SRQR on Chatterjee, Partha. From the Politics of the Governed Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World.

New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. 135-57. Chapter 1: The Nation in Heterogeneous Time SUMMARY: This chapter can be read as Partha Chatterjees response to Benedict Andersons idea of nation in homogeneous, empty time. The chapter is roughly divided into five sections. In the first section, Andersonian homogeneous, empty time stands contested by what Chatterjee refers to as the heterogeneous time of modernity. The next section is on the two contradictory pulls of universal citizenship and particularist rights in the politics of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and briefly examines two major works by Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras (1946) and The Untouchables (1948) wherein Ambedkar looked for the specific historical origin of untouchability. The third section is on a fiction of nationalism (Dhorai charitmanas [194951] written by the Bengali writer Satinath Bhaduri) which will demonstrate how a familiar historicist narrative of modern nationalism is disrupted by the heterogeneous time of colonial governmentality. Discussion on Dorais story goes hand in hand with two other issues namely Gandhi-Ambedkar strife on the issue of representation of the untouchable and the Pakistan resolution detailed in Ambedkars book in the last two sections. Section I Chatterjee starts off with the need to revisit certain familiar concepts of social theory such as civil society and state, citizenship and rights, universal affiliations and particular identities (3-4). Because he is looking at popular politics, he argues that he will consider the question of democracy (4). For him, civil society is the closed association of modern

elite groups, sequestered from the wider popular life of the communities, walled up within enclaves of civic freedom and relational law; citizenship will take on two different shapes the formal and the real. Instead of the ruler and the ruled, he will use terms such as those who govern and those who are governed; governance is the body of knowledge and set of techniques used by, or on behalf of, those who govern and democracy as the politics of the governed (4). He begins this chapter with a conflict that lies at the heart of modern politics which is the opposition between the universal ideal of civic nationalism, based on individual freedoms and equal rights irrespective of distinctions of religion, race, language, or culture, and the particular demands of cultural identity, which call for the differential treatment of particular groups on grounds of vulnerability or backwardness or historical injustice, or indeed for numerous other reasons (4). Chatterjee argues that this opposition is a symptom of the transition that occurred in modern politics in the 20th century democratic politics grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty to one shaped by governmentality. Benedict Anderson demonstrates the universal ideal of civic nationalism in Imagined Communities wherein he argues that the nation lives in homogeneous empty time1 (4). It
1

One fundamental change brought about with the imagined communities of nations and that is to do with ones conception of time/history. For Anderson, the idea of homogeneous, empty time (borrowed from Walter Benjamin) can represent the meanwhile, as opposed to Messianic time where there is the simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present) which cannot. Hence, the former is important for an imagined community. This is explained by Anderson in two forms of imaginings of 18th century Europe namely novel and newspaper. In the narrative of a novel, two characters even though never meet are strangely connected in two ways first because they are embedded in societies where members can pass each other without being acquainted and second they are embedded in the minds of the readers. This idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time is, for Anderson, analogous of the idea of the nation, as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history (26). An American may never meet or even know the name of a handful of fellow-Americans and may have no idea what they are up to at any time yet he/she has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity (26). Anderson illustrates the same in four fictions from different cultures and epochs. In the case of newspaper, according to Anderson, different stories are juxtaposed. The arbitrariness of the inclusion and exclusion shows that the linkage between these stories has been imagined. There are two sources for these linkages. One is calendrical coincidence: the date at the top of the newspaper representative of the homogeneous, empty time. The other is the relationship between the newspaper as a form of a book and the market. Newspaper in this perspective is merely an extreme form of the book but of ephemeral popularity (34). He calls it one-day best-sellers (35). He then points out to a kind of mass ceremony of reading newspaper which is the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (imagining) of the newspaper-as-fiction

was a dominant strand in modern historical thinking that imagined the social space of modernity as distributed in homogeneous empty time (4). He explains how a Marxist would call homogeneous empty time as a time of capital. Just as the simultaneous experience of reading the daily newspaper or following the private lives of popular fictional characters makes the imagined community possible, similarly the same simultaneity experienced in homogeneous empty time allows us to speak of reality of categories of political economy such as prices, wages and so on. Then, Chatterjee moves on to talk about Andersons book titled The Spectre of Comparisons, a follow-up analysis of Imagined Communities wherein he distinguishes between nationalism and the politics of ethnicity. Anderson identifies two kinds of seriality that are produced by modern imagining of community: unbound and bound. The unbound seriality is the everyday universals of modern social thought: nations, citizens, revolutionaries, bureaucrats, workers, intellectuals, and so on, while the bound seriality of governmentality is the finite totals of enumerable classes of population produced by the modern census and the modern electoral systems. Unbound serialities are typically imagined and narrated by means of the classic instruments of print-capitalism, namely, the newspaper and the novel. They afford the opportunity for individual to imagine themselves as members of larger than face-to-face solidarities, of choosing to act on behalf of those solidarities, of transcending by an act of political imagination the limits imposed by traditional practices. Thus. unbound serialities are potentially liberating. For Anderson, bound serialities operate only with integers as numbers, implying that for each category of classification, any individual can count only as one or zero, never as a fraction, which in turn means that all partial or mixed affiliations to a category are ruled out. Thus one can only be
(35). Hegel, as Anderson points out, sees it as a modern mans substitute for morning prayers. Each communicant is aware that the ceremony is replicated by many people whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion (35) and this ceremony is repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. Further the fact that the same newspaper is consumed by the newspaper reader and his other neighbours reassures that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life (35-6).

black or not black, Muslim or not Muslim, tribal or not tribal, never only partially or contextually. According to Anderson, bound serialities are contricting and conflictual and they produce the tools of ethnic politics. Chatterjee further comments that Anderson uses this distinction between bound and undound serialities to make his argument about the residual goodness of nationalism and the unrelieved nastiness of ethnic politics. Anderson although acknowledges the variability of human wants and values and does not cast them aside as unworthy or ephemeral but he wishes them as the historical ground on which the ethical universal could be established. He thus posits the politics of universalism which requires an understanding of the world as one, so that a common activity called politics can be seen to be going on everywhere. Here, Chatterjee observes that the conception of time has translated in space, so that there is the time-space of modernity and it is this space which politics inhabits. Chatterjee starts the next paragraph with a short sentence in negative: I disagree. He calls it one-sided and one-dimensional approach to the idea of time-space of modern life. His argument is: People can only imagine themselves in empty homogeneous time; they do not live in it. Empty homogeneous time is the utopian time of capital. It linearly connects past, present and future, creating the possibility for all of those historicist imaginings of identity, nationhood, progress, and so on. He says that empty homogeneous time is not located anywhere in real space it is utopian. The real space of modern life consists of heterotopias (Foucault; idea of multiple time, multiple spatial dimension we occupy in time). For Chatterjee, time is heterogeneous, unevenly dense. He gives the example of the industrial workers who do not internalize the work-discipline of capitalism and even when they do, they do not do so in the same way. He contends that politics does not mean the same thing to all people.

Then he speaks about Homi Bhabhas idea of how the narrative of the nation is split into double time. At one at pedagogic level, people were an object of national pedagogy because people are always in the making, in a process of historical progress, not yet fully developed to fulfil the nations destiny. On the other hand, the unity of the people, their permanent identification with the nation, had to be continually signified, repeated and performed. Then Chatterjee cites examples from the postcolonial world for the presence of a dense and heterogeneous time: one could show industrial capitalists delaying the closing of a business deal because they hadnt yet heard from their respective astrologers, or industrial workers who would not touch a new machine until it had been consecrated with appropriate religious rites, or voters who would set fire to themselves to mourn the defeat of their favorite leader, or ministers who openly boast of having secured more jobs for people from their own clan and having kept the others out. Chatterjee say that if one calls these as the co-presence of several times the time of the modern and the times of the pre-modern, it is endorsing the utopianism of Western modernity. Chatterjee cites work from recent ethnography that establish these other times as not mere survivors from pre-modern past but new products of the encounter with modernity. It is these times which he calls the heterogeneous time of modernity. Section II In this section, Chatterjee wants to focus on certain moments in Ambedkars life, in order to highlight the contradictions posed for a modern politics by the rival demands of universal citizenship on the one hand and the protection of particularist rights on the other. In Who Were the Shudras (1946) and The Untouchables (1948), Ambedkar looked for historical origin of untouchability and traces its history to be some 1500 years old. He then

argues that initially the Brahmins, the Shudras and the untouchables were all equals and the inequality that exists today is the result of the conflicts in later history. Thus for Chatterjee, The modern struggle for the abolition of caste was thus a quest for a return to that primary equality that was the original historical condition of the nation and here the utopian search for homogeneity is made historical. For Chatterjee, Ambedkars narrative is a familiar historicist narrative of modern nationalism. Then, Chatterjee gives a short prelude to the next section which will show how this narrative of modern nationalism gets disrupted by the heterogeneous time of colonial governmentality by examining the fiction of nationalism Dhorai charitmanas (194951) by the Bengali writer Satinath Bhaduri. Section III Dhorai charitmanas was structurally modelled on Ramcharitmanas by Tulsidas. But here instead of the exemplary king Rama, there is Dorai from one of the backward castes. Dhorais father died when he was a child and when his mother remarried, he was brought up by the village holy man, Bawa. He grew up begging and singing songs of Rama. He never went to school but knew that those who could read the Ramayana are men of great merit and social authority. He was steeped in the mythic world. His elders knew of the government, courts and police but they refrained from getting entangled in these matters. Then there is the story of Ganhi Bawa (a Gandhi-like figure) who influenced the whole village. Chatterjee thinks that Dhorais upbringing can be read as a faithful ethnography of colonial governance and the nationalist movement in northern India. Chatterjee here quotes Shahid Amins studies on how the authority of Mahatma Gandhi was constructed amongst the peasantry through stories of his miraculous powers and rumours or how the Congress program and the objectives of the movement were themselves transmitted in the countryside in the language of myth and popular religion. Chatterjee infers that If Gandhi and the

movements he led in the 1920s and 1930s were a set of common events that connected the lives of millions of people in both the cities and the villages of India, they did not constitute a common experience. So, even when people participated in the same great events, their understandings of those events were narrated in very different languages and inhabited very different life-worlds. This makes Chatterjee conclude that the nation, even if it was being constituted through such events, existed only in heterogeneous time. Chatterjee then moves on to the idea of the nation as an abstraction which for Anderson is an imagined community. The nation as an ideal and empty construct, floating as it were in homogeneous time, [which] can be given a varied content by diverse group of people, all of whom, remaining different in their concrete locations, can nonetheless become elements in the unbound seriality of national citizens. According to Chatterjee, this is the dream of all nationalists and also of Satinath Bhaduri who was part of the Congress and this is the underlying politics behind the story of Dhorai through whom the nation is coming to shape and the hero is on a journey towards the kingdom of citizenship. Section IV Chatterjee states that Ambedkars dream of equal citizenship also had to contend with the fact of governmental classifications. Chatterjee quotes Ambedkars view on the problem of representation faced by untouchables in India. Ambedkar says that The right of representation and the right to hold office under the state are the two most important rights that make up citizenship. But the untouchability of the untouchables puts these rights far beyond their reach ... they [the untouchables] can be represented by the untouchables alone. To which Chatterjee adds that the general representation of all citizens would not serve the special requirements of the untouchables, because given the prejudices and entrenched practices among the dominant castes, there was no reason to expect that the latter would use

the law to emancipate the untouchables. Chatterjee points to the various ways in which the special needs of representation of the untouchables could be secured and many were tried in colonial India. One was the colonial officials protected the interests of the lower castes against the politically dominant upper castes or the colonial government would nominate distinguished men from the untouchable group to serve as their representatives. Another was reservation of seats in the legislature for candidates from the lower castes and separate electorates of lower-caste voters to elect their own representative. Then Chatterjee clarifies Ambedkars stance who outrightly refuses protection by the colonial regime. The Congress declaration of independence or Swaraj in 1930 invoked the following response from Ambedkar: the bureaucratic form of Government in India should be replaced by a Government which will be a Government of the people, by the people and for the people. . . . We feel that nobody can remove our grievances as well as we can, and we cannot remove them unless we get political power in our own hands. No share of this political power can evidently come to us so long as the British government remains as it is. It is only in a Swaraj constitution that we stand any chance of getting the political power in our own hands, without which we cannot bring salvation to our people. . . . We know that political power is passing from the British into the hands of those who wield such tremendous economic, social and religious sway over our existence. We are willing that it may happen, though the idea of Swaraj recalls to the mind of many the tyrannies, oppressions and injustices practiced upon us in the past. (This was declared by Ambedkar at a conference of the depressed classes) Chatterjee speaks about Ambedkars dilemma. The colonial government uplifted the oppressed from the tyranny of Hinduism but for it, the untouchables were still subjects not citizens and only an independent nation could provide them citizenship. Yet, Ambedkar was

aware of the fact that independence also meant the rule of the upper castes, how could the untouchables expect equal citizenship and the end of the social tyranny from which they had suffered for centuries. Chatterjee remarks on Ambedkars position which he thinks is clear: The untouchables must support national independence ... but they must press on with the struggle for equality. This culminates into a dramatic standoff between Ambedkar and Gandhi in 1932. During the course of negotiations between the British government and Indian political leaders on constitutional reforms, Ambedkar argues that the untouchables constitute a separate electorate and must be allowed to elect their own representatives to the central and provincial legislature. But the Congress headed by Gandhi although conceded to a similar demand for the Muslims, refused to see the untouchables as a community separate from the Hindu and instead had reserved seats for them. At that time, the British had not granted universal adult suffrage to all Indian which means that suffrage was severely limited by property and education qualifications and it is unlikely that the depresses castes would have any influence in these elections and hence the demand for a separate electorate of the depressed classes. But according to Gandhi issue of untouchability was a matter internal to Hinduism. He threatened to go on a fast and Ambedkar conceded. The negotiations became the Poona Pact where the Dalits were given a substantial number of reserved seats but within Hindu electorate. Chatterjee calls this as a temporary resolution in the early 1930s. Chatterjee points out that Ambedkar had no problem with the idea of the homogeneous nation as a pedagogical category the nation as progress, the nation in the process if becoming except that it was not only the ignorant masses but the upper-caste elite who needed training on citizenship. The upper-caste elite has still not accepted the fact that democratic equality was incompatible with caste inequality. Ambedkar refused to join Gandhi in performing that homogeneity in

constitutional negotiations over citizenship. Ambedkar insisted that the untouchables were a minority within the nation and needed special representation in the political body. On the other hand, Gandhi and Congress asserting the nation as one and indivisible has conceded that the Muslims were a minority within the nation and the untouchables represent an internal problem to Hinduism. Chatterjee aptly notices that the homogeneity of India slides into the homogeneity of the Hindus. Then Chatterjee comes back to Dorais story as his education in nationalism continues. The Congress volunteerss letter to Mahatma fooling the villagers to vote for the Congress provoked the following response from Chatterjee: The vote is the great anonymous performance of citizenship which is why it probably did not matter too much that Dhorais introduction to this ritual was through an act of impersonation. Chatterjee adds that it only concealed the question of who represents whom within the nation. The people voted for Mahatma but it was the Rajput landlord who was the chairman of the district board with support from the Congress. Then Dhorais joins Mahatmajis army which is in the context of the Quit India movement of 1942. The nationalists abandon Dhorai and other rebels. They are now wanted men and must surrender but Dhorais unit resolves not to.

Section V This section discusses the Pakistan resolution for an independent state and Ambedkars book on it titled Pakistan or Partition of India (1940). The dual pull of Ambedkars politics is again conjured up in the book: universal and equal citizenship within the nation on one hand juxtaposed with special representation for the depressed castes in

the body politic. Chatterjee highlights the dialogical structure of the book wherein Ambedkar presents both the Muslim case for Pakistan and the Hindu case against Pakistan. Chatterjee does not fail to notice the neutrality of Ambedkar evident in the debate. Chatterjee thinks that the significance of the book is that Ambedkar is judging the utopian claims of nationhood in the concrete terms of realist politics. Then Chattejee focuses on Ambedkars conclusion on partition which for the latter, on balance, would be better for both Muslims and Hindus. Ambedkars arguments come when he considers the alternative to partition: how was a united and independent India, free from British rule, likely to be governed? The Muslims were against the idea of a single central government, dominated by Hindu. So, if there is no partition, India will have a weak central government with powers devolved to province. Thus the new state of Pakistan would be a homogeneous state with boundaries redrawn along Punjab and Bengal to form homogeneous Muslim and Hindu regions to be integrated into Pakistan and India respectively. In this new division, India or Hindustan would be composite not homogeneous where minority question could be handled reasonably and in Pakistan the communal problem will be reduced and of minor significance. Chatterjee goes on to unfold Ambedkars real-politic logic wherein he shows that only in united India, Hindu dominance is a serious threat because this will alert the Muslims who fearing the tyranny of majority would try to have a strong Muslim party to oppose the Hindu Raj. But if partition happens, Ambedkar says, Muslims in Hindustan would be a small and widely scattered minority. Now Chatterjee comments on Ambedkars arguments. According to Chatterjee, Ambedkar is fully aware of the value of universal and equal citizenship and wholly endorses the ethical significance of unbound serialities. Ambedkar also realizes that the slogan of

universality is often a mask to cover the perpetuation of real inequalities. The politics of democratic nationhood offers a means for achieving a more substantive equality, but only by ensuring adequate representation for the underprivileged groups within the body politic. Thus a strategic politics of groups, classes, communities, ethnicities bound serialities of all sorts is thus inevitable. Homogeneity is not forsaken; but on specific contexts, it can often supply the clue to a strategic solution, such as partition, to a problem of intractable heterogeneity. But unlike the utopian claims of universalist nationalism, the politics of heterogeneity can never claim to yield a general formula for all peoples at all times: its solutions are always strategic, contextual, historically specific and, inevitably, provisional. Then he comes back to Andersons distinction of nationalism and politics of ethnicity. Anderson does concede to the fact that bound serialities of governmentality can create a sense of community on which the politics of the ethnic feeds. But for Anderson this sense of community is illusory. He calls them phantom communities. Thus for Anderson, it is only the unbound serialities of nationalism that need not turn the free individual members into integers (numbers) and it can experience the simultaneity of the imagined collective life of the nation without imposing rigid and arbitrary criteria of membership. But for Chatterjee, such unbound serialities cannot exist except in utopian space. Chatterjee further his argument thus: To endorse these unbound serialities while rejecting the bound ones is, in fact, to imagine nationalism without modern governmentality. What modern politics can we have that has no truck with capitalism, state machineries, or mathematics? The historical moment that Anderson, and many others, seem keen to preserve is the mythical moment when classical nationalism merges with modernity. I believe it is no longer productive to reassert the utopian politics of classical nationalism. Or rather, I

do not believe it is an option that is available for a theorist from the postcolonial world. Chatterjee brings us to the end of Dhorais story where Dhorai how lives with his band of fugitive rebels and he is brought face to face with the limits of his dreams of equality and freedom. Chatterjees stark comment here is: It is not the bound serialities of caste and community that prove illusory but rather the promise of equal citizenship. Finally Dhorai leaves the mother and son leaving behind his bundle, along with the copy of the Ramayana. When Chatterjee says that Dhorai has lost forever his promised place in prophetic time what did he meant? Was is a plea on behalf of an unsung hero or was it a comment on the nationalist movement? Or does it have to do with the imagining of the national community? Coming back to Ambedkars narrative, Chatterjee charts out Ambedkars frustration post Independence. Although instrumental in putting together one of the most progressive democratic constitutions in the world, he is frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the state. Chatterjee comments that changing the law was one thing; changing social practices was another matter. Then Ambedkar converts to Buddhism in 1956. Chatterjee sees it as an act of separatism. Chatterjee finally concludes that the conflict between universal affiliations and particular identities at the founding moment of democratic nationhood in India is still unresolved. RELATION: QUESTION: RESPONSE/EVALUATION: