Ajay Skaria

Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India,

This book explores a crucial dimension of Indian history: the politics of wildness. It suggests that wildness was affirmed in various ways by early nineteenth century forest communities as a way of challenging upper upper caste values. With colonial rule, wildness was marginalized, leading to a new identity: adivasi.

The Local Life of Nationhood

What characterises many studies that invoke the local can be described as a logic of transcendence. This logic of transcendence does not reject nor disregard the local. Rather, it affirms the centrality of the local. At the same time, the focus is on how the local is historically transcended into higher levels of generality and abstraction; the argument is that only through attention to these higher levels that the meanings of the local become clear. In contrast, the other local which we refer to in this essay is a set of practices which emerges in intimate relationship to nationalism, which in some ways even sustains nationalism, even though the places it produces cannot be understood within the same logic of transcendence. At times, this other local refers to the political and conceptual practices that emerged at the limits of the abstract time and space that constituted nationalism. At other times, this local refers to the marginal in order to represent nationhood anew. Nationhood does not exhaust, sublate or transcend this local; rather, this local continues to live, in the era of nationhood, not so much outside the national, but beyond and alongside it. This other local is explored in this essay by discussing the cases of Germany and India.

Gandhi's Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram

A curious category in Indian nationalist thought is the ashram. Among nationalist ashrams were the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan, and the gurukuls (school-ashrams) set up by the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist organization. Most famous were the Gandhian ashrams. In South Africa, Gandhi set up the Phoenix settlement and the Tolstoy farm. On his return to India in , he set up the Satyagraha ashram in Ahmedabad, and made that his base. Later, he was involved in and often based at the ashrams at Wardha and Sevagram.1 My question here is a simple one: What was the politics of the Gandhian ashram? Mainstream nationalists such as Nehru, frustrated about the amount of time that the principal leader of the nationalist movement spent on the tiny ashrams, had a simple answer: eccentricity. Gandhi, obviously, did not feel this way.

Being jangli: The politics of wildness

In the early nineteenth century, some Bhils raided Maratha villages in the Khandesh region of western India, and carried away several cattle. A Peshwa official reported that ’respectable people were sent to the Bhils to tell them that it would be well if they ceased opposing the peasants and were loyal to the state’. The Bhils then retorted: ’We are kings of the forest, our ways are different, do you not worry your head with them’.’ Involved in incidents such as these-and they are legion in records of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century-is a postulating of difference

Relinquishing republican democracy: Gandhi's Ramarajya

Gandhi is famously hostile to republican democracy (schematically, majority rule that systematically provides for division of powers and rule of law in order to protect minorities, and the abstract equality of citizens). For him, in such an order of general responsibility, or responsibility organized in accordance with the measure of the judge as the ‘third party’, the practice of responsibility becomes inseparable from domination. For him, every general responsibility remains a form of ‘brute force’ that can affirm only the major. This essay explores his troubled attempts to think instead—through an emphasis on dharma (religion), Ramarajya (a word that generally refers to the reign of the epic hero Rama) and satyagraha (‘passive resistance’)—the absolute responsibility that constitutively practises a politics of the minor. For him, it suggests, such a responsibility entails a very distinctive equality of deference, which is quite antithetical to the equality of sovereignty. The essay focuses especially on the resistance or satyagraha that is constitutive of this equality of deference, and which makes this equality constantly question and provincialize both itself and general responsibility.

Ambedkar, Marx and the Buddhist Question

This essay tries to frame one question, which at its most abbreviated can be posed thus: why does Ambedkar convert to Buddhism? Given Ambedkars militant secularism, to ask this question is also to ask: what assumption of responsibility does that conversion enable which exceeds secular responsibility? This essay tracks how Ambedkars religion questions both the liberal concept of minority, and the dissolution of the minor that is staged in Marxs critique simultaneously of religion and secularism. Buddhism becomes in the process a religion of the minor.

‘Can the Dalit articulate a universal position?’: the intellectual, the social, and the writing of history

The term intellectual, whether understood as a certain kind of human or as a social activity, is marked by a striking tension between a claim to universality and searching questions about what that universality excludes. The claim to universality gathers force with the Enlightenment, which demands ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’. Now the intellectual’s reason not only places him above the social but makes him the midwife and harbinger of its future; he will bring about the ‘transformation of consciousness by the dispelling of prejudice and the spread of theoretical truth’. This futurity and universality of the intellectual is enshrined even more firmly in place with the consolidation of what Foucault has described as ‘total history’. Such history makes ‘rationality the telos of mankind’: the ‘project of a total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle – material or spiritual – of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion’. Relatedly, as Foucault writes elsewhere, ‘the “left” intellectual’ was for a long time

Only one word, properly altered: Gandhi and the question of the prostitute1

As the ‘only’ suggests, Gandhi did not think of the change that he suggested as major*it was merely a matter of making the book a little less indelicate [gramya-also rural] so that it would not upset fine tastes (such as that of Annie Besant, whom Anthony Parel speculates was the ‘English friend’) [komal dil-sensitive minds]. Effectively, he seemed to contemplate an alteration that retained the argument signalled by the word*the argument that more robust minds would already have muscled onto, brushing past the word. What is at stake in this word, and in the desire to alter it? Here, I would like to argue that the word is not only a forceful manifestation of the sexism which pervades Hind Swaraj , and that the proposed alteration is not only an ineffectual attempt to mute this sexism. More, the word and the desire to alter it are a symptom of a trembling in the texture of Hind Swaraj itself. The word veshya (prostitute) marks the moment when a certain tension within Hind Swaraj over the question of the proper becomes especially fraught. It occurs at a crucial turn in the book’s argument. Hind Swaraj is organised as a dialogue between a nationalist Reader who is willing to use violence to drive the British out of India, and an Editor who, ventriloquising Gandhi’s explicit positions, argues that such violence would not bring about swaraj [home rule]. For the Reader, initially, swaraj is a self-evident term: it involves driving out the British but retaining British institutions. By the fourth chapter, the Editor has problematised this understanding, suggesting that ‘this means that we want English rule, but don’t want the English’. With this rejection, swaraj is no longer a self-evident term. Now the question can be seriously asked: what is swaraj?

Homeless in Gujarat and India: On the curious love of Indulal Yagnik

Acknowledgements: This article—begun for a conference in 1997 at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in honour of Walter Hauser—is dedicated to the memory of Rosemary Hauser (1928-2001). In the long period of its making it has benefited from many conversations and for these I thank: Arun Agrawal, Shahid Amin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sudhir Chandra, Partha Chatterjee, Alon Confino, David Hardiman, Walter Hauser, Qadri Ismail, Pradeep Jegannathan, Priya Kumar, Allan Megill, Parita Mukta, Gyan Prakash, Gloria Goodwin Raheja, Tridip Suhrud and Babu Suthar. In the 1920s, the writer Ramanlal Desai (the father of the Marxist sociologist A.R. Desai) drew a comparison between two Gujarati figures whom he considered among the most prominent in the post-Gandhian generation-K.M. Munshi and Indulal Yagnik. He described them as symptomatic of two strands of Gujarat: Munshi was a pratibashaali siddh purush, a resolute and accomplished man, and Yagnik an asthir man na fakir, a mendicant of unstable mind.’ I

The melancholy of publicness: on The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2015, 304 pp.,

ABSTRACT Dipesh Chakrabarty’s new book, The Calling of History, traces the career of Jadunath Sarkar, arguably the most prominent historian of the twentieth century. In doing so, it provides a fascinating account of how history became a researchable topic in India. This review teases out the exploration in Calling of the relation between what Chakrabarty calls the cloistered and public lives of history. The cloistered life of history, the life internal to the discipline, sees itself as representing the public sphere – the sphere of those rational practices which are constitutive of modern citizenship. Relatedly, the ‘public life of history’ is about those forms of publicness that are excluded from the public sphere. The review points out that what makes this relation especially interesting is that both are lives of publicness; it explores how, in Calling’s account, Sarkar’s valorization of the cloistered life of history shaped his writing and his politics.