INTERVIEW

Partha Chatterjee Interviewed by Manu Goswami

Manu Goswami (MG): Some thirty years ago you became a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. Yet your graduate training was in the heartland of Cold War American social science, in game theoretical analysis of international relations. Did this early encounter breed distrust of mainline social science or just hasten your involvement with subaltern studies? Partha Chatterjee (PC): That is a history that somebody else should disentangle. Im not the best person [laughing] to analyze this early biography. It was largely serendipity that I ended up in the political science department at the University of Rochester, the cradle of what would become rational choice political theory. I went there in 1968, when I was just twenty years old. It wasnt necessarily that I wanted to do what they taught, but I had a certain facility in mathematics. Obviously, I was still growing up and hadnt quite found myself intellectually. But what was attractive, and looking back I can say this now, was the intellectual rigor of an essentially axiomatic deductive analysis. The kind of model building that became fashionable at that time was part of a very positivist philosophy of science. The idea that you could model political processes in a rigorous way had a certain attraction. In the specic eld in which I trained, and where quite interesting work was done at that time, many of the usual difculties of political analysis could be set aside. In thinking nuclear arms strategy, it was plausible to conceive that the decisions were being made by very, very few people accustomed to hardheaded rational calculations. This was the ideal situation that game theorists like to think about. You could assume rational players who had a clear idea of what their information was, what their uncertainties were, and what their objectives were, and you could then devise strategies like a chess player would. This was the late 1960s, when talks for limiting the number of missiles were just beginning between the United States and the Soviet Union. There were lots of counterintuitive ideas that this literature produced at that time. It was better strategy, for
Public Culture 25:1
DOI

Partha Chatterjee

Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press

10.1215/08992363- 1890504

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instance, to let the other side know exactly what arms you have rather than keep it a secret, as old- fashioned conventional military thinking would counsel. I was interested in not only how people came upon these kinds of arguments but also the way states and statesmen actually thought and worked. But it was a very, very restricted eld. I could see even then that attempts to generalize these methods to elections or the way political parties mobilized votes would not work. I went back to India immediately after my thesis was defended and realized that this work simply had no prospects. There was not a second person with either the knowledge or interest in this mode of analysis! So I just gave it up. Its just one of those things that ended almost as soon as it began. MG: It was an early experience of incommensurability. PC: Yes, it was. Although, in my most recent book, The Black Hole of Empire, I do go back and think about the way in which the global imperial system of the nineteenth century transitioned to the twentieth- century order, rst with the League of Nations system of mandates and trusteeship, and then later to the postwar global order. And I realized that the work I had done many years before was still relevant as an analytical framework. After almost forty years, I could refer back [laughing] to the work I had done as a graduate student. MG: When you began your career, your scholarly career, India was an object of social science research, not an instigator of social science theories. This is a major shift that your own work and the larger trajectory of subaltern studies track. PC: It is completely true that in the discipline of political science, including political theory, India was entirely an object of analysis. There were no scholars, no institutions that were recognized as having any role to play in producing theories for what would become the eld of Indian politics. Yet, interestingly, this was the time when sociology, or what was then named Indian sociology, was a recognized eld with several practitioners. There was a clear awareness that there were institutions and practices that required a rather more specialized set of conceptual frameworks and that simply extrapolating from Weberian sociology would not do. By the late 1960s, there was an established eld within which M. N. [Mysore Narasimhachar] Srinivas and his students and people like Andr Bteille were publishing. And even foreign scholars such as Louis Dumont, a major gure of the time, were necessarily in conversation with Indian practitioners, who were accepted as equal interlocutors. Looking back now, I think that
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part of what subaltern studies accomplished was to bring the questions raised by Indian sociology and Indian anthropology into political and social history. You could not understand Indian politics without looking at the questions posed by Indian sociology, and the adoption of methods such as ethnography, oral history, and so on were absolutely essential. Subaltern studies was able to create a disciplinary overlap, though it was not alone in doing this. But this was, I think, an example of what you were suggesting of turning something that was purely an object of analysis into a eld with its own apparatuses of thinking and analysis. We were saying that in addition to whatever Western social science had to offer, you needed experience- based knowledge from the eld. All serious scholarship would now require that. MG: Your work has been remarkable for its transdisciplinary purchase. Did your membership in the Subaltern Studies Collective, which initially comprised mostly historians, enable an indifference, a generative indifference, toward disciplinarity? PC: I think that is certainly true. For various reasons, even within India, I was located, professionally speaking, outside the university structure. So that allowed a certain freedom to hunt and gather [laughing] in the forests. Disciplinary territories were never very clearly marked in my case; there was no supervising authority to ask me why I was straying into other areas. This was an advantage. Subaltern studies emerged, of course, out of the study of modern Indian history, but effectively we could mobilize resources from any eld. After the initial volumes, the group expanded, and it included people from many different disciplines. We had literary scholars like Gayatri Spivak and political theorists like Sudipta Kaviraj. The whole project was not conservative in any disciplinary sense. It was quite the opposite. This association, along with the fact that I was located outside the university structure, allowed me to roam more freely than I might have done in other circumstances. MG: The problem of popular politics its genealogy, its modes, and its limits has been the central concern of your work. Could you talk about your own early political formation? PC: I left India to become a graduate student in the United States when I was twenty, just out of college. The mid-to late 1960s, when I was in college, was a period of immense political upheaval. This was really the moment of transition to forms of mass democracy in India. In 1967 the Congress Party was defeated
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for the rst time in several states, including in West Bengal, where I was based. When I went back to India in early 1972, events were leading up to the emergency of 1975 77. Politically, the emergency was a quite formative period. It had been preceded by intense repression of the Left. The 1970s were the most severe authoritarian phase in Indian politics. Several of my friends were deeply involved in Left politics; others were at its fringes. But I quickly realized how indiscriminate this apparatus was and could be. Several of my friends were in prison. Three very close friends from school and college were actually killed in prison. The most active phase when I was involved in what one could say was street politics was just before the emergency and then all the way through 1977 78. Most of it had to do with campaigns for civil liberties and the release of political prisoners. After 1977 78, in West Bengal at least, there was a long period of Left rule with its ups and downs, its early promise and later degeneration into an unthinking bureaucracy. [The period] 1977 78 was the most active phase of political involvement that I have ever been through. And this was when I rst began my historical research. Subaltern studies hadnt been formed as yet, but I had decided for my next project to look precisely into forms of popular politics, especially rural politics, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The most intense education I received stems from these years, when I traveled extensively in rural West Bengal. For ve or six years, I was in some village or other for twenty days in a month. This opened my eyes to things that I would never have known, since I was brought up in the city. This was an extremely formative part of my background as a practicing social scientist. It was crucial not only in terms of my acquaintance of rural India and, obviously, with the life of the poor. Even more, it taught me how to talk to people and make myself understood and acceptable and get people to tell me about their lives and their involvement in political struggles. I had never formerly trained as an anthropologist, and so these were methods that I had to work out for myself. This experience has stayed with me. I dont visit rural areas that often now, but when I do, I have no problems in dealing with rural life or rural people. MG: The book that came right after this experience was on nationalism. PC: Yes. MG: You were the rst person to tackle the question of nationalism in colonial worlds, to say that it was a distinct ideological and historical phenomenon.

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PC: Yes. MG: How did you arrive at the questions that animated Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World? PC: Nationalist Thought was actually the second part of what was supposed to be a three- volume book. The rst volume was Bengal, 1920 1947: The Land Question. It looked at the agrarian structure and legal forms of ownership that were part of the transition from colonial landlord proprietorship to the kinds of landholding that developed after Indias independence. It dealt with the emergence of an owner peasantry as the main population of rural Bengal. This research about agrarian structuresthe arrangements of tenancy, relations among landlords and tenants, landless farmers led me directly to consider popular organizational and ideological forms. And in the 1920s and 1930s, that meant nationalism in the countryside. So my research on agrarian structure led me to think about the political and ideological forms of political movements centered on the peasantry. Nationalist Thought, in itself, looks like traditional intellectual history. But that is not where the questions actually emerged. I had never wanted to do intellectual history as conventionally dened. I was far more concerned with the traces of mass politics in the realm of canonical ideas and doctrines. MG: The book is notable for a strong political pessimism, especially its conclusions. This disappears or dissipates in your later, more ethnographic, works that turn to the logic of collective democratic practices. Could you talk about this shift? PC: Nationalist Thought was a move into the domain of ideas and discursive analysis. I soon realized that the answers that one got in this domain led to a sense of historical inevitability that, as you say, is the tone on which that book ends. I needed to come out of the cage of intellectual history. In The Nation and Its Fragments, I tried to move into other areas that no intellectual historian would touch, such as popular theater and questions of caste. It was an attempt to connect the domain of concepts and ideas with everyday political life. It was at that level that it became evident that everyday political practices were so varied that there was no single logic that unied them. At the level of grand conceptual ideas such as nation or nation- people, there is an urge to unify and claim a certain universal validity for what is going on. But everyday politics was carried out in an immensely heterogeneous social eld. My later work attempts to nd a language
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for this social heterogeneity while recognizing at the same time that there was something that held together, whether at the level of the state or the ideological representations of something called the nation, including its summoning of affects and loyalties. How does one make, whether structurally or otherwise, connections between an enormous heterogeneity and claims to belonging to an utterly homogeneous space called us, the collectivity called the nation? This is where my later work moved. MG: Was this emphasis on coexistent multiplicity the pathway to your critique of civil society arguments? In the post- 1989 era, amid a general rediscovery of the civil society concept, you begin to elaborate a counterargument about political society. What is political society? PC: The heterogeneity that concerned me was not the free associations of civil society. Rather, it was the new form of democratic politics that emerged in postcolonial India. The Indian constitution guarantees basic freedoms to citizens. Read in a traditional liberal way, this simply means that everybody is the same as far as the state is concerned. Everybody has equal rights, so therefore it is possible to posit a homogenous sphere that everybody inhabits in their public life. Yet neither social life nor political associations conform to this topography of a modern civic sector alongside a traditional sector that consists of caste, religion, patron- client relations, and so on, as modernization theory would have it. Modernization theory recognizes a split in placing the traditional outside the space of the civic and in assuming that the former operates in terms of caste, patronage, loyalties. The practices of democratic politics that I am concerned with are the new forms of association produced by both the activities of modern governance and the activities of modern politics. This was neither the politics of freely associated modern citizens with knowledge of their rights nor a traditional sphere of caste or religious obligations. The concept of political society names this disjuncture or difference. It points to all the deviations and exceptions from the civic and constitutionally sanctioned ways of association among citizens. Political society is premised on the existence of the domain of the civic and of the liberal constitutional. Yet it takes other routes that are not simply a carryover of some traditional ways of associating or protesting. These are entirely new forms. This inquiry is something that subaltern studies enabled. But I would argue that built into the subaltern studies focus on peasant insurgency, for instance, was the assumption that the state and forms of governance were external to the immediate social world of peasants. Thats no longer true. Government agencies and nongovernmental organiza182

tions that essentially do governmental functions are part of the daily lives of most Indians outside the domain of the properly civic middle classes. This domain could not have been studied properly in the original frame of subaltern studies. The research question now is about the new forms and meanings of the popular, including ideas of populism. MG: Political society is then a postcolonial problematic in both a chronological and substantive sense. PC: Yes. MG: In Lineages of Political Society you argue for a political theory grounded in and oriented by exceptions. This follows your critique of the abstraction of normative liberal democratic theory. Could you expand on this thesis? PC: Governments in societies like India often deal with departures from the civic norm as an immediate, pragmatic issue. My favorite example here is the relation between the administration and urban squatters on public lands or minor lawbreakers of all kinds. From a strictly legal interpretation, the administration could deal with them as lawbreakers. But the sheer social heterogeneity, which is the reality of power in a society like India, cannot be dealt with in terms of an abstract homogeneity on which the basic assumptions of liberal constitutions are grounded. They dont correspond. The basic strategy of democratic practice in contemporary India is improvised exception. It is to formulate a ground for exception, to acknowledge that the law does apply equally, and yet claim that this particular instance, whether squatting or stealing electricity, is a contingency that necessitates a provisional exception. It is my claim that the entire task of administration has now become one of continual resort to the argument of exception. Contemporary subaltern discourse today consists of an expansive use of the idea of exception, by which different population groups are able to say that if governments can make exceptions in the case of the rich all the time and get away with it, so why wont they make one for us? I just came across a recent study of popular criminality in Delhi slums. The slum organizers or minor criminal gangs routinely make a show of strength in front of the police station, naming all the local politicians with arms in their houses. The police, they say, know that these people have arms in the house, so why shouldnt the slum dwellers be allowed to keep theirs? Asserting a right becomes a right to be regarded as an exception. This is now a pervasive modality of making political claims. What this suggests
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is the lack of a conceptual vocabulary or language to articulate claims in any kind of positive sense rather than as a deviation from some abstract norm. Inherited normative claims, which come with an entire body of liberal constitutional thinking, are still in place and have claims to legitimacy. Yet political practices deviate enormously from these norms. And even as illegal practices are justied as legitimate exceptions, there is no denition of a new normativity. This is the situation of democracy at the moment. MG: So one of the objects of postcolonial political theory is to confront this new condition of conspicuous illegality and legitimate exception. Has this condition intensied or altered with the worldwide ascendancy of neoliberalism? PC: It has, but Im not certain what the full implications are. The ascendancy of neoliberalism does amplify the onus on the efcient delivery of government services. Earlier modes of legitimate state action had needed to conform to the ethical prescriptions of liberal constitutional norms. This is no longer the main object. For instance, a neoliberal administration would say that it just happens to be the case that there are all these squatters without real title to the land, and yet we need to recognize them and give them certain services. Whats the best way to proceed? Simply ignore the fact that they dont have title? Create a certain claim? Even institutions like the World Bank make the distinction between having a right and an entitlement. So it is acknowledged that some have a right because they have legal title to land and others have certain entitlements because they have been on the land for years and a good administration must recognize that. The exception is made part of a modality of governmental operation, where the onus is on a consequential evaluation of outcomes. Is this outcome better in terms of some objective criterion of performance or delivery of services? This modality of neoliberal governance has brought populations considered outside the pale into some kind of legitimate and legible presence within a market domain. Practices like microcredit, for instance, are precisely targeted to such populations, which are then integrated into larger institutional circuits of credit and capital. The interesting question to pursue is what effect this has on the way these populations respond to governments and the market. This is still a murky area, for the conceptual division between a formal and informal economy no longer holds. This goes back to the argument I was making earlier, that there is one kind of legitimate normality and the rest is all deviation. The practices that compose the so- called informal economy are neither outside the world of capital nor a legal sphere. Yet they are at a tangent from it, and we do not fully understand
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their inner workings and complexity. Simply describing them as a difference from some normative domain elides a great deal of internal diversity. The informal sector in India today is not just the household or small manufacturing or service units of the self- employed. It involves very large production units that are networked in ways we do not fully understand. There are entire manufacturing facilities that are really cities, industrial cities. Almost every unit there is informal. They are not formally incorporated units because they want to dodge taxation, pollution control, labor laws, and so on. Yet they have to acquire capital without being incorporated. From what one knows, this happens through caste relations or credit relationships based on trust rather than legally validated contracts. The informal sector no longer consists of economic activities of a relatively marginal kind. These shifts have large implications. For all the talk of China and India as the next great manufacturing industrial powers of the world, we still do not understand the contours of the new capitalist organizations that are emerging in those countries. It is certainly possible to think that they are quite distinct from the incorporated civic associations of Western capitalism. But we need to know more before we can assess the consequences for democracy or capitalism. MG: One of the arguments you make about contemporary shifts in India concerns what used to be called the peasant question. This is being posed, you claim, in a qualitatively new way because of the unstable mix of market- oriented neoliberalism and electoral democracy. Could you elaborate on this? PC: Lets take the much talked about case of farmer suicides in India. They are an extraordinary phenomenon. There is, on the face of it, nothing new about indebtedness among the peasantry. But the context has utterly changed from the one assumed by earlier work in subaltern studies. For one of the most persistent dimensions of peasant life in late colonial India, from the mid- nineteenth century onward, was both peasant indebtedness and the many instances of collective resistance to indebtedness. There were insurgencies against landlords and money lenders from the 1860s and 1870s all the way through to the early twentieth century in northern India. Why is the response to indebtedness today that of individual suicides? Many would say that this is a function of neoliberal governmentality where all forms of collective resistance have disappeared. Yet we still need to explain why this is the case. It is not as though there is no collective politics at all. There are powerful collective movements that make collective demands. But something has changed. Is it that peasants are now indebted to banks, not moneylenders? But public institutions like banks in India nd it very difcult
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to recover loans from individuals by taking away their land. It is far more likely that private moneylenders are able to coercively appropriate land. So it remains puzzling why collective resistance against them is no longer possible. What are the legitimate and feasible forms of political protest in postcolonial democracies? Certain combinations that were entirely possible and expected fty years ago have just disappeared, even as others such as regional identity politics have ourished. While there is a notion of exploited peoples, it no longer corresponds to localized face- to- face communities. What is the domain of the popular today? What are the media through which it coalesces and mobilizes? These are the new tasks of research. MG: Does your project on political society intersect with contiguous attempts to rethink the political? Im thinking here of Ernesto Laclaus idea that populism is the signature political form of Latin Americas twentieth century. PC: Populism is a particularly important category to think about. As a descriptive category, it refers to specic forms and modalities of mobilization. But it also raises evaluative questions about different kinds of popular mobilization, not all of which are worthy of support. So I dont think we can only consider the rst and forget about the second. Populism does offer, however, the possibility of rethinking modalities of collective action, including accounting for why certain mobilizations take place at great speed but also dissolve very fast. I think many distinctions have to be made to understand contemporary mobilizations. Populism is a phenomenon all over the world today, but we cannot assume similarities across contexts. I think these questions need serious new work. MG: Subaltern studies was forged in the wake of authoritarian populism. Did this prohibit thinking about populism in other ways, of aligning it with more experimental democratic forms? PC: Its interesting you say that, because we were very aware of the authoritarian uses of populism in the 1970s in India. What was enabling at the time was Antonio Gramscis idea of the people- nation and the possibility that the idea of the people could have ambiguous political resonances. The ideas of Caesarism and passive revolution were particularly crucial for subaltern studies. But populism then was restricted to something negative, even as we stuck to the idea of the people. All of this needs to be rethought. We have to think anew about the forms of passive

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revolution, how its structures have changed enormously, and the implications of this for something like state populism, on the one side, and populist mobilization against the state, on the other. We need to think through these distinctions much more closely. We do not as yet have good evaluative criteria for differentiating between modes of populism. I wish some of you would do it. [Laughing.] MG: An implicit theme of your work has been a critique of approaches that simply assume the comparability of the phenomenon under consideration, whether democracy, state forms, or nationalism. There is now a wider crisis of received models of comparison in the social sciences. How does your project on postcolonial political theory speak to questions of comparison or rather comparability? PC: I am suspicious of comparisons that simply facilitate a certain application of general theory. A great deal of comparison in comparative politics, for instance, uses empirical data that are not strictly comparable. Things are made, rather than found, comparable. All too often this does violence to ones ndings. My own inclination would be to be a little more modest about how much we can generalize. When comparisons are oriented toward showing contrasts or difference, they actually help sharpen the object that you began with. And they also establish connections across phenomena where such connections were not previously seen. All of these uses are extremely enlightening. But I think one should take small steps toward building larger comparable sets. This is a slower process and you probably get far less dramatic results. But I would prefer that to the kind of cross- country comparisons made on the basis of extremely dubious data that have been forced into a certain grid where they dont really belong. Of course, it depends on the structural level at which youre making comparisons. There are some kinds of comparisons more easily made across contexts because youre dealing with large structures, with fewer variables, much fewer uncertainties. It is easier to make comparisons of that kind. But the sorts of phenomena were interested inthings like everyday life, the political practices of ordinary people a re far more difcult to render comparable. MG: Your most recent work is The Black Hole of Empire. Could you say more about this return to imperial history? PC: For the past four to six years, I have returned to international politics, to where I began as a graduate student. I was impelled by an effort to understand

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the emergent world order the making of new regional and economic powers, the implications of the global nancial crisis for Western powers, and the like. In recent times, the scale of intervention, military and diplomatic, in many world regions can only be described as imperial. This prompted my return to the history of empire as a political form, especially to what I think was the watershed moment of the second half of the eighteenth century. This was the moment of a new geopolitical order where supposedly modern and newly capitalist European states acquired overseas land territories and took on the business of governance. This was a departure from the historical experience of empire in the Americas. Although a large part of the thinking about empire during this period was shaped by the experience of the Americas, the problems encountered in other regions were of a different order. It seems to me that the emergence of the modern state itself its constitutional forms, representative government as a normative idea, the so- called law of nations was forged in the late eighteenth century. One of my arguments is that the kinds of solutions devised in the early nineteenth century in the context of utilitarian thinking, stage theories of social development, and ideas of liberal tutelage that were part of liberal theory came to constitute the new form of empire. It is in the early nineteenth century that a whole range of techniques of power were devised that allowed for enormous exibility in facilitating different ways of exercising power over other peoples, ranging from direct administration and outright annexation of territory to what would be called protectorates. These allowed for a measure of internal sovereignty while taking over effective external sovereignty. There was a clear recognition of gradations of sovereignty within legal domains where the law of nations applied only to countries with equal sovereignty. What seems crucial is how the two questions of sovereignty, on the one side, and governance, on the other, get separated after the coalescing of ideals of popular sovereignty as the only legitimate locus of sovereignty in the modern world. Utilitarian thinking was absolutely fundamental in enabling such a distinction, in making it possible to say that what mattered was less who rules than whether the rule was good or efcient. Modes of ruling could be compared on a consequentialist basis, that is, whether imperial rule was for the good of most people or not. The great burden of anticolonial movements was to reassert the question of popular sovereigntyto say that whether or not foreign powers are ruling in good or bad ways is irrelevant. Its a question of who rules. From the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, anticolonial nationalism struggled to enshrine the nation- state, which came to a place of dominance only after the end of World War II, as the universally legitimate form of the state. Once this was recognized,
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you would think that empire should have vanished. But it does not. One of my arguments is that already in the nineteenth century, you have a range of imperial practices and exercises of power that do not require direct territorial colonization. Imperial power can be and was established through a range of other means. Empire resides in who claims the privilege to make exceptions within a world order of states. The imperial privilege is precisely the privilege to make exceptions. In contemporary international institutions, despite the operation of a one- member, one- vote system, a whole range of exceptions to national sovereignty are made and can be made. The question becomes who can effectively claim to make exceptions, to decide what rules apply to whom. The book, then, is a conceptual history of empire over the past 250 years.
Works Cited

Partha Chatterjee

Interview:

Chatterjee, Partha. 1984. Bengal, 1920 1947: The land question. Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi. . 1986. Nationalist thought and the colonial world: A derivative discourse? London: Zed Books for the United Nations University. . 1993. The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. . 2011. Lineages of political society: Studies in postcolonial democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. . 2012. The black hole of empire: History of a global practice of power. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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