Notes on Methods

Concepts, Methods and Indian Studies in Indian Politics

9(2) 283–290, 2021
Politics: A Conversation with © 2021 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Sudipta Kaviraj Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/23210230211043041
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Hilal Ahmed1

The study of Indian politics, especially in the conventional disciplinary framework of political science,
is often differentiated from what is called political theory. Indian politics, more generally, refers to the
functioning of institutions (Parliament, Supreme Court, political parties) and the everydayness of
political processes. On the other hand, political theory is envisaged as a sophisticated mode of thinking
about certain concepts (liberty, equality, justice, secularism) and intellectual traditions (liberalism,
Marxism and so on). The dominance of Eurocentric Western concepts and categories is clearly visible in
such disciplinary representation of political theory as a subject. Although a section of Indian scholars has
questioned this imaginary dividing line between theory (read Western!) and politics (read Indian/
empirical!) in last two decades, the study of the theoretical aspects of Indian politics has not yet been
given adequate intellectual attention.2
Sudipta Kaviraj’s work is an exception in this regard. He has been engaging with the complexities of
Indian politics for serious political theorization for almost five decades. Kaviraj’s work recognizes the
historical formation of Indian politics as a point of departure to underline the specific constitution of
Indian modernity. Unlike other scholars of his generation, especially the self-declared Marxists, Kaviraj
has always been critical of theoretical rigidity of any kind. This intellectual openness helps him to engage
with Western intellectual traditions without compromising with his adherence to the empirically
informed, historically conscious, and theoretically adventurous analysis of Indian politics.
Kaviraj’s work introduces us to an interesting methodological trajectory. He does not outrightly reject
the value of Eurocentric/Western theoretical thinking. Instead of employing them uncritically, he asks us
to locate these theoretical reflections in their immediate Western context. This contextualization of
Western theories, Kaviraj argues, may help us in tracing the manner in which a particular modern
experience is understood, evaluated and eventually theorized. In other words, Kaviraj is not merely
interested in the act of theory; he seems to explore the mechanisms that produce theoretical reflections.

Note: This section is coordinated by Divya Vaid (divya.vaid.09@gmail.com)

1
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India.
2
The intellectual unease with theory-politics binary, at least in the field of political science, has an interesting history. The pioneer-
ing works of Rajni Kothari (1970), Dhirubhai Sheth (2018) and Ashis Nandy (1983) established an intellectual tradition of serious
theoretical thinking on Indian politics. Partha Chatterjee (2011), Rajeev Bhargava (2009), Suhas Palshikar (2017), Peter R. deSouza
(2018), Yogendra Yadav (2020), Aditya Nigam (2021), Nivedita Menon (2012), Nivedita Menon et al. (2014), Prathama Banerjee
(2020), Pratap Bhanu Mehta (2003), Gurpreet Mahajan (2013) and others have approached this question from a number of different
stand points in recent years.

Corresponding author:
Hilal Ahmed, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, New Delhi 110054, India.
E-mail: ahmed.hilal@csds.in
284 Studies in Indian Politics 9(2)

Kaviraj employs this methodological premise to study Indian political realities in a very different
way. Instead of getting trapped in the intellectually fashionable binary—Western concepts versus Indian
concepts—he takes a different and somewhat more challenging route. He historicizes the politics
phenomena by examining their relationship with societal processes. This historicization, however, does
not reduce the specificity of postcolonial Indian politics to colonial past. Kaviraj makes a strong plea that
we need to ask second-order theoretical/political questions to capture the complexities of our political
experiences. In this sense, the impact of colonialism on community formation in south Asia—the gradual
transformation of the fuzzy communities to enumerated modern identities—is recognized as an important
vantage point for the study of contemporary political phenomena. Kaviraj reminds us:

The historical discipline, cautious and measured about facts, has to become more hospitable to more risky
theoretical generalizations. Colonial power or the state is not one of the classically constituted objects of either
political theory or colonial history; it has to be constituted as an object at the frontier. A proper object of historical
sociology, it cannot be addressed until the two disciplines enter into a cognitive dialogue. (Kaviraj, 2010,
pp. 39–40)

This conversation with Sudipta Kaviraj raises three broad thematic issues. The first set of questions tries
to explore the shifts and movements in his intellectual responses and positions. Secondly, there are a few
clarifications that seek to unpack the relationship between his intellectual responses to political questions
and his strong adherence to the impermanency of politics. The final set of questions is about his notion
of context specific theorization, which somehow takes us away from the conventional distinction between
‘theoretical analysis’ and ‘descriptive empiricism’.
Hilal Ahmed (HA): In an essay entitled ‘On Political Explanation in Marxism’, you try to offer an
exploratory conceptualization of politics within the field of Marxism (Kaviraj, 1989). This conscious
move, in my view, clearly challenges the ‘economic determinism’ of Marxist thinking. What do you
think of this intellectual trajectory?
Sudipta Kaviraj (SK): This is a very interesting question—which I shall answer in two parts. As an
academic student of politics, I faced a major intellectual obstacle because of the existing trends in Indian
Marxist thought. I grew up in West Bengal in the 1960s, where intellectual life, in part, was dominated
by Marxist thinking; but Marxists firmly believed that the power of their theory laid in a strict economistic
explanation of history. The arrival of the first few works of Gramsci, and Althusser’s structuralist
arguments helped in a critical reassessment of this form of Marxist thought, by showing us that the
Soviet-Comintern form of Marxist thinking was not its only form; that it was possible to think inside
Marxist theory in other ways as well. Difficulty with economic determinism did not create an option
between remaining within Marxism and abandoning it. It was possible to think inside Marxism in non-
deterministic ways, and more significantly, to innovate within the broad principles of Marxist theory.
HA: There is a related question. In your essay ‘On the Status of Marx’s Writings on India’, one finds a
deep sensitivity to the context of an author and his/her theoretical moves (Kaviraj, 1983). In fact, we
discover a strong argument in favour of context-specific reading of Marxism—the ‘context’ of Marx, his
use of certain ‘idioms’ in his writings and his European readers as ‘audience’. This context-centric
attitude is also reflected in your doctoral thesis ‘The Split in the Communist Movement in India’, where
you underline the specificity of a communist movement in a colonial/postcolonial society (Kaviraj,
1979). Although, I do agree with your claim that ‘authors are not always trustworthy guides to their own
processes of thinking’, I urge you to read your own work as a reader of Indian politics. In this sense, it is
imperative to ask you: why did you think that the Marxist mode (the ways in which you re-conceptualized
Ahmed 285

it in your initial writings) was relevant for understanding Indian politics of the 1970s–1980s despite the
fact that there had been a strong adherence to context-specific explanation?
SK: There are actually three parts to this question, and I shall answer them separately.

1. Reading Marx: I started serious thinking about social theory by reading Marx, because that was
the predominant trend in West Bengal culture in the sixties—which was my context. By reading
Marx ‘contextually’—that is, suggesting that Marx was thinking about Europe even when he was
writing about India, I wanted to open space for independent theorizing about India, in a way that
was not derived from Marx’s own theorization of European history. It was to use Marx against the
Eurocentric habits of thought of Indian Marxists.
2. The communist movement in India, it follows logically, must respond to a political environment
entirely different from the European—both in Marx’s time, and our own. Indirectly, this suggests
that an imitative form of politics had little chance of real success.
3. I thought that if Marxist thinking could be historicized radically—to understand the specifics of
Indian history—it could provide us with useful explanations of the Indian political processes,
because except for Marxists no other form of political analysis gave sufficient attention to the
political fate of subaltern groups—who constituted the vast majority of Indians. Marxist analysis
seemed to me to be indispensable, but it was equally indispensable to reject its Eurocentric form.

HA: In the introduction of your book Imaginary Institution of India you identify a movement away from
Marx (Kaviraj, 2010). We find this movement in many Marxist commentators and observers of Indian
politics. Apart from you the most noticeable among them are Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
You seem to be more concerned and sensitive about your Marxist intellectual trajectory. Obviously, you
are not responding to those ‘activists–intellectuals’, who are only interested in one’s commitment to
Marxism for reassuring its triumph as an ultimate theory of truth. On the contrary, your suggestion that
the study of politics must look at the ‘historical sociology’ of concerned phenomena, it seems, reflects a
deep engagement with Marxism. You also admit this in the same introductory essay. Could elaborate the
placing of this ‘movement away from Marx’ in your thinking in the later period?
SK: Without doubt, over the last decades, as I thought about my questions, my relation to Marxist theory
has changed. I believe that if there are serious changes in one’s thinking, it is essential to give an account
of that change—to show precisely what has changed, and why I thought the change was necessary. That
is why I feel it is important to state clearly, without obfuscation, the nature of that change. I feel that
many of my central questions are still derived from Marx’s theory. But first, it is important to state
that Marxism is not a theory of everything: there are many significant problems in history in which
Marxism is not seriously interested.
Second, I now believe that Marx gave exclusive attention to a principal logic of modernity—capitalism
and industrial development; but neglected the logic of the modern state. Instead of pretending there is a
fully developed theory of the modern state inside Marxism, we should acknowledge its absence and try
to supply that theory as best we can—by drawing upon other strands of theory, or thinking on our own.
Third, I think what Marx called ‘bourgeois democracy’ was a historic regime quite different from
modern democracy. It changed profoundly after the middle of the nineteenth century and there is a
serious absence of theorizing of modern democracy—the state that evolved after the mid-nineteenth
century in the Marxist tradition. As I thought about these questions, I had to propose arguments that were
not always drawn from the Marxist tradition. Over the years, my understanding of Marxism itself has
changed. I now believe that Marx’s detailed theory was primarily directed at modern European history;
in thinking about non-Western history we need much more uninhibited theorizing.
286 Studies in Indian Politics 9(2)

HA: One finds a very interesting engagement with the writings of Gramsci in your explanations of
Indian politics. Again, unlike others, your take on Gramsci remains more critical and creative. For
instance, your essay, ‘A Critique of the Passive Revolution’, brings in the Gramscian concepts and yet
tries to show that the trajectory of Indian politics moves away from the classical Gramscian case (Kaviraj,
1988). In your later writings, in my view, Gramsci is evoked sometime quite explicitly and sometime
rather indirectly. For instance, the essay, On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse,
Hegemony, there is a long discussion on the applicability of hegemony as a concept for understanding
colonial power (Kaviraj, 1997). So, the question is: What could be the possibilities of using a concept or
a particular set of concepts (in this case, hegemony) that emerge in a concrete historical context coined/
argued by a thinker for explaining a puzzling question of his/her time, for explaining a very different
historical event/practice?

SK: This is a fundamental question for that part of our intellectual culture in which authors engage with
historical and social-theoretical questions. I think on these questions too it is essential to think in a
historicist way—that is a way that is deeply and uncompromisingly historical. Social thinkers (philosophic
thinkers reflecting on highly general questions are often exempt to this rule) always think through
historically specific questions. But if we believe that there are large structures in history, and social
formations, it follows that historical situations can be comparable.
There are two ways in which we can learn from Gramsci. Firstly, he thought about a society where
capitalism arrived relatively late, which had deep internal unevenness, and in which society was largely
agricultural and marked by profound religiosity in its peasant popular culture. Evidently, some of these
specific features are similar to India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of Gramsci’s
arguments and the new concepts he devised to deal with them could help us think about the Indian case.
But, I believe even in such cases, when we move into greater detail, the Indian case diverges from the
Italian, and we have to think on our own.
The second way of learning from Gramsci is methodological. Gramsci was a major theorist of
‘difference’ within the Marxist tradition. That means that when the pre-existing theorization could not
help in explanations of new, different cases, he devised his own concepts. I call that sometimes ‘lateral
elaborations’ of a theory—making a theory move into new historical territory—which also forces the
theory to change itself. To learn from Gramsci in this sense, paradoxically, is not to apply his concepts
as I did in case of the ‘passive revolution’ but to devise concepts and arguments of our own.
Hegemony as a concept can be taken in a general or a historical meaning. As a historical concept, it
enabled Marxists to produce a far more realistic and sophisticated understanding of capitalist democracies
than earlier stages of Marxism. But it also has a certain applicability more generally: to investigate and
analyse dynamics of power where subtler and more insidious processes of consent work to stabilize
dominance of social elites.
HA: This brings me to another related question: What should be, in your view, our engagements with
certain concepts (particularly the concepts such as hegemony) which, although help us in illuminating
the broad sketch of an experience and/or political phenomenon, might not be able to accommodate
specificity of our own historical context?
SK: I believe we should be opportunists in theoretical thinking. We should use concepts which are in
general use; but if we are sensitive to historical specificities, that would help us in bending them, and
subsequently developing more appropriate concepts and theoretical tools. I think it is a general requirement
of thinking with theory. Liberal theorists face this task as much as radicals. But in most cases, authors register
the difficulties arising out of historical difference, they are far more reluctant to fashion new concepts.
Ahmed 287

HA: Colonialism has been a constant theme in your writings. In fact, your association with the subaltern
studies collective is somehow linked to your deep interest in the making of modern India. In your recent
book, you make an interesting observation. You say, ‘it is not always appreciated how difficult it is to
deliver on the abstract promise of “subaltern studies” to drag up from the ruins of everyday life pieces of
subaltern experience, then to find a language to express them and finally to theorize on the basis of the
distinctiveness of that angle of vision’. Two interesting questions emerge here (Kaviraj, 2010, p. 4).

(a) Despite recognizing the difficulty of theorization in a strictly subaltern studies mode, your
writings reflect a profound compassion for the complex world view of what you often call the
‘ordinary people’. What do you mean by this?
(b) The study of colonialism as a discourse, you argue, also takes us beyond the established
disciplinary boundaries. Your later works on modernity as well as some of your unpublished
papers and projects seem to move beyond the study of colonialism. You, it seems, are now more
concerned with what may be called the early modern—a historical moment which has made a
remarkable comeback in the historical researchers in recent years. What is the significance of this
early modern in your explanatory framework?

SK: Some of this is in fact very simple: by sheer numbers the world is a world of ordinary people. One
of the major mysteries of history is how elites rule against their interests, with their consent. I do not
think one requires a ‘radical’ stance to accept that immense truth of social life. Subaltern studies, if
analysed closely, will show a multiplicity of methods and techniques—though these reflections cohered
around two primary themes—initially about peasant consciousness and modes of action, and later about
themes of colonial dominance. Both these raise questions of subalternity—though certainly in very
different ways. But writing about these themes always raises two elementary types of problems of which
authors should show some self-awareness.
The first is the sheer difficulty of constructing accurate pictures of subaltern life: all forms of life
crumble when they move into the past, but subaltern life crumbles in a particularly profound way.
Subalternity involves a lack of ability—through heteronomy and illiteracy—to leave traces in history. To
write historically about subalterns, Dalits, women, is simply much harder. This is quite different from the
relative ease with which scholars can complain about mistreatment and degradation. Saying that these
groups are degraded and repressed is quite different from the intellectual enterprise of portraying their
life, and particularly capturing their experience. Subaltern studies rendered its own task much harder by
often claiming that the task of the historical was not merely to portray life, but to capture experience. The
second enterprise is methodologically and philosophically much more difficult.
There is a second concern associated with the ‘capture’ of experience. There is quite often a problematic
implicit claim that intellectuals can ‘express’ the experience of these groups by lending them our eloquence.
Gayatri Spivak raised some of these concerns forcefully in her essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’—there
is an act of ‘speaking for’ in the act of ‘making them speak’. I think we should be aware about these
questions, which lie at the heart of any radical and critical history. It is important to avoid immodesty.
As I became more convinced of the value of Marxist historicism, my way of thinking about power has
changed, and has become more historical. I realized that the central question for historical sociology of
power is whether the forms of social power in Indian society have changed significantly with the arrival
of the modern state. Much of my published work seeks to understand the two stages of the evolution of
a modern state form: the colonial period and the period after Independence. But I became acutely
conscious that to really understand the nature of modernity, one must have some grasp of the
288 Studies in Indian Politics 9(2)

pre-modern. Otherwise, it remains an assumption. That is why, as you correctly point out, in my recent
work, I have read more about pre-nineteenth century political and intellectual history.
But the ‘early-modern’ debate is fascinating for another reason. It destabilized the very temporal
categories—rather simple ones such as ancient, medieval and modern—through which we set up our
thinking about the past. By proposing that we see the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as ‘early modern’
in a different way from the colonial modern, it sets up an intriguing temporalizing hypothesis. I am
persuaded that it is a different period, with a rupture with the earlier one, but I have qualms about
whether it should be called early modern; because that tends to go back to the old habit of thinking about
our history through a primacy of the history of Europe. But what it suggests is the amazing thought that
all history need not be thought of in terms of three universal periods of ancient, medieval and modern.
There is no transcendental obligation for other histories to follow every stage of the history of Europe. I
am delighted, because these raise theoretical questions at a high level of generality.
HA: You have written extensively on literature and language. In fact, literary works are taken as serious
political resources in your writing. How do you look at the political values of literary works as a mode
to understand politics in colonial India (Kaviraj, 1995)? This oversimplified question, I admit, is not the
kind of criticism Ayesha Jalal (1996) offers in her rejoinder to Gyanendra Pandey on subalternity. I am
also aware of the fact that you have answered this kind of questions in a rather sophisticated way on
several occasions. Yet, I ask this question to understand your take on complex figures like Bankim, who
is often called a symbol of communalism in our popular discussion on secularism.
SK: I think we get two types of benefit by reading literature this way. Firstly, central questions of
modernity and history are discussed and thought through in literature: studying literary cultures give us
a fascinating picture of how people thought in a particular epoch. Secondly, some of the profound
questions addressed in these literary texts are still profoundly relevant. Reflections on modern power or
nationalism in Tagore and Gandhi give us serious insights about the uses of power in our own times. My
fascination with Bankim is for two reasons: firstly, I think he is one of the first and one of sharpest critics
of colonialism—with a satirical power and relentlessness that I find fascinating. Secondly, I also find
particularly attractive his combination of a tragic view of the human condition with a comic view of the
everyday—which appeals to me an aesthetic that can deal with the peculiar predicaments of modernity.
I find the argument about Bankim’s communalism simplistic and tiresome. Of course, there are
strands in Bankim’s thought that are hostile to Muslims. My admiration for some aspects of Bankim does
not involve an equal admiration for everything he wrote. But this applies to Marx as well, or Tagore, or
Gandhi. When modern Western scholars write admiringly of Aristotle, no one suspects them of hidden
support for slavery. But there is a more complex issue involved in that. By externalizing the decline of
the Islamic aspect of Bengali culture to a few authors like Bankim, we oversimplify and mask a larger
historical shift in Bengali elite culture from which Islamic elements became absent. That is not a problem
of overt communalism but of making the Islamic side invisible—which is rarely addressed in Bengali
cultural criticism. Bankim is a sign of a larger and profound shift in culture: we’re all produced by that
culture. It is not very promising to remain content with criticisms of Bankim, and to be indifferent to this
larger change in which we are all immersed.
HA: Your emphasis on the literature, it seems, is quite selective. The literary works/traditions that are
produced in postcolonial India are not adequately dealt with in your schemes of explanations on
postcolonial politics experiences. Why? Please elaborate.
SK: That is true. In writing about literature, I often write about authors I like as a reader—this is reflected
in my papers. Apart from some Sanskrit writers, my favourite writers are Bankim, Rabindranath and
Ahmed 289

Sukumar Ray: in a paper on Bengali humour, I take up examples precisely from these three. I am also an
intellectual historian of literature. And as historians we lead a dual life; when we open our books, a secret
door opens into an enchanting world that captures our imagination; and we live large parts of our lives
there—in a world in which we roam as a stranger from another time. For me the most interesting time is
the rise of the modern—the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is quite true that I write very little about
postcolonial literature: though I have tentatively suggested in some papers that the music of films
represents some of the poetry of the city. But that hardly amounts to a serious engagement.
HA: In recent years, especially after the rise of mass media—mobile phone, TV, Internet, social media,
etc., the reading–writing culture has been transformed in a significant way. How do you look at the
impacts of this type of changes on the contemporary political sensibilities?
SK: I think this is a profound shift in technology and sensibility. It might be as significant as the coming
of the print, of the modern book. The coming of the digital culture is an inauguration of a new age of
technology of reading, writing and thinking. The relation between the visual and the discursive—the
word and the image—is a really fundamental question. And in ways that are still obscure to me, the
relation between these two spheres of the written and the imagic is undergoing a profound transformation.
I cannot see clearly where it is going, only that it is not leaving our world unchanged.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of
this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Hilal Ahmed https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1628-3442

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