“One of the forms in which the political subject emerges is the dialogic role. Yet, as the agency of politics, the political subject not only dialogues, but also courts death. Is there a connection between these two functions or roles?”
These are the dramatic opening lines of Emergence of the Political Subject, a book that is hard to define. Right from the first chapter, titled ‘Death and Dialogue', down to the closing (pre-Epilogue) sentence that talks of migrant “population flows” as a “mass of invading bodies,” it maintains a tone that some readers may find illuminating, some others intriguing, and yet others — perhaps a large section — not fully intelligible.
Ranabir Samddar seems to have opted against an academically structured discussion of his theme. He prefers to proceed along a non-linear route — of propositions that sound arbitrary (like the dialogue-death equation) and arguments that await elaboration and conclusion in vain till the end.
Promises of insights
All this is punctuated by promises of insights that are not pursued. Among them is his illustration of the initial assertion with the way the Mahabharata — “studied, invoked, and sought to be emulated in the colonial time on many occasions,” as he recalls — “constitutes the relation between death and truth.” He cites two epic dialogues on death: one between Yudhishtira and Vyasa, after the fall of Abhimanyu in a battle, and the other between Bhishma “lying on his deathbed of arrows” and all the would-be survivors of the war. Vyasa uses the occasion to preach “appropriate practices” and Bhishma offers sage counsel about the sort of problems — practical and political — the post-war scenario has in store. Inexorably, the author moves on to the best-known of the Mahabharata's death-centred dialogues, the Bhagvad Gita.
Samaddar's interpretations of these dialogues are illustrative of his distinctive tone. The Gita, he says, “proceeds through dialogues that aim for a new ethic superseding the old. The new ethic, as the anti-colonial political subject realised, would mean causing deaths to even fellow-Indians in the event they sided with the colonial ruler, and war...” The obvious allusion here is to the early nationalists, the “terrorists” of pre-mass-destruction times. However, the Gita's part in the mass freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi does not figure in the analysis.
More notable is the conclusion the author draws from all the three dialogues. Says he: “The anti-colonial political subject learnt to wage war and kill if necessary, but this is not all, it learnt to see actions in connection. Thus, from the moment of its emergence, it was to be free from any metaphysics of self, with which Western philosophy had always tried to misguide politics.” The point is repeatedly made. The book, says the blurb, demonstrates “why we need less of Western political theories and philosophies to understand colonial and post-colonial life.”
Not proven
After one has turned all the pages, the proposition (more familiar as a far-right argument) still remains unproven. Defining the “political subject” as “actors of politics ...in aggregate”, he moves on to a category of the subject who is captured neither by the term “citizen” nor by the phrase “political society.” In this category fall “migrants, illegal immigrant groups, refugees, informal labour, fleeing peasants...displaced population groups, and shop floor workers of industries with sunset technologies.”
Samaddar takes the narrative right into the first decade of the 21st century. As he is about to close his case, he recalls: “In November 2005, the suburbs of Paris erupted with immigrants' riots, the suburbs were in flames, and well-versed persons too ruminated if this was the return of the political subject.” Displacement, in particular, remains a recurring theme throughout the discourse.
Forty-six years after Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man that saw revolutionary potential only in the rejects of the system, can we talk of a quasi-citizen category as incompatible with Western thought? One wonders.
EMERGENCE OF THE POLITICAL SUBJECT: Ranabir Samaddar; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B1/I-1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area, Mathura Road, New Delhi-110044. Rs. 795.
