A double articulation of sovereignty

RAJAN KURAI KRISHNAN

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HOW do we understand the difference inscribed by Dravidianism, a combination of non-Brahminism and Tamil identity, as a substantial marker of a federal India? Alternatively, how can Indianism be reformulated as essentially a federal polity incorporating a shared sense of sovereignty with various regional polities? In response, the paper tries to posit Indianism and Dravidianism, not necessarily as opposed to each other but as complimentary sources of imagining the nation through the concept of ‘double articulation’.

Historically speaking, as a political party that had gained enormous popular support in Tamil Nadu, the DMK in 1963 officially gave up its separatist aspirations and declared state autonomy, ‘Maanila Suyatchi’, as its political goal. In the same year, its parent organization, Dravidar Kazhagam and its leader Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, though preserving the agonistic posturing towards Indianism, supported Congress rule in the state and more specifically the leadership of K. Kamaraj, as Tamil rule. It was clear that the aspiration to a sovereign nation state either as Dravidian or Tamil country, that was first fully articulated in the 1940s, the decade of fierce contestation around the formation of new nation states post British rule, was no longer on the political agenda of the two major organizations of the Dravidian movement.

In fact, sovereignty had never been the primary goal of the political activities of these organizations as compared to issues of social justice, resistance to Brahmin hegemony and preserving a progressive Tamil identity. The confrontational posturing against the Union government was largely symbolic. Ardent Tamil nationalists with sovereign aspirations, however, saw this as a sign of weakness or betrayal. Hence, most serious evaluations of Dravidianism as a political project rest on the question of the meaning of sovereignty in a democratic polity and in an age of global capital dispensation, marking the rise of a global empire as suggested by political philosophers Hardt and Negri.1

 

For starters, even as the aspiration for a sovereign Dravidian state was given up, the possibility of either the Indian National Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party ever coming to power in the state on their own has become increasingly remote during the fifty year rule of the Dravidian parties since 1967. The Dravidian parties also return most of the members of parliament from the state, often playing a considerable role in the functioning of the central government. It appears that in effect a historical bargain was struck in which sovereign aspirations were traded for a share in the democratic governance of the state. This in turn underscores the necessity of a federal polity in the national imagination which today is being heavily contested by the homogenizing centralist forces of the nation state consolidation. What do powers invested with the state government mean for forging economic, cultural and the social life of the people of the state? In other words, what exactly is the meaning of sovereignty in such a context?

The enigma of governance at the state level having sovereign characteristics can perhaps be best understood through a close analysis of the massive struggle for the statehood of Telangana in the recent past. This was a struggle that roused the passions of a vast swathe of people marked by self-immolation, violent protests and attempts at fast unto death. Note that the struggle was not for a sovereign nation, but rather separate statehood for a region which shares the same language with the residuary Andhra Pradesh. Though it is hard to ascertain how exactly the people have gained, given the alleged concentration of powers with the Union government, the passion with which the struggle for statehood was conducted indicates a certain perception of sovereignty associated with ‘self-governance at the level of the state’.

 

What Dravidianism has appeared to achieve is to have ensured full control over governance at the state level on the one hand, as also democratic representation at the Union level through electing Members of Parliament, on the other. While this may still be a far cry from aspirations for regional autonomy known as Maanila Suyatchi, certain in potentia sovereign dispensation has housed itself in the process of electoral democracy, which appears to coexist with the sovereignty claimed for India as a nation state. In other words, the state apparatus based on juridical sovereignty is pan Indian while substantial power exercised through governance appears to stem from the regional polity.

This short paper highlights two key propositions in this respect. The first, as stated at the beginning, is that what appears to happen in the case of national and regional identity is the double articulation of sovereignty. The concept of double articulation is borrowed from the philosophical treatise, A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.2 The second proposition is that such a double articulation had its genesis in colonial differences. The paper draws upon Partha Chatterjee’s much acclaimed theorization of the inner domain of culture to propose this.3 The paper will elaborate on both these propositions and narrate certain key moments in the political history of Tamil Nadu to illustrate the case.

 

Let us first look the key concept of double articulation through a quick reference to the source material from which it is borrowed, A Thousand Plateaus (hereafter TP) by Deleuze and Guattari. For the purposes of the present essay I would like to extract and simplify the proposition of double articulation embedded in a complex set of philosophical exegesis. The proposition suggests that every phenomenon, basically a particle, is at once a sign. It is analogues to the combination of matter and function. The particle has a constitutive side that makes it a particle; it has a relational side where it has a sign function. Getting constituted, on the one hand, and getting to function, relate or represent, on the other, are the simultaneous processes of every phenomenon which can be called double articulation. The constitutive side may be called form of content; the relational/functional/representative side may be called form of expression.

Deriving from such formulations, and extending it to the formation of a polity, the paper suggests that the historical formation of a people results through a double articulation. As form of content it relates to aspects of governance or ‘self-regulation’ of the polity. As form of expression it relates to propositions of sovereignty. Like in the case of language, there is an arbitrary link between governance and sovereignty. Governance relates to issues faced on the ground, the immanence of human relations, while sovereignty is a transcendental claim of structures of rule. It is like the gap between actual implementation or enforcement on the ground and the existence of a law.

For instance, though legally banned, child labour, manual scavenging or sex work continues to thrive in broad daylight. Hence, whatever the expression of sovereignty, it is essentially in the realm of governance that the people test relations of power. All the same, we should not forget that form of content and form of expression together make the double articulation that constitute the phenomena, howsoever arbitrarily connected they may be. The vernacular everyday life and power relations stand in some form of relationship to the transcendental structures of law.

 

It is precisely for this reason that language is the primary repository of the collective memory of a polity, that the commonsensical dialectical sequencing of Indianism emerging first and Dravidianism emerging as a response to it should be interrogated. Let us first check why such a perception of historical sequence may exist. It is true that when the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885, there was no similar organization that spoke of the Dravidian nation or the Tamil nation. The elite formation of the Indian National Congress betokened a process of inception of nationalist consciousness as a movement towards a modern nation state. If the birth of the South Indian Liberal Federation in 1917, as an elite formation, was likened to the Indian National Congress with the conscious inscription of ‘South’ as a qualifier, it certainly happened much after the formation of the Indian National Congress.

However, if we think of sites of articulation where the imagination of the nation began in the context of colonial difference, the imprint of the region using a particular language on the imagination of the nation could easily be seen as simultaneous, like the particle-sign. It is in this context that the work of Partha Chatterjee assumes significance. In highlighting the ‘inner domain of culture’ as the resource with which the nation as a sovereign entity could be imagined, he has already accommodated the difference of language as a key site of imagination. The popular articulations of colonial difference in ballads and chap books had specific modes in which the inner domain of culture articulated itself. It was followed by an explosion in print culture which brought back the past through the circulation of classical texts of the language; the historiography in the vernacular had to narrate pasts of locations in which the region became the site of imagining the self.

 

The leaders of Indian National Congress in Tamil Nadu had to align themselves with the flowering of historical self-consciousness in the Tamil language as a central feature of the history of Tamil Nadu, even if they sought to annex these to the narrations of history with pan-Indian provenance. What gave these articulations of Indianism a regional character is because the language deployed had specific cultural inflections. Once the form of content was cemented by language, it hardly mattered whether the form of expression was regional or national. This has enabled the symbolic dimension of sovereignty to be located at some distance from the actual manifestation of power relations that remains local and site specific. A local zamindar of a Tamil district could be equally praised as a vassal of the emperor in Delhi or the one in London.

The specificity of regional cultural inflections is even more keenly felt in the popular modes of circulation of double articulations in the public sphere. Let us take a look at one illustration that I find quite charming. A Tamil song was composed to lament the death of Pandit Motilal Nehru in 1931. It began with the line, ‘Gnana Panditha Motilal Nehruvai Parigoduthome Nam Parithavithome’ (we have lost the enlightened Pandit Motilal Nehru and we are forlorn). It became a popular gramophone plate due to its musical composition and voice of the female singer. It is possible that many famous singers were asked to render the song at political conferences and rallies. The song became so popular that it was sung in all contexts.

 

A close associate of Rajagopalachari, Kalki Krishnamurthy, an ardent Congressman and a great satirist, wrote a hilarious article about this bizarre circulation of the song beyond the confines of politics. In the given event, he heard the song sung inappropriately at a Brahmin marriage, on the ritual occasion of the Nalungu when devotional or romantic songs are rendered like a musical soiree, which is obviously a happy moment. He wondered whether Motilal’s death was lamented as much even in his home state. Most interestingly, in the self-respect journal, Paguththarivu (Rationalism), I found a lyric that critiqued the Congress and its upholding of the status quo. A note beneath the lyric stated that it could be sung to the tune of the Gnanpanditha Motilal Nehru song. Such typical hybridization of the affective and the intelligible is what characterizes the vernacular public sphere where double articulation thrives in all random and arbitrary connections.

In short, the sites and energies in the formation of the political were necessarily regional and intrinsically bound to the language. While the material basis of human and cultural interactions provided the form of content of the region, Tamil became the form of expression which could house both Dravidianism and Indianism. Luckily the historical mobilization of the non-Brahmin elite by the South Indian Liberal Federation, aka Justice Party, and the popular mobilization of the historic bloc of non-Brahmins by Periyar through the Self-Respect Movement could give the form of expression, Tamil, a different form of content that sought to redefine social relations non-hierarchically. Its contradistinction and agonistic posturing with Indian nationalism rested on this different form of content.

 

It will be appropriate to conclude the essay by returning to the key question. While the double articulation in the domain of actual politics was split into form of content as non-Brahminism and form of expression as Tamil, it is still worth asking as to why sovereignty could be articulated as Indianism. In other words, how the form of content chose to be governance of Tamil Nadu, leaving the form of expression to be the Indian state, remains to be explored; abstracting further, we may ask, how does the Tamil self find contentment within sovereign India? If we recall Mani Ratnam’s 1992 bilingual film Roja, and Vairamuthu’s lyric in Tamil that balances the Tamil self and the Indian nation, one may call it the Roja paradox. It addresses the listener in the vocative as Tamil, but keeps alternating the location of the self in Tamil Nadu and India.

If we are to fully grasp the significance of double articulation, we should see how it could operate in the domain of the actual, virtual and the real. Let me posit that the actual domain is where politics happens on the ground, as we elaborately cognized above, the very site of political action. The virtual consists of the fictive in the narrations where several modes of encryptions of the actual take place through condensation and displacement. The real is the site of law and sovereign power.

 

In fact it is my work in the domain of the virtual, the mediascape, particularly the unique formation of faciality machine in the combination of MGR and Sivaji Ganesan, that I found the possibility of solving the puzzle. It explains how the form of expression as Tamil in the actual domain can be transformed to form of content of governance in the real domain of sovereignty and not necessarily as the state apparatus through an inversion in the media-scape or the virtual domain. It is because the Tamil interiority or Dravidianism could easily accomplish being the subject making force, it could leave it for Indian exteriority or Indianism to be the force of signifiance or the form of expression of sovereignty; that is, the process of self making is so completely Tamil that formal sovereignty can rest anywhere.

Both M.G. Ramachandran and Sivaji Ganesan became stars by acting in films scripted by M. Karunanidhi, building on the popularity of Karunanidhi’s ornamental Tamil dialogues. M.G. Ramachandran became the electoral vehicle of the DMK while Sivaji Ganesan switched over to the Congress and became its celluloid response to MGR. In terms of their film narrations, Sivaji Ganesan excelled in the portrayal of interior emotions articulated in ornate Tamil; MGR became a swashbuckler taking on bad guys, restoring order and justice. If I distribute the form of content, internalization or subjectification axis to Sivaji, and form of expression, externalization of signifiance axis to MGR, it appears that they both ended up in the wrong camps. (Signifiance is the counterpart of subjectification in the scheme of faciality elaborated in TP.)

That MGR, a quintessential political product of Dravidianism, renamed his party as All India Anna DMK and was awarded the Bharat Ratna, while Sivaji Ganesan, who was a Congressman for the better part of his active life, was resuscitated by the DMK which erected a statue for him in a significant location across the Gandhi statue on the Chennai Marina beach, speaks to this crossover in the domain of the virtual. Sivaji Ganesan, the sovereign Tamil interiority working for the Congress and MGR, the formal sovereign externality working for the DMK are finally recovered by the right camps. However, what happened in the process as represented in the virtual domain of film narrations is that Indianism was filled by Tamil interiority and Dravidianism was filled by sovereign externality. It is possible to argue that between the actual of the political and the real of the sovereign dispensation, a vast mediating ground of the virtual consisting of narrative tropes always operated. In the case of the Dravidianism-Indianism double articulation in Tamil Nadu, film narration and the faciality machine constituted by the MGR-Sivaji duo effectively provided such a virtual domain.

 

It is in the consequence of such operations in Tamil Nadu where the critical yield of analysis rests. In constituting the immanence of the political as the governance of the state of Tamil Nadu and the transcendental apparatus of the state as Indian, Dravidianism has managed to retain on the one hand the vibrancy of the political at the grassroots level. On the other hand, I conclude by proposing that by thus cementing governance and Tamil interiority/identity firmly, Dravidianism compels the sovereignty of the nation state to acknowledge the federal character of the Indian Union.

 

Footnotes:

1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001.

2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury, London, Delhi, New York and Sydney, 2013.

3. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.

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