Labor, Piety, and Contradictions of Capital in South Asia

Introduction

The notion of labor has been an object of interdisciplinary debates beyond the conventional labor studies paradigm in South Asia for some time. One of many concerns that was consistently part of these debates was the intersectional dimensions of labor, critically enriched by questions of gender, caste, and religion. Thus, scholars have been invested in recuperating the marginal engagements with capital, reshaping how labor was understood in the context of the Global South (Parry; Chambers; John and Gopal; Gooptu; Anandhi and Kapadia; Rao; Ray and Qayum; Sen; De Neve; Mehrotra; Raman; Kumar; Mehta; Prakash). Much of this scholarship challenges with conviction the universalizing tendency that underlies the narratives of capital (Chakrabarty 2000; Joshi 2005). More importantly, the colonial history as a key trajectory of capital’s subsumption of ‘native productivity’ into the general structure of labor was scrutinized within the context of some of these intersectional engagements.

However, scholars have paid less attention to the ways in which religion operates as a moral tradition within which practices of labor are often regarded for their moral teleologies. In other words, one must highlight how labor practices were reasoned in terms of their moral underpinnings in each respective tradition. This angle of inquiry has stakes that are yet to be explored compared to the deconstruction of the figure of labor in the context of the marginal engagement with capital in South Asia. Two recent books—Caste, Knowledge and Power by K. N. Sunandan (2022) and Pious Labor by Amanda Lanzillo (2024)—contribute a useful intervention to advance the scholarship on labor in the Global South in this regard and thus deserve a detailed critical appraisal. This article contextualizes the scholarly advancement made possible by these works while offering some preliminary reflections on the question of piety and labor. Part of the task the article undertakes is to move beyond the conventional account of pious practice as a religious or cultural contradiction within capital’s normative time or as an assertion of religious identity in the face of colonial modernity. I consider piety rather as a moral practice, and this approach draws its force from the prominent moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. The idea of practice has a distinct theoretical trajectory in MacIntyre, much of which emerges from his preoccupation with the idea of ‘end’ or what is generally taken to be the teleology of things. This article suggests that the conventional accounts that seek to think about labor and piety together understand ‘end’ only in terms of an outcome, that is, surplus production, rather than virtuous self-making. They thus begin from motivation, assertion of identity, intention, and consciousness—a priori registers that do not disclose the teleologies of a given practice in a tradition. The article, therefore, moves away from such a priori registers and tries to contextualize the colonial shift in terms of the shift in the teleologies of practices that scholars understand as labor and piety. Sunandan’s and Lanzillo’s recent books provide us with useful resources to push this approach further. For the broader scholarship that explores the intersection between religion and labor, Sunandan and Lanzillo offer a much-needed advancement, illuminating how colonialism transformed traditional practices into labor with a single teleology. However, this advancement remains rooted in the conventional historiography of colonial transformation that generated two sites for its investigation: the first is how the transformation recruited tradition’s practices into capital’s expansion through wage labor; the second is how the communities reacted to colonial transformation through reasserting their identities. This reassertion of identities, nevertheless, does not change the fundamental ‘end’ of capital, but only diversifies its means, producing, in the process, different notions of time and life that capital sometimes finds difficult to domesticate. Lanzillo’s work certainly contributes to this story while offering a refreshing perspective on how the Muslims of North India remobilized their past as a resource to encounter the colonial transformation. Here, Muslim artisans, engaged in tailoring, carpentry, lithography, stonemasonry, and electroplating throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appear as pious figures that embody the religious past of Islam. For Lanzillo, these figures provide a generative archive to think about piety and labor together, as well as the archive of Islam itself, which she calls “artisan Islam,” in the face of colonial transformation. Sunandan, on the other hand, offers an ethnographic history of how practices of a tradition became rearranged in line with capital’s telos. Unlike Lanzillo, Sunandan is less interested in the assertion of identities among artisanal communities in Malabar than in the kinds of taxonomies (e.g., knowledge) that industrial capitalism generated to detach the artisanal practices from their traditions. The crucial problem we are left with is that of the interaction between traditions and capital mediated by wage labor. In this interaction, what might the teleology of piety, as a moral practice in a tradition, look like? And how does labor, oriented to the accumulationist teleology of capital, transform when it encounters a teleology of piety? How does this teleology of piety itself become reshaped when it encounters capital?

To take up these questions, I begin by outlining Sunandan’s core argument in the book, elaborating on its structure and his historical analysis that supports it. I then move to Lanzillo’s work to do the same, all the while highlighting the question of labor and its entanglement with religion that Lanzillo rigorously addresses. This discussion will lead us to the more specific problem of piety as a moral practice in a tradition, so that we can see what, in fact, changed in it when it encountered labor while also inviting us to think about how the practices of labor themselves were argued over in a tradition.

Asharis of Malabar

Sunandan’s Caste, Knowledge and Power advances a philosophically ambitious argument about labor, tools, and knowledge in the context of colonial Malabar. Specifically focusing on the ashari (carpenter) community, Sunandan investigates specific shifts in ashari practices in the late nineteenth century during the increasing industrialization of the profession. In doing so, Sunandan argues that the designation of Asharis in Malabar as a caste group has much to do with this colonial-industrial transformation of their practices. What is specific to this transformation is the rearrangement of the ashari practices as an object of professional knowledge that is commercialized. In fact, the very idea of knowledge in this context became predicated on a separation between carpentry as an object of knowledge obtainable through commercial training and as a tradition that primarily depends on the cultivation of familiarity with the tools of work. Sunandan also demonstrates that this colonial transformation, in addition to its seemingly negative consequences to the tradition of carpentry, provided a positive modernization to the upper caste Brahmins called Namboothiris. In this story of modernization, what emerged to sustain the structure of caste hierarchy was a rearrangement of power that Sunandan calls colonial-Brahmanical, which would ensure that colonial knowledge becomes productive to the continuity of the caste-based domination of the Brahmins in Malabar.

This does not mean that the colonial transformation offered a smoother transition to the Namboothiri Brahmin domination in Malabar. In fact, Namboothiri Brahmins often had to face strenuous conditions that forced them to reconstitute some of their normative practices in line with the colonial standards in order to sustain their dominant position in the caste structure. Sunandan’s analysis of acharam, or what is roughly translated as ritual, is very useful to understand this story. In the conventional historiography of caste power in South Asia, scholars tend to conceptualize acharam as ‘ritual’ and therefore as a domain distinct from the political. Sunandan, however, does not fall prey to this conventional dichotomy. This is because Sunandan reads acharam as part of the everyday practices and habits of Namboothiri Brahmins, and its implication overrides the scholarly separations of ritual from the political. In the process, Sunandan proceeds to examine the historical shift in the meaning of acharam as a result of the colonial transformation. Initially regarded as a threat to tradition and culture by Namboothiri Brahmins, the colonial intervention, which carries a particular definition of knowledge, eventually succeeded in pressing the community to change. In this process of encountering the colonial power, the Namboothiri community was forced to reconstitute itself as religious (Hindu) by centering on acharam as a ritual requirement of their identity. However, this transformation ensured their distinction from other communities. For example, the newly emerged institutions of public eateries had special sections, often segregated from other spaces, that catered to Namboothiris’ needs. Sunandan also refers to “Brahmin hotels” established specifically for Namboothiri Brahmins so that they can maintain their distance from other communities in a way that preserves their “purity.”

The ashari community’s transformation, on the other hand, recruited them to the position of laborers subordinate to the interests of the emerging industrial capital. In narrating this historical episode of transformation, Sunandan offers a detailed and thick sketch of the ways in which the ashari community engaged that transformation. Here, Sunandan particularly mentions myriad efforts from the colonial administration and the missionary organizations to establish educational institutions and industrial centers. They also began to encourage and subsidize carpenters, artisans, and goldsmiths to move to small towns and big cities. With the founding of PWD (The Public Works Department) in the second half of the nineteenth century, carpenters began to gain more demand in the cities, especially in the context of constructing urban infrastructure. However, this was met with resistance from these communities since the work of carpentry and artisanship was never imagined to be carried out in a factory before. Sunandan quotes one of the colonial officials as reflecting on the reluctance of the ashari communities to migrate to the urban setting for their profession,

We have found that the hand weavers of Salem like the hand-weavers of Madras object to working in a factory, and although their wages were good their attendance is unsatisfactory. This is mainly because the weavers prefer to work in their own home, assisted by their women and children, and dislike being subjected to the discipline and regular hours of working which must necessarily prevail in the factory (Sunandan 67).

The workers preferred to stay in their desham (roughly translated as native village) with their communities. We may note that the factory began to represent the distinction between home and work then, whereas desham did not hold such a distinction tenable. However, Asharis responded to such colonial demands by actively ignoring them. While this contributed to their enclosure as a community with the features of caste, Sunandan also thinks that this active ignorance was part of the community’s strategy to manage the colonial pressure.

Labor and piety

This colonial transformation is also vital to Lanzillo’s account of the Muslim artisans in the Northwestern provinces, Oudh, and Punjab in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elaborating on the colonial transformation among Muslim artisans, which prompted their reaction in terms of asserting their religious identities, Lanzillo draws a rich entanglement of religion and labor. Building on illustrated manuscripts and trade manuals in Urdu prepared by Muslim metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, boilermakers, carpenters, and press workers, the author shows the ways in which the religious artisans encountered and negotiated technological advancements in their fields, such as steam engines, new plasters, lithographic presses, and electroplating. Lanzillo argues that those illustrated manuscripts and trade manuals, while platforming the assertion and articulation of religious identities of Muslim artisans, also challenge the cultural and political narratives produced by the Muslim elites in the Urdu language. In the process, Lanzillo highlights the internal marginalities of caste and gender that are present as well as absent in this literature.

Lanzillo draws from several documents, including illustrated manuals, to build her narrative. One of which was written by Shabihunnisa and printed in Lucknow in 1907. Shabihunnisa is a teacher in a Muslim girls’ school aided by the government. Shabihunnisa’s illustrated manual titled Muft Kā darzī (the free tailor) offers valuable lessons to train young women in sewing, weaving, and embroidery. Lanzillo discovers that Shabihunnisa’s manual is not simply about providing training lessons in these professions, but the manual also offers charged criticism of the gendered and caste-ed character of the Muslim elite in the profession (83–84). This, carried out from a reputable social standing such as that held by Shabihunnisa, who was deemed an accomplished and educated wife of a moulvi from Belahra and who belonged to a landlord family, indicates that Shabihunnisa’s social criticism gestures towards a much-needed mobility within the community to survive the colonial transformation rather than towards a targeting of a rotten social malaise afflicting the community. This function of critique, which Lanzillo considers a form of asserting identity, lies at the heart of the labor training that Shabihunnisa wanted to provide to her fellow female community members. Lanzillo contrasts Shabihunnisa’s manual with Khwaja Muhammad’s Risāla-yi Idrīsiyah, published in the early twentieth century in Allahabad. Khwaja Muhammad’s text, as Lanzillo reads it, is not explicitly based on the call for mobility, a necessary outcome of labor, unlike in the case of Shabihunnisa’s, but on the need for self-reform, or piety. Moreover, Khwaja Muhammad’s text is contrasted here with Shabihunnisa’s for its omission of women’s labor, which Lanzillo characterizes as “masculinizing the work of tailors in a context where women were increasingly positioned as potential competitors” (91). Despite this contrast, Lanzillo tells us that Khwaja Muhammad’s approach to labor was underlined by a notable absence of concern for its outcome (e.g., mobility), unlike in Shabihunnisa’s, where labor was narrated as a means to the end of economic upliftment (90). This understanding of labor, adhered to by Khwaja Muhammad, is in fact foundational to reconsidering the capital-labor relationship in colonial India because the capital-labor relationship was not always infused with the discourse of commodity production but rather with the moral arguments about self-making. The concern that governed such moral arguments was what better moral self, rather than what commodity, could an artisanal labor produce. This also raises the important question of teleology, moral and otherwise, to which I will return later in this article.

In the remaining sections of the book, Lanzillo illustrates instances of what she calls “assertion of religious identity” among Muslim artisans. One of these is their tendency to relate specific labor to a certain prophetic figure in Islam. For instance, an Urdu compendium titled asrār al-san’at (secrets of industry) written by Alimuddin Nairang Hashmi, who was a state employee of princely Bhopal, depicts the popular understanding of carpentry as related to Prophet Nuh (or Noha). Prophet Nuh, by the decree of God, built a ship to rescue the believers from the flood, which descended as a divine punishment upon the disbelievers. The narrative of this ship-building informed the ways in which carpentry was associated with religion, tells us Lanzillo (114). Blacksmiths and tailors created similar narratives of association with Prophet Dawood and Prophet Idris, respectively (Lanzillo 106).

The author reveals that the colonial administrators often dismissed Muslim artisans as not quite Muslims due to their overlap with Hindu spaces and practices of worship. Lanzillo cautions us about such narratives and, by extension, highlights the practitioners’ own understanding of their tradition. However, Lanzillo situates the increasing tendency of narrating the prophetic histories in relation to the respective labor within the rise of a new elite and middle-class interest among Muslims who began to position themselves as potential industrialists (Lanzillo 106). The narratives of the prophetic past, which Lanzillo thinks emerged as part of the middle-class and elite class interests of Muslims, were contrasted in this text with “local” and “sufi” associations with the respective labor (107). Notably, the class interest that Lanzillo attempts to build here appears to be too complex to sustain a strong contrast with the “local” narratives, partly because the local centers of piety that the author refers to often went on to become the economic centers. However, Lanzillo’s argument about the class interest among the Muslim artisans raises some critical questions about the labor-religion intersection in general and the concealed assumptions about the construction of class itself. More specifically, what was the nature of the capital-labor relationship that was assumed in Lanzillo’s argument about the class interest of the Muslims who wanted to appropriate the religious narratives of their labor? Lanzillo’s story about the elite Muslim appropriation of the Islamic narratives of labor remains analytically silent about whether the capital-labor relationship in this context was contradictory. In other words, one might ask whether the remobilization of the Islamic narratives of labor in favor of the Muslim elite class interest constitutes a contradiction within the normative structure of capital or whether it refuels the thrust of reintegrating into the capital’s teleology. Here, what is left unexamined is the idea of assertion of identity, which Lanzillo often returns to but does not expound upon in framing the Islamic narratives of labor.

The idea of assertion of identity tends to exhaust the space to think about identity’s stakes in relation to the nature of class formations in respective communities. In Lanzillo’s account, the assertion of religious identity among artisanal Muslims is framed in such a way that is both contradictory and convivial to capital, favoring the interests of both elite and working-class sections of the community. What this results in is the creation of a difference in interest, taste, and attitudes among these class groups that can be explained in terms of a narrative of religion. In other words, the idea of the assertion of identity is used as an analytical device to capture the religious character of a worker. But beyond that, it may not help us discern the moral arguments about laboring practices in traditions that are not necessarily anchored in a discourse of commodity/outcome but, rather, in the production of a virtuous self. What is central to the virtuous self is the idea that the ‘end’ is not necessarily about an ‘outcome’ preceded by a ‘means,’ but it is itself a ‘means.’ This particular idea of virtuous self, which anthropologist Saba Mahmood extensively relies on to conceptualize the notion of piety in the context of a mosque community in Egypt, remains unaddressed in Lanzillo’s account of the ‘pious labor’ of Muslim artisans. For Mahmood, the pious women in Cairo’s Mosque movement cannot easily be explained in terms of the expression of their identities, for practices are not always about expressing or marking them (48, 51, 56). They are, rather, about cultivating specific capacities, dispositions, and comportments of the self (Mahmood, 27–28). For Mahmood, therefore, one must look at the power in a tradition that enacts specific procedures, protocols, techniques, and discourses through which a moral self comes to be cultivated (28). This could be a productive direction to take in understanding how specific moral arguments presuppose practices of labor as part of the fashioning of moral self rather than the production of commodities.

Practices of tradition, practices of labor

In discussing Khwaja Muhammad’s text, Lanzillo writes, “he explained that tailors must maintain both ‘outer and inner purity’ as they sewed. To be outwardly pure meant cleansing oneself and performing ablution as one would for prayer, while inward purity meant to ‘work honestly, without theft.’ He argued that Hadith1 taught that completing one’s ‘daily work’ without complaint was a farz, or religious duty” (90). This kind of religious approach to labor was not distinct to Western India. In the context of agrarian Bengal, Andrew Sartori traces the centrality of the labor-piety nexus in the formation of the Muslim subject. Discussing A. F. M. Abdul Hai Bhawali’s influential pamphlet Usman, Adarsh Krishak (Usman, the Ideal Cultivator), Sartori argues that the Muslim piety in Bengal was envisioned to be inseparable from labor, or more specifically, “property-constituting labor,” the kind that underlies Lockean liberalism (146). In his pamphlet titled Burir Suta (The Old Woman’s Thread), Mohammad Mohsen Ullah draws a connection between the Prophet Adam and cultivation, tells us Sartori. This is almost in line with Lanzillo’s argument about the association drawn between Prophet Nuh and carpentry in some of the Muslim narratives she examined. But interestingly, such narratives themselves were not part of the elite Muslim aspirations in Sartori’s account. In fact, the class configuration was represented in the pamphlets of Muslim cultivators that Sartori examined within the logic of what he explains as property-constituting labor, rather than property without labor. This was clearly visible in the Muslim hostile approach to Hindus on the assumption that the Hindu property constitution was not necessarily backed by pure labor, but rather on moneylending, as well as other forms of wealth creation (Sartori, 149). The economic vices of greed and corruption were thus recognized by the Muslim cultivators as quintessentially Hindu, even when those vices were committed by Muslims themselves (Sartori, 153). In other words, committing those vices makes a Muslim a Hindu and thus indicates the embodied condition of virtues and vices rather than their economic effects. Although this was part of Sartori’s intellectual history of Lockean liberalism in Bengal that valorizes the property-constituting labor as the locus of political freedom, the idea of (Muslim) piety itself, which was part of Sartori’s story in Bengal and Lanzillo’s in North Western India, needs to be elaborated in terms of moral traditions within which piety tends to be conceived as practice. Because without the invocation of a moral tradition followed by performing specific practices, piety cannot be described. In other words, what kind of piety was articulated through labor in South Asia? What happens to the notion of piety itself when it is associated with commodified labor as opposed to labor as a practice within a tradition? More importantly, why are specific practices that the scholars think to be pious called ‘labor’? At the same time, if piety is understood to be a practice of virtuous self-making, as Mahmood argued, how would one understand a labor recognized as a practice of self-fashioning in the context of specific traditions? Without historicizing the notion of piety beyond categories such as assertion, expression, and consciousness in the first place, its intersection with labor, which underlies similar stories from colonial India, may not make sense.

Sunandan’s exposition of the relationship between body and tools is the best place to begin thinking about this duality and, by extension, to elaborate on the very idea of moral practice in the context of artisanal labor. Sunandan, in explaining the relationship between the laborer and tools in the context of ashari-pani (work of carpentry), argues that the ashari-pani came to be understood as a ‘labor’ in the wake of the advent of the colonial knowledge system. This is because colonial knowledge, which depends on classificatory schemes, tends to regard tools as independent of their relation with the laborer and thus possessive of their own features. Sunandan provides an example by discussing conceptualizations of water. According to Sunandan, water appears in modern scientific knowledge as a quantifiable entity that consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But for an Ashari, “water appears as a relation between the process of looking by the Ashari and the process of self-revealing by the water: Ashari’s action on water and water’s action on Ashari” (Sunandan, 27). The object for an Ashari is primarily definable in terms of its relation, location, and relative condition in the network of connected objects. Relying on this example, Sunandan illustrates the ways in which Ashari’s knowledge of the wood is closely entwined with Ashari’s uses of the same. “A piece of wood”, writes Sunandan, “that was brought into the ashari world was always considered to be an object awaiting ashari use” (29).2 But this does not make the wood any lesser than those who use it. Because Asharis “did not just use the tools but acted along with them” (Sunandan, 29). The action, however, is not a means to an end (to eventually produce something out of it as an end result), but rather, “it was the way an ashari was supposed to be in his world” (29). This significant observation goes against the grain of presupposing the body as independent of the work and the work as independent of the body: a presupposition that lies at the heart of colonial modernity. Notably, Sunandan moves against the notions of intention, motivation, and plan, all the while remaining focused on pani (work). The relationship between tool and body is not realized through any prior register of consciousness, intention, motivation, or plan. It is built through embodied action, and in that very embodied action, the subject is born. Sunandan writes, “the idea was not that hands use chisels and chisels use hands, but that both co-acted and conversed with each other” (29). In this process, Sunandan tells us, “the tools transform into a part of the body and even disappear as an object” (29–30). This idea of embodied action cannot be explained in the conventional terms of piety or labor that foreground prior registers of identity and consciousness. That is, piety, in those terms, tends to be posed as motivation or, in general, that which precedes the action, whereas labor represents the abstract sum of capacities enacted in the production of surplus value. Sunandan’s idea of embodied action, which has been vital to how pani was imagined by Asharis, is closer to the idea of tradition described by anthropologist Talal Asad. Asad explains tradition as embodied practice and discursive learning (2015, 167). What is crucial to Asad’s notion of tradition is the idea of capacity that embodiment generates, often unthinkingly, sometimes consciously, for a virtuous living (2015, 166). In fact, the very unthinkingness in both Asad and Sunandan remains emblematic of the notion of excellent practice (or pani) that blurs the line between body and tool, enabling the disappearance of the tool as an object. This makes it difficult to translate pani as labor.

The idea of excellence [τέλειον] certainly comes from Aristotle and has been much theorized by scholars who considered piety as a moral practice in a tradition. For Alasdair MacIntyre, the morality of a practice refers to the excellence of a given practice according to the standard set by a given tradition. It is worth remembering that Asad draws from MacIntyre to construct his idea of tradition, in particular, MacIntyre’s (Aristotelian) idea of moral action as excellent practice. MacIntyre’s excellence, or what Asad calls authoritative practice, always comes from a tradition and its normative authority. Thus, MacIntyre writes, “a practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them” (MacIntyre 2007, 190). The tradition, or normative authority, is thus imperative to conceive of an excellent practice. This authority is consistently recalled by Asharis while approaching their tools. Sunandan thus quotes an Ashari as saying: “he [grandfather] told me that Asharis have the right to do whatever with the wood piece, but that we must act responsibly and discreetly. If Muthappan [the creator God] has full rights over the creation of Asharis, Asharis have full control over the things in our world; they are made for our purpose” (28). This recalling of authority remains fateful to how Asharis deal with their tools. Thomas Chambers’ monograph on Muslim artisanship in the north Indian city of Saharanpur offers an intimate ethnography of apprenticeship as a form of authority in the field of artisanal labor. Known as ustād-shāgird (master-apprentice) system, this relationship involves training students in artisanal labor as a moral practice. Chambers argues that apprenticeship in Saharanpur “is not a clearly defined space of skill acquisition and well-established hierarchical structures . . . rather it is a complex assemblage of forces which at times align and at others conflict. It is also a space of multifaceted emotions from love, intimacy, care, and respect to anger, betrayal, jealousy, and distress” (111). While Chambers’ narrative of ustād-shāgird is highly productive for thinking about such spaces of authority, one must not lose sight of the fact that authorities and the relationships they enact are historically produced. Therefore, authorities are always “complex” and “multifaceted” everywhere, which, nevertheless, do not supersede the fact that they are authorities meant to ensure the reproduction of normative practices and certainties about their own moral teleologies within the context of contingent historical conjunctions. The very notion of excellence as a moral practice is deeply part of the historical reproduction of these normative practices and certainties.

But the excellence that MacIntyre refers to as a condition of moral action is not necessarily tied to the end product, but rather, to the very practice itself. In other words, the excellent practice, or what is known in the Ashari’s universe as pani, is foremost about the moral self that is made through the repetition of practice, almost blurring the line between body and tool. “Action itself was not just a means to an end,” writes Sunandan, “it was the way an Ashari was supposed to be in his world” (29). Hence, “an action was not defined or evaluated in terms of the quality of the end product or efficiency of the procedure,” but on the virtue of pani acquired through the practice itself (29). Krishnan Ashari, a chief carpenter whom Sunandan interviewed, describes this virtue of pani in this way: “When we are asked to make a chair, we do not imagine the final form of it at the beginning. It is pani [work or action]3 that leads to the particular form. In other words, details are dedicated during the work, and so each chair will be different. But again, it is pani that leads us while we make the chair so that everybody sees it as a chair; during the pani, we don’t have to repeatedly think that ‘I am making a chair’ (30). This particular understanding of pani, not tied to the modern teleology of labor, could be read in line with MacIntyre’s critique of labor. After explaining the feature of modern labor, which is the shift of work from the household to factories in the service of capital, MacIntyre writes, “as, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other” (227). This, according to MacIntyre, leads to the immoral character of covetousness represented by Aristotle’s term pleonexia. For MacIntyre, thus, the “means-end relationship embodied for the most part in such work—on a production line, for example—are necessarily external to the goods which those work seek; such work too has consequently been expelled from the realm of practice with goods internal to themselves” (227). The idea of labor that MacIntyre critiques possesses a different teleology than his idea of practice with its own internal goods, to which Sunandan’s notion of pani primarily corresponds.4 In discussing what she calls the positive ethics, Mahmood expands on the notion of virtue conceptualized by MacIntyre while focusing on the formation of the moral self. For Mahmood, the idea of piety must be understood as a fashioning of the self (29). Therefore, an excellent practice refers to the subject it must create rather than the property it constitutes.

Even while Lanzillo does not seem interested in conceptually expanding the idea of piety reflected in the workers’ manuals, the idea of pious practice in the sense of MacIntyre’s theorization of excellent practice and Asad’s articulation of tradition, nevertheless, remains present. Khwaja Muhammad, for instance, is quoted by Lanzillo as saying, “the tailor’s purpose was created by almighty God, and as if by a flash of lightning, he gave [tailors] the power of creation, to make clothes fall into [the tailor’s] hands” (92). This divinity of the practice of tailoring, for Khwaja Muhammad, is deeply connected to the tailor’s inner and outer purity. As Lanzillo concludes, “To be outwardly pure meant cleansing oneself and performing ablutions as one would for prayer, while inward purity meant to ‘work honestly, without theft” (90). To perform the work well, a form of moral action, however, is contrasted here with Shabihunnisa’s approach to sewing, which was merely incidental to a worker’s religious identity (Lanzillo 90). For mobility became the sole defining good of work, Shabihunnisa and others framed work “as a means to an end, not a form of piety in itself” (Lanzillo 90).

Here, as Lanzillo shows, Khwaja Muhammad refuses to tie the practice of tailoring to the teleology of labor that appropriates practices for the external good of value extraction in service of urban capital. What is entailed here, as well as in Krishnan Ashari’s approach to pani, is the notion of practice as a moral action with its own internal goods for the virtue of the subject. For Khwaja Muhammad, writes Lanzillo, “the education of a tailor at the feet of his ustād was a form of religious education, a chance to learn to be a good Muslim tailor” (92). Understood this way, these interlocutors’ approach to work—or, more specifically, practice or pani, which entails authority, submission, piety, excellence, and life itself—remains elusive to the modern category of labor.

Conclusion: Piety and the contradiction of capital

In his seminal book Rethinking Working Class History in Bengal 1890–1940 (1989), Dipesh Chakrabarty challenges the kind of Marxist historiography that seeks to construct a pure class consciousness as a necessary form of contradiction within the capitalist structure. In the case of jute mill workers in Bengal, what often preceded the working-class outbreak was sometimes religious or caste consciousness, which are usually regarded as elements of “precapitalist” sensibilities in dominant Marxist writings. Thus, the capital-labor relationship in India, according to Chakrabarty, was not fully devoid of the contradictions often understood to be precapitalist and therefore ‘pre-political.’

Chakrabarty’s postulation of religion in this analysis not only intended to demonstrate another contradiction within capital but also to defy the conventions that reify contradictions as part of a pure consciousness. In other words, the function of religion here is “to divide class” (Chakrabarty 1989, 190). While Lanzillo builds on Chakrabarty’s intervention to challenge the Marxist notion of the pure working-class consciousness, she prefers to widen this register so as to include Islamic piety as a form of asserting identity that can form a contradiction within capital (Lanzillo 3, 172). If the deconstruction of a pure working-class consciousness was the central objective of Chakrabarty’s effort, the reconsideration of the various expressions of identity to account for the contradictions of capital was the key undertaking of Lanzillo. But as Mahmood showed earlier, “assertion of identity” is not always a helpful device to articulate the grammar of the concept of piety. The “assertion of identity,” central to the story of piety that Lanzillo narrates, reproduces the trouble that is inherent to Chakrabarty’s focus on consciousness as a central register to account for the character of an event (of riot). While Chakrabarty’s historicization of consciousness is highly relevant, it might also be productive to think closely about the moral arguments in a tradition that accompany acts of riot and worship in a given scenario.

The contradiction of capital, which Chakrabarty discovers in the domains of religion and culture in order to activate a critical politics of difference, is indeed a potential generated by practices that do not seek to fulfill the teleology of capital. However, the contradiction of capital itself is not exhaustive of the moral teleology of practices in a tradition, or more precisely, the capacities and virtues in a tradition. Marx himself was not unaware of this aspect of life when he wrote about the contradiction of capital that labor generates. Marx famously invoked Aristotle to advance the initial thesis of the distinction between use value and exchange value, arguing the idea of household (oekonomia in Greek), or what Sunandan called desham, set the terms for activities that are laborious, but not labor (Marx, 138). As MacIntyre rightly argued, the teleology of labor begins with the moving out of the productive activity from the household, meant to acquire the external good (surplus production) of a practice, rather than its internal good (virtue). But the practices themselves, meant to acquire internal goods for the capacity of individual virtue and tradition, are not to be fantasized in terms of the liberal conception of freedom. Those practices are to be understood as part of an authoritative tradition, as Sunandan’s pani or Lanzillo and Chamber’s insights about apprenticeship suggest. In an article that the Wittgenstein scholar James Klagge wrote about Marx’s notions of freedom and necessity, the true implication of what Marx meant by the “realm of freedom” in a communist society is discussed. Klagge shows that Marx, in the process of articulating what he calls free labor, or all-round development of the individual as an end in itself, seems to advance certain conditions for it, and thus limits the true spirit entailed in freedom (1986). He thus quotes from Marx’s Grundrisse to show his conception of free labor under communism:

It is true that the quantity of labor to be provided seems to be conditioned by external circumstances, by the purpose to be achieved, and the obstacles to its achievement that have to be overcome by labor. But . . . the overcoming of such obstacles may itself constitute an exercise in liberty, and . . . these external purposes lose their character of mere natural necessities and are established as purposes which the individual himself fixes. The result is the self-realization and objectification of the subject, therefore real freedom, whose activity is precisely labor (quoted in Klagge, 1986, 773).

Here, the labor, which was otherwise regarded as a means to the end of surplus production, becomes itself an end. As Klagge himself acknowledges that Marx’s routine phrase of “the true realm of freedom” suggests that this “realm of freedom” is not simply a matter of “freedom” (Klagge, 774). To put it in a truly Wittgensteinian sense, Marx’s freedom does not refer to what the term freedom semantically means, but only indicates a sum of activities, with all their laborious conditions, which are not conceived in the service of capital as their key teleology. Thus, the “condition” of activity/practice and freedom or free labor are not to be mutually contrasted, but to be recognized as a reference Marx was trying to establish to think about practices that are not dictated by the teleology of capital and thus not to be translated as labor. This is precisely what connects to Sunandan’s understanding of pani in the context of the artisanal communities in Malabar. Because the notion of pani in Malabar, as well as the idea of piety understood by Lanzillo’s interlocutors, are not necessarily anchored in a discourse of commodity production, but in the preconception of self-making. In other words, in the absence of the discourse of commodity production, the practice of self-making will invariably establish the teleology of pious labor. Sunandan and Lanzillo indeed open a space to think about practices in different moral traditions that are not easily translatable as labor precisely because of their teleology (i.e., cultivation of virtue) that is not fully dictated by the teleology of capital (surplus production) in South Asia.

The Author Declares no Competing Interests

Muhammed Shah Shajahan is an independent scholar who graduated from the ASPECT interdisciplinary PhD program at Virginia Tech. Shajahan taught courses in religion and political economy at Virginia Tech’s Department of Religion and Culture. His research sits at the intersection of moral philosophy and political economy.

Notes

• 1. The term “Hadith” refers to the collection of deeds and words attributed to prophet Muhammad.

• 2. One may be reminded here by Heidegger’s idea of “ready-to-hand,” in which a tool expresses its true qualities only in its use. See his Being and Time, (1962, 98).

• 3. As seen in this parenthesis, Sunandan faces difficulty translating pani. The term work’s invariable reference to “labor” seems to risk a mistranslation of pani, all the while signaling the critical stakes in the eventual colonial transformation of pani to labor that occurred.

• 4. I want to insist that the concept of teleology here does not refer to any consequences of an action, because in Aristotelian philosophy, the consequence of an action can only be thought in terms of the excellence (τέλειον) of that very action, not in terms of what that action might produce as its final outcome. Heidegger rightly cautions us about this when he wrote, “a path through a meadow stops at a garden fence. But the garden fence is not τέλειον. Being-the-path is not as such determined by the garden fence. That, at which the path stops, is itself a being which, in the same manner, is like that which stops at it.” In other words, τέλειον is a mode of being for Heidegger. See his Basic Concepts in Aristotelian Philosophy 1924/2009, p 63.

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