The Post-Colonial State in Our Time

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Vijay Prashad, professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author, most recently, of The Darker Nations: A People's History of The Third World. Much of what he said is not strictly speaking original, but the interpretive framework he is after promises to bring together many disparate phenomena operating across the developed/developing world divide, from urban gentrification to the creation of financial bubbles. To understand the current world order, Prashad takes us back to the imagination of an alternative path, the Third World dream of liberation and self-assertion; through it, as Fanon once said, formerly colonised societies would achieve what Europe could not.

From an economic and geographic perspective, this vision is decidedly not new: we see the invocation of the old I.S.I. (import-substitution-industrialisation) model set against today's neoliberal tyranny, the South-North resource flow as "accumulation by dispossession" (Prashad quotes David Harvey on this), and so on. But in a cultural sense, the awareness of the immediate postwar aftermath as an age of new global connections, which I discussed earlier in the context of Amitav Ghosh's essay on Hindi films in the non-Western world, is a fruitful area of historical thinking that is just now coming to the fore. Prashad's focus on major state figures like Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, and on high-level events like the Bandung conference, thus serves a dual purpose: to render new cultural meanings to traditional diplomatic and political narratives (showing how these figures were important to a deep and wide movement that thought of the world differently, not just seeing them as another Cold War power bloc), and to argue that the idea of the Third World was institutionally anchored in state and transnational power (the implicit contrast is to today's fragmented, subterranean, ragtag resistances epitomised by the World Social Forum). The destruction or "assassination," in his term, of these power structures represented the real death of the dream in the late 1970s.

After his vibrant and provocative presentation, I asked Prashad a nagging question. On the one hand, he still views the "Global South" as a viable force in international relations, and he is interested in studying the developmental models and pathways of "BRIC" (Brazil-India-China) nations as an alternative to the current U.S.-dominated world order. But on the other hand, he rightly pointed out that India's current government continues to send heavy subscriptions to the IMF and is even seeking to restart the Doha round. Is the post-colonial state not now part of the very process that creates an "accumulation by dispossession"? Can it be part of a "globalising" world economy and a source of resistance to it at the same time? Prashad's answer was that elections matter and things may change. The Indian state does not essentially have one role or another, but its policies swing back and forth; therefore, it is also susceptible to influence, to the contingent democratic process. An electoral victory, for example, would presumably reconfigure the state on the world stage. Such a faith in popular democracy to triumph over large-scale structures is in many ways not traditional Marxism at all. It relies instead on forging innovative links between local resistances and state power, and not in the least on a considerable degree of optimism.

The Lives of Documents

Recently, the Indian government has announced with much fanfare that former Infosys chief Nandan Nilekani will be put in charge of a project to introduce a national biometric ID card. The advantages, laid out in reports from publications like the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, seem appealingly obvious: better provision of services to the poor, especially migrants, ending the confusing system of local identifications subject to state-level corruption and "vote-bank" politics, and above all domestic security from potential terrorists (read: infiltrating Pakistanis). Most of the reader comments submitted to the above named papers on this story are celebratory, viewing the project as a great step forward for India's development. There is also, however, a troubling reminder of the process by which states come to know their citizens: the Economist article, for example, is titled "Peering into their murky world." Gathering information in order to make individuals legible to the state is one of the first principles of what Foucault termed "governmentality," and much historical research over the past few decades has explored just how complicated this task becomes in colonial and post-colonial societies.

India has a long history, dating back to the Raj, of government attempts to identify, classify and record its population. Previously fluid identities (of ethnicity, caste, class, religion) must be fixed, an often impossible or hopelessly contentious procedure. The ostensibly impartial bureaucratic spirit instead produces its own logic of distinctions and exclusions. This is most evident when ascertaining citizenship in the post-Partition states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Thousands of people are caught between official classifications, their families divided and their identities, loyalties and sentiments of belonging uncertain. Within India, a country that contains a sizable minority population (mostly Muslims), the constant fear of an "enemy within" makes the spectre of Pakistani infiltration all the more effective as a justification for the project of knowing the population. The imperative of domestic security is only partly about terrorism; it also solves the problem of potentially disloyal Muslims and re-defines "Indianness" as something more restrictive. It is therefore not surprising that the ID card scheme was first promoted by L.K. Advani and the BJP, and in the wake of the 2002 state-sponsored massacres of Muslims in Gujarat, trusting governments to be responsible stewards of personal information and not use them toward communal ends is not a given. This mechanism of limiting citizenship and rights is also available for use against illegal or undesired immigrants, threatening further divisions and conflict in the wider South Asian region.

On the other hand, the state's attempt to peer into the "murky world" inherently suffers from enormous difficulties. Of India's 1.2 billion people, those most immediately targeted by the ID card scheme, the poor and migrants who currently lack documentation, are also the hardest to identify and track. Searching for their identity involves actually bestowing documentation upon them for the first time, initiating a confusing and troubled relationship between pieces of paper (or plastic) and the sense of who a person is. During the late colonial period, the need to certify one's status for the purposes of political representation or employment led to lasting anxieties about belonging among marginal groups (like Anglo-Indians on the railways). The document is not a neutral record but a powerful intervention that fundamentally changes the way people perceive themselves and their relationship to the community. The universalising mission of the new ID card likewise threatens not to erase local or regional divisions but to further fracture the personal and political consciousness of those living on the territory of India.


Two of the best books on South Asian history to have appeared in recent years, both as part of the "Cultures of History" series from Columbia University Press, deal with the themes discussed here. Both approach certain modern bureaucratic practices across the colonial/post-colonial divide as living forces intruding into and remaking the most intimate aspects of people's lives. Vazira Zamindar's The Long Partition looks, in part, at the formation of the passport system as the means by which the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan sought to resolve claims of belonging. The stories of divided families, "stateless" individuals, and the long, unfinished process of fixing identities to the nation-state reveal the difficulty and ultimately the violence of such a project. Laura Bear's Lines of the Nation discusses the ambiguous role documentation plays in Anglo-Indians' understanding of themselves: forced by the colonial railway bureaucracy to provide stringent proof of their familial origins, they continue to the present day to be haunted by a lack of (written) evidence that may challenge their status. The struggle of Anglo-Indians to maintain their group identity in the face of an uncertain past and their precarious position in modern Indian society reveals the unforeseen results of centralised bureaucracies attempting to impartially record and classify. Zamindar's and Bear's remarkable historical contributions remind us that documents, whether passports, railway archives, or biometric ID cards, have many lives beyond their role as carriers of information. Their production is an act with serious consequences, and we would do well to heed them.

Five Life-Changing Undergraduate Readings

As I rapidly approach the end of my undergraduate education, I look back at what I've accomplished academically in four years at Berkeley and I am tempted to conclude that it's all been rather mundane: semester followed by semester in an indistinguishable haze of half-completed readings, "winged" finals and papers, and beer-soaked celebrations.

There were, however, moments of genuine clarity and learning, when my perspective on the world shifted and I could suddenly think in a new way about a certain subject. I've thought of five assigned readings from my classes so far that have been able to accomplish this, in however small a measure. I do not include the many fascinating books and articles I've read for research or outside interest inspired by my studies, which would be far too many.


1) Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Ed. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen. Trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995). Read for Letters & Science 40: The Soviet Experience, Prof. Irina Paperno (Spring 2006).
This collection of diaries is a remarkable insight into the minds of ordinary Soviet citizens living during the years of Stalin's Terror. What is most surprising about these fragments of memory is how much the official ideologies of the state were a living force in people's daily lives. The most shocking example is that of Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, a student who earnestly tries to become the "new man" and struggles through some unsuccessful attempts at getting a girl. In his clumsy yet charming words the glorious visions of Stalinist propaganda meet the banal facets of everyday life.


2) Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 1999). Read for History 114B: Modern South Asia, Prof. Eugene Irschick (Fall 2007).
Indian women have been traditionally conceptualised by the West either as hopelessly sensuous and sexual or as repressed and traditional, in a perverse dichotomy borne of a heady brew of Orientalist, colonial, patriarchal and other nasty discourses. Puri's work is based on actual interviews with contemporary women, talking about their sexual lives and the challenges they face, from pleasing their husbands to understanding what it means to be an "Indian" woman in the 21st century.


3) Violent Environments. Ed. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts (Cornell University Press, 2001). Selections read for ESPM 168: Political Ecology, Prof. Nancy Peluso (Spring 2008).
This collection of essays takes on dominant assumptions of environmentalist thinking, by debunking the idea of natural scarcity as a driver of conflict and challenging the violence of capitalist enclosures and conservation measures. Perhaps the most interesting piece is by James McCarthy, who does something completely unique in academia: applies the analytical tools of political ecology, normally used to defend local resource control by Third World indigenous peoples against big bad Western environmentalists, to the First World case of the Wise Use movement in North America.


4) Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Political Life (Knopf, 2007). Read for Public Policy 103: Wealth & Poverty, Prof. Robert Reich (Spring 2008).
The main reason why this book makes the list is that having Reich as a Professor is one of the small yet incredibly rewarding perks of being a Berkeley student. What he says is not particularly original or controversial, but he has been able to express in clear language some basic truths of our age: that the economy has undergone a fundamental shift in the last thirty years so that I am now a "symbolic analyst," that corporations have no morality, and that we all have choices to make as consumers and citizens. The fact that I was taking Reich's class in the year of Obama's election and the beginning of the economic crisis makes it that much more of a timely and unforgettable read.


5) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005). Read for History 280U: Histories of the British Empire, Profs. Thomas Metcalf and James Vernon (Fall 2008).
Since I only read the first chapter, I hesitated to include it on this list. But Cooper touches on what is perhaps the most important concern animating my current scholarly interests: the tension between resisting the modernity of colonialism and the fact that colonised people often appealed to "Western" or "Enlightenment" notions of rights, citizenship and justice to make claims. Cooper uses the example of West Africa under French rule, but similar arguments have been made by Indian historians like Sumit Sarkar who have been very inspirational to me outside of my undergraduate curriculum.

Review: The Passion Of Christopher Hitchens

It is probably impossible to "objectively" review Hitchens's latest and most bristling book-length polemic, entitled God Is Not Great. Either you flat out accept the assumption that Hitchens rejects -that there is a God (in the case of his most vehement American critics, add "and His Son is Jesus")- in which case you are simply arguing past him, or you agree and can throw up your hands in the air with self-satisfaction, secure in your "secular humanism." There are massive problems with his argument for the return of the Enlightenment, and with his adulation of scientific progress (an equally angry book could very well be written about the monstrous injustices of science, from eugenics to the Atom bomb). What is difficult to challenge honestly are his attacks against superstition, fundamentalism, and the inherent hypocrisy of all sycophantic belief.

Hitchens is trapped, however, by his newfound neo-con posturing. In some ways he appears to be consistent: he deplores the whole of Christianity as much as he does the whole of Islam, and has no room for nuance. But when challenged, as he was by Bill Maher on television, to comment on the disturbing Protestantism animating George W. Bush, he cannot throw his friends on the bus. No, Hitch says, Bush is not actually religious, and his conversion from alcoholism was not due to Jesus but to threats from his missus (this said on no evidence whatsoever). He wouldn't even comment on whether Karl Rove was an atheist or not (Rove claims he is). He also ludicrously insisted on referring to this sleazy charlatan as "Dr. Rove" (imagine Hitch's snide huffing and puffing if one gave honorifics to some of his favourite targets like Mother Teresa and Kissinger). The assumption that people, especially those one happens to agree with, are "secretly" humanists and only outwardly religious does a huge disservice to Hitchens's otherwise worthy attack on religion. Bush's faith is real enough, and drove him headlong into the Iraq War. Religion is that much more dangerous than Hitchens would have it because it is more deeply rooted than even Hitchens thinks.

Finally, Hitchens's love for America and its tradition of separation of church and state (he constantly returns to his heroes Paine and Jefferson) grossly misunderstands the reality of religion in America. Yes, the U.S. has never had an official church, and the Jeffersonian position on religion is an example the rest of the world should emulate. But for a country that is upwards of 80% Christian (Hitchens claims, again on little evidence, that people lie to pollsters and spend their Sundays drinking martinis, thus putting the problem out of sight, out of mind), and where presidential candidates have to appear at a ridiculous forum with a bearded gnome asking them questions that sound an awful lot like the religious tests the Constitution forbids, the problem is very real indeed. Perhaps Europe, where much to Hitchens's dismay citizens have to pay taxes for an established church but where belief levels have fallen dramatically, is a better example to follow. In America, unofficial religion rages ever stronger, while in Europe organised Christianity is dying (Islam is another problem altogether). Perhaps this "neutering" of religion's deleterious influence on society is a better way forward than simply saying it's not the government's business and letting it spread privately. Better an irrelevant Pope than a relevant Rick Warren.