Contemporary India Final Assignment

Q.) According to Ganguly, Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds foregrounds the discursivity of caste. Comment on this approach with examples from the book.

The Discursivity of Caste: A Postcolonial Reading

Introduction In this paper I try to engage with Debjani Gangulys conception of the discursivity of caste as developed in her book, Caste And Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives. After the linguistic turn in criticism, there is definitely nothing novel about attributing discursivity to phenomena of various kinds. Caste is no exception to this rule. Yet, as one of the claims of Gangulys work could be, there are several domains from which an enquiry into the discursivity of caste can be made. Ganguly specifically adopts postcoloniality as a vantage point to foreground her claims about the discursivity of caste. My engagement with her claims in this study will be an attempt to elaborate on her concerns and formulate a critical understanding of them. In other words, I will try to understand the formative assumptions that constitute the core of Gangulys work.

At the outset, I would like to clarify how this paper understands the terms, discourse and postcoloniality- two conceptual referents, which are central to understanding Gangulys arguments.

Discourse: As Michel Foucault elaborates, discourse is constituted by the difference between what one could say correctly at one period (under the rules of grammar and logic) and what is actually said. (Foucault, 1991; 63) A study of the discursivity of caste would then take as its object the conditions of the possibility of a particular idiom of articulation that caste assumes in a given time period and the relations between this articulation and other possible articulations, previous or simultaneous. I intend to show in this paper that Gangulys effort has been to foreground the discursivity of received notions of caste by way of unearthing alternative articulations of the samecaste as performance. This, I think, in certain ways fails to engage with the relational nature of articulation itself. Articulation can be

understood as any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; 105) My proposition is that Gangulys reading of caste as performance as opposed to the dominant form of caste as identity does not consider in its full adequacy the mutual imbrications of the multiple discursive formations that shape the articulation of caste in postcolonial India.

Postcoloniality: As David Scott explains, the term postcoloniality as a political-theoretical project, has been concerned principally with the decolonisation of representation. Scotts contention is that there is in the present an after postcoloniality which urges criticism to move beyond the political implications of nationalist anti-colonial movements and their claims on self-representation, to understand the

postcolonial political in its own right. What is important for this present, writes Scott is a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which modernity is inserted into and altered the lives of the colonized. (Scott, 1999; 17) When Ganguly talks of postcoloniality, she primarily operates within the first sense of trying to deconstruct representational strategies that have gone into talking about caste. She uses postcoloniality as a vantage point for a hermeneutic reading of caste, as a position from which a better understanding of dalit life-worlds can be obtained. For her, these lifeworlds signify countermodern ways of inhabiting the present, or in another sense, alternative modernities that are beyond the scope of those practices, modalities and projects through which modernity or at least the normative version of it frames our lives. (Ganguly, 2008; ix, 25) My attempt in this paper will be to contrast her

understanding/critique of modernity from the postcolonial vantage point to other different critical understandings (like Scotts for

example) of modernity from the point of view of postcoloniality. It is my contention that this contrast might be a symptom of an emerging tension within the corpus of postcolonial academic writing, a tension that produces the very stakes of postcolonial criticism.

The construction of the argument of Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds In the first part of her book, Ganguly attempts to signpost hegemonic discursive formations that have enabled the staging of specific articulations of caste. These formations she names as orientalism, nationalism, marxism and as a critical academic stance; postcolonial historiography. It is necessary to specify here that following Laclau, Ganguly marks these formations as theoretical horizons which are pragmatic attempts to subsume the real into the frame of symbolic objectivity that will always be overflown in the end. (Ganguly, 2008; 24) This overflowing, as I understand it, can be of two types. In one sense, there can be different symbolic or articulatory possibilities that result from the pragmatic attempts to enframe the real which disturb the objectivity of the given symbolic arrangement. In a second sense, the real is fundamentally inimical to any symbolic arrangement and is thus unavailable for any conceptualization. The recovery of this real then is the overflowing which results from the pragmatic attempts of the (postcolonial) intellectual. In the second part of the book, Ganguly shifts focus from the hegemonic articulations of caste to its

performative dimension, the aspects of living with caste that exceed conceptual discourses. determinations by the aforementioned hegemonic

In

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understanding caste in its performative dimension by choosing suitable examples from the second part of the book. Of course, the arguments about the discursivity of caste and its conditions of possibility as a category are made in the first section of the book. Yet I believe that it is through the multiple examples of the non-conceptual, affective forms of caste practices or practices of dalits that the proper implication of the discursive nature of caste is best brought out.

The performative dimension of caste I read Gangulys description of dalit life-worlds as an attempt to posit an outside to the hegemonic discursive frameworks that create a semblance of symbolic objectivity around the conception of caste 1. This outside refers to the multiple performative sites at which caste intersects with other cultural practices and produces multiform lifeworlds and complex and efficacious modes of subjectivity. (Ganguly, 2008; 8) Ganguly clarifies that her interest in the performative dimension of caste does not merely concern its practices in liberal
1

The tracing of these multiple sites is indeed the overflow that Ganguly generates which is of the second kind that I have described before.

democratic politics as distinct from the national-political pedagogic 2. Instead, her interest in this dimension of caste practices leads her to concern herself with those kinds of practices that cannot be conceptualized in terms of the liberal democratic historicist setup, those that produce conceptual excesses.

Ambedkars Mythography: Gangulys foremost example in this regard is Ambedkars attempts at crafting an alternative Indian historiography. Her analysis of Ambedkars historical texts locates in them a mythographic register which effect an internal dialogization of the authoritative historiographical mode itself, introducing

fragments from the past not to verify his claims but to creatively mould them into the necessity of the present. To the extent that Ambedkars mythographic register can be said to be the beginnings of an alternative understanding of the historical formation of Indian

modernity, Gangulys claim that these narratives lay beyond the frameworks of liberal historicist thinking can be acknowledged. But what is important to point out in this regard is that the generation of such a register can itself not be understood in separation from the colonial engagement with Indias past. The very necessity of finding resources in the past, of conceiving of a past that was, is an act that is
2

We can draw parallels here with Nicholas Dirks assertion that caste in the postcolonial present cannot be thought of as class as well as a straightforward clone of some Western sociological categor y (as substantialized ethnicities, bloc political voting groups, and so on). (Dirks, 2003; 295)

historical. Even in his text The Buddha and His Dhamma, the resort to the invocation of the supernatural, which Ganguly suggests is an act of faith on part of Ambedkar, can be understood as an epistemic enterprise3, of making meaning of certain aspects of life. Woven within a definite narrative schema at a particular historical moment, the supernatural is invoked to literally bring forth the object of faith, to make faith mean something4. This does not mean that this invocation is instrumental to Ambedkars political line. I am trying to point out that any articulation, as I proposed earlier, is relational in nature. The very description of this invocation as a non-secular way of being can only be made in the mode of a transaction with a secular-historical discourse5. The power of this discourse does not necessarily lie in the prohibition of its opposites; it lies in their production too6.

Performativity, writes Judith Butler, is not a singular act, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates
M.S.S. Pandian drawing on Valentine Daniels work has described the change brought in by colonialism as one from an ontic discourse (offering a way of being in the world) to an epistemic discourse (ushering in a way of seeing the world). (Pandian, 2007; 12) 4 Ganguly quotes Ambedkar, Every great religion has been built on faith faith cannot be assimilated if presented in the form of creeds or abstract dogmas (Faith) needs something on which imagination can fasten, some myth or epic. (Ganguly, 2008; 164) The sense in which Ambedkar talks about religion is not any different from the very modern institutions that we have come to know by that name. 5 Notice for instance, that every time Ganguly cites a piece from Ambedkar to mark his use of non-secular idioms, he is pairing it up with that against which it is being positedIt must be an incantation, instead of being read as an ethical exposition. (Ganguly, 2008; 164) Or for instance- The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual. There is nothing material or social about it. (Ganguly, 2008; 160) 6 Talal Asads critique of the secular as a site of power constantly tries to make this point. (Asad, 2003)
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the conventions of which it is a repetition. (Butler, 1993; 12) A performative act, Butler goes on to show borrowing from Derrida, is always a citational practice. Yet it is also by virtue of this reiteration that constitutive instabilities of the norm are exposed, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm.(Butler, 1993; 10) As long as we are talking about caste, we are already referring to a set of normative variants of the phenomenon/category of caste. Thus any practice that is nominated as a caste practice can perform the destabilization of the norm it seeks to reiterate or cite only by appearing unintelligible. Ganguly is making a similar claim regarding caste in its performative dimension. But I fail to understand how her examples can be made to be cases of this unintelligibility. The drafting of a mythographic register to infest the present with instances of a mythical past can be read as an example of a contestation over the past. This might be a novel way of playing with the norms of writing history but within the nationalist corpus a resort to a time that was is in no way novel or counter-normative. In fact the execution of such a gesture confirms the entry of a new player within a game whose terms are determined by colonial discourse. The results of this game are of course not predetermined and in this can be found the scope of uncanny beings and practices7.
7

I believe that this is the import of Partha Chatterjees assertion that anticolonial nationalisms are derivative and yet different in the way they are imagined. (Chatterjee, 2006)

The life-world of Sushila: When Ganguly gives the example of the neo-Buddhist Sushila operating in multiple channels of faith as a rejection of non-secular transcendence that is advocated by dalit politics, I believe she is giving an example of wa ys of one such uncanny ways of being in the world. Within a modern framework, Sushilas predicament lies in the fact that as a Hindu idol worshipper she does not belong to the dalit emancipation narrative. Neither can her idol worshipping habits be qualified in terms of her Buddhism. She is that subject whose multiple identities defy the imperatives of nationstate classifications. The object of postcolonial enquiry would then be how and why the nation state and normative modernity requires identities to be fixed? What is the emancipated dalit activists discomfort with multiple identities and what does this tell us about the very unfreedom of the emancipation doctrine itself? No doubt Ganguly is concerned with all of these questions, but the mere pointing out of the uncanny neither tells us how the certitudes of the modern nation state are disturbed by it nor does it problematise the terms in which universal emancipation is granted to the dalit subject. In other words, the post-secular reading that she attempts does not deal with the construction of the secular in particular ways that disallows thinking of it in any other way. The secular remains an imperative with the nation-state that her reading does not help wrest from it. She does not make the constitution of the uncanny as the uncanny, the object of her investigation.

The discursive production of the performative dimensions of caste I think that the predicament of these performatives that Ganguly makes much of in terms of the conceptual excesses they pose is precisely that their status as uncanny or catechristic is fixed discursively by the imperatives of those very hegemonic formulations that have arranged all the terms of thinking our past, present and future. Alternatively, I am trying to say that while Gangulys claim that caste in these hegemonic discursive formations is inevitably constructed as an object of policy, progress, amelioration and the complicity of disinterested social sciences with all of this is undeniable, the role of modern discursive production is not limited to such sites only. The constitutive outsides that Ganguly posits to modern discursive formations might as well be constituted outsides8. Performatives of the seemingly non-secular/non-modern varieties can be as much an engagement with the terms of these hegemonic formations. The articulation effected by these performances no doubt often results in an overflow of the hegemonic discursive formations by the way of the changes wrought in the identity of each of its constitutive elements. These moments of overflow are of crucial political valence (for eg. the Mandal agitations and counter-agitations). But it is precisely the function of modern power or its hegemonic labor to reconstitute the symbolic matrix to contain this overflow.

Herein, I believe, lies the crucial implication of foregrounding the discursive nature of caste. There are no doubt dalit life-worlds like other life-worlds. But both the translation
Hasnt this always been the case with shudra-atishudras, that their status has always been allotted to the outside of the social formation. Can we ignore the role of modern power in the reproduction of this constitution of outsides?
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of these life-forms to the political category that is caste as well as the lack of this translation can be attributed to the workings of modern power. As in the case of Sushila, the everyday life of faith can indeed be a different imagination of freedom than the one that is envisaged by radical dalit politics of a particular variety. But in no way does that necessarily imply that the powers of the secular-modern are given a slip. Freedom can be as much an effect of this power, which as Foucault has argued, can be both individualising as well as totalizing (Foucault, 2003). Does that mean that there can be no scope for politics within this tight-knit grid of modern power? Like Ganguly I would disagree. I also think, much in tune with her, that this politics can be one that revolves around questions of sovereignty. But in my understanding the site of this politics is not some affective outside, some form(s) of popular sovereignty that operate in a nonadversarial framework in relation to authoritarian state sovereignty which embody in turn some genuine consensus built into them (Ganguly, 2008; 125). I have tried to show till now that such frameworks are often produced by modern power formations. My contention is rather that it is within the translation from dalit life-forms to categories like caste that the possibility of politics inheres. Of course this politics can assume both adversarial and non-adversarial forms in relation to state sovereignty. Sovereignty when thought out to be at stake in this politics is conceptualized precisely in terms of a discursive re-articulation of existing social realities. Or in a different sense, it can be thought out in terms of a manifestation of violence.

Sovereignty and Caste Violence: The real break with the discursivity of caste

A particular implication of Gangulys proposals could be that if living with caste can be thought of in terms of an ethical wa y of being in the world, untouchability or the violence associated with it can as well be a part of it. Untouchability of course has been declared as an act of violence, atrocity by the law. Gangulys counter-argument here could well be that this fixes the meaning of the phenomenon. This is once again undeniable. Within a life-form that is constituted by caste, the status of untouchability is that of a banal reality. There is nothing extraordinary about it. But what is to be understood is that once declared as illegal and thus violent, the continuation of this practice is made manifest as some act or principle of sovereignty. Thus it does not remain a benign force and becomes a site of laying claims to the disputed sovereignty of the nation-state by disturbing its monopoly on violence. The point I am trying to make is that the everydayness of untouchability, a constitutive feature of the caste system can itself no more be imagined as a site where popular forms of sovereignty are played out. In fact it is here that the stakes of the politics of high sovereignty are laid out and the certitudes of the nation-sate are really contested. It is here that the conception of caste in terms of an object of policy, amelioration and progress gives way to the unruly threat of violence, which always contains within itself an excess of meaning. It is in the phenomenon of caste violence that both the discursivity of caste and the ethics of caste practices meet their true limits. Violence is the site where the

real overflows the objectivity of the symbolic and raises its ugly head. It is precisely the containment of this violence that the discursive production of caste has been trying to effect since caste as a phenomenon and a category surfaced on the symbolic horizons of the entity that we now know as India.

Conclusion In foregrounding the discursivity of caste, I believe, Ganguly is proposing two different things. Firstly, she is trying to present the category of caste as historically contingent. Secondly, she is offering a catachrestic9 reading of caste, offering seemingly absurd alternative formations through which caste is lived, which cannot even be rendered intelligible in terms of the available discourses on caste. Indeed she attempts a redrafting of the narrative space within which caste can be talked about by a trope of the overflowing of this space with the lived reality of caste as a set of relations one has with ones everyday life, and which have no connection whatsoever (hence the clause of absurdity attached to them) with the discourses which make intelligible the very phenomenon of caste. I repeat here my contention that in redrafting the narratives that make caste intelligible to us,
9

Ganguly borrows the term catachresis from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak usage of it to describe the specific nature of the postcolonial worlds transactions with European constructs. Inasmuch as catechresis describes a transaction, it denotes the absurd or wrong use of a term that has its origin in a foreign discourse. In this transaction, Ganguly notes, is foregrounded the agency of the postcolonial intellectual in transforming the narrative space within which these constructs can be rearticulated. (Ganguly, 2005; 14)

Ganguly is not paying enough attention to the relational nature of each articulation that is made in a particular problem-space. There is no attempt here to comprehend the possibility that if caste is historically contingent then the production of contingency and change is not the work of some invisible hand but the resultant of active political agency. The fact that hegemonic discourses themselves have had to be rearranged signifies the necessity produced by counter-hegemonic catachrestic processes, which operate within given narrative spaces to constantly modify them.

Alternative narratives of belonging and becoming that have resignified caste in recent times have resulted in the resignification of the very practices of democracy and sovereignty. This has happened precisely because of (and not in spite of) novel political practices within the nation-space that have time and again rendered its certitudes problematic. Dalit politics or the collectivity that it imagines has time and again made claims of self-respect and dignity- claims that can hardly be classified under the rubric of bourgeois equality. The problematic of the discursivity of caste has to be understood within this framework rather than from an imaginary vantage point of an outside past, from which modernity is viewed as a repressive instance of rule, all other instances of sovereignty being thought to be benign and under threat from it. Any engagement with Foucaults work should

alert us to the essentially productive character of modern power. Thus an understanding of the affective dimensions of caste practices cannot eschew a study of the possible conditions of the production of this affect. Particular forms of affect need not be thought of as incompatible to modern ways of living if we are to take arrive at any understanding of postcolonial modernities. This also does not mean that they have to be thought in instrumental or strategic terms to arrive at their political value. Affective relations have their histories and as Anne Laura Stoler has tried to show in a different context, the colonial rule had as much of an interest in states of affect as it had in other domains. (Laura Stoler, 2001)

The unavailability of caste as a specific phenomenon in excess of its modern discursive production can be attributed to the very special role it has to play in both the dislocation of the Indian social and its reconstitution. This specialty of the role is such that each hegemonic formation (for eg. nationalism, Hindu communalism and in recent times even the realm of production relations) has had to reconfigure itself in reference to the phenomenon of caste. In reference to this historicity of caste and its shared constitutive premise with the idea and the practice of the nation, an unfettered dalit life-world and its consensual existence within a given scheme of things definitely produces conceptual excess. But the aesthetic reproduction of this life-form

cannot really share a critical relation with the very modern conditions of its production. The postcolonial critics intervention is already circumscribed by the imperatives of modern productive power. In such cases indeed as I had tried to point out before, the postcolonial critical enterprise becomes a project fraught with the tensions that have arisen from the specific production of the postcolonial political within modern institutionalized power structures. Scotts after

postcoloniality might just prove to be a more effective vantage point to interrogate these power structures than to merely try and empty specific categories of their colonial (and national) epistemology, to secure them above and over colonial representations.

To conclude then in Dirks words, It is.as impossible to return to a (neo)traditional view of caste that can escape either the critiques of privilege or concerns that caste is concealing the accumulated violence of both old India and new- traditional as well as modern operations of domination, exploitation, exclusion or erasure- as it is to suggest any longer that caste in nothing but class, that it is likely to die a quick death under the pressures of the modern, or that it might be reborn as a straightforward clone of some Western sociological categor y (as substantialized ethnicities, bloc political voting groups, and so on). (Dirks, 2003; 295)

References:

Asad, Talal- Introduction: Thinking about Secularism in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Chatterjee, Partha Whose Imagined Community? in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Dirks, Nicholas B. - Caste Politics and the Politics of Caste in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Foucault, Michel- The Subject and Power in Rabinow and Rose eds. The Essential 2003. -Politics and the Study of Discourse in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991 Ganguly, DebjaniCaste And Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Foucault, New York: The New Press,

Perspectives, Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal- Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms and Hegemony in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,

London: Verso, 2001.

Laura Stoler, Anne- Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response in The Journal of American History, Vol.88, No.3. pp.893-897. (Dec., 2001). Pandian, M.S.S.- Introduction: The Politics of the Emergent in Brahmin and Non- Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007. Scott, DavidIntroduction: Criticism after Postcoloniality, After in

Refashioning

Futures:

Criticism

Postcoloniality ,

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Submitted by: Bhuvi Gupta M.Phil (CS) Roll No. 09/M/271