!"#$%&'(")#%&*#+,-.-$/&0+,+12"3$&"4&1&5.,#6&71-.",12.8-&98:+-.:8 96-;"(<8=/&>.2.,#&?1@1,@1( A"6(:+/&A":.12&B+C-%&7"D&EF&<?.,-+(%&GHHF=%&IID&EFJKL M6N2.8;+#&N$/&Duke University Press A-1N2+&OPQ/&http://www.jstor.

org/stable/466674 9::+88+#/&RESTHSRTGT&TU/EU
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://links.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://links.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Text.

http://links.jstor.org

Body, Crowd, Identity

GENEALOGY OF A HINDU NATIONALIST ASCETICS

Two historical ruptures have left their indelible traces in the contemporary Indian contest over the social. The first such rupture was an outcome of the epistemic violence of colonial rule in India, which brought to bear on the exigencies of colonial governance all those tactics, strategies, and meticulous, intimate knowledges, from censuses to surveys, that had evolved in the West between the decline of absolutism and the institution of the modern mode of power. It insinuated into the arena of the Indian socius the identitarian categories of caste and religion.1Marking a radical break from what Sudipta Kavirajhas characterized as the precolonial noninterventionist high ground of the state in Mughal times, colonial rule inaugurated the governmentalizationof the Indian state.2 To govern is, as Foucault has suggested, "to structure the possible field of action of others"; it is, in effect, to instill the merest assurance of volition into the synapses of a habitus. For, if "governmentality" is not fetishistically the state and not essentially the body, it is ultimately only a name for a congeries of relations between practices of the state and practices that materialize "the body," between, in other words, the reason of the state, that is, governmental rationality, and the self-subjection of the subject, that is, ascetics. While the rationality in question may precede or outlast the state in a modulated or unmodulated form and while the ascetics may be prefigured in previous historical formations in different ways, only to be rectified by future deployments, both this ascetics and this rationality, when redeployed within the modern mode of power, work ultimately on the basis not of prohibition but of prescription. Their relation is not one of juridicality but of pervasive gridworks of power. What are incited and elicited are actions by the subject on the actions of other subjects, actions upon actions that draw the individual and the mass together within a pastoral framework wherein each governs and supervises the actions of the
other.3

Milind Wakankar

Secondly, the emergence of bourgeois Indian nationalism and the inception of its quest for hegemony and state power in the latter half of the nineteenth century implied the formalization and redeployment of certain indigenous idioms of self-subjection for the elicitation of consent and for the incitement of action. One major consequence of this process was that the substantiation of the nationalist "self" was posited as the
Social Text45, Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter 1995. Copyright ? 1995 by Duke University Press.

telos of a regime of collective ascetics; this was in effect an "Indian" modalization of the colonial ideologeme of possessive individualism. For what differentiated the logics of bourgeois Indian nationalism-engaged, Ranajit Guha has shown, in universalizing its own class interests as a prelude to hegemony-from the reason of the colonial state, was an axiom of power resting on a distinctly "Indian" economy of veridicality (or codification).4 The truth-claim that cohered at the center of this axiom was simple and yet momentous in its implications: it entailed merely that one a defined (or "possessed") self, definedoneself,in termsof a "body"pressed,a "body"set to work in the service of the "nation."The significance of this transformation lay in what became its indispensability for bourgeois Indian nationalism; the very constitution of the nationalist subject in India could not have been effected without this strategic forcing-together of body-as-self and nation-as-ascesis. It was in fact only when late-nineteenth-century nationalist discourse, with its innumerable prescriptions, codifications, impasses, and rectifications, had begun to seek to solder together the body-as-self and the nation-then simply a name for the future as a horizon of affect-that that process was initiated wherein the potentially disparate nationalist ensembles of practices ("what is to be done") and of knowledges ("what is to be known") began to converge around the restive form of the nationalist's body-at-work. In other words, the gap between that body, as the "inscribed surface of events . . . the locus of a dissociated self ... a volume in perpetual disintegration," and the body social or nation, could not have been bridged in this exemplary governmental manner without historically specific strategies, narratives, representations, and rhetorical ruses, without, in other words, a discourse (or discourses) of the nation's origin.5 The institution of the postcolonial regime of power in India implied, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has argued, the putting in place of the hyphen between "nation" and "state."But, as the legatee of both the colonial and the nationalist modes of governmentality,that regime retained the codifications that (as I have suggested) gradually established a governmental relation between the body and the body social in colonial times. The past decade of increased violence against Indian Muslims betrays the tenacity of those older morphisms of the body in Indian history. That the dominant Nehruvian apparatus of government shares with the recently ascendant Hindu nationalism-whose agenda is one of an identitarian reinscription of the universal bourgeois citizen-subject-the very modes by which that agenda problematizes the Indian Muslim, is a sign of the unraveling of the postcolonial modern at the crossroads of decolonization and nation-statehood. It would be the task of a genealogy to examine and expose the historical roots of this complicity, to grope beneath the traditional histories, the myths of origin and metaphysics of descent that clutMilind Wakankar

ter the state's own trajectory, so as to uncover the shifting articulations between the body and history. The hoary origin of the nationalist subject would have to be relocated at the lowly threshold of what Partha Chatterjee has characterized as a "moment of departure" for nationalist discourse.6 This was a phase in its historical trajectory when the search for origins seemed to (Hindu) bourgeois nationalist writers as the best guarantee of both the assertion of difference and the confession of sameness. Hindu spirituality, reinvested with lofty origins and anchored in the most hallowed descent of the "nation," was juxtaposed to and modified by the requirements of post-Enlightenment rationality. Here a genealogy would uncover the formulation of a late-nineteenth-century North Indian ascetics, a code of self-cultivation or anushilan, a set of guidelines for a relation to the self that sought to take into account the needs of both "rationality" and "spirituality,"redirecting the bourgeois nationalist male subject toward action against the colonizing other. Simultaneously, a genealogy would uncover in this very ascetics the attempt to generate a discourse of origins for the construction of a "Hindu" male subject poised in a stance of permanent provocation toward the "Muslim" male other. How did the nationalist Hindu subject emerge as the ghostly double of the nationalist Indian subject? How is it that we can detect today a deeper convergence in their respective social epidemiologies? What is the efficacy of the crowd in the contestation of this governmental logic of lofty beginnings? The "effective history" of the present would require, in other words, our willingness to engage with this indispensable axiom of governmentality in India, namely, the postcolonial state's investment in, and deployment of, such myths of origin as part of its effort to sustain the hegemony of its identitarian discourse, its efforts, in effect, to "fix" the "primordial" opposition between the proselytizing, perfidious, and lustful (male) "Muslim," and the idolatrous, outraged (male) "Hindu," that pious son of the soil. Such a genealogy is the work this paper has set itself. "Why are Bengalis not courageous?" the novelist, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, had asked himself. The reason was not hard to come by. It was "simply this: the physical is the father of moral man."7 Similarly,the insinuations of a blatantly racist colonial criminology and the remorseless logic of evolutionary theory drove the nationalist, Sarala Debi, to decry "physical weakness [as] a crime" and as the sign of a "weakling nation [that] is doomed."8 If, in the Orientalist logic of colonial stereotyping, the (male, Hindu, bourgeois) Bengali is "bookish" and "effete," if the (Hindu) nation needs to be rejuvenated after centuries of foreign (Muslim and British) oppression unchallenged by Hinduism's philosophical otherworldliness, what better site for collective reform than the (male, Hindu, bourgeois) body itself? Equipped with this logic, the late-nineteenth-century Bengali (male) elite set about creating the conditions for what it
Body, Crowd, Identity
47

called a "culture of physical education." What this involved, as an indispensable constituent of this nationalist agenda, was the gradual assimilation to its own organizational and regulatory structures of all those heterogeneous Meyerholdian spaces, all those far-flung commons and "public arenas" in distant villages and mofussil towns where male physical culture, group exercise, men working together in traditional sports such as wrestling, stave (or lathi) wielding, kabaddi, weightlifting, and indigenous martial arts had subsisted for centuries in dispersed arenas for the display of prowess, in akhras or rudimentary gymnasia, in the grounds of small temples dedicated to martial deities, and often in the estates and under the aegis of feudal lords.9 In 1866, the Nationality Promotion Society, set up by Rajnarayan Basu, began its campaign for the revival of "national gymnastic exercises," the rejuvenation of what it called "the military prowess of the ancient Bengalis," and for the reform of the Bengali diet.10 Simultaneously, a quest for a ready repertoire of heroes was set in motion. Mythical figures, medieval Pala kings, the gods Ram and Krishna, and various Rajput, Maratha, and Sikh heroes were all roped in. In 1867, with the institution of the Hindu Mela (or fair) devoted to cultural and sporting events, and to wrestling, gymnastics, and traditional sports, the Bengali elite began the inexorable process of incorporating the spirit of popular sport within the ethic of a masculinized body social. In 1868, Nabagopal Mitra established a school for gymnastics and later trained several physical education instructors whom he sent out to teach in many newly founded akhras. And British educators, themselves firm believers in bodily reform as the key to the "building of [a] national character"-which, in the context of the home country, constituted a racially charged response to the rise in the influx of proletarianized immigrant communities in latenineteenth-century England-sought to introduce in Bengali schools, as a necessary component of its "civilizing mission" to inculcate "civic virtues" in the native populace, a variety of "manly sports" (though, significantly, these did not include such less regimented and more folkish sports as tightrope-walking and acrobatics). In 1870, the viceroy broached the idea of a school for Indian princes that would encourage "field sports and outdoor exercises."11 It was his successor who later underscored the link between the body and "national character" by advocating the virtues of "energy, fearlessness, the love of youthful exercise, an instinctive scorn of all unmanly ease." "No race, no class," he added, "can long maintain its social and in moral ascendancy if it degenerates physical vigor" (italics mine).12All the elements of the strategic nexus between nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, Orientalist typologizing, and colonial stereotyping can be dis-

48

Milind Wakankar

cerned in this prescription. Colonialist stereotyping of "the Bengali" vacillated between the valorization of Western education (to generate a cheap native white-collar labor force) and the espousal of a martial raciology (to ensure the "loyalty" of the so-called martial races, the Sikhs and the Marathas, who formed an integral part of the colonial army). The Bengali was, alternately, intellectually acute but too "servile," given to a life of contemplation but too "effete," and a member of a "race" that had perhaps been "valorous" at one time but was now the living travesty of "martialness." As a consequence of the rhetoric of "regeneration," however, a new possibility slowly emerged. It now seemed as though the gendered colonial subject, the "lazy native," but also the white-collar native bourgeois, needed only to define a relation to his body, evolve a culturally derived ascetics, to ensure the "ascendancy" of his "race"/"class" on the tree of evolution and in the struggle for survival. These requirements for a national-cultural "vigor," themselves derived from the shifting and differential address of colonial governmentality, had (for the colonizers) the unforeseen effect of generating a differential logic (for the colonized) of a more enabling kind. It now seemed that if the Bengali bourgeois male's "effeteness" was the result of the absence of an ascetics, if he could shake off this condition by putting in a little ethical hard work, it was this very possibility of an ascetics, of a horizon of national-cultural regeneration, which could in turn ensure the assertion of difference. What was needed to replace the colonial stereotype of the "effete Babu" was the constitution of a (Hindu) nationalist (male) subject on the site of a "rational"revision of Hinduism on the one hand, and an acknowledgment of the colonizing West's hegemonic discourse of progress on the other. It was Bankim Chandra who defined for physical education both its precise location in the larger movement for what is called, in textbook histories, "socio-religious reform" in Bengal, as well as the exact nature of the regime it prescribed.13 At the core of the program lay the notion of anushilan, and its locus was the (bourgeois, Hindu) male body. This body was to serve as a link between culture and power, between an ascetics and a politics, and between what was after all an elitist-Hindu program for national-cultural regeneration and the dispersed Hindu national-popular itself. It involved a reading of the Gita that appropriated the threefold ethics of "devotion," "knowledge," and "duty" (or "action") against the countervailing ethic of renunciation and otherworldliness that coexisted among the heterogeneous themes in that text.14 Anushilan entailed the cultivation of the "innate human faculties," both physical and mental, as part of a quest for the "perfectibility of man." For Bankim, culture, in the Hindu, and not in the Arnoldian or Comtean sense, entailed the "harmonization" and "moderation" of all these faculties. One was not to be inor-

Body, Crowd, Identity

49

dinately abstinent like the ascetic, excessively indulgent like the glutton, or dedicated to plunder like the colonizing European. One was to be, like Krishna, the mythic hero, "a householder, diplomat, warrior, law-giver, saint and preacher" all at the same time (NT, 70). It was the duty of every practitioner of anushilan to cultivate "devotion" (bhakti) towards one's reformed (and reforming) self, to one's country, and to God. Butand this is where one can see the outlines in this discourse of a theory of action evolving from an ascetics-in order to love oneself and love one's country, one also needed to exercise self-protection, rightful self-defense, just war, the right balance between force and mercy, and (quite crucially for a later Hindu ethic of "tolerance" toward those who must submit to "us") a relationship with those whom one "protected" that no doubt consisted of "subordination," but of a kind which implied "not fear, but respect on their part" (NT, 79). The dharma of man was to embrace every aspect of a man's being, to colonize every aspect of social life, indeed the world, or humanity, itself. This formulation of a self-consciously "Hindu" notion of perfectibility was a nationalist inflection of the colonial trope of humanism. As Ranajit Guha has sought to demonstrate, this was a humanism that worked against Western notions by insisting on the "visibility" of the "ideal," and by securing this ocular evidentiality on the firm basis of a historicization of that ideal. Moreover, that historicization was itself determined by the requirements of a "rational"examination of myths and scriptural material, by extricating, in effect, the rationally verifiable from what was seen as the detritus of the supernatural, the miraculous, and the vulgar that cluttered these texts and invited the opprobrium of Orientalists and missionaries. "We cannot see God," Bankim's "Guru" argued, and "there is no chance that we shall be able to imitate" Him. But if we are at least to strive to "imitate" Him, as anushilan doubtless requires us to do, "we must have a religious history where characters of religious men have been described ... men who resemble God, or who due to their vast numbers of qualities can be considered parts of God, or who are believed to be God incarnate, can be made our ideal."15 This meant that, just as this notion of perfectibility served in a disembodied and rarefied way as the horizon of all spiritual aspiration, it also had to be simultaneously "embodied" in ideal men, adarshpurush, such as Krishna, for it to serve as the locus of emulation and as the source of inspiration. As the "Guru" puts it to his disciple in Bankim's programmatic Dharmatattva or Anushilan: "By effort or culture everyone can be a man of dharma ... So long as they cannot be that, let them follow the ideal."16 Hence, in addition to the new bodily and spiritual ethic of perfectibility there was also the need for an ideal which, in anushilan,meant a quasi-historicalhero. These requirements for anushilan had two consequences for the processes of social othering that ensued.
Milind Wakankar

First, Bankim's program for anushilan soon found acceptance among bourgeois nationalist Hindu youth, quite in keeping with that program's own elitist premises. The Anushilan Samiti (or society) founded in Bengal in 1901 was only the first in a series of such societies that were set up all over Bengal and that soon became the nuclei for clandestine terrorist groups that presented the first violent nationalist challenge to colonial rule. The samitis soon became the units of an elaborate organizational structure, extending from villages to the apex authority in Dacca. There was a strict daily regime which each samiti had to follow. The secretary of a village samiti had to "maintain a register of members of his samiti containing full details of their antecedents and bio-data ... maintain an akhra (gymnasium) for lathi (bamboo stave) play . . . and [appoint] for each group of ten members ... a dalpati (leader) who would be responsible for their attendance and training." The core doctrinal texts to be imbibed as part of samiti education were the "Hindu scriptures," of prime importance among which was the Gita, which "had approved of all actions if made for greater interests." Equipped with this reading of the Gita, Hindu youth in far-flung samitis were to work together secretly to terrorize the colonial bureaucracy with carefully planned assassinations and attacks on the symbols and sites of colonial authority, often using country-made bombs.17 The importance of this organizational setup as a model for later Hindu nationalist organizations cannot be exaggerated. As I will show in a later section of this paper, samiti-organization, along with the proliferation in Swadeshi times of Shivaji Clubs and the exchange of their personnel in Bengal and Berar (in Maharashtra), served as prototypes for the structures set up by the premier Hindu nationalist organization, the RSS. Secondly, almost from the beginning, and in keeping with the cultural specificity of both the practices grouped under anushilan-a Hindu ideal, the use of the Gita for doctrinal purposes, the Hindu character of the rituals of initiation-and of those practices, quite blatantly Hindu, which characterized early-twentieth-century nationalism in Bengal, the question of the identity and the role of the Bengali Muslim within this self-reforming, self-defining body social was ignored. Indeed, the Hindu nationalist character of such practices surfaced during the Hindu-Muslim violence of 1908, 1925, and 1946, when, according to John Rosselli, "some of the most famous [Hindu] physical culture clubs and leaders were busy organizing the 'self-protection' of Hindus against Muslims."18 As the Indian nationalist movement against British rule gained momentum, how did a movement seeking the bodily incorporation of the ideal come to define the "Muslim other" as its object, even as that movement evolved into a quasi-militaristic effort aimed at the colonizer? "Projects for physical reform," Jean Comaroff has argued, "represent efforts to rework the physical grounding of conventional realities, efforts
Body, Crowd, Identity

How did a movement seeking the bodily incorporation of the ideal come to define the "Muslim other" as its object?

51

to intervene in the dialectic of the person and the world." Such attempts "to remake habit tend to treat the body as a 'memory' in which are lodged, in mnemonic form, the organizing principles of an embracing context. Scrambling this code-that is, erasing the messages carried in banal physical practice-is a prerequisite for retrainingthe memory, either to deschool the deviant or to shape new subjects as the bearers of new worlds."19 Yet, if messages are to be scrambled, and substantive mnemonics installed, it follows that there is always the danger of producing not just "new subjects as bearers of new worlds," but new "others." In this sense, the (necessarily male) body can be reconstituted as the shifting node between the past, the present, and the future, as the locus of both continuity and discontinuity, degeneration and regeneration. It can serve both as the threshold for a return to a glorious past left behind amid the ignominy of the present, as well as a point of imminent departure from the tyranny of an unchanging future. This tendency to return to the old so as to ensure the perdurability of the new was something Marx put his finger on in the opening lines of the EighteenthBrumaire,when he remarked that the "tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Just when men "seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed .. . they conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes."20In a similar fashion, revisionary history can also serve to gloss over complexities and ambivalences, producing a univocal and teleological reconstruction of a supposedly "national" past. Scrambled and unscrambled at every historical turn, this ever seamless mnemonic then subsumes the blockages and detours of history within the two-dimensionality of the mythic. Hence the ease with which Hindu nationalism reads "India" as "Hindu," and its history as the drama of foreign oppression, first by the "tyrannical Mughal" and then by the Englishman. But for the body to have been coded in this way in colonial Bengal, there had to have been a fundamental ambiguity in the ascetics that served as the bedrock of anushilan. The problem lay perhaps in the very modality of "imitation." In Bankim's formulation, according to Guha's paraphrase, it is precisely "the visibility of divine attributes in their personsthat makes it possible ... to emulate . . . ideal men." But there is, Guha conand tinues, "more to perfection than some disembodied abstract concept of It is actualized and embodiedin human beings. It follows theremorality. fore that the ideal itself will no longer remain trappedin thought alone. in Incorporated experience, it will henceforth realize itself in its particular moments as defined by the coordinates of time and space-that is, by history."21Where a christological problematic would have made a sharp distinction between the ideal and its embodiment (postulating, for instance,
Milind Wakankar

a discontinuity between the corporeal body of the king and the spiritual body of the sovereign in the medieval West), the bodily thematic in anushilan blurred the boundaries between the two. Personified, embodied, corporated, realized, presentbefore one's eyes, the ideal man bodiedforth the body social in its purest, most pristine realization, unsullied by foreign matter. How were women located within this body social incarnated by the "ideal man"? This was a moment in Bengali bourgeois nationalism when the gendering of the nationalist subject and, to borrow a phrase from Anne McClintock, the consolidation of a "scopic" politics, together secured the elision of women's agency, especially of female sexuality, from both the site of the family and the site of nationalist mobilization.22 As Partha Chatterjee has tried to show, the nationalist insertion of women within a revisionist-nativist domain of traditional Hindu spirituality was inextricably linked to its orchestration of a logic of difference which distinguished a male "outside" world, on the one hand, where the race for modernity had been lost to the West, and, on the other, a feminized "inside" world where that battle had always already been won by the socalled spiritual treasures of Hinduism embodiedin women.23The Bengali bourgeois Hindu woman was to be a symbolic marker of "chastity, selfsacrifice, submission, devotion, kindness, patience and the labors of love." These "spiritual" signs required a scopic evidentiality, and "her dress, her eating habits, her social demeanor, her religiosity" were to display the unadulterated attributes of the "true" nationalist subject. Women were not to "eat, drink or smoke in the same way as men, they must continue the observance of religious rituals which men were finding it difficult to carry out; they must maintain the cohesiveness of family life and solidarAs ity with the kin to which men could not now devote much attention."24 goddesses, as mothers, as symbolic stand-ins for the "motherland" they were to preserve the cherished hopes for the freedom of the "motherland" that had been frittered away with the apathy of their benighted half-"modernized" sons/husbands. The nationalist agenda at this "moment of departure"-which remained a bourgeois nationalist, Hindu agenda, despite what Guha calls its uniquely inflected "humanism"-devoted its efforts to educating this woman in the household, this mother in the family, and thus reinscribed this "inner" domain within the differential economy of a nativist logic resolutely set apart from, yet bearing the traces of, an other logic, preponderant in the "outer" domain, in which the triumphalist claims of Western reason were both reluctantly accepted and enthusiastically embraced. Woman as symbolic mediator served as a bridge between the revisionist nativism of the nationalist and what appeared to be the indisputable rationality of the colonialist: an "intermediary between obscure forces and the group," to use Fanon's words.25
Body, Crowd, Identity
53

The nationalist project in this "moment of departure" deployed a scopic politics that ensured the "visibility" of both the ideal (bourgeois Hindu) man and the ideal (bourgeois Hindu) woman. The ideal woman was this "goddess among us," descended from all the goddesses of the past, and all the martyred heroines of yesterday; the ideal man was this enlightened man "among the masses," who, "having attained through anushilan ... an exemplary unity of knowledge and duty," would lead us to assured victory, descended as he was from the gods, heroes, and martyrs of yesterday.26The elite provenance of both these "ideals" must not be underplayed. This was, after all, as Sumit Sarkar has underscored, a bourgeoisie that espoused "bourgeois ideals derived from a growing awareness of contemporary developments in the West," an awareness acquired as a result of an English education and of employment in administrative and clerical posts, chiefly in the government, and in the legal profession; but this was also a class that retained considerable intermediate holdings in the rural areas where it often came into conflict with a predominantly Muslim peasantry.27 So much for the "universality" of the ideal man. Bankim's "Guru" had said to his disciple in Dharmatattva or Anushilan: "Very few people understand the innermost essence of a religion. But the character of the common people is governed and molded by the rule and imitation of those few who do understand it."28Ostensibly an elite vanguard open to genuine practitioners of anushilan, this group of ideal men were obviously to be derived from the reforming ranks of the bourgeoisie. Corresponding to the ideal woman, the ideal in the "inner" domain where nationalism could recycle a triumphalist narrative, was an ideal man in the world "out there" calling for action against the enemy. What this institution of cathected opposites succeeded in ensuring was the installment of the "family" as the indispensable trope for a Hindu nation regenerated by the coming together of the ideal Hindu woman on the one hand, and the ideal Hindu man on the other. This is not to discount the evidence of women's resistance to such prescriptions that recent feminist historiography in India has sought to unearth. Chatterjee's reading of the nationalist principle of a gendered separation of domains is heuristically enabling for an insight into the axioms of early Bengali nationalism. What this heuristic betrays, however, is a negligence of the role and agency of women in the emergence and contestation of the nationalist Indian bourgeoisie. It retains its usefulness only in providing an account of the phantasmatic dimension of nationalist ascesis. The importance of this dimension will become clearer in a later section of this paper where I discuss that contemporary morphism of the phantasmatic body social which implicates both Nehruvian and Hindu nationalism in the demonization of the Indian Muslim.
54

Milind Wakankar

"In the household dharma," Bankim's Guru says, "[the wife and the husband] are each objects of devotion; those who represent them should each be objects of this kind of devotion." Moreover, "the structure of society is of the same kind as that of the household. The king is at the head of society, as the parents are the heads of the household."29The idea of conjugal austerity for the sake of "strong" Hindu (male) progeny was of course implicit in this. But more crucially in terms of images and ideas that were still only nascent, the trope of the family sustained the notion of a hierarchy within a "putative organic unity of interests."30This symbolic equalization of ideal "parents" papered over a real subordination of roles. The "ideal Hindu woman" was subordinated to the "ideal Hindu man" despite her minimal authority within the household, an authority tolerated to the extent that it confined itself to the upkeep and nurture of the "household" and its regeneration. This necessarily implied other subordinations. "Gender difference between women and men serve[d] to symbolically define the limits of Within this hierarchy connational difference and power between men."31 stituting the basis of the "nation," the "ideal Hindu male" could offer his "protection" to those who served him. As the Guru puts it to the aspiring practitioner of anushilan in Bankim's Dharmatattva, "You are the protector of (1) your wife and children, your family, (2) your country, (3) your master, that is, he who employs and pays you to protect him, and (4) the refugee."32 At the time, Muslim self-assertion within this framework of exclusions had only just begun. The Muslim was still, for the late-nineteenth-century Bengali bourgeoisie, "an object of retrospective hostility ... for [his] one-time domination of us, the Hindus." On the "plane of thought we were utterly indifferent to Muslims as an element in contemporary society ... [although] we [did] have friendliness for the Muslims of our own economic and social status with whom we came into personal contact." But, "we felt only mixed concern and contempt for the Muslim peasant whom we saw in the same light as we saw our low-caste Hindu tenants."33 As the ethic of the body social and the familial trope gained more and more mileage with the greater "threat" of Muslim self-assertion, these relatively mild cathexes soon acquired the intensity of the hypercathexes that can be seen in Hindu nationalism today. At what Chatterjee calls nationalism's "moment of departure," the Muslim was still an element inside the body social, albeit one whose agency, whose very presence, had been effaced. If one looks at the shift that has taken place in the problematization of the Muslim since then, the changes seem both radical and, in an unsurprising way, a logical outcome of a long process that has been at work since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. To recapitulate, that process involved the splitting of the nationalist subject along the lines
Body, Crowd, Identity
55

Nationalistic discourse asserted notions of difference through the recovery of the "national," which itself was modulated by conceptions of the "modern.'

of the "divergence between the modern and the national . .. [since] the specificity of [each] remained distinct and opposed" (NT, 80). Nationalistic discourse asserted notions of difference through the recovery of the
"national," which itself was modulated by conceptions of the "modern."

This program for a "national religion," having failed to incorporate the national-popular, remained confined to an elite Hindu male ascetics. As the symbolic material for a relentless national "self-purification" were already in place, only the widening of its social base and a greater proximity to the national-popular were required for nationalism to generate the epidemiological notions of the social that we see circulating today: perceptions of the Muslim as alien, other, aggressive, and one who infests the body social in subtle imperceptible ways. In fact, when Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, for six years a senior member of the Calcutta Anushilan Samiti, established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the National Volunteers Organization, or the RSS) in 1925 soon after an episode in Nagpur of what he perceived as "Hindu-Muslim" violence, it was easy to see that these essential elements of anushilan had finally been institutionalized.34 The RSS was launched on the day of the Hindu festival of Dussehra, which commemorates the victory of the hero of the Ramayana, Ram, over his adversary, the demon-king, Ravana. As the mythic ruler of an alien kingdom who had abducted Ram's virtuous consort, Ravana could conveniently serve as a symbol of both the supposed alienness and the lustfulness of the Muslim. Following the elite, upper-caste base of anushilan, the initial RSS volunteers were Nagpur Brahmins. Hedgewar instituted and later refined a detailed physical and mental regime for his volunteers:35
Having raised the banner, the swayamsevaks [volunteers] offer pranam (salute) by raising the right hand to the chest, palms parallel to the ground, head bowed. Following roll-call, the swayamsevaksassemble in different areas of the field in gata groups [which normally consist of twenty volunteers of the same age and belonging to the same locality of the town]. The shikshaks [teachers], assisted by the gatanayakas [gata-leader], teach Indian games and yogic exercises. The repertoire of games is quite large, and the games are all meant to build a spirit of cooperation. The most popular game is kabaddi (a vigorous kind of team tag). Some "defensive" skills are taught, such as the use of the lathi (a five-foot long weapon made of bamboo) and the sword. After about one-half hour, the mukhya shikshak [the shakha, or branch's, head teacher] blows a whistle to mark the end of the physical part of the program. Either in gata, combinations of the gata, or as a single group, the members assemble in a circle for the discussion period. The themes of the discussion typically relate to attributes of "good" character (e.g., fidelity, fortitude, honesty, obedience to superiors, hard work, personal discipline), the need for unity in India, or some hero or heroic event in the history of Hindu India. Finally, the swayamsevaks again assemble in rows before the

56

Milind Wakankar

banner.The Sanghprarthana RSS prayer)is then recitedin Sanskrit (the by

the whole group-Namaste sada vatsale matribhumi (Salutations to thee o

loving motherland). This is followed by the shout, Bharat mata ki jai!

([Glory be] to Mother India!) . . . These activities are referred to as sadhana ... the pursuit of religious enlightenment.36

This regime was to be duplicated in the innumerable cornerside clubs and nationalist schools that the RSS established all over the country for the recruitment of Hindu male youth, to serve as training grounds for "young militants," then still overwhelmingly Brahmin, in the fight against the Muslim "enemy." Three fixtures of every RSS club were apparent at the outset. First, the akhra (or gymnasium) served both as the site of bodily reform and of political indoctrination. Second, both before and after classes and sports, volunteers were to take the RSS oath before the saffron flag of the Maratha hero Shivaji and the Rajput hero Rana Pratap, both of whom had emerged since the last decade of the nineteenth century as martial ideals in the Hindu nationalist canon of martyrs and heroes. And third, such oaths were also to be taken before pictures of Ram and his lieutenant, the monkey-god, Hanuman (or Maruti). The centrality of the gymnasium to the RSS regime can perhaps be attributed to the influence of the anushilan movement. But whereas anushilan samitis had for the most part operated in a clandestine manner in Swadeshi Bengal and after, RSS clubs installed themselves at the very core of the recreational regimes of small towns and villages. Youths belonging to the "same age" and the "same locality" were to imbibe in these clubs not just the guidelines for an ascetics, but were to discover in that overwhelming "spirit of cooperation" the faintest traces of a community that had once lived together in the redemptive glow of a Hindu ethos. That "motherland," that "mother" left behind, forlorn and forsaken, somewhere in the distant past, would find in the games and drills in the grounds, in the diligent but easy scholastics of the makeshift classrooms, in prayers recited in Sanskrit (the language of the "great books of Hinduism," the Vedas), and in the earnest questionings and strenuous frolic of her sons, the possibility of both retribution for the wrongs done to "her" in the past and of a vindication in the future that would usher in Hindu rule. All the components of Bankim's nationalist ascetics were to be inscribed at the doctrinal core of this regime. Devotion or bhakti toward the nation required a governmental framework where an ethics of the self cathected an ethics of nationalism. "Obedience to superiors" as a consequence of obedience to oneself, or "personal discipline." "Fidelity" to the cause of the nation as a consequence of fidelity to oneself, or "honesty." And finally, "fortitude" in the struggle against the enemies of the nation as a consequence of a relentless exercise of fortitude, or "hard work." The

Body, Crowd, Identity

57

saffron flag symbolized those supposedly eternal values of "Hindu tolerance" and pluralism, distorted at first by Muslim "belligerence," and later subverted by the ascendancy in postcolonial times of such Western notions as "secularism."For Hindu nationalism it was then that a spurious notion of the equality and coexistence of faiths took the place of the ageold wholeness of the nation. What brought each community together was now simply its common link to the territory, not a larger ethos or tradition. It is this lost ethos and tradition to which the saffron flag alludes, that presumably tolerant past where every other faith acknowledged the centrality of Hinduism to the heritage of the nation.37I shall have occasion to return to this ethic of tolerance a little later. Here, it remains to be pointed out that the centrality of Ram in its iconography was evident even at this early moment in the trajectory of Hindu nationalism. From Bankim's deployment of Krishna-bhakti as the rehearsal of desh-bhakti(or devotion to the nation), to the RSS's establishment of Ram-bhaktias the foundation on which the ethics of Hindu nationalism were to rest, required a very small and quite effortless shift within a larger Vaishnavite framework where both Bhagavatism and the relatively later and, at least in the Hindispeaking belt of North India, more popular idea of Ram as an avatar of Vishnu had coexisted and often overlapped since ancient times, finding its most efficacious means of dissemination in the tradition of popular readings and enactments of Tulsidas's medieval epic, the Ramcharitamanas. Again, I shall return to this issue later in this paper. What is noteworthy here is the unobtrusiveness with which certain disciplinary structures and regulative regimes were clustered around the ethic of bodily reform. Within the clubhouse, physical reform skirted the domains of pedagogy in the strict sense and of the discipline of the gata. After the salute, the exercises. After the games, the pleasant chatter; in the midst of moral instruction, attention was nevertheless to be paid to the exercise of the soul, to sadhana, to the work of "religious enlightenment." Here the patriarchal fabric of the Sangh, its pyramidal hierarchy extending from these scattered clubs all the way up to the apex authority of the sarsanghchalakat Nagpur, becomes evident. "Religious enlightenment" and moral "discussion" under the guidance of "teachers," sworn to celibacy, helps promote the discursive articulation of nationalism with Hinduism, and both nationalism and Hinduism with the ethic of the gendered celibate body social. Celibacy is after all merely the negative inscription of heterosexuality. Sangh recruitment requires that the men and women who consitute its cadres retain their ties with the patriarchaland/or homosocial social formations from which they are drawn (formations that tend to be overwhelmingly petit bourgeois). The Sangh's prescription for a radical ascesis in the cause of Hindutva takes care not to disrupt the fabric of gendered oppression. At the same time, the homophobia that underMilind Wakankar

lies its strictly celibate homosociality can be discerned in its concerns about Hindu male effeteness. For one, this homophobia serves as a denial of precisely that closeted homoeroticism on which the Sangh bases its efforts for local recruitment and corps solidarity. On the other hand, a great deal of the libidinal counterflow and negative cathexis in Sangh mobilization is derived from the fear of what is perceived as the (supposedly) historically attested threat of the sodomizing Muslim male. (The frequency by which Muslim women are raped during riots betrays the horrific polymorphousness of this fear.) At the core of such collective activity is the establishment of the link between the male body and the mass through "physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions."38 Bodily reform relies on what Pierre Bourdieu calls the "silence" of sport for the effective interpellation of the subject. The proximity of so many uniformed, uni-forming, bodies-in-unison initiates a kind of silent communion between each gesture. Since every action mimes another, collective mimesis sustains the possibility of collective regeneration. As Bourdieu explains, "collective bodily practices," by "symbolizing the social, contribute to somatizing it and ... by the bodily and collective mimesis of a social orchestration, aim at reinforcing that orchestration."39 The marked tendency in anushilan to historicize the ideal man can be discerned in the images of Ram that circulate in India today. Bankim had merely subjected ancient Puranic literature to "an elaborate hermeneutic operation ... to recover whatever was humane and plausible about [the god, Krishna] . . . without reliance on the purely mythic and the supernatural ... to construct Krishna's humanity-his politics, his sociability, even his mortality-his historicity in short."40 Mass-cultural reproductions of Ram have now achieved the metaphysician's feat of "placing present needs at the origin."41This Ram of course still belongs to a mythical and glorious past when his benign absolutism supposedly ensured the serenest of reigns. This Ram is also very much with us; he is three-dimensional, very much alive. This time, however, he is angry: an emblem of tolerance, statesmanship, belligerence, and bloodthirstiness all at the same time. As Anuradha Kapoor has shown, Ram had been portrayed in traditional icons going as far back as the fifth century C.E., as androgynous.42 His "Kshatriya" or warrior-like qualities were underplayed in miniature art where violence was muted by the requirements of iconic suggestion and his godliness foregrounded; conventional portrayals froze his ageless body sempiternally at the threshold of youth. The images of Ram that circulate today circumscribe the earlier diffusion of gender identity, relocating Ram within a warrior cult directed at supposed Muslim intransigence. His body "now emphatically ... that of the adult male" (104), he is now shown as "heavily armed" (75) and "ready for war" (103). His arrow, straining at his bow, is pointed away from the viewer of the icon. Ram
Body, Crowd, Identity
59

does not address the viewer but looks away, inviting the viewer to gaze with him in the direction of the enemy. This is not a moment of benediction. It is an explicit call to arms from an "ugra [indignant] Ram, responding as it were, to the specific moment, the loss of the janambhoomi (i.e., the motherland, as well as its supposed metonym, the disputed mosque, allegedly built forcibly on the grounds of a temple) and involved in a fight to regain it" (103). A more striking shift in the representational codes of such iconography has been the attempt to endow Ram's images with realism. The ideal man must now be seen as he is. Realisms, easy to reproduce mechanically, "regulate space in such a way as to regulate time" (100). They make the image "seem 'close' to us." As a result, "other depictions of the past come to appear quaint, unreal or even naive" (100). By tethering the image to the present and ensuring its accessibility, the viewer is enabled, indeed invited, to attain a kind of proximity to the "ideal man" that was not available in the stylized renditions of yesterday. The sheer extent of the circulation of such images is itself a breakthrough for Hindu nationalism, which, while spawning a host of front organizations, has continued to broaden its mass base in the rural and semiurban areas that were hitherto isolated from its propaganda machine. Such images are afloat in mass culture-circulated through stickers, posters, popular calendar art, mobile video vans driving into remote villages, and on national TV-and are convenient sites for propagandization.43 For women in the RSS and in the other outfits of organized Hindu nationalism, the installment of Ram as male ideal has meant that their own undeniably enhanced "militancy" in the cause of the Hindu "nation" has had to engage with a new form of patriarchy. As Tanika Sarkar has pointed out, what distinguishes this nationalist woman from those that came before her is her greater access to public space, a more "visible" militancy, the image of which is reproduced incessantly through the medium of mass culture.44Within the familial trope of Hindu nationalism, the old notion of "motherhood" and "motherland," and of the woman raped by the "lustful" Muslim, has of course been retained. But what has changed is the relation of woman to the motherland; her role is now not only one of nurturance or abject prostration but one of active "service" (seva) in defending that "motherland" against the enemy. Similarly, the older deployment of female martial deities as ideals remains a central component of patriarchal ideology. But the relation to the male ideal has become an active and far more crucial one. Women are now not merely the objects of his "protection," but are themselves "pressed into action to liberate and restore [the "motherland"] to him."45Devotion to Ram and devotion to the nation can then easily overlap. The implication of this shift in the constitution of the gendered nationalist subject has been the
Milind Wakankar

extension of the familial trope to cover the whole of society. Its earlier severance of domains had been a part of nationalist discourse's attempt to come to terms with the imperatives of modernity ushered in forcibly by colonialism. That line between the two domains (between the inner and the outer) has given way to an absolutization of the familial trope in a manner that is remindful of organizations in totalitarian formations. The RSS defines itself not as an "organization within society, [but as the] organization of society."46The presence of women in its cadres, Sarkar suggests, both confirms the logic of the familial trope and sustains the hierarchical structure implicit in the RSS's self-definition as a family. If the RSS is society, and society the state, the very possibility of a demarcation of domains- inside-outside, inner-outer-is rendered redundant. Since the nation is the family, it follows that women can serve that nation only by serving the father, Ram. It matters little whether they do this in the capacity of sisters, wives, or mothers-their very efficacy within Sanghsociety-nation is a function of the necessarily familial sources of their strength and energy. The image of the militant woman that is circulated in organizational literature betrays both the liberatory and the subtly constraining effects of (what Sarkar calls) the "new patriarchy." Read productively, Sarkar's description of one such image yields the register of that disciplining: The cover page of Jagriti [Awakening] depicts two women crouchingin a helpless posture againsta darkbackground.A young, rathergrim looking woman, steps out of that frame on to the radianthalf of the page with an upliftedhead. There are no Hindu markson her body-no veil, no sindur, no bindi [vermilionmarkson the forehead,denotingmaritalfidelity].She wears sandals, her sari is drapedtightly aroundher and her whole stance
is free, even aggressive . . . she . . . wear[s] the Samiti uniform-a purple-

borderedwhite sari. (42) The threat of the "lustful" Muslim provides the first half of the image with the connotative baggage for its "dark background." The crouching helpless woman is, after all, still an indispensable symbolic mediator of the "threat" to the "motherland." But in the second half of the image, the "new woman" effects a radical shift in both her stance and her location. No longer in that dark, claustrophobic domain where she crouched in fear and lingered in inertia, she "steps out" and becomes "visible"; hence the "radiant" background of the second half of the image. Her relation to the structures of patriarchyis now a more defiant one. There are no marks of "feminine virtue" engraved on her body, and this could also mean that her role as a symbolic mediator of divinity has given way to a more secularized female ethic. Yet this stepping out has its own constraints: her newfound freedom is not to be mistaken for a changed negotiation of her
Body, Crowd, Identity
61

sexuality-her sari is, after all, "draped tightly around her," any looseness, any lack of care in this regard would entail a sexually modulated deployment of her newfound martial ethic. But since she is to remain abstinent, "tight," while at the same time "uplifted," the martial ethic can safely coexist with the requirements of familial motivation. She is, after all, still a member of the RSS family: she continues to don the austere colors of the organization's uniform for women, "a purple-bordered sari." Serving less crucially now as a symbolic mediator of the nation, the nationalist woman can derive from her insertion into the real only the comfort of being relocated within the master trope of the family-as-nation, there by the side of Ram to aid and abet him. The older Hindu ethic, the inculcation of a warrior-like profile in its cadres, was a consequence of what Hindu nationalism perceived, both in the colonial state's certification in 1909 of separate electorates for Muslims and in the greater Hindu-Muslim collaboration against that state that characterized the 1910s and early 1920s, as the political self-mobilization of "the" Muslim community.47 The new Hindu ethic, discontinuous with the first in that it lays claim to the originary institution of the social in the shape of the "Hindu nation," adopts a pluralistic rhetoric of "tolerance." It sees the currently hegemonic notion of the "secular state" as being part of the worldwide Muslim "conspiracy" against that aboriginal, autochthonic Hindu nation. It thus seeks to replace the Congress's "secular state" by a "Hindu Rashtra [nation]" that would, by dint of its very "Hindu-ness," ensure "real toleration" toward Muslims. "Real tolerance" is almost always opposed to "appeasement." (Mahatma) Gandhi, for instance, had to die. His assassin believed that Gandhi was not being "belligerent" enough toward Muslims; he did not stand up to them like a man.48"Real tolerance" would mean masculine tolerance, a tolerance like Ram's, ready at one moment to take up arms against the foe, at another to forgive him who must remain meek and submissive, never angry and intransigent, if he is to imbibe the blessings of the deity. The logical outcome of this ethic of tolerance, now enshrined as the quintessence of the Hindu notion of civil society, is the demonization of all that is "intolerant." Hence the seeming paradox that this toleration, "to be secure, must then stamp out all that is not Hindu, for what is not Hindu is always intolerant."49 Ever intolerant, this "minority" would also seem to be ever disloyal. And this is no doubt because it is ever alien. It arrived in this "sacred land," not, as everybody else did, irregularly and over centuries through lines of commerce and migration, but (like the British) through catastrophic "invasions," accompanied always (unlike the British) by the destruction of temples and forcible conversions. This was the period of the "Dark Ages," beginning with the decline of the last "Hindu" empire
62

Milind Wakankar

soon after the beginning of the Christian era and ending with the advent of colonialism. If the British were able to dislodge the Mughal empire with such ease and take its place, this was because "Hindus" were then too "weak" and too "disunited" to be able to rally together and take arms. But the struggle continued; "Hindus" continued to oppose foreign rule; all the great achievements of the nationalist struggle are therefore "Hindu" achievements. India is "free" today, yet not free enough. The alien invader perseveres in the guise of this "Muslim minority." "He" (he who once raped us repeatedly, ravished us in plunderings, and violated us with his rule) never belonged to this "sacred soil," this "sacred chthonic mother"; he can never belong here as long as he retains his ties with his brethren in the lands from which he came. This Muslim is unpatriotic; this Muslim does not belong here; this Muslim should go back. These varied cathexes make it easier to understand the extraordinary affective potency of the Hindu nationalist slogan, Babar ki santan, jao Pakistanya kabristan (Sons of [the Mughal emperor] Babar, flee to Pakistan or stay and die). This slogan, moreover, efficaciously establishes a link between the distant past-the "intolerant"Mughal empire-and the more immediate past that is epitomized in the trauma of Partition, a trauma that seemingly provides a link between Muslim "separatism" during the nationalist movement and the "problem" of Muslim "communalism" today. The creation of Pakistan with Islam as its state religion may well have constituted, as Faisal Fatehali Devji has argued, the originary failure of the Nehruvian nationalist project, and the Muslims who chose to remain in India were indeed made to bear the burden of this historical guilt.50 But, for Hindu nationalism, the creation of Pakistan clinched the retreat, even the rout, of the forces of Muslim "separatism."After all, "the Muslim as an overt outside enemy [was] preferable to the Muslim as a covert internal one."51Bearer of both the mark of a success and the taint of a failure, the Indian Muslim could then be reinscribed with the stigmata of an "alienness" without recourse and a "citizenship" without bona fides. The space for the deployment of the couple "citizen/alien" is of course the juridical sphere of parliamentarianism, suffrage, and constitutionality. National newspapers, deploying the juridical logic that characterizes the liberal public sphere, narrativize the history of violence against Muslims as a struggle within the state between different electoral-political sectors of the state, that is, within political society itself. It would seem as though everything is a question of vote-banks, electoral maneuvering, affirmative discrimination, kowtowing to the minorities, repressing the majority. One is then left wondering, along with Gyan Pandey, if "the kinds of atrocities perpetrated in recent instances of sectarian strife-the call to leave not a single Muslim, man, woman or child alive, which was acted upon in several places in Bhagalpur; the massacre of all 18 Muslim
Body, Crowd, Identity
63

Hindu nationalism conceives the nation as a body social beset by the dual presence of the Muslim: first, a "united" worldwide Muslim power "bashes" India in the UN; second, a "Muslimminority" infests this body social from the "inside." Hence the need for purification.

passengers traveling in a tempo-taxi along with the Hindu taxi-driver . . . their burial in a field which was then planted over with garlic; the chopping off of the breasts of the women; the spearing of infants and children, the spears with the victims impaled on them being then twirled around in the air to the accompaniment of laughter and sounds of triumph"-can be reduced to "elite" electoral manipulation.52 Nor would it be correct to speak of spaces of religious practice untouched by "the madness," where the everyday life of faith sustains its even tenor.53This would amount to a reading of communal violence as simply the handiwork of organized political hoodlumism in a supposedly peaceful and mutually supporting comity of faiths. It would be equally risky to deploy the epidemiological metaphor of the "communalization" of the body social. If the body social can indeed be seen as "communalized," why quarrel when the nation is seen by the Hindu nationalists in a similar way? In effect, Hindu nationalism conceives the nation as a body social beset by the dual presence of the Muslim: first, a "united" worldwide Muslim power "bashes" India in the UN; second, a "Muslim minority" infests this body social from the "inside." Hence the need for purification. One would then begin with the body as the site of such reform. (The social would follow of itself, presumably to be realized phantasmatically in moments of violent expenditure: we're all in this together.) This is where, it would seem, both the epidemiological framework of Hindu nationalist discourse and the juridical logic of the liberal public sphere converge. Both speak of the prostrate body of the nation, as yet unredeemed by Hindu tolerance in the one case and modernity in the other. For both, it is a question of hygiene and reform. Admittedly, the disease has different names in each case. For Hindu nationalism, the problem stems from the inauthentic gesture, now grown malignant, of stateendorsed secularism. For liberal discourse, it is the vestige of a premodern, prenationalist notion of the body social, the communal body of coreligionists, which, as the locus of popular action, has the seemingly inevitable consequence of incessant communal violence. But the regulatory dimension of both secularism and communalism is apparent once their contiguity within the discursive logic of social epidemiology is established. The so-called debate over secularism glosses over the possibility that such violence has, and has had, other quite incommensurable motivations, and that it may have served as the site of heterogeneous modes of agency, for the instantiation of autonomous rationalities. As Gyan Pandey has recently argued, the "fragments" of the nation-"the smaller religious and caste communities, tribal sections, industrial workers, activist women's groups, all of which might be said to represent minority cultures and practices"-have been thrust into the sidelines of what has been proMilind Wakankar

64

It moted as "the national culture."54 would seem as though subaltern agendas, irrupting in the body social and punctuating the nation's official narrative in the form of jacqueries, revolts, protests, resistances, desertions, avoidances, and everyday struggles can go by no other name than "riots" (invariably "communal" riots) and "disturbances." So for the sake of the body social, both Hindu nationalism and liberal discourse choose to deny such subaltern activity. When the crowd irrupts within the body social, both choose to condemn it by relegating it to the margins of the official narrativeof nationally endorsed counterinsurgency. But it is in the midst of such violence, in the very frenzy of governmental self-renewal and crisismanagement that other, perhaps incommensurable, identities have been recuperated by radical historians from the margins of the governmental texts of counterinsurgency. Moreover, the terrifying nature of such violence need not prompt us to draw facile distinctions between the (legitimate or illegitimate) violence of the state and the (legitimate or illegitimate) violence of the crowd. As Achille Mbembe's recent work has tried to show, such violence irrupts in that intimate space between the commandmentand its subjects, which is characterized neither by resistance nor domination but by the polymorphous and labile play of identities. Where there is such an irreducible proximity between the state and its "citizens," between the commandment and its subjects, riots, pogroms, massacres in turn acquire the character of an irreducible complicity.55 Such intimacy between the commandment and its subjects has two consequences. On the one hand, no causal or structural argument derived from the governmental address of identitarianism can emerge unmodified by the promiscuous logic of such violence. In fact, the incessant need to hold identities "in place" through what Georges Bataille calls the sacrificial expenditure of violence, the constant need, in other words, to renew, to repeat (if only to "fix") the identitarian discourse of the state through violence, is itself a sign of the impossibility of governmentality and the recurrent failure of its identitarian address.56 This is because the crowd, willy-nilly the state's accomplice in such violence, can nonetheless be seen to have followed a very different set of motivations arising from the heterogeneous nature of its own constitution-of its own institution of the social in the form of the community. The event of violence, seemingly so much at odds with the force of workaday habitus, therefore presents both the opportunity for yet another periodic renewal of governmentality through violence, and for yet another renewal of community through contestation. Both governmentality and community, state and crowd remain mutually heterogeneous even in their proximity. But what Claude Lefort characterizes as the instinct to reify the body in the social, or the social-as-body, and hence to congeal the heterogeBody, Crowd, Identity
65

neous determinations of the social-historical with the hypostasizing illusion of the body, continually works to suture the discourses of nationalism, Hindu or liberal.57It would seem as though the social cannot be seen in terms other than those of the body. A characteristic passage in Louis Dumont's work provides us with another instance of this spectral return of the body in discourses on the social: in It Communalism itselfis ambiguous. can finallyappeareitheras a genuine to transition the nation,or as an attempton the partof religionto opposethe of transformation allowingfor the externalappearances a modernstate.It by 58 is a kind of politicalJanus,lookingboth backwards forwards. and Gyan Pandey correctly ascribes this notion of a genuine, as opposed to a meretricious, transition to the nation, to what is Dumont's inherently Eurocentric model of nation formation.59 But more pernicious and less apparent than the persistence in Dumont's argument of a modular and epigonal notion of nationalism in the colonies is his inability to adhere to the terms with which he had himself initiated his argument. Dumont asserts, on the one hand, that "communalism is ambiguous"; one would therefore imagine that any reference to communalism is irreducible. Yet, on the other hand, Dumont seems quite willing to specify the nature of this ambiguity: "an attempt on the part of religionto oppose the transformation by allowing for the external appearances of a modern state." This

something, this pathology that irrationally opposes the transition to the nation-which, moreover, seems synonymous (for Dumont) with the transformative potential of modernity itself-is designated by Dumont as "religion."Were religion to attain political power, it would seem as though it would provide only the "external appearances" of modernity. This inauthentic modernity in the erstwhile colonies bears the name of communalism because it represents a kind of debasement of nationalism. Nationalism in the colonies can only assume the contours of the modern by remaining inherently ambivalent. It must look fervently at the past even as it is poised determinedly toward the future. This debased form of nationalism in the erstwhile colonies would seem to be haunted by the specter of communalism. Indeed, it can only be called communalism, because its body is Janus-like. Within this logic, all radical identitarian practice must of necessity be communal, even if it is precisely the communalisms and fundamentalisms of the identitarian address of governmentality to which such practice remains permanently opposed. The phantasm of the body, of a body social that is without seams or fissures, fascinates both liberal and Hindu nationalist discourse. The phantasm of the body elides the historical basis of all identity, and glosses over its shifting, changing forms. In this sense, the hegemony of governmental identitarian discourse ensures the continuing efficacy of the ideological in the postcolony. It is precisely
66

Milind Wakankar

the stake of the secular that, by deploying the question of the sacred within the domain of ontico-ontological differance-by simultaneously denying and upholding the sacred within the juridico-ethical logic of tolerance-respect-contrives the folding over of the social-historical, and hence the keeping in place of the ideological, in postcolonial India.60 Albeit directed (in)consistently at the citizen-subject constituted within this fold, this identitarian address of governmentality in India is at the same time inscribed in the postcolonial logics of modernity; it is imbricated with the language of modernization, socialism, secularism, and universal suffrage-the grand narratives of a seemingly finished process of decolonization where the nationalist subject, the Nehruvian subject of state-sponsored planning, centralization, bureaucratization, and secularism, has presumably made a successful transition from imperialism to nationalism at the latter's "moment of arrival."61 Yet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty points out, in India today "one can discern two kinds of political 'languages."' One is the language "characteristic of the project of nation-building, and involves the rituals of the state, political representation, citizenship, political rights, etc." This language is part of the "colonial heritage and it is what Indian nationalism owes to the colonial experience." The other language, on the other hand, "derives its grammar from relationships of power, authority and hierarchy, which predate the coming of colonialism, but which have been significantly modified by having been made to interact with ideas and institutions imported by British rule." "It is true," Chakrabarty goes on to say, "that members of the Indian elite classes equivocate and use both languages, and it is also true that our history has moved in a direction of greater interlacing of the two languages in Indian institutions and practices."62Yet, the "lives and aspirations of the subaltern classes have been enmeshed on the whole in relationships" articulated in this space of difference within postcoloniality, a domain of "feudal, precapitalist relations" that constitute what Chakrabartycharacterizes as a vast and often obscure "nation without citizens" (376). It is this "concurrence" of both feudal and capitalist modes of production in India-or to be more specific, the contradictory "inherence" of precapitalist modes within the hegemonic capitalist mode installed by the bourgeois-feudal-bureaucratic social formation-that ensures both the concatenation of modes of power and the incessant contestation of identities, bringing the state to periodic crisis.63In effect, even as it is poised toward the affective horizons of the future, toward progress, economic strength, and secularism, the governmental mode in India is constantly unsettled by social formations and modes of power that inhere in it and yet remain heterogeneous to it. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has argued that the postcolonial subject's engagement with modernity is necessarily "catachrestic." It constitutes a series of attempts to reclaim "concept-metaphors" such as
Body, Crowd, Identity
67

"nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, or even culturalism" that have "no adequate referent" within postcolonial space itself. What "is effectively being reclaimed is a series of regulative political concepts, the authoritative narrative of which was written elsewhere, in the social formations of Europe."64 By narrativizing such counterclaims, themselves necessarily catachrestic, as mere symptoms of communalism, the identitarian discourse of governmentality chooses to deny that modernity is cited differently every day in postcolonial India. So that what is folded over and forgotten is, in effect, the question of the meaning of the modern, a question whose ontico-ontological bearings can be determined only within postcolonial spaces of difference. An analysis of governmentality in contemporary India, one more comprehensive than I have been able to undertake here, would have to take into account other regionally differentiated sites where the uneasy link between the body and the body social has been sustained; these consist of, for instance, such contested loci of pastorality as the gendered crises of rape, intercaste marriage, and family planning and state-funded sterilization programs. Such an analysis would thus inevitably come to focus on the postcolonial state in what Partha Chatterjee has called its most "paradigmatic form," a stage at which a long drawn-out "passive revolution" is finally at an end, and nationalist discourse is "passive revolution uttering its own life-history" (NT, 49, 51). Chatterjee's genealogy of the (post)colonial Indian state charts the latter's emergence at the intersection of the trajectory of nationalist discourse and the objective requirements of a protean "war of position" whose forms were crystallized at "moments of departure, maneuver and arrival."By seeking to uncover the axioms of governmentality in India, one may hope to derive the programmatic threshold for a reconception of the ethics of "citizen-subjecthood" in postcolonial India .65 Such a reconception would have to address the specificities of the normalizing apparatuses of the postcolonial mode of power. It would have to unravel the implications of the identitarian address of governmentality in India. For, as I have tried to argue in this paper, identity is one of the primary sites of subjectification, or subjectformation, in India, and therefore one of the principle objects of governmentality. It is at the intersection of two lines of force, that of the intransigence of subaltern action and of the productivity and intimacy of the postcolonial regime of power, that one may attempt to limn the traces of a radical citizen-subject standing at an angle to the postcolonial modern. I have tried to show how the productive and incessantly unresolved tension between the rationality of the state and those other rationalities, incommensurable with it, that emerge from shifting subaltern definitions of identity, of community, class, caste, region, and gender ensure at least the enabling conditions for such a recuperation against the backdrop of the urgent situation unfolding in India.
Milind Wakankar

To sum up, the symbolic economy of Hindu nationalism has certainly been successful in establishing a governmental fit between the micro- and the macro-body. It has been able to incite a host of cathexes and has been redirecting them on to the ever receding figure of the Indian Muslim. In doing so, it has successfully rewritten the text of Nehruvianism and sought to substitute the Nehruvian citizen-subject with the ego-ideal of the nationalist Hindu. Yet, it is apparent that the very fracturedness of governmentality in India would militate against the success of either project. That "nation without citizens" which Chakrabarty gestures toward has sustained its "permanent provocation."66 Gramsci perhaps had a presentiment of such possibilities when he spoke of the "contradictory consciousness" of the subaltern. He made a distinction between a consciousness that is "superficially explicit or verbal," which the subaltern has "inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed," and that other consciousness, "implicit in his activity . . . which in reality unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the world."67 Likewise, an irreducible complicity in mobilizations of violence against Muslims is one of the undeniable conditions of subalternity in India today; uncritically absorbed, and haunted by the forms of religiosity, the workings of this complicity are impossible to inventory. However, in seeking to throw off those conditions by broaching the contentions of the everyday, subaltern action also elicits the interlocking, often contradictory, solidarities of caste, class, locality, and gender. Intransigent in its claims, relentless in its historical ontology of the present, it seeks nonetheless to further what Foucault described as the "undefined work of freedom."68 This at least provides us with the perspective of a host of agonisms working to generate alternative definitions of the social.

Notes
This paper could not have been written without Qadri Ismail, who commented on it at every stage. John Archer and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan provided encouragement. Saurabh Dube supplied key leads. Sanjay Krishnan, Aamir Mufti, and Jyotsona Uppal made invaluable suggestions. My debt to the work on the Indian right of Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Anuradha Kapoor, Gyan Pandey, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen will be evident from these pages. 1. See, for instance, Kenneth W. Jones, "Religious Identity and the Indian Census," in The Census in British India: New Perspectives,ed. N. Gerald Barrier (Delhi: Manohar, 1981). 2. Sudipta Kaviraj, "On State, Society and Discourse in India," in Rethinking Third WorldPolitics, ed. James Manor (London: Macmillan, 1991). 3. This paragraph, and indeed this essay on the whole, draws on some of Foucault's later work. See Michel Foucault, "Questions of Method" (1977), in The Foucault Effect, ed. Colin Gordon, Graham Burchell, Peter Miller (London: Body, Crowd, Identity
69

Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); "Governmentality" (1978), in ibid.; "Foucault at the College de France I: A Course Summary" (1978), Philosophyand Social Criticism 8 (summer 1981): 235-42; "Foucault at the College de France II: A Course Summary"(1979), Philosophy and Social Criticism 8 (fall 1981): 351-59; "Subject and Power," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1984). Foucault's characterization of governmentality as the "structur[ing] [of] the possible field of action of others," is taken from "Subject and Power," 221. 4. Ranajit Guha, "Discipline and Mobilize," in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). 5. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language,Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148. A 6. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thoughtand the Colonial World: Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Hereafter cited in the text as NT. 7. This, and the following two paragraphs, build on John Rosselli's researches in his essay, "The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal," Past and Present 86 (February 1980): 121-48. All citations in these three paragraphs are from this essay. 8. Rosselli, "Self-Image of Effeteness," 123. 9. For an ethnographic account of a Banares akhara, see Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banares: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880-1986 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 111-24. Sandria B. Freitag tries to situate akharas within the contested spaces of "public arenas" in Northern Indian towns in colonial times, in CollectiveAction and Community:Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalismin North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). In Bengal the term for such gymnasia is akhra. 10. Cited in Rosselli, "Self-Image of Effeteness," 127. For RajnarayanBasu's Hindu revivalist role in the Adi Brahmo Samaj, see David Kopf, "The Missionary Challenge and the Brahmo Response: Rajnarian Bose [sic] and the Emerging Ideology of Cultural Nationalism," in Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS) 8 (1974): 11-24. 11. Cited in Rosselli, "Self-Image of Effeteness," 139-40. 12. Cited in Rosselli, "Self-Image of Effeteness," 139. A Lecture: Constructionof Humanism in Colo13. See Ranajit Guha, Wertheim nial India (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies, 1993). 14. For a discussion of the heterogeneous subtexts of the Gita, see A. L. Basham, The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 82-97. 15. See Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Essentials of Dharma [Dharmatattva or Anushilan], trans. Manomohan [sic] Ghosh (Calcutta: Sribhumi Publishing Company, 1977), 21. Unless specified otherwise, all quotations from this text are from this edition of Dharmatattva. At places I have used the translations of selected chapters from Dharmatattva contained in S. N. Mukherjee and Marian Maddern's edition of Bankim's essays, SociologicalEssays: Utilitarianismand Positivism in Bengal, ed. and trans. S. N. Mukherjee and Marian Maddern (Calcutta: Rddhi, 1986). 16. Bankim, Dharmatattva, 22.

Milind Wakankar

17. Saral Kumar Chatterjee, "Anushilan Samiti as Revolutionary Party: 1905-1913," in Freedom Struggle and Anushilan Samiti, ed. Buddhadeva Bhattacharya (Calcutta: Anushilan Samiti, 1979). 18. Rosselli, "Self-Image of Effeteness," 147. 19. See Jean Comaroff, "Bodily Reform as Historical Practice," in John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnographyand the Historical Imagination (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), 70, 72. 20. Karl Marx, The EighteenthBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York:International Publishers, 1990), 15. 21. Guha, Constructionof Humanism, 9; italics mine. 22. Anne McClintock, "No Longer in Future Heaven: Nationalism and Gender," in Imperial Leather:Race, Gender,and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, forthcoming), 467. 23. Partha Chatterjee makes this argument in his "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," in Recasting Women:Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). 24. Chatterjee, "Nationalist Resolution," 247, 247-48, 248. 25. Cited in McClintock, "No Longer in Future Heaven," 466; from Frantz Fanon, "Algeria Unveiled," in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), 42. 26. Chatterjee, paraphrasing Bankim, Nationalist Thought,79. 27. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947, (Delhi: Macmillan, 1992), 67. 28. Bankim, SociologicalEssays, 188. 29. Ibid., 176. 30. McClintock, "No Longer in Future Heaven," 453. 31. Ibid., 451. 32. Bankim, SociologicalEssays, 190. 33. Nirad C. Chaudhari, cited in Sumit Sarkar, "Hindu-Muslim Relations in Swadeshi Bengal, 1903-1908," Indian Economic and Social History Review 9 (June 1972): 161-216. The latter half of this essay contains an account of Muslim reform movements toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. 34. The standard work on the RSS is Walter K. Anderson and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhoodin Saffron: The Rashtriya SwayamsevakSangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987). For Hedgewar's stint in the Calcutta Anushilan Samiti, see Anderson and Damle, 31. For accounts of the RSS's front organizations, the VHP and the BJP,see Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, ed. Tapan Basu et al. (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). 35. See "RSS Training," in Anderson and Damle, 89-107. 36. Ibid., 91-92. 37. This account of the RSS's saffron flag is a summary of Tanika Sarkar's characterization. See her "Women's Agency Within Authoritarial Communalism: The Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ramjanmabhoomi," in Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, ed. Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Viking, 1993), 33. 38. See Marcel Mauss's seminal account of the structuring of habitus through bodily practices, in "Techniques of the Body," Economy and Society 2 (February 1973): 70-88, esp. 85. 39. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Programme for a Sociology of Sport," in In Other Words: Essays Towarda Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).

Body, Crowd, Identity

71

40. Guha, "Construction of Humanism," 10. 41. Foucault, "Nietzsche," 149. 42. Anuradha Kapoor, "Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram," in Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, ed. Gyan Pandey (Delhi: Viking, 1993). Quotations in the remainder of this paragraph are from Kapoor's essay. 43. For an account of this propaganda machine, see Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags. 44. Sarkar, "Women's Agency." 45. Ibid., 27. 46. Ibid., citing an RSS pamphlet, 33. 47. Ashish Banerjee provides a synoptic account of these developments in his "'Comparative Curfew': Changing Dimensions of Communal Politics in India," in Mirrors of Violence:Communities,Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). 48. See Ashis Nandy, "Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi," in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). 49. Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, 75. 50. Faisal Fatehali Devji, "Hindu/Muslim/Indian," Public Culture 5 (fall 1992): 1-18. 51. S. H. Deshpande, "Evaluating Hindutva: The Muslim Question and Savarkar," Timesof India, 4 January 1994. 52. Gyan Pandey, "In Defence of the Fragment," Economic and Political Weekly,16 March 1991, 566. 53. See, for instance, T. N. Madan, "Secularism in Its Place," Journal of Asian Studies 46 (November 1987): 747-58; Ashis Nandy, "An Anti-Secularist Manifesto," Seminar 314 (1985): 14-24; and Nandy, "The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance," in Mirrors of Violence:Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). 54. Pandey, "In Defence of the Fragment," 559. to 55. Mbembe uses the term commandment "embrace the images and structures of power and coercion, the instruments and agents of their enactment and a degree of rapport between those who give orders and those who are supposed to obey them . . . the authoritarian modality par excellence"(30). See his "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," Africa 62 (1992): 3-37. I extend Mbembe's rapportto embrace complicity. 56. For Bataille's notion of "expenditure," see Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure," in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985). 57. See Lefort's essay, "Marx: From One Vision of History to Another," in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). 58. See Louis Dumont, "Nationalism and Communalism," in Homo-Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 318. 59. Gyan Pandey, The Constructionof Communalismin Colonial North India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4-5. 60. This Heideggerian-Derridean notion of "ontico-ontological differance" is taken from the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

72

Milind Wakankar

61. For a critique of the final, Nehruvian, moment in the trajectory of Indian nationalist discourse, when its uninhibited espousal of post-Enlightenment rationality and progressivism as part of the reasons of state implied a strategic compromise with the feudal and precapitalist component of the historical bloc poised at its moment of hegemony, see Chatterjee, NT, 131-66. For a critique of the pretensions of Nehruvian "planning" and its embeddedness in the rationality of the Indian state, see Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments:Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 200-19. 62. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Invitation to a Dialogue," in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 374. 63. For this notion of "inherence," see Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Marx after Marxism: A Subaltern Historian's Perspective," in Economicand Political Weekly, 29 May 1993, 1094-96. 64. Spivak's comments on the notion of "catachresis" are in her "Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value," in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 225. 65. For an elaboration of this notion of a "citizen-subject," see Etienne Balibar, "Citizen Subject," in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York:Routledge, 1991). 66. Foucault, "Subject and Power," 222. 67. Cited in T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 569. 68. Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" (1984), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 46.

Body, Crowd, Identity

73