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A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

SHRUTI KAPILA
SHRUTI KAPILA*
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay revises the common assumption that non-violence has been central to political modernity in India. The “extremist” nationalist B. G. Tilak, through a foundational philosophical reinterpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, created a modern theology of the Indian “political”. Tilak did so by directly confronting the question of the possibility of the “event” of war and the ethics of the conversion of kinsmen into enemies. Writing in the aftermath of the Swadeshi movement and from a prison cell in Rangoon, Tilak interpreted action as sacrificial duty that created a vocabulary of violence in which killing was naturalized. Violence, whether conceptual or otherwise, was not directed towards the “outsider” but was of meaning only when directed against the intimate. Unlike the distinction between friend and foe that has been taken as central to the understanding of the political in the twentieth century, it was instead the fraternal–enmity issue that framed the modern political in India. Tilak foregrounded the idea of a de-historicized political subject, whose existence was entirely dependent upon the event of violence itself. This helps to explain both the unprecedented violence that accompanied freedom and partition in 1947 and also the fact that it has remained unmemorialized to the present day.

Type
Forum
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 437 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Tilak, B. G., Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya or Karma Yoga Shastra (1915), trans. Suthankar, B. S. (Bombay, 1935), 44Google Scholar; hereafter Gita-Rahasya.

2 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (Orlando, 1969), 53Google Scholar.

3 Estimates of numbers killed vary from several hundreds of thousands to a million, while those displaced vary from seven to ten million. For a comparative perspective see Mazower, Mark, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century,’ American Historical Review 107/4 (2002), 1158–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Arendt, On Violence, 54.

5 First published in Marathi in 1915, other vernacular editions in Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu and Tamil soon followed. By 1925, Hindi and Marathi editions were in their sixth print runs, in the tens of thousands.

6 Implicit here is an engagement primarily with Schmitt's, CarlConcept of the Political (1932), trans. Schwab, George (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; and Derrida's critique of Schmitt.

7 Gandhi, M. K., Hind Swaraj (1909), ed. Parel, Anthony J. (Cambridge, 2005), 49Google Scholar.

8 On neighbourliness as a Gandhian idea see Skaria, Ajay, ‘Gandhi's Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101/4 (2002), 955–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Wolpert, Stanley, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the making of Modern India (Berkeley, 1962)Google Scholar.

10 On genocide see especially Mamdani, Mahmood, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

11 The sociologically robust but theoretically underexplained accounts in various now standard texts in the disciplines of history, anthropology and politics are more sure-footed on causes of violence and memory rather than on the conditions of the possibility and the subsequent absorption and acceptance of violence.

12 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, What Is Philosophy? (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

13 Shruti Kapila, “Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth”, special journal issue on Hind Swaraj, Public Culture, forthcoming.

14 Pollock, Sheldon, The Ends of Man at the End of Premodernity, Gonda Lecture (Amsterdam, 2005)Google Scholar.

15 Kapila, Shruti, Governments of the Mind: The Self and Its Sciences in Modern India (Cambridge University Press, MS under review)Google Scholar.

16 Kapila, Shruti, “Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920”, Modern Intellectual History 4:1 (2007), 109–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Lenin, V. I., The National Liberation Movement in the East, trans. Levin, M. (Moscow, 1962) 14–15Google Scholar.

18 Kahn, Paul W., Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar.

19 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, especially chap. 12 on worldly and timely action.

20 Badiou, Alain, The Century, trans. Toscano, Alberto (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar.

21 Tilak also discusses seriously the canonical political theorists from Hobbes to Kant to British liberals and idealists and on to Nietzsche, and endorses only Nietzsche.

22 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 28.

23 Ibid., 37.

24 This position is in direct contrast to that analogously theorized by Foucault which posits labour (oekesis) and love (eros) as techniques for the will-to-selfhood. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2005).

25 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 46.

26 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 52.

27 Here he takes the example of the truth-seeking Harischandra and the figure of St Paul.

28 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 15–39.

29 This is why this interpretation is an act of political theory/philosophy despite being steeped in a theological exegesis, and why no pundit in Benares or even Poona recognized it as part of a shastric interpretation or textual tradition. All the contemporary reviews point to this. Conversely, this is one of the most popular texts of twentieth-century India and indeed now is received as the dominant reading of the message of the Gita.

30 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 45.

31 Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Hallward, Peter (London, 2002), 59Google Scholar. Original emphasis.

32 On Gandhi and friendship see Devji, Faisal, “A Practice of Prejudice: Gandhi's Politics of Friendship”, in Subaltern Studies XXII (Delhi, 2005), 78–98Google Scholar.

33 Derrida exposes that underlying the desperately concrete idea of friend–enemy in Schmitt is indeed the figure of the brother. Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, George (London, 1997), 138–70Google Scholar.

34 Though at its limits Hind Swaraj can be read as anti-human.

35 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 54.

36 It does indeed make more sense to read Gandhi via Levinas (cf. Ajay Skaria) since naming/other/difference/ethics are the conceptual repertoire. As opposed to action/event/subject/namelessness/political that cohere Tilak and are more open to the anti-ethical writings of Alain Badiou. Tilak is no communist in the making.

37 Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Hallward, Peter (London, 2001), 80–87Google Scholar.

38 The not-naming is specific to the translation and the commentary of the Gita.

39 All the more striking, in that after the Swadeshi era and through the long-winded trial against the imperial state when the Gita-Rahasaya was written Tilak stubbornly refused any naming of his politics. When pushed, he did say that the only politics he had been involved with were “Indian”.

40 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 407 and 45.

41 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 558.

42 Ibid., 113.

43 Shruti Kapila, “Self, Spencer and Swaraj”.

44 Tilak's system hints at a pragmatic paradigm inasmuch as it hinges on the categories of self-knowledge and recognition/discrimination of the doable and the non-doable, or the possible and the impossible, which in turn are related not to historical time but in to the ordinary/everyday (nitya) and the purposive (kamya). Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 70–85.

45 The “state of exception” here is not the same as Giorgio Agamben's in a literal sense because Tilak is not interested in the sovereign power of distinction between bare life (zoe) and the good life (bios). It is simply apdharm, or the suspension of quotidian norms.

46 Tilak, Gita-Rahasya, 41–9.

47 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 138.

48 Tilak, B. G., Arctic Home of the Vedas (Poona, 1903)Google Scholar.

49 Badiou, Alain, Metapolitics (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

50 On Hindutva and sacrifice see P. Ghassem-Fachandi's forthcoming work.