Political Agonism in the Indian Age

Violence Outside the State

In her gripping exploration of neglected dimensions of Indian political thought, Kapila uncovers what she calls a political theory of violence, one rooted in the ability of the individual subject both to kill and to die, that is, to sacrifice his own life. This grounds the political as individual sovereignty, a sovereignty detached from the legally sanctioned rules of the state. This theme is first traced back in the life and work of the early independence nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak was one of the inspirers of the first (failed) mass movement in Indian politics—the Swadeshi or Home Rule movement of 1905–1908, triggered by the colonial proposal to partition Bengal. Through philosophical reinterpretation of the Hindu scripture, Gita, Tilak elaborated a modern theology of the Indian “political.” This underlined the power of words (notably to foment sedition) as well as the power of the terrorist bomb as a weapon with global ramification, beyond state borders, and with democratic potential. The practice was replicated and amplified by the Ghadar movement, an international political movement founded by expatriate Indians—Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims—with the aim to overthrow British rule in India. What Kapila detects in the Ghadar is the emergence of a new subject, marked by its capacity for sacrificial militant mobility. This partisans’ world war offered a counter geography to the British Empire and broke the link between territory and politics. The Ghadar movement was succeeded by more institutionalized secret societies and paramilitary voluntary organizations, the most prominent of which, the umbrella RSS, was inspired by the ideologue of Hindutva, Savarkar. Savarkar—a strong influence on the politics of today’s ruling party, the Bharatiyva Janata Party (BJP)—believed that total attachment to Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) was to be forged through the shedding of blood.

Kapila’s reflections on violence also foregrounds an original—though not entirely novel or unexpected—reading of Gandhi. Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence is situated within a broader ongoing reflection about the relationship between self-sacrifice and the political. Importantly, and not unlike his opponent Sarvarkar, Gandhi saw how the virtue of death detached sovereignty from the state and deposited it into the individual. As the violence of Partition erupted, however, the Ghandian subject—the subject who could die but not kill—was transmuted into a different figure of sovereignty. Independence leader and statesman Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel redistributed the Gandhian language of sovereignty. The people as police, as both protectors and killers, became the custodians of life and death—of sovereignty itself—with catastrophic results resulting in the death of one million people. What is remarkable about twentieth century political violence in India is that it was not primarily directed towards the “outsider” but, rather, that it took aim at the intimate, the brother. 

Enmity and Brotherhood

Kapila invokes Sigmund Freud vividly to evoke the powerful force of hostility and hatred that stems from intimate identification. Intimate enmity leads to love and fellowship, but also to conflict and murder. We find this brotherly conflict played out in the rivalry between Gandhi and Ambedkar—as well as between Gandhi and Savarkar—over the future of Hinduism and the identity of India. Most tragically, throughout modern Indian history, brotherly violence displaced the antagonism between friend and foe that had been taken as central to the understanding of the political in western political thought, under the influence of Carl Schmidt. As Kapila sharply puts it, “it was the fraternal that equipped the political in India.”

Again, we can trace this theme in the writings of the major figures she turns her attention to. Tilak’s reading of the Gita focused on Krishna’s discourse to Arjuna the warrior, and its central dilemma of whether or not he ought to kill his own kingsmen. As in the Biblical story of Abraham, sacrifice of kin crucially serves as proof of loyalty to the gods. Savarkar’s polemics, for his part, were geared towards constituting Islam and Muslims as “foreign” or Other. Savarkar advocated the fomenting of civil war, but crucially not of genocide: for him, war and confrontation were preconditions for equality and friendship. Violent conflict eventually turned foes into friends, through their defeat and incorporation. For Savarkar, paradoxically, enmity was a condition of fraternity.

Gandhi’s vision, too, was haunted by the question of the relationship between violence and political community. For him, however, what made fraternity possible was self-sacrifice. Sacrifice and fasting became the basis of life with others, and thus the springboard for Swaraj or self-rule. Yet this fraternity was not boundless; on the contrary, it strictly maintained boundaries. In Gandhi’s view, relations between Muslims and Hindus were marked by what Kapila, following Jacques Lacan, calls “extimacy,” the establishment of distance in a claustrophobic intimacy. Gandhi advocated the separation of communities; he famously rejected interreligious marriage. Overzealous intimacy between Muslims and Hindus, he feared, portended violence. By contrast, low-caste Hindus—the “Untouchables” or dalits—were in his view “so intimately mixed with those of the caste hindus in whose midst and from whom they live, that it is impossible to separate them.” Dalits, by contrast to Muslims, were not a radical alterity (and hence, on Ghandi’s view, should not be granted separate electorates).

A strikingly different view of caste, as a historical system of inequity of power and subjugation, was presented by Ambedkar, a progressive social reformer, law minister and himself a dalit. Hostility and violence were inherent to the Hindu social fabric, with Brahmins emerging as Nietszchean supermen: those who can kill but not die. Untouchables, in turn, had “no right to life or liberty.” While Ambedkar’s discussion of caste uncovered the violent source of sovereignty in India, Pakistan, in turn, opened for him the possibility of peace between Hindus and Muslims. The way Partition unfolded, however, told a different story. As it was later overseen and ideologized by Patel, Partition grounded Indian nationality in a principle of unity, based on a two-nation theory. One fateful consequence was that the Muslim in India was burdened with “foreigness,” as a form of historical displacement. As the nation was constituted, the brother became the foreigner in its midst. Kapila acutely notes that violence rooted in intimacy has long been a family secret of Hindus and Muslims, and even of India and Pakistan. It was a civil war that did not dare to speak its name.

Violence and brotherhood are the two major themes of this captivating book, and a vivid, if internally complex, picture of their relationship emerges if we opt for a thematic and analytical—rather than chronological—reading of Kapila’s history. Two other crucial themes emerge, albeit in a more minor key.

The Past and the Future

In a century of nationalism and independence, the question of the identity of India was posed as a profoundly historical question. In the influential account of Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, India was a historically open civilization, with an exceptional destiny to forge nationality out of diversity. For Nehru, the past was the testament to, and the unique credential for, India’s claims to a distinct nationality. The figures to whom Kapila directs her attention, by contrast, held a markedly different view of history and its potentiality.

For Savarkar, history converted the identity of India into a battlefield for a new fraternity of Hindutva to emerge. Hindutva was, Kapila quips, a theory of violence in search of its history. The problem for Hindutva was that the history of India was one of miscegenation, mixture, and multiplicity of beliefs. So Savarkar had to declare a war on the past. Hindutva was not the political articulation of a given historical identity (it certainly had little religious basis in the religion of Hinduism). It was (and is), rather, a struggle to anticipate the future, with historical contingencies as sets of hurdles to overcome. Ambedkar, for his part, held a radically different view of history. The past for him overtly carried revolutionary potential: it projected itself into a different future. The idea of Pakistan itself was based on futurity, rather than being the belated expression of a repressed idea. Amdebkar, in his writings, deployed historical facts from Rome or England, as evidence and precedents, but in such a way as to sever India’s connection with those histories. At stake, in the end, was a future that could only be founded through a rupture with the past.

In the thought of Ambedkar and other progressives, this rupture from the past was made through the appearance of a radically new idea and practice—that of democracy or republicanism—an idea that had no deep history in India. This takes me to my second minor theme.

The Republican People

Ambedkar identified the nation as the “container” of the political, in the form of a republican democracy. The people were the basic unit of politics: the political was related to democracy and to popular sovereignty, rather than to cosmopolitanism and universalism. In parallel, foremost Muslim philosopher and politician Muhammad Iqbal elaborated an Islamic republicanism. He rejected global Islam, as well as a “substantive” view of the community as grounded in religion, culture or language. For him, fraternity and sovereignty were equivalent, as Islam had bequeathed the idea of civil society to the world. Yet fraternity was not about the primacy of the bounded, or the territorial, or the theocratic. Republicanism was a distinctively new language of the political for the Muslims of India.

The four themes we have analyzed (violence outside the state; enmity and brotherhood; history and the future; and the republican people) are fused within Kapila’s powerful analysis of Partition. Kapila interprets partition violence in terms of civil war. Violence is integral to the sudden eruption of “the people” as the new subject of the political in India. Republican sovereignty was the culmination of a historical struggle against foreign power. More importantly, it marked the making of the “constitutive inside,” in the sense used by agonistic philosophers such as Chantal Mouffe and Hannah Arendt, from whom Kapila takes inspiration. The nexus, central to Kapila’s book, between history and agonism, raises a number of questions about the relationship between history, politics, and the identity of India.

History and Agonism

Indian political theorists’ rupture is not only from western intellectual history but from history itself. What survives is a kind of political agonism: a stance that emphasizes the politically productive dimensions of conflict, unmoored from constraints of law, custom or tradition. Precisely because it breaks with precedent, Kapila suggests, agonism emerges as the enduring political form of the world’s largest democracy. As she puts it elsewhere: “what was at stake for these founding figures was not so much the parting of ways with Europe, but parting with, and decoupling from history itself, the creation of a new world, a new moral vocabulary, and a new imaginary” (Kapila 2014, 258). This raises tricky questions about the methodology of global intellectual history, and how to mobilize that history to think about and contest the future of India. In closing, I raise two questions: about the method, and about the politics of this global intellectual history.

First, Kapila thinks of global intellectual history not as an anti-western or post-colonial but as a radically a-colonial enterprise. It does not define itself in relation to western political thought and colonial frames. It invents its own categories. To be sure, it does so, when necessary, in conversation with, or in parallel to, the categories of western philosophers—thus Kapila shows how Indian political theorists echo, and sometimes anticipate, Freud, Arendt, Mouffe or Badiou. Yet in Kapila’s history, the west is firmly provincialized; and the Indian Age is imagined as inaugurating the “new Europe.” What she means by this is that the Indian experience has the potential to acquire centrality, as a laboratory of diversity, and in light of the salience of the questions it poses, notably around sovereignty, democracy and violence.

The Indian Age is spontaneously global. This is true in a number of senses. The most obvious is that the thinkers that Kapila analyses are not attached to space and territory, and most of them reject the western category of the state. Space, however, is inevitably inscribed in time, which raises the question of whether the Indian Age is also unmoored from time. Kapila glosses the Indian rupture as a rupture from history itself. This delivers a history of violence that is in some ways a strange history, because violence appears as an abstract, timeless subject and object. It is a history of violence that actualizes a series of “events,” but remains at once detached from the historical lives of flesh-and-blood people, agnostic about the comparative ethics of dying and killing, and structurally indeterminate as to its purposes and aims. One question this posed to this reader is whether, when we inscribe violence as timeless and formless in this way, we run the risk of writing a paradoxically ahistorical intellectual history. One particular trope of western political theory was that it claimed to be both universal and timeless. Kapila’s book raises the intriguing question of whether global intellectual history can avoid this trope. How can global history be properly historical: bounded in time, if not in space?

We may also wonder about the politics that this intellectual history facilitates and obscures. In thinking about how to mobilize history to think about and contest the future of India, can an intellectual history of agonism inspire political resistance? The issue is particularly pressing at a time when the mobilization of intellectual history and political theory is itself a political weapon for India’s governing party, the Hindu nationalist BJP. Kapila’s provocative history of enmity raises key political questions. First, if brotherhood is inevitably, structurally, about enmity, how is it even possible to talk about the civic status of Muslims in India? What is the alternative to the BJP’s relegation of Muslims to the permanent status of the internal Others? As Kapila’s history shows that ideas about Muslim communalism were shared well beyond Hindutva ideologues, the pressing question is raised as to whether the Indian tradition has the historical resources to make sense of the status of Muslim as equal citizens—as truly fraternal brothers. There is, of course, a more pressing worry about the centering of Indian political thought on the theme of brotherhood. It tethers citizenship to bonds of blood and ethnicity, and thereby displaces India’s rich tradition of multicultural diversity. And it situates women firmly outside of the political: women are strikingly and regrettably absent from Kapila’s book.

Second, if India is essentially a futurity, not a past, what is the role of the writing and rewriting of history in scripting the future? If all history is agonistic—a meaningless tug of war between shifting coalitions of brothers and rivals—what role can it play in fending off the BJP’s quite determinate project of rewriting history to project Hindutva as its future—to glorify the idea of a mythic past, in an attempt to instill racial and nationalist pride in their people? Third, and last, we may ask about Kapila’s declared agnosticism—her refusal to present her work of historical scholarship as a political intervention in India’s contemporary debates. To be sure, Kapila—in spite of the scrupulous political neutrality she imposes on herself—betrays an unmistakable admiration for Ambedkar’s republican democracy and its inspiring agenda of social justice. Yet because she professes disdain for what she calls liberal constitutionalism or “imperial liberalism,” she makes little of Ambedkar’s long-standing commitment to political and institutional solutions to agonistic competition. Thinking with Ambedkar today, a legitimate worry arises. As BJP ideologues are busy demolishing all constitutional constraints on unbound majoritarianism, isn’t a political theory of agonism, of the kind deployed by Kapila, essentially playing into their hands? Kapila is critical of the existing “celebratory” scholarship on the Indian Constitution, and she argues that “the political cannot be exhausted by the law.” Here, as in the whole book, there is a troubling ambiguity as to whether Kapila merely records, or in fact endorses, India’s tradition of eulogy of extra-legal violence. Other major theorists of violence—from Georges Sorel to Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon—have been centrally preoccupied with the justification (or lack thereof) of violence. As Kapila eschews the question of justification, all is left, it seems, is vindication.

Kapila would no doubt protest that the writing of intellectual history need not be a political speech act. Her book studiously avoids political intervention and is primarily a work of outstanding—rigorous and imaginative—scholarship. She could also point out that nothing, on principle, stops a pessimistic intellectual historian from being an optimist of the will—the political will. Yet at a time when there are urgent political calls for the writing of histories that matter—global histories, post-colonial histories, a-colonial histories—it is striking how this marvelously novel history of India casts a politically cynical and menacingly somber shadow on our present.

Cécile Laborde is the Nuffield Chair of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is notably the author of Critical Republicanism (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Liberalism’s Religion (Harvard University Press, 2017).

Works Cited

1. Kapila, Shruti. 2014. “Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political.” In Rethinking European Intellectual History, edited by Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, 232–52.

2. Kapila, Shruti. 2021. Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press.