Abstract
We, the People of Europe?—A big question mark, a question mark that Eteinne Balibar in his book We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship can afford. His concern here becomes a wide variety of socio-political questions that include questions of unification of Europe, sovereignty and citizenship in the age of globalization. This leads him to the interrogation of the ‘nation form’ and ‘nationalism’ and the relation between the two, which he studies in the light of (a) historicity of nations and of nationalisms, (b) national identities and (c) structural violence. My concern is not his study by itself, which of course is an important contribution in political philosophy in the given historical conjuncture, but rather my interest lies in the question mark. What he questions here is a certain socio-political congregation, which in reality exists. When I say, We, the people of India—this very speech act entitles me not only to my existence as an Indian alone but also to the ‘we’ as ‘us’ the ‘Indians’ who exist—is it not a matter of fact? Can I question do we Indians exist? If in political philosophy as Balibar also points out, borders and territories, state, community and ‘public’ structures, citizenship and sovereignty, rights and norms, violence and civility are considered to be speculative categories, then what is that force which makes these theoretically speculative structures inherent in terms of breakage? Or do we simply call this ‘state violence’? I think here lies the difference between Balibar’s question mark and mine. I arrive at this conclusion not because of any structural causality that is inherent to each of these questions but because certain unpredictable events and dialectic evolutions nourished the idea of ‘Indianness’ in a way that the idea of being ‘European’ did not experience. What I mean by this is a shared experience of a colonial past that functioned as an adhesive and initiated the effort of assembled individuals to dissolve the ‘seriality’ in them to create this certain ‘group’ in the Sartrean sense—I quote ‘we are free together; therefore the ensemble is free’. One could evaluate this freeness in the Indian context and to engage with that evaluation would lead me to a different direction altogether, but what I am interested in is to see how We, the people of India, came together. Within what kind of discursive matrix does such an identity lie? To engage with the material of inert determination of the future and go backward in tracing the moments of such congregations into the groupuscules that led to a massive movement against colonial power. Having said that, I limit this project, and I will explain how.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Theory of Practical Ensembles, Vol. 1, Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (Verso, London, New York, 2004).
- 2.
The group unlike the series is the instrumentation of a common aim, comparable to one’s body (Sartre denies any organic idealism)—it is the end as well as the means. The group project is ‘tearing away man from the status of alterity which makes of him a product of his product, to transform him into a product of the group, that is to say—so long as the group is freedom—into his own product’.
- 3.
A negation of praxis, which exercises its own counterfinality without an author and produces its own idea or rationality by virtue of having been worked by man, who then is alienated within it, theoretically free and sovereign but in reality ‘powerless’—a victim of inertia
- 4.
- 5.
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ In Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Eds. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1992), 7.
- 6.
Ibid., 8.
- 7.
However this remains contested.
- 8.
Ibid., 35.
- 9.
Peter Brooke, The Empty Space (Touchstone Book, New York, 1968).
- 10.
For Walter Benjamin, each moment mankind has lived becomes a citation—Theses on the Philosophy of History (Illuminations, Pimlico, London, 1999).
- 11.
Introduction, Shireen Moosvi, Facets of the Great Revolt 1857, Ed. S. Moosvi (Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2008), xi
- 12.
- 13.
It has been tried to emphasize on the distinction between the two theatres by the use of quotation marks for one and not for the other. It becomes more self-evident as we elaborate more in the chapters.
- 14.
Refer to Erika Fischer–Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre, Trans. Jo Riley (Routledge, London and New York, 2002)
- 15.
In Richard Schechner, ‘Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance’ (The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 17, No. 3, Theatre and the Social Sciences, September, 1973), 5–36.
Schechner tries to give precise definitions to the terms drama, script, theatre and performance in this essay. He calls drama ‘the smallest, most intense (heated up) circle. A written text, score, scenario, instruction, plan or map’, script ‘the basic code of the event’ of theatre, theatre ‘the event enacted by a specific group of performers’ and performance ‘the whole constellation of events, most of them passing unnoticed, that takes place in both performers and audience...’.
- 16.
Mulk Raj Anand, On the Progressive Writer’s Movement; In Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), Ed. Sudhi Pradhan (National Book Agency Pvt. Ltd., Kolkata, 1979)
- 17.
Political scientist, Partha Chatterjee, one of the most influential critics of the nationalist project in colonial Bengal in his most significant contribution to reading of nationalism in India, Nation and Its Fragments, outlines his methodological premise through a critique of Benedict Anderson according to whom ‘the historical experience of nationalism in Western Europe, in the Americas, and in Russia had supplied for all subsequent nationalisms a set of modular forms from which nationalist elites in Asia and Africa had chosen the ones they liked.’ Chatterjee in his enlightened post-colonial force writes back—‘History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the post-colonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation but also that of our anticolonial resistance and post-colonial misery... The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on difference with the ‘modular’ forms of the national society propagated by the modern West’ (Chatterjee, 5). He further argues that ‘By my reading, anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within the colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains— the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the ‘outside’, of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed... The spiritual, on the other hand, is an ‘inner’ domain bearing the ‘essential’ marks of cultural identity’ (Chatterjee, 6). Firstly, the difference that is realized in a colonized society comes through the formation of the identity. The identification of the difference, I would argue, is not a conscious process that is postulated as contradistinctive to the colonial sovereign state, but this happens through a process of political representation in the colonized dominion. Here by representation, borrowing from Carl Schmitt, I mean something that assumes that although every state form presupposes a structural identity between rulers and ruled, such identity can never be fully realized in practice and identity on the other hand presupposes the ‘unmediated’ unity of the people. I would argue here that it was the non-realization of identity that led to the realization of difference within the colonized natives—the difference which later was stimulated by socio-economic circumstances and events leading to aporia that an ‘unmediated’ unity of the people could be attained. Secondly, political sovereignty cannot exist at two levels within the same dominion as has been suggested by Chatterjee—a dominion he calls the ‘inner domain of sovereignty’. Schmitt argues that the interdependence of modern state and liberalism born out of reformation and disputes over religious toleration corresponds with the rise of something approaching the theory of ‘possessive individualism’. Drawing from Abbé Sieyes that the nation’s constitution was not a constituted or collective power but rather a constituent or individual power, he argues that liberalism’s foundation was in the private sphere where each one of the member of the people had to be a constituent of the power, i.e. the nation (Carl Schmitt as referred to, by Duncan Kelly, 119). As Sumit Sarkar has pointed out in Modern India 1885–1947, the British Government in India was an autocracy of hierarchically organized officials, headed by the Viceroy and the State of Secretary, but gradually there was an attempt to liberalize the system, through induction of native representatives which was later often demanded by the ‘initiated’ and ‘qualified’ natives. Thirdly, the nationalist project cannot be reduced to binaries of the material outer domain where the West was sovereign and the spiritual inner domain where the East was trying to mark out its cultural identity, thereby East and West seen as two distinctive homogenous categories. But rather the formation of a cultural identity was a part of the non-realization of identification with the colonizer, in this case, the British sovereign state. The problem is augmented, when the question is that of the formation of a new community which is a people comprising all communities with different religious beliefs and also often no religious belief at all. Here, by a people comprising all communities, I am referring to the idea of the Indian state that started shaping up in the early twentieth century. ‘An independence pledge was taken at innumerable meetings throughout the country on January 26 (1930), denouncing the British for having ‘ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually’, asserting that it was ‘a crime against man and God’ to submit any longer to such a rule and calling for preparations for ‘civil disobedience, including non-payment of taxes’ (Sarkar, 284). An ‘unmediated unity’ was felt by the demand of Purna Swaraj or total independence, which took birth from the realization of difference and the consolidation of an identity of being an Indian, thus, making the rule of the British sovereign state not only unacceptable but completely illegitimate.
- 18.
Rabindranath Tagore, English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: Miscellaneous Writings, Introduction by Mohit K. Ray (Atlantic Publishers and Distributers, New Delhi, 2007), 1117.
- 19.
Urmila Sharma and S.K. Sharma, Bhawani Mandir in Indian Political Thought (Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, 1996) 253.
- 20.
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post-colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2000).
- 21.
See Marvin Carlson , ‘Introduction: perspectives on performance: Germany and America, In The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Saskya Iris Jain (Trans.) (Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, London and New York, 2008).
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Saha, S. (2018). Nation and Its Theatre: Towards a Methodology. In: Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1177-2_1
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