Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road...

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

...who is that on the other side of you?

– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

 

THIS article is about a third; a conceptual third born out of a reflection on Ambedkar’s lived experience of being ‘outside the fold’ and Foucault’s genealogy of ‘the thought of the outside.’ It is also about a third register, a register beyond the dual register of the (Hindu/Brahmin) Self and the ‘lacking others’ of the (Hindu/Brahmin) Self, a register beyond the Self and its ‘appropriated others’.

In other words, it is about a dialogue between what I call the third and what Ambedkar and Foucault call the outside; outside in two senses: being outside (the Hindu/national/constitutional fold) and thinking (about) the outside or outsided-ness; i.e. being experientially or existentially outside, or being empirically outside and the concept of the outside, a Foucauldian concept that takes the ‘thought of the outside’ beyond the simple inside/outside binary as also beyond a mere spatial understanding of inside/outside.

The article is thus a reflection on the mutually constitutive dyad – ‘inside-outside’, and ‘exclusion-inclusion’ – incumbent upon constitutionalism and developmental democracy, a dyad that is at times empirical and at times conceptual, a dyad that lends itself in turn to the question of ‘giving voice to the unheard or space to the outside.’ It asks: What if, exclusion or outsided-ness is not the only problem we are confronted with? What if, inclusion, the terms of inclusion, is the new problem we are confronted with in the rhetoric around inclusive development and participatory democracy (as also apparently inclusivist Hinduism)? What if, one is always already included?

Let us call this the problem of ‘being inside yet outside’¹ or the problem of ‘exclusion through inclusion’. The Vedic dasi Uma Chakravarti invokes, who occupied the outhouse and who looked excluded, looks paradoxically included if one takes the outer boundaries of the entire household, the somewhat unseen boundaries of the upper caste Hindu mansion into consideration.² In that sense, today’s inclusion is not inclusion by extending the boundary; rather today’s inclusion as exclusion is more insidious. Hence, if one has to talk of exclusion, one will perhaps have to ask: What is it that the (logic of the) mansion excludes? The issue is thus not to have just a ‘room of one’s own’ or ‘have room’, but to see whether there is room, room for the radically Other in what could be called the logic of the mansion.

 

One has to see, as Ambedkar suggests, how the larger structure of the ‘Hindu village is a working plant of the Hindu social order’; an order that excludes through inclusion. Metcalfe saw Indian village communities as ‘little republics’. Ambedkar sees them, unlike Gandhi and Tagore, as ‘republics of humiliation’. To him, ‘the Indian village is the very negation of [the idea of] a republic’ (one may ask in this context: is the modern secular socialist ‘republic’ called ‘India’ fundamentally different from the ‘Hindu village’?).

Further, what if (dalit) exclusion, even if there, is not easy to remedy; given errors of commission (i.e. structural exclusion), as against errors of omission (i.e. mere human forgetting); given foreclosures, as against mere ‘putting aside’? It is not that we have forgotten to include someone but that our structures are conditions for exclusion. Which is perhaps why Ambedkar says: ‘Hindus cannot destroy the caste system without destroying their religion.’ He adds: ‘I thought for long that we could rid Hindu society of its evils and get the depressed classes incorporated into it on terms of equality. ...Experience has taught me better. I stand today absolutely convinced that for the Depressed Classes there can be no equality among the Hindus because on inequality rest the foundations of Hinduism. We no longer want to be part of Hindu society.’ What if as my colleague and friend Deepti Sachdev shows – to touch the (lived experience of the) Other – the Other rendered untouchable, to inaugurate touch, to be touched, be touched by the Other, requires a fundamental re-signification of Hindu/Brahmin forms of life?

 

What if the critical question is not, as Freud shows in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, who is included, but what is included? The real task, or the ‘real of the task’ (the movement from the ‘real task’ to the ‘real of the task’ is a movement from a rather simple understanding of what is real, what is really real as task to the Lacanian real; the real of the task thus gestures to the difficult, the impossible, the inassimilable nature of the task) is to include, say in the context of higher education, not the dalit student, but the ‘dalit’ of the student.

Indian developmental democracy moves from one ‘whom’ (of exclusion/inclusion) to another ‘whom’; Ambedkar, on the other hand, marks the what. The what of exclusion/inclusion, the what of humiliation (as also hurt perhaps) – where humiliation as a lived experience perhaps exists somewhere in-between (i) discourses of exploitation-oppression emanating from the modern secular ideological tradition and (ii) discourses of pain and suffering emanating from medical and spiritual traditions and consequently the what of social affirmation/justice – an affirmation not reducible to constitutional essentialism.

 

This is important because the context of public discourse in India seems to be dominated by a pet language triad: democracy, development, and secularism, and one needs to ask whether terms like equality, justice and freedom address the essence of humiliation (and hurt) and the longing for dignity and self-respect in dalit life forms. Perhaps what Ambedkar called the ‘twice-born character of Indian civil society’ overwhelms the essence of Ambedkar’s own constitutionalism.

Further, sociological and anthropological accounts of practices of untouchability hardly give us any idea of the lived experience of such practices or of processes of psychological anticipation or ontological wounding in the inner world of dalit subjects.³ Which is why Ambedkar moves from the somewhat western casts of the Constitution to ‘casts of the mind’ and the ‘archaeology of untouchability’. This takes him in turn to The Buddha and his Dhamma.⁴

Given the question of the third and the outside, as also questions of exclusion and inclusion, it would not be out of context to see what then could be the genealogy of our ‘models for control of individuals’ as against the ‘two major models’ Foucault observed ‘in the West’.

It seems to me that essentially there have been only two major models for the control of individuals in the West: one is the exclusion of lepers and the other is the model of the inclusion of plague victims.⁵

I think we still describe the ways in which power is exercised over the mad, criminals, deviants, children, and the poor in these terms. Generally, we describe the effects and mechanisms of the power exercised over these categories as mechanisms and effects of exclusion, disqualification, exile, rejection, deprivation, refusal, and incomprehension; that is to say, an entire arsenal of negative concepts or mechanisms of exclusion… However, there is another model of control that seems to me to have enjoyed a much wider and longer success⁶ …Plague replaces leprosy as a model of political control, and this is one of the great inventions of the eighteenth century, or in any case of the Classical Age and administrative monarchy.⁷ …We pass from a technology of power that drives out, excludes, banishes, marginalizes and represses to a fundamentally positive power that fashions, observes, knows and multiplies itself on the basis of its own effects.⁸

 

Foucault shows how there have been only two major models for the control of individuals in the West. What have, then, been our models of dealing with the Dalit? How does our social formation (the Indian village and the Hindu religion being Ambedkar’s objects of analysis) perpetuate a culture of untouchability and hegemony over the untouchable? This is important because as Foucault suggests in the Birth of the Clinic, there have been and will be other distributions of the body and of power.⁹ Foucault hence seems to suggest that the genealogy of subject formation in non-western settings could be different from that in the West. Any attempt at integrating Foucault in non-western settings must keep this background in mind. In other words, one must turn Foucault (like Marx and Freud) ab-Original while deploying Foucault in non-western settings. Foucault offers us a methodology to revisit and make sense of our experiences; he does not give us the content of our experiences.

 

One thus has to be sensitive to the Other distributions of the body and of power. Ambedkar calls it graded inequality: Ambedkar shows how the type of inequality from which caste ridden society suffers is of a different kind and is altogether irreducible to the bourgeoisie/proletariat, white/black, or more abstractly the friend/enemy model, because its logic divides the dominant and dominated groups – groups that could be called ‘intimate enemies’ – through obsession with the hierarchization of micro-differences within. The relation with inappropriate(d) Others is not a straightforward one. What Ambedkar calls subordinate imitation and the reduction of the Other to a ‘lacking/dwarfed/impure image of the self’ complicates the relation.

Frameworks of simple exclusion/inclusion, simple frameworks of exclusion/inclusion do not work when it comes to the dalit question and to questions of untouchability. It is here that Ambedkar raises the problem of explanatory or interpretative models; he shows in a paper titled ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’, how to ‘advance a theory of caste’ one needed to confront head on western authors whose explanations of caste rested on theories of racial difference.

 

This brings us to the problem of substitute signifiers or the problem of presencing (as against the problem of absence or silence). This is somewhat akin to the case of the student who was never present in class. But the roll-call register of the master showed that the student was indeed present. Somebody had answered for the absent student when the master called her name. Thus, she found a place in the roll-call register of the class while she was never present in the class. Consequently, she found a place in the (colonial) archive.

The problem with the third is not just that she does not find representation. The problem with the third (at present) is not just whether she can get herself represented or not; the problem with the third is not just whether she can speak or not; the problem with the third lies also in the fact that she is sometimes present(ed) in the register of the hegemonic; her name figures; someone else (re)presents her; she comes to be (mis)represented in the register of the hegemonic through numerous substitute signifiers.

Thus the third or the ‘new subaltern’ is present as raw data in this age of data-retrieval while all the while she was or is never there; someone else sees to it that she, she as the absent third, is (re)presented in the register. All this begs the question, why does the discourse of constitutionalism and developmental democracy (as also apparently inclusivist Hinduism) miss the third? Why do we remain complicit in the foreclosure of the third?

Is it because our thought-world is circumscribed and restricted by the logic of the two – bourgeoisie/proletariat, man/woman, white/native, colonizer/colonized, developed/primitive, normal/mad …which is never really two, which in actuality is One …which in actuality is the logic of the One and the Same. This is because one arm of the binary (proletariat, woman, native, colonized, primitive, mad…), is not another, but is simply the negative, the dark, the derogatory, the lacking underside of the other arm (bourgeoisie, man, white, colonizer…) of the binary.

 

Is it because the postcolonial political economy of the Indian state framed the question of inclusion in a particular way? Given a mixed economy, the post-independence path fixed by the Indian policy makers was that of centralized allocation of resources which led to state directed control of the market economy. First growth (2nd five year plan) and then growth with redistribution (5th five year plan) became the mantra of India’s state sponsored development objective for the period 1950-1990. Finally, the era of liberalization policies began with the decontrol of the market economy in the early 1990s, which subsequently was deepened in the next couple of decades. These policies led to the setting up of a competitive market economy, with the role of the state gradually truncated; this meant a de-emphasis on state directed allocation of resources.

In the post-liberalization period, the initial emphasis was back on growth with the second objective of redistribution relatively demoted; this was roughly the period from 1991-2004. As the benefits of economic growth were soon found to be accompanied by exclusions, rising income inequalities and equally obstinate social inequities, the attention reverted back to the question of income gap and poverty once again, and in that context, a reassessment of the transition route of the Indian economy was seen as essential. This inaugurated a particular kind of framing of the concept of inclusion.

 

But what is inclusion? Social encircling? Human embracement? Encroachment into? Encompassment of? Or is inclusion the involvement of an organ, the spread of a malignant disease, the involvement of the spleen and liver in say gastric carcinoma? Or is inclusion akin to the presence of cellular inclusions: say for example inclusion bodies: a non-living mass such as a droplet of fat in the cytoplasm of the cell? Or is inclusion the presence of a solid, liquid or gaseous foreign body enclosed in a mineral or rock as in geology? Thus biological or geological understandings of inclusion could stand as conceptual-ethical guards on usual social science understandings of inclusion.

The biological and the geological guards are also important because most social (science) interventions in the name of inclusion seems to be accompanied by an initial contempt for the situation as a whole, including its victims. Also, today’s incitement to discourses on inclusion coincide, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World (in this article that of the dalit) is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity – in short, of its sub-humanity.¹⁰

This article is hence an attempt at problematizing the given of ‘empirical’ exclusion without an attention to ‘conceptual’ exclusion (as also the ‘concept of exclusion’) and the ‘critical history of thought’ including ‘the thought of the outside’. The domination of the idea of empirical exclusion works to set the terms of locating and including the excluded; the ‘excluded other’ thus is at one and the same time excluded and (potentially and if possible actually) included. This new found obsession with exclusion-inclusion also owes its popularity to the current globalization model.

In the globalization model, there is nothing that is potentially outside; everything, every little ‘thing’ lies potentially within the realm of inclusion. Even if it is in the outside now, it could potentially be within the realm of the inside. Graham and Slee¹¹ argue that the term inclusion suggests a ’bringing in’; a term that ’presupposes a whole into which something (or someone) can be incorporated’; it seeks to ‘include the Other into a prefabricated, naturalized space’.¹² The motto of inclusion arises from economic, moral, technological and teleological desires.

 

On the other hand, critiques of capitalism, including Marxists such as Hardt and Negri,¹³ consider the logic of inclusion as having, with globalization, paved the way for the creation of one globe – Empire. The world has already shifted from the stage of imperialism to empire building; the global has in effect subsumed the local. While they would still criticize capitalism and uphold a future beyond capitalism, this inclusion must be deemed positively in the sense that this process by default creates the subjects of the globalized world – the ‘multitude’ – who are now in a position to initiate change within and of Empire itself; transformative politics becomes global too and address flows/nodes of Empire. Rather than objecting to inclusion, such critiques of global capitalism forward a different path of globalization that by making use of the global networks of inclusion would uproot capitalism and create a new global order.

 

As against this, there are the proponents of exclusion, who would vouch for a separate space that would resist assimilation and inclusivism. They would defend the local as a distinct conceptual space of other-ness (where the ‘other’ is not the other of the Same as in Irigaray but the other of the Other) marking its difference from the Global. In the South, the position of post-developmentalists has forcefully positioned the local Other or the Other local in its resistance to global capitalism.¹⁴ In this face-off, the centre/capital is striving to assimilate the ‘third world’/local in the face of strident resistance from the ‘third world’/local itself. They would critique the ‘inclusivists’ for their moral war, their economic plunder enacted within the ambit of cultural imperialism, as trying to generate a forced assimilation of Third World into the privileged Centre. For them, exclusion is not necessarily a problem; rather, they problematize the logic and modality of inclusion.

What then are our relationships with the (dalit) Other? How did Ambedkar respond to the question of inclusion/exclusion? During the 3 October 1954 All India Radio broadcast, Ambedkar declared: ‘My social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words: liberty, equality and fraternity. Let no one however say that I borrowed my philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has roots in religion and not in political science.’

 

But which religion? Perhaps a religion Religion cannot host. Perhaps a religion premised on what Ambedkar calls the ‘destruction of religion’; ‘what the Hindus call religion is really Law [or rules and not principles] or at best legalized class-ethics’ leading to a ‘more or less anxious and servile conformity to externally imposed rules’; ‘such a religion must be destroyed and ...there is nothing irreligious in working for the destruction of such a religion.’ Ambedkar asserts: ‘Before we adopt another religion, we have to wipe out the culture of this religion [Hinduism].’ Because the Hindus, Ambedkar felt, are ‘wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born’.¹⁵

With the turn to Buddhism (and the conversion) late Ambedkar or the Other Ambedkar has perhaps achieved what Phule and Periyar had failed to achieve: ‘making a conscious non-Hindu identity a collective material and radicalizing force in India.’¹⁶ The archaeology of caste or of untouchabilty thus takes Ambedkar to a critique of Hinduism and of a society based on Varna: ‘To a slave his master may be better or worse. But there cannot be a good master; ...a society based on Varna or caste is a society which is based on a wrong relationship.’

From the 1930s Ambedkar’s life was to delineate two strategies for emancipation. The first was critical legal constitutionalism. The other was a turning away from Hinduism in particular and religion in general, not to land in secularism, but elsewhere. The elsewhere is a form of Buddhism, official Buddhism cannot host. The elsewhere is Dhamma. Hence a new yana – navayana as against Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana. Ambedkar is, as if, looking for a third way for the third (i.e. the dalit), a middle path, an in-between that puts under erasure the two poles – the two poles of liberal discourse and theological discourse – the two poles of theologizing liberal political views and politicizing Buddha’s views – the two poles of nibbana as self-conscious liberation and Aufklarung or eclairissement as civic achievement of liberty and equality – the two poles of personal moksha and social moksha – the two poles of an ab-Original Enlightenment and an ab-Original religion – religion as social, which runs counter to the commodified discourse of much of pop-Buddhism.

 

Ambedkar’s Buddhism hence does not metastasize into liberation theology; one pole cannot be reduced to the other without surplus. The two poles are sharply marked in terms of two essays titled ‘Buddha or Karl Marx’ and ‘Religion or Dhamma’. Religion has conventionally been seen as personal salvation/moksha. Dhamma is social. The lone man can do without Dhamma. Society cannot. Society, according to Ambedkar, has three alternatives: anarchy and dictatorship – both lead to the loss of liberty – and a third way: Dhamma.

 

Footnotes:

1. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998.

2. U. Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 1990.

3. G. Guru and S. Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2012.

4. The Buddha and his Dhamma. Edited, introduced and annotated by Aakash Singh Rathore and Ajay Verma. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011.

5. M. Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975. Trans. Graham Burchell. Picador, New York, 2003, pp. 323-329.

6. Ibid., p. 44.

7. Ibid., p. 48.

8. Ibid., p. 48.

9. M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. Taylor & Francis e-Library, Routledge, 2003.

10. A. Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. Verso, London, 2001.

11. L. Graham, and R. Slee, ‘Inclusion?’ Paper presented at Australian Association for Research in Education, Annual Conference, Sydney, 27 November-1 December 2005. Available online at www.aare.edu.au/05pap/gra05189.pdf. Accessed 19 November 2015.

12. L. Graham, ‘Discourse Analysis and the Critical Use of Foucault.’ Paper presented at Australian Association for Research in Education, Annual Conference, Sydney. 27 November-1 December 2005. Available online at www.eprints.qut.edu.au/archive. Accessed 19 July 2015.

13. M. Hardt and A Negri, Empire. Harvard University Press, Combridge, 2000.

14. A. Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995; P.K. Basu, Globalisation An Anti-Text: A Local View. Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2008.

15. Annihilation of Caste. Edited and annotated by S. Anand. Navayana, New Delhi, 2014.

16. G. Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards An Enlightened India. Penguin India, 2008.

 

References:

B.R. Ambedkar,. Words of Freedom: Ideas of Nation. Penguin India, New Delhi, 2010.

M. Foucault, ‘The Thought of the Outside’, Critique 229, June 1966, pp. 523-46.

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004.