Interrogating Professor Partha Chatterjee

An Interview by Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty

Partha Chatterjee is widely recognised as India’s most important political theorist. His contributions to the theories of nationalism and popular politics are not only taught in universities everywhere, but are also used as a theoretical framework by scholars across the world. Prof Chatterjee was also a founder of the influential Subaltern Studies group, which radically changed the study of social sciences in India. His many books include, Nation and its Fragments, Politics of the Governed, I am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today, The Princely Impostor, The Black Hole of Empire, The Truths and the Lies of Nationalism. Prof Chatterjee is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University. He is also a well-known theatre actor and playwright. 

NMC:  When I am asked to describe myself, I don’t ever say that I am an Indian, except if I were speaking with a foreigner. I take my Indianness to be almost as natural (and therefore absent) as being a human being. This would be true for all of my friends. Admittedly, this is a narrow social group – urban, upper-caste, affluent, English-speaking, young adults. Yet, I am told that social media platforms like twitter and adult WhatAapp groups are full of people claiming to be ‘proud Indians’ – some go so far as to proclaim that, for them, ‘India comes first’ (or ‘Nation first’). What explains this difference – between some people who do not consider Indianness to be their primary identity, while others consider it to be an all-engulfing, defining identity?

Partha Chatterjee: Declarations of identity are always contextual. How you want to identify or differentiate yourself depends on who you are speaking to. In fact, when you identify yourself, you also differentiate. As you say, if you were with foreigners, you would want to identify yourself as Indian because the others are not Indian. But among your friends, that is a meaningless identification because everyone is Indian. Other marks of differentiation become relevant there. For instance, whether or not you were Punjabi or Tamil or Bengali or Manipuri. If you were a Manipuri in Manipur, your primary identity could be Meitei or Kuki or Naga (as the terrible events there are reminding us). When marriages are negotiated in many Indian villages, the relevant identities may be caste and clan (jati and gotra). When I was growing up in Kolkata, a frequently asked identity question was ‘Are you ghoti or bangal (West vt East Bengali)?’ Or perhaps ‘Are you Mohun Bagan or East Bengal (Popular rival football clubs in Kolkata)?’ It is possible to say that each individual is a bundle of identities, one of them being activated in a particular situation. But that is also a little misleading. One is not always carrying a list of identities in one’s pocket. If you were put in an unfamiliar situation, you may in fact develop an identity of which you were not aware earlier. In many US cities, for instance, immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh develop a common desi cultural identity to distinguish themselves from other ethnic groups.

The phenomenon of super-patriotic Indians who declare themselves ‘Indians first’ occurs in one such new context – that of social media. That has become a public space of political contestation. To say ‘I am Indian first’ is a way of expressing a partisan identity, of distinguishing oneself from others who are supposedly more regional or perhaps global-cosmopolitan in their political preferences. The context in which such declarations are made will usually clarify not only who the speaker identifies with but also who he/she distinguishes himself/herself from.     

NMC:  There is increasingly an implicit equation between being Hindu and being nationalist now. One cannot imagine a Tagore today, denouncing nationalism as an ideology, while continuing to assert his patriotism, and even Hinduness. How did this change in our public sphere take place? Is there any specific time-period that you can identify where the dominant ‘secular’ consensus got replaced?

Partha Chatterjee: As a critic of nationalism, Tagore was exceptional even in his time. He often took political positions that were unpopular, as for instance in his unsparing criticism of the armed revolutionaries or his opposition to Gandhi’s non-cooperation and khadi movement.

If you look at the rise of nationalism in India, there was always a significant, perhaps even a dominant, view that the Indian nation was ancient, with a civilizational core that was Hindu. Since there was no pressure at this time to define the legal-constitutional form of citizenship in a future Indian nation-state, the question of secularism was not an urgent one. This began to change from the 1930s when Muslim leaders expressed their anxiety about their place in a democratically ruled India. They demanded constitutional guarantees against majoritarian rule by Hindus. That is when a specific constitutional discourse of secularism began to emerge, especially in the writings and speeches of Nehru. It became even more urgent after the bloody partition of the country to promise those Muslims who chose to stay in India that they would be protected as equal citizens of the country. Secularism was developed as an ideology that distinguished itself from the demand that since Pakistan had been formed on the basis of a religious division, Muslims must either leave India or accept Hindu dominance.

It is true that secularism was the dominant ideology in the Congress until the 1970s. But it is doubtful that there was ever a consensus over it. It is significant that even though the matter was discussed in the Constituent Assembly, the term ‘secular’ was not used even once in the Constitution. The terms ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ were inserted into the Preamble of the Constitution during the Emergency. There is a lot of debate about the reasons for the decline of secularism as the dominant ideology of the state and the rise of Hindu nationalism from the 1980s. It has been argued that the pressures of electoral politics, especially in northern and western India, pushed the Congress leadership into compromising secularism in order to adopt a soft-Hindu stance. This was particularly obvious after the debates over the Shah Bano case. The fallout of the Mandal agitations and the mobilization of backward castes in 1989 then prompted the BJP to launch the Ram Mandir movement in order to claim a unified Hindu voting bloc. The momentum created by that agitation has intensified ever since.       

NMC: In your book ‘The Truths and Lies of Nationalism’ you have pointed to the implicit ‘us’ vs ‘them’ language we use when we talk of India’s past. Even those Hindus who profess to be liberal/secular make the claim to tolerance in the name of Hinduism being a tolerant religion and ‘we’ Indians (Hindus) being accepting of all outsiders. We imagine that by being Hindu we somehow have an older connection with ‘India’ than people who follow other religions. How and when did this come about?

Partha Chatterjee: The idea that India is characterised by a civilizational history that is ancient, and hence Hindu, goes back to the 19^th century. It was propagated by British and German scholars and was picked up by early Indian nationalists who explained the presence in India of other peoples such as Parsees, Jews and the early Christians by invoking the Hindu spirit of tolerance and accommodation. Islam was, of course, associated with conquest, as was Christianity in the recent period. But there too the argument was made that Hindus came to tolerate those religions being practised in their land. Even Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, which emerged in protest against the sacrificial religion of the Vedas and the rigidity of the caste system, were, it was claimed, accommodated within a Hindu social order.

The strongest argument against this claim came in the 20^th century when Hindu-nationalist ideologues such as Savarkar argued that the spirit of toleration was a sign of weakness which Hindus must get rid of. He was particularly scathing against Buddhism which, he said, by preaching non-violence and universal brotherhood, had left Indians unprepared to defend themselves against foreign invaders.

The assumption that the core of Indian nationhood lies in its ancient Hindu civilizational heritage makes those who speak Sanskritic languages and participate in Sanskritic traditions the natural constituents of the Indian nation. Others, such as speakers of Dravidian languages, the adivasis of central India who were thought to be too uncivilized to belong to the great Hindu tradition and the tribal peoples of the northeast who were radically different both racially and culturally, would have to, as it were, pass the test. This has been the underlying assumption for at least 150 years.   

NMC: The history that I have studied in school is almost entirely the history of the Indian nation – as if everything that happened in this geographical region was destined to finally express itself in Indian nationalism. As you have pointed out in your book, our textbooks privilege the ‘great empires’ (Mauryan/Mughal) because their territories covered a large part of what we know as India now. Why does the nation state need its citizens to internalise this kind of historical ‘truth’?

Partha Chatterjee: School education in every country is the training ground for producing disciplined citizens who will have the necessary skills to carry out various tasks in government, the economy and the social services. Schools everywhere act as a machinery of standardisation – from language, manners, dress, learning aptitudes to cultural accomplishments. Hence, you have national systems of examination to grade all school students on a single comparable scale. Needless to say, teaching material, such as textbooks, are also standardised. There is little scope for varied interpretations or critical questioning. Exceptional students are exposed to other accounts if they are encouraged to do so by their teachers or if they are curious enough to read outside their prescribed textbooks. This is a situation that prevails in most countries. The ideology that dominates the ruling groups is also reflected in what is taught in schools.

In many countries where there is universal secondary education, most students, except for a small number who go to expensive private schools or religious schools, go to public schools. In India, school education has become more stratified. Upper-middle class students in cities go to private schools under the Central boards, whereas most other students go to government-funded schools that come under State boards. The former group studies in English; the latter in the regional languages. This creates a major bifurcation in the school system. The State boards usually have their own textbooks that do not always correspond to those in the Central boards. The history books in particular often reflect the orthodoxies that prevail in the regional culture.

NMC: I am studying political science in high school, and we are learning about the constitution, and the structure of the post-independence Indian state. We learn nothing about the debates that took place, and the political contests that ultimately led to the victory of ‘Nehruvian Socialism’. Do you think that India would have looked very different if Gandhi and Patel had lived longer?

Partha Chatterjee: These exercises in counterfactual history are often entertaining but, of course, they don’t change anything. History is not reversible. But yes, I do think Gandhi’s assassination led to a period when the Hindu right-wing, which voiced the resentment and anger of partition victims, was temporarily discredited and de-legitimised. This, and Patel’s death, allowed Nehru to exert control over the Congress, change the laws of Hindu marriage and succession and introduce economic planning and rapid industrialisation. Gandhi may have opposed large-scale industrialisation and probably would not have approved of a legislature changing the rules of marriage and inheritance which were based on religious practice. But then, Gandhi’s influence over the Congress leaders had also waned.  

NMC: How has India’s politics changed – if at all – with the LPG reforms of 1991? I have read elsewhere that the reforms led to the decline of the power of the bureaucratic elite and the intelligentsia and led to the rise of the mercantile/business elite. Would you agree with this characterisation? If yes, has this change had anything to do with the rise of the BJP since the 1990s?

Partha Chatterjee: Yes, the structural reforms of 1991 did lead to a decline in the importance of the public sector and, along with it, in the dominance of the bureaucracy. There was also a decline in the virtually monopoly power of a handful of business houses and the rise of several new big capitalist firms. The deep association of the middle class with government service began to decline and careers in the private sector became more and more attractive. Alongside, there was also a huge expansion of privately owned print and television media and advertising. All of this meant that the influence of capitalists over the urban middle classes and of those who aspired to a middle-class lifestyle greatly increased.

Did this have an effect on the rise of the BJP? Not directly. In fact, to the extent that the BJP rode on the Ram Mandir agitation and then the killing of Muslims in Gujarat, the corporate houses were wary of the political style of the BJP. The social legislations of the first UPA government in which the Left had a strong voice, the subsequent corruption scandals of the second UPA government, and a carefully cultivated bid to promote Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, as a pro-business leader who can bring in necessary structural reforms for economic growth produced the massive support of the business houses for Modi in 2014. It was more for Modi as PM than for the BJP as a party.

NMC: I have started reading Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ and his argument on how ‘print capitalism’ helped in the creation of the national community. What role does news media and social media have in producing a political consensus in today’s world? What is the role of political videos and memes in a country like India where a large number of people find it difficult to read, even when they are officially ‘literate’?

Partha Chatterjee: It is because most people in India do not read that we find there has been a much greater influence of orally circulated stories, poetry and songs and of visual performance in the spread of religious and social messages in India. The great Bhakti and Sufi faiths were propagated through poetry, music and congregational performance. Even in more recent times, cinema and television have had much greater influence than the printed text. Anderson speaks of the American and European experience where a combination of universal school education and the publishing business produced an imaginary community where millions of otherwise unrelated people could share the common experience of witnessing national events such as elections or wars or sports victories by reading newspapers. In the Indian case, it is a more recent phenomenon where television channels, and now social media, both promoted by big capital through ownership and advertising, which bring such national events to millions of people by using a mix of visual, aural and textual media.  

NMC: Finally, How do you see the rise of AI, fake-news, deep-fakes, ‘surveillance capitalism’, in the context of politics in the coming years? Is a politics of resistance at all possible any more? What form would such a politics take?

Partha Chatterjee: I don’t have a good answer to this question. There is no doubt that these new technologies will be widely used. But it is not necessarily given that they will only be used by one side. After all, print, visual, aural and other technologies have also been used earlier as tools of resistance. It is a question of developing adequate tactics for spreading the message of resistance. But since I don’t use social media and have no idea of how they actually work, I am the last person to give you advice in this matter. Here, you are far more knowledgeable than I am. When I get a chance, I will try and learn something from you.

Interviewed by Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty, The Shri Ram School, Moulsari

No part of this interview can be reproduced in any manner without a citation. The citation below can be used.

Maitra Chakravarty , Nayantara. “Interrogating Professor Partha Chatterjee .” De Omnibus Dubitandum , 20 June 2023, artful-writer.com/2023/06/20/interrogating-professor-partha-chatterjee.