A seminar organised by the Xenos Research Group, Department of Sociology, with the collaboration of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Department of Politics
The first of two talks on communalism, secularism and the Left in India by Saroj Giri, Xenos Visiting Fellow. (See also Thursday 13 November 2008).
Event Information
Location: Room 307, Richard Hoggart Building
Cost: Free – all are welcome
Time: 12 November 2008, 18:00 - 19:30
Comments
1. Critique as Ideology: The Dissident Left and Maoists in India
Saroj Giri (Xenos Visiting Fellow, University of Delhi)
A seminar organised by the Xenos Research Group, Department of Sociology,
with the collaboration of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Department
of Politics
6.00pm-7.30pm, Wednesday 12 November 208
Room 307, Richard Hoggart Building,
Goldsmiths, University of London,
Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW
2. Hegemonic Secularism, Dominant Communalism: Imagining Social
Transformation in India
Saroj Giri (Xenos Visiting Fellow, University of Delhi)
6.00pm-7.30pm, Thursday 13 November 2008
Room 307, Richard Hoggart Building,
Goldsmiths, University of London,
Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW
*
Abstracts
1. The ‘humanitarian’ notion of people in extreme suffering and in need of
relief, aid and services not just often promotes imperialist ideology of
‘humanitarian intervention’ but also, perhaps unexpectedly, goes to sustain
certain tendencies on the left that thereby undermine the political
subjectivity of people for revolutionary change. This humanitarian notion
however often appears as a critique of neo-liberalism, particularly
critical of the ‘withdrawal of the state’. Thus the involvement and active
participation of large sections of the people in the Maoist armed struggle
(‘people’s war’) in India is sought to be denied by portraying people as
merely ‘suffering’, ‘trapped’ in a ‘conflict situation’ – calling for
urgent humanitarian intervention (or dialogue, truth and reconciliation) by
civil society and/or state. Or people are supposed to have become Maoists
by default, only since the neoliberal state abandoned its ‘constitutional
obligations’ to provide them basic goods and services. This is the argument
of the old welfarist dissident left. The anti-’totalitarian’, post-Marxist
left in turn presents the left-wing rebels as merely ‘capitalising on’ or
‘exploiting’ the subaltern’s helplessness. Radical armed struggle is
portrayed as just the mirror image of the security-centric state – as
undemocratic. Instead of seeing the germs of a political alternative in the
Maoist resistance, the dissident left sees in it only warnings for the
present state order to put its house in order ‘before it is too late’. It
therefore displays a fundamental attachment to working in and through the
‘spaces of dissent’ and democratic, constitutional rights that are given by
and presuppose the existing state order, thereby continuously deferring and
displacing any political struggle for the overthrow of the state and the
existing order as such.
2. This paper asks: does the ‘secularism vs. communalism’ structuring of
Indian politics, show a real divide and terms of contestation and struggle,
or has it mostly served to displace and preclude the possibilities of
radical social transformation? Communalism in India is mostly viewed either
as an aberration, a deviation from the ‘secular fabric of our nation’, or
as the (by-)product of the homogenising drive of modernity, of the modern
secular Indian state, thereby creating competing proto-modern identities.
In both cases, communalism is not treated as a force in itself but is
regarded as epi-phenomenal or incidental to Indian secularism or modernity.
It will be argued here that communalism is instead the ‘absent basis’ of
the present socio-political dispensation, a persistent underlying core,
sometimes overt, sometimes covert, the bone sustaining the flesh of the
existing Indian nation-state which reproduces in the name of secular
democracy. Secularism as the legitimising principle of state power here
only appears as covering up the state and society’s actual basis in
communalism. By treating communalism as an epi-phenomenonal threat, and
thereby overlooking its full embedded strength, secularism defines the
fight against communalism in a way which precludes any other fight against
communalism except its own. Such an ideological structuring of the
political field precludes attempts at radical social transformation. Given
‘hegemonic secularism and dominant communalism’, and a political field
constitutively defined by this configuration, where do we therefore locate
the political subject which would transcend the systemic logic for radical
transformation of society and state? Bhagat Singh’s rather forgotten
formulation of addressing the communal question through a social and
economic revolution would be recalled here.
Alberto Toscano
Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
United Kingdom
Staff page:
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/sociology/staff/toscano.php
Historical Materialism:
http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/
Hi John, I’m really interested in both the papers you’ve mentioned here. I won’t be able to make it to the talks in London tomorrow and so I wondered if it was possible to get the transcripts of the talks or something. Please let me know. Thanks.
Adity