Civility in Crisis

Democracy, Equality and the Majoritarian Challenge in India

Suryakant Waghmore, Hugo Gorringe

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000333732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Staatsbürgerkunde & Bürgerrechte

This book critically examines the relationship between civility, citizenship and democracy. It engages with the oft-neglected idea of civility (as a Western concept) to explore the paradox of high democracy and low civility that plagues India. This concept helps analyse why democratic consolidation translates into limited justice and minimal equality, along with increased exclusion and performative violence against marginal groups in India.

The volume brings together key themes such as minority citizens and the incivility of caste, civility and urbanity, the struggles for 'dignity' and equality pursued by subaltern groups along with feminism and queer politics, and the exclusionary politics of the Citizenship Amendment Act, to argue that civility provides crucial insights into the functioning and social life of a democracy. In doing so, the book illustrates how a successful democracy may also harbour illiberal values and normalised violence and civil societies may have uncivil tendencies.

Enriched with case studies from various states in India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of political science, political philosophy, South Asian studies, minority and exclusion studies, political sociology and social anthropology.

1
Rural civilities

Caste, gender, and public life in Kerala

Sharika Thiranagama

The South Indian state of Kerala is famous for its public culture and inclusive public institutions that many Malayalis believe have ameliorated caste inequality. In this chapter, I investigate how these new forms of public life coexist with caste sentiments and practices. How do we understand civility not only in new forms of public life but also in new forms of private life? How do caste and gender intersect in texturing everyday experiences of civility?

I examine two modes of civility in public and private life. First, how do men who engage in a project of personal transformation such as those initiated by the CPI(M) (Communist Party–Marxist) in Kerala understand themselves as progressive and non-casteist? I suggest that forms of progressive civility in seemingly caste-free associational publics should be understood not as the elimination of caste lines but as their reconstitution. Second, while it is commonly accepted that caste is naturally practised in the ‘private’, I suggest that these ‘privates’ are, in fact, what I call a ‘private-public’ and what Gorringe calls a ‘semi-public’.¹ I argue that a civility that focuses on respect and equality should be examined through these private-publics and thus caste-textured lives.

The notions of both civility and democracy, while resting implicitly on conceptions of strong public lives, need to understand the gendered everyday experiences of forms of civility and incivility as constituted in private-publics rather than only in the formal associational public. While we commonly examine questions of public/private, civility and democracy within urban settings, I focus on the rural settings in which Dalits are overwhelmingly concentrated in India.

Is there an Indian Public? Multiple publics, gender, caste

As Blom Hansen describes, much scholarship on the modern public in India has focused on the emergence of new forms of public space and public representation in colonial and postcolonial India.² In addition, Kalpagam highlights the importance of understanding the colonial and postcolonial state to understand the emergence of new kinds of spatial as well as conceptual notions of the public rather than the more Habermasian view that the characteristic force of the public is its independence from the state.³

Kaviraj argues that notions of ‘openness’ to all and ‘universality of access’ were not part of an Indian repertoire of publicness.⁴ While there was a ‘rich repertoire of concepts of public responsibility, obligation, action’, this was not congruent with the idea of ‘universality of access to all’ individuals stripped of their social attributes.⁵ Instead, British colonial rule both introduced new kinds of public spaces within cities and implemented an understanding of the universal and open public within racially segregated colonial urban forms, whereby representation of the ‘masses’ was actively discouraged. Only some people (colonial officials and, to a highly limited extent, a comprador class of elite Indians) were considered as the ‘public’.⁶ Thus, the idea of a universal public and commons with the universality of access emerged through a colonial form which excluded as well as rendering the universal public as the site of recognition and worth. At the same time, this coexisted with multiple publics, structured by different languages, social interactions, and community transactions.⁷

These multiple publics were partly substantialised around emerging colonial concepts of distinct communities. Freitag shows how new public arenas and public forms emerged through new forms of religious and caste communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁸ Through cultural performances such as mass religious festivals where the city was the stage for religious display, internally divided groups formed distinctly modern, newly coherent Hindu and Muslim ‘communities’ that aspired to transcend sub-divisions and internal differentiations.⁹ The literature on the public and political action in South Asia has often stressed two arguments: that the public is necessarily supra-local and yet that publics, as they have emerged, have been the stage not for a universal mass (the state occupying the place of the universal nation) but for the display of community difference.¹⁰

This is connected to another cluster of scholarly work which examines what Blom Hansen describes as the creation of an ‘institutionalized public sphere … defined by vernacular newspapers, language standardization, and distinctive styles of oratory’.¹¹ The proliferation of language movements, as well as the growth of discreet and segmented publics around caste and community, he suggests, ‘have had the peculiar effect of enabling the vernacular publics to be experienced as culturally intimate in a way that is historically unprecedented’. This is recognisable to scholars working on South India, especially in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where linguistic nationalism has been central to contemporary identities and notions of selfhood. Hansen has discussed the violent political performances that cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• The Indian paradox: High democracy and low civility
• Chapter 1: Rural civilities: Caste, gender, and public life in Kerala
• Chapter 2: The Christian conundrum: Minority citizens and the incivility of caste
• Chapter 3: Disjunctions of democracy and liberalism: Agonistic imaginations of dignity in Bihar
• Chapter 4: To be a Hindu citizen: Politics of Dalit migrants in contemporary West Bengal
• Chapter 5: Modernity without alterity: Caste associations and Hindu cosmopolitanism in contemporary Mumbai
• Chapter 6: Towards greater civility: Public morality and transversal queer/feminist politics in India
• Chapter 7: Inter-caste accommodations and minimal civility in rural India
• Chapter 8: An uncivil city*
• Afterword*
• Index