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9 On civil and political society in postcolonial

democracies

Partha Chatterjee

I
Banldmchandra Chattopadhyay. the most renowned modernist literary
figure in nineteenth-ccntury Benp.1, died 00 8 April 1894. Three weeks
after his death, a memorial meeting. organized by the Cbaitanya Library
and tbe Beadon Square Literary Club, was held at the Star Theatre in
Calcutta.' It was decided that the speak:en would be Rajanikanta Gupta,
the Iristorian. Haraprasad Sastri, the famous ocbo.... of BoddlUsm and
early lleosali Ill....tore, and Rabindranath Tason:, theo a yo"", but
already much acclaimed poet. Nabinchandra Sen, one of the most
respected senior figures on Bengal's literary sceoc and a younger con-
temporary of Bankim in the civil service. was asked to preside. To the
surprise of the organizers, Nabinchandra refused. In his place. GurudaB
BaneJjee, judge of the Calcutta High Court. presided over the meeting.
The address on Bankim. delivered by Rabindranath that day later wcot
on to become something of a landmark essay in Bengali literary critiCism.
Memorized by generations of schoolchildren. it bas been for more than a
century a staple of the fonnaUOD and transmission of aesthetic canons in
Bengal's new high culture.
What Will concern us here is not the assessment of Bankim's literary
output or of his historical role, on which much has been writteo,1
Instead. our concern will be the reasons for Nabinchandra Sen's refusal
to come to Bankim's memorial meeting. The poet Nabinchandra was

Earlier vemons of Ibis paper were prescnilld and discussed at academic meetInp in
Odcutta. H~rabad. New York.. Phi.delphia. and Tashkenllam g;ratef'ul toan oIthOle
who dilCU:l8Ild the piper with 1Jle. I am cspcciatl)' grateful 10 Sudipta Kavirlj ror his
thoughtf'ul comments which led to the present version oIlM paper.
I All Ihree inslitlltionl survive today, more than a hundred yan "tet, I1thouab
pcrfonllllTlCCS al the Star Theatre were stopped af'ter a fire destroyed plrl orlbe bulldinJ a
rewyeanaJO.
2 M.- RlCmtly, and brilliantly, by Sudipta Kaviraj: 17le Unlrtsppy CmtrdowrruJ: Battk-
imcllam1ra ChattoptJdhyay and the FomIQlibn of Narirmall8t DbooWJi! ill huiD (DIl1hi.:
O1f'ord UniveIsity Press, 1995).

16S
 166 Partha Chatterjee
known to have been close to Bankim and. although he did not orten
share what he thoupt were the latter's excessively Wcatemizcd literary
tastes. he clearly deferred to his superior erudition, intellect. and public
lltandm,. The reasons for Nabinchandra's refusal had nothing to do with
Banlrim, Nabinchandra objected to the very idea of a public condolence
meeting.
'Imitating the English. we have now begun organizing "condolence
meetings",' Nabinchandra wrote. 'As a Hindu, I do not understand how
one -can can a public meeting to express onc's grief. A meeting to express
grief. think of it!' 'How many buckets have you arranged for the public's
tears?', he is said to haVe remarked to one of the organizers. 'Our' grief,
he claimed, was 'sacred'; it drove one into seclusion. 'We do not mourn
by wearing black badges round our sleeves.' A meeting in a public
auditorium could only create. he thought. the atmosphere of a public'
entertainment; this was nol 'our way of mourning for the dead'}
Soon after the memorial meeting, Rabindranath Tagore wrote an essay
in the journal Sddhtm4..4 Entitled 'The Condolence Meeting', the essay
began by mentioning .the objection that had been raiaed to the public
condo1cncc of Bankim's death, It was true, be said, that the practice was
hitherto unknown in the country and that it was an imiLiLtion of
European customa. But, like it or nol, because of our European contacts,
both extemal wnditions and subjective feelinp were undergoiQg 8
change. New llOcial occds were arising, and new ways would have to be
found to fu1fil them. Ilause of tbciI unfamiliarity, ...... might """"
artificial and unpleasant at tint. But merely because they were European
in origin W8J not a good reason for rejceting them. outright
The main point of objection to the idea of a public wodolence meeting
seems to bave been its Jqtrimata, artificiality. That which is /crtrim is a
product of human action: it is an artifice - fabrica~ unnatural. Some-
times it indicatecl a "mere' form, empty within; sometimes it could even
dclcribe behaviour that is iJisiDcerc, false. This .is what Nabincbandra
would bave meant when he referred to the" showing of grief by wearinJ a
blade armband. The krtrim form of a public meeting was inappropriate,
he must have said, for expressing an emotiQD as intense and intimate as
grief at the death of a loved one.
In his essay, Rabindranath straightaway took up the question of
artificial social forma. A certain. krtrimata was unavoidable if social
3 NabincbaDdra Sea, Jmar jltJoJt, vol. V (19U) iD NabT1lcdlfdrG "'CIlIIl1bGIr. voL U. cds.
Slllliknmu DaqupQ and Haribandhu MIlkhali (Calcutta: Datlaebaudhuri. 1976). p.
",.
4 Rabiodrauth n.hr, 'Sobabtla' <M-y...June 1194) in 1tJMuJM.J'flNItiltJ4lr, vol. X
(cak:utta:~orWa1 BcDpL 19891, pp. 291-~.. . , 'Soktabhl', p. 293.
Post-oolonial civil and political society 167
norms were to be followed, he said. Sundy, not everything could be left to
individual taste aod fcclinj. ArtillciaIity coold be said to be defect in
matters which were strK:tly internal to the self, where individUal feelings
reipcd supreme. But society being 8 complex cotity, it was not always
easy to detennine the boundary between the domain of the individual
and that of society. ]n matters pertaining to society, certain univenally
recopUzed rules bad to be followed if social relations were not to
degenerate into anarchy. For example, Rabindranath pointed out, grief
at the death of ono's falber, or - another examplo - the feelings of a
dovotee towards god, could be said to involve some of tho most intimate
and intense emotions in human lifo. Yet society claims to lay down the
procedures of funerary and other associated rites to be followed on the
occasion of a father's death, or, in the other case, the procedures of
worship to be followed by all devotees, irrespective of individual pre-
ference or taste. This is SO because society deems it necessary to regulate
and order these aspects of life in a way that is beneficial for all of society.
Having made this general point about the necessary 'artiftciality' of all
social regulations, Rabindranath then goes on to argue that lDdian
society was for a 1001 time largely a 'domestic society' or a 'society of
households' (garhasthyapradJuJn som'l'), a society in which the stronpst
social bonds rested on the authority of parents and other elders within
the family. The spcc:iftc forms of social reJUlation' iD. ]Ddia R:ftoct this
dOD1C8tic character of traditional society. But this was DOW changing,
Recently there have bem lOMe chanscs in this society of households. A new
flood bas swept into its domain. III name 11 tho public.
11 is a new thiDa 'With a DCW name. 11 is impoaiblo to transla1e it into Ben-
plio The word "public' and ill oppolite 'printe' baw DOW come into use in
Bcnpli . ,
Now that our society consists DOl only of houschoIdI but a1Io of an emc:qcnt
public. the IfOWIh of DCW pWJic raponsibililiel hal become inevitable.'
One such new public responsibility was the public mourniD.B of the death
of those who had devoted their lives oot just to the good of their own
hoUJCholds but to the aood of the public. Tho form of mouminC wu
'artificial' as before, but it was DOW a form. in which not just the members
of the household but members of the public were required to participate.
What is interesting about this part of Rabindmnatb, argument is the
explicit identification of a new domain of social activity involving 'the
public' and of new social regulations orderinC these public practices. But
he then goes on to make some observations about this emergent public
domain that are still more interestina.
 lo. PuriM c..;"Ulllffjf!/f
I do Dot dcDy the (act that the public in our oountly is not approprilltcly grier.
Itricten by the death of ,great mcD. Our public is Iti.I1 younS; ita behaviour bean
the mark of ldoleIcenc:e. It does not recopize its benefactors, does Dot realia the
m. value of the beftefits it l'IlOf:ives, easily forscrs its frietu.ts and thinks it will only
receive what is Jiven to it but will notincur any obligations in return.
I say such a public need. to be educated. and di!JCUSSious in public: tneetinp are
a priDci.paI means of IIlCh education.
What we have here is a public which is not yet a proper public and a
group of sodal leaders who think of their role as one of guiding this
public to maturity. Rabindranath, as we caD now recognize easily, is only
restating here the fundamental problematic of the nationalist project of
modernity under colonial conditions. The driving {ONl:: of colonial
modernity is a pedagogical mission.
What a 'proper' public must look like is also.:needless to say, given by
world history. Rabindranath bas DO doubt about this. The examples lbat
come to his mind in the context of Bankim's death are from the literary
world of Europe and the relationship there between eminent literary
figures and the public:
we do not have a literary society in Out country and in society itself there is no
cultivation of literature. Social practioes in Europe make it possible for eminent
petIOI1lJ to appear on numerous oc:cuionJ at numerous public meetinp. Their
circle of acquaio:tances it JlOt restricted to their family and friends; they IlJC at aD
times pIatDt before the public. To tbc:i.r complltt'iots, they are close al hand and
visible. Whiai is why at their death, alhadow of gricffalls over the wbolcC01.lt1II}'. 7
By contrast, areat men in India. despite their greatness, are not
similarly visible in public. 'Elipeclally since women have no plaoc in our
outer society, our social life itself ill ~ous1y incomplete.' The kind of
intimate knowledge of a great person's life., habits. and thoughts that can
evoke loVe and gratitude among ordinary people is completely tackina in
our society. Instead of loving and respecting our great men, we turn them
into gods to be wonhipped from. afar. The condolence meetina, argued
R.abindranath. was precisely the occasion at which those who were close
to a pat person could tell the public what he was like as a human being,
with faults and idiosyncracies. They could make the great man as a
private person visible to the public.
It is easy to recognize the sort of public sphere Rabindranath was
wishing for. It was a public sphere consisting of not only books and
joumals and newspapers but also active literary.-societies, literary gather-
in.., an involvement of the public with thinp literary and cultural, an
interest of ordinary people in greatness not as a superhuman gift but as a
human achievement. Following Habermas, we can even sense here a hint
6 Ibid. J Ibid., p. 294.
Post-eolonial civil and political society 169
of that deW conception of personhood where the private and the intimate
are, as it were. always oriented towards 8 public. Rabindranatb, we can
see., was imagining for his own country 8 world of literary activity
embedded in a public sphere constituted by a variety of civil social
institutiOns, the sort of world he himself bad seen at first hand when,
some fifteen years ago, he had lived in England for more than a year as a
student.
Was Nabinchandra not appreciative of a public sphere of this kind?
What was the older poet objecting to? Many years after this incident.
when writing his autobiography, Nabinchandra Sen returned to the
subject. He was, as can be expected, strongly derisive of literary societies
and literary gatherings, dismissing lit"" as places wh.... people met for
idle talk. or rather idle listening. His idea of commemorating great
literary figures was a very dift'ercn.t one.
If hmead of these utterly wa&tcfuI meetingI and speeches. the orpnizm were to
preserve the birthplaces of the ancieDt and {modem] poets of Bensal and hold a
IOl1 of religious festival (debpuj4,. "",ttl ursah) every)l$U' at those Places. then we
can paj our respecb to our areat writerll, bold a community satherinl and at the
same time brina: cm;Iit to the cause of Benpli litetature. MendJcant baimgis and
itinerant sinacrs haw in this way turned 1M birthp1aoN of the VaiRlava poets
Jayadcva, Chandidas and Vidyapati into placcs of pilpimaac wbcrc they hold
annual festivals. But we. instead of roUowing this sacted and 'iPdipnou'
(.rwJddl) path, thanks to &g1ish civilization and education, spend our time
orsanizinl these laughable cond'o1enR and memorial meetinp devoid of aD lrue
oompauion. l
H,lndcccl SUQeIled 1It0l1ike tbe Voimava poolS of olel, lit. birtbpl_
of modern writers like Madhusudan, Dinabandhu, and BanIdm should
be turned into p~ of pilgrimage where devotccs would gather once
every year.
Nabinchandra also gave in his autobiography a particularly caustic
description of Bankim's condolence meeting.
The CODdolcDcc meeting was held. When Rabi Babu finished his long. mca.ndcring
lament. wiped the tears from his eyes and sat down, the audicoce - 80 I was told-
started shouting from an sides, 'Rabi Thakur! Give UI a aongI' The cmiDcot
Gurudu Babu, wbo was chairing the meeting, was much aD!Ioyed by this and
said that Rabi Babu had a bad throat and would not be able to sinl today ...
They say in Engli&h that people go to church DOt to worship but to listen to the
music:. Perbapl it iJ truer to say that they 110 there to diaplay their clothes.
Similarly in Out condolence meetinlls, people wll1k: in chewiQa; pan, IunnminI a
tune from Amrita Babu's latest farce, askinJ for a sons: in Rabi Thakur's
effeminate voice and generally expecting a good evening's entertainment.Ii
a AntiJrj1Jxm, p. 208.
~ Nabinchlndrl's description of this incident, thoUJb coloured by his prcjudiml, is not
 170 Parlha Cha(lerfr~
Nabinchandra seems deafly unwilling to accept lhat a public condo~
lenct meeting, like many other formal occasions in modern European
social life (including going to church), has any significance apart from
mere show. Indeed, he is unprepared even to accept that humanization of
greatness which is part of the celebration of ordinary life which. lies. as
Charles Taylor has pointed out, at tbe heart of the transformation in
social consciousness brought about by Western modernity. JO Nabin-
chandra would rather have the great deified after their death, their
birthplaces turned into places of pilgrima,e. their statues 'worshipped
with llowen and sandalpaste', This, be would say, was 'our' way of
coJlec:tivelyexpressing our gratitude to the great.
We have hen: the seeds of a serious disagreement. .Does modernity
require the universal adoption of Western forms of civil society? If those
specific forms have in fact been built around a secularized version of
Wcste:m Christianity, then must they be imitated in a modernized non-
Christian world? Are the nonnative principles on which civil social
institutions in lhe modern Wtst are based $0 culturally particular that
they t;aD be: abandooed in a nonWestern version of modernitY? These
questions ba~ been raiacd often cnoup in recent dilC1lllions. I wish to
discus. here only a particular aspect ofthe matter.
II
I have not brought up this incident at the beginning of tbis chapter
merely 10 present one more curiosity from the history of colonial
modernity in nineteentb..century Bengal. I think this largely fora:otlen
disagreemeal can be shown to have an intqestiDg sipificanoe for us
today. one that was not clear to any of the antagonisls a hundri yean
ago. In order to .bring this out, let mcfirsllstate that the question of
condoleoce meetings is not, as far as I can see, a malter of debate today.
Their rom is largely the same as in the West, with the laying ofwrealbs,
observing a minute's silence lind memorial speeches. The&e practices. of a
secularized Western Christianity are rarely recognized as sucb in India
today. they have been quite thoroughly domesticated in the secular
public life of the country's civil institutions. Ofcourse, it is not unusual to
find a few indiaenoua touches added on, such as the aarJ,anding of
portrails or Ihe burniDJ of i.ncense sticks. Music can be part of such a
secular function: in West BenpJ as well as in Bangladesh, by nlr the most
Post-ooJonial cijl II'JKI polilicJtl society J1l
likely music on such an OCUlsion would be something composed by
Rabindranath Tagore himself. However, the abDospbere would not be
one of a public entertainment: Nabinchandra's fean on this count have
pro~ed to be unfounded. Rabindranath's hopes of grooming a public
into maturity seem to have been borne out
This, of course, only concerns public institutions of civic life whose
formal pra~ioe& are recognized as being secular. In other collective
institutional conteXts, which it would be JI'OSsIy mislcadina: to call
'private', Ihere is, needless to say, on an accasion such as the death of a
prominent person or of someone closely connected wilh the inslitution,
the continued observance of practices \hat are deady mxttpriztd. u
religious, In the domain of the state itself, however, the political pressure
to be scrupulously 'secular' requires state authorities to assemble, para.
doxicalty enough, a represelktative col1ection of practices from a variety
of religions. Each of these - recitations., prayers, discourses, rn11&ic - is
presented in a state mourning ceremony as representing a religion; what
makes it a part of a 'secWar' slate function is the aimultaneoUll presence
in OQl event of all of the&c repraentative Tetipms of \be country. We will
return to thia difference between sccuIar publk practices in civil inatitu
tions and state institutions when we talk about the relation today
belween civil society und political society,
III
Let us now turn to the family, civil sOciety, political society, and the state.
These are classical concepts of political theory, but used, we know. in a
wide variely of senses and often with much inconsislency. I must clarify
here the sense in which 1 flnd it useful to ~ploy these conoepts in tBlking
about contemporaJY India.
Hegel's synthesis in the Philosophy of Rjght of these elements of what
he called 'ethical life' spoke of family, civil society, and the state, but had
no place for a distinct sphere of political. society.1I However, in under
standing the structure and dynamics of mass political. ronnatiODll in
twentieth-century nation-states, it seems to me useful to think of a
domain of mediating institutions between civil society and the natA 'n
sharpness of the nincteenth-eentury distinction between state and civil.
society, developed along the tradition or Buropean anti-absolutisl think-
iDg, bas the analyti<al disadvantage today ofeither regarding the domain
of the civil as a dcpoliticiZed domain in cou!t'ast with the political domain
II G. W. P. Head. The PIliiosophy of Right; ed. and tnDt. T. M. Knox (OXford: The
ClateadoD Press. 1952).
112 Partha ChoJterj
of the state, or of blurring the distinction altogether by claiming that aD
civil institutions are political. Neither cnnpbasis is helpful in understand-
ing the complexities of political phenomena in large parts of the
contemporary world.
] find it useful to keep the term 'civil society' for those characteristic:
institutions of modem associationallife originating in Western societies
which are based on equality, autonomy, freedom of entry and exit.
contract. deliberative procedures of decision-making, rocopized rishts
and duties of members, and other such principles. Obviously, this is not
to deny that the history ofmodemity in non-Western countries contains
numerous examples of the emergence of what could weD be called civil-
social institutions which nevertheless do not always conform to these
principles. Rather, it is precisely to identify tbese marks of difference, to
understand their significance. to appreciate how by the continued invoca-
tion of a 'pure' model of origin - the institutions of modernity u they
were meant to be - a nonnative discourse can still continue to energize
and shape the evolving forms of social institutions in the nOD-Western
world, that I would prefer to retain the more classical sense of the term
civil society I1lther than adopt any of its rec::ent revised versions, I2 1ndeed,
for theoretical purposes, I even find it useful to hold on to the sense of
civil society used in HeseJ and Marx as bourgeois society (bilrgnlJche
Ges<lIschaft).
An important consideration in thinkina about the relation between
civil society and the state in the modem history of countries such as India
is the fact that whereas the legalbureaucratic apparatus of the state has
been able, by the late colonial and certainly in the post.colonial period, to
reach as the target of many of its activities virtually all of the population
that inhabits its territory, the domain of civil social institutions as
conceived above is still rcstrictcd to a fairly sma11 section of 'citizens',
This hiatus is extremely significant because it is the mark of non-Western
modernity as an always incomplete project of "modernization' and of the
role of aD enlightened elite engaged in a pedagogical mission in relation
to the rest of society.
But then, how are we to conceptualize the rest of society that Uti
outside the domain of modern ciVJ1l1OCiety1 The: most common approach
has been to use a traditionallmodcm dichotomy. One difftcu1ty with this
is the trap, not at all easy to avoid. or dchistoricizin, and esscntialii'-ing
'tradition', The Rlated difficulty is one of denying the possibility that this
other domain, relegated to the zone of the tradit!9nal, could 6nd ways of
n An accounl ofsomc ol'lhCle vemol\ll i~ Biven in Jeun L. Cohen lind Andrew Aralo. Clwl
Srx:llty and Political '17tItyCC&mbl'idF. MIUI.: MIT Pmll, 1994}.
Post-wlonial civil and political society I7J
coping with the modern that might not conform to the (Western
bourgeeis. ICCU1arized Christian) principles of modem civil society. ]
think a notion of political society lying between civil society and the state
could help us see some of these historical possibilities.
By political society, I mean a domain of institutions and activities
where several mediations are carried out. In the classical theory, the
family is the elementary unit or social organization: by the nineteenth
century, this is widely assumed to mean the nuclear family of modem
bourgeois patriardly, (Hegel, we know. strongly resisted the idea that the
family was based on contract, but by the late nineteenth century the:
contractually formed family becomes the normative model of most social
theorizing in the West as well as of reformed laws of marriase, property,
inheritance, and personal taxation. Indeed, the family becomes a product
of contractual arragements between individuals who are the primary
units of society.) In countries such as India, it would be completely
unrealistic to assume this definition oCthe family as obtainiog universally,
In fact, what is sianUicant is that in formulating its policies and Iawstbat
must reach the areater part of the population, even the state docs not
make this assumption,
The conoeptual move that seems to have been made very widely, even
if somewhat imperceptibly, is from the idea of society as constituted by
the elementary units of homogeneous families to that of a population,
differentiated but classifiabtc, describable, and enumerable. Michel Fou-
cault has been more perceptive than other social philosopbcn of recent
times in noticing the crucial importance of the new concept of population
for the emergence of modcrp. governmental technologies,l3 Perhaps we
should also note the contribution here of colonial anthropology and
colonial administrative theories.
Population, then, constitutes the material of society. Unlike the family
in classical theory, the concept of population is descriptive and empirical,
not nonnative. IDdeed, population is assumed to contain large elements
of 'naturalness' and 'primordiality'; the internal principles of the consti.
tution of particular population groups is not expected to be rationally
explicable since they arc not the products of rational contractual associ-
ation but are, as it were, prc-rational. What the concept of population
does., however, is make available for governmental functionl (economic
poli(,')'. bureaucratic udministration, law and political mobilization) a set
of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching large sections of the
inhabitants or a country U:i the targeb or 'policy',
I) Sec especially Michel Foucault. TIJo.. Hi~forJ' 0/ St','OI4fity {Hllrmondsworth: VikiGIo
198~},
174 ParIllO Chutlf!rft'l!
Civil social institutions, oli the other hand. if they are to confonn to
the normative modelpresented by Western modernity, must necessarily
exclude from its scope the vast mass of the population. Unlike many
radical theorists, [ do not think that this 'defect' of the dllSsical concept
needs to be rectified by revi!ing tbe definition of civil society in order to
include withia it social institutions based on other principles. Rather, I
think retaining the otdel' idea of civil society actually helps us captu~
some of the eon8ictinS desires of modernity that animate contemporary
political and cultural debates in countries such as India.
Ovil society in such countries is best used to describe those institutions
of modem associatioDa) life set up by nationalist elites in the era of
colonial modernity, though often as part of their anti-colonial stroggle.
These institutions embody the desire of this elite to replicate in its own
society the forms as well as the substance of Western modernity. We can
see this desire working quite clearly in the arguments of Rabindranath
Taaorequoted at the beginning of this chapter. It is indeed a desire for II
neWethk:allife in society, one that is in conformity with the virtues of the
BnligbtemneDt and of bourpois freedom and whose known cultural
forms are those of secu1arized Western ChriJtiaDity. All of these are
apparent in Rabindranath's argument for new secularized public rituals.
It is weJlrecognized in that argument that the new domain ofcivil society
will tons remain an exclusive domain of the elite. that the actUal 'public'
will DOt match up to the standards required by civil society and that the
function of civil social institutions in relation tp the public at large will be
ODe of pe4aaoay rather than of free associatioD.
Countries with relatively long histories of dOlonial modernization and
nationalist movements often have quite an extensive and impressive
network of civil social institutions of this kind. In India, most of them
survive to this day, not as quaint remnants of colonial modernity but
often as serious protagonists of a project of cultural modernization still
to be completed. Howe\'er, in more recent times, they seem to have come
under siege.
To understand Ibis, we will need to historicize more carefuDythe
concepts of civil society, political society, and the state in cotonial and
post-oolonial conditions.
IV
The explicit fonn of the post-eolonial stale in India is that of a modern
liberal democracy. It is often said, not unjustifiably, that the teason why
b'boral democratic institutions have perfonned more creditably in India
than in many other paris of the formerly colonial world is the strength of
Post-eolonial civil aDd political society I7l
its civil social institutions which are relatively independent of the political
domain of the state. But one needs to be more careful about the precise
relationships involved here.
Before the rise of mass nationalist movements in the early twentieth
century, nationalist politics in India was largely confinl to the same
circle of elites which was then busy setting up the new institutions of
'national' civil society. These elites were thorouahlY wod.ded to the
nonnative principles of modern associational public life and criticized the
colonial stale precisely for not living up to the standards of a libenl
constitutional stale. In talking about this part of the histol')' of nationalist
modernity, we do not net!d to bring in the notion of a political society
mediating between civil society a.nd the slate.
However, entwined with this process of the formation of modem civil
social institutions, something else was alao happening. I havc explained
elsewhere how the various cultural forms ofWestem modernity were put
through a nationaliSl sieve and only scIcotivcly adopted, and tbco
combined with the recoDJtitutcd elements of what was claimed to be
indisenous tradition.'4 Dichotomies such as spiriblallmateria1, inned
outer, alienfmdigenous. etc: were applied to justify and legitimize thcae
choices from the standpoint of a nationalist cultural politial. We would
have noticed in the debate between the two ~ cited abQ.ve a clear
example of this politics. What I wiSh to point out here in particular if that
even as the associatiooal principJes of secular bourJCiois civil institutions
were adopted in the ,new civil society of the natioaalist elite, the
possibility of a ditTer.,. mediation be..... the populalion and the"'1e
was already beina imaBined, one that would Qot ground itself on a
modernized civil society.
The impetus here was directly political. It had to do with the fact that
the governmental technologies of the c:olonialltale were already seeking
to bring within its reach 1arJe sections of the population as the targets of
its policies. Nationalist politics had to find an adequate stratepe response
if it were not to remiUn immobilized within the oon6nca of the 'properly
constituted' civil society of the urban elites. The cultural politics of
nationalism supplied this answer, by which it could mediate politicaUy
between the population and the nation-state of the future. In the debate
betwten the two poets, Nabinchandra's arguments anticipated this
strategic answer. It would, of course, be explicated most dramatically and
effectively in what I have elsewhere described as the Gandhian moment
. ofmanoeuvre.'s
,. Tbe NariDll and Its F~fI1S: ~lal ruul PostcolDlli41 Hi.Jlorlu (PrincetOll: Princeton
University Press, 1994).
15 N",hmq/ist '1'IIuvJh' find the OdtNriol World (London: Zai Boob. 1986).
.. "
This mediation between the population and the state takes place on the
site of a new poHtical society. It is built around the framework of modern
political associations such as potiti~ parties. But, as researches on
nationalist political mobilizations in the Oandhian era have shown
repeatedly, elite and popular anfi-eolonial politics. even as they came
together within a formally orpnized arena such as that of the Indian
National Congress, diverged at specific momeuts and spilled over the
limits laid down by the organization, 16 This arena of nationalist politics,
in other words, became a site of strategic manoeuvres. resistance, and
appropriation by different groups and classes. many of those negotiations
remaining unresolved even in the present phase oftbe post-eolonial state.
The point is that the practices that activate the forms and methods of
mobilization and participation in political society are not always consis-
tent with the principles of association in civil society.
What then ate the principles thatgovem political society'? The question
has been addressed in many ways in the literature on mass mobilizations,
electoral politics. ethnic politics, etc. In the light of the conceptual
distinctions I have made above between population, civil society, political
society, and the state, we need to focus more clearly on the mediations
between population on the one hand and political society and lhe state
on the other. The major inetrumental form here in the post-.oolonial
period is that of the developmental state which seeks to relate to different
sections of the population through the governmental function of welfare.
Correspondingly, jf we have 00 give a name to the major form of
mobilization by which political society (parties. movements, non-party
political formations) tries to channel and order popular demands on the
developmentalltate. we should call it democracy. The institu(ional forms
of this emergent political ',society are still unclear. Just 8S there is tl
continuing attempt to order these institutions in the prescribed forms of
liberal civil aoc:icty, there is probably an even stroo:ser tendency to strive
for what are perceived to be democratic rights and entitlements by
violatine those institutional norms. 1 have suggested elsewhere that the
UDCCrtam. institutionalization of this domain of political society can be
traced to the ablcnce of a sufficiently differentiated and flexible notion of
community io the thtoretk:aI conception of the modem state. In any cue,
then II _ dlumlDa in poUdcal IOClely in the countries of !be pooI-
colonial world, not all of which are worthy of approval, which neverthe-
less can be seen as an attempt to find. new democratic forms of the
I' .....
ODe .. of ItIJdieI or bIdiIn aaIioGafitt poJi6ce wbicIi expIiCIUy addrellel thiJ '.plit in the
ofpoltb' II eoe.laiDcd ill Ihe volUlDOl or Subaltml Shrtiin publimed ill India by
Od'ord UDhmity Pma, and ill ~ mooopap)d written by hiatorlllIUl OODlributina: to
that IOricI.
In
modem state that were Dot thougbt out by the post-Bnliptenment social
consensus of the secularized Cbristian world.
There are at least four features of political society in post-eolonial
democracies which need to be Doted. First, many of the mobilizations in
political society which make demands on the state are founded on a
violation of the law. They may be associations of squatters, encroachen
on public properly, _ . travollets on public transport, babitnal
defaulters of civic taxes, unauthorized users of electricity, water, or other
public utilities, and other such violators of civic regulations. It is not that
they are associations of citizens who merely happen to have \'iolated the
law; the very collective form in wflicb tlley appear before the state
authorities implies that they are not proper citizen, but rather population
groups who survive by sidestepping the law. Second, even as they appear
before the state as yiolators of the law, they demand governmental .
~tfare as a matter of 'right'. There is a clear transformation that bas
oocurred here from 'traditional' notions of tbe paternalistic function of
rulers. Even as we may look for specific gmeaJogies of the 'pastoral
function' in nonWestcm societies. the rhetoric of rights is without doubt
a very recent mass phenomenon in these countries and can only be
regarded as the effect of a process of globalization of modern govern-
mental technolosies along with the language of democratization. Third,
even as welfare functions are demanded as a right, these rights are seen to
be collective rights. They are demanded on behalf not of individual
citi7.en. (since this position is, in any case, unavailable to violators of the
law) but of a 'oommunity', even if this community is only the product of
a recent coming together through the illegal occupation of a particular
piece of public: land. or the coll;cctive illegal c:onsumption of a public
utmty. Individual riShts ,have no standing when the individuals are'
known violators of the laW; collective rights can mean something when
an olclcr ethic of subsisteDctl is married to a new rhetoric of democratiza-
tion. Finally, the agencies or the state and ofnon-aovemmental organiza-
tions deal with these people Dot as bodies of citiams belonsing to a
lawfully constituted civil society, but as population groups d.etervina
wolf..... The de_ 10 which they will be so ncopized dependa entitely
on the pressure they are able to exert on thole state and non-state
aaencies through their strategic manocuvres in political society - by
ma.ldng connections with other marginal groups, with moRl dominant
&fOups, with political parties and leaders, etc:. The effect of these strategic:
moves within political societyia only c.onjunctural, and ma), increue or
decRaSe or even vanish entirely if the strategic configuration of (umaDy)
local political fon:es change. But that is the ground on which tbcae
relations between population groups and governmental agencies will
 178 Partha Chatterjee

operate within politiall society. This is very different from the well-
structured, principled llJld CODstitutionaUy sanctioned relations betweeo
tho state and individual members ofcivil society. 11
In conclusion, I wish to suggest three theses that might be pursued
further. 'r\\erIc arise ftom the 'ni.~ mQy at: mm\m1i.\"j' Yo. 1\00.-
WClitem societies: .
I. The most lipificant site of transformations in the colonial period is
that of civil society; the most sigJ1ificant transformations occurring in
the post..coloniaJ period are in political society.
2. The question that frames the debate over social transfonnation in the
colonial period, is that of modernity. In political soc:ioty of the post-
colonial period, the framing question is that ofdeIIlocracy.
3. In the context of the latolt phase of the .sJobalization of capital, we
....y ..c\l.l>o~... ~ ~ _ ~
an<!~.i.e. _ c M l society an<! poIili<alsociety.
Before endina. J tbould make a final remark on my story about the two
poets and death Rabindranath T8.30re won the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1913 and went on to become by far the most eminent literary figure in
Benpl. In his long and active career, be steadfastly held on to his early
commitment to an ethical life 01 public virtue, guided by reason,
rationality, and & conunltme:nt to a modernist spirit of humanism. Since
his death m1941. however. he of aD modem liIerary ftaures has been the
one '" he <Ioilled. On .... day l>o ojjod, hi> 'ood"j .... .u...
llItough
the ....... of Calcutta, there was a h"", J1<de when poople fought
'With one another 'in an attempt to Collect rdks from me body. Since then.
hi. birthpJace bas been turued mt. a pJace of pilgrimage where annual
conaresations are held overy year - not religious festivals in their specific
ceremonial practices, and yet Dot dissimilar in spirit. We oould easily
imagine the older poet Nabinchandra. Sen chuckling with delight at the
prcd.ica.meJlz of his more illustrious: junior. The disagreement over 'our'
way of iDouming for the dead bas not, it would appear, been resolved as
yet.

11 llnlw dillclWed tbae poidtllit IJl'eIter 1eIllth in 'Community in the Eat'. Eunomic tlIII!
Po1UIcaI Wuk/J> (Bombay). 32, 6 (7 February 19518); 'L'Etat et Ja commUllluti til
Qrimt', Crldqw IltternrIl!Dlldt(PIl'iS), 2(WiAtcr 1999), pp. 75-90.