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Critical Studies in PoliticsAn Introductory Note

Aditya Nigam

This note introduces to the readers of this forum a group endeavour called Critical Studies in Politics initiated by the teachersresearchers in Political Science located in different Indian universities. The initiative aims to redefine the object of the study of the discipline of political science in its efforts to radi-cally destabilize the disciplinary formations. The note raises critical issues towards restructuring of the discipline of political science in India both in terms of its objects and its methodological approaches.

One initial output from this collective activity is Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power, a collection of essays by a group of political science teachers and researchers (Menon et al., 2014).1 But it is also an endeavour that we hope will have a life beyond this volume in terms of consoli-dating a change that has already been underway in the discipline. This change has to do with two sets of issues, namely, the way the discipline frames its object and the methodological approaches it sanctions or allows. There was a time when our discipline was not only identified with a more or less derivative application of methodological debates in the West, especially US academy, but even its concerns were framed within limits defined by them. Not only was politics defined in very rigid terms as what went on in its formal domainthat of parties, electoral behaviour, state policy, decision-making, pressure groups and so on, but there was also an equally inflexible insistence on only certain kinds of quantitative empirical methods. Things began to change from the 1980s onwards and political science too was not immune to these changes though the pace of changes in our discipline has been excruciatingly slow.

The Backdrop

In the larger scenario of social sciences/humanities in India, in the overall move away from the rigidly defined relationship between discipline, object and method, the intervention of Subaltern Studies in history was of major importance. It raised, simultaneously, questions that were of substantive and meth-odological importranging from a critique of nationalist historiography and reopening the question of the archive. How is one to write a history of the subaltern groups in an archive that is primarily consti-tuted by the state and its officialscolonial and post-colonial? What sources other than the archives can one access in order to write such histories? Such questions came to the fore quite dramatically. And just

Aditya Nigam, Professor, CSDS, Delhi. E-mail: aditya@csds.in

Studies in Indian Politics2(2) 231235

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New Delhi, Singapore,Washington DC

DOI: 10.1177/2321023014551887http://inp.sagepub.com

*This section is coordinated by Rajeshwari Deshpande (rajeshwari.deshpande@gmail.com).

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as Subaltern Studies was a deferred effect of the Naxalite movement in the domain of history writing as many of its practitioners have recorded, another impetus from outside the academy, came in the form of the influence of the ascendant womens movement. The questions raised by the focus on gender were difficult to confine within disciplinary boundaries. What was political, for instance, was no longer self-evident and with a slogan like the personal is political; the impetus to write and discuss politics in the broader sense of relations of power and domination became unavoidable. Where existing disciplinary formations refused to give way to this demand, new avenues opened up outside them, in multidiscipli-nary locations like womens studies. Gradually, mainstream social science disciplines also began to open up in response. The discipline of political science too was not immune to this change.

Another important development, intellectually speaking, of this period of the 1980s, was the begin-ning of a major re-examination of the cultural and intellectual legacy of colonialism. The impetus came from two directions. The first, again, was the displaced effect of Naxalism and its emphasis on the continuation of the colonial legacy in the postcolonial. The early Maoist formulation about the semi-colonial nature of Indian society may have completely misrecognized the actual economic and political formation of independent India but it did prompt a re-examination of the culturalintellectual legacy of the past including, say the re-examination of the mythology associated with the Bengal renaissance. The other impetus came from the Gandhian and neo-Gandhian influence that tied up with emergent social movements, especially fledgling environmental movements and their critique of the mega-development imagination. Critiques of development, science and modernity more generally, emphasized the continuities with the colonial legacy even more dramatically. Alongside these arose the now well-known critiques of secularism and the nation-statematters that were of direct relevance for our own discipline but which the discipline took a long time to respond to. While some of these may have had larger global coordinates as in Edward Saids writings on Orientalism, a clearly more radically situated critique had now emerged, which had started setting the agenda of social and political research in India.

Pushing Disciplinary Boundaries

Between them, these transformations, mainly outside the formal disciplinary formations, began forcing a change within disciplines. For our discipline, the challenge was clearly there to think its very object afresha challenge that was taken up only falteringly. Over a decade later, the challenge was further reinforced with the emergence of the Dalit movement. How could we study the Dalit movement in any degree of complexity, if we were to focus exclusively on the Dalit political parties and their leaders, or on votes polled by them? There was after all, a clearly different style and distinctive discursive formation that the Dalit politics brought into view, alongside a whole range of semiotic transformations. Was it possible for someone seriously interested in studying the rise of the Dalit movement then, to ignore all the complex aspects of its discourse, its literature and its non-political practice and focus only on the manifest levels of its politics?

Such have been the multiple impulses that have been knocking at our disciplinary door, to which some of the leading practitioners of political science have responded over the years and which we in the Critical Studies in Politics group wish to engage with, so that we can face the challenge that confronts us.

One of the ways in which a discipline renews itself constantly is by incorporating that which previ-ously lay outside it, at times in an adversarial relationship with the disciplinary orthodoxy. As new

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themes and issues find their way into university syllabi, the subject itself changes. Some of these changes have been evident in the way in which political scientists have begun opening themselves to historical, anthropological, sociological and literary scholarshipboth in terms of engaging with them as well as in terms of using methods specific to these different disciplines. Thus a political scientist today is far more open to entering the archive or going to the field as ethnographer, just as she is more open to study-ing texts of political thought with the insights of literary theory. Interdisciplinarity, in other words, is now more widely practiced than it was two decades ago.

However, all this is not to say that, therefore, the policing of disciplinary boundaries is a thing of the past. Certainly not. Gate-keeping still continues in large measureand though there is a grudging acceptance of newer themes and methodological approaches, there is also an all-too-evident resistance to change. Students entering political science departments for research come with the excitement of studying politics in all its diversity but are often disappointed by the insistence of departments to contain that enthusiasm within disciplinary boundaries. It is this that impels us to come together to bring out this volume.

The idea of the group endeavour called Critical Studies in Politics (CSP) came out of the experience of teaching, studying and doing/guiding research in Departments of Political Science in different parts of the country. As such, there are two things that we wish to achieve. As suggested above, we want to open up the disciplinary apparatus in ways that respond to the demand of the times and do away with the false division of disciplinary boundaries. And yet, in doing this we want to hold on to our central concern with the politicalif by the political we understand the level at which politics constitutes society, if one were to take Claude Leforts distinction as our reference point. At this level, then, we see ourselves as moving beyond the level of formal politics alone to direct our gaze at the way in which it underlies, through law and state, through networks of disciplinary power, the very form and constitution of institutions as diverse as the family and the university. We want to look at how the political, in this sense, is implicated in knowledge-formations and structures the human relationship to nature; how it organizes time and space, collective memory and such non-measurable things, in order to produce, say, the political community of the nation.

The critical in critical studies is an aspiration for us. It should also be understood, at least to some extent, in the sense in which Max Horkheimer originally used it for critical theoryas an endeavour that is both explanatory and normative at the same time. To this sense, we add anotherour critical approach must attempt to transcend the division between theory and empirics.

Theory versus Empirics

As is well known, there are two divides in Indian Political Science: one between empirical work and theoretical work and the other between normative political theory and other kinds of empirical theory. The two divides overlap and intersect, and reflect entrenched distinctions drawn between facts and the-ory (in the first) and facts and values (in the second). In the second divide, there is the additional assump-tion that there is a universally accessible rationality that produces a universal set of values and norms to which everyone can or should subscribe. Neither of these divides is sustainable; nor is the assumption of universal rationality undergirding normative theory. Facts are inevitably theory-laden, and normative theories must compete with other theories (often no less normative or ethical) for influence over political

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imaginations, since there is nothing uniquely universal or obviously rational about any one set of values.

In cultures like ours in India it seems, this division between the empirical and the theoretical did not have the same resonance that it did in either the United States of America or other parts of the Western world. This may have to do with the fact that political reflection as such has continued to be an existential engagement rather than exclusively a professional academic activity. A proper history of political thought/thinking in India still remains to be written but from whatever work has become available over the past couple of decades, we can say that political reflection and thought wasand continues to bevery much part of an entanglement in politics itself. This fact itself points towards a specificity that requires close study and research, for it gestures towards a very different trajectory and perhaps mode of thinking and its relation to practice.

As CSP, we believe the task of reconstructing political studies for our purposes requires deep engagement with such diverse intellectual traditions and their ways of thinking about modernity and modern politicsas signalled above. In other words, we wish to re-frame what has so far appeared to be a deficiency or a lack in the development of political studies in India as a sign of a different possibilitythat thinking here is perhaps a practice embedded in different intellectualcultural traditions where the sharp theory/practice divide has not been institutionalized as in the modern West.

This issue incidentally ties up with a larger problem of the relationship between theory and practice, which we at CSP are especially concerned about. This is the question of the universal claims of theory that notoriously speaks about everywhere from nowhere in such a way that we see no problem in simply applying theory born in one context, to understand practice in another. Such an approach, we believe, empties practice in the rest of the word but the West of any thought-content. It matters little what the social agents themselves think about what they are doing; what matters is that we have is a theory that is intelligible in the Western academy through which we can make sense of the practice of any group of people anywhere in the world. We can then with no difficulty reduce an Ambedkar or a Gandhi to a liberal or a secular thinkerunmindful of the fact that they were intervening in a con-text and situation that is entirely different, within which each of them was trying to fashion a distinctive political ethics. That thinkers like them or others like Mohammed Iqbal developed their thought in conversation with leading contemporary Western philosophers does not at all warrant their reduction to some second rate version of a fundamental Western thought. The fact that each of these thinkers is rooted in or in a serious dialogue with some part or the other of their own tradition can then either be elided or considered as some sort of unresolved contradiction. It is important for us to approach thinkers in our parts of the world with a double move: one which takes the manifest levels of their discourse seriously in their own right and considers it in its own context; the other which subjects them to the task of theoretical abstractionan operation that is of an entirely different order from that of applying a given theory to their work. Our task is more like extracting the theory from their oeuvrethe theory that underlies their practice and discourse, sometimes articulated but often just implicit.

Ours is not an argument for some indigenous theory, for Western theory is an important resource for us provided we know what to do with it. Its unthinking application to any and every context is really the problem that we wish to avoid. One of the key issues, it seems, is to examine the concepts and categories that we take from these theories in the actual lives they live in our contextswhich may be very different from that in their places of origin.

One of the key issues that come up in the context of our relationship to Western theory has to do not merely with the concepts and categories that it gives us but rather also with the stories that it appends

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to them. The genealogy of the political that we are given in the familiar story of secularization, of the disestablishment of the Church, and the emergence of the political as an independent object of reflec-tion, is a highly misleading one. It is misleading because the story of the political in large parts of the world neither had the kind of close fusion of political and religious power, nor therefore does the idea of their separation make any sense. Neither in India, nor in the Arab and Persian world, nor in China do we find, at any point, the kind of fusion that makes separation such a key issue. The history of the political is diverse and differs across different societies and does not conform to the story that we receive through our social science theories. This basically means that the task of theorizing the political for us cannot but be tied to the task of producing alternative accounts of how politics was conducted in societies outside Europe. Theory in this sense will have to be inescapably historical as well.

Note

1. This note draws in part on the joint Introduction written by the editors, Menon, Nigam and Palshikar (Menon et al., 2014, pp. 118).

Reference

Menon, Nivedita, Nigam, Aditya, & Palshikar, Sanjay. (2014). Critical studies in politics: Exploring sites, selves, power. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.