Vinayak Chaturvedi
1.
2.
As an undergraduate at UCLA in the late-1980s, I immersed myself in agrarian studies. A lot of my time was spent considering Chayanov’s ‘peasant economy’, Lenin’s ‘peasant differentiation’, Elvin’s ‘equilibrium trap’, Scott’s ‘moral economy’, Popkin’s ‘rational peasant’, Hobsbawm’s ‘primitive rebels’. My favourite class was taught by Robert Brenner and concerned the transition from feudalism to capitalism. While Brenner was interested in the political role of the peasants in transforming the countryside, I remember him warning of the dangers of ‘romanticizing the peasantry’. Carlo Ginzburg also taught in the department. Though I never took a class with him, much to my regret, his writings were on many course lists, especially The Cheese and the Worms (1976). This was when I first encountered Gramsci’s arguments about subaltern classes. I was particularly struck by how Ginzburg’s work challenged the famous line from The Communist Manifesto about the ‘idiocy of rural life’.
Becoming a historian was intimately tied to becoming a Marxist, a trajectory I have found was shared by many fellow travellers. This was also the period when Subaltern Studies entered the American academy with the publication of Selected Subaltern Studies (1988), a collection that became required reading for those working on South Asia and the Global South more generally. The project drew on Gramsci’s prison writings to understand the subaltern classes – the marginalized, the oppressed, the peasantry – as historical subjects. Subaltern autonomy and agency were at the centre of various case studies, particularly when it came to the use of violence. For me this was an exciting development. One essay that stood out was Partha Chatterjee’s ‘More on the Modes of Power and the Peasantry’. Chatterjee began by engaging with Brenner, especially on the question of anti-determinism, to explain that there was great diversity in peasant rebellions, which depended on the diverse forms of property relations in the countryside. I could see the theoretical connections between Chatterjee’s arguments about subaltern classes and my reading of Brenner and Ginzburg – an intellectual triangulation that left an imprint on my thinking.
These influences informed my approach in graduate school. My supervisor at Cambridge, C.A. Bayly – although not a Marxist – reinforced the idea that historical materialism was the only theory that could adequately explain historical change. He reiterated Brenner’s warning about the dangers of peasant nostalgia, adding that anyone studying subaltern classes should understand that peasants and workers sometimes choose fascism. He cited numerous examples from modern history. But at the time I dismissed this insight. The focus of my research was the exploitation of Bariayas (formerly known as Dharalas) in central Gujarat. I pointed out the paradox that their oppressors, Patidars, were also the greatest supporters of Gandhi and the nationalist movement in the area. I wrote about the peasant leaders and intellectuals who rejected not only British land and judicial policies, but the nationalist movement and its Patidar supporters, arguing instead for a community independent of both. In 1947, the Baraiyas formally became ‘Indians’, but their situation continued to worsen, as the nationalist leadership established its dominance in the decades after independence.
In 2002, as I completed the research for my first book, Peasant Pasts, Gujarat was the site of some of the most devastating communal violence in post-colonial India. Nearly two thousand Muslims were killed and 150,000 displaced. My book examined the long history of violence between landed groups and the peasantry, but nothing that prepared me for this outbreak of religious violence. In hindsight, it was clear that I had ‘epistemological blinders’ on. By focusing on the revolutionary potential of peasants, I failed to see the transformation among Hindus that was taking place. Peasant communities that had been written out of the history of anticolonial nationalism were now turning towards Hindu nationalism. I was aware that my explanations were incomplete. But the answers I was seeking were not to be found in agrarian social history. I opted for a different intellectual path.
3.
I wrote Hindutva and Violence, in part, to understand the spread of Hindutva through a study of its primary intellectual architect. In many ways, I was trying to come to terms with the mistakes I had made while caught up in the zeitgeist of anticolonial nationalism that had dominated South Asian historiography. The underlying question was how to interpret this historical conjuncture. Did I share the perspective of many scholars, that the subaltern classes had little agency when they voted for Hindutva candidates or killed in its name? One view considered Hindutva an upper-caste Hindu construction for (and by) elites to dominate the marginalized groups in Indian society. Another, often expressed after the Gujarat violence, was that subaltern classes were intoxicated in the act of killing, so they did not know what they were doing. Violence in the name of religious nationalism was – for the subaltern classes at least – not a conscious act.
I felt that scholars of the subaltern classes were at an impasse on these questions. Chatterjee describes the potential for transformation from ‘below’ whereby the marginalized ‘choose how they want to be governed’. These are politically emancipatory moments. But he further argues that there is a ‘dark side’ to India’s politics that is full of violence and criminality. Chatterjee concedes that he has abandoned the idea of an ‘innate secularism’ among the people – at least in his discussions of Bengal – while also suggesting that it is no longer ‘productive’ or ‘morally legitimate’ to celebrate the ‘universalist ideals of nationalism’. If I understand him correctly, the dark side of political society exposes the limits of our interpretative frameworks for the study of subaltern classes. Reading Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line, I was reminded that Marxists have faced parallel epistemological challenges in other historical contexts. Eley points to the writings of Timothy Mason on Nazi Germany. Mason concluded that there was ‘no clear path…from class conflict to the fundamental projects of the Third Reich’. In Eley’s words: it was ‘an extreme and tragic case of materialist social history running up against its limits’.
I first raised criticisms of Chatterjee in an essay I wrote in 2011, ‘From Peasant Pasts to Hindutva Futures?’, where I suggested that there is a failure among those who condemn Hindutva to understand its appeal. In When Victims Become Killers (2001), Mahmood Mamdani observes that communities that were subjects of European regimes in Asia and Africa often resorted to genocidal violence as new citizens of postcolonial nations. Mamdani’s insights are directly relevant for South Asia. However, there remains a reluctance to place subaltern groups at the centre of these histories of violence. There is no simple explanation for why large numbers of the poor, the marginalized, the subordinated and the nonliterate in many parts of India have turned to Hindutva. But to suggest that they do not contribute to the making of Hindu populism is to deny the theoretical advances made in social history by the past generation. How seriously did I want to take the idea of subaltern subjectivity? And what is the responsibility of the historian when subaltern classes choose Hindutva?
4.
These are unpopular questions, especially for those who consider support for Hindutva as merely a matter of false consciousness. I suspect this has much to do with the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru’s argument that ‘Hindu nationalism’ was an oxymoron. He identified it as the antithesis of ‘Indian nationalism’: Hindu nationalism was a ‘pre-modern’ sense of the nation. Nehru’s assertion that it was not ‘real’ implied that there was a modern nationalism that was both authentic and Indian – for him, one that was secular, democratic and progressive. Yet within this framing was an acknowledgement of the persistence of older forms of nationalism. I raise Nehru’s critique to underscore the point that while some would want to wish Hindutva away, I believe it is necessary to – as I write in my book on Savarkar – ‘annihilate the epistemic conceptualization of Hindutva’ by confronting it.
In a recent essay in NLR, Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues that writing about nationalism is a ‘regular refuge of historians’ in the decolonized world – and that ‘every refuge has its price’. For him, to write about Savarkar – or the intellectual life any other modern subject – is a ‘narrow ambition’. While Subrahmanyam does not go as far as calling it a mistake to write about Savarkar, and while he acknowledges the ‘tragic and inescapable pathology of nationalism’ in Israel, Russia and the United States, he makes no specific critique of Hindutva itself. Of course, Subrahmanyam is aware of the dangers of Hindu nationalism as he sometimes discusses in his writings and interviews; not to mention, his brother S. Jaishankar is one of the central planners of Hindutva policy in the government of India today. But for Subrahmanyam, modern historians – even if they are critical – write about nationalism too much.
Ignoring the historical conceptualization and developmental history of Hindutva however has not diminished it. Instead, it has proliferated beyond what anyone could have imagined. I concede that studying Savarkar’s ideas is insufficient to explain the diverse historical processes through which this has taken place, especially the role of subaltern classes. However, the first step was to make it thinkable. The challenge has been to understand the tactics and strategies by which Hindutva has spread, by force and domination as well as persuasion and conversion.
5.
Savarkar claimed that his conceptualization of Hindutva was like the seed of banyan tree that had the potential for ‘luxuriant expanse’. Once the roots and limbs of a banyan tree are established it is difficult to destroy; for Savarkar the banyan tree not only served as a metaphor for the strength and proliferation of Hindu nationalism, but also for the fact that it belonged to the soil of India. However, as Benedict Anderson observed: ‘Under the banyan tree no healthy plants can grow’. This was a reference to Indonesian politicians who also adopted the tree as a symbol for their political organization. A flourishing banyan tree can destroy life under its vast canopy and extensive root system. In other words, Savarkar’s use of it as a metaphor for the future of Hindutva was all too prescient, given its rapid expansion as a destructive force in Indian society, from above and below.
6.
Seria negligente sugerir que as classes subalternas compartilham uma única interpretação do Hindutva. Não só há grande variação, mas também muito debate e resistência. Em uma palestra recente, Chatterjee argumenta que ainda há a possibilidade de um movimento contra-hegemônico na Índia em torno do qual precisamos nos unir. Ignorar as formas cotidianas de oposição ao Hindutva seria um erro de julgamento – mas também devemos reconhecer como os proponentes do Hindutva exercem dominação contra essa resistência para garantir que sua hegemonia seja reproduzida. A ascendência da direita hindu me forçou a repensar muitos dos princípios que orientaram meu trabalho inicial. Nisso, muitas vezes encontrei inspiração nas "Teses sobre a Filosofia da História" de Benjamin. Para Benjamin, era o contexto do fascismo na Europa; para o sul-asiático de hoje, é o irmão mutante do fascismo, Hindutva. Benjamin argumentou que "nem os mortos estarão a salvo do inimigo se ele vencer". Mas ele também observou que é o materialista histórico que tem o potencial de "despertar esperança no passado". Em outras palavras, a tarefa é continuar escrevendo a história – se não por aqueles que não querem mais escrever contra os piores aspectos do nacionalismo hoje, então por aqueles comprometidos com a derrota do Hindutva. Isso não seria um erro.
Nessa época no ano passado, eu estava de volta à minha cidade natal na Índia Central. O dia todo eu tinha debatido se deveria comparecer à estreia de Swatantrya Veer Savarkar. Eu tinha publicado recentemente uma história intelectual de Savarkar e estava curioso sobre como os nacionalistas hindus queriam que ele fosse retratado na preparação para as eleições. No final, cheguei ao cinema, caderno e caneta na mão, pensando que talvez pudesse escrever sobre o filme. Logo me arrependi. O filme biográfico começa com uma narração de seu diretor e estrela, Randeep Hooda, explicando que, embora o nacionalismo indiano tenha sido geralmente celebrado como uma história de não violência, esta era uma história de violência. Em seguida, ele essencialmente reproduz os episódios-chave da biografia pseudônima, Life of Barrister Savarkar (1923), com Savarkar retratado como um super-herói mítico que busca vingança contra inimigos hindus, enquanto consistentemente se encontra no lugar certo na hora certa - um Forrest Gump para as massas Hindutva. O resultado é um cruzamento entre hagiografia vulgar e fantasia histórica (não, Savarkar nunca conheceu, muito menos influenciou Lenin).
Durante o intervalo, um homem se aproximou de mim e disse que eu parecia familiar. Ele queria saber meu nome. De repente, eu o reconheci. Eu disse a ele que o havia entrevistado muitos anos atrás. Ele era membro do All India Hindu Mahasabha, uma organização de direita da qual Savarkar serviu como presidente. Voltei para meu assento, apenas para ser seguido. Ele e outros membros do Hindu Mahasabha sentaram-se ao meu lado para a segunda metade do filme. O homem logo se virou para mim: "O que você está escrevendo em seu caderno?" Expliquei que estava tomando notas sobre o filme. Ele se inclinou e tentou ler o que eu estava escrevendo; felizmente, era ilegível para ele, e ele desistiu. Dizer que eu estava desconfortável seria um eufemismo. Depois do filme, ele me pressionou para saber meus pensamentos. Eu não sabia o que dizer. Não conseguia lembrar a palavra hindi para ou equivalente a "hagiografia", então simplesmente disse que havia muitos erros no filme. Acrescentei que o cineasta tinha feito um péssimo trabalho ao tratar o papel de Savarkar como presidente do Hindu Mahasabha. Ele concordou. Saímos do cinema.
Esta foi minha primeira viagem de volta à Índia desde que publiquei meu livro sobre Savarkar, Hindutva e Violência, e todos com quem falei me aconselharam a não discutir isso em público. Um seminário do qual eu deveria participar foi cancelado. Aqueles que trabalham na Índia no Ocidente estão bem cientes de que seus escritos estão sendo monitorados; quase todas as grandes universidades têm uma organização hindu de direita em seu campus que realiza vigilância em nome de agências governamentais na Índia. Mas a situação na Índia é muito pior: acadêmicos perderam seus empregos, foram assediados, atacados ou detidos indefinidamente por acusações de terrorismo. Recebi uma mensagem do meu editor: "Fico feliz em ouvir de você, especialmente porque ninguém parece ter linchado você durante o filme Savarkar. Suponho que eles conheçam seu livro, mas não o leram.
2.
As an undergraduate at UCLA in the late-1980s, I immersed myself in agrarian studies. A lot of my time was spent considering Chayanov’s ‘peasant economy’, Lenin’s ‘peasant differentiation’, Elvin’s ‘equilibrium trap’, Scott’s ‘moral economy’, Popkin’s ‘rational peasant’, Hobsbawm’s ‘primitive rebels’. My favourite class was taught by Robert Brenner and concerned the transition from feudalism to capitalism. While Brenner was interested in the political role of the peasants in transforming the countryside, I remember him warning of the dangers of ‘romanticizing the peasantry’. Carlo Ginzburg also taught in the department. Though I never took a class with him, much to my regret, his writings were on many course lists, especially The Cheese and the Worms (1976). This was when I first encountered Gramsci’s arguments about subaltern classes. I was particularly struck by how Ginzburg’s work challenged the famous line from The Communist Manifesto about the ‘idiocy of rural life’.
Becoming a historian was intimately tied to becoming a Marxist, a trajectory I have found was shared by many fellow travellers. This was also the period when Subaltern Studies entered the American academy with the publication of Selected Subaltern Studies (1988), a collection that became required reading for those working on South Asia and the Global South more generally. The project drew on Gramsci’s prison writings to understand the subaltern classes – the marginalized, the oppressed, the peasantry – as historical subjects. Subaltern autonomy and agency were at the centre of various case studies, particularly when it came to the use of violence. For me this was an exciting development. One essay that stood out was Partha Chatterjee’s ‘More on the Modes of Power and the Peasantry’. Chatterjee began by engaging with Brenner, especially on the question of anti-determinism, to explain that there was great diversity in peasant rebellions, which depended on the diverse forms of property relations in the countryside. I could see the theoretical connections between Chatterjee’s arguments about subaltern classes and my reading of Brenner and Ginzburg – an intellectual triangulation that left an imprint on my thinking.
These influences informed my approach in graduate school. My supervisor at Cambridge, C.A. Bayly – although not a Marxist – reinforced the idea that historical materialism was the only theory that could adequately explain historical change. He reiterated Brenner’s warning about the dangers of peasant nostalgia, adding that anyone studying subaltern classes should understand that peasants and workers sometimes choose fascism. He cited numerous examples from modern history. But at the time I dismissed this insight. The focus of my research was the exploitation of Bariayas (formerly known as Dharalas) in central Gujarat. I pointed out the paradox that their oppressors, Patidars, were also the greatest supporters of Gandhi and the nationalist movement in the area. I wrote about the peasant leaders and intellectuals who rejected not only British land and judicial policies, but the nationalist movement and its Patidar supporters, arguing instead for a community independent of both. In 1947, the Baraiyas formally became ‘Indians’, but their situation continued to worsen, as the nationalist leadership established its dominance in the decades after independence.
In 2002, as I completed the research for my first book, Peasant Pasts, Gujarat was the site of some of the most devastating communal violence in post-colonial India. Nearly two thousand Muslims were killed and 150,000 displaced. My book examined the long history of violence between landed groups and the peasantry, but nothing that prepared me for this outbreak of religious violence. In hindsight, it was clear that I had ‘epistemological blinders’ on. By focusing on the revolutionary potential of peasants, I failed to see the transformation among Hindus that was taking place. Peasant communities that had been written out of the history of anticolonial nationalism were now turning towards Hindu nationalism. I was aware that my explanations were incomplete. But the answers I was seeking were not to be found in agrarian social history. I opted for a different intellectual path.
3.
I wrote Hindutva and Violence, in part, to understand the spread of Hindutva through a study of its primary intellectual architect. In many ways, I was trying to come to terms with the mistakes I had made while caught up in the zeitgeist of anticolonial nationalism that had dominated South Asian historiography. The underlying question was how to interpret this historical conjuncture. Did I share the perspective of many scholars, that the subaltern classes had little agency when they voted for Hindutva candidates or killed in its name? One view considered Hindutva an upper-caste Hindu construction for (and by) elites to dominate the marginalized groups in Indian society. Another, often expressed after the Gujarat violence, was that subaltern classes were intoxicated in the act of killing, so they did not know what they were doing. Violence in the name of religious nationalism was – for the subaltern classes at least – not a conscious act.
I felt that scholars of the subaltern classes were at an impasse on these questions. Chatterjee describes the potential for transformation from ‘below’ whereby the marginalized ‘choose how they want to be governed’. These are politically emancipatory moments. But he further argues that there is a ‘dark side’ to India’s politics that is full of violence and criminality. Chatterjee concedes that he has abandoned the idea of an ‘innate secularism’ among the people – at least in his discussions of Bengal – while also suggesting that it is no longer ‘productive’ or ‘morally legitimate’ to celebrate the ‘universalist ideals of nationalism’. If I understand him correctly, the dark side of political society exposes the limits of our interpretative frameworks for the study of subaltern classes. Reading Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line, I was reminded that Marxists have faced parallel epistemological challenges in other historical contexts. Eley points to the writings of Timothy Mason on Nazi Germany. Mason concluded that there was ‘no clear path…from class conflict to the fundamental projects of the Third Reich’. In Eley’s words: it was ‘an extreme and tragic case of materialist social history running up against its limits’.
I first raised criticisms of Chatterjee in an essay I wrote in 2011, ‘From Peasant Pasts to Hindutva Futures?’, where I suggested that there is a failure among those who condemn Hindutva to understand its appeal. In When Victims Become Killers (2001), Mahmood Mamdani observes that communities that were subjects of European regimes in Asia and Africa often resorted to genocidal violence as new citizens of postcolonial nations. Mamdani’s insights are directly relevant for South Asia. However, there remains a reluctance to place subaltern groups at the centre of these histories of violence. There is no simple explanation for why large numbers of the poor, the marginalized, the subordinated and the nonliterate in many parts of India have turned to Hindutva. But to suggest that they do not contribute to the making of Hindu populism is to deny the theoretical advances made in social history by the past generation. How seriously did I want to take the idea of subaltern subjectivity? And what is the responsibility of the historian when subaltern classes choose Hindutva?
4.
These are unpopular questions, especially for those who consider support for Hindutva as merely a matter of false consciousness. I suspect this has much to do with the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru’s argument that ‘Hindu nationalism’ was an oxymoron. He identified it as the antithesis of ‘Indian nationalism’: Hindu nationalism was a ‘pre-modern’ sense of the nation. Nehru’s assertion that it was not ‘real’ implied that there was a modern nationalism that was both authentic and Indian – for him, one that was secular, democratic and progressive. Yet within this framing was an acknowledgement of the persistence of older forms of nationalism. I raise Nehru’s critique to underscore the point that while some would want to wish Hindutva away, I believe it is necessary to – as I write in my book on Savarkar – ‘annihilate the epistemic conceptualization of Hindutva’ by confronting it.
In a recent essay in NLR, Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues that writing about nationalism is a ‘regular refuge of historians’ in the decolonized world – and that ‘every refuge has its price’. For him, to write about Savarkar – or the intellectual life any other modern subject – is a ‘narrow ambition’. While Subrahmanyam does not go as far as calling it a mistake to write about Savarkar, and while he acknowledges the ‘tragic and inescapable pathology of nationalism’ in Israel, Russia and the United States, he makes no specific critique of Hindutva itself. Of course, Subrahmanyam is aware of the dangers of Hindu nationalism as he sometimes discusses in his writings and interviews; not to mention, his brother S. Jaishankar is one of the central planners of Hindutva policy in the government of India today. But for Subrahmanyam, modern historians – even if they are critical – write about nationalism too much.
Ignoring the historical conceptualization and developmental history of Hindutva however has not diminished it. Instead, it has proliferated beyond what anyone could have imagined. I concede that studying Savarkar’s ideas is insufficient to explain the diverse historical processes through which this has taken place, especially the role of subaltern classes. However, the first step was to make it thinkable. The challenge has been to understand the tactics and strategies by which Hindutva has spread, by force and domination as well as persuasion and conversion.
5.
Savarkar claimed that his conceptualization of Hindutva was like the seed of banyan tree that had the potential for ‘luxuriant expanse’. Once the roots and limbs of a banyan tree are established it is difficult to destroy; for Savarkar the banyan tree not only served as a metaphor for the strength and proliferation of Hindu nationalism, but also for the fact that it belonged to the soil of India. However, as Benedict Anderson observed: ‘Under the banyan tree no healthy plants can grow’. This was a reference to Indonesian politicians who also adopted the tree as a symbol for their political organization. A flourishing banyan tree can destroy life under its vast canopy and extensive root system. In other words, Savarkar’s use of it as a metaphor for the future of Hindutva was all too prescient, given its rapid expansion as a destructive force in Indian society, from above and below.
6.
Seria negligente sugerir que as classes subalternas compartilham uma única interpretação do Hindutva. Não só há grande variação, mas também muito debate e resistência. Em uma palestra recente, Chatterjee argumenta que ainda há a possibilidade de um movimento contra-hegemônico na Índia em torno do qual precisamos nos unir. Ignorar as formas cotidianas de oposição ao Hindutva seria um erro de julgamento – mas também devemos reconhecer como os proponentes do Hindutva exercem dominação contra essa resistência para garantir que sua hegemonia seja reproduzida. A ascendência da direita hindu me forçou a repensar muitos dos princípios que orientaram meu trabalho inicial. Nisso, muitas vezes encontrei inspiração nas "Teses sobre a Filosofia da História" de Benjamin. Para Benjamin, era o contexto do fascismo na Europa; para o sul-asiático de hoje, é o irmão mutante do fascismo, Hindutva. Benjamin argumentou que "nem os mortos estarão a salvo do inimigo se ele vencer". Mas ele também observou que é o materialista histórico que tem o potencial de "despertar esperança no passado". Em outras palavras, a tarefa é continuar escrevendo a história – se não por aqueles que não querem mais escrever contra os piores aspectos do nacionalismo hoje, então por aqueles comprometidos com a derrota do Hindutva. Isso não seria um erro.
