Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Pursuit of a “Different” Freedom in Modern India
TL;DR: For instance, this paper argued that the exclusive deployment of Western concepts to explain historical development in India and other non-western countries, not only has marginalized indigenous systems of knowledge and practices, but has also resulted in the histories of these countries being presented in negative terms as a deviation from the universal trajectories of capital, democracy, and liberalism, which are themselves grounded in particular historical experiences of the West.
Abstract: IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, subaltern historians and postcolonial scholars have brought to our attention the need to question the generally assumed universality of Western categories in framing the histories of the rest of the world.1 The exclusive deployment of Western concepts to explain historical development in India and other non-Western countries, they say, not only has marginalized indigenous systems of knowledge and practices, but has also resulted in the histories of these countries being presented in negative terms as a deviation from the universal trajectories of capital, democracy, and liberalism, which are themselves grounded in particular historical experiences of the West. Thus, as Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, has argued, most scholars trained in this intellectual tradition have characterized India as “not modern” or “not bourgeois” or “not liberal.” The new intellectual sensitivity toward non-Western systems of thought has resulted in a significant number of works that deploy the critical category of difference. Yet none of the four major schools of historiography on modern India—Marxist, Cambridge, nationalist, and subaltern—has extended this notion of difference to the discourse of freedom associated with the Gandhian nonviolent resistance movement against British colonialism. This is a surprising omission, given the striking ways in which the Gandhian discourse of freedom departed from the Western discourse of freedom. While the distinctiveness of the Gandhian movement in relation to other forms of anticolonial resistance of the day was evident to Gandhi’s contemporaries and has been noted by scholars, the use of difference as an analytical category to
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12 Nov 2012
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a discursive framework for policing in the context of police, labour, and colonial violence in the British colonies of North Africa and South-West Africa.
Abstract: Introduction: police, labour and colonial violence Part I. Ideas and Practices: 1. Colonial policing: a discursive framework 2. 'What did you do in the colonial police force, daddy?' Policing inter-war dissent 3. 'Paying the butcher's bill': policing British colonial protest after 1918 Part II. Colonial Case Studies: French, British and Belgian: 4. Gendarmes: work and policing in French North Africa after 1918 5. Policing Tunisia: mineworkers, fellahs and nationalist protest 6. Rubber, coolies and communists: policing disorder in French Vietnam 7. Stuck together? Rubber production, labour regulation and policing in Malaya 8. Caning the workers? Policing and violence in Jamaica's sugar industry 9. Oil and order: repressive violence in Trinidad's oilfields 10. Profits, privatization and police: the birth of Sierra Leone's diamond industry 11. Policing and politics in Nigeria: the political economy of indirect rule, 1929-39 12. Depression and revolt: policing the Belgian Congo Conclusion Notes to the text.
70 citations
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04 Jul 201839 citations
Cites background from "Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonv..."
...…that the freedom from British colonialism could be attained not by the assertion of temporally-spatially divided identities, but by losing them (Mukherjee, 2010); a large number of Africans who eagerly struggled to pursue Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid doctrine which announced that the…...
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...As such, the subject (as jivanmukta) is in the phenomenal world, but not of the phenomenal world (Mukherjee, 2010)....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the heated debate over the future of Mecca after the Saudi occupation in 1924, both from its discursive position as a quintessential cosmopolitan "open city" and as the site of a material struggle over urban space.
Abstract: In recent years, historians and postcolonial critics have illuminated several trends of universalist thought among a group of Indian intellectuals and activists who articulated forms of humanist anti- imperialism within the circuits of publication and translation in the transregional Indian Ocean public sphere. While this recent work has done much to open up a discursive space for forms of non- Western universalism, it has, whether intentionally or not, reiterated the claims of a transcendent liberal secular humanism in a new guise. But what would this Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism look like when grounded in the politics of place rather than in the domain of the transcendent? Willis’s article considers the heated debate over the future of Mecca after the Sa‘udi occupation in 1924, both from its discursive position as a quintessential cosmopolitan “open city” and as the site of a material struggle over urban space. In particular, it considers the writings of the South Asian scholar and activist Abul Kalam Azad, a major figure in the Indian Khilafat movement and the Indian National Congress, who was simultaneously a critic of the nation form and communalism (on the basis of universal humanism) and a vocal supporter of Ibn Sa‘ud’s conquest and government of the holy cities. While Azad has been lauded in South Asian historiography as a paragon of secular humanism, how do we reconcile his cosmopolitanism with his support of the exclusionary religious policies of the Sa‘udi state?
17 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the role of the Gandhian notion of citizenship in the shaping of Indian citizenship and its implications for the resilience of Indian nationhood, and argue that a conception of citizenship that can be extrapolated from Gandhi, and that persisted as a practice, as well as a political language, instilled in the dynamics of Indian Citizenship attributes that played an important role in securing Indian unity and its democratic viability.
Abstract: This article examines Gandhi's legacy in the shaping of citizenship in India and its implications for the resilience of Indian nationhood. I contend that a conception of citizenship that can be extrapolated from Gandhi, and that persisted as a practice, as well as a political language, instilled in the dynamics of Indian citizenship attributes that played an important role in securing the resilience of Indian unity and its democratic viability. The Gandhian conception of citizenship was developed after independence in conjunction with three other primary concomitant notions of citizenship. The ongoing multifaceted interplay between the four competing conceptions of citizenship, and the tensions and shifting balance of power between them became part of the mechanism that enabled the sustainability of some conflicts within the Indian polity to the detriment of other more threatening divisions. In the effect of this process Indian citizenship has been able to inhibit the tensions that had the potential to br...
14 citations
Cites background from "Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonv..."
...…self-rule that stems from the self-disciplined, self-realised individual, liberated from attitudes of exclusivity, absolved from any particularistic identity and therefore becomes part of the ‘living unity’ or the oneness of life (Dalton 2000, pp. 2–3, 6–7, 44, Mukherjee 2010, pp. 472–473)....
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TL;DR: The role of the legal profession and the evolution of aspects of Indian nationalist ideology during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22 is analyzed in this article, where the authors analyze the role of legal professionals in the development of panchayat.
Abstract: This article analyses the role of the legal profession and the evolution of aspects of Indian nationalist ideology during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22. Very few legal professionals responded to Gandhi's call to boycott the British courts despite significant efforts to establish alternative institutions dedicated to resolving disputes. First identified by leading legal professionals in the movement as courts of arbitration, these alternative sites of justice quickly assumed the name ‘panchayats’. Ultimately, this panchayat experiment failed due to a combination of apathy, repression, and internal opposition. However, the introduction of the panchayat into the discourse of Indian nationalism ultimately had profound effects, including the much later adoption of constitutional panchayati raj. Yet this discourse was then and remains today a contested one. This is largely a legacy of Gandhi himself, who, during the Non-Cooperation Movement, imagined the panchayat as a judicial institution based upon arbitration and mediation. Yet, after the movement's failure, he came to believe the panchayat was best suited to functioning as a unit of village governance and administration.
3 citations