Colonial governmentality and the public sphere in India

Journal of Historical Sociology

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 418-440

  Kalpagam, U ^a  

^a GB Pant Social Science Institute   (India)

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EID: 0035602905     PISSN: 09521909     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Read Foucault (1979 & 1991) for understanding 'governmentality' and Scott (1999) for understanding 'colonial governmentality'.
2. See the special issue 'Aspects of "The Public" in Colonial South Asia', South Asia, Vol. XIV, No. 1, June 1991. Especially the articles by Freitag (1991) and Price (1991). Also see Gupta (1981/1998).
3. Habermas (1962/1989:83) recognized this relationship to the nature of the state when he noted, 'As a consequence of the constitutional definition of the public realm and its functions, publicness became the organizational principle for the procedures of the organs of the state themselves; in this sense one spoke of their publicity'. See especially Halasz (1997), Benhabib (1992), Fraser (1992).
4. Whereas Kant grounds his notion of publicity in the moral sovereignty of individual citizens, Mill provided a utilitarian argument for freedom of expression in that it was necessary for peaceful coexistence and to individual self interest. Both Marx and Weber evaluated liberalism's promise of freedom with the reality of modernity's social order and concluded that it did not fulfill its promise. Habermas's attempt to restore the principle of public reason in modern liberalism by grounding a theory of rationality in communicative action that is inter-subjective and dialogical leads him into a familiar narrative framework, of a 'progressive emancipation of an enlightened domain of unrestricted and rational discussion of matters of general interest' (Scott 1999: 35).
5. Pointing to the limitation of Habermas's analysis, Scott (1999: 36) notes, 'More specifically, what gets elided is the emergence of a new-that is, modern-political rationality in which power works not in spite of but through the construction of the space of free social exchange, and through the construction of a subjectivity normatively experienced as the source of free will and rational, autonomous agency'.
6. Mehta (1999:30) notes, 'This project is infinitely patient, perhaps even secretly counting on its own extended incompetence, of not getting there and hence permanently remaining in between. By the nineteenth century virtually every liberal justification of the empire is anchored in the patience needed to serve and realize a future. And that future is invariably expressed through the notion of progress'.
7. Also see Scott (1999: 31, 41) for an understanding of the 'structure' and 'project' of colonial power.
8. Freitag (1989) argues that there are important differences between the European and Indian experiences of the way the transcendence from particular and local interests to general and supra-local interests was effected. Whereas in both, collective and symbolic activities provided an enlarging ideological frame of reference by which popular identification with local 'community' became transmuted into identification with a larger entity, the way in which connections were forged between elite public opinion and mass collective activity differed. State-focused institutional activities and collective action of public arenas often remained separate in colonial India.
9. Dirks (1987) argues that the introduction of property and bureaucracy in nineteenth century India introduced complexities and contradictions that ultimately reduced the local kings into figureheads though the process of bureaucratic rationalization and centralization of the state. Cohn (1996) highlights how the codification of law by the colonial state in its attempt to base a system of jurisprudence on prevailing Hindu and Muslim law preferred fixity to regional variations and hence accorded authority to the oldest extant law as the norm. This in turn contributed to the centralization of disparate and diffused tendencies prevailing at the local level. Also read Price (1991) for one such illustration of transcendence from particular or local to the general or supra-local interest in the shift from vertical mobilization of castes to horizontal mobilization of castes.
10. Read Haynes (1991) for more on how the Gandhian rhetoric through the use of metaphors drawn from Hindu and Jain religious experience in the sphere of public politics forged powerful psychic connections between critical indigenous values and the notion of nationalism.
11. Stephen (1883). Cited in Mehta (1999:29).
12. See Freitag (1989) and Haynes (1991).
13. Read the chapter 'Struggle for the freedom of the press' in Chanda (1987), pp. 413-451.
14. I use the term 'covenant' as a substitute for Locke's 'compact'. The compact refers to the implicit act of consent and trust whereby men unite together under 'one body politick under one government' (Locke, 1960:332). Peter Laslett in his 'Introduction' to Locke (1960: 113) notes, 'Locke's insistence that government is defined and limited by the end for which political society is established, that it can never be arbitrary or a matter of will, can never be owned, is expressed in a particular and exact application of his doctrine of natural political virtue-the concept of trust'.
15. Quoted in Stokes (1959/1989:47). Also cited in Scott (1999: 52).
16. Chatterjee (1984: 167) notes, 'Gandhi does not even think within the thematic of nationalism. He seldom writes or speaks in terms of the conceptual frameworks or the modes of reasoning and inference adopted by the nationalists of his day, and quite emphatically rejects their rationalism, scientism and historicism'.
17. Gandhi (1966), Volume Nineteen, pp. 284.
18. Sinha (1995) points out the shift in British policies after 1857 from the Anglicist aim of creating a class of westernized Indians as conceived by Macaulay in his 1835 Minute on Education, to a conscious courting of the traditional and orthodox Indian groups.
19. See Ali (2001) for a detailed analysis.
20. See Sarkar (1993) and Sinha (1995) for the debates carried in the various newspapers on the Age of Consent Bill.
21. Gandhi (1968), Volume Twenty-Seven, pp. 347-348.
22. The curbs on the freedom of the native press were many and continued throughout the colonial period. See Narain (1998).
23. Cited in chapter 10 'Discrimination by law' in Natarajan (1962: 101).
24. Cited in chapter 10 'Discrimination by law' in Natarajan (1962: 101).
25. Cited in chapter 10 'Discrimination by law' in Natarajan (1962: 102).
26. Vernacular Newspaper Reports (VNR) of North Western Provinces and Oudh, Hindustani Lucknow, 25th July 1894. (Cited in Narain, 1998:63, n # 16).
27. Amin (1984) has brilliantly portrayed how the making of the Mahatma entailed widespread dissemination of his miraculous powers, which often were only rumours.
28. Gandhi (1969), Volume Thirty Five, pp. 489-490. It is a moot question as to whether the use of Hindu religious metaphors in the Gandhian rhetoric did or did not contribute to suffusing the liberal public sphere with majoritarian values, symbols and norms.
29. Chatterjee (1985) has noted that Gandhism that was originally a product of anarchist philosophy of resistance to state oppression, itself becomes a participant in its imbrications with a nationalist state ideology.
30. It is possible to draw both comparisons and relations between the critique of colonial governmentality in Gandhi's Ramarajya and the critique of bourgeois liberties in Burke's reflections on France. Limitations of space do not permit me to elaborate on this theme.