‘The
sociologist, as a student of interhuman relations or social mobility is
convinced that in health matters compulsion – no matter at what stage – is an
absolute necessity.’[1]
(Sarkar, 1941.)
Benoy Kumar Sarkar
was not a Nazi. He was being deliberately provocative when, in 1939, he called
Nazi Germany ‘a state
of the people
and
by the people.’
[2]
(The omission of 'for the people' was made good two years
later
.) Sarkar was not a fascist
either, although the word has followed him, even in the writings of his
admirers. ‘Was B.K. Sarkar a fascist?’ wondered the Italian scholar Giuseppe
Flora.
[3]
Answering his own question, Flora suggested that Sarkar regarded fascism largely as
a temporary economic strategy for ‘backward’ nations.
[4]
Indeed, while Sarkar could take a generous view of Mussolini’s Italy, he maintained
his distance: ‘The world has come to realize that there is a limit to dictatorship
and absolutism,’ he wrote in 1925 when the Italian opposition forced Mussolini
to make some political concessions.
[5]
He raised a sardonic eyebrow at the rhetorical excesses of Hitler and
Ludendorff during their trial for having conspired against the German government
in 1923.
[6]
If anything, Sarkar was a critic of fascism, albeit a mild one. ‘Fascism as a
moral force has to justify its existence among the people,’ he wrote about
Italy, unimpressed with the murder of the socialist parliamentarian Giacomo
Matteotti in 1924.
[7] Nevertheless,
when an introduction has to be prefaced with the observation that the subject
was not a Nazi, it usually indicates that there is a problem that cannot be
dismissed as a superficial desire for economic growth or trains that run on
time. This chapter explores some aspects of that problem, which has to do with
the imaginary of freedom and statehood in the final decades of colonial India,
when the nationalist vanguard sought to combine development, democracy and
citizenship in a single institutional framework.
Sarkar made no
attempt to define freedom. The historical diversity and contextuality of
freedom made such attempts futile, he wrote towards the end of his life.
[8]
Nevertheless, when Sarkar imagined free India, in the period between the First
World War and Indian independence, he was clear about its constitutional shape:
he wanted an inclusive, liberal, democratic state, in which the individual
citizen would have all the rights associated with the European Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment and its institutional offshoots were, after all, a universal
resource, and universal access to that resource was central to his politics of
anti-colonial redress. Sarkar’s vision of liberal statehood, however, is so
fraught with internal tension that it barely holds together. To reconcile the
universalism of his racial posture with the observable ‘facts’ of Indian
backwardness, Sarkar relied on a straightforward Mill-derived notion of a
‘lag,’ i.e., the different locations of nations on a common timeline of
progress and liberty.
[9]
The role he envisioned for the state, particularly in ‘latecomer’ nations like
India, had to do with this lag: while it lasted, the vanguardist state would compensate
for the backwardness of society, even if it had to put the individual in a
re-education camp or a hospital.
[10]
It is not that this is an unreasonable or ‘flawed’ vision of freedom. Rather,
Sarkar – not unlike other enthusiasts of the modern state – posits notions of identity,
citizenship and governance in which there is a normative confusion between the
state, the nation and the community, and the individual can never be certain
where he is located. Consequently, Sarkar’s nation-state is also normatively
authoritarian and potentially fascist. He was – and we are – thus left with an
ideological dilemma, which is also a practical difficulty within a postcolonial
nationhood that is, in the end, a project of liberation: the individual is both
essential to freedom and a problem of freedom.
The problem is
constituted by several interlocking but not fully reconcilable formulations
connected to the urbanization unfolding around Sarkar. Fittingly, his thoughts
on the relationship between the state and the individual are most fully
articulated in the monumental and relentlessly comparative
Villages and Towns as Social Patterns, published during the Second
World War. India was not an especially urbanized country then, but
Villages and Towns is heavily weighted
on the side of the town. ‘Ruralism’ was ‘a thing of the past,’ synonymous with
feudal backwardness, Sarkar had insisted in his writings on Japan a decade
earlier.
[11]
In the process of this unfolding polemic, the city became a metaphor of the modern
nation. This was reasonable enough: of the various levels of government in
colonial India after the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, municipal administrations
were the most ‘independent,’ i.e., most directly under the control of Indian
politicians and political parties.
[12]
Under the circumstances, what Sarkar called ‘municipal democracy’ (alternately,
‘municipal socialism,’ with its characteristic combination of popular pressure
from below and ‘scientific’ autocracy from above) was not limited to C.R. Das’
Calcutta, but constituted a larger model of national governance.
[13]
Sarkar had a dual
purpose in choosing the city. One is that it allowed him to get away from the
‘India lives in her villages’ discourse that was shared by Orientalists and a
section of Indian nationalists, Gandhi being the most prominent.
[14]
For Sarkar, the village, like the ‘community’ or caste, was a racial ghetto in
the world: unless one could get away from the village, there could be neither
modernity nor freedom. The other purpose was to reject a particular Western
discourse of the Indian city, which might be described as Kipling’s ‘city of
dreadful night’ narrative, or the more contemporary ‘drain inspector’ discourse
exemplified by Katherine Mayo’s
Mother
India.
[15] Sarkar
did not deny that Indian cities like Calcutta and Bombay had dirty drains. Dirt
has its ideological uses in a world of cosmopolitan-nationalist scholarship and
imperialism. For instance, whereas Mark Harrison has suggested that Indian
politicians obstructed British-colonial initiatives in urban sanitation after
the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms,
[16]
Sarkar pointed out that British-Indian expenditure on public health was pitiful
when compared to what the German state spent.
[17]
The implication was that the Indian vanguard – scientists-as-administrators,
and individuals conscious of their historical role in the world – could manage
their dirt (and dirty) better than the British could. Moreover, Sarkar was able
to argue that the problems of the colonial city – filth, disease, crime,
neuroses, poverty, disrupted families, street children – had nothing to do with
racial difference, climate or geography. They had been ubiquitous in the west
also, and only recently tackled by interventionist governments.
[18]
The pathologies and cures were both embedded in a common modernity, in Bombay
as in Berlin. That commonality was a way out of the ghetto.
The megacities
of the modern world, Sarkar observed, produced ‘creative’ individuals on the
one hand, and managerial forms of governance on the other.
[19]
India was no exception, and he embraced that universality as freedom itself. The
individual subject was a necessity of freedom-in-society, being a
self-conscious political actor in the world. The relatively unindividuated
subjecthood centered on the patriarchal family that Dipesh Chakrabarty has
theorized for Indian nationalism was for Sarkar a peculiar and retrograde
weakness.
[20]
The family and similar ‘traditional’ formations were not legitimate constraints
upon individuality, but were, rather, challenges to overcome. Sarkar’s
fascination with hereditary and environment influences on human behavior did
not amount to a crude determinism: ‘Until morbidity, physical or mental, can be
demonstrated by unquestionable tests the individual is responsible for his
choice of…saintly or…scoundrel-like behavior,’ he wrote about urban criminality.
[21]
But the freedom of the individual was also revolutionary in nature, being an
inherently confrontational dynamic fundamental to the insurgent statehood that
underlay Sarkar’s vision of progress and racial equality. Crime and revolution
were located in the same basic processes of individualization, which was itself
an act of intellectual rebellion in a colony where criminals were ‘tribes,’
rebels were ‘hordes,’ and society a shapeless lump of ‘communities’ for H.H.
Risley to mold.
[22]
Yet not only was
the individual at the helm of the state a potential tyrant, the population
constantly challenged the nation either with its useless non-individuality or
with a lethargic, selfish or disruptive subjectivity. The state could be
engineered to contain these possibilities, but not without considerable powers
of coercion. When India became independent, Sarkar grumbled:
‘The greatest drive in our character is…to
be found in the chase, maddening as it is, for personal glorification, power,
position and purse. It is a disastrous situation and India will have to be
saved from this calamity and disgrace. A new therapeutic has to be devised.’
[23]
Again, there are compelling
overlaps between Sarkar’s ideas about ‘therapy’ and the kinds of coercion that
scholars of colonial state medicine have highlighted.
[24]
It might be argued that by proposing a normative and permanent conflict between
the individual and the state, Sarkar was merely recapitulating his theory that
conflict produces freedom.
[25]
That freedom, however, took the form of a fetish of state power. The fierce
advocate of decolonization slipped repeatedly into a perverse identification
with oppressors and oppression itself: the Italian and German states had both
embarked upon ambitious projects of ‘internal colonization,’ he noted approvingly
in 1936, adding that India would need to follow suit.
[26]
He was referring to state-directed economic mobilization: specifically, the
Bonifica project for the reclamation of
‘useless’ or ‘unhealthy’ land, which was a showcase of Italian-fascist
governance, and which Sarkar observed first-hand in 1929.
[27]
There is, however, considerable political and ideological overflow. Shortly
before his death in 1949, Sarkar endorsed the reclamation of the Andaman
Islands as a ‘prospective colony for Indians.’
[28]
The implications for the indigenous population of the islands – excluded from
Indianness and individuality – need not be recapitulated here; suffice it to
say that they were unhappy.
[29]
‘Localism of every sort in administration has to be extirpated in all possible
ways,’ and local minorities everywhere required to assimilate ‘in language,
morals, manners and customs’ (guided by a Central Department of Culture), was
his comment on the organization of the Indian Union.
[30]
It is not surprising that Sarkar, a sincere advocate of freedom, would also be
deeply ambivalent about democracy. The world was witnessing a
digvijaya of democracy, Sarkar had
written earlier, meaning that whoever won the world war, the world would be
more democratic.
[31]
It is in that
context that we might examine Sarkar’s fondness for Germany, which went much
further than the conventional inclination of nationalists in the colonized
world to be well disposed towards enemies of the colonial power. It could be almost
delusional: after the Second World War, Sarkar declared that the diffusion of captured
German soldiers, scientists and military technology around the world amounted
to a triumphant ‘German invasion in men, ideas and inventions.’
[32]
Ressentiment nationalism gave Sarkar an immediate ideological affinity with
German Romanticism.
[33]
It gave him, for instance, a similarly convoluted outlook on Nietzsche: what
was the place of the ‘free’ individual in the Volk and the state, if none could
be dispensed with? The boundaries of the state were the limits of individuality.
We find Sarkar concluding, ultimately, that the individual needed the state to
make him an individual, and an essentially reinvented community to sustain him
in his individuality. For all his antipathy towards Orientalist constructions
of India as a ‘spiritual’ culture, Sarkar cannot give up the Geist: the state
itself becomes the guarantor of the ‘national spirit’ in the individual
citizen.
To understand
the ramifications of this imaginary, it is useful to look at Detlev Peukert’s
analysis of the relationship between the state and society in Nazi Germany. By
aggressively invading those areas of society that had hitherto been ‘private,’
Peukert suggested, the German state inadvertently brought about a retrenchment
of the private sphere. Individual dissent and freedom were secreted but also
contained within this remapped privacy. Simultaneously, by blurring the lines
between the public and the private, the regime opened up the state to semi-autonomous
agents, compromising its own coherence and control.
[34]
In India, obviously, the problems were not identical: here, bourgeois privacy was
itself underdeveloped. To produce the individual citizen, the state that Sarkar
envisioned would have to create as well as violate the private world, while
remaining vigilant against ‘traditional’ formations hostile to the private and
the public alike. This is consistent with Sarkar’s conception of ‘Young India.’
The ‘old’ masses, by definition, had to be awakened (at midnight, to borrow
Nehru’s rhetoric) to individuality and modernity by the ‘young’ vanguard in
order for the liberal nation to come to fruition. What is startling, however,
is the suggestion that the vanguard itself needed the state. Why did it need
the state? It needed the state to contain it: to prevent it from dissipating
into the world of movement, to guard it against the treasonous aspect of
cosmopolitanism, and to prevent it from becoming another unidentifiable mass.
Needless to say, each of these considerations has serious implications for
masses that show a reluctance to ‘wake up,’ and for elites that show an
inclination to dissipate.
Sarkar’s state
is thus an instrument of containment, packed with disciplining institutions as
well as ‘spirit.’ It need not be Nazi Germany or a crudely Romantic fantasy of
homogeneity. Certainly, Sarkar’s own thinking evolved from an early affiliation
with Herder towards an explicit preference for a ‘pluralistic’ state.
[35]
But some of the scholarship on fascism, totalitarianism and other forms of
state coercion that has followed in the wake of the Third Reich – the work of
Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Peukert, Robert Gellately and others – is
nevertheless useful in an examination of Sarkar’s thinking, not least because
independent India has generally privileged the state and the community over the
individual in its structure of rights, laws and government. With its roots in
ressentiment and its desire for the signs of the colonizer’s power (especially
the state), anti-colonial nationalism tends to create the individual as well as
the mob, potentially consigning the former either to the violence of the mob,
or to the lawlessness of the state of exception.
Individual Indians and Indian Individuals
In April 1936,
in Rangoon to address the Convention of Religions (an event organized to
mark the centenary of Ramakrishna’s birth), Sarkar outlined his vision of the
role of the individual in history:
‘Man as an individual or in groups has had
but one function, and that is to transform the gifts of the world into which he
is born, namely, Nature and society, into the instruments of human and social
welfare. It is not Nature, region or geography that in the last analysis
determines man’s destiny. It is the human will, man’s energy, that re-creates
the topography and natural forces, humanizes the earth and spiritualizes the
geography. Then, again, it is not the group, the clan, the nation or the
society that ultimately forces the individual to submit to the social
milieu, the group
mores, the tradition, and the status quo. It is rather the
individual personality that compels the
mores
to change and the
milieu to
break, that subverts
status quo and
re-forms tradition.’
[36]
This is easily recognizable as another
articulation of Sarkar’s notion of
vishvashakti,
in which talented individuals emerge to seize and refashion the circumstances
of their historical moment.
[37]
It indicates both his debt to fundamentally conservative Victorian ideologies
of ‘great men,’ and his eagerness to move beyond them in ways that threatened
the Victorian edifice of empire. He remained, however, unwilling to surrender
to the determinism of Marxist theory, writing in roughly the same period:
‘The individual is not perpetually at the
mercy of economic forces as the Marxists believe. He can control and combat
them, influence them and transcend them too. Similarly, the individual cannot
be postulated to be invariably dominated by the society, as Durkheim suggests.
The society itself can be moulded, re-shaped, transformed by the individual.’
[38]
Sarkar was positing individuality
as an unruly asset of liberalism: it was necessary for freedom, threatened by
the other paraphernalia of freedom (such as the community and the state), and
it was, in some circumstances, itself a threat to freedom: an element in need
of restraint.
The
simultaneity of the desire and the fear surface very strongly, for instance, in
Sarkar’s view of women in modern Indian society. There can be no doubt that he
was a liberal on the ‘women’s question’
[39]:
he was broadly in favor of equality for women in the law, in the family and
marriage, in education and in the professions. Sexual freedom was central to
this vision of equality. Describing the community-forced celibacy of Hindu
widows as a ‘sterilization’ that was both unjust and unwise, Sarkar demanded
(in the language of racial hygiene and public health) that Indian women become,
and be accepted as, autonomous agents of sexual choice, divorce and remarriage.
[40]
In the same vein, he attacked restrictions on inter-caste and inter-religious
marriages. In all of these areas, Indian social and governmental institutions
needed reform, he held, without any caveats about national freedom having to
come first. The pursuit of reform was itself the process of independence;
ensuring that women were equal and free was a process of ‘individualization.’
[41]
Sarkar’s long-standing advocacy of romantic love (which surfaces in
Love in Hindu Literature in 1916, and
continues into the 1940s) was another facet of this desire for autonomous
individuals who were whole – and free – women and men.
[42]
Individual women were not only wanted for modern India, they already existed in
the cities; society had to facilitate their proliferation and accommodate their
presence.
At
the same time, such women unnerved Sarkar. He described their emergence not only
as individualization, but also (taking his cue from Ferdinand Tönnies) as ‘masculinization.’
[43]
Feminism was
both ‘nothing but the
participation by women in all the so-called male activities,’ and a
‘pathology,’ Sarkar suggested: a neurosis intimately connected with juvenile
delinquency, criminality and venereal disease, which had to be ‘sociologically
appraised as the cost of civilization or price of progress.’
[44]
The new individualized/masculinized women, Sarkar wrote, were ‘society women,’
not ‘community women.’
[45]
A double meaning was imbedded in the word ‘society’ when used in this context:
it designated not only the public sphere of national life, but also,
implicitly, the realm of elite frivolousness and selfishness. Moreover, the
society woman was ‘artificial,’ Sarkar wrote, as opposed to the ‘natural’ woman
of the old-fashioned type: ‘Under the regime of masculinization the…woman
natural is replaced by or transformed into the…woman of artificial will and
impulses, the woman of conventions, contracts and business intercourse.’
[46]
Within and without the family, such women brought conflict and chaos, upending
older relationships, hierarchies and roles. As usual, he refused to condemn
conflict and chaos: these were the engines of freedom, and artifice was the
stuff of statecraft and the will to innovate. But it was clear to him that the
family and ‘community’ were no longer adequate as structures within which
conflict and chaos might be contained and utilized. They were, in fact, overtly
counterproductive: ‘[T]he greatest breeding centres of criminals are, first,
the family, and secondly, the street-corner or the neighborhood.’
[47]
New structures were needed, which could not only form unmediated relationships
with the individual fragments and products of older communities, but also
manage the free individual.
Even
more than women (and overlapping women), youth represented an individuality
that both excited and alarmed Sarkar. Apart from his ubiquitous homages to
‘Young’ Bengal/India/China/Asia, he wrote in great detail, and with great
social-scientific exactness, about the nature of youth: in particular, the
interconnected social, political, psychological and biological characteristics
of different age-groups. Only those between the ages of sixteen and twenty, and
between twenty and thirty, were capable of change, he wrote; these were the
dynamic individuals who might command
vishvashakti.
[48]
Only these could be ‘creators of the as-if,’ i.e., could imagine
transformation. Sarkar’s enthusiasm is, of course, aligned with a powerful
strand of youth-worship within Indian nationalism and its wider culture, of
which Rabindranath was the most prominent ideologue.
[49]
It was, however, also affiliated with more dispersed developments, such as the
construction of juvenile delinquency as a condition of individualized defect in
the era of Havelock Ellis (who Sarkar admired),
[50]
and post-Boer-War European youth movements (from the Boy Scouts to the Hitler
Youth) driven by the fear of racial deterioration in the modern city.
[51]
Peukert has pointed out that a basic function of such movements in Germany was
to normalize war;
[52]
that is perfectly aligned with Sarkar’s own view that war was not only normal
but also the necessary incubator of nationhood.
[53]
Closer to home, it reflected the political discourse of ‘seditious’ teenagers
caught up in anti-colonial militancy, and the social-scientific and clinical
discourses of adolescence and child-psychology which self-consciously modern
Indians had embraced as part of the political, intellectual and legislative
contests of dyarchy.
[54]
To acknowledge the dynamic individuality of youth – patriots as well as
degenerates – was to show yourself as a dynamic individual, if not young.
But
dynamic youth bent on transformation alarmed their older compatriots.
Panchcowri Banerji, the Swadeshi-era politician and journalist (and, according
to Sumit Sarkar, possibly a police informer
[55])
complained in 1916:
‘Thanks to Surendra Nath Banarji and his
crew, [patriotism] has ruined many a student. Indeed, every big agitation
requires young men. Then, again, it is the boys who possess any real capacity
for work. No wonder, therefore, that they should now suffer from slightly
swelled heads. And it is this suffering from swelled heads which is the main
cause of all the anarchism, assassinations and arrests of the present day.’
[56]
While the colonial police
obviously concurred,
[57]
so did the wider discourse of modern youth. The European youth movements, John Springhall
has noted, were intended to function as mechanisms for the socialization of the
disorderly and the déclassé, and it is hardly a coincidence that they dressed
their members in uniforms.
[58]
A reading of post-war German memoirs and memorializing literature – I am
thinking of Böll and Grass, but Peukert lists others – quickly reveals that
fascist youth culture in the 1930s was highly uneven: full of bullies and
conformists, but also full of the indifferent, the fickle and the outright resistant.
[59]
Instruments of containment were clearly needed, and since youthful
individuality was inherently ‘wild,’ it was a need that would never exhaust
itself. Sarkar’s interest in scientifically conceived, carefully regulated
pedagogical structures and methods should be seen in this light. It would be
inaccurate to describe National Education and related Indian projects as
strait-jackets for youth. The colonial school in general, from Aligarh and the
Chief’s Colleges to the Ramakrishna Mission and Santiniketan, also created the
individual, by making a scientific intervention in heredity and environment,
and liberating youth from the retarding constraints of family and community.
[60]
In most cases, bureaucratized, modernized, disciplined and disciplining
education sought to manage the young individual in the process of ushering him
into the state.
Vishvashakti is, after all, a theory of managed
individuality as much as it is a theory of freedom. It is in the nature of the
individual to struggle against society, Sarkar suggests, and this struggle
generates not only freedom but society itself, in the form of culture and the
state. Sarkar wove that notion into a conception of human nature: ‘The four
instincts, ambitions, urges or drives lead to four different spheres of
creation. These spheres…constitute culture in the most generic sense. The
state, law, politics, society and allied forms and relations of human life are
derived from the urges [of conquest].’
[61]
Even when groups – such as nations or classes – appeared to be the agents of
struggle/conquest, they could be treated analytically and governmentally as
individuals, subject to the laws of human nature.
[62]
Only those who exhibited this nature were true political subjects, fit for
freedom. Fitness itself took on two overlapping meanings: to be individual by
nature was a sign of imminent (or potential) statehood and sovereignty, but it
was also to be already free.
Naturally,
therefore, Sarkar was troubled by the paucity of individuality in India, and
sought to recuperate it wherever possible. Even as he ranted against Max
Mueller and the Orientalists for portraying India as a useless cloud of spirit,
he could not deny the accusation entirely when it came to his own time, when Indians
themselves misread their past – that foundation built on Manu and Kautilya –
‘exclusively as marvelous exploits in
pacifism,
ahimsa i.e., non-killing
and non-resistance, spirituality, and ‘self-realization!’
[63]
Sarkar, who dedicated
The Politics of
Boundaries to Kautilya in an act of creative wistfulness, does not name a
specific villain for this decline into spirituality, non-violence and unworldly
passivity. The death of the Indian individual, he felt, was the result of a
circumstance and an era: the colonized condition of India in nineteenth
century, when political agency – understood as statecraft – became irrelevant
and unnecessary. He gave no explanation for how his condition came to pass in
the first place and only vaguely gestures at missionaries and Macaulay, which
left an empty historical space where the apathetic citizenship of the colonized
subject could be deployed. Rather like the Chinese and Japanese critics of
Rabindranath, Sarkar was implying that Indians had forfeited their
individuality and their freedom simultaneously: one could afford to ignore the
desires and priorities of the political individual when one had no political
responsibilities, but it was both unnatural and contemptible.
[64]
Sarkar’s
fondness for Nietzsche can also be understood in the context of this project of
re-naturing Indians. The re-naturing was nothing but a rediscovery of the Self,
he suggested. In 1922, having come across Nietzsche’s weakness for Manu, he
wrote:
‘The means to the re-humanizing of
humanity have been devised, says [Nietzsche], by the Hindus. ‘Close by Bible,
open by Code of Manu’ is his prescription. And why? Because Manu is the
propounder of an ‘affirmative’ religion – the religion of the deification of
power,’ whereas Christianity is the creed of the slave, the pariah, the
chandala. Says Nietzsche: ‘One breathes
more freely, after stepping out of the Christian atmosphere of hospitals and
poisons into this more salubrious, loftier and more spacious world. What a
wretched thing the New Testament is beside Manu, what an evil odour hangs
around it!’
[65]
It should be noted, first of all,
that while Sarkar outgrew Manu (rejected by 1941 as an obsolete destroyer of
women’s individuality
[66]),
Nietzsche was not jettisoned, being central to the articulation of individuality
and freedom in the tropics.
[67]
From Conrad’s Congo to M.V. Portman’s Andamans, Nietzschean affectations and
distortions allowed the white man to set himself apart from the natives, to
experience himself as being ‘beyond society,’ and enabled episodes of
apotheosis.
[68] Given
that centrality, Sarkar’s attempt to appropriate Nietzsche for India is a significant
maneuver. He was not simply turning the tables, grabbing an important cultural
icon, or adding a dimension his Weber-derived faith in the charisma of the
revolutionary leader.
[69]
He was also revealing his awareness of a vital model of modern personhood, that
was essential to
both racialized and
cosmopolitan individuality, i.e., to the sovereignty of the national man
engaged in Realpolitik and the worship of power in the world (including the
power of the state), and to the transcendence of the nation. It should
be noted, secondly, that Sarkar reacts warmly to the Nietzschean contempt for
the New Testament as a religion of slaves: not only does it undermine an
important plank of European superiority and empire, Sarkar has no desire to be
identified with the slaves in the arrangement of power in the world. This
remains a fundamental limit within his radicalism.
Consequently,
Sarkar’s individual is an unpredictable and unreliable democrat. His take on
the French Revolution – that the ideals of the revolution were unworkable and irrelevant
without Napoleon – shows how his predilection for ‘militarism’ and state power
shapes his political individual.
[70]
The charismatic and even oppressive leader can be – in a sense, has to be -
rehabilitated within the revolutionary state. The brilliant individual makes
nationhood possible and revolution complete. In articulating this (while
evaluating Sun Yat-Sen’s manifesto for the overthrow of the Manchu monarchy in
China), Sarkar transformed the French Revolution into a movement that was far
more Romantic than rational. His revolutionary nationhood – and national
citizen – was poised on the edge of this inviting, Romantic, authoritarian
chasm. We have here a glimpse of Subhas Bose, who Sarkar regarded as being
(unlike Gandhi) the true radical of his historical moment.
[71]
For the outraged Oriental in search of
wholeness after being reduced to a wraith or a yoga mat, the individual – a
creature of will, agency and revolution – was essential. But for the
nationalist in search of a place in the sun, the individual could not be
allowed to wander about in splendid isolation; he – and she – had to be
harnessed
for the community, i.e.,
harnessed
to the state
. Ancient Indians, Sarkar insisted,
recognized social obligations; theirs was not an individuality of selfishness
or self-indulgence. He wrote about Bhartrihari: ‘His ‘whole duty of man’ was
oriented not only to the sensuous elements in life but also to the moral or
social obligations as well as to the supersensual.’
[72]
The search for individuality in ancient India involved obvious difficulties:
Sarkar had to concede, for instance, that Indian literature often lacks easily
identifiable authors. He turned the lack into an advantage: it is not that
individuals were absent, but that they were adept at working collectively
within institutions, such as councils and the editorial committees of
encyclopedias.
[73] We
have here a rejection of another Orientalist construction, which is a ‘bad’
individuality that prevents the development of social responsibility, and hence
citizenship and politics, in the Orient. By arguing that early Indians were
individuals who nevertheless recognized social obligations, Sarkar posited the
possibility of history, politics and nationhood, expressed as usual in
metaphors of war and conquest, but with a distinctly Teutonic twist:
‘Verity, life is a grand war in Indian
estimation. And yet this conception of the ‘Armageddon’ of life is not a Hindu
patent. ‘Thus we half-men struggle,’ says Browning. And the Siegfrieds of the
Nibelungenlied e.g., of Hebbel’s plays
and Wagner’s operas, are Browningite in their obstinately aggressive
individuality.’
[74]
Without such
individuality, Sarkar clarified, there could be no ‘energism,’ that Romantic
intangible which allowed states to compete and survive.
[75]
Producing individuals therefore had to be a basic objective of the modern
state, which – in America, France, Germany and the USSR but not in India
– had already embraced the imperative of mass
education. Mass education, Sarkar suggested, would effect a qualitative change
in revolutions and republics, taking them beyond particularistic grievances and
into the realm of universal concepts of racial equality and national sovereignty,
i.e., true liberalism. He wrote:
‘Since 1870 education has become
universal all through the civilized world except only in dependencies,
protectorates, and the spheres of influence. As a result of this…[people] will
act more as the ‘moral agents’ of Immanuel Kant and not as the mere creatures
of environments and historic circumstances. The will is becoming more and more
self-legislative and free; and revolutions will be welcomes as
Nishkama Karma or ‘categorical
imperatives’ by leaders of the human race. The idea of
swaraj as sovereignty and democracy will grow into a commonplace
phenomenon in the normal psychology of individuals.’
[76]
A relationship of escalation was
thus established between revolution and education: revolution may have to
precede mass education in India and China as it had in France and Russia, Sarkar
suggested,
[77] but
mass education accelerates and intensifies revolution by embedding it in the
individual consciousness.
The
ubiquitous references to ‘psychology’ in Sarkar’s writing are not a
coincidence. They reflect his interest his Pareto’s sociology, but more than
that they indicate Sarkar’s desire to identify himself with a particular
discipline of knowledge and expertise.
[78]
They also reflect his conviction that freedom was a mentality of the
fully-formed individual. (Even ancient India was a land of psychologists,
insisted.
[79])
For Sarkar,
then, freedom from colonialism takes on a layered meaning: it is freedom from a
particular situation of political oppression, but it is also the liberation of
the individual into a permanent
revolutionary mentality, and the liberation of the nation from a passive
relationship with history into radically new, self-directed, possibilities and
directions. The latter is, essentially, the phenomenon of freedom-at-midnight.
Ironically, liberation from history and reconnection to world-history turn out
to be the same thing. It is a quasi-millenarian, obsessively future-facing
movement in which Marx and Lenin are saluted desultorily before the Romantic
overwhelms the Material. It is through the nation – both as a state and as a politically-focused
community – that the freedom of the individual is achieved and expressed.
Recuperating the
individual was a particularly pressing problem in India because here, Sarkar
writes, the colonial regime had abandoned the individualizing function of the
nation and the state. The more impressive Indian accomplishments in physics and
chemistry in the early twentieth century, he observed, had come when individual
Indians had struggled heroically against their institutional milieux, or sought
out contacts in countries other than Britain.
[80]
Science in modern India was thus inherently individualistic as well as
revolutionary: a matter of dams and temples, as Nehru and Nargis (who
inaugurated a dam in her most famous movie, and criticized Satyajit Ray for not
showing more dams in his films) may have recognized. Here, we find again the
convergence of a critique of the colonial state, a desire for cosmopolitanism,
‘pluralism,’ and national rejuvenation. We find also an acknowledgment of the
connection between individuality and progress: it is individual ‘manipulation’
of the community or the institution that drives progress.
That formulation
complicates Sarkar’s ideal national community, because it must constantly
evaluate whether the manipulative individual is helpful or disruptive, and
whether the ‘world-conquering’ freedom of the heroic individual threatens
freedom in society. Sarkar’s vision of Tilak, for instance, is affiliated not
only with his fascination with the ‘Napoleons’ who realized revolution and
freedom in society, but also with a vision of restraint. He enthused:
‘Prince among journalists, Napoleon among
fellowmen, propagandist among philosophers, mathematician, lawyer, orator, this
apostle of liberty was the very sun of the social system among the Marathas, –
the Goethe of Poona
as much in the
radiation of influences as in the bringing together of world-forces. A towering
personality that he was both in thought and deed, in idealism, organizing
capacity and constructive statesmanship… [O]ne should have to appraise the
literary output of Tilak the prophet, preacher, patriot as a tremendous dynamic
force no less vitalizing and momentous for his race than was that of Voltaire
for France during the last and greatest period of his devotion to ‘reason’ and
‘humanity.’’
[81]
Tilak emerges as a superman
imparting his ‘energy’ to the race, but the connection with Voltaire suggests
Sarkar’s investment in a Romanticism contained by the Enlightenment. Thus, even
as he writes of energies and dynamic forces, he declares:
‘It may be considered to be a fit
theme for self-congratulation that Young India’s mentality is not prepared to
submit to the Periclean or Napoleonic dictatorship of its own ‘enlightened
despots,’ – howsoever great and good the results already attained by it or
howsoever
necessary it may have
turned out to be for historical and environmental reasons.’
[82]
That restraint
can be applied more widely to situations of excessive individual self-interest.
The dynamic is evident in the views Sarkar expressed about commerce in
twentieth-century India, which are a mixture of Nehruvian disdain for the
vulgarity of the profit motive and a real anxiety that the ‘mania for
money-making’ – and even the desire to take credit for ‘original’ research and
innovation (the quotation marks are Sarkar’s) – would decimate ideals of public
service.
[83]
The tension is never resolved, but it is contained by the nation: patriotism,
not greed, can be the basis of individual pursuits that produce wealth and
power. Sarkar adds:
‘The standard of spiritual urge in India
is being set today not only by the academicians, authors, scholars, inventors
and business experts but also by such men and women as have taken to public
life, social service, political propaganda, rural reconstruction, and…to
proletarian upheaval.’
[84]
Individuality is thus directed towards national service. Sarkar’s
colonial location, the nakedness of his desire for the instruments of war, and
his conviction that the individual is the most basic such instrument, remain
evident throughout. He writes:
‘In every department of life in
India today, political or cultural, everybody who is anybody is a fighter, a
fighter against some social obscurantism, whether Hindu or Moslem, some alien
despotism, some vassalage in art or some industrial thralldom, or some
subjection in scientific or philosophical theory. In such fights lies the
emancipation of his soul. These subversions constitute his perpetual
sadhana. Verily
Shakti, energy or force, is the very deity of India’s men and
women.’
[85]
The remark
about shakti being the true deity of
the individual Indian may very well be a Bengali-Hindu slippage. More than that,
however, it is that familiar convergence (and distortion) of Nietzsche,
Machiavelli and Bismarck: Sarkar’s love of the powerful individual who has
merged not just with the nation but also with the state. We are left,
therefore, with a tortured attempt to reconcile liberal governance with
Romantic individuality. The state is the producer, the culmination, the showcase
and the container of the free individual. For that very reason, not much
remains of the individual when he cannot be shown to be serving the
nation-state. The liberal state shelters, and shelters in, the shadow of the
Great Dictator. And because it does not disavow democracy, it is inevitably
itself the Great Dictator.
The Sheltering Cage: ‘Demo-Despotocracy’
and India
Like most Indian nationalists of
his class, Sarkar saw the state as an axiomatic object of desire and pursuit.
It was, in some contexts, more important than nationhood itself: harder, more
tangible, less deniable once extant. The lack of a state was a shortcoming in
the nation, indicating not only weakness in the world, but the inability to
close the historical ‘lag’ evidenced by weakness. In the contemporary Indian
context, however, the state – as an idea and an institution – was very unevenly
developed. Apart from Sarkar, the only major polemicist of the state was
Gandhi, and he was for the most part an ideologue of the anti-state.
[86]
One can, of course, find a kind of theory of the state in Bankim’s reworking of
Krishna (1886), or even earlier in Michael Madhusudan Dutta’s
Meghnadvadh Kavya (1861).
[87]
But in such cases the approach is oblique and metaphorical, with little sense
of an immediate relevance in the world of policy. This is perhaps unremarkable
in a colonized society in which a fully independent Indian state, evolving
rapidly from its colonial predecessor, remained literally fantastic even in the
final years of colonial rule. A complete picture of the state of freedom lay
across a chasm of the imagination. Bose could not see it coming when he escaped
from house arrest, Gandhi did not foresee it when he rejected the Cripps
Mission and launched the Quit India movement, and Sarkar did not believe it even
after 1947, in the brief period when India was a Dominion.
[88]
The decades preceding 1945 were years of half-measures and half-theories of
independent statehood, in which Britain (or alternately, Japan) maintained a
dominating presence. In the permanent semi-colony, the philosophy of an
independent state is inevitably stunted.
In the same period, however, Indians
acquired extensive experience of statecraft as a set of practices. Since the
Minto-Morley reforms of 1909, at any rate, nationalist politicians and
political parties had been oriented towards the control of the organs of the
state. We see this in the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim
League even before the end of the Great War.
[89]
It becomes inescapable in the dyarchy councils, the post-war urban
administrations, the history of the Swaraj Party, and after the
Government of India Act of 1935 in Rajagopalachari’s Madras and other provincial ministries.
[90]
During the Second World War, we have the additional instance of Bose’s
government-in-exile based in Southeast Asia. (It is important to remember that
unlike many governments-in-exile, Bose – who had cut his teeth in Calcutta’s
‘municipal democracy’ – ran a real administration, with taxes, conscription,
punishments, and a population of increasingly unhappy ‘overseas Indians.’
[91])
In all these situations, there was an intertwining of authoritarianism and
autonomy. In part, this had to do with the location within the colonial state
(or the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere): freedom from colonial diktat coexisted
with awareness of the limits of that freedom. In part, however, it reflected
the perception even limited freedom was dependent upon authoritarianism for its
sustenance and expansion. The experience of independence could not be separated
from authoritarian statecraft.
This
was the Indian context of Sarkar’s vision of the state. His polemic represented
its assumptions even as he strained against its limits. There can be no doubt
that he believed that the insurgent Indian state should be free not only in the
sense of being its own agent in the world, but also in the sense that it should
conform to established models of liberal democracy. He had no interest in a
governance that was narrowly ethnic in its identification, and his ambivalence
on the question of Indian unity was, among other things, an ideology of
tolerance and an aspect of his broader vision of ‘pluralism.’ Similarly, in decisively
separating
Bismarck and Machiavelli from
Jesus and Buddha, and making no secret of his preference for the former, Sarkar
articulated a clear preference for a secular state, in which there were readily
apparent boundaries between private identities and public concerns.
[92]
His ‘Hindu’ enthusiasms had nothing to do with any fondness for a statecraft of
religion or even of religious identity; the ideological overlaps between him
and Savarkar were superficial.
The state need
not be the focal point of the life of the individual, Sarkar suggested early in
his career: there was more to life.
[93]
The emphasis on the state as the preeminent institution of organized human
existence seems to have increased sharply after the Great War, influenced by
the radical reorganization of the European states in that period. The rhetoric
of ‘pluralism’ continued to function as an ideological hedge, however, keeping
Sarkar from getting drawn fully into political fundamentalisms, including
statist fundamentalisms like fascism. He welcomed Kemal Pasha’s revolution in
Turkey, seeing it as ‘a significant landmark in the life of the oppressed
nationalities’ and a successful defiance of Western geopolitical hegemony, but
grimaced at Ataturk’s intolerance of parliamentary opposition.
[94] ‘Kemal Pasha has been behaving like
Mussolini,’ he remarked unhappily in 1926.
[95]
(Simultaneously and somewhat inconsistently, he grimaced at British satisfaction
with the disappearance of the centerpiece of Khilafat politics in India.
[96])
Pluralism remained, thus, the modern citizen’s way of negotiating with the
state:
‘Pluralism rests fundamentally on the idea
that the ‘real’ is hardly ever general, universal or absolute but essentially
individual, personal and relative. The very fact that the life of an individual
or a group can be regulated by many other than the standardized norm or
conventional mores to which tradition is used, challenges the despotism or
infallibility of any recognized system of moral, social or political
absolutism.’
[97]
Yet within this
avowal of the liberating and liberal state, we find a great deal of
ambivalence, which becomes sharper in the 1920s. The more infatuated Sarkar
became with the hard state, the more ambiguous he became about the implications
for the freedom of the individual. When he wrote of the restriction of
individual freedom by the state, as in the Soviet Union, he almost never got
into issues of legitimacy or illegitimacy.
[98]
Even the colonial state, which Sarkar explicitly equated with terrorism, was never
categorized as illegitimate.
[99]
What was more relevant than legitimacy, for him, was necessity. It is not clear
whether this was an endorsement or the recognition of a reality, but there is
no meaningful distinction, and it is always the state that ‘needs.’ We have, in
this vision of the needy state, the kernel of the state of exception.
[100]
It also foreshadows Gellately’s description of Nazi Germany as a ‘prerogative state,’
or a state based on extraordinary but permanent prerogatives that flow from an
absolute national interest – i.e., a need – that crowds out liberal
considerations.
[101]
The fetish of
necessity is connected to Sarkar’s ambivalence about democracy. When he wrote
about Italy in the mid-1920s, he portrayed Mussolini as a steely-nerved
political genius (who had lost his nerve lately
[102])
but fascism as a betrayal of Mazzini’s ‘message of social justice and personal
freedom,’ adding: ‘Mazziniano embodies today all the forces that are arrayed
against fascism – socialistic, democratic, republican.’
[103]
The orderliness of Milan was the orderliness of the prison-house, and Mussolini’s
attempts to muzzle the press reminded Sarkar of the British Raj.
[104]
Italy fascinated Sarkar precisely because these were significant
resemblances: Italy, like India, had a deficit of modernity.
[105]
Governance in a ‘second class nation’ necessarily had to be a process of compensation
and catching up, but the means mattered, because the ends could not be divorced
from considerations of freedom.
It is important
to understand that democracy and freedom were both connected and separate for an
inter-war intellectual and anti-colonial nationalist like Sarkar. Nothing was
more valuable than freedom, he wrote unambiguously on the eve of the Second
World War.
[106] As
the remarks on Mazzini indicate, fascism became particularly problematic when
it conflicted with democratic traditions that were themselves intertwined with
nationalism. His early enthusiasm about the Soviet Union never translated into
a prescription for a similar regime in India. He soon came to see the Comintern
as obstructing his vision of interclass and international cooperation.
[107]
‘Tremendous doses of
a-satya, a-shiva and
a-sundara are associated with…the Soviet regime,’ he wrote under the
heading of ‘The Annihilation of Freedom,’ when Germany and the USSR went to
war.
[108]
(After the war, be remained bitter that Nehru and the Congress had evidently
favored the Soviets over Germany, Japan and Italy, and that Indian foreign
policy experts continued to be anti-German and anti-Japanese.
[109]
Also, as Flora has indicated, Sarkar had absorbed Benedetto Croce’s dislike of
communism generally and the Soviet Union particularly.
[110]
He was apparently less receptive
to Croce’s views on
fascism.
[111])
All the same, he felt compelled to weigh the
pros and cons of the democratic tsunami he believed was sweeping the world. On
the one hand, he saw in the democratic state an enhanced capacity for the
general well-being of society; on the other, he saw a heightened potential for
mediocrity, uniformity, tyranny and the ‘excessive demand for well-being.’
[112]
Tocqueville’s reservations about democracy were reasonable, he observed,
adding: ‘Democracy represents by all means a progress upon the stage of
non-democracy, but is inevitably a condition of certain evils not known or
apparent in that stage.’
[113]
Even as he encouraged the Constituent Assembly of India to establish a republic
based on universal suffrage, he remained skeptical about bourgeois democracy,
seeing it as susceptible to plutocracy and a host of other evils:
‘The inequalities of money manifest
themselves in the most inhuman manner. Obnoxious snobbishness prevails in the
atmosphere. Sycophancy on the one hand, and nepotism, on the other, constitute
the most fundamental basis of municipal morality. Bribery, sex-exploitation,
extension of patronage to the unfit and other undesirables, promotions based on
backbiting and secret informations, distribution of orders for goods among
relatives and party-members, - these are some of the normal features of
municipalized urbanism. The milieu is vitiated from top to bottom by deliberate
injustice and palpable inequality.’
[114]
The ‘balance sheet of democracy’ – the phrase
is Sarkar’s – was evidently weighted more heavily on the negative side. Sarkar thus
kept his distance from democracy, and it did not matter very much whether the
model was Soviet or bourgeois. What mattered was the location of democracy in
the needy state. The ambivalence explains Sarkar’s apparently naïve
observations about a
digvijaya of
democracy at the very moment when totalitarian regimes had demonstrated what
they were capable of. Since democracy was not inherently good or synonymous
with freedom, Sarkar could speak of unsavory regimes as being ‘democratic.’ The
digvijaya, it turns out, was not just
of democracy, but of a particular kind of state: what Sarkar, in 1939, called
‘demo-despotocracy,’ or the modern regime in which democracy and despotism had fused
inseparably.
[115]
Demo-despotocracy
is not merely a clumsy neologism. It indicates a particular relationship
between the state and the individual. Sarkar’s critique of democracy veers
repeatedly into the discourse of the clinic: psychology, unfitness, sex,
undesirables.
[116]
Democracy generates individuality in the form of the expert-administrator,
located within modern bureaucracies, who investigates and compels:
‘What is needed in India is more officials
appointed by the Government, corporation, municipalities, district boards, and
union boards per 1000 inhabitants. These officials are to be not only men and
women of general qualifications capable of doing propaganda work about health,
agriculture, better babies, dietetics, cattle improvement, co-operative credit
or cottage industries. A very large number of these officials must be technical
experts, i.e., men and women trained in medicine, hygiene, farming, veterinary
science, nursing, midwifery, pedagogics, vocational guidance, and such other items.’
[117]
Simultaneously, it generates individuality-in-sickness
and problems of governmentality, which the state must confront and solve.
[118]
We see here Sarkar’s location within a statecraft that is not so much
right-wing or left-wing as modern, in which the emphasis on individuality
inevitably produces the individual as a deviant or delinquent, to be subjected
to the clinical state.
That Foucauldian
element in Sarkar’s thinking is related to his notion of tacit or passive
consent, which amounts to a tautology of democracy: if there is a state, there
must be popular consent, and implicitly, individual consent. ‘An undemocratic
state is as great a contradiction in terms as an undespotic state,’ he wrote in
1939, meaning that the absence of active resistance was tantamount to consent.
[119]
A basic aspect of Sarkar’s ‘pluralism’ is that power is diffused in the people
and a plurality of institutions. Thus, even in authoritarian regimes, power is
essentially democratic in its nature and distribution, and even fascism can be
described as a triumph of democracy. So can colonialism, even without the
pretense of representative government. British India was a demo-despotocracy, Sarkar
argued, not because of dyarchy or the Government of India Act of 1935, but
because the ruled had given their passive consent:
‘The transfer of power [to the East India
Company] was an act of free choice on the part of the Indian peoples or
princes. The people, the folk, the demos did not revolt against the transfer of
power from one hand to the other.’
[120]
The idea that British India was
democratic because Indians had passively consented to a ‘transfer of power’ may
be a bizarre reading of popular consent, and of the history of colonization. The
notion of passive consent, however, made it possible for Sarkar not only to
accept the authoritarian state as democratic and legitimate (as long as it
could be described in modern phraseology like ‘transfer of power’), but also to
be blind to signs of resistance, and indeed, to see small acts of resistance as
illegitimate or insignificant.
Sarkar’s idea of
demo-despotocracy is both perceptive and naïve. It is perceptive because it
acknowledges the coercive fabric of the modern state. Sarkar understood that
states are controlled by bureaucratic and economic elites, and he certainly
understood that when the individual citizen is ‘necessarily’ coerced, the
source of the coercion is not quite external: ‘[I]n the dictatorships of today
the people is not something antithetical to the ruler, the authority, but a
part and parcel of a synthetic organization which combines the two in one solid
structure.’
[121] He
was writing at a time when the FDR administration in America had already raised
the specter of bureaucratic-political overreach within liberal democracy.
[122]
But it is naïve because he misunderstood the nature of the relationship between
the totalitarian state and the people, particularly in Germany and the Soviet
Union. Noting that modern despots like Hitler and Stalin acknowledged popular
sovereignty like any democrat, he concluded that ‘the despots are incessantly
being kept alive to the interests of the masses and dominated by their demands
at every step.’
[123]
By presuming a relationship of identity and even equality between the state and
the governed, he more or less missed the element of terror in totalitarian
governance. He was, in other words, unwilling to recognize the contemporary
phenomenon of totalitarianism as something different from garden-variety
authoritarianism, not to mention the New Deal.
Moreover,
Sarkar’s essentially bourgeois vision of class and justice – i.e., the fact
that he was ‘for’ the working class but ‘against’ a radical overturning of the
relations of production – ensured that he
saw the managerial state as a social necessity.
[124]
The different classes, with their different interests, would continue to exist
in his free society, and while a ‘friendly alliance’ between the classes was
highly desirable, the potential for class conflict would remain. That conflict
could be managed by the state, which would ‘take all social classes along with
it in its march towards progress.’
[125]
The state and citizenship become a glue that holds the classes together. As
usual, the state-fetish compromises Sarkar’s radical inclinations, or
recuperates his reactionary tendencies. It also leads him close to fascism. About
Mussolini’s Italy, he wrote in 1932:
‘[A]nti-socialists from Bismarck to
Mussolini…have only rejected the vices of socialism and absorbed its virtues.
While the vice consists in class antagonism virtue consists in increase in the
freedom of the people, better employment facilities etc.’
[126]
Whose freedom did Sarkar have in
mind? The answer can only be the freedom of the individual who has already
accepted the contingencies of docile citizenship.
The
prioritization of docility in the thinking of an intellectual committed to a
vision of productive conflict and
matsyanyaya
is both jarring and understandable. The state resolves the contradictions: it
behaves according to the principles of conflict and
matsyanyaya beyond its borders, but eradicates (or rather, manages)
fish-rule within its territory. In the process, however, it becomes the biggest
fish of them all. Bholanath Bandyopadhyay has remarked that for Sarkar, the
state was only a means to an end that can be described as freedom.
[127]
Bandyopadhyay is, I think, wrong in this assessment. Freedom, for Sarkar, came
to be virtually inseparable from an accommodation reached with the state, i.e.,
identification with the state to the extent that being swallowed by the ‘fish’
changes nothing. The state produces the individual, nationhood and freedom, but
in the process, it produces itself and its needs. It is thus an end in itself:
troubling but necessary.
That vision of
the state informs Sarkar’s imaginary of modern India, which, he wrote, needed
to develop a range of autonomous institutions, from academic councils to
commercial associations. These organizations, he argued, would have a built-in
diplomatic function: they would facilitate contact and exchange with their
counterpart organizations in other countries.
[128]
(He was thinking specifically about exchanges with the French
science-and-technology establishment.) They were, as such, the institutions of
self-representation that Indians lacked. He himself became involved, in the
early 1930s, in a secretive and abortive effort to create such structures for
economic, intellectual and political contact between India and Italy.
[129]
It is curious that Sarkar would expect colonial India to have produced
structures that are typically associated with sovereign states like France, but
there are two overlapping explanations. One is that, as Partha Chatterjee has suggested,
a semi-autonomous and institutionalized nation-state had already begun to
emerge
within the colonial state, and
Sarkar was impatient with the pace of its emergence.
[130]
The other is that Sarkar had in mind a shadow state, with its own institutions,
that might operate
irrespective of the
colonial state. ‘Young India,’ from the latter perspective, was already free
and endowed with all the material of statehood, capable of bypassing the
colonial apparatus, but lacking the will to act on the capability. If that will
was developed, the shadow-state would emerge into the light, projecting its
individual representatives into the international realm of competition and
cooperation.
In either case,
only an Indian state would enable the individual Indian to emerge fully. It
should come as no surprise that Sarkar’s vision of that state is explicitly
pedagogical:
‘In the twentieth century in every
civilized and independent country education is free as the air. It is naturally
inconceivable that there can be a republic in a society which does not enjoy
universal education. And yet all the republics that we know of had been
instituted long before the idea of ‘compulsory’ education, or ‘free elementary
education,’ or ‘public school’ system was conceived. Statesmen should rather
recognize that the very institution of the republic is itself a powerful
educative agency, and that actual participation in the work of government is an
integral schooling for democracy.’
[131]
Here, Sarkar is obviously aligned
with a broad principle of republican governmentality. It can be traced back to
a very early stage in his thinking, when Sarkar – actively engaged in
developing the extra-colonial schools of the National Education scheme
[132]
– wrote that the state comes into being to further the interests of the people.
[133]
To reconcile that conviction with his later insistence that the state comes
into being before the people are unified, i.e., before there is a people, he
resorted to the vanguardist notion that a small elite can represent a larger
population that is only potentially a people.
This committed him to a specifically colonial governmentality, in
which the nationalist vanguard perceives that their society has jumped the gun
by embracing a political form with which the masses have not identified
themselves. In those circumstances, the state becomes a vital – and inevitably,
fetishized – instrument of ideological and moral training, and democracy the
functioning of a disciplining agency.
That
disciplining function structures Sarkar’s view not only of the Indian future
but also of the past. It shapes, for instance, his praise of Shivaji. At that
point, Shivaji had already become an icon of the Hindu nation, and of the right
wing of Indian nationalism generally.
[134]
Sarkar deployed Shivaji in a way that is both conventional within nationalist
discourse and novel. Sarkar’s Shivaji is a national hero and an empire-builder
– like Frederick the Great of Prussia, the author insisted. But while the
Maratha’s conflict with the Mughals was noted, there was no anti-Muslim content
in Sarkar’s rhetoric.
[135]
Shivaji and Aurangzeb were both claimed as Indian emperors. Shivaji’s greater
significance, for Sarkar, was that the man could be represented not only as a
symbol of the individual will-to-statehood and deliberate ‘political
engineering’ that was the hallmark of statesmanship,
[136]
but also as a symbol of democracy in the service of the nation: the mobilizer
of ‘low class’ Marathas. Democracy
must serve
the nation; it is useless if it does not.
The democratic
nation-state that Sarkar imagined for India was resolutely ‘pluralistic’: by
the 1920s, when he wrote about Shivaji, he had outgrown his infatuation with
Herder and national monoculture.
[137] He went out of his way to articulate his ‘world-conquering’
Indian nationhood in multiple Indian languages, including Urdu.
[138]
Nevertheless, pluralism had to be managed and promoted by the state or by
quasi-state institutions: to be
ordered,
not dispersed, along federal lines.
[139]
That discrepancy reflects a vital uncertainty within Sarkar’s vision of a free
Indian state: for all the declarations that unity is unimportant, there is a
persistent fear of fragmentation, and a corresponding obsession with managerial
authority. Sarkar’s appreciation of the various linguistic-literary ‘academies’
in India, and his desire for a ‘National Culture Department,’ reflect his
desire for modern bureaucratic organization even in culture, bringing to India
a feature of the European nation-state. He could praise Bankim’s ‘love of
individuality’ and call for the organized management of culture in the same
breath: if he saw a conflict, it was either to be accepted wryly as the price
of freedom, or more enthusiastically as ‘creative disequilibrium.’
[140]
Bankim became Nietzsche, Bankim’s Krishna became Zarathustra, and Zarathustra
became a New Deal bureaucrat in Sarkar’s imagination.
[141] (It might be said that this inadvertently
savaged Bankim, Nietzsche, Krishna and Zarathustra at the same time, but as
Sudipta Kaviraj has noted, Bankim started it.
[142])
It reflects an essential feature of ressentiment in the colony: when the nation
is perceived as underdeveloped and engaged in desperate catch-up with the
already-developed, the state or quasi-state organizations must compensate for
the individual. That compensation is, of course, perceived and presented as
helping the individual, not restraining
him.
Germans and Others
Sarkar’s
reputation and self-perception as a ‘world scholar’ began during his long stints
in Germany in the early and middle 1920s, and it is not surprising that he
would be fascinated by the political evolution of the German state between the
world wars.
[143] There
were many facets to this fascination. In the long clash between the communists
and the German right in the Reichstag, Sarkar reserved greater disdain for the
former, seeing them as disruptive and, worse, agents of a foreign power.
[144]
He also absorbed some of the contemporary German resentment of the Treaty of
Versailles. ‘[M]illions of Germans have been given away in subjection to
neighbours on all sides,’ he observed in 1926, establishing a shared political
cause between Germany and India.
[145]
(A personal factor is apparent here: Sarkar’s wife Ida was an Austrian – with
Bavarian roots – from South Tyrol, a German-speaking region ‘given away’ to
Italy. She perceived her situation as a kind of statelessness.
[146])
He remained a cautious observer, noting in the same breath that the ‘German
atmosphere today is fearfully nationalistic.’
[147]
But in his Indian eyes, Germany became literally a colonized country: ‘The
treatment of the Saar is an object lesson in colonialism,’ he wrote, and 1918
was a ‘catastrophe…which has kept [the] German mentality in chains,’ but the
‘German mind seems to be united in the decision that submission is no longer to
play any part in Germany’s relations with the nations that have overpowered her
in arms.’
[148] Anti-occupation
sentiment in the Ruhr could even be described in the familiar language of
satyagraha and
hartals.
[149]
(Gandhi remained useful in the unlikeliest of situations.)
In spite of the
apparent spinelessness of the Wirth administration in Weimar (which had brought
on ‘the nadir of national depression’
[150]),
Germany mattered to Indian nationalists. A common enmity with Britain meant
taking a certain pleasure in German successes in the First World War, and the
Bengali bhadralok were quite ready to raise a small cheer for the Kaiser.
[151]
It was not a universal response; it did not compare, in fervor or significance,
to the pro-Japanese sentiment in Bengal after 1905. Precisely when Sarkar wrote
his early paeans to Germany in
The Futurism of Young Asia, the satirist
Sukumar Ray lampooned German militarism as well as its Indian echo in a poem
about a belligerent Bengali everyman: ‘
Saat
German, Jagai eka / Tobuo Jagai larey.’[152] (‘Seven Germans versus Jagai alone / But
still Jagai fights.’) For Sarkar, however, belligerence was no laughing matter:
it was a necessary element of citizenship and the state of war. Moreover, he
had made an intellectual investment in German history, knowledge and the
language itself. Germany came to represent, for him, a model of the state and
the people that had undeniable relevance to India, not so much to be followed blindly
as to be recognized as a projection of the modern self.
Sarkar saw no
sharp disruption between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich: a perspective
that is obviously grotesque (the first was a troubled democracy, the second a
genocidal dictatorship), but not without substance. It is, for instance, somewhat
aligned with the thinking of Gellately, who has pointed out the continuities in
the policing apparatus across the temporal boundary of 1933: early Nazi
round-ups of communists were based on police lists prepared in the Weimar
period.
[153] Moreover,
like Gellately, Sarkar highlights the continuation of democratic politics and
plebiscites, suggesting that the Nazi regime and the German population engaged
in an intimate dance in which public opinion was assiduously courted by the
leadership.
[154] Unlike
Gellately, however, Sarkar refused to see the Nazi state as something other
than ‘normal,’ or to question the nature of that model of normalcy. In 1936,
when the Nürnberg laws had already been deployed, he continued to regard
Germany as proof that late-comers to modernity and power could ‘catch up with
the go-aheads’ in the game of ‘world-conquest.’
[155]
In 1935, 1936 and again in 1938, he described the Nazi Winter Relief program as
a model of progressive state action on the one hand and social service on the
other,
[156]
missing – or rather, ignoring – not only the compulsion that went into such
programs, but the wider context of intimidation and force in which they were
imbedded.
[157]
The refusal to
react more sharply to the Nazis was a common Indian non-response, having to do
with distance, proximity in time, and the existence of more pressing calamities
closer to home.
[158]
Gandhi’s remark that the Jews should have committed mass suicide is perhaps the
best-known example of this failure.
[159]
(Nehru, pointedly shopping at Jewish-owned stores, was an exception in this
regard.) In general, Indians who took an anti-Nazi stance did so because of
their communist or pro-Soviet affiliations, and not because of a particular
revulsion towards the Reich.
[160]
For Sarkar, however, ignorance and indifference were not the major factors. Modern
Germany represented for him, first and foremost, a Romantic alternative to the
liberal and materialist models of community. As such, it had room for the
Titanic individuality of Sarkar’s world-makers, and he had no doubt that India
– as a nation as well as a state – was an unmade world, in need of making. Secondly,
situated as he was in the
Sturm und Drang
of the Weimar Republic, Sarkar literally saw a society convulsed in struggles
to determine the relationship between the classes, between the home and the
world, and between the people, the state and the charismatic leader. He saw, in
other words, a process in which threats to democracy were intertwined with
populism, and with the ‘creative disequilibrium’ that he identified as a source
of freedom. Consequently, in the 1930s and beyond, he remained well-disposed
towards the Third Reich, seeing it not only as an understandable reaction to
the excesses of Versailles, but also as an expression of freedom, and indeed,
as the triumphant emergence of a new form of democracy.
Finally, Sarkar – with his insistent sense of
history – was able to link the German turmoil of the interwar years to the
deeper past, going back to the Napoleonic wars. What was happening in Germany
was, he perceived, the climax of a statecraft of race in which the state had
finally become fully race-conscious. Race-consciousness, in this vision, was
not so much a matter of discrimination as of ‘scientific’ governance: maintaining
control over conflict, regulating the processes of assimilation, and all the
while pursuing the best interests of the political community of the people.
It is not that
Sarkar did not see the implications of this statecraft for marginal communities
and dissident individuals, or that he was not troubled. He accepted the
implications – it would be unfair to say that he ‘accepted’ the Nazi atrocities
of the war years, but he remained silent about them in his postwar writings –
at two levels. At one, the powerful, interventionist, managerial state was the
necessary price of freedom in a world of
matsyanyaya,
especially for countries like Germany and India, which, unlike the US and
Britain, had recent histories of ignominy and no oceans to protect them.
[161]
The German state was also glamorous, much like Japan was glamorous: not in
spite of the havoc it wreaked, but because of the havoc it could wreak. Havoc,
as Leni Riefenstahl and Goebbels both understood, was inseparable from the
aesthetics of order. In this vision of what is essentially a national-security
state looking inwards as well as outwards, communities and individuals that
held themselves aloof from the state were nuisances at best, or at worst, foreign
bodies in an increasingly biological model of the nation/state. That model complicates
Sarkar’s insistence that the state was a voluntary and artificial association
in which minorities were normatively protected by the contract itself.
[162]
Sarkar’s adoption of the biological model – with its troubled and troubling
relationship with the willful and ‘creative’ individual – was directly influenced
by his admiration of (and acquaintance with) Karl Haushofer, the German political
scientist who had once been a general and a military advisor to Japan, then a teacher
and friend of Rudolf Hess, and finally a victim of the Nazi regime.
[163]
(Herbert Spencer may have played a role also.) At another level, Sarkar sought
a clear-eyed reconciliation between what he saw with what he wanted. The world
was increasingly democratic, democracy was not synonymous with justice, and the
democratic state would produce its victims. Unlike Gandhi, he offered no
alternatives, except the vague hope that in India, the inclusion of the
proletariat in parliamentary democracy would produce a less destructive state.
Sarkar’s Germanophilia
was not an uncomplicated adulation. In ‘The New Germany and Young Asia,’ he
outlined his vision of the role that Germany might play in the post-Great-War
world:
‘The crushing defeat sustained by German
arms entailing, as it has, the loss of colonies promises almost to be a
blessing in disguise to Germany. For it has served to enlarge the horizon of
German horizons and energies. It has enfranchised German idealism from the
narrow territorial limits of the Teutonic race. German Kultur has at last been compelled to take note of the many races
outside of Europe in whose service Germany’s humanists and cosmopolitan
thinkers must have to devote their brains and brawns. The new Freiheitskampf, the coming war of
Liberation, to which the diplomacy, science, arts and philosophy of Young
Germany are addressing themselves is accordingly not to have for its objective
merely the regions of Mitteleuropa on
the lines of the little Vaterland for
which the heroes of 1806-1813 fought. No, the Kleists and Schillers of Germania
in the twentieth century are destined to evoke the romanticism of their
compatriots for the emancipation of much larger areas of the earth’s surface.
The continent of Asian peoples who are striving to achieve their freedom and
shatter the fetters of the colonial powers is looming large in the
consciousness of Germany’s liberators as a great field of cooperation and
comradeship on which to work out the spiritual reconstruction of mankind. The
colonial powers are the common enemy of Young Asia and New Germany.
Automatically therefore German idealists have their natural allies in Asian
revolutionaries.
The present is not the time for a
Schopenhauerian pessimism for the German race. There is still a great future
before Germany, greater than she ever could imagine for herself while she was
carving out little slices from China or Africa or taking possession of tiny
unknown islands in the South Seas. German statesmen, intellectuals, and manual
workers have only to open their eyes and see that their place in the sun is
being assured in and through the friendly cooperation which is being extended
to them by the peoples of Egypt, Afghanistan, India and China. The few crumbs
which the British Empire may choose to grant to the Germans, its vanquished and
humiliated enemies, from out of its table by way of commercial concessions and
favours in the markets of its colonies, dependencies and mandated areas…can
only add insult to injury in the estimation of every normally thinking German.
But Germania’s genius has far more honourable and much more momentous work to
do for the world.’
[164]
Sarkar understands, here, that
Germany was invested in European chauvinism and white racism, and he is
conscious of the colonial tendencies inherent in German policy towards the non-European
world. At the same time, in the aftermath of Versailles, he sees Germany not
only as a European state without colonies and a fellow-victim of the
Anglo-French-American nexus, but as not-Britain and anti-Britain. From the
latter position, he slips into equating the condition of not having colonies
with the condition of not being colonialist, and even with being
anti-colonialist. The level of wishful thinking is striking: Sarkar also saw the
early USSR as a point of hope for colonized people, but never in such rosy
terms.
[165]
The Soviets were too prosaic for the Romantic longings of the colonized man in
search of wholeness. As Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Sarkar still regarded
the former as an exciting model of a relatively young, not-yet-degenerated,
‘world-conquering’ race.
[166]
Sarkar’s
enthusiasm about Germany was partly pragmatic. Much of The Futurism of Young Asia was written with a German readership in
mind, and the promotion of a common political mission for Germans and Asians is
among other things a work of propaganda: an attempt to mobilize support, and to
turn Germany from one
political-historical side to the other. Not unlike Gandhi’s seduction of Indian
capitalists to the Congress side of the anti-colonial struggle, Sarkar attempted
to seduce his readers and audiences by explaining the benefits: there was money
for Germany in Asian freedom, a grander historical role and new avenues of
competition. The generous sprinkling of German phrases, the references to
German history and literature, and the invocation of the need for ‘a place in
the sun’ serve the same function.
But Sarkar’s
engagement with Germany was not driven entirely, or even largely, by such
reasoned calculations. It had also to do with his refusal to relinquish a nationhood
of ‘spirit’: he sought, after all, not just to create an Indian state (or
multiple Indian states), but to awaken an eternal but dormant nation through
the agency of the vanguardist state. In that sense, Sarkar’s worldview, like
that of Nehru and to some extent Rabindranath,
[167]
was both prosaic and Romantic: ‘If [we examine] the beginnings of romanticism
in Europe we need only understand that romanticism has been a native Asian
commodity as well,’ he wrote, claiming a ‘German’ resource much as he claimed
Japanese Bushido.
[168]
Sarkar needed the Romantic. His enthusiasm for Romantic art and literature in
India reflected his conviction that the history itself was not sufficient ‘proof’
of nationhood, except perhaps for the vanguard.
[169]
For the rest, romance was essential, and the task of the vanguard was to impart
the flesh and blood of romance to the dry bones of history. The nation, after
all, was both extant and an ongoing project of construction. That construction involved
propaganda, and Romantic culture was a particularly effective form of
propaganda, because when it was effective it became realized as the fabric of
nationhood. (To paraphrase Benedict Anderson, the imagined community is not an
unreal community.
[170])
And indeed, the vanguard was not immune to the need for romance. There is in
Sarkar a persistent vacillation between realism and Romanticism: on the one
hand he is the Machiavellian who sees justice as irrelevant even if that is
unfortunate, but on the other he is driven by ressentiment, in which the
perception of injustice is everything.
Moreover, what
Germany had demonstrated in the years between 1870 and 1918 is that while the
Romantic produces nationhood, the imperatives of nationhood generate realism,
which further ‘realizes’ the Romantic project of nation-making. Ostensibly
realist literature, for instance, could serve Romantic purposes, Sarkar wrote
about his contemporary Bengali writers, placing them alongside their German
forbears:
‘All these writers embody in a subtle
manner the discontent which prevails among the intelligentsia with the existing
state of things. Each one is looking forward to the new social order, a new
art-philosophy, a new
Weltanschauung.
But nobody writes in the style of a demagogue advocating a revolution. The
poets are, however, dealing not so much with the romantic past as with the
living present. One noticeable trait of the current poetry is the importance
given to the different cities and villages, landscapes and historic sites as
themes for imaginative portraiture. Another striking feature is the sympathy of
the writers with the life of the working classes, the cultivators, the backward
races, and so forth.’
[171]
In India, as in
Germany, realism in descriptions and depictions of landscape literally formed a
national terrain.
[172]
Bringing Bankim into his analysis, Sarkar added:
‘The romantic handling of the past with a
leavening of nationalism, love of individuality, and the sturdy spirit of
freedom which characterize the robber-stories of Goethe and Schiller and the
romances of Scott has certainly been a common feature of India’s modern
fiction, saturated with idealism as it is. In this sense
Vande Mataram is the message not only of [
Anandamath] but virtually of every literary work, novel or drama,
conceived in the background of mediaeval history.’
[173]
Sarkar was not always kind to Bankim,
who he eventually accused of propagating pseudo-scientific nonsense about connections
between geography and racial essence.
[174]
But in Sarkar’s analysis of
Anandamath
in 1922, colonial India is a ‘Rosseauesque state of nature.’
[175]
That is of course a jab at the British, but it also allows him to posit a
similarity between the forest-and-bandit romanticism of German nationalist
mythology, and the historical ‘wilderness’ of colonial India, which generated
its own bandits. Bandits were simultaneously primitive and desirable; they were
undoubtedly individuals, but they had to be brought into a docile relationship
with the state, and this had to be done without eradicating their Romantic
sense of themselves or their existence in the real world of politics and
statecraft. Here Sarkar referenced the work of the Gujarati writer G.M.
Tripathi, who had taken it upon himself to update Puranic literature: ‘[W]e are
presented with a realistic picture of men and manners such as the eighteen
Puranas of old India have perpetuated
for us in Sanskrit in regard to previous ages.’
[176]
Sarkar’s praise for Tripathi indicates his investment in a form of Romanticism
that recovers the Indian past in a form that is actually more prosaic than
poetic, stripped of flying chariots and hovering nymphs but not of the fantasy
of nationhood, and thus usable as history.
Since
postcolonial nationhood is never complete but an process of endless yearning,
assimilation and discrimination, the Romantic and the realistic (not to mention
the didactic) must exist simultaneously and continuously within national
culture. It is difficult to find a better model for this cultural work than
Germany before 1945.
[177]
German romanticism provided Sarkar with an alternative to an unattainable
England, i.e., a way around the usual liberal roadblocks in the way of modern
nationhood: literacy, world-historical consciousness, rationality, punctuality,
whiteness, manhood.
[178]
For its Indian offshoots, it also provided a European-pedigreed ideological receptacle
for what would otherwise have to be dismissed as backwardness or superstition,
and it came with its own exemptions and caveats. The nation-state that Sarkar
imagined was not – could not be – exclusively Romantic: the power and
instruments that the colonial nationalist sought were also coldly rational. It
was in the process of explaining India’s own desire for ‘a place in the sun’
that Sarkar insisted that ‘Hindu politics was, as a rule, thoroughly secular,
i.e., Lutheran and Machiavellian.’
[179]
The combination of Luther and Machiavelli would have to constitute the basic
framework of the Indian state in the present and the future, as well. Other
icons – Nietzsche, Herder, even Mill – could be delegated to the realm of
culture. Culture (and the international theater of war) was where creative
disequilibrium and turmoil was desirable, boundaries were identified only to be
transgressed immediately, and where the state did a portion of its work. The
state itself, on the other hand, exemplified the arrest and control of turmoil:
its crystallization as the political purpose that defined the race/nation/people.
A dual
conception of peoplehood is perceptible here, with the state functioning as an
instrument of bifurcation. On the one hand, the people are a body politic, with
a political agenda; on the other, they are a culture, with diffuse and inherent
desires (for revenge, conquest, dominance and so on). It might be said that the
former is the rational, organized, unified, restraining level of the state, and
the latter is the space of freedom that the state sustains and is sustained by.
The separation, however, was a particularly fragile one, not only because the
state was tasked with restraint, and freedom designated as the incubator of
fascism (as in Weimar), but also because the political agenda that the state
pursued was itself constituted by febrile desires that are inseparable from
Sarkar’s understanding of race. Sarkar’s construction of nationhood is, in
general, premised on ordinary similarity and universality: all the world is
Romantic, with the possible exception of England.
[180]
It is that very dynamic that lends a hidden urgency to considerations of
‘blood’ and Volk. The nation-state was both above race (understood as nothing
less than desire itself), and a creature of race. Like Germany since Bismarck
or Prussia since Frederick, Sarkar’s Indian state might or might not be liberal
in its rhetoric and institutions, but it had to be consciously self-interested,
and it had to be ‘militarist.’
[181]
Simultaneously, it had to be democratic: militarism – the urge to conquer and the
desire for Dreadnoughts – was vested in ‘the people.’
[182]
In Germany after
WWI, Sarkar saw a racialized community that was cosmopolitan in its political
partnerships: Teutonic, but potentially aligned with a wider world of oppressed
races, rather like his ‘Hindu race.’ He did not miss Peter Gay’s point about
the thin, unloved nature of the Weimar state and the isolation of its cultural
elite.
[183]
He developed, nevertheless, an understanding of modern Germany that was both
perceptive and frighteningly naïve. He grasped that postwar Germany represented
an overt racialization of the European state. In ‘The Achievements of the War,’
he wrote:
‘Every cloud…has a silver lining. The
Orient is not blind to the fact that so far as Europe is concerned, the
achievements of the war are already great. Notwithstanding the problem of
German irredentas and other minorities, Europe is certainly going to be a far
more decent place to live in than before.
The nationality principle for which Kosciusko died and Kossuth fought, and
to which Bismarck and Mazzini gave a recognizable shape has at length been
thoroughly realized. It has in fact been carried to its furthest logical
consequence. The slogan, ‘one language, one state,’ may not in all cases turn out
to be as convenient in practice as it is mystical and romantic in theory.
Europe may need federations and Zollvereins in order to modify the extreme
atomistic organization of the new ethnic polities. But, on the whole, the
anachronism of race-submergence and race-autocracy that prevailed on a large
scale between the Jura and the Urals and between the Baltic and the Black Seas
has been rung [sic] out once [and] for ever.’
[184]
Europe, he declared, was now going
to be a ‘more decent place to live.’
[185]
This is not simply a failure of prescience. It is closely tied to his belief
that the state had to acknowledge race and nationhood in order to do its work.
The major problem of the prewar years, he suggests, was that multi-racial,
multilingual and multi-national states did nothing to control or mold their
racial-national material. Now that races/languages/nations were out in the open
domain of statecraft, he expected freedom, which becomes synonymous with not
only conflict, but also coercion.
It
is useful to ask, at this juncture, how Sarkar could have misread Germany to
the extent that he apparently did. In spite of his obsession with colonialism
as an influence on ‘racial destiny,’ he did not fully anticipate the broader
points that Hannah Arendt – his contemporary – would make about colonialism and
totalitarianism: that totalitarianism has its roots in colonialism, and that
colonialism had resurfaced as an intra-European dynamic of totalitarian
expansionism.
[186] (Peukert
has a made a similar connection between colonial warfare and Nazi governance.
[187])
To recapitulate Arendt’s well-known thesis, colonial rule in the late
nineteenth century – particularly in Africa – had produced a form of deviant
statecraft, based on terror and operated by what she called ‘the mob’: the greedy,
racist and power-hungry flotsam and jetsam of liberal-European civilization. In
the interwar period, the mob had surfaced within Europe itself, entering into
an alliance with capitalists, overwhelming the weakened nation-states, and
opening the door for totalitarianism. This new statecraft had subjected
Europeans to the forms of racism, terror and aggression that hitherto only
colonial subjects had experienced.
[188]
Arendt’s
thesis of totalitarianism has drawn its share of criticism, much of it justified.
The distinction she makes between the civic, liberal nationalism of the
Victorian era and the racist, aggressive identity-politics of the interwar
years ignores, for instance, the extent to which racism and its associated
forms of violence were normative, not deviant, in the late-nineteenth-century
Europe. It is, in fact, very much like the distinction that present-day Western
writers sometimes make between patriotism (good, Western) and nationalism (bad,
Eastern). Also, the ‘special’ nature of the totalitarian state, which was
axiomatic for Arendt, has not held up well. Gellately, for instance, has implicitly
questioned the most basic foundation of Arendt’s work, which is the
all-obliterating function of terror in the Nazi state. The Third Reich resorted
to the widespread use of terror only in its final years, Gellately argues,
suggesting that until the outbreak of war in 1939, consent and coercion in
Germany were so intimately woven together as to be almost indistinguishable. Terror
affected only a small minority, who were excluded from the nation.
[189]
In
some ways, Sarkar’s stance on Germany is aligned with that of Arendt’s critics.
Where Arendt insisted on total novelty, Sarkar saw incremental expansions of
democracy between the Kaiser’s Reich, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
Since he did not see democracy as being incompatible with tyranny, and regarded
it simply as a situation in which the state derived (or at least claimed to
derive) its legitimacy from the popular will, it is not necessary to criticize
him for declaring the Third Reich a democracy. It is more useful to unpack his position
with an eye on its implications for liberal democracy in a multi-ethnic state.
His views on nationalism and the nation-state are in some ways indistinguishable
from Arendt’s: both saw nationhood as a liberal condition having to do with
shared political interests and historical trajectories.
[190]
The nation-state, for them, was both limited (in Anderson’s sense of the term
[191])
and inclusive.
[192]
Sarkar, however, would have disputed the glowing liberal credentials that
Arendt awarded the European states of the pre-Great-War period: he was too
conscious of their colonial depredations, and unwilling to make a convenient
separation between ‘bad’ colonials and ‘good’ metropolitans.
[193]
(That, in fact, was a large part of his quarrel with Congress Moderates like
Lajpat Rai.
[194])
The
major misalignment between Sarkar and Arendt is on the issue of terror. Here,
the personal locations of the two scholars are a significant factor. As a Jewish
refugee from Nazi Germany and an activist who subsequently worked with Jewish
survivors of the Holocaust, Arendt emphasized terror. Terror affected her
personally. Sarkar, on the other hand, stood outside the circle of terror. Not
only did he leave Germany well before 1933, as an Indian bird of passage
nesting in the relative safety of the ivory tower, he had been external to the
racial politics of Weimar. Moreover, his sense of self was quite clear: he was
an Indian and a Hindu. He walked consistently in the shoes of the majority, even
if by default. Not surprisingly, he did not see – or was not overly troubled by
– the other side of Gellately’s argument: that terror was deployed both
systematically and randomly against those defined as external to the nation and
the state.
[195] A
veteran of the anti-colonial strategy of National Education, he (like Bose,
also an organizer of nationalist schools) was unwilling or unable to see the
mutually constitutive connections that Peukert has made between education,
terror and faith in a future based on the ‘scientific temperament’ (which,
after is, is what Sarkar meant by ‘futurism’).
[196]
Likewise, even in 1941, he did not fully grasp the implications of Peter
Fritzsche’s point that terror, produced by violent exclusion of various
minorities, underlay the German-majoritarian experience of individuality as
well as community.
[197]
Following
Fritzsche and Peukert, it can be said that the selective use of terror in
Germany became a basic strategy of constituting insiders and outsiders, and
thus, not only marking the limits of the nation-state, but also traveling
continuously towards those limits (without ever arriving).
[198]
What Sarkar saw, however, was a swirl of political activism followed by the
emergence of a regime alive to the need to define those limits. He was not
blind to coercion, but like most Germans, saw it as remote, and, to use a term pregnant
with meaning in German history, as normal. His interwar Germany was a normal
nation-state, becoming increasingly democratic and clarifying its boundaries.
As Maja Zehfuss and other scholars of modern
Germany have pointed out, ‘normalcy’ – both during and after the war – was a
bourgeois strategy of seeing and acknowledging, or rather, not seeing and not
acknowledging.
[199]
Those who saw and acknowledged indiscriminately were relegated to the margins
of bourgeois society. For the rest, the terror of those pushed beyond the
limits was not so much invisible as beyond the scope of the nationally-directed
imagination. If we recall Agamben’s thesis of the ‘state of exception,’ this is
indeed a specific, modern form of normalcy in statecraft: the ‘ordinary’
democratic state preserves pockets of extraordinary coercion, in which ordinary
expectations of rights, laws and justice do not apply, and which contain those
excluded from normal citizenship.
[200]
It is important to remember that the state of exception is
not actually exceptional: Agamben’s point is that it is a norm of
the modern state, and that Nazi Germany – with its redundancy of coercive
bureaucracies, privileging of the police over the judiciary, obsession with
delinquency, overlaps of legality and illegality, and empire of camps – was the
prototype. (The wider applicability of the prototype can also be glimpsed in
Foucault’s thoughts on the prison, in spite of Agamben’s attempt to distinguish
between the prison and the camp: one legal, the other extra-legal.
[201])
With its heavy
emphasis on Realpolitik, Sarkar’s vision of the nation-state, even the
democratic, bourgeois nation-state, is pockmarked with ‘camps,’ or states of
exception. These are essential to making
matsyanyaya vanish within the borders
of the state, so that the state can appear to be above the struggles of society
even as it wades into conflicts, interprets, takes sides, crushes some and
enables others. In other words, it is here that the managerial state does its
most critical managing, continuously defining its borders through race-making
and citizen-making, which, for Sarkar, were not only connected (race being
largely about political purpose), but also never-ending (since political
purposes and challenges change historically). Sarkar, as such, could not
disavow terror entirely when it came to the functioning of the nation-state: it
was normal.
Nazi Germany
could, therefore, represent a democracy of terror, in which people saw
participation in state terror (by informing the police on Jews, communists, homosexuals,
and each other) as a normal civic duty and good citizenship. Terror was itself
constituted by this participation, since mass participation made terror a
highly diffused form of public knowledge.
[202]
This is a dynamic that Arendt does not fully grasp: she isolates the mob from
the public, and terror from civic life. She is unable to come to terms, thus,
with Reinhard Heydrich’s remark that Warsaw-type ghettoes were unnecessary in
Germany because Jews marked by the yellow star would be ‘under the watchful eye
of the entire population.’
[203]
Sarkar, with his ambivalence about democracy, is better positioned to see this panoptic
dynamic, although it might be said that his notion of passive consent is too
limited to account fully for the logistics of terror-in-democracy. (Orwell, in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, may have come
closer than either of them.
[204])
Peukert, who also relies on ‘passive consent’ in his analysis of Nazi Germany, is
more sensitive than Sarkar to the internal fractures and complexities of such
passivity/consent, including its interpenetration with both dissent and terror.
[205]
Moreover, state terror was not simply obliterative as Arendt argued, but
productive, and its major product was race. As Sarkar saw it, however, race was
neither inherently connected to terror, nor inherently a major problem of
modern society. It became a problem when the state failed to manage it
effectively at the level of the individual. Hence, ‘the sooner…inequalities are
accepted as first postulates, the better for human welfare.’
[206]
The Didactic State and the National Body
Ironically, it
was when Sarkar looked at the United States that he saw the clearest evidence
of the failure, or rather, the partial success, of race-management as state
policy. In the American case, he could speak as a man with a direct stake in
the issue: he was an indignant Asian observer of anti-Asian discrimination. In
‘America’s Ultimatum to Asia,’ he wrote:
‘So far as the Americanization of
immigrants from Asia is concerned the problem has ceased to exist. The New
Worlders do not want to Americanize the Asian laborers. The men, women and
children of the Orient have been postulated to be ‘unassimilable’ before
anything was attempted in the way of ‘adopting,’ naturalizing, assimilating or
amalgamating them. The problem has thus passed beyond the limits of a merely
local labor-legislation or ‘domestic’ industrial dispute into the arena of
international politics.’
[207]
He added:
‘It is evident that the waves of Asian
invasion did not assume any formidable magnitude. And yet prohibitive special
legislation has been enacted by America to put an absolute stop to the tide of
immigration from China, Japan and India.’
[208]
The American state, Sarkar was
saying, had failed to respond scientifically, reasonably and responsibly to a
standard problem of governance when it came to Asian immigrants. In an era when
the individual (constructed as a deviant or as an experiment-in-progress) had become
the primary lens which the scientifically-inclined approached ‘problem’ populations,
the state that did not approach race-management rationally also, inevitably,
failed simultaneously at the task of making individuals and managing populations.
[209]
That, indeed, was a major criticism that
Sarkar’s Indian contemporaries often directed at the colonial state: that it
was a clumsy, unprofessional operation that had failed to meet the basic
requirements of modern governance.
[210]
When we come
down to the details of race-management, coercion, even terror, again become necessary to the relationship between
the state and the citizen. With reference to eastern- and southern-European
immigration to America, Sarkar described what liberal citizen-making entailed:
‘To America…these guests from Europe can
contribute their primitive midwifery, agricultural superstition, high
birthrate, and rural ignorance. In American cities they make their presence
felt by room and clothing that reek with odors of cooking and filth. Like
Bohemians in the country towns of Texas they displace old American settlers
from their favorite habitations. Jews are shunned by ‘Americans’ because they
eat garlic; Greeks because they are mere barbers and dirty show-shiners;
Italian fruiterers because they come from Naples, the city of rogues and rascals,
or because their women are notorious for cat-like fecundity; and Slavs because,
as Kuokol writes in
Wage Earning in
Pittsburg, of their rows and fights when they get drunk on pay-day or when
celebrating a wedding or christening. These are the people that are easily
duped by the ‘managers’ of political parties, and materially help lowering the
level of public life. They can be handled without trouble by employers and
captains of industry, and are pounced upon by capitalists to be exploited as
tools in the breaking of strikes. They spoil the labor market and demoralize
the proletariat class. In all respects they represent an enormous drag and a
dead weight upon America’s advance in civilization, democracy, and efficiency. Such
is the raw material that the United States is eager to wash, scrape, chisel and
polish, to manufacture 100 percent Americans of.’
[211]
The ‘bad citizenship’ of particular
racialized populations, in other words, diminishes both republican politics and
the labor movement. This is, of course, a turning back upon whiteness of a
major racist argument against self-government for non-whites in the colonized
world. In the process of making the point, however, Sarkar borrows wholesale
the WASP/nativist discourse of immigration in America. This is, at one level, a
matter of indifference: he is not interested in being fair to Russian or
Italian immigrants to America. Rather, he wants to score polemical points for
Asia. At another level, it indicates his persistent alignment with the insider-group
within the nation-state: here, the WASP-American upper classes, with their
investment in a particular model of citizenship and statecraft that normalizes
acting upon groups and individuals on
the margins of the state. It is, essentially, what Partha Chatterjee has
characterized as the discourse of policy, operating in grimy pockets within the
republic constituted by a discourse of rights.
[212]
Sarkar’s
interest in American society – and to a lesser extent, history – was unusual
for an Indian intellectual of his time. But the apparent dynamism of race and
republican rhetoric in America – the coexistence of democracy, racial
diversity, and discourses of exclusion and inclusion – made it an irresistible
chemistry experiment-in-progress, more fluid and ‘energized’ than even Germany,
and vitally relevant to races that
perceived themselves as ill-managed. In this regard, Sarkar grasped –
intuitively and implicitly, rather than overtly – the aspects of ‘internal
colonialism,’ necessary coercion, citizen-making and race-making in
governmentality. By acting forcefully upon ‘misfit’ communities, the state
effectively dissolves those communities (or renders them purely private), thus
opening up their members to an individuated and unmediated relationship with
the state itself. The United States had established that relationship with
whites but not with Asians, and thus compromised its own modernity:
‘On the one hand, the patriotic
Americanizers have been trying their best to abolish the ‘race lines,’ the
‘little Italys,’ the ‘little Hungarys,’ etc., from their cities. They are
thoroughly convinced, as they should be, that these ‘immigrant colonies,’ these
clan-communities, these towns within towns, present the greatest hindrances to
Americanization by perpetuating Old World traditions, customs and ways of
thinking.
Rightly, therefore, they
are determined to do away with the segregations as far as practicable in order
to assimilate the ‘new men, strange faces, other minds’ from Europe. On the
other hand, American behavior towards Asian immigrants has been the very
antithesis of this attitude. The only method directly calculated to prevent
fusion, amalgamation or even assimilation has been pursued in the treatment of
Orientals. It is a story of systematic ostracism, localization, persecution and
torture from beginning to end. Young Asia has at last been forced to realize,
like the Jew in medieval Europe, that in this land of the free ‘sufferance is
the badge of all our tribe.’’
[213]
Such a
compromise could not fail to appear anomalous to Sarkar. The fear of
clannishness, ‘towns within towns,’ etc., reflects the modern citizen’s fear of
the ghetto, or, to invoke present-day Indian discourse, the ‘mini-Pakistan’
that competes with, diminishes and subverts the nation-state.
[214]
Sarkar is largely sympathetic to this fear. He recognized, like Heydrich, that
the ghetto is the shadow of the state of exception: a zone apart, and a
signifier of the limits of the state. Unlike the concentration camp or a secret
prison, the ghetto is a reflection of the weakness of the state, but like camps
and black sites, it reflects exclusion from the state.
[215]
There can be little doubt that between the ghetto and the camp, Sarkar
preferred the latter. The eradication of the ghetto was a liberation: as an
Asian and a colonized man, ghettoized in the world in general and the West in
particular, he wanted to break out,
into
the state. This was a remarkable double movement: coming from the right
(towards the unitary nation-state), and also from the left (towards racial
desegregation). In a related double movement, the modern state that Sarkar saw
– either in America or in Germany – acted upon the individual either positively
(by ‘scraping’ him into a proper citizen) or negatively (by enabling or joining
the mob). The state, in other words, normatively broke
into the ghetto, dissolving it and transforming portions of it
into zones of exception.
That,
ironically, was inseparable from the inclusion of the individual in the body
politic. Sarkar’s analysis of the racial abuse of Asians in the US was closely
connected to his faith in the state as the major political agent of the
racial-national community and its individual members. It was the primary source
of dignity (or indignity when it was absent, as for Indians and the Chinese);
it was also the primary source of humiliation. As an Indian in the global ‘albinocracy,’
Sarkar was not oblivious to non-state agency in racism: discrimination by
private clubs, mob violence, and so on. But it was the forbearance and support
of the state that gave mobs and private agencies their power, he implied in his
remarks on the United States. Without the state, the mob was nothing. Power, in
this analysis, flows from the state to the mob, rather than from the mob to the
state as Arendt argued.
[216]
An effective
state was necessarily discriminating, but unlike the mob, it discriminated
intelligently. Sarkar was particularly incensed that American immigration
officers treated Indian merchants, scholars and travelers as if they were
laborers. Similarly, assaults on ‘high class’ Japanese were especially
outrageous, and photographing Chinese students in a forced state of undress was
unacceptable not least because they were students, not coolies.
[217]
For all his criticisms of bourgeois society, Sarkar was fundamentally bourgeois
in his sense of self and expectations of the state. Conscious that the technology
of governmentality could become an instrument of racial violence, but invested
in the basic principles of bourgeois governmentality, he compensated by
restricting his criticism to situations where the wrong class had been
targeted: to errors of modern governance, brought on by racism. Sarkar’s idea
of race-management becomes clearer here. While he was interested in the
rethinking of categories and social-scientific studies of ‘assimilability,’ he
also called for a wide range or basic and sophisticated state interventions:
the suppression of mob violence, the elimination of crude rituals of
humiliation, the teaching of individuality to the clannish, the teaching of
science and reason to those who wore the uniform of the state.
[218]
Not
surprisingly, Sarkar’s understanding of the relationship between art and
propaganda is suffused with didactic concerns. For India, he both abjured
propaganda and embraced it: the best art was also propaganda.
[219]
About Ram Ganesh Gadkari’s anti-alcohol melodrama
Ekach Pyala, he approvingly commented: ‘This drama is a study in
the drink-evil and domestic misery, – and can always be used in the propaganda
for prohibitionism.’
[220]
This particular concern both reflects contemporary American obsessions with
social degeneracy, class and ethnic ghettos,
[221]
and anticipates the Nazi preoccupation with embodied degeneracy.
[222]
In either case, Sarkar recognized the governmental value of a ‘propaganda’ that
could be utilized to increase the jurisdiction of the state. Broadly speaking,
he assumed that modern India was, or should be, a didactic society. Unlike
Gandhi, who also sought to banish the ‘drink-devil’ and practiced a politics of
moral instruction, Sarkar help up a vision of didacticism that was inseparable
from coercion.
He was not hostile to ‘art
for art’s sake,’ but he saw it as a decadent luxury.
The romance of
the state – which was inseparable from the science of the state – had to be
taught continuously. The lessons pointed in the general direction of a
citizenry that was both Enlightened and Romantic:
‘Nationalism is being fed by
historical and antiquarian researches. These have given rise to a vast amount
of dissertation in folklore, anthropology, ancient paintings and sculptures,
philology, and historical interpretation. Young India is almost repeating in
this manner the ‘romantic movement’ initiated by Herder and his associates in
Germany… Some very creditable historical romance has also come out from the pen
of erudite authors like Rakhal Das Banerji. And this possesses as powerful a
nation-making force as had the dramas of Dwijenralal Roy, the Schiller of
Bengal, about ten years ago. Jogendra Nath Bose has written two epics,
Prithviraj and
Shivaji. But the compositions, although sometimes rising to poetic
levels, are, like Voltaire’s ‘national epic,’
La Henriade, nothing but versified history planned with the avowed
object of teaching a political and moral lesson to Young India.’
[223]
Clearly, Herder
had not so much been left behind as rendered instrumental in a very
contemporary conceptualization of freedom. Regarding Dwijendra Lal Roy’s historical
dramas, Sarkar wrote: ‘But his
Leitmotif is…the
struggle for independence.’ About Roy’s much-sung nationalist anthem ‘
Dhane dhanye pushpe bhara’ (1905),
Sarkar enthused in 1922: ‘A chauvinism such as this is as elemental as human
blood.’
[224] Body-metaphors
linked the individual citizen to the state, where national institutions
constituted ‘the ganglionic cells of positivism which pervade the entire body
politic.’
[225] They
also linked Sarkar to what would become the rhetoric of National-Socialist
biopower: medical models of nationhood, degeneracy, purification, hygiene, healthy
and sick organisms, parasites in the body politic, blood and cells.
[226]
This language was a productive necessity: it produced people, and a
public. For Sarkar in 1941, Germany
was
a shining example of progress-through-public-health, and of a people realizing
themselves through ‘that revolutionary zeal, that faith that can move mountains,
which has been one of the outstanding features of National-Socialist Germany.’
[227]
The limits of the ‘public’ are, in practice, located in individual citizens and
non-citizens who are either normal or deviant, and normalcy and deviance are
‘naturally’ articulated through biological models and metaphors.
[228]
Exclusion and objectification of the individual thus becomes a basic, natural, but
also progressive/scientific, function of the nation-state. In Germany, Sarkar
wrote admiringly just as the Nazi programs of sterilization and murder of
‘defective individuals’ neared their completion,
[229]
the state had become alert to ‘the need of preventing hereditarily diseased
progeny as an item in human welfare,’ and ‘criminality is being correlated with
biological degeneracy in a definite measure.’
[230]
We are left with
some disturbing ‘lessons’ that the Indian state might learn from its German and
American counterparts (and predecessors) when it comes to the production and management
of the individual. If national ‘chauvinism’ is ‘elemental like human blood,’ it
places the humanity of the inadequately nationalistic under a question mark,
dehumanizing them at the level of the body itself. This then enables various
kinds of state action directed at the body, from education to incarceration and
torture. These enable the body to be healthy and free. The need for such action
was axiomatic for Sarkar. The continuation of colonial rule, he wrote in the
aftermath of the Jallianwallabagh massacre (as part of an attack on the
insufficiently militant Lajpat Rai), was a ‘degrading plight which none but a
race that is hastening towards annihilation can tolerate in shame and silence.’
[231]
Freedom became therapeutic, even clinical. And in Sarkar’s invocation of a
‘race hastening towards annihilation,’ there is the familiar echo of Gobineau.
[232]
Sarkar had, of course, mugged Gobineau. He had taken the language of racial
death, but reinterpreted it to mean the death of a
people, meaning a political community. But this reinterpretation of
Gobineau was also deployed by European fascism.
[233]
Ironically, for all his determination to maintain a world-historical distance
from savages, Sarkar slips into identifying with them; simultaneously and more
dangerously, he slips into identifying with the state that can either
assimilate or eradicate the misfits, and that can differentiate
‘scientifically’ between citizens and aliens, the desirable and the dying.
Sarkar had no illusions about the coercive aspect of eugenics and state
medicine. He had followed American eugenics – early twentieth-century programs
for the sterilization of ‘degenerates,’ criminals, the ‘feeble-minded,’ etc. –
with interest and admiration.
[234]
‘In every human society the demands of eugenistic prophylaxis are as
indispensable as those of individual prophylaxis against contagious diseases,’
he declared.
[235] Because
eugenics and social hygiene were supposedly preventive
rather than reactive, he saw them as better –
meaning not just more effective, but also more progressive – than the treatment
of those who had already been through the conventional rituals of medicine and
law, such as diagnosis, trial and similar formal demonstrations of fault:
‘The problems of progress…are directly and
indirectly associated with eugenic topics,’ he noted.
[236]
We circle back, here, to Sarkar’s
proximity to Agamben’s camp-world: the bypassing of formal procedures produces
Homo Sacer, or ‘bare man,’ who has been
produced by the state as an individual by exclusion rather than inclusion.
[237]
The inmate of the camp, it turns out, is the shadow of the free individual. Both
are ‘progressive.’ Sarkar’s India needed camps. Historical ‘lag’ not only made
them necessary, but was constituted by their absence:
‘These items of social insurance are entirely
unknown as yet throughout India and constitute but another index to her
socio-cultural lag in the field of
étatisme
and government compulsion.’
[238]
He condemned the ‘sterilization’ of Hindu widows not only because it destroyed
the wholeness of individual women, but also because it displaced on to a
backward society – and a backward, ignorant patriarchal family – a legitimate
function of the modern state. (In the process, it contributed to lower
birthrates and deprived the state of an essential resource of national power.
Sarkar was an admirer of Ataturk’s compulsory-marriage policies.
[239]
He had also lectured and published in Italy on birth-rates and demographic
health.
[240])
The imaginary of freedom was inseparable from winning that function – literally,
the right to sterilize (or to enforce procreation) and thus ‘make’ the
individual – back from the community.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I return briefly to the ‘young’ in ‘Young India.’ Regarding
Satish Chandra Roy, who died in 1904 at the age of twenty-one, leaving behind a
small body of writing on the bold, joyful, magnanimous spirit of youth, Sarkar
remarked during his Weimar period:
‘It is in the school of terror and
defiance that the world’s youth loves to grow up. Roy’s message will be
appreciated by the younger representatives of all races and ages and will have
a special significance to the leaders of the
Jugend-Bewegung in present-day Germany.’
[241]
Sarkar is not praising a uniquely
Indian youthfulness here; rather, he wants to claim, for the Indian nation,
what is admirable in any modern race. But that universal is actually specific
to European Romantic nationalism, with its echoes of Nietzsche on the one hand,
and the right-wing youth movements on the other. The youthfulness that Sarkar
admires is related to contemporary Indian literary fantasies of children who
transcend geography,
[242]
but it is closer in ‘spirit’ to what Karl Schenzinger evoked in the 1932
propaganda novel
Der Hitlerjunge Quex, in
which the adolescent Heini, secretly watching a Hitler Youth gathering, is
simultaneously terrified, thrilled and awakened to his German identity.
[243]
Heini’s awakening is virtually orgasmic. Sarkar’s ‘futurism,’ too, is among
other things a deployment of the erotics of youth: the pleasure of the
individual becoming self-aware by joining something larger and purposeful. Intended
to serve the national state of ‘terror and defiance,’ it is
like Hitler’s conceptualization of youth
as ‘the defiant embodiment of masculine strength,’
[244]
but it represents India at a particular historical moment when modernity is
simultaneously exciting, alarming and elusive. The most powerful sign of this
modernity was a state that, even when it was ‘artificial,’ might recuperate and
recast nature:
Indian nature. Politics
itself becomes a matter of identifying and reclaiming one’s ‘blood’ and ‘ganglionic
cells.’ It was, however, a blood that the state produced and policed: eugenics
and public health were necessary instruments in ‘the promotion of human
development and national regeneration.’
[245]
Blood of this nature tied India to Germany not in any crude sense of Aryan kinship,
but in the sense of violent transformations, interventions and exclusions
surrounding the individual and the body.
Sarkar’s vision
of individuality as an aspect of freedom that is dangerous, dormant or useless
until it is harnessed by the state, and of the state itself as a
quasi-individual, leads us inexorably to his fascination with fascism and his
evident approval of the military-authoritarian models of the state that
developed in Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. He had already
moved away from crude exaltations of the linguistic-racial Volk; in his mature
thinking (by which I mean his post-Great-War work), multiracial and
multilingual states – and even the multinational state – were legitimate and
normal, and considerations of the Herderian soul irrelevant to statecraft. At
the same time, his ‘four instincts’ theory of human nature is as indebted to
European right-wing thought as it is to ‘authentic’ Indian political theory.
Also, the concern with culture did not go away: in spite of Sarkar’s
declaration that the conflation of culture with nationality was ‘confusion
worse confounded,’ it became partially submerged in the form of national
history.
[246]
The fetish of the Volk was replaced by the fetish of the state itself.
Sarkar’s
apparently admiring vision of German nationalism and the Third Reich should be
seen in the light of his desire for a state that could realize the Romantic by
scientifically managing its human material. His understanding of the role of
the state in a democracy left the door open – in fact, held the door open – for
spaces of coercion within what was otherwise a state of ‘freedom.’ Typically
more receptive to statist narratives than to discourses of resistance, he barely
acknowledged the misery the German state generated between Bismarck and Hitler,
except as a sort of distasteful necessity. Also, his use of ‘the people’ in the
German case goes against his usual tendency to avoid biological constructions
of peoplehood: he indirectly endorsed the racist construction of the Volk, with
all its exclusions. In a significant slippage, blood became both Romantic and
clinical. The reification of the people by the state remains the final purpose
of Sarkar’s statecraft, to the extent that it is inseparable from freedom.
Thus, while there
is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Sarkar’s preference for ‘pluralism’ and
anti-authoritarianism over ‘patriot-despots’ and monopolistic political parties,
the ideological problem that he represents has to do with what happens when pluralism
and the purposeful nation-state come into conflict. Not only does his
adversarial outlook on ‘traditional’ structures of community and family (reimagined
as ghettos) generate inevitable issues of dissent and compulsion, there is a
persistent tension in his thinking between a nation of ‘one people’ engaged in
the single-minded pursuit of the national interest, and a liberal citizenry
that thrives on the absence (or the overthrow) of centralized, top-down
direction. It may be suggested that the first preference has to do with
political and state-oriented affairs and the latter with culture and knowledge,
but that separation is not fully satisfactory, since for Sarkar culture and the
state are closely linked phenomena, both being aspects of nationhood. The
notion that culture is a space of cosmopolitanism, separate from the space of
citizenship, becomes untenable when culture must also serve the state.
[247]
This is, therefore, an area of vacillation (or rather, oscillation), where the
liberal is constantly faced with the possibility or necessity of curtailing his
liberalism. One aspect of this tendency to accommodate the illiberal is that
freedom is consistently defined in racial terms: to be free means to be free
from racial oppression, even if it means being subjected to ‘compulsion’ or unconstitutional
governance.
Even that
formulation is not without its internal difficulties. Since race is primarily a
matter of political purpose, the focus on external racial threats means that
injustice towards ‘internal’ racial dissidents does not matter: it is simply
necessary. The individual is protected by the state only as long he or she is
aligned with the national interest. Racial freedom thus goes hand in hand with
racial oppression. Here, it is useful to look again at Sarkar’s rebuke to Sun
Yat-Sen for having described Manchus as foreigners in China.
[248]
The distinction that Sarkar made in the Chinese case between ‘real’ foreigners
(the West) and the Manchus (who are patriotic Chinese) is directly relevant to
India, where Sarkar wanted to include Muslims within the Indian race/polity.
This inclusiveness, which is closely tied to the ability to differentiate
correctly between real and false foreignness, is not entirely benign, since it not
only allows the state to determine who does not belong, it privileges the
community of citizens, allowing Sarkar to subsume all kinds of reluctant people
within the nations he wants to defend. The line between liberal inclusion and
illiberal governance remains a fine one, especially when grand external enemies
can be identified as a threat that justifies the coercion of internal
troublemakers.
April 22, 2013
Notes
Redacted
