1965: 49). In
another significant version of the tale, the brothers received a shower of paper
scraps from the heavens and were directed to circulate these to each village (Hunter
1868: 237). According to subsequent testimonies of the rebels and colonial officials,
the book in question was the Bible and the showered scraps of paper were a part of
the Gospel of St. John (Baske 1996).14
11
Guha contents Eric Hobsbawn’s idea of the ‘pre-political populations’ or tribal categories that
lacked political consciousness.
12
Diku is a Santal term for the outsider or non-Santal.
13
West Bengal State Archives, Judicial Proceedings.
14
Chotrae Desmanjhi, who witnessed the rebellion as a teenager, told the Santal stories of event to
missionary Lars Skrefsrud in the 1870s and this was later published as Chotrae Desmanjhi Reak
Katha by his missionary press at Benagaria.
The directives of Thakur, or the Thacoor Perwannah as it was subsequently

called (WBSA JP 1855: 25), was a powerful testimony of Santal
self-determination.15 The divine mandate to the brothers also foreclosed any ave-
nues of intercession, leaving only a suspended moment where the script for the
future could be written, potentially in sacrificial blood. Its language is decidedly
futuristic—about deliverance of justice, legitimacy, fiscal moderation, and control
over a homeland. It also implied that all Santals, regardless of the bloodshed (or
perhaps because of it) would be the commandants of that futurity. But that though
the perwannah is prospectively worded, the rebellion itself was firmly grounded in
the present. The moment of sovereignty was not an impending one, it needed to be
claimed in the performance of the rebellion. There is also the complex negotiation
with modernity—paper, the printed word, books, letters.
The Gospel of St. John curiously becomes both a medium of deliverance as well
as an instrument of its own denunciation. In other words, the Bible is received,
acknowledged and then subversively refigured for imminent Santal objectives. Like
in the case of Sherwill, a similar temporal channel is also being carved here; but
while Sherwill used colonial violence to gain intimacy, the Santals used the Bible to
inaugurate that violence. The appearance of the Thakur represents the messianic
nature of Santal presentism, where sacrifices of the present become the enduring
reality. In fact, it could be said that the rebellion was a sacrifice to time itself—for
propitiation as well as its negation—and therefore the ‘event’ of the rebellion, the
six months or so when the Santals kept fighting and regrouping, is completely
encrusted with the wounds of sacrifice.
But significantly, the sacrifice was not just limited to the killing of
money-lenders, petty officials, and (a few) Europeans. There was intra-group
bloodletting as well—the hunting of so-called ‘witches’ skulking within the tribe.
The foot soldiers of Sido and Kano were directly ordered to identify any woman
suspect of being a witch, and once captured, they were forced to eat human excreta,
drink blood, and then thrown alive into a fire (Varma 2007: 2130). Protesting
relatives and friends were threatened with death (Fuchs 1965: 50). The Santal
struggle, it seems, was powered only by drawing the blood of its own, and its final
reabsorption into the meta memory of the tribe.
After the declaration of the perwannah, other incidents also set the stage for the
rebellion. There was furious rumour-mongering, fantastical tales of impending
death and diabolism. Giant snakes and reptiles were believed to be on the prowl,
swallowing people in their path. Men were told to abandon the fields and women to
stay in bed and not keep their feet on the ground (Bodding 1942: 190). A buffalo
was said to be causing death wherever it stopped to graze, and villagers were
directed to clear the grass around houses and settlements (Bodding 1942: 190).
There was also a rumour of anonymous mercenaries that had been sent to kill the
dikus, and the Santal villagers were asked to identify themselves with flagged
15
Santal ideas of time, in particular during the rebellion of 1855, have been informed by Prathama
Banerjee’s (2006) incisive work on primitivism and temporality in colonial Bengal.
320 A. Avijit
Fig. 9 Engraving of Sido

based on Walter Sherwill’s
sketch of the rebel leader in
Bhagalpur jail shortly after his
capture on 19 August 1855,
ILN, 23 February 1856
buffalo hides and flutes to escape the violent purge (Bodding 1942: 191). Rumours
have an intriguing relationship with time because they can speak from anywhere,
and one can never know—the past, present, or future; or the living, the dead, or the
undead.
The engraving of Sido in the ILN (Fig. 9) can be viewed in the temporal contexts
of both the Perwannah, and Sherwill’s own intimate encounters with the Santals.
Sido emerges in clear, neo-classical vitality as a Christ-like figure, upright, calm,
and assured. Or perhaps like David after slaying the Goliath, the eyes now calmed
by the ferocious catharsis of slaughter. The hands appear folded in quiet determi-
nation, and not in deference or submission to the colonial state. It is quite possible
that Sherwill positioned Sido in this manner before he sketched him, or that the
torso and folded limbs were appended later, outside the jail. Sherwill is also keen to
emphasize the five coin-size tattoos on his left forearm, a mark given to Santal boys
when they reach seven years of age and symbolizes their entry into the tribe (Archer
1974: 54).
The sketching of Sido somewhat problematizes the classic ‘historicism’ of
Chakrabarty’s assertions, and yet affirms the temporal logic by which relationships
can be viewed. Sherwill’s sketch resonates the messianism of the perwannah story,
embodying the rebel leader with the discursive divinity of Thakur as well as that of
Biblical idols entrenched in pictorial culture of Europe. While it is true that the
Sherwill-Sido encounter—the victorious general sketching the doomed anti-hero—
is the classic metaphor for colonial hegemony, it also represents a temporal con-
flation where intimacy can be claimed, and then visually mediated. Rycroft had
argued that Sido’s placement on the ILN page beside a cache of captured weapons
(Fig. 10) represents the final silencing of the tribal voice by the might of the
colonial state (Rycroft 2006a: 206). In other words, the layout betrays the triumph
of Utilitarian historicism. This chapter, however, proposes that Biblical comport-
ment of Sido and the aesthetic assemblage of weapons actually positions the Santals
as ancient knowledge-bearers who are to be invoked with both restraint and regard.
Fig. 10 Article on the ‘Santhal Insurrection’ by Walter Sherwill featuring captured rebels Sidu
and Singra as well as confiscated Santal weaponry, ILN, 23 February 1856
322 A. Avijit
8 The Temporal Ethnocentrism of Santiniketan
From Europeans and Sherwill we now turn our attention to other indigenous
notions of time informing Santal representation and its relationship with colonial
modernity. Of particular significance is the historical subjectivity of the Hindu
Bengali middle class in the late 19th century that was almost completely shaped by
the urban modernity of Calcutta ‘in which time acquired a new meaning’ (Sarkar
1992: 1543). As Prathama Banerjee has convincingly argued, this subjectivity
positioned the Santals (and other tribes) as embarrassing anathemas to progres-
sivism and Hinduism’s civilizational grandness, and an attempt was made to purge
their presence from the new teleological reconstruction of Bengali history (2006:
43). The treatment of the ‘primitive’ was thus guided by a similar notion of spa-
cialized temporality as that of the colonialists; that is, the ‘primitives’ shared the
same space but were adversely locked in time. A few decades later, the artists from
nearby Santiniketan would qualitatively invert the characterization by making the
Santals central to their pictorial critique of modernity. But this inversion was only
made possible by retaining the temporal rationality of the ‘primitive’; only now,
scorn and suspicion had been replaced by glamour and adoration. Art historians
have declared this as the ‘nationalist moment’ in Indian art, the moment when the
once-banished peoples are recalled into the new story of nationhood (see Rycroft
2006a, b: 153; Mitter 2007: 29).
This may not have been the case. Through Sherwill’s pictorial narrativization of
the Santals as well Harkness’ ‘Tuda Family’ (just to highlight two examples), I
suggest that the British were actually seeking an intimacy, an intimacy guided both
by fear and approval. This is not to suggest that temporal ethnocentrism was
inoperable. But through this representation the Indian ‘primitive’ reminded colonial
modernity of its edifices and strengths rather than its temporal opposite, the type
perceived by the Bengali historians. The ‘primitive’ held not just the potential of
modernity but was also the inspiration of it. The ‘noble savage’ emerging from
Tagore’s pictorial workshops thus becomes far more disturbing than the
multi-layered depiction by the colonialists. If the Bengali middle classes’ counter to
colonialism was apologetic Hinduism where the tribal was duly expunged, the
Bengal artists’ incorporation of the Santal was not only ‘apologetic primitivism’ but
also the select reshaping of their charisma to suit ideology and aesthetics.
9 The Bengal Project and ‘Apologetic Primitivism’
Santiniketan, or Kala Bhavan, was a cultural project initiated by Rabindranath

Tagore in a village on the outskirts of Bolpur, 150 km northeast of Calcutta. The
year was 1919. The land had been donated by a wealthy zamindar to his father,
Debendranath Tagore, who had it organized as a meditative country retreat in the
1860s (Strickland-Anderson 1924: 463). Rabindranath first opened a school for
boys in 1901 and this ultimately developed into a mission for honing a range of
visual languages. Nandalal Bose, the principal actor in the recasting of the Santal
image, was invited to be the first principal of Kala Bhavan. Bose, incidentally, was
a student of Abanindranath Tagore, Rabrindranath’s nephew and the founder of the
pioneering Bengal School of Art.
Rabindranath Tagore’s aesthetic enterprise was a culmination of his disen-
chantment with the colonial modernity. ‘Materials as materials are savage’, he
wrote in an essay titled ‘Poet’s Religion’, ‘they are solitary; they are ready to hurt
one another’ (Tagore 1922: 7). For Tagore, ‘true beauty’ or spiritual and historical
greatness could only be discovered in temporal spaces where, for instance, the
Upanishads were conceived, or the epics were formulated (Tagore 1922: 46). This
was the forest hermitage; idyllist tracts where philosopher wordsmiths articulated
the oneness of nature through their creative visions. In some ways, Tagore’s
assessment can be seen to imitate that of the apologists of Calcutta—the invocation
of temporal narratives that could inspire or redeem the present. But while the
middle class of Calcutta searched for ancient building blocks to own and indigenize
modernity, Tagore’s project summoned its precise counterpoise to underscore its
rejection.
Nandalal Bose succeeded in transforming Tagore’s environmental
anti-modernity into a romantic pictorial idiom (Mitter 2007: 93). The rural actors
deployed for the project had to be the Santals, since they lived in large numbers in
the villages surrounding Santiniketan. Nandalal had been previously trained in the
Government College of Art in Calcutta and subsequently began working with the
Indian Society of Oriental Art, an aesthetic collective founded in 1907 by a clique
of European art connoisseurs (Mitter 2007: 93). As a student of Abanindranath’s
Mughalized art, Nandalal was already focused on indigenous traditions, and now
was ready to renounce urban Calcutta for the rural idealism promised by
Santiniketan. Tagore’s essays on the mystic glamour of the forest proved to be
immediately impactful.
At Santiniketan, Nandalal posited the Santal world as a singular, temporal
exemplar, to be protected and promoted. Santals were painted in every performative
and perfunctory moment—dancing, singing, ploughing, threshing, fetching water,
getting married—as long as the setting precluded the intervention of colonial
modernity. The ‘noble savages’ of Birbhum were designed to be pure and uncor-
rupted, living simple, fulfilling lives under the canopy of the forests. And, as with
the rest of the pictorial successors, the Santal women were signifiers of this ide-
alized world; their bodies and gestures now sexualized by a new artistic verve that
could only emerge by abandoning the colonial squeamishness of Calcutta. Mitter
has pointed out how this erotic pageantry of the ‘black lissom Santal woman’
provided an aesthetic antithesis to the ‘pale, cloistered ladies of urban Calcutta’
(Mitter 2007: 29). The pleasurable fetishization of the Santal body appears to have
largely impersonated the colonial approach to the ‘primitive’; both were embold-
ened by the new-found freedom to fantasize the anatomically illicit, while imposing
an unequal power relationship in which the subject’s agency was either neutralized,
controlled or manipulated. Nandalal, indeed Tagore, also seemed to be burdened by
324 A. Avijit
Fig. 11 Nandalal Bose, Santhal Dancers, watercolour on paper, 1947
the psychological effects of colonialism wherein their perceived masculinity had

been undermined by the sustained allegations of effeminacy. The sexualized figure
of the Santal thus lies deeply implicated in the psychological politics of the Empire
in 19th century Bengal.16
Santhal Dancers (Fig. 11), painted in the year of India’s Independence, reveals
other intersections and influences. The effect of Japanese woodcuts and
print-making is evident, but more striking is the manner in which Nandalal tampers
with Santal morphology in order to make it consciously better. The aquiline nose,
the stilted brows, the corrupted eyefold, the reedy lips and the heavily kohled eyes
suggest physical and cultural impositions aimed at artificially perfecting the Santal
archetype. For Nandalal, Santal physiognomy by itself was not good enough; in
fact, it was racially deficient, and required necessary pictorial liberties for allevia-
tion. But Nandalal’s re-grafting wasn’t created just for the Santals; it had its roots in
other body-projects emerging from anti-colonial imperatives, significantly the
Swadeshi movement of 1905 that rallied around the banishment of foreign goods
and the cultivation of indigeneity.
Niharika Dinkar has argued that in the backdrop of the masculinity crisis in
Bengal, an attempt was made during Swadeshi to reclaim the Indic body from the
effeminate gendering of colonialism (2010: 173). Abanindranath first began this
16
For more on the psychologically gendering effects of colonialism see Nandy (1983), Chatterjee
(1993), Sinha (1995) and Sarkar (2001).
reclamation by rejecting the anatomical realism of the western academy and opting
for a ‘lissom’ and ‘delicate’ figuration, famously with his iconic Mother India
(Dinkar 2010: 169). Nandalal followed suit with his paintings of mythological
heroism and sacrifice, where ‘delicate’ male gods dominate capitulating female
icons. So unlike the elites of Calcutta who countered the allegations of effeminacy
and non-historicity through idioms of ‘manliness’, the Bengal artists chose the
rather curious path of androgynous desexualization. The sinewy body of the Santal,
once glorified by Sherwill, proved far too robust for the reclamation of masculinity.
Nandalal’s Santals, however, became more ‘robust’ after a visit to Ajanta in
1909 (Dinkar 2010: 170), and Shiv Kumar has further suggested that
Abanindranath’s influence became subsequently weaker, leading to the develop-
ment of his own style in Santiniketan in the 1920s (Siva Kumar 2008: 90). But it
would seem that the iconography of Swadeshi would never abandon Nandalal, as
our reading of the Santhal Dancers (Fig. 11) reveals. The Santal body in the
painting negotiates both the robustness of Ajanta and fragility of Swadeshi in a
complex avowal of racial masculinity preoccupied with Nandalal’s own self-image.
The similarities with Ajanta (Fig. 12) are important because they commend an
idealized world of knowledge and art, much in the same manner the British saw
glimpses of their own past in the neo-classical renditions of the Indian ‘primitive’.
The bodies of Santal are no doubt sexualized, but the painterly technique of washes
and mists, as Dinkar has described it, creates a diffused quality as if to convey a
state of equanimity of the corporeal with the ethereal (Dinkar 2010: 172).
Nandalal’s Santals, following Tagore’s philosophy of the forest, are entombed in an
idealized state of existence.
Fig. 12 Detail of the drummer from Nandalal Bose’s Santhal Dancers, 1947 (left); 5th century
fresco of the Buddhist deity Padmapani from Cave 1 at Ajanta
326 A. Avijit
Jamini Roy, though not from Santiniketan, is also significant to our Santal story.
Roy had been trained at Calcutta’s Government School of Art under Abanindranath
as well as under the Orientalist art scholar Percy Brown but soon rejected the
stylization popularized by Abanindranath and Nandalal, stating that ‘the revival of
Bengal art will not come from Ajanta, Rajput, and Mughal art’ (Mitter 2007: 104).
By the 1920s he had turned his attention to local folk and popular art that included
scroll painting, terracotta relief and painted clay models and paintings sold outside
Kalighat temple in south Calcutta (Sinha 2008: 562). He also went on to develop an
elaborate culture around his ‘primitivism’, establishing a workshop of artisans and
family members, making his own colours, binding agents, as well copies of his
works that could be circulated more widely.
Roy’s early Santal works where analogous to that of Nandalal, and possessed
similar psychological responses to gender and colonial modernity. According to
Mitter, Roy’s anti-capitalism ‘sought to restore the collective function of art … and
in the process, he radically cast ‘indegenism’, the nationalist paradigm’ (Mitter
2007: 100). For Mitter this ‘nationalism’ becomes the crucial difference between the
Indian and western response to modernity. ‘Western primitives’, he argues, ‘sought
to restore the values of the pre-industrial community in the life of the alienated
modern individual, while Roy used the notion of the village community as a
weapon of resistance to colonial rule’ (Mitter 2007: 100).
Is Mitter right in his reading of the Santal pictures? Let us consider the argu-
ments in his defence. To begin with, there is little doubt that in these pictures we
confront the crisis of masculinity in Bengal society, a crisis resolved through the
(customised) sexualisation of the Santals. Secondly, the Santals represent the idea
of the fraternal—family and kinship bonds—and this idea of fraternity was also
serviced to resolve these gender anxieties. The body of the Santal, and their
ecosystem, was thus fantasised as the Indic ideal and became worthy of being the
national “weapon of resistance”. There is also a clear difference between these
artists and the apologists of the nineteenth century, who were more collaborators
with modernity, and for whom adjusting the ‘primitive’ in the Aryan logic became a
project of defamation and slander. For Mitter, the Santal pictures appear to be more
about incorporation, recognition and applause. Rewinding the primitive into the
idealist pre-colonial world of the Santals, as Mitter would suggest, was repurposed
as the unfettered agents of their own future, the metaphors for sovereignty. So one
could argue, that the Santal were finely in sync with the nationalist moment as well.
However, I suggest that works convey an entirely different ideology.17 By being
forced into the forest, the Santals are also being made pre-political ‘… and emptied
of all self-determination’, the kind articulated in the Thacoor Perwannah. The
forest metaphor also seems particularly anachronous in 1920s and 1930s, the high
noon of Gandhian politics, when the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience
17
My hermeneutical reading of the Santal pictures is informed by Ronald Barthes’ argument that
one cannot appeal to the biography or the intentionality of the author/painter to interpret meaning
in a work of art. In other words, it is the painting that has made the painter, and not vice versa. See
Barthes (1977: 142–147).
Fig. 13 Jamini Roy, Santhal Girl, tempera on card, 1930s (left); Santhal Woman—Seated,
gouache, 1930s
movements laid popular claims to sovereignty.18 The 19th century looked apolo-
getically behind the shoulder, towards Aryanism and the ‘golden ages’ of the past;
the 20th century demanded decolonization, rupture, and futurity. The Bengal artists,
instead, forced the Santal into a wilderness where the idea of sovereignty lay
captive to the artists’ own cognitive vulnerabilities. Not only can the Santals not
come out of the wild, it was undesirable if they did so. The moral and ethical
resolution of Bengal selfhood became directly related to the temporal detention of
the tribe, and ultimately, about defanging them permanently.
Jamini Roy’s images were stylistically radicalized after his folkish turn and his
disenchantment with the Nandalal oeuvre. The silhouette became chunky and
vigorous, in a way transcribing the manner of Santal self-representation (Fig. 13).
In the history of Modernism in India, this was a bold intervention because it meant
an authentic appropriation of local form and technique and its subsequent release
into the capitalist modernity of Calcutta. Ideologically though, the formatting
18
The reference to Gandhi may appear ironic, since the he had personally invited Nandalal to make
posters for the Haripura Session of the Congress in 1938. Although this requires further analysis, I
suggest that what drew Gandhi to the painter was their somewhat common critiques of modernity.
But I also think that this is where their comparison ends – Gandhi’s critique was about empow-
erment (self, community, nation), while Nandalal seemed to portray quite the reverse. However, it
also must be said that the Haripura posters did push Nandalal towards a more forceful depiction of
traditional life.
328 A. Avijit
Fig. 14 Jamini Roy, untitled works on the Santals, tempera on board, 1940s
remained true to the ideals of Tagore and oblivious to the ‘presentism’ of the
Santals—their displacement, poverty, indebtedness, alienation or even their history
of anti-colonialism. In this context, it’s easy to see why this was ignored—any
acknowledgment of their rebellious past would empower the Santals with genuine
political subjectivity and complicate the construction of an Arcadian forest-dweller.
Women had to be dancing or carrying pots, men had to be the eternal drummers,
binding custom and community (Fig. 14).
The trope of the tribal drummer is also a good example of how Santiniketan
negatively imbibed tribal clichés. In the colonial translations, the drummer appears
to be a hidden metaphor for individualism, empowerment, and even threat (Fig. 8).
And in case of Sherwill’s ‘Sonthal Dance by Moonlight’ (Fig. 7) this pictography
also becomes prophetic considering the rebellion that followed a few years later. The
drummer here is seen to graphically tear away from the collective animation of the
group and is asserted as a subject of portentous disobedience. In the Bengal com-
positions, however, the drummer has been hoisted to the centre of the frame and then
co-opted into the propaganda of primitivism, his drumbeats attempting to outshout
colonial modernity without actually confronting it.
The image of the imprisoned Santal became prototype for a number of other
Bengal artists, though with changes in format and style. Benode Behari Mukherjee,
an apprentice to Nandalal at Santiniketan, disrupted the silhouette, adding flat
colours and eschewing the physiognomic enhancements of his mentor, while still
continuing with the school’s inherent ideology (Fig. 15). Haren Das (1921–1968),
who studied at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, used reproducible
woodcuts for his Santal studies (Fig. 16), and with aid of this technology, bridged
the gap between ideology and its dissemination. The Santal’s ornamental tempo-
rality could now be more readily seen among the Calcutta bourgeoisie, reinforcing
the community as passive actors in the process of decolonization. If the Santals had
once been used as a site of anti-colonial resistance, as argued, their purpose after
1947 (when Das produced most of his signature woodcuts) was shortened to an
ethnographic imaginary that stood at odds, yet completely in place, in the drawing
rooms of Nehruvian modernity.
Fig. 15 Binode Bihari Mukherjee, Santhals Resting, oil on board, 1953
Fig. 16 Haren Das, Moody

Maid, woodcut, 1963
330 A. Avijit
Fig. 17 Ramkinkar Baij, The Santal Family, concrete, 1938, Santiniketan, Bengal
There was one notable exception to this ideological trend—Ramkinkar Baij.

Ramkinkar began as a student of Nandalal at Santiniketan in the 1920s where he
began to display an unusual talent for sculpture (Siva Kumar 2012: 41). His early
work showed the influence of Nandalal and Abanindranath, but it was with
sculpture that he evolved a bold and radical sensitivity for displaying the Santal, not
as metaphors of anachronism but by situating them firmly in the colonial present.
The Santhal Family (Fig. 17), executed in 1938 in cement, is apotheosis of both
Ramkinkar’s style and ideology. From a distance, the family—the parents, the
children, and a dog—appear more like stalagmites looming from an ancient floor,
shaped by the rhythms of the natural world. But the sculpture itself could not be
more timely: the migrant family struggling to take their meagre possessions to a
distant, unfamiliar address. Since the second half of the 19th century, Santal
migration to burgeoning tea estates of Bengal and Assam was a common feature, as
was the more disagreeable dislocation to coalfields in south Bihar. Ramkinkar’s
recognition of this alienation is evident in the sculpture, but without any invocation
of verdant lands or the wistful metaphors of fraternity. Rather the trauma of dis-
lodgment and the uncertainty of the future is reinforced, as is the determination to
grip the present. The itinerancy of the Santal becomes ironic, since for long this had
remained their mythical and historical burden, eluding their every attempt at
permanence.
The Santhal Family is also rooted in materiality—the straw mat, the basket, the
small lumps of cloth carried by the family—all become the portable yet permanent
markers of capitalist ethics. There are no drums, flutes, flowers or other ornaments
of the Santal idyll, so intrinsic to the grammar of Santiniketan. The medium—
granular concrete—is used almost as a medium of aesthetic rebellion, disposing
nostalgia in favour of rationality and rejecting continuity for the prevailing tech-
nologies of survival. The nuclear family is privileged over community; the young
Santals march purposefully into a new world now ruled by money and clock-time.
The politics of labour also situates the sculpture in the very heart of Marxian tension
as the cries of the suppressed Santals are discursively absorbed by the omniscience
of modernity. The Santhal Family, for many of these reasons, has often been called
the first Modernist sculpture of India; one can even say that Ramkinkar, through his
visual anti-historicism, is the first true theorist of the subaltern.
10 Conclusion
The visual story of the Santals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a
complex one. While the colonialists fundamentally used historicist protocol in
dealing with the Indian tribe, situating them at the base of a temporal ladder, their
visual engagement betrays a more ambivalent approach. While pictures, particularly
those composed by Sherwill of the Santal rebellion, seem to use familiar tropes of
tribal narritavization—‘wild men’ dancing to ancient rhythms—they, in fact,
express a range of intimate approaches, including anxiety and deference. This
chapter argues that the temporal and epistemological distance built by historicism—
of the primitive and the civilized—was actually foreshortened, even reversed, in
these pictures, leading the European colonizer to recover what he believed to be
hidden, primordial knowledge, a knowledge as significant as the revelations of the
Enlightenment. This gave the Indian tribal both agency and power.
The painters of the Bengal School of the early 20th century made the Santals the
weapons of their critique against colonial modernity. They returned them to their
forests, their drums, their dances and their Arcadian docility—what they believed to
be the true character of the Indian primitive. But by atavistically positioning the
Santals in the pre-modern, they subverted the very ideal of resistance, reducing the
community to a prop without a purpose, an ageless but neutralized circularity of
experience to be exploited as the nationalist’s answer to colonialism. This notion of
the Indian tribal—of bow-and-arrow hunters with bare torsos and loincloths living
in huts of wattled bamboo—continues to be well preserved in the 21st century by
both artists and image-keepers, and more so as their demands for recognition and
representation continue to grow.
332 A. Avijit
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Leïla

Exploring Indian Modernities

St. Edmund’s College

ISBN 978-981-10-7556-8 ISBN 978-981-10-7557-5 (eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018

Printed on acid-free paper

Portsmouth, UK Prof. Leïla Choukroune

Portsmouth, UK Prof. Leïla Choukroune

1 Understanding the Modern in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part I Imagining the Modern: Ideas, Institutions, and Challenges

Part II Experiencing the Modern: Makings and Practices

9 Modern Mixes: The Hybrid and the Authentic in

Part III Narrating the Modern: Texts and Travels

About the Editors

Prof. Leïla Choukroune is Professor of International Law and Director of the

Fig. 10 Article on the ‘Santhal Insurrection’ by Walter Sherwill featuring

Leïla Choukroune and Parul Bhandari

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 1

1 Tracing the Modern

Parson’s modernization theory remains controversial (despite a short comeback

1.1 Multiple and Contradictory Modernities

Subsequently, there emerged critiques to this unilinear understanding of the mod-

1.2 Looking Back and Beyond

An important element of such an envisioning of the modern is when the modern is

commensuality. Furthermore, some contributors also explore the modern as an

1.3 Post-colonial Ambivalences of Modernity

secondly, that such changes are signalled or marked by a functional change in

3 Learning from a Multidisciplinary Path

3.1 Shifting the Gaze

3.2 The Governing Principles of Modernity

accommodate different de-territorialized legal spheres in one hybrid project testing

3.3 The Practice and Understanding of the Modern

externalized, and presented to make sense of the everyday realities of Indian

3.4 Trajectories of the Makings

3.5 Locating in Transnational Exchanges

An explanation of Indian modernity signiﬁcantly takes into account the influence of

use of English language to the setting up of parliamentary democratic systems, to

form the framework to understand the ‘modern’. In particular, we are keen to

Kesavnanda Bharathi v. State of Kerala. 1973. 4 S.C.C. 225.

Underlying questions of transgression are questions of norms, if only because what

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 21

To do justice to these questionings, one needs to raise some threshold interrogation

by Frederick L. Ware where he says ‘the project of moral realism is to establish an

power of implementation and enforcement) in the naturalization of norms as pos-

vassalage.19 She valuably focuses on testimonial injustice and hermeneutical

An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognized expertise and com-

Coming speciﬁcally to the Indian scenario, however, it is important to extend the

If jurisprudence is based basically on the view that law is an instrument of order

The State of U. P. v. Raj Narain, 1975(4) SCC 0428 SC.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 37

immediate attainment by bringing about non-violent social revolution. Through such a

modernities. As in India indeed, these legal journeys challenge modern western

2 A Modern Law for India: The Constitutional Path

2.1 Modern Law

While approaching Indian legal internationalization as a path towards, and an

2.2 An Indian Legal Modernity?

component is almost completely obliterated’.10 There is no romantic fascination for

2.3 The Constitution as the Promise of a Modern

Ambedkar’s highly symbolic decision to publicly burn a copy of the Manusmriti