Ranabir Samaddar

The heterogeneous world of the citizen

In response to the broad range of approaches given by this Special Issue, this article offers a critical post-colonial view on the question of citizenship after orientalism. Drawing on the historical trajectory of the emergence of the citizen in India through the era of anti-colonial struggle and beyond into that of the post-colonial nation state, the article exemplifies what can be called a discontinuous way of studying the figure of the citizen – the figure that ended colonialism, that brought about revolution, and that snatched the establishment apparatus called the constitution to turn it against itself. As this article shows, one of the discontinuous ways of studying citizenship is to mark out those moments and dynamics when or whereby power and resources are redistributed and a new definition of the political community emerges.

Law and Terror in the Age of Colonial Constitution Making

In this exploration into the close relation between terror and law, I attempt first to show that the relation between terror and law is not a simple question of relating violence to law, but to the very process of constitution making. Second, laws relating to terror may or may not find a formal place in the constitution, but this relation is essential to the working of the basic law, of the foundational concept of the rule of law. Third, intelligence gathering occupies a key place in this relation, and this activity, which has no mention in the constitution almost anywhere in the world, is the fulcrum on which reasons of state stand. Fourth, intelligence is the close monitoring of human movement, of the body, of the physical activities, and in this physical form of politics we have the meeting of the body and reasoning, terror and constitution, violence and law. And finally, the article describes a specifically Indian experience; yet may have larger significance in terms of retrieving the history of constitution making.

Flowing waters and the nationalist metaphors

In this article about the dispute between India and Bangladesh over sharing of the waters of the river Ganga, four themes are presented: (1) the politics of scarce resources, in this case water, has been one of the national strategies of power; (2) therefore, the language of dispute over a scarce resource makes the problem appear to be an international rather than a fundamental one; (3) a critical study of the history of the dispute shows that this has been not only a technopolitical tangle, but a tangle of words, ideas, and concepts, which has created self‐locked positions only, making conflict resolution difficult; (4) and finally, such resolution in South Asia today necessitates a different regional policy both of scarce resource as well as common resource management. Yet, the greatest impediment to such realization has been the deadly hold of the nationalist language in conceptualizing and thematizing the dispute and also strategizing its resolution. In other words, it is not just a question of “the w...

Policing a riot-torn city: Kolkata, 16–18 August 1946

ABSTRACT Calcutta is now known as Kolkata, but for the purposes of this article, Calcutta is retained throughout. Historical accounts of the Great Calcutta Riots (1946) emphasize their role in making Indian Partition an inevitable outcome of nationalist-religious politics in colonial India. It is seen as a critical event in the religious wars, conventionally known as the Partition riots or communal riots, in the Indian sub-continent in 1945–47. This article, while basing itself on previous historical understanding, views the Great Calcutta Killings as a remarkable event in the mutually constitutive relations between the police and the crowd. The police apparatus built by the colonial state was based fundamentally on the obedience of individuals and individual subjection to the institution of law and order when the feudal form of allegiance was no longer required. Their conduct was now required to demonstrate total and exhaustive obedience to whatever the imperatives of the colonial state were in relation to protection of the economy, commerce, trade, education, health, territory and security of life. The success of the apparatus depended on a smooth interrelation of these imperatives and thus between different functions of the police. The Calcutta Riots showed that there may be moments when the smooth relations break down, when all bounds of obedience are broken, and populations imagine their conduct not in juridical terms, but in other possible frames. In other words, politics will no longer be conducted in a civilian frame, but in the frame of war—one more reason to think of the riots as a moment in a war. In those moments, the link between the reason of state and that of the government may collapse. In this context, the Calcutta Riots further tell us (a) how borders within a city emerge in situations of violence and how an event like the Calcutta Riots dispels the myth that the city is an organic unity unaffected by borders and boundary-making exercises; and (b) how the failure of the Calcutta Riot Enquiry Commission to conclude its findings demonstrated the closure of legal logic.

Introduction : reading Foucault in the postcolonial present

This book emerges from a fundamental discontent that the three of us share with the politics of Foucault-inspired scholarship. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political theory, literary criticism and historiography, in recent years, and many of the authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. But while Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for the interrogation of colonial biopolitics, as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development in the postcolonial era, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of the forms of political subjectivity that such regimes of power incite. Instead they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities and provoking disenchantment with the political itself. Worse, they have been the target of a morose criticism for their apparent inabilities to have addressed spaces outside the Western world ( Chaps. 2 and 3). And worse still, they have been used to displace our understanding and recognition of the brutality and exploitative nature of colonial and every other form of biopolitics: the war, killing and multiple forms of violence without which it would not have been possible ( Chap. 3).

Leaders and publics: Stories in the time of transition

The story of a nation is, in a sense, a story of many possible modernities, politics, cultures, histories, disciplines and, above all, hegemonies. Yet it remains to be worked out in detail as to how plurality is disciplined, how in subsuming the pluralities the nationalist public emerges in politics, and then how the public refuses to vanish or bow before the majestic strides of the leaders of the nation. We know that Jurgen Habermas has repeatedly emphasised the historical nature of the power against which the public sphere functions as a buffer.’ He speaks of the political function of the public sphere and its transformation,2 and has taken care to remind us at the outset that he has discussed the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere which should not be confused with the ’plebeian public sphere’. The ’plebeian public sphere’, he says, ’remains oriented toward the intentions of the bourgeois public sphere’, while continuing a ’submerged existence’.3 Admittedly all this is

Introduction: A Post-Colonial Critique of Capital Accumulation Today

The introduction makes three main points, which characterize this volume. (a) It looks at how accumulation under post-colonial capitalism tends to blur various geopolitical boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on the one hand and creates zones and corridors on the other. In this context, it draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. With increasing inflow of virtual capital in the form of offshore funds, venture business, hedge funds, Internet-based investment and banking, and forward trading, more people are forced to accept precarious work conditions in the unorganized sectors resulting in massive de-peasantization and creation of footloose labour, otherwise known as migrant or transit labour. (b) At the same time, family household becomes the new site of capitalist production and market system, which is different from what is assumed to be a site of non-capitalist production, something that is outside of capital. (c) The introduction also draws attention to what is now called affective labour that is to say labour actualized in the forms of care work and reproductive work. Affective labour leads to the conceptualization of affective value by focusing on the labouring body and subjectivity. Affective value is often mistaken to be essentially a cultural category, and not an economic category, in spite of its vulnerability to exploitation, thus becoming an element in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. These three aspects taken together reflect on one of the principal features post-colonial capitalism, namely the overwhelming existence of informal conditions of production. These new forms of accumulation result in new discursive and political terrains of struggle. The chapters of the volume reflect from different discursive, analytical, and conceptual perspectives on these new forms of accumulation and unique modes of struggle.

The post-colonial burden of resilient life

For almost one century the critique of colonial life had originated from within the life of the colonised. Then with the great Leninist (also Rosa Luxemburg’s) interventions in the European communist movement, the critique began to attain international character. Internationalists (mainly communists and anarchists) within developed capitalist countries began paying greater attention to the nature of the colonial life to the extent that the site of the critique became wider. Concepts of super profit, underdevelopment, profit from extraction of resources, neo-colonialism, unequal trade, national liberation, agrarian revolution, rentseeking capitalismand rent-seeking state, andmilitary-industrial complex causing continuous wars of aggression and plunder became part of the common sense of the colonised. Postcolonial life, people of the ex-colonial countries realise, is one of precariousness, continuing uncertainties, dangers and fortitude – all summed up in one word, resilience. Yet the critique of capitalism could not escape the infamous fault line in internationalist radical thought. Critique originating from the North and critique originating from the South – two inescapable geopolitical terms of our time – remained perched for a long time on an extremely uncertain unity. Deluze, Foucault, Virilio, Zizek, Bauman and Butler – these and many other major figures of critique belonged to them, the North; Mao, Castro, Fanon and many never-to-be-famous figures of critique belong to us, the South. This is how critique was received by thosewhowere to gainmost from the global study of capitalism.We always longed for themomentwhen another Sartrewouldwrite a preface to anotherWretched of the Earth. Possibly, that period of drought in the internationalist thinking in theNorth is ending. At least that is what appears from the publication of Brad Evans and Julian Reid’s Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Evans andReid of course do not use the term post-colonial life. But the life they speak of and discuss is the life that millions in the South live and the life that the global managers of capitalist governance want to incorporate in the discourse of global governance. Evans and Reid have closely studied this discourse – formulated in particular in the last two decades through various development strategies, disaster management courses, millennium goals, climate, environment and resource-related policies, and policies of protection of the vulnerable population groups. Through a close examination of these policies, strategies and actions, the critique Evans and Reid has produced crosses the fault line (indicated above), even though indirectly. But clearly whoever reads the book will know this is a critique of post-colonial life. After all neoliberalism is nothing if not an ideology and a range of policies

Development, Democracy, Governmentality and Popular Politics

Perspective The point I want to emphasise at the outset is the emergence of governmental rationality as a specific form of rationality. There is now an acute need to study actual governmental processes in the context of the two great popular desires, for autonomy and social justice since, more and more, these governmental processes interact with popular notions, institutions, and desires, and produce the particular kind of political society in which we find ourselves. Though I want to discuss here the issue of governance in a very specific way—namely, in the current developmental context—I shall request you to keep this perspective in mind, precisely because the urge to develop is marked by two other desires—the desire to be autonomous, and the overwhelming phenomenon of the citizen appearing as the justice-seeking subject.

Reflections in another mirror: Fictional genealogies of Chilkigarh

Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Nirmalesh Dhabaldeb for access to the private papers of the Dhabaldeb family and to Sankar Sen IPS for access to the Thana Village Diary Note Books. am further grateful to Barun De, Pradip Bose and Partha Chattopadhyay for their comments. The study forms a part of an ongoing work on Jamboni. It is being done with the assistance of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. I I first heard of the fictional genealogies of the Chilkigarh Raj family during my third trip to Jamboni-the erstwhile Jamboni pargana of the Junglemahals,l now within the Jhargram subdivision of Midnapore district in West Bengal. I had been told that a loyal official of the estate had written an account. Subsequently one more account came to my notice---one written by the rajpurohit-the royal priest. Surprisingly, neither of the two accounts is very old, and the priest’s account had been written later. It is the published version of the two while the other remains unpublished. It was published in a local chronicle-Jhargram Barta in 1390 B.s. in 101 instalments. However the serialisation remains incomplete. Shambhunath Sarangi, the priest, is