Books
WHY INDIA VOTES?
by Mukulika Banerjee. Routledge, New Delhi and Abingdon, Oxon, 2014.THE first puzzle is the title’s question mark. It suggests that the researchers – Mukulika Banerjee is the prime mover of a collective effort, but as author, the interpreter of last resort – are not entirely sure why, or perhaps not entirely sure that they can ‘prove’ the answer that is given. It also implies, perhaps, that the reasons Indian citizens vote, differ from those in other democracies. And given that this is a study by anthropologists in twelve (hopefully representative) locations across the country, and is about how Indians vote as well as why they bother to vote, given the tiny impact an individual vote has on outcomes, there may be some doubt that these accounts add up to an explanation of why ‘India’ votes.
They shouldn’t worry: this is a very convincing description of ‘the campaign, the ways in which ordinary people talk about politics and politicians, voting day, the experience of voting, the role that officials play in conducting the elections, and the shared feeling of communitas that elections in all their carnivalesque nature bring’ (p. 144). The argument that knits together the myriad answers to the question ‘why do you vote?’ into a more general answer is powerful, and most certainly valid.
Anthropologists have in the past studied Indian elections, and often written about elections that happen while they were doing fieldwork, usually as part of a broader study of politics in a local community, or even larger units. But this is probably the first time that a coordinated study of this magnitude has been undertaken. Half of the anthropologists recruited to observe and interview in the five weeks leading up to polling day of the 2009 Lok Sabha election were already doing extensive fieldwork in those particular areas. There were twelve polling stations studied, eleven reports of which are usefully summarized in appendices to this volume. The polling stations were mainly in villages or hamlets (7), but also in towns (2), and cities (2) in Tamil Nadu, Western U.P., Eastern U.P., Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Kerala (which does not have an appendix report), Maharashtra, Bihar, and West Bengal. The size and political weight of each resident community or caste is reported in those summaries, and a quick reading suggests that no particular community has been missed: there are places with scheduled castes prominent, and scheduled tribes, OBCs, elite castes, Muslims of various kinds, migrants, and others. The vignettes of observed behaviour make it clear that old and young, male and female, rich and poor are all well represented.
Can we then say that this was a representative sample of ‘India’? And can we be confident that this is as good an account as can be written of what ordinary voters think and do as an election campaign reaches a climax on polling day? I would judge the answer to both these questions to be ‘yes’. While this study could be slighted as being based on ‘anecdotal evidence’, the numbers of persons observed and interviewed – though these numbers are not specified in this volume – are clearly very large, and would certainly match the normal sample size of almost any public opinion survey.
I note that ‘representative samples’ drawn by those doing quantitative studies, such as those of the National Election Studies of the Lokniti Network of CSDS (with whom this group of researchers was associated, with the Lokniti researchers acting as ‘academic collaborators’), are also far from perfect. They are done by selecting voters (at random) of particular polling stations (randomly selected) within constituencies (selected at random), and while there may be the proper proportion of, for example, ‘rural’ versus ‘urban’ respondents, they are inevitably drawn from places with special characteristics – being the political stronghold of one party or the other, or with a particular social configuration of caste or community, of economic enterprise, or a history of communal riots, to give a few possible examples. Moreover, you can hardly be assured that even if the gender ratio is accurate (and that can be adjusted, of course), that you have not left out or sampled in small numbers important categories, like young women agricultural labourers. I have myself witnessed survey directors justifiably ‘massaging’ polling results in order to correct for inevitable distortions in the sample.
The study had a framework that determined each researcher’s focus, indicated by chapter titles: ‘The Campaign’, ‘Political Language’, ‘The Polling Station’, and ‘Why Do People Vote?’ Each chapter has a descriptive narrative illustrated by examples from several locations, with quotations from printed material, mobile phone texts, interviews and speeches, and so on. There are useful boxed summaries of things like ‘Elections and Music’ or events (‘Rahul Gandhi’s Rally’ in Chhattisgarh, contrasted with ‘Lalu Prasad’s Rally’ in Bihar), and indeed 16 pages of well reproduced colour photographs of the campaign and of polling day. The explanations of the minutiae of procedure are clear and accurate, dealing with the explicit provisions of the Model Code of Conduct, for example, as well as how it operates in practice, and whether it produces its intended effect of ‘creating a level playing field’.
The ‘Campaign’ chapter covers things like the distribution of materials to party workers and voters, from flags and pamphlets to illicit liquor; public meetings and face-to-face contact; how candidates make a visual impression through clothing and distribution of flyers or merchandise; and the on-the-ground implications of changing party alliances. The chapter ends with a short section on ‘Elections as Carnivals’, on which Banerjee has written before, and one on ‘Voters, Politeness, and the Triumph of the Democratic Ethos’. This is a very useful corrective to newspapers (properly) prominently reporting incidents of violence, and the impression that TV viewers now have that what is important is the verbal ‘fight’ (sometimes so labelled). On the ground, as Banerjee underlines the almost universal practice of civility, in part because ‘while political loyalties divided people during elections, they needed to live with these divisions as indeed with others’ (p. 84), but mainly because of the secret ballot, so ‘it was therefore possible to agree with everyone, disagree with no one and yet be able to register one’s opinion’ (p. 86).
In dealing with ‘Political Language’, Banerjee not only describes with both affection and admiration the extent to which ordinary citizens talk politics – ‘some [gatherings at] tea-stalls would have put 24-hour news channels to shame, with their quality of in-depth analysis’ (p. 88) – but analyzes the nuances of using multiple languages, including making bilingual puns, and the creative use of party symbols. The exploration of the nuances of certain words – most vividly the ‘dan’ [‘gift’] of ‘matdan’ [vote] – is both fascinating and instructive. Banerjee also underlines the importance of political leaders’ facility in speaking, and the power of their political rhetoric, in giving politicians stature and appreciation, even though most voters have ‘uniformly negative’ perceptions of politicians. Here voters are quoted in luscious detail on just how politicians make money, with politics described by one voter as a ‘sewer’.
Yet this seems forgotten when citizens turn out to vote, as is well known, in larger and larger percentages the more rural and poor they are. Voting day is a culminating event, for which voters often dress in their best clothes, travel in festive groups, and patiently wait in long queues to cast their vote. There is a rich description of place and procedure, focusing on how the small army of officials perform their tasks. But more crucial for the general argument is the point made through observing the voters (including those who proved unable to vote) that voters saw themselves as ‘king for a day’, for once equal to everyone else. A middle-aged lady in Kerala reacted to the provocation of the question of how her one vote could matter among millions with, ‘My single vote is like an atom; it may be small, but it packs a lot of power’ (p. 140).
To discover why Indians vote, these researchers had the luxury of being able simply to ask the question, and the training and inclination to take seriously the answers that emerged. There are wonderfully vivid, articulate, and convincing responses reported, and a range of motives analyzed, including those who felt no enthusiasm but performed the job, those who were after a material benefit, those who supported a candidate or party out of loyalty, or against someone as a protest, or from loyalty to their own community. One particular explanation, ‘peer pressure’, is inferred from the fact everyone can see who voted by looking for the ink mark on the voter’s finger. That marking had the ‘curious levelling effect’ of indicating equality, and thus, ‘for everyone, without exception, the source of this pride [of having voted] lay in being counted as [an equal] citizen of the country’ (p. 159).
The idea of ‘voting for citizenship’ and seeing the right to vote as a sign of the government respecting the ordinary citizen, is amply illustrated by subtle (and inspiring) remarks from a wide range of voters. The conclusions of the volume refer to convergent analyses of other scholars, to argue that elections ‘emerge as one of the most important, open and secular institutions that can mediate between the citizens and the state’ (p. 183). If elections in India are so significant in and of themselves, in particular in celebrating a citizen’s identity and empowerment, then perhaps it is not quite right to categorize the regime as a ‘patronage’ democracy. Rather, this book allows us to embrace the term ‘electoral’ democracy with enthusiasm, as do Indian citizens, who, election after election, turn out in such immense numbers.
Philip Oldenburg
Research Scholar, South Asia Institute,
Columbia University, New York
PLAYING THE NATION GAME: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India by Benjamin Zachariah. Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2011.
NOT many today, and not just critical theorists, buy into the idea of nationalism as a positive virtue. Given the widespread prevalence of restrictions on freedoms that states engage in, often by invoking nationalism and ‘threats to national integrity’, most markedly in dealing with restive sections of the citizenry, it is no surprise that the terms ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ invoke contradictory feelings. We often ask: What does it mean to be an Indian? Is it a cultural, or a spatial category? Does the category ‘Indian’ unconsciously (or consciously?) mean ‘nationalist’? Do we have alternative categories to address our belonging to a place? Can we think of identities without talking about nationalism and nation? Do we have an alternative way to support and think about the genuine cause of freedom struggle movements like those in Kashmir and the Northeast without falling in the trap of ‘nationalisms’? These everyday questions have often been left unanswered.
The book under review attempts to problematize the naturalness of the categories of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, and explore how Indian historians of varying orientations (national, subaltern and left) deploy ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ as a legitimate framework to write Indian history. Zachariah clarifies, ‘The basis of any academic work’s justification generally tends to be its newness. However, this work’s claim to any importance is in its restatement of what has been said before, but was not taken seriously enough. There is still a tendency, despite the widespread acknowledgement of the arbitrariness, accidentalness and artificiality of "nations", to regard nationalism as a necessary, inevitable and/or reasonable basis upon which to organize the world, even among academics and intellectuals whose own work goes a long way towards destabilizing the alleged naturalness of the nation’ (p. viii). Going on, ‘As a result of an obsession with nationalism, many subtle inflections of class, caste, gender, region, labour or language remain relatively muted in academic literature’ (p. 2). Zachariah argues that even when historians try to decentre nationalism as the main problematic of looking at the Indian past, their attempts, to a large extent, remain grounded in a ‘residual’ nationalism.
In narrating the historiography of Indian nationalism, Zachariah argues that Indian contributions to the debate on the origins and nature of nationalism were often unsurprisingly nationalistic (p. 42). By examining various historical writings, he shows us how the nation was central to the concern of historians of different schools. For instance, a residual nationalism was part of even a project like Subaltern Studies, which was premised on questioning the dominant statist canons of history writing. He argues that various historians and writers unproblematically talk about ‘authenticity’ to justify nationalism, and that the usage of ‘national’ and ‘authentic’ culture means ‘Hindu’. He states that there should be a consistent separation between the concepts of state and nation, and also between anti-colonialism and nationalism (Indian). He argues that nationalism by nature is exclusive – it excludes communities in the name of less authentic and non-nationalistic. By examining the colonial discourse, he shows how dominant streams of nationalist thinking considered non-Hindus as cultural outsiders, and how Muslims were left out of India’s nationalistic imagination.
The second chapter discusses how the early twentieth century debates on nationalism excluded various sections; the ‘true’ nationals were already being identified as Hindus, while Muslim intellectuals who were uneasy with these developments and kept their distance from ‘nationalism’, were already being described as ‘separatists’ (p. 89). He claims that figure of the ordinary man/masses was of no particular relevance to the self-proclaimed leaders of ‘national’ movements. The voice of the non-elite was unheard in these narratives. He goes on to criticize Subaltern Studies: ‘The famed Subaltern Studies project, in proclaiming itself, as we know, sought to find ordinary peoples’ contributions to the national movement, thereby misconceiving the project at its very inception; in abandoning its search for its eponymous hero, it left an important project unfinished: to view the lives of people without the disciplining lens of "nationalism" ’ (p. 113). While the third chapter focuses on how the Bengali bhadralok engaged with the colonizer, both as a progressive and disruptive force, the fourth explores ways in which the category of Hinduism was used for the ‘national’ cause, and shows how the category of Hinduism became an integral part of the nationalistic political imagination in India. As illustration, he points out how both the Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society paved the way for the development of Hinduism as a ‘national’ category. ‘A category was found to meet a need: that of the "authenticity" of the entity that had to be imagined as a "nation" ’ (p. 204).
Is Nehruvian developmental nationalism more inclusive and egalitarian as compared to cultural nationalism? Does the category of ‘cultural’ have any role in the Nehruvian developmental imagination? Zachariah attempts to answer this question in chapter five, a terrain that he had explored in a detailed manner in his earlier work.
1 Nehruvian developmental nationalism aimed to provide an alternative to the Hindu cultural nationalism by focusing on the question of development and progress rather than culture. State-led developmentalism was considered preferable to a dangerous, potentially or actually exclusionary ‘cultural nationalism, where "culture" stands for sectional interests, usually of a majoritarian nature’ (p. 208). But Nehruvian developmentalism too excluded many sections of the people, the difference lying only in the language of legitimacy. As he clearly states: ‘The exclusions of developmentalism need to be highlighted, by class; the top-down, wait-for-us-to-lead position was differently exclusionary, not necessarily less so, than an exclusion based on "culture". The cultural was only a step away, hidden from view by a different language of legitimation: there was a strong presence of Hindu nationalism, at least by default. Exclusions were based on being non-Hindu, and Hindu usually meant upper-caste, just as "national" at least implicitly often meant being upper-caste Hindu. The "tribals", being backward, needed to be developed by the Indian state, so that they might know that they belong. If they didn’t, the message was delivered by force’ (p. 251).Through various examples Zachariah shows that the Nehruvian ‘inclusive’ developmentalism was a myth and that in whichever form it appears nationalism is discriminatory and leads to fascism. Here I am reminded of what George Joseph, the freedom fighter and friend to both Nehru and Gandhi wrote to Nehru in 1936 after reading his Autobiography, ‘On your socialism, there is one question I should like to ask you: why do you stop with it, why don’t you go on to the next step, Fascism, and be done with it. Of course, Fascism is a reaction against socialism, just as socialism is reaction against capitalism. I shall put it in Hegelian terms: Capitalism is the thesis, Socialism is the antithesis and Fascism is the synthesis. That is how the world movement is working itself out: here in India, the word will be Nationalism, the only difference I can see.’
2Notably, when addressing the question of majority-minority, the author like many other historians too falls into the trap of a ‘Hindu-Muslim’ binary. It would have been more rewarding had the author avoided this binary by looking at how other minority communities engaged with the nationalist questions. For instance, how Indian Christians dealt with the alleged ‘western-ness’ of Christianity and were forced to prove their nationalism. In this the author could have fruitfully engaged with nationalists like George Joseph to understand how he negotiated with his minority identity and nationalist identity.
3 Likewise, the argument would have been more representative had the author considered voices of dissent like Periyar to understand how he wrestled with the categories of nation, region and nationalism, or engaged with some of the early sociological debates on nationalism in India, for instance, A.R Desai’s Social Background of Indian Nationalism.4 Nevertheless, this well written book is a welcome addition to the scholarly debates on nationalism in India, a book that historians, political sociologists and political scientists will find illuminating and provocative.Renny Thomas
Centre for the Study of Social Systems,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
Footnotes:
1. Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History c.1930-50. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2005.
2. Correspondence, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers (pre 1947), Vol. 37, NMML, New Delhi.
3. See George Gheverghese Joseph, George Joseph: The Life and Times of a Kerala Christian Nationalist. Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2003.
4. A.R. Desai, Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1948.
FOUNDING AN EMPIRE ON INDIA’S NORTH-EASTERN FRONTIERS, 1790-1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity by Gunnel Cederlöf. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2014.
Founding an Empire researches the early beginnings of a polity that is enmeshed in the vagaries of local climate and ecology: the East India Company in North East Bengal in the late 18th and first half of the 19th century. The book opens with a chapter that alerts the reader to the rather inchoate character of Company rule in the region during the 1790s, a condition that the author finds manifest in the many debates over the principles and practices of land revenue settlement in northeastern Bengal, conflicts over land surveys and land rights, disputes over private and commercial trading rights, and over access and regulation of the resources of the land. The bureaucratic principles that seek to govern this complicated political and legal terrain are further confounded and restrained by the sudden and profound changes inflicted on the physical terrain by the seasonal monsoon rains, ‘in which river courses shifted, cultivated fields turned into lakes’ (p. 5).
In many ways, this theme of a capricious and temperamental nature and the accompanying mimetic history of unsure, unstable governance form the fulcrum of the book, and is outlined well in the first chapter, ‘Commercial Flows and Bounded Landscapes in Between Empires’. The chapter returns to the moment of the founding of Company rule in this part of India – the acquisition of the rights of revenue farming and jurisprudence by a trading company in 1765 – but is careful to disentangle the story of commerce from that of administration, underlining instead the pervasiveness of a ‘malfunctioning administration’, the persistence of a ‘shallow’ form of political authority until the 1830s. The second chapter, ‘The Order and Disaster of Nature’, dwells on the theme of the disjunct between rigid principles of land revenue and the pragmatism of everyday administration in eastern Bengal and Sylhet which found itself in the dramatic natural occurrences of the late 18th and the early 19th century: earthquakes, floods, deluges, extreme weather conditions, failure of monsoons.
The argument for a representation of Company rule as a study in contrast between the ideas of administration in Calcutta and the exigencies of the local government is carried forward into the third chapter, ‘Making "Natural" Boundaries’, which explores the protracted process of boundary making in a fluid landscape. The conflicting notions of space in the Company’s administration, the mirroring of these conflicts in the changing river courses of northeastern Bengal, the making and remaking of borders, the final cartographic decisions that routinely ignored the situation on the ground, and the implications of this for the rights of people living within the Company’s territories are analyzed very carefully and well. The narrative of a protracted process of establishment of the sovereignty of the Company state is sustained through the fifth chapter, ‘Bureaucratic Control and its Mismatch with Nature’ as Cederlöf proceeds to elaborate this mismatch through a schematic analysis of the evolution of revenue law in Sylhet, specifically in the riverine lowlands, as it emerges out of a contested relationship between practices of indigenous custom and land rights and the more abstract rules of Company administration in Calcutta between the 1790s and the 1830s. The ‘contradictory tones of reluctance and expectation’ in the reports of the Company from Sylhet were now being harmonized within the structure of a bureaucratic state and its production of the fiscal taxpaying subject, a process that continued to be at divergence with conditions of local ecology.
By the late 1830s, a period that Cederlöf sees as marking a decisive shift towards the East India Company’s more direct involvement in questions of governance, this bureaucracy enables an unambiguous narrative of sovereignty that it sustains through its extensive implementation of revenue settlement. The latter casts the legal rights of subjects in terms of their rights to possess or dispose of property, and creates what the author terms as the ‘fiscal subject’.
There is another well researched chapter at the midriff of the book, ‘The Land Between Rivers: Connecting Bengal and China Markets’, which mines the archive closely to write a history of British expansion (often failed) into regions east of the Cachar valley – Manipur and the Irrawaddy valley. Interspersed with stories of intrigue and resistance to this expansion from local polities, the chapter offers a fascinating and rare account of the travels of G.J. Bayfield, a British official whose search for profitable trade routes between Cachar and Burma took him along the South West Silk Road in Burma; it also suggests possibilities of research into these unexplored connected histories of south eastern Asia.
In Founding an Empire on India’s Northeastern Frontiers, the East India Company has as its objective the eventual conquest and subjugation of the region but is unrelentingly presented as a bumbling state, fumbling its way through a labyrinth of unfamiliar ecological and social conditions. The section on Garos and zamindars in the third chapter is an illustration of this. Here Cederlöf tells us that the increasing extractions of the zamindars (‘who had managed to increase their authority and control over land without EIC government interference’: p. 53) from the Garos (‘who were dependent on the zamindars’: p. 53) during the early 19th century is an accentuation of an already existing relationship of exchange and violence between them. The EIC eventually steps in to establish its sovereignty in the Garo Hills in the figure of David Scott in the early decades of the 19th century.
This image of an unstable Company state exonerates the East India Company from the active interest that it takes in the policies of taxation in the Garo Hills and in the cotton trade and cotton production from the hills, from almost the very moment of its acquisition of Diwani rights over Bengal (see for instance John Eliot, ‘Observations on the inhabitants of the Garrow Hills, made during a public deputation in the years 1788 and 1789’, Asiatick Researches 3 (1794): 21-45). In what was evidently a clear and immediate acknowledgement by the Company of the importance of the cotton trade on the borders of northeastern Bengal in the late 18th century, it replaced the position of the Mughal fouzdar, in charge of liasoning with the zamindars/choudhries of the Garo foothills, with that of a Sezawal. Could the marked increase in Garo raids on the zamindaris at the foothills of the Garo Hills have had anything to do with this imbrication of the Company in the local political economy? Exonerations such as this book insists on, can therefore offer only a truncated history of EIC conquest and governance in this part of eastern India.
Despite repeated remonstrations to the contrary, the book does not really stray from the standard narrative of the East India Company as a mere corporation of merchants (p. 3) who turn into reluctant civil administrators: ‘As long as merchants remained merchants, they found means of negotiating their way around seasonal high and low river levels… but once the officers of this mercantile corporation began to formulate administration practices for their territorial acquisitions, their inability to find flexible solutions to irregular natural conditions often ended in conflict or failure’ (p. 220). One might ask at what stage in the history of northeastern Bengal were the Company officials merely ‘merchants’? Here the book’s treatment of the economy and polity of late 18th century northeastern Bengal leaves much to be desired. Even a cursory glance at some of the relevant works on the period and region demonstrate, the resilience of local peasant society was tried not merely by natural disasters and extreme weather conditions, but by the severe taxation that was the sign of the arrival of the Company. Two glaring omissions from the bibliography are Narahari Kaviraj’s, A Peasant Uprising In Bengal 1783 (New Delhi, 1972), a work that uses the colonial archive very effectively to demonstrate the effects of the revenue farming experiments in the early years of Company rule in Bengal and Jon Wilson’s, ‘A Thousand Countries to Go To: Peasants and Rulers in Late Eighteenth Century Bengal’ (Past and Present 189, November 2005).
1769-1770, the years that Cederlöf describes as a period of oscillating weather and the most severe droughts, famines and depopulation (p. 24), find a different description in Kaviraj: ‘As a cumulative effect of a long series of wreckless revenue experiments coupled with (my emphasis) scarcity of rains, Bengal was visited by a terrible famine in 1770 which took the lives of at least one third of the inhabitants of the province… Side by side with [the] profiteering of grains, there proceeded during the famine the unending extortion of revenue from the starving peasant. Warren Hastings himself pointed this out…the net collections of 1771 exceeded even those of 1768.’ (p. 9). The Rangpur peasant uprising or dhing of 1783 that Kaviraj sees as the inevitable response to the Company’s oppression is also the opening mark of the parenthesis that contains Ranajit Guha’s subaltern rebellions in his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, the closing mark being the Birsaite uprising of 1900.
To say that Founding the Empire is a very significant contribution not just to serious historical research on eastern and northeastern India but also to larger histories of capital, conquest and trade that are impossible to extract from protean nature, is to state the obvious. Cederlöf demonstrates a rigour of research and analyses that is now definitive of her work. With a brave sweep of history that brings together ecology, law, land and the state in a rare moment of cohesion, she compels the tangled and tedious details of the archive to tell a remarkable story of a critical half century in the history of British rule in India.
Sanghamitra Misra
Assistant Professor,
Department of History, University of Delhi
