Contemporary India Final Assignment

Q.) According to Ganguly, Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds foregrounds the ‘discursivity of

caste.’ Comment on this approach with examples from the book.

The Discursivity of Caste: A Postcolonial Reading

Introduction

In this paper I try to engage with Debjani Ganguly’s conception of the discursivity of

caste as developed in her book, Caste And Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives.

After the linguistic turn in criticism, there is definitely nothing novel about attributing

discursivity to phenomena of various kinds. Caste is no exception to this rule. Yet, as one

of the claims of Ganguly’s work could be, there are several domains from which an

enquiry into the discursivity of caste can be made. Ganguly specifically adopts

postcoloniality as a vantage point to foreground her claims about the discursivity of

caste. My engagement with her claims in this study will be an attempt to elaborate on

her concerns and formulate a critical understanding of them. In other words, I will try to

understand the formative assumptions that constitute the core of Ganguly’s work.

At the outset, I would like to clarify how this paper understands the terms, discourse

and postcoloniality- two conceptual referents, which are central to understanding

Ganguly’s arguments.

Discourse: As Michel Foucault elaborates, discourse “is constituted by the difference

between what one could say correctly at one period (under the rules of grammar and

logic) and what is actually said.” (Foucault, 1991; 63) A study of the discursivity of caste

would then take as its object the conditions of the possibility of a particular idiom of

articulation that caste assumes in a given time period and the relations between this

articulation and other possible articulations, previous or simultaneous. I intend to show

in this paper that Ganguly’s effort has been to foreground the discursivity of received

notions of caste by way of ‘unearthing’ alternative articulations of the same- caste as

performance. This, I think, in certain ways fails to engage with the relational nature of

articulation itself. Articulation can be understood as ”any practice establishing a relation

among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory

practice.” (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; 105) My proposition is that Ganguly’s reading of

“caste as performance” as opposed to the dominant form of caste as identity does not

consider in its full adequacy the mutual imbrications of the multiple discursive

formations that shape the articulation of caste in postcolonial India.

Postcoloniality: As David Scott explains, the term postcoloniality as a political-

theoretical project, has been concerned principally with the decolonisation of

representation. Scott’s contention is that there is in the present an “after

postcoloniality” which urges criticism to move beyond the political implications of

nationalist anti-colonial movements and their claims on ‘self-representation’, to

understand the postcolonial political in its own right. “What is important for this

present”, writes Scott “is a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and

projects through which modernity is inserted into and altered the lives of the

colonized.” (Scott, 1999; 17) When Ganguly talks of postcoloniality, she primarily

operates within the first sense of trying to deconstruct representational strategies that

have gone into talking about caste. She uses postcoloniality as a vantage point for a

hermeneutic reading of caste, as a position from which a better understanding of dalit

‘life-worlds’ can be obtained. For her, these life-worlds signify ‘countermodern’ ways of

inhabiting the present, or in another sense, alternative modernities that are beyond the

scope of those ‘practices, modalities and projects through which modernity’ or at least

the normative version of it frames our lives. (Ganguly, 2008; ix, 25) My attempt in this

paper will be to contrast her understanding/critique of modernity from the postcolonial

vantage point to other different critical understandings (like Scott’s for example) of

modernity from the point of view of postcoloniality. It is my contention that this

contrast might be a symptom of an emerging tension within the corpus of postcolonial

academic writing, a tension that produces the very stakes of postcolonial criticism.

The construction of the argument of Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds

In the first part of her book, Ganguly attempts to “signpost hegemonic discursive

formations that have enabled the staging of specific articulations of caste.” These

formations she names as orientalism, nationalism, marxism and as a critical academic

stance; postcolonial historiography. It is necessary to specify here that following Laclau,

Ganguly marks these formations as “theoretical horizons” which are “pragmatic

attempts to subsume the real into the frame of symbolic objectivity that will always be

overflown in the end.” (Ganguly, 2008; 24) This ‘overflowing’, as I understand it, can be

of two types. In one sense, there can be different symbolic or articulatory possibilities

that result from the pragmatic attempts to enframe the ‘real’ which disturb the

objectivity of the given symbolic arrangement. In a second sense, the ‘real’ is

fundamentally inimical to any symbolic arrangement and is thus unavailable for any

conceptualization. The recovery of this ‘real’ then is the overflowing which results from

the pragmatic attempts of the (postcolonial) intellectual. In the second part of the book,

Ganguly shifts focus from the hegemonic articulations of caste to its performative

dimension, the aspects of living with caste that exceed conceptual determinations by

the aforementioned hegemonic discourses.

In what follows I will try to understand the implications of understanding caste in its

performative dimension by choosing suitable examples from the second part of the

book. Of course, the arguments about the discursivity of caste and its conditions of

possibility as a category are made in the first section of the book. Yet I believe that it is

through the multiple examples of the non-conceptual, affective forms of caste practices

or practices of dalits that the proper implication of the discursive nature of caste is best

brought out.

The performative dimension of caste

I read Ganguly’s description of ‘dalit life-worlds’ as an attempt to posit an outside to the

hegemonic discursive frameworks that create a semblance of symbolic objectivity

around the conception of caste1. This outside refers to the “multiple performative sites

at which caste intersects with other cultural practices and produces multiform life-

worlds and complex and efficacious modes of subjectivity.” (Ganguly, 2008; 8) Ganguly

clarifies that her interest in the performative dimension of caste does not merely

concern its practices in liberal democratic politics as distinct from the national-political

pedagogic2. Instead, her interest in this dimension of caste practices leads her to

concern herself with those kinds of practices that cannot be conceptualized in terms of

the liberal democratic historicist setup, those that produce ‘conceptual excesses’.

Ambedkar’s Mythography: Ganguly’s foremost example in this regard is Ambedkar’s

attempts at crafting an alternative Indian historiography. Her analysis of Ambedkar’s

historical texts locates in them a “mythographic” register which “effect an internal

dialogization of the authoritative historiographical mode itself”, introducing fragments

from the past not to verify his claims but to creatively mould them into the necessity of

the present. To the extent that Ambedkar’s mythographic register can be said to be the

beginnings of an alternative understanding of the historical formation of Indian

modernity, Ganguly’s claim that these narratives lay beyond the frameworks of liberal

1 The tracing of these ‘multiple sites’ is indeed the ‘overflow’ that Ganguly generates which is of the second kind that I have described before. 2 We can draw parallels here with Nicholas Dirks’ assertion that caste in the postcolonial present cannot be thought of as class as well as “a straightforward clone of some Western sociological category (as substantialized ethnicities, bloc political voting groups, and so on).” (Dirks, 2003; 295)

historicist thinking can be acknowledged. But what is important to point out in this

regard is that the generation of such a register can itself not be understood in

separation from the colonial engagement with India’s past. The very necessity of finding

resources in the past, of conceiving of a past that was, is an act that is historical. Even in

his text The Buddha and His Dhamma, the resort to the invocation of the supernatural,

which Ganguly suggests is an act of faith on part of Ambedkar, can be understood as an

epistemic enterprise3, of making meaning of certain aspects of life. Woven within a

definite narrative schema at a particular historical moment, the supernatural is invoked

to literally bring forth the object of faith, to make faith mean something4. This does not

mean that this invocation is instrumental to Ambedkar’s political line. I am trying to

point out that any articulation, as I proposed earlier, is relational in nature. The very

description of this invocation as a non-secular way of being can only be made in the

mode of a transaction with a secular-historical discourse5. The power of this discourse

does not necessarily lie in the prohibition of its ‘opposites’; it lies in their production

too6.

3 M.S.S. Pandian drawing on Valentine Daniel’s work has described the change brought in by colonialism as one from an ontic discourse (offering a way of being in the world) to an epistemic discourse (ushering in a way of seeing the world). (Pandian, 2007; 12)4 Ganguly quotes Ambedkar, “Every great religion has been built on faith … faith cannot be assimilated if presented in the form of creeds or abstract dogmas … (Faith) needs something on which imagination can fasten, some myth or epic.” (Ganguly, 2008; 164) The sense in which Ambedkar talks about religion is not any different from the very modern institutions that we have come to know by that name. 5 Notice for instance, that every time Ganguly cites a piece from Ambedkar to mark his use of non-secular idioms, he is pairing it up with that against which it is being posited- “It must be an incantation, instead of being read as an ethical exposition.” (Ganguly, 2008; 164) Or for instance- “The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual. There is nothing material or social about it.” (Ganguly, 2008; 160)6 Talal Asad’s critique of the secular as a site of power constantly tries to make this point. (Asad, 2003)

Performativity, writes Judith Butler, is “not a singular ‘act,’ for it is always a reiteration

of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the

present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.” (Butler,

1993; 12) A performative act, Butler goes on to show borrowing from Derrida, is always

a citational practice. Yet it is also by virtue of this reiteration that constitutive

instabilities of the norm are exposed, “as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as

that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that

norm.”(Butler, 1993; 10) As long as we are talking about caste, we are already referring

to a set of normative variants of the phenomenon/category of caste. Thus any practice

that is nominated as a caste practice can ‘perform’ the destabilization of the norm it

seeks to reiterate or cite only by appearing unintelligible. Ganguly is making a similar

claim regarding caste in its performative dimension. But I fail to understand how her

examples can be made to be cases of this unintelligibility. The drafting of a

mythographic register to infest the present with instances of a mythical past can be read

as an example of a contestation over the past. This might be a novel way of playing with

the norms of writing history but within the nationalist corpus a resort to a ‘time that

was’ is in no way novel or counter-normative. In fact the execution of such a gesture

confirms the entry of a new player within a game whose terms are determined by

colonial discourse. The results of this game are of course not predetermined and in this

can be found the scope of ‘uncanny’ beings and practices7.

7 I believe that this is the import of Partha Chatterjee’s assertion that anticolonial nationalisms are derivative and yet different in the way they are imagined. (Chatterjee, 2006)

The life-world of Sushila: When Ganguly gives the example of the neo-Buddhist Sushila

operating in multiple channels of faith as a rejection of non-secular transcendence that

is advocated by dalit politics, I believe she is giving an example of ways of one such

uncanny ways of being in the world. Within a modern framework, Sushila’s predicament

lies in the fact that as a Hindu idol worshipper she does not belong to the dalit

emancipation narrative. Neither can her idol worshipping habits be qualified in terms of

her Buddhism. She is that subject whose multiple identities defy the imperatives of

nation-state classifications. The object of postcolonial enquiry would then be how and

why the nation state and normative modernity requires identities to be fixed? What is the

‘emancipated’ dalit activists’ discomfort with multiple identities and what does this tell

us about the very ‘unfreedom’ of the emancipation doctrine itself? No doubt Ganguly is

concerned with all of these questions, but the mere pointing out of the uncanny neither

tells us how the certitudes of the modern nation state are disturbed by it nor does it

problematise the terms in which universal emancipation is granted to the dalit subject. In

other words, the post-secular reading that she attempts does not deal with the construction

of the secular in particular ways that disallows thinking of it in any other way. The

secular remains an imperative with the nation-state that her reading does not help wrest

from it. She does not make the constitution of the uncanny as the uncanny, the object of

her investigation.

The discursive production of the performative dimensions of caste

I think that the predicament of these performatives that Ganguly makes much of in terms

of the conceptual excesses they pose is precisely that their status as uncanny or

catechristic is fixed discursively by the imperatives of those very hegemonic formulations

that have arranged all the terms of thinking our past, present and future. Alternatively, I

am trying to say that while Ganguly’s claim that caste in these hegemonic discursive

formations is inevitably constructed as an object of policy, progress, amelioration and the

complicity of ‘disinterested’ social sciences with all of this is undeniable, the role of

modern discursive production is not limited to such sites only. The constitutive outsides

that Ganguly posits to modern discursive formations might as well be constituted

outsides8. Performatives of the seemingly non-secular/non-modern varieties can be as

much an engagement with the terms of these hegemonic formations. The articulation

effected by these performances no doubt often results in an overflow of the hegemonic

discursive formations by the way of the changes wrought in the identity of each of its

constitutive elements. These moments of overflow are of crucial political valence (for eg.

the Mandal agitations and counter-agitations). But it is precisely the function of modern

power or its hegemonic labor to reconstitute the symbolic matrix to contain this overflow.

Herein, I believe, lies the crucial implication of foregrounding the discursive nature of

caste. There are no doubt dalit life-worlds like other life-worlds. But both the translation

of these life-forms to the political category that is caste as well as the lack of this

translation can be attributed to the workings of modern power. As in the case of Sushila,

the everyday life of faith can indeed be a different imagination of freedom than the one

that is envisaged by radical dalit politics of a particular variety. But in no way does that

necessarily imply that the powers of the secular-modern are given a slip. ‘Freedom’ can

8 Hasn’t this always been the case with shudra-atishudras, that their status has always been allotted to the outside of the social formation. Can we ignore the role of modern power in the reproduction of this constitution of ‘outsides’?

be as much an effect of this power, which as Foucault has argued, can be both

individualising as well as totalizing (Foucault, 2003). Does that mean that there can be no

scope for politics within this tight-knit grid of modern power? Like Ganguly I would

disagree. I also think, much in tune with her, that this politics can be one that revolves

around questions of sovereignty. But in my understanding the site of this politics is not

some ‘affective’ outside, some form(s) of popular sovereignty that operate in a non-

adversarial framework in relation to authoritarian state sovereignty which embody in turn

some “genuine consensus” built into them (Ganguly, 2008; 125). I have tried to show till

now that such frameworks are often produced by modern power formations. My

contention is rather that it is within the translation from dalit life-forms to categories like

caste that the possibility of politics inheres. Of course this politics can assume both

adversarial and non-adversarial forms in relation to state sovereignty. Sovereignty when

thought out to be at stake in this politics is conceptualized precisely in terms of a

discursive re-articulation of existing social realities. Or in a different sense, it can be

thought out in terms of a manifestation of violence.

Sovereignty and Caste Violence: The ‘real’ break with the discursivity of caste

A particular implication of Ganguly’s proposals could be that if living with caste can be

thought of in terms of an ethical way of being in the world, untouchability or the

violence associated with it can as well be a part of it. Untouchability of course has been

declared as an act of violence, atrocity by the law. Ganguly’s counter-argument here

could well be that this fixes the meaning of the phenomenon. This is once again

undeniable. Within a life-form that is constituted by caste, the status of untouchability is

that of a banal reality. There is nothing extraordinary about it. But what is to be

understood is that once declared as illegal and thus violent, the continuation of this

practice is made manifest as some act or principle of sovereignty. Thus it does not

remain a benign force and becomes a site of laying claims to the disputed sovereignty of

the nation-state by disturbing its monopoly on violence. The point I am trying to make is

that the ‘everydayness’ of untouchability, a constitutive feature of the caste system can

itself no more be imagined as a site where popular forms of sovereignty are played out.

In fact it is here that the stakes of the politics of high sovereignty are laid out and the

certitudes of the nation-sate are really contested. It is here that the conception of caste

in terms of an object of policy, amelioration and progress gives way to the unruly threat

of violence, which always contains within itself an excess of meaning. It is in the

phenomenon of caste violence that both the discursivity of caste and the ethics of caste

practices meet their true limits. Violence is the site where the real overflows the

objectivity of the symbolic and raises its ugly head. It is precisely the containment of this

violence that the discursive production of caste has been trying to effect since caste as a

phenomenon and a category surfaced on the symbolic horizons of the entity that we

now know as India.

Conclusion

In foregrounding the discursivity of caste, I believe, Ganguly is proposing two different

things. Firstly, she is trying to present the category of caste as historically contingent.

Secondly, she is offering a catachrestic9 reading of caste, offering seemingly ‘absurd’

alternative formations through which caste is ‘lived’, which cannot even be rendered

intelligible in terms of the available discourses on caste. Indeed she attempts a

redrafting of the narrative space within which caste can be talked about by a trope of

the overflowing of this space with the ‘lived reality’ of caste as a set of relations one has

with one’s everyday life, and which have no connection whatsoever (hence the clause of

absurdity attached to them) with the discourses which make intelligible the very

phenomenon of caste. I repeat here my contention that in redrafting the narratives that

make caste intelligible to us, Ganguly is not paying enough attention to the relational

nature of each articulation that is made in a particular problem-space. There is no

attempt here to comprehend the possibility that if caste is historically contingent then

the production of contingency and change is not the work of some ‘invisible hand’ but

the resultant of active political agency. The fact that hegemonic discourses themselves

have had to be rearranged signifies the necessity produced by counter-hegemonic

catachrestic processes, which operate within given narrative spaces to constantly

modify them.

Alternative narratives of belonging and becoming that have resignified caste in recent

times have resulted in the resignification of the very practices of democracy and

9 Ganguly borrows the term catachresis from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak usage of it to describe the specific nature of the postcolonial world’s transactions with European constructs. Inasmuch as catechresis describes a transaction, it denotes the absurd or wrong use of a term that has its origin in a foreign discourse. In this transaction, Ganguly notes, is foregrounded the agency of the postcolonial intellectual “in transforming the narrative space within which these constructs can be re-articulated.” (Ganguly, 2005; 14)

sovereignty. This has happened precisely because of (and not in spite of) novel political

practices within the nation-space that have time and again rendered its certitudes

problematic. Dalit politics or the collectivity that it imagines has time and again made

claims of self-respect and dignity- claims that can hardly be classified under the rubric of

bourgeois equality. The problematic of the discursivity of caste has to be understood

within this framework rather than from an imaginary vantage point of an ‘outside past’,

from which modernity is viewed as a repressive instance of rule, all other instances of

sovereignty being thought to be benign and under threat from it. Any engagement with

Foucault’s work should alert us to the essentially productive character of modern power.

Thus an understanding of the affective dimensions of caste practices cannot eschew a

study of the possible conditions of the production of this affect. Particular forms of

affect need not be thought of as incompatible to modern ways of living if we are to take

arrive at any understanding of postcolonial modernities. This also does not mean that

they have to be thought in instrumental or strategic terms to arrive at their political

value. Affective relations have their histories and as Anne Laura Stoler has tried to show

in a different context, the colonial rule had as much of an interest in states of affect as it

had in other domains. (Laura Stoler, 2001)

The unavailability of caste as a specific phenomenon in excess of its modern discursive

production can be attributed to the very special role it has to play in both the dislocation

of the Indian social and its reconstitution. This specialty of the role is such that each

hegemonic formation (for eg. nationalism, Hindu communalism and in recent times

even the realm of production relations) has had to reconfigure itself in reference to the

phenomenon of caste. In reference to this historicity of caste and its shared constitutive

premise with the idea and the practice of the nation, an unfettered dalit life-world and

its consensual existence within a given scheme of things definitely produces “conceptual

excess”. But the aesthetic reproduction of this life-form cannot really share a critical

relation with the very modern conditions of its production. The postcolonial critic’s

intervention is already circumscribed by the imperatives of modern productive power.

In such cases indeed as I had tried to point out before, the postcolonial critical

enterprise becomes a project fraught with the tensions that have arisen from the

specific production of the postcolonial political within modern institutionalized power

structures. Scott’s “after postcoloniality” might just prove to be a more effective vantage

point to interrogate these power structures than to merely try and empty specific

categories of their colonial (and national) epistemology, to secure them above and over

colonial representations.

To conclude then in Dirks’ words, “It is….as impossible to return to a (neo)traditional

view of caste that can escape either the critiques of privilege or concerns that caste is

concealing the accumulated violence of both old India and new- traditional as well as

modern operations of domination, exploitation, exclusion or erasure- as it is to suggest

any longer that caste in nothing but class, that it is likely to die a quick death under the

pressures of the modern, or that it might be reborn as a straightforward clone of some

Western sociological category (as substantialized ethnicities, bloc political voting groups,

and so on).” (Dirks, 2003; 295)

References:

Asad, Talal- ‘Introduction: Thinking about Secularism’ in Formations of the Secular:

Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Chatterjee, Partha – ‘Whose Imagined Community?’ in The Nation and Its Fragments:

Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 2006.

Dirks, Nicholas B. - ‘Caste Politics and the Politics of Caste’ in Castes of Mind:

Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Delhi: Permanent

Black, 2003.

Foucault, Michel- ‘The Subject and Power’ in Rabinow and Rose eds. The Essential

Foucault, New York: The New Press, 2003.

-‘Politics and the Study of Discourse’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies

in Governmentality, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991

Ganguly, Debjani- Caste And Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives, Delhi: Orient

Longman, 2008.

Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal- ‘Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms

and Hegemony’ in Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy, London: Verso, 2001.

Laura Stoler, Anne- ‘Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response’ in The Journal

of American History, Vol.88, No.3. pp.893-897. (Dec., 2001).

Pandian, M.S.S.- ‘Introduction: The Politics of the Emergent’ in Brahmin and Non-

Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, Delhi: Permanent

Black, 2007.

Scott, David- ‘Introduction: Criticism after Postcoloniality’, in Refashioning Futures:

Criticism After Postcoloniality, Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1999.

Submitted by:

Bhuvi Gupta

M.Phil (CS)

Roll No. 09/M/271