Books
POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN ANCIENT INDIA
by Upinder Singh. Harvard University Press, Delhi, 2017.ARGUABLY the doctrine of non-violence has played a foundational role in constituting the modern imaginaries of ancient India. The anti-colonial struggle led by the Congress party, especially leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, helped in popularizing this myth or imaginary of ancient India as non-violent. They argued that the constitutive basis of Indian civilization has always been non-violence, in stark contrast to modern western civilization which, in their opinion, was based on speed and violence. The primary credit for this ‘myth making’ goes to Gandhi who championed this idea in a phase when the groups believing in violence were growing in the struggle for national liberation.
It is important to acknowledge that even when Congress and Gandhi enjoyed hegemonic status and had a defining influence in shaping a vision for India, there were many groups and individuals supporting the use of violence. Equally over time, there have been numerous intellectual debates and discussions coinciding with the everyday prevalence of socio-religious and political conflicts in India. Unsurprisingly, in our contemporary political discourse, the continuing justification of violence tends to question not only the practice but even the relevance of the ideals of non-violence.
In such a context, Political Violence in Ancient India by Upinder Singh provides a timely, rich and critical account of the discussions and debates around political violence in ancient India. Although her attempt in this book is to study the history of political violence as an idea, Upinder Singh’s exploration of the subject is more like that of a political theorist. Using a variety of sources to studying ancient India, her engagement and narrative style is exemplary and will help open up new kinds of inquiry into political and social thought in ancient India.
Singh’s narrative style is easy and accessible. Although a dense 600 pages, the book is an absolute tour de force in terms of its engagement with the various sources and schools of thought in ancient India. The book presents a panoramic view of different schools of thought and intellectual traditions in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism and texts like Dharmashastra, Arthashastra, Ramayana and Mahabharata. Situating her enquiry in the larger context of state formation and kingship relations in ancient India, Singh presents not only how violence was not just rooted in the practices of state formation and maintenance of order but also how it had been richly debated, discussed and made invisible by numerous scholars and intellectuals. The author explores the theory and practices of kingship and empire building over 1200 years from 600 BCE to 600 CE through a detailed study of texts, inscriptions, coins and artistic representations.
There are altogether five chapters in the book excluding the Introduction and an analytically rich conclusion which discusses the travels and circulation of key texts and ideas beyond the Indian subcontinent. The first three chapters – Foundation, Transition, and Maturity – cover the entire period of twelve hundred years and establish how violence or the danda was regarded as inevitable even in Jain and Buddhist philosophy despite their singular emphasis on non-violence. Even Ashoka, once he relinquished war and supported Buddhism and took to promoting social and religious harmony through his numerous rock edicts, did not completely rule out the use and role of violence. The last two chapters are about ‘the state’s involvement in warfare against other states, and its age-old conflict with the wilderness and its human and animal inhabitants’ (17). The fifth chapter on Wilderness presents an interesting argument about the complex relationships that existed between ‘state’, people and forest dwellers. Some of these complexities and conflicts continue to resonate in our post-colonial politics as well.
Ancient Indian political thought is very rich in its deployment of conceptual categories for understanding or explaining social and political realities. There have been interesting developments in terms of the use of the concept of Dharma which encompasses not just all spheres of individual and collective lives but also shapes, possibly even determines, the meaning of various other concepts such as religion, politics, duty, violence or non-violence. It would perhaps be too simplistic to ascribe any hierarchy among these concepts here. Nevertheless, despite the inherent slipperiness of the term, Dharma did provide a basis for not just the organization of social and political life but also as a resource for intellectual debate and discussion. One defining feature of ancient Indian political thought has been its engagement with various facets of an issue in an effort to retrieve/excavate different layers of meanings embedded in a concept. So in this book one finds a rich account of debates on the issue of political violence in ancient India. And Singh has done commendable work in bringing together all these traditions to present a wide range of responses around the question of political violence in ancient India.
Mining Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain texts, the author argues that in all these traditions, despite the emphasis on ahimsa paramo dharmah (non-violence is supreme religion) violence, both in worldly life and more specifically in the life of a king, is considered inevitable. Contrary to popular imagination, Jainism and Buddhism also recognize the role and inevitability of violence in the life of a king. Many texts even go to the extent of celebrating violence.
Generally speaking, there are two major traditions of political thought represented by the Dharmashastra and Arthashastra within the Brahmanical perspective on state and politics. Buddhism and Jainism constitute the other major traditions. Though substantially differing from each other, they also share many common ideals. Their views on Dharma, kingship, power and violence reflect these differences and similarities and Singh effectively captures such distinct and yet overlapping argumentation. Fortunately, all these concepts are discussed and debated, not in absolute terms but as relative and context specific, making the reading even more rewarding.
We are introduced to an engaged, rich and critical narrative of progression of political argumentation in ancient India on the issue of political violence which equally continues to affect our contemporary public-political discourse. In doing so, she draws upon not only epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana but also Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntala and Raghuvamsha and Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa; and the realpolitik argumentations in Kautilya’s Arthashastra to Kamandaka’s Nitisara that combines the realpolitik of Kautilya with the ethical percept of the Dharmashastras. All these treatises show that kingship is inherently embedded in violence, and that any invocation of absolute non-violence for a king is not just undesirable but can lead to disastrous consequences.
Even more interesting are the responses and justifications for the use of political violence. Nevertheless, it is critical to underscore that in addition to Kautilya’s Arthashastra, other texts and scholars have also made similar effort and, therefore, the question of violence and non-violence has been discussed from a range of perspectives. In the most elaborate exposition, even when the use of violence by the state or king is acknowledged, recognized or celebrated by the later poets and theorists, there has simultaneously been a persistent questioning of the use of violence.
The two chapters on War and Wilderness examine the everyday embeddedness of violence in state politics/kingship and the conflicts and tensions between ‘state’ people and forest dwellers. The inevitability of war is elaborately discussed in almost all the major traditions of political thought in ancient India. Buddhism and Jainism too considered it unavoidable. There is an elaborate discussion and treatment of war in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Kamandaka’s Nitisara. Kautilya meticulously classifies war into three categories: open war (prakashyuddha), crooked war (kutayuddha) and silent war (tusnimyuddha) to discuss in minute details the tools and techniques of warfare. The Mahabharata and Ramayana elaborately discuss the nature, inevitability and justification for the war. War and warriors, heroic efforts and courage became the celebrated topics for later poets and writers. War and violence were not only seen as normal in state relations but also celebrated and commemorated. However, equal emphasis has been given to the negativities of war. Both the Mahabharata and the Ashoka pillar edicts are testimony to the rich and critical engagements with the question of war in ancient India. Ashoka’s renunciation of war for what he called Dharmavijay is probably the most radical response to war based on an absolute ‘moral commitment to nonviolence’. However, even in his formulations we do not find a total negation of violence as Ashoka continued to justify capital punishment as also the use of force against the border and forest people.
The chapter on Wilderness provides a rich account of the imagery of forest and animals in the normative framework on state and kingship or as a royal symbol in ancient Indian political thinking. Broadly speaking, there are four ways in which the forest is imagined: first, ‘forest as a rich economic and military resource’; second, ‘forest as a place of exile for political rivals’; third, forest as a site of royal hunt’, and the fourth and the most problematic as, ‘forest as the abode of people who posed a violent political threat to the state’. And thus there have been ever present tensions and conflicts between forest dwellers and inhabitants of the state. In a sense the forest became a playground for not just royal hunting but also the assertion of royal power. Extracting forest resources, taming animals and controlling forest dwellers were seen as integral to the attempt by an ambitious ruler to expand his territory and assert his authority. And Singh’s work rightly explores these to better understand the larger political processes and argumentation over violence and non-violence in ancient India. In fact, these conflicts and tensions continue to influence our post-colonial politics two thousand years later.
This book also presents a sketchy account of travel and the circulation of Indic texts and ideas beyond the Indian subcontinent. Singh explores not just the power and influence of these ideas and texts in shaping the political process in the subcontinent, but also their impact on the political and socio-religious processes in Indonesia, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Thailand. These critical and elaborate explorations help open up new ways of doing and studying Indian political thought.
This book is a novel attempt in terms of treatment of subject by situating it in the larger context of debates and discussions over the use of violence and paradoxically, extolling the virtues of non-violence in contemporary India. Political violence is situated in the larger corpus of concepts in ancient India such as dharma, artha, moksha and so on. One question that arises is: can we think of violence and non-violence in ancient India without relating them to the concept of dharma, no matter how slippery that term might be? This is not to prioritize one concept over the others but to understand the overlapping and interrelated worlds of kingship, religion, state and violence in ancient India.
Another question which merits deeper exploration relates to the ideal of non-violence as promoted by Gandhi, Congress and many modern Indian thinkers. Was this merely ‘myth’ making or selective use of history? Equally, has the emphasis on the promotion of peace, order and harmony through non-violence been central to Indian political thought including in modern India? And is it also the case in other parts of the world and civilizations?
We must acknowledge the innovative ways in which Upinder Singh has attempted to engage with our past. A tour de force, the book successfully explores the multiple layers of argumentation between the extremes of violence and non-violence by situating them in the larger context of history, religion, state formation and scholarly debates and discussions in ancient Indian political thought.
Mithilesh Kumar Jha
Teaches political science, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati
NATURE AND NATION: Essays on Environmental History by Mahesh Rangarajan. Permanent Black, Ranikhet (in association with Ashoka University), 2018.
Rangarajan’s book offers a rear-view mirror insight into India’s ecological history and the opportunity to learn from it. ‘The past matters as it can illustrate how the present came about. By knowing better what choices were made in the past, when and why, the dilemmas of the present can be seen in a more holistic way’ says the author, and he is right. So many modern day conservation policies have been shaped by India’s colonial past as well as by the leaders who inked our first wildlife laws that continue to shape our ecological future.
The book titled Nature and Nation is a collection of 10 essays and is an exhaustive reminder of the events that shaped current conservation policies. The journey from a British colony to becoming independent, to an economy that hunted wildlife till the passing of the Wildlife Protection Act (1972), was a long and arduous one and only a scholar of history of Rangarajan’s eminence with an eye for detail could capture it in an intriguing way that makes for scholarly reading as well as engaging storytelling.
A political History of the Lion in India (Chapter 3) makes for an interesting read and how the lion became a symbol of power as well as of the modern Indian state fits in well with the central theme of the book. The record of hunting over 57 lions in the region of Delhi seems hard to imagine but it is a fitting reminder of the factors that have shaped the rapid decline of the species. Post-independence, the clash between middle class enthusiasts and the local people again provides an insight into competing visions and how Gir evolved from a princely reserve to a major tourist destination.
I found Chapter 5 – Striving for a Balance – particularly fascinating as it delves deeper into the decisions taken during Indira Gandhi’s tenure – a prime minister who is often lauded for the bold decisions she took in favour of wildlife and conservation. Gandhi in the 1970s and 1980s faced the same dilemmas that confront contemporary leaders today, especially the debates that are centred around large dams. While Gandhi may have taken a bold decision by not giving the go ahead to the Silent Valley project, Rangarajan reminds us that she also said no to the Moyar Dam that would have flooded the entire Mudumalai National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu. These and other nuggets of information makes ‘Nature and Nation’ a lucid read with just the right level of detail thrown in.
Rangarajan takes us back in the past to remind us of battles that were fought before, the ecological dilemmas that previous leaders were confronted with and the decisions they took. The author takes us on a journey from colonial India to the present, reflecting on how our natural world shaped up – the challenges it faced and the political interventions that preserved large tracts of nature.
Rangarajan is a historian par excellence but he is also a political commentator of the present. He does touch upon the present times in the final chapter – The Politics of Ecology – but this stops at 1995. One had hoped to read in greater detail about our current times and that is my singular disappointment about the book. One is left wanting to know more about Rangarajan’s sharp incisive views of current conservation policies, especially in the light of his tremendous knowledge of the past.
That said, Nature and Nation is an imperative read for anyone interested in the ecological history of South Asia and how we managed to preserve our rich biodiversity amidst many upheavals in the past
Bahar Dutt
Environment journalist, Delhi
IN PURSUIT OF PROOF: A History of Identification Documents in India by Tarangini Sriraman. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2018.
WE are today so subsumed by the coerced ubiquity of Aadhaar and its various inefficacies and encroachments that it’s possible that we have lost sight of the true nature of the relationship between identity documents and welfare processes in India which, in many ways, goes back to the very inception of the state. Indeed, to understand the popular making of ID documents, as Tarangini Sriraman argues in her fine new book, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India, we must consider various dispersed moments throughout the country’s history: from the move towards producing ration cards in wartime colonial India, the everyday mobilization of a patchwork of documents during the time of the ‘License Raj’, the arbitration over evidence of refugee status post Partition, the issuing of distinctive identities to slum dwellers, and, finally, to the recent move towards a so-called ‘unique’ digital ID.
‘In Pursuit of Proof’ as Sriraman, a professor at Azim Premji University, concedes, isn’t a comprehensive history of identification documents in India. Yet, it makes for essential reading for those of us trying to understand the present moment, where every day we have before us new evidence of the state’s sovereign power, of its ability to use identity as a precondition for welfare. ‘Identification documents function simultaneously to reinforce the state as an arbiter of people’s welfare claims and render it liable to popular manipulations,’ writes Sriramanan. ‘If they occasionally make people and their representations legible, they more often obscure and render opaque the claim-making and the welfare-allocation process.’ It is this dialogue between the state and the individual that forms the core focus of ‘In Pursuit of Proof’. Or as the author puts it, the book hinges on the basic premise that one cannot separate a question over how a welfare claim is pieced together from the question over the resources that the state possesses in validating claims made by people seeking benefits and entitlements.
Sriraman tells the story of the relationship between welfare and identity through five crisply written chapters. She uses the ration card which, as she writes, has seen various different recasting of moulds of citizenship, on account of a migrating urban poor, as her research site. In the first chapter the book harks back to the decade leading up to Independence and the decade that followed. This period, she argues, helped set the tone for the broad mechanics of the welfare state, in that it predicated the grant of entitlements to the existence of stable and enumerable households. Colonial authorities, she points out, were interested in the ration card purely as a means to alleviate wartime scarcity in resources, but the administration found that they could achieve this end only by documenting home and homeless subjects.
In the second chapter, Sriraman shows us how the ration card, which came to serve as both a marker of family and as a ground for corruption, solidified a power inherent in the ID document which, in turn, instilled in low ranking officials of the bureaucracy an ability to fluidly mend the rules to serve different purposes. The ‘ID document can lure, tantalize and animate officials located within a culturally bureaucratic world,’ she argues. During the period generally designated as the License Raj, ‘officials crafted, on the go, affidavits and declarations of the kind that had no precedent and no basis in existing administrative legislations.’ This mending of the rules, and this place that the ID document came to occupy in Indian society, Sriraman argues in the third chapter, came to be deeply interwoven with the manner in which refugees that came into Calcutta, Chandigarh and Delhi, among other places, staked their claims for citizenship. The ability of refugees to muster ID documents in their possession, ration cards, or employment letters, or any other such piece of documentation, she shows us, was critical to their being successful in ‘narrativising’ their identity.
The fourth chapter, which focuses on the creation of identity in the Delhi slums in the 1990s, is perhaps the most fascinating account contained in the book and, in and of itself, tells us a larger story about the relationship between welfare and identification. The move, initiated under the helm of the former Indian Prime Minister V.P. Singh, to enumerate the homeless, and to issue to them three kinds of identification documents: a ration card, a card that came to be called the V.P. Singh card, and a metallic token, Sriraman argues, helped set up a ‘tenuous legal infrastructure of identity.’ The intention here was to nullify the absence of an identity document serving as an impediment to the poor from receiving welfare, but it forced the administrators of the plan, the book tells us, into making different manners of enquiry to determine proof of identity.
Finally, ‘In Pursuit of Proof’ tackles the digital ID, the Aadhaar card that has become omnipresent, without which it has become impossible for any person in India today to stake a claim for welfare. This chapter shows us how the Aadhaar architecture simply cannot serve as a means to fortify the welfare state. The ID penalizes, Sriraman argues, those who inhabit the ‘in-between modes of dwelling’. The porters at the Delhi bus terminal, for example, ‘can neither be the ideal urban residents nor homeless subjects because they cannot demonstrate permanent residence and because they dwell in their place of work.’ Ultimately, as the book contends, a valid claim can neither be purely electronic nor purely documentary.
Suhrith Parthasarathy
Advocate, Madras High Court
