Modernity and politics in India

Daedalus

Volumn 129, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 137-162

  Kaviraj, Sudipta ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0037783602     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Although societies may have possessed these capacities in earlier periods, they are greatly enhanced under modern conditions. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash suggest that this kind of sociological reflexivity is a mark of contemporary societies - see Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1995) - and this transforms the nature of "risk."
2. See Beck, The Risk Society (London: Sage Publications, 1992). I think, however, that this was always one of the major distinguishing characteristics of modern societies and can be seen, as Michel Foucault's later work suggested, in political disciplines of the eighteenth century.
3. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979);
4. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1974).
5. If colonial empires provided a significant part of the capital required for industrialization, this is a condition that late modernizing societies cannot replicate - although some recent scholarship has sought to question the connection between colonialism and the early accumulation of capital.
6. The experience of Western modernity appears attractive now if we adopt a resolutely short-sighted view and refuse to look beyond 1945. On a longer view, the rise of aggressive nationalism, militarism, fascism, death camps, and repeated failures of democracy were essential parts of the modernity on offer, and, not surprisingly, Indian writers like Tagore and Gandhi had a deeply ambivalent and critical attitude toward its claims to provide a form of good life unquestionably superior to traditional ones.
7. I have argued this in Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," in Subaltern Studies, VII, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
8. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978).
9. Within colonial ruling groups, often there was bitter conflict between missionaries and colonial officials. Officials at times found the missionary universalism and enthusiasm for conversion troublesome. Missionaries accused administrators of turning their backs on both Christian and rationalist ideals.
10. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
11. I am most familiar with the modern history of Hinduism, but this does not imply that such changes did not happen in other faiths.
12. Said, Orientalism.
13. Partha Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997).
14. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
15. Tagore's famous novel The Home and the World (Ghare Baire) played on this distinction.
16. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.
17. S. N. Eisenstadt, "The Jacobin Component in Fundamentalist Movement," Contentions (5) (Spring 1996).
18. Preamble to the Constitution of India.
19. B. R. Ambedkar, one of the most interesting figures of the nationalist movement in its last phase, came from an untouchable caste, was Western-educated, became a prominent lawyer, and eventually played a preeminent role in the drafting of India's constitution.
20. Christianity survived for two millennia precisely because it changed its form and content quite radically: from early Christianity to its adoption by Rome; the adaptation after the discovery of Greek classical texts, especially Aristotle; Protestantism; and adaptation to a rationalist culture in modern times. My suggestion is, in the case of traditions, that this the rule, not the exception.
21. This does not at all mean falling over into indigenism. Indigenous traditions in India were utterly unfamiliar with democracy and cannot offer productive conceptual tools without much creative elaboration. Some parts of Western theory, evident in authors like Alexis de Tocqueville, remain particularly relevant in understanding the complexities of Indian democracy.
22. Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy and the Countryside (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
23. T. N. Madan, Sociology of Religion (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).
24. See Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism audits Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) for detailed arguments on various sides.
25. Eisenstadt, "The Jacobin Component in Fundamentalist Movement."