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Political Modernity in the Postcolony: Some Reflections From India’s Bhil Heartland

Alf Gunvald Nilsen

“We are the ones who make the state!” This is how activists of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna

Sangath (KMCS/Peasant and Workers Consciousness Union) and the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan

(AMS/Adivasi Liberation Organization) – local social movements in rural districts of western

Madhya Pradesh – would typically express their understanding of the relationship between their

communities and the local state and its representatives. The activists were Bhil Adivasis – that is,

members of India’s Scheduled Tribes (ST) – and their resort to this turn of phrase is remarkable

for at least two reasons.

Firstly, as Adivasis, they are among the poorest citizens of the Indian polity. Almost half

of India’s STs – approximately 44 per cent – live below the official poverty line, and although they

only constitute eight per cent of India’s population, they nevertheless make up 25 per cent its

poorest decile. As Ramachandra Guha has noted, the material deprivation of Adivasi communities

is closely related to political marginalization – despite being rights-bearing citizens, tribal

communities are very often de facto disenfranchised in relation to the Indian state, and therefore

not capable of effective claimsmaking.

In western Madhya Pradesh, this disenfranchisement took the form of a local state-

society relation that I have referred to elsewhere as everyday tyranny. Everyday tyranny was

manifest in a set of profoundly coercive and predatory interactions between Bhil Adivasis and

local state personnel, in which the latter would use the powers vested in them in relation to law

enforcement as well as their role in dispensing public services – coupled with very real threats of

violence – to extract a wide variety of bribes from tribal villagers. As I have argued in my

previous work, everyday tyranny was reproduced over time through the workings of an

“emotional habitus” of fear and resignation that was pervasive in Bhil Adivasi communities and

which fostered a deferential acquiescence in relation to the local state and its personnel. The

KMCS and the AMS – which organized and mobilized throughout the 1980s and 1990s – took aim

at everyday tyranny and achieved a significant democratization of state-society relations through

persistent law-based mobilization. It is against this backdrop that the significance of the
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statement that opens this article has to be understood: by developing the moral courage to

withstand and to challenge the predation of local state personnel, a subaltern group that had

previously conceived of the state as an oppressive and omnipotent entity – several activists told

me that, in the past, they would refer to the state as bhagwan (god) or mai-baap (mother-father)

– had come to see the state as an institution which obtained its legitimacy from the democratic

participation of its citizens.

Secondly, Adivasi claims to be the makers of the state points us in a potentially

interesting direction in terms of how to think about political modernity in the postcolony – and

this is the point at which this article seeks to make a substantial intervention. One of the

foundational tropes of sociological Eurocentrism pivots on the proposition that political

modernity and its institutional manifestations – for example democratic legality, civil society, and

citizenship – are purely western achievements. According to such narratives, the global South –

the postcolony – is, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has phrased it, stuck in an “imaginary waiting room of

history” and capable, at best, of mimicking, with greater or lesser success, the modern statehood

of its former rulers.

A significant body of research has now accumulated that documents and analyzes the

multiple origins of the modern state, modern conceptions of sovereignty, and modern

technologies of rule. Moreover, the rich historical work on the Haitian revolution has done much

to unearth the transnational historical trajectory of democracy. The objective to this paper is to

make a modest contribution to these recent advances towards a more complex and less

Eurocentric conception of political modernity by way of an analysis of the roles played by law,

civil society, and citizenship in the social movements of Bhil Adivasis in western India. I pursue

this analysis against a specific foil, namely Partha Chatterjee’s well-known work on civil and

political society in the postcolony. The tenor of the argument that follows will hopefully make

clear the general orientation that I adopt in approaching the task of provincializing political

modernity – which is that a counter to Eurocentrism should not come in the form of an exclusive

focus on the particularity and otherness of the postcolony, but rather as a deciphering of how

universalizing democratic vocabularies are appropriated, refracted, and imbued with new and

more radical meanings in and through the oppositional projects of subaltern groups.

Law

I start my exploration of these questions with a discussion of the significance of law in the

mobilizations of the KMCS and the AMS.

The two movements both emerged from interventions of urban middle class activists – in the

case of the KMCS, these were often disenchanted NGO workers, and in the case of the AMS, the

two key external figures were former activists with the Communist student organization AISF.

Crucially, the starting point for the mobilizations of the KMCS and the AMS were a series of law-

based challenges to specific cases of corruption, violence, and malpractice by local state

personnel that reversed the grammar of everyday tyranny in important ways. In the chapter

where I develop this analysis in full, I provide a detailed example of how the KMCS began

mobilization in a village by successfully challenging the legality of an attempt by local police to

extract a bribe in order to turn a blind eye to a community dispute. The challenge followed a

fairly typical form: a delegation of villagers and activists confronted the Deputy Superintendent

of Police with the corrupt demands of local constables and officers and demanded to know

whether this was legal or not. The DSP confirmed that it wasn’t and made it clear that he would

take stern action against any attempt to collect bribes from the villagers. Following this incident,

the constables at the local thana stayed well away from this village and never attempted to

collect the bribe they had demanded.

The significance of the challenge levelled in this incident – and, as I show in my chapter, many

other incidents as well – was two-fold. Firstly, the confrontation between the villagers and the

local police entailed a significant amount of collective learning about the local state – above all,

that the powers of state personnel were circumscribed by legal regulations, and that they could

therefore also be held accountable for their actions. Confrontations like these, then, generated a

political and bureaucratic literacy centred on the law that enabled skilled and assertive claims-

making in communities that had previously been subordinated to a fearsome and seemingly all-

powerful state.

I want to note that this should not be read as an argument about the intrinsic efficiency of the law

as such, but rather as a statement about the transformative potential of a specific combination of

law and collective action. I say this because, although legal stipulations and procedures were of

great importance to these early mobilizations, the KMCS never adopted a strictly judicial form of

activism that sought to achieve political goals via the court system. Rather, the law provided the

KMCS with a highly effective language of contention that was consistently coupled to the

disruptive power of subaltern collective action. By linking law and disruption in this way, Bhil

Adivasis proved themselves capable of responding to corrupt exactions with assertive claims that

effectively redrew the boundaries between themselves and the local state by demonstrating that

they would no longer kow-tow to corruption and violence and expected legality to prevail in local

state-society relations.

Significantly, this form of protest goes against the grain of what Chatterjee has argued is the

hallmark of subaltern politics in India today. In Chatterjee’s account, subaltern claims-making is

geared towards gaining tacit acknowledgement of various illegal practices through the

declaration of an exception from legal norms. This was ostensibly not what the KMCS and the

AMS did. Quite the contrary: through their activism, the KMCS and the AMS actively held the state

and its personnel accountable to the law and insisted on legality in local state-society relations. It

would be problematic, therefore, to simply reduce the law, as Chatterjee seems to do, to a pillar

of private property and a channel through which the elites that inhabit civil society relate to the

state – especially as the law is becoming every more salient in the strategic repertoires of

subaltern movements in India today (I’m thinking here of rights-based legislation – not just as

enacted laws, but also in terms of how these laws come to mediate subaltern resistance through

various forms of legal consciousness – which I will talk more about towards the end of my

paper).

In this sense, the early claims-making of the KMCS and the AMS is arguably an example of what

Julia Eckert calls “legalism from below” – that is, practices in which subaltern groups use the law

to oppose illegal or extra-legal ways of governing. In the context of everyday tyranny, this resort

to the law was fundamentally subversive of regnant power relations – not because the law is, as
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it is often assumed to be in liberal theory, a great equalizer, but because of the hegemonic

compulsions that flow from the fact that – to paraphrase E. P. Thompson – the law cannot serve

its ideological function if it does not, at least on occasion, appear to be just. The law, then,

provided activists with a vocabulary of contention that could be leveraged in relation to the

hegemonic political idioms of the state through collective action.

What this dynamic suggests is that the importance of the law for subaltern politics resides not so

much in its instrumental capacity to regulate social relations. Rather, as Michael McCann has

argued, the significance of the law must be understood in terms of how it comes to be constitutive

of social relations as subaltern groups appropriate legal conventions and discourses. And one of

the most crucial aspects of subaltern appropriations of the law in this regard is the fact that –

regardless of their concrete results – they can foster an ability to articulate visions of rights and

entitlements that run counter to everyday forms of domination. In the case of the KMCS and the

AMS, it was in this sense in particular that legalism from below was significant: it drove the

emergence of new practices and new imaginaries, grounded in politico-bureaucratic literacy and

the collective moral courage that was generated through confrontations with state authorities,

that enabled Bhil Adivasis to mobilize collectively to challenge their adverse incorporation into

local state-society relations.

Civil Society

I would like to move on to consider how these new practices and imaginaries wrought important

reconfigurations of local state-society relations and to reflect on what this can tell us about the

relationship between subaltern politics and civil society in contemporary India.

In western Madhya Pradesh, the moral courage to resist that was generated through

confrontations with state authorities and the politico-bureaucratic literacy that Bhil Adivasis

developed through their collective engagements with state authorities fused in a crucial synergy

that gave rise to an oppositional local rationality around which claims for the right to have rights

could be staked. As a consequence, practices of acquiescence and deference started to give way to

assertion – first of all, against the corruption and the violence of the local state. Activists were
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clear that it was their newfound ability to pursue grievances by fusing the law with collective

mobilization that had enabled them to take a stand against the exactions of forest guards, police

constables, and patwaris. Activists would also put their claims-making skills to use to obtain

small-scale development interventions from the local state. Crucially, such interventions were

spoken of as the rightful entitlements of citizens who contribute to the state through taxes.

The changes that had taken place were also clearly inscribed in the imaginaries that shaped

Adivasi relations with the local state. When activists spoke of how they had perceived the state

and its personnel prior to their participation in the KMCS and the AMS, they would time and

again return to representations of the state as a god-like entity – that is, they would literally refer

to the state as bhagwan and themselves as inferior underlings. Significantly, participation in

rights-based mobilization seems to have eroded the hold of those imaginaries and generated new

sets of meanings centred on democratic representation and public accountability.

Two key themes emerge from activist narratives of how perceptions of the state and its

personnel had changed: firstly, that the state is a representative institution that draws its power

from a citizenry that consigns legitimacy upon it through the act of voting, and, secondly, a

reversal of the entrenched hierarchies that ascribe superiority to the state functionary and

inferiority to the Adivasi peasant. The idea that the state derives its legitimacy from citizens and

is undergirded by the labour of peasant cultivators and therefore also accountable to the public

was closely related to the positing of Adivasis as bearers of rights – invariably referred to as haq.

The idea of being a bearer of rights was normally associated with protection from the arbitrary

use of state power, having the right to make democratic claims, and entitlement to a modicum of

welfare from the state. One might call this a minimal conception of rights, yet it stands in stark

contrast to the subjection that was at the heart of everyday tyranny and it was pivotal in bringing

about the dethroning of the state in Bhil imaginaries.

In sum, the KMCS and the AMS articulated and organized defiance and opposition by aggregating

Adivasi grievances into rights-based claims and demands. And in pursuing these claims they

carved out a space in which democratic transactions could take place. In doing so, these
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movements effectively brought civil society from formal to substantive existence in the tribal

areas of western Madhya Pradesh. This, I think, should give cause for questioning the tenability

of Chatterjee’s claim that civil society exists in India only as “enclaves of civic freedom and

rational law” for a privileged minority. And it also begs questions about the historiography that

underpins this claim, in which civil society is a circumscribed space due to its origins in the

political activity of nationalist elites in early twentieth century India.

My point here is not merely – as has been argued by many others before me – that subaltern

groups appropriate the democratic idioms and practices of the modern Indian state, but that we

cannot think of civil society in static terms. Indeed, civil society is a far more fluid and porous

domain than what Chatterjee allows for – in no small part due to the fact that subaltern groups

have demanded and (to varying degrees) obtained substantial entry to and inclusion in its ambit

over the past seven decades. Our conceptual attempts to grapple with subaltern politics will

therefore have to take cognizance of how mobilization on the terrain of civil society shape and

reshape both the political subjectivities of subalterns and the workings of India’s democracy.

This does not entail a simple positing of civil society as a sphere of free civic association. Indeed,

it is the state – or rather, that part of the state that Gramsci labelled political society – that

provides the legal and political frameworks within which civil society is constituted. And at the

same time that these frameworks enable the very existence of civil society, they also

circumscribe what subaltern groups can and cannot achieve through mobilizations on this

terrain. This in turn has ramifications for how we understand the impacts of the activism of the

KMCS and the AMS on local state-society relations. As much as these movements democratized

the local state by bringing a rudimentary civil society into being in western Madhya Pradesh, this

cannot be construed as contesting the hegemony of the state. Rather, it is quite conceivable that,

through its concessions to the demands of the KMCS and the AMS, the state bolstered its

legitimacy and sought to contain subaltern claims-making within the political boundaries of a

particular hegemonic formation.

Yet, the containment of subaltern resistance within a liberal field of politics is neither a foregone

conclusion nor an achieved state of affairs. As Ajantha Subramanian has pointed out, claims-

making is in itself “generative of new understandings and subjects of rights” – and these new

understandings and subjects may well exceed the boundaries of what is politically permissible

within a determinate hegemonic formation. In the final part of this paper, I want to explain in

more detail what I mean by this by discussing Chatterjee’s conception of citizenship in relation to

the claim for local self-rule by the AMS.

Citizenship

Citizenship is absolutely central to Chatterjee’s theorization of political modernity and popular

politics in India. In The Politics of the Governed, he traces its origins to the French Revolution and

then posits an understanding of citizenship that is overwhelmingly oriented towards a specific

legal status that is in turn embodied in a determinate bundle of rights. Moreover, his

understanding of citizenship also appears to be static – that is, citizenship seemingly cannot be

anything other than the liberal bundle of rights associated with “the insistence on the

homogenous national” that is seen as having animated the emergence of political modernity in

the West.

The problem with this view of citizenship lies in the fact that it renders us incapable of

acknowledging and unravelling how the political idioms of democratic modernity are

appropriated by subaltern groups and how, as a result of such appropriations, these idioms are in

turn inflected with meanings that exceed the confines of the liberal mould. This erases from

analytical and political view the full spectrum of ways in which collective action from below

impinges on and inscribes itself in hegemonic projects of state-making and the emancipatory

possibilities contained in these dynamics. To recover such a view of subaltern politics, we would

have to reorient our analytical focus to take into account the ways in which claims are

transformed into rights in ways that bring about reconstitutions of both governmental categories

and legal frameworks, and by extension, the meanings of citizenship.

As a way of doing so, it might be productive to consider the trenchant restatement by Margaret

Somers of the Arendtian dictum that citizenship – ultimately and fundamentally – is “the right to

have rights” and locate the origins of this right, as Engin Isin has suggested, in oppositional acts

that rupture social and historical patterns of domination and subalternity. It was precisely this –

an oppositional claims for the right to have rights – that was at the heart of mobilization in

western Madhya Pradesh. In a context where state-society relations were defined by

subjecthood, the KMCS and the AMS demanded – most fundamentally – the de facto recognition

of Adivasis as having rights in relation to the state as a political community. Indeed, as much as

the KMCS and the AMS appropriated constitutional rights and legal provisions in their claims-

making, it was not the existence of those rights and provisions in and of themselves that brought

about de facto citizenship in Adivasi communities – it was the act of mobilizing to challenge

everyday tyranny that enabled Adivasis to constitute themselves as those to whom the right to

have rights is due.

Once the origins of the right to have rights are located in acts, citizenship is no longer bounded by

the tenets of liberal theory. Rather, it becomes a dynamic cultural formation as a result of the

generative nature of claims-making. In the chapter that this paper draws from, I analyze this in

relation to how the KMCS articulated a prefigurative claim to forest rights and how the AMS

mobilized for local self-rule during the mid-1990s. For reasons of time, I will limit my discussion

here to the latter.

The AMS’s mobilization was closely linked to the national campaign for local self-rule in Adivasi

areas, which ultimately resulted in the enactment of the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension

to the Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) – a law which, in a nutshell, devolves significant powers of

governance to the level of the Gram Sabha in Scheduled Areas. Now, PESA is widely known to not

have lived up to activist expectations that the law would bring about significant emancipatory

transformations for Adivasi communities. However, the law has had a significant impact on state-

society relations in tribal areas by enabling Adivasi communities to articulate political

imaginaries centred on ideas of autonomy, sovereignty, and – notably – rights over natural

resources.
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This holds true also in the case of the AMS. Activists readily admitted that the Sangathan has not

been able to use PESA to secure substantial advances in terms of self-rule. However, the notion of

hamare gaon, hamara raj has come to mould the way in which activists conceive of citizenship

and rights. Significantly, the rights-based claims that were articulated by the AMS were neither

simply claims to be recognized as citizens with civil and political liberties in the liberal sense, nor

were these claims bounded by a logic of equality in which subaltern groups demand rights that

are already in existence. Rather, rights-based claims increasingly came to be articulated in terms

of a collective Adivasi identity, in which the central loci of consciousness formation were the

dispossession of natural resources – jal, jangal, zameen – and the claim to have the rights to these

resources restored through the restitution of Bhil sovereignty within a determinate territory.

What was engendered in and through this process of opposition, appropriation, and negotiation

was akin to what James Holston has called “insurgent citizenship” – that is, a conception of rights

that remains conjoined in many ways with hegemonic regimes of citizenship, but which – due to

its grounding in the social needs of subaltern groups – pushes in the direction of the invention of

a new society rather than merely a perpetuation of the old. To be sure, the discourse of

indigenous rights that emerged among AMS activists was forged in relation to what Chatterjee

would call governmental categories – that is, the Scheduled Tribe as a specific population group

and the Scheduled Area as a particular space within the national territory inscribed in India’s

constitution. Yet it also destabilized and exceeded these categories in significant ways.

This is so because the claim for local self-rule was centred on the injustice of dispossession and

disenfranchisement as the origin of Adivasi subalternity. This is very different from the

constitutional trope of backwardness, which effectively erases from view the ways in which the

dispossession and disenfranchisement of Adivasis is inextricably linked to colonial and

postcolonial processes of state formation and posits the Adivasi as overwhelmingly passive and

dependent on an external agent – that is, the benevolent state – for succour and uplift. The

mobilization rejected the paternal governance of the state and insisted on Adivasi self-activity as

the pivot of emancipatory transformation. In this way, the idiom of citizenship came to be
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inflected with insurgent meanings that exceed both that which is purely governmental and that

which is purely liberal. That excess is located in the claim for justice for Adivasis – a justice that

requires for its fulfilment something more than just welfare and protection, namely a particular

form of inclusion and membership in the political community predicated on what Noel Castree

refers to as a “differentiated geography” that grants resource control, a measure of territorial

sovereignty, and the inscription of the Adivasi into the juridical framework of the state as a legal

subject capable of self-governance.

As Niraja Jayal rightly argues, claims for rights “are implicitly claims to citizenship, and often to

an expanding conception of it” and it is very commonly this – the appropriation and expansion of

hegemonic political idioms – that enables subaltern groups to disrupt entrenched state-society

relations. And it is precisely such disruptions – effected through oppositional collective action –

that enable subaltern groups to shape and reshape the meanings and practices that we associate

with political modernity, and to expand these meanings and practices in more progressive and

encompassing directions. This, I believe, was true when the slaves of Saint Domingue made their

bid for freedom against colonial rule and slavery, and it is true today when Adivasis challenge

disenfranchisement and dispossession in the world’s largest democracy.