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There can be few scholars working anywhere in the world today with Partha Chatterjee’s sustained record of close intellectual engagement with India’s political economy and its place in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. As is well known, his interests also range widely over issues in social and cultural history, from rural mentalities to bourgeois forms of religious belief, from the role of discourse in shaping the tools of government and law, to the survival strategies of the poor excluded from the benefits of market reforms.
His interests have also been strongly comparative, including compelling accounts of the technocratic detachment of modern postcolonial states from what he calls the “people-nation”, the great mass of their citizenry. “Political society” emerges to fill the space: an arena for political contestation in which their huge populations of urban poor are able to seek rights and recognition outside formal state institutions. A leading voice of scholarly reflection and critique, much of his recent work explores the growth of populist support for forms of strong-man rule in India and across the world.
Federal futures?
Chatterjee’s new book, For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State, offers a critical exploration of the subcontinent’s history since the 1930s that is by turns fine-grained and wide-ranging. Naturally, he revisits many key arguments from his earlier work, often with sharp new insights. What is novel about the book, though, and likely to provoke wide debate, is his directly posed question. What might constitute “justice” at each level of the federal republic’s politics and society, and – perhaps even more importantly – what social forces might be able to bring it about?
To structure the book, Chatterjee employs his familiar distinction between India as a nation-state and what he calls “the people-nation”. The latter is the domain of community, local identity, attachment to place and above all a shared vernacular language. A “just republic” requires proper recognition for “the people-nation” within India’s federal structure. This means appreciating that India’s vernacular language communities possess a deep history and sense of their own distinctive territorial homelands. Independent India’s linguistic states emerged out of this long-term process of cultural formation.
Having laid out this broad problematic, Chatterjee reminds us of the federal model that came out of the Constituent Assembly Debates. The model emphasised national unity, a single national economy, a largely presidential style of politics, and the disruptive potential of popular sovereignty. The only real respite, Chatterjee suggests, came with the coalitional democracy that flourished between 1989 and 2014. He concedes that India’s experience of coalition politics has been a chequered one. But only a federal form based on coalition politics can accommodate shifting social forces, allow each state to retain its distinctive identity, and, above all, prevent any region from imposing its will on the others.
Concise and full of fresh insights, the first four chapters of the book reprise some of Chatterjee’s most important arguments. He explores the long-term limits of liberal governmentality in the Indian setting, and the succession of “passive revolutions” through which Indian capitalism has been able to exploit its changing political environment since 1947. He explores its contested hegemony under Modi and the deeply unstable legal framework for Indian citizenship.
Chatterjee moves in his fifth chapter to the real heart of the book. Given India’s social complexity, diverse and still emerging regional states, lopsided economic development and contrasting cultures of capitalist development, how can it be possible to agree on any definition of justice as the basis for a “just republic”? In this carefully argued part of the book, Chatterjee emphasises – perhaps not surprisingly – a comparative and contextual approach. Different rationalities may shape what people value. Collective as well as individual rights matter for oppressed communities, and it is difficult everywhere to combine procedural fairness with substantive justice.
But the problem, he points out, runs far wider than balancing consistency with the undoubted need to deliver protections to the precarious and often immiserated workers who populate India’s huge informal economy. It is also the long-term decline of trust in India’s ponderous legal apparatus. There is also the widespread popular belief that a single righteous leader may be more likely to deliver meaningful justice, and that authoritarian rule may better guarantee real social upliftment. Whilst acknowledging the undoubted appeal of these siren calls, Chatterjee points us rather towards the long, slow work of political education in defence of democracy.
He then moves on, in the second half of the book, to India’s “people-nation” itself, and to the coalitional democracy he sees as most likely to deliver these finely balanced political and judicial compromises. He points out a key development in India’s federal structure. Linguistic states and the rise of regional parties have created what is now an “asymmetric” federal system. It recognises diversity and the need for local accommodations, and hence provides something of a bulwark against regional secessionist movements.
A federation of ‘peoples’?
But Chatterjee brings a distinctive new dimension to this now familiar argument. He references the historian Christopher Bayly’s famous contention that early modern India saw the emergence of “regional patriotisms” grounded ultimately in vernacular language communities. These patriotisms gained a dramatically expanded cultural reach with the coming of vernacular print. Out of these processes, Chatterjee contends, India has now emerged very much as a federation of “peoples”. The nation itself is now imagined principally in the language of regional vernaculars, each understood to possess its own distinctive history and culture.
He concedes, of course, that many factors shaped patterns of linguistic unification and the demand for independent statehood. These include perceptions of disadvantage by linguistic minorities, fears of domination by neighbouring language communities, concerns to protect access to natural resources, and perceptions of political party advantage. The power of language also played its part, enabling otherwise quite heterogeneous populations to recognise themselves as sharing a common history and membership of a language community.
Nonetheless, the very makeup of linguistically constituted states gives some of them a special role. All have come into existence through political negotiation and compromise. They have experience in managing social diversity and containing its social strains by looking to commonalities of history and culture. Many have a long record of negotiating special provisions to take account of particular local needs and circumstances.
Given these qualities, Chatterjee suggests, a key role for some of them lies in supporting a revival of the coalitional form of national politics, and through it, of pushing back against the Hindu majoritarianism that has its principal home in the Hindi states. It was only in these states that a language community arose on the basis of religious culture, as communities of Hindi speakers emerged from the mid-nineteenth century on the basis of a newly mobilised Hindu religious identity. This gives the Hindi states a very different character from the linguistically constituted states, where very gradually developing commonalities of vernacular language drew in otherwise culturally diverse communities.
Faced with this religious majoritarianism, Chatterjee asks, how are the rights of Dalits and Muslims across India to be safeguarded in a “just republic”? He reminds us of Ambedkar’s deep frustration at the thwarting of popular sovereignty during the process of constitution-making. Following Ambedkar, he insists that it is the collective, not the individual, that matters when the rights and freedoms of minority groups are at issue. But what about the emergence of successful elites within these groups, whose claim to special protections may seem much less strong? The principle of popular sovereignty means that answers must come from within Dalit and Muslim communities themselves, and reflect their collective autonomy and drive for self-representation.
Turning to the dynamics of class power as it has developed across India’s federal structure, Chatterjee outlines the very different histories of the linguistically constituted states. In some states of India’s “core growth” zone – Maharashtra, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu – strong regional identities and rights-based interventions to help the marginalised have significantly boosted human development indices. Key moves have been the democratisation of healthcare and education, greater popular involvement in public services and transport subsidies. The social base of entrepreneurship in these states tends to be broad, technically skilled labour comes from all castes and classes, and there is a productivist social ethic which favours the emergence of SMEs.
“Zones of extraction”, such as Chattisgarh, by contrast, focus on the export of raw materials and commodities. They lack a strong regional identity or cohesive caste structure, and local Maoist movements lack appeal outside their core Adivasi supporters. Different again are “zones of labour supply” such as West Bengal. These have seen large-scale outflows of workers as well as capital, as successive state governments have prioritised protection of the peasant subsistence economy. Many small-scale enterprises flourish, but without the cohesion of a larger entrepreneurial class or a wider political drive to transform healthcare and education.
For Chatterjee, therefore, the progressive capitalist culture and distinctive social ethic of key states within India’s core growth zone have a special historical significance. Their shared deep roots in a common history and vernacular language, their acceptance of diversity as a strength rather than a weakness, and their history of inclusive community-building will give them a key role in building the “just republic”. And, of course, these are the states most likely to engage constructively in coalition-building, and hence to stand most effectively against Hindu majoritarianism.
In conclusion, Chatterjee turns to gender, caste and class. The most successful movements for gender justice have not emerged from any pursuit of universal norms, but rather from action in women’s own immediate lives. The great mobilisation of OBC and Dalit communities since the 1980s, and the huge disparities of wealth that have emerged in the “billionaire’s raj” of Modi’s India, mean that older catch-all categories must give way here too. The best hope of assembling progressive caste and class alliances in support of the “just republic” will come from a focus on regional and local caste-class formations, particularly in the “core growth” regions with their distinctive local capitalist cultures.
Some questions
It is testimony to the analytical sharpness and provocative framing of Chatterjee’s work that few readers will come away without further questions. As is well known, Bayly’s work on “regional patriotisms” and vernacular print drew substantially on Benedict Anderson’s influential 1983 work, Imagined Communities. For Anderson, with his insistence on the link between capitalism and print culture, the emergence of vernacular print was a profoundly repressive, as well as a creative process. Some vernacular languages became “languages of power” in their elevation to print. Others, based in oral tradition alone, with scripts deemed unsuitable for print, or disapproved for their association with “uncultured” communities, were pushed to the margins. What might this tell us about the cultural cohesion of linguistically constituted states?
Nor does Chatterjee’s model propose ways of engaging constructively with the Hindi states, of connecting with their huge populations of urban poor, and others who may be drawn away from a majoritarian consensus. This apparent conceding of such a key political ground seems puzzling, because Chatterjee has elsewhere written so eloquently about these populations and their dynamic histories of political contestation outside formal state structures. North India also, of course, has a rich and continuing history of heterodox religious culture in which syncretism and bhakti-related social inclusiveness have played a significant role. Again, it would be fascinating to have Chatterjee’s further reflections on this part of his argument.
Needless to say, these are very minor concerns, placed alongside the scale of Chatterjee’s remarkable achievement in this work. It combines huge breadth, striking analytical sharpness and a sustained focus on an absolutely key question in the politics of modern India and federal states across the world. In the present moment, it is a book that scholars and the serious general reader alike will want to reach for and to read.
Rosalind O’Hanlon is Professor Emeritus of Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her latest book is Lineages of Brahman Power: Caste, Family, and the State in Western India 1600–1900. Her previous books include Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives, coedited with David Washbrook, and At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India.
For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State, Partha Chatterjee, Permanent Black and Ashoka University.
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