to contribute to making persuasive collaboration with colonialism possible. Evidently the British colonialists were somewhat more successful in integrating Indian idioms into their forms of rule in the 19th century than they were in Kenya in the 20th. But, overall, we have a fundamental recognition by Guha that politics can take religious and cultural forms not always evidently ‘political’ in the modern sense, yet central to elite political subjectivity. Guha analyses these idioms ‘from the inside’ – i.e. not as an anthropologist – examining their names and political effects and noting ‘that something as contemporary as nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalism often made its appearance in political discourse dressed up as ancient Hindu wisdom’ (p. 245). We are probably here in the presence of a historically specific ‘mode of politics’, in Lazarus’s sense, yet Guha fails to take the same step when it comes to the political discourse of the Santal rebel. Why should a discourse of ‘social duty’ be more easily recognisable as ‘political’ than one that is ostensibly (crudely?) ‘religious’? Could it be that the idiom of dharma, despite its ancient origins, is more recognisably political, as it directly concerns a state politics whose main feature has universally been the maintenance and reproduction of difference and hierarchy? Could it be that the idiom of dharma is evaluated from within its own subjectivity, while that of the Santal is not?
What distinguishes the idiom of dharma from that of the Santal cannot be that the one is ‘modern’ and the other ‘traditional’, nor can it be that one is religious and the other not; it can only be that the former is ‘evidently’ a state discourse of power while the latter is not. This, it seems to me, is the nub of the fundamental problem faced by Guha’s work, by Chakrabarty’s and indeed by Subaltern Studies as a whole. Politics is equated throughout their analyses with ‘the political’, with power, the public, the civil, the state, and, as a result, it represents the social, as indeed the intellectual represents the subaltern’s voice. Politics is not consistently understood as an affirmative collective subjectivity, with the result that it is equated with that limited consciousness effectuated within the parameters of state conceptions. In their work, the subject is not conceived as prescribing a universal but is exclusively socially located; after all, it is ‘peasant subjects’ as such – the identification of a ‘peasant consciousness’ – to which Guha in particular is wedded and which he seeks to represent. Once a peasantry has been identified by the investigator – while no question is asked about how such people may have identified themselves – then it automatically follows that a subjectivity is sought that conforms to or deviates from what the investigator conceives a ‘peasant consciousness’ to be. Not surprisingly, it is the core features or ‘elementary aspects’ of the class consciousness of the peasantry that are the central concern of Guha’s (1999) work on the peasantry in colonial India. Despite the enormous step forward taken by Guha in understanding that ‘the political included actions that challenged the theorist’s usual and inherited separation between politics and religion’ (Chakrabarty, 2002: 19), the ‘religious’ idiom is still understood as an analytical deviation from the ‘obviously political’; it has to be shown to be political by analysis, while presumably the ‘obviously political’ needs no such work of analytical nomination.
The fallacy of this view can be seen through a contemporary example which is so common it is scarcely commented on. A commonplace account of the politics of ethnic, religious or xenophobic violence today in Africa and elsewhere makes reference to the poverty of those involved. I shall have occasion to mention this below in the context of South Africa, but the point to emphasise at this stage is that, within the ‘public sphere’ as in academia, the market is ultimately held to account for the political subjectivity or consciousness of the poor. Agency here is simply foreclosed. It is assumed that perpetrators of violence who are poor are unable to think for themselves; they are said to simply (re-)act as automata to their social condition, and, as a result, their agency is denied, much as the agency of the Santal rebels has been denied by the Santals themselves as well as by their historians. What indeed is the difference between maintaining that ‘God made me do it’ and ‘Poverty made him do it’? None whatsoever as far as the denial of agency is concerned. Yet there is in fact a very important difference, in that the second statement is considered a valid account of politics in modern scientific discourse, while the former is not. Even if a survey were to be conducted showing that a majority of all adults maintained that God was the active agent in xenophobic or ethnic violence today, this would be interpreted as pathological, as an indication of a ‘moral panic’ akin to the belief in ‘supra-terrestrials’, not as a ‘fact’. Yet if the same proportion of respondents stressed the perceived threat to their rights to housing or jobs as the motivation for xenophobic violence – interpreted by scholars as resulting from poverty or unemployment – this is said to constitute a legitimate finding.
The reason for this difference is that social conditions in general and economic forces in particular constitute scientifically legitimate substitutes for agency and the political subjectivities of people today, whereas ‘supernatural’ ones do not; it should be clear that such an account is objectivist and, hence, amounts to a state mode of thinking. Moreover, the emphasis placed on poverty is an inference drawn in the work of scholarly commentators, not necessarily by the perpetrators themselves, who emphasise their citizenship rights (Neocosmos, 2011b). The epistemic reason at work here is clearly apparent. We should also note in passing that ‘supernatural’ factors are not of the same order as ‘religious’ ones; it is quite possible today for the latter to be legitimately included in the list of ‘causes’ in scientific studies of inter-ethnic violence, for example. The most important point is that accounting for violence in terms of poverty (or inequality or even ‘relative deprivation’) is a political discourse of the state today; it is the state that systematically refuses to acknowledge the existence of political subjectivities, reducing them to the socio-economic or to psychology, thus denying agency. On the other hand, to say, as the Santal rebel did, that his god Thakur will do the fighting was a subjectivity totally beyond (external to) colonial state comprehension at the time in that situation (although not necessarily outside precolonial state subjectivity, incidentally), and, as a result, colonial state discourse had to locate it elsewhere: outside ‘the political’, in the domain of the ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’.9
What this means is, paradoxically, that the Santal’s statement can be considered as political, in Badiou’s sense of the term, in the context of 19th-century India, as it was expressive of a collective subject and existed well beyond the (scientific) parameters of state thinking, exceeding thereby the subjective configuration of the colonial world and mere agency. On the other hand, the statement about the economic account of violence today is not political, operating as it does within the ambit of state (scientific) thought and thereby simply reproducing the extant and denying subjecthood and the transcending of the extant. An internal analysis of the former in terms of its specific categories and names could possibly have elucidated the singular character of its politics; yet once it had entered the archive, such elucidation became well-nigh impossible, for it was controlled and packaged within a category of ‘atavism’ and ‘irrationality’ by the colonial discourse of power. The conclusion must then be that, whatever the idiom or discourse being investigated, its political character must be established, and it can only be established ‘from within’, as Lazarus (1996, 2001b) maintains, through an analysis of its own statements and categories. It cannot be represented from outside through a sceptical commitment by sympathetic academics. Moreover, it is not the case that just because some statements seem to belong to a realm of ‘the political’, to the ‘public sphere’, to ‘civil society’ or whatever, that because their location labels them as ‘politics’ within modernist (neo-)liberal or Marxist conceptions, they are indeed idioms of agency, whereas others that seem to occur outside such a domain – such as religion – are not to be considered as politics.
The problem here is that of historicism, which, in addition to a notion of time, holds to an idea of totality (e.g. ‘society’, ‘nation’, ‘social formation’) within which political agency is confined to a specific domain of the political. A proliferation of the number of political domains does not, unfortunately, solve the problem of the social reduction of consciousness itself; it is rather the existence of sites which
