Violent Fraternity

Indian Political Thought in the Global Age

Shruti Kapila

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691215754
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

A groundbreaking history of the political ideas that made modern India Violent Fraternity is a major history of the political thought that laid the foundations of modern India. Taking readers from the dawn of the twentieth century to the independence of India and formation of Pakistan in 1947, the book is a testament to the power of ideas to drive historical transformation.Shruti Kapila sheds new light on leading figures such as M. K. Gandhi, Muhammad Iqbal, B. R. Ambedkar, and Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of Hindutva, showing how they were innovative political thinkers as well as influential political actors. She also examines lesser-known figures who contributed to the making of a new canon of political thought, such as B. G. Tilak, considered by Lenin to be the "fountainhead of revolution in Asia, " and Sardar Patel, India's first deputy prime minister. Kapila argues that it was in India that modern political languages were remade through a revolution that defied fidelity to any exclusive ideology. The book shows how the foundational questions of politics were addressed in the shadow of imperialism to create both a sovereign India and the world's first avowedly Muslim nation, Pakistan. Fraternity was lost only to be found again in violence as the Indian age signaled the emergence of intimate enmity.A compelling work of scholarship, Violent Fraternity demonstrates why India, with its breathtaking scale and diversity, redefined the nature of political violence for the modern global era.

1

Political Theology of Sedition

The Extremists of to-day will be Moderates tomorrow, just as the Moderates of to-day were Extremists yesterday.

—B. G. TILAK¹

ON 29 JANUARY 1919, at the High Court in London, a defamation case opened to a packed gallery.² Two formidable foes came to court for a decision on the true nature of politics in India. One was Balgangadhar Tilak, famed if feared. Though superseded by Mahatma Gandhi as the icon of Indian freedom, Tilak had been anointed as Lokmanya or the ‘Will of the People’ in India and declared by none other than Vladimir Lenin to be the revolutionary figurehead of Asia.³ Tilak had sued Sir Valentine Chirol for defamation. Chirol was the former editor of the London Times, a public figure and a writer with friends in the imperial bureaucracy and the British establishment. At the time of the trial, Chirol was a ‘diplomat without portfolio’ and an emissary to the Paris Peace Conference convened at the end of the First World War.

Tilak came to London at the very end of his life, ostensibly to clear his name. As the presiding judge, Mr Justice Darling, reminded the court before the verdict, the law of libel regards the wrong that is committed in the defamation of character; and ‘the character of a person is something which, although it is incorporeal—you cannot see it or touch it—is a possession, and a person’s character is that which he has created for himself during the time which he has lived’.⁴ Mr Justice Darling could well have added that, much like character, ideas too are incorporeal and, as the trial itself had testified, moreover carried an enormous power to effect historical change. The trial was in effect a battle of political ideas, some of which had been authored by Tilak personally, and an assessement of their effects as these had been represented by Chirol’s pen. It would be no exaggeration to say that what was above all at stake in the defamation suit was how to ‘name’ Indian politics.

Undoubtedly, Tilak was the author of a new form of politics in India. A couple of years prior to his arrival in London, he had spent six years in solitary confinement in a prison in Rangoon. Indicted and punished for sedition in a high-profile case in 1908, he had spent a part of his prison sentence writing a monumental commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. His commentary, as will be elaborated below, identified a new horizon of the political, premised on the circumvention and denial of the state as the bearer of sovereignty. In articulating the anti-statist subject as the basis of sovereign power, through a reinterpretation of the Gita, and especially with regard to killing and violence, Tilak profoundly rooted the notion of political enmity in the internal and intimate.⁵

Tilak’s Gita was a conceptual articulation of the anti-statist subject that identified and delineated the political realm and action in relation to ethical questions of life and death, enmity and kinship, duty and sacrifice. Before his imprisonment in Rangoon, and prior to writing his most famous book, Tilak was already a public figure and had led a life punctuated by confrontations with the colonial state. These controversies included publicity-generating episodes of litigation and an insistent polemic conducted through two newspapers that he owned and edited: the Mahratta in English and the Kesari in Marathi. They encompassed a wide range of debates, whether as to the social question on the age of consent for women in India, the delimitation of law in relation to religion, or even the rights of princely rulers.⁶

Often cast, including by Chirol, as a Hindu revivalist who introduced religion into the political domain, or as an extremist in contrast to his liberal and moderate contemporaries, Tilak nevertheless inaugurated the political in India in a very precise sense, elaborated in this chapter, initially surpassing, through popular mobilization, the polite politics of dissent of the Indian National Congress, of which he was also a member. From converting religious congregations and festivals into occasions for declaring political and nationalist agendas to organising mill workers in western India, Tilak had earned both his sobriquet as ‘the Will of the People’ and his status as revolutionary figurehead: even though his brand of revolution—despite Lenin’s optimism—while radical indeed, was decidedly conservative.⁷

Tilak created what can be termed a new ‘political theology’. What is meant here is not simply the public life of religion. More specifically, political theology refers to the fact that foundational concepts of modern political life are undergirded by theology.⁸ In Western historical experience, theology, though potently associated even with political modernity, has more often than not been obscured behind modernity’s proclaimed universalisation, dominated by a particular form of rationalism commonly labelled ‘secularism’.⁹ However, as the controversial legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt famously stated, all modern political ideas, and ideas of the state in particular, are in effect ‘secularized theological concepts’.¹⁰ The work of theology and its persistence in politics is now being rigorously exposed, if not to radicalise political vocabularies then certainly to critique dominant and liberal accounts of religion, in approaches ranging from the French communist philosopher Alain Badiou’s theorisation of revolution to the American critical liberal-legal theorist Paul Kahn’s arguments on contemporary global warfare.¹¹

By contrast, in the Indian context, religion is all too visible, especially in its relationship to a political domain that arguably lacks a proper veil. Religion is thus often depicted, in contemporary scholarship and commentary on India, as a difficulty either vitiating relations between communities and neighbours or comprising a set of uncontainable public practices that the supposedly transcendent authority of the state seeks in vain to manage or restrict to the private sphere. The failure of the postcolonial state to distance religion from the political, and the heightened visibility of religion in general, are both widely perceived as problems to be overcome, especially in the wake of the recent electoral successes of Hindu nationalism.¹² Secularism in India has been understood at best, by those who oppose Hindu nationalism, as stillborn; or at worst, as argued by Hindu nationalists, as a malevolent form of hypocrisy. More than secularism, as the discussion of Tilak below will clarify, it is political theology, or the mutual re-articulation of religion and modern political concepts, that, brooking no boundaries, has instead clothed religion with new political concepts. Such a political theology, it is argued here, realised new and potent forms of sovereign power that could not be contained within the law.

Political theology, as Schmitt noted, is fundamental to sovereignty. Tilak is not only iconic in terms of the debate on sedition in India—his 1908 sedition trial becoming a cause célèbre—but at a more foundational level, as discussed below, he redirected and broke the imperial hold upon and legal regulation of Indian politics. Equally, Tilak represents the initial, foundational and open interplay between a religion and a politics that the imperial state not only sought to separate, but whose separation it zealously policed.¹³ Yet it was precisely because the realm of religion offered a relatively autonomous domain under colonial conditions that it became productive of a political theology that discovered sovereignty beyond the bars of its powerful statist cage. Tilak’s political theology, in short, established a crucial gap between sovereign power and the legal order, with consequences that persist to this day.

Sedition is the negation or the breaching of sovereign power and order. Even as sovereignty remains a ‘borderline’ concept entailing both preservation and the disruption of order, it is most palpable in its exception that reveals state authority making visible the normally invisible sovereign power. Yet, as Schmitt alerts us, sovereign power is neither quantifiable nor easily absorbed entirely into institutions or even the legal order. Lying inside but crucially also above the law, its own rules of exception allow for the visibility of sovereign power.¹⁴ Further, fundamental challenges to it render the otherwise opaque nature of sovereign power visible. As with Tilak’s case, the question of violence is salient to sedition. Sedition is the exemplary legal instrument and a point of ascription that pushes antagonism into an intense legibility defining not only the stakes of sovereignty, but also the limits of law. Sedition is thus essentially related to sovereignty.

The initial problem the colonial law of sedition in 1908 had to address in the face of a new anti-statist political theology of Tilak was how to name and label his political action and incendiary prose. In coming to London to clear his name a decade later through a libel suit against Chirol—even though he lost that trial too—Tilak aimed to curtail the endlessly expansive horizons of imperial sovereignty. The scholarship on imperial sovereignty has highlighted its ‘lumpy’ nature in its expansive hold over distinct territories that forced either its concentration or dilution, or negotiation with the people that it ruled over.¹⁵ Equally, the uncovering of the role of cultural mores, especially of race and custom, has gained attention insofar as it helps to explain the longevity of British imperial rule and its legal instruments.¹⁶ While cognisant of this robust and insightful scholarship, however, the emphasis here is not on the creation or preservation of British imperial authority.

In focusing on Tilak’s iconic confrontation with sedition, it is argued here instead that the law—and by extension the state—became the legible limit and visible point of departure for the inauguration of a new and potent measure of the political. Striking against the fundamental idea of the state as the monopolist of violence, Tilak’s rendition of the political decoupled law from violence. In related writings that brought Tilak to the zealous attention of imperial courts, violence was increasingly posited as a human and individual capacity that not only challenged imperial rule but also, significantly, created a new political subject. Such an anti-statist political subject was not defined by mere negation of the state or law. Rather, discove...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Political Theology of Sedition
• 2. Ghadar! Violence and the Political Potential of the Planet
• 3. Hindutva’s War and the Battlefield of India
• 4. Gandhi and the Truth of Violence
• 5. The Triumph of Fraternity: Sovereign Violence and Pakistan as Peace
• 6. The Philosophical Discovery of Muslim Sovereignty
• 7. A People’s War: 1947, Civil War and the Rise of Republican Sovereignty
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index