The notion of ‘political society’ that Partha Chatterjee presents most prominently in his book The Politics of the Governed (2004) has been formulated, developed and reformulated in a series of articles and book chapters. Here, I reflect on the dichotomy that Chatterjee draws between associations of civil and political society by considering its applicability to the way in which village clubs and small local NGOs operate in the Indian state of West Bengal, the region from which Partha Chatterjee's own examples are drawn. I demonstrate the multiple ways in which these associations are affected by and involved in the mediations of ‘political society’. However, I also argue that they simultaneously comply with many of the legalistic norms of ‘civil society’. The coexistence of these two seemingly contrasting modes of operating calls into question the viability of the dichotomy drawn by Chatterjee. Following Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Véron I therefore argue that, ‘like all binary distinctions, [Chatterjee's distinction between political and civil society] is also overdrawn’ (Corbridge et al. 2005, 256) and ‘can more reasonably be thought of as a set of interlocking political practices that are arranged along a continuum’ (Corbridge et al. 2005, 214); they are not so much separate worlds as overlapping norms and strategies.

The chapter is based on interviews conducted with the leaders of 94 local NGOs and village clubs in two districts of West Bengal.

The tendency of animals and plants to multiply beyond the means of subsistence and to spread over all available areas is well understood. What naturalists wish to know is not how species are dispersed, but how they are checked in their efforts to overrun the earth. Geographic barriers are rare, except in the case of oceans, and since even these were formerly bridged at the north, another cause must be sought. This has been found in the group of phenomena commonly hidden under the word climate, and nearly a century ago it was shown by Humboldt that temperature is the most important of these climatic factors.

In the northern hemisphere animals and plants are distributed in circumpolar belts or zones, the boundaries of which follow lines of equal temperature rather than parallels of latitude. They conform in a general way, therefore, with the elevation of the land, sweeping northward over the lowlands and southward over the mountains. Between the pole and the equator there are three primary belts – Boreal, Austral and Tropical – each of which may be subdivided into minor belts and areas. In the United States the Boreal and Austral regions have each been split into three secondary transcontinental zones. The Boreal are known as the Arctic, Hudsonian and Canadian; the Austral as the Transition, Upper Austral and Lower Austral. The subordinate faunas and floras need not be here considered.

Partha Chatterjee's ‘Politics of the Governed’ and in particular, his concept of political society, is deservedly famous because it identifies the central conundrum in a post-Foucauldian theoretical world, where hope is not lost but politics loses its way in a mass of identities and governmental ascriptions, where universalist citizenship is an ideal, but the citizen herself or himself is a cipher in some computerized code; when welfare becomes the ideal of an equal citizenship in a Marshallian framework, but this notion of welfare itself creates a ‘proliferation of governmentality’ (Chatterjee 2004, 36). What do we do when our deepest aspirations (for example, for universal equality) turn into categorical chains that imprison us (as has happened to affirmative action in India); or, conversely, as the communitarians bemoaned of old, what do we do when the idea of universal citizenship that we struggle for obliterates our most personal identities? Unlike Foucault, for whom resistance or politics was only possible at the interstices, for Chatterjee, ‘popular politics in most of the world’ remains an abiding area of interest, an arena that he fleshes out with compassion and insight.

Nobody had ever paid any correct attention to the fishes of this beautiful river, nor indeed of the whole immense basin, which empties its water into the Mississippi, and hardly twelve species of them had ever been properly named and described, when in 1818 and 1819, I undertook the labour of collecting, observing, describing, and delineating those of the Ohio. I succeeded the first year in ascertaining nearly eighty species among them, and this year I added about twenty more, making altogether about one hundred species of fish, whereof nine tenths are new and undescribed.

Many of them have compelled me to establish new genera, since they could not properly be united with any former genus; and I could have increased their number, had I been inclined, as will be seen in the course of this ichthyology; but I have in many instances proposed sub-genera and sections instead of new genera. I sent last spring to Mr. Blainville of Paris, a short account of some of them, to be published in his Journal of Natural History, in a Tract named Prodromus of seventy new genera of Animals and fifty new genera of Plants from North America, and I now propose to publish a complete account of all the species I have discovered.

It seems to me that there is much confusion of ideas in the general statement of the variability of species so often repeated lately. If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary, and if individuals alone exist, how can the differences which may be observed among them prove the variability of species? The fact seems to me to be that while species are based upon definite relations among individuals which differ in various ways among themselves, each individual, as a distinct being, has a definite course to run from the time of its first formation to the end of its existence, during which it never loses its identity nor changes its individuality, nor its relations to other individuals belonging to the same species, but preserves the categories of relationship which constitute specific or generic or family affinity, or any other kind or degree of affinity. To prove that species vary it should be proved that individuals born from common ancestors change the different categories of relationship which they bore primitively to one another. While all that has thus far been shown is, that there exists a considerable difference among individuals of one and the same species.

The earliest geological induction of primeval man is the doctrine of terrestrial catastrophe. This ancient belief has its roots in the actual experience of man, who himself has been witness of certain terrible and destructive exhibitions of sudden, unusual telluric energy. Here in America our own species has seen the vast, massive eruptions of Pliocene basalt, the destructive invasion of northern lands by the slow-marching ice of the glacial period, has struggled with the hardly conceivable floods which marked the recession of the frozen age, has felt the solid earth shudder beneath its feet and the very continent change its configuration. Yet these phenomena are no longer repeated; nothing comparable with them ever now breaks the geological calm.

When complete evidence of the antiquity of man in California and the catastrophes he has survived come to be generally understood, there will cease to be any wonder that a theory of the destructive in nature is an early, deeply rooted archaic belief, most powerful in its effect on the imagination. Catastrophe, speaking historically, is both an awful memory of mankind and a very early piece of pure scientific induction. After it came to be woven into the Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Mohammedan cosmogonies, its perpetuation was a matter of course.

From the believers in catastrophe there is, however, a totally different class of minds, whose dominant characteristic is a positive refusal to look further than the present, or to conceive conditions which their senses have never reported.

Diversity and Differentiation

In 1876 Simon Newcomb (an American polymath who published in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and economics) wrote an essay, “Abstract Science in America, 1776–1876,” for an issue of the North American Review dedicated to the centennial of the American Revolution. The essay provides a recap of American science – clear, concise, contemporary – and a view of what contemporaries thought about the state of American science:

Three themes dominated the science of this period: exploration, classification, and utilization. Jefferson, in his famous letter of instruction to Meriwether Lewis, illustrated the tone: “The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it's course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river, may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.” He also listed among the “objects worthy of notice” animals, plants, minerals, soil, topography, and climate. Embedded in this letter – the main focus of which was trade, commerce, and navigation – were Jefferson's own scientific interests, kept subordinate because of the reluctance of Jefferson's largely mercantile oriented congress to pay for science that did not promise a commercial payoff. The pro-British mercantile elite found many of the enlightenment tendencies of the Francophile Jefferson suspect, superfluous, ungodly, but this judgment was more a matter of politics, balance, economy, and utility than any true anti-science bias. The outstanding American scientists of the previous century, Franklin, Bartram, Rittenhouse, all had roots in the mercantile class and were themselves mindful of the young country's need for practical and useful knowledge. Jefferson too thought of science in terms of utility, for though he might not view commerce as the sole guide for scientific activity, he always tended toward a measure of utility.

This anthology of nineteenth-century American science writing began with my pursuit of American studies. Over the years I became intrigued by the scientists of the period, especially the first half of the century. They often wrote about science and natural history, literature and exploration. When I queried my science friends on their familiarity with scientists of the nineteenth century, they recognized names, knew who represented their own fields, but had rarely read any of the original work. I soon realized one of the reasons why when I tried to find ready sources for the primary works of the early naturalists (Say, Nuttall, Wilson). Not only were there no anthologies of early American science, but even the compendiums of nineteenth-century science writing, of which there are scores, rarely bothered with the Americans. If by chance they should, the same three or four names appeared: Joseph Henry, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a smattering of William James as philosophy of science or Thoreau as natural history. I came away from these anthologies with the uncomfortable feeling that American science in the nineteenth century was inferior at best, non-existent at worst. Of course, there might be good reason for this omission from the British and European point of view; simply put, they were far ahead of the Americans in both productivity and scientific infrastructure, but that did not mean science in the United States had not made contributions to the century or that it would not be of interest to students of the American nineteenth century.

A current is a progressive motion of the water, causing all floating bodies to move that way towards which the stream is directed. The set of a current is that point of the compass towards which the waters run, and its drift is the rate it runs per hour. The most usual way of discovering the set and drift of an unknown current, is the following, supposing the current at the surface to be much more powerful than at a great distance below the surface:—

Take a boat a short distance from the ship, and, by a rope fastened to the boat's stern, lower down a heavy iron pot or loaded kettle to the depth of 80 or 100 fathoms; then heave the log, and the number of knots run out in half a minute will be the miles the current sets per hour, and the bearing of the log will show the set of it.

There is a very remarkable current, called the Gulf Stream, which sets in a north-east direction along the coast of America, from Cape Florida towards the Isle of Sables, at unequal distances from the land, being about 75 miles from the short of the southern States, but more distant from the shore of the northern States. The width of the stream is about 40 or 50 miles, widening towards the north.

Partha Chatterjee is one of the very few scholars in India who have systematically tried to theorize the specificity of Indian democratic politics. His conceptualization of political society can be seen as an approach to explicate the latter's logics. This conceptualization has been modified and refined over the years by mediating on the concrete historical experience of a post-colonial country and through a critical engagement with the received Western normative political theory. In this paper, I will first provide a sketch of Chatterjee's criticism of the concept of civil society, and then present a critical review of his concept of political society. I will focus on the three tension-ridden components of his project, viz. the defence of a communal way of life, mapping the differentiated political space, and a suspicion towards constitutionalism. I will argue, against Chatterjee, that the concept of political society does not denote a positive political development, that is, it does not present a possibility for ‘substantially redefining property and law’ in favour of subaltern people/classes or the ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of the people’; rather, it should be used to provide a critical insight into Indian politics, particularly in relation to the process of capitalist expansion and differentiation.

Chatterjee's Critique of Civil Society

It is well known that the discussion on political society is embedded in the debate on civil society and the critique of the conceptual infrastructure of Western normative theory.

On the Laws of Evolution

Wallace and Darwin have propounded as the cause of modification in descent their law of natural selection. This law has been epitomized by Spencer as the “preservation of the fittest.” This neat expression no doubt covers the case, but it leaves the origin of the fittest entirely untouched. Darwin assumes a “tendency to variation” in nature, and it is plainly necessary to do this in order that materials for the exercise of a selection should exist. Darwin and Wallace's law is, then, only restrictive, directive, conservative, or destructive of something already created. Let us, then, seek for the originative laws by which these subjects are furnished – in other words, for the causes of the origin of the fittest.

The origin of new structures which distinguish one generation from those which have preceded it, I have stated to take place under the law of acceleration. As growth (creation) of parts usually ceases with maturity, it is entirely plain that the process of acceleration is limited to the period of infancy and youth in all animals. It is also plain that the question of growth is one of nutrition, or of the construction of organs and tissues out of protoplasm.

The construction of the animal types is restricted to two kinds of increase – the addition of identical segments and the addition of identical cells. The first is probably to be referred to the last, but the laws which give rise to it cannot be here explained.

In the Journal of Lewis and Clark, there is an account of a quadruped which appears to have not excited that attention which it merits. The following extracts are made from the above mentioned work: “Saw the skin of a mountain sheep, which the Indians say lives among the rocks in the mountains: the skin was covered with white hair, the wool long, thick and coarse, with long coarse hair on the top of the neck and the back, resembling somewhat the bristles of a goat.” Vol. II. p. 49.

“The sheep is found in many places, but mostly in the timbered parts of the rocky mountains. They live in greater numbers on the chain of mountains forming the commencement of the woody country on the coast, and passing the Columbia between the falls and rapids.” Vol. II. p. 169.

The latter passage was written while our travelers wintered at the mouth of the Columbia river. But on their return, at Brant Island, an Indian “offered two sheep skins for sale: one, which was the skin of a full-grown sheep, was as large as that of a common deer; the second was smaller, and the head part, with the horns remaining, was made into a cap, and highly prized as an ornament by the owner. The Clahelellahs informed us that the sheep was very abundant on the heights, and among the cliffs, of the adjacent mountains; and that these two had been lately killed out of a herd of thirty-six, at no great distance from the village.” Vol. II. p. 233.

During the past three decades, the central concern of planners and policymakers in India has been to attack widespread poverty and to bring large numbers of families above the poverty line. Several public policies have been designed to realize this important goal. Popularly known as anti-poverty programmes, these policies are intended to help target groups such as small and marginal farmers, and landless labourers. If implemented with a reasonable degree of efficiency, the programmes would probably have produced better results than they actually have. In fact, according to one observer, ‘none of these have succeeded in achieving these objectives’.

As far as rural development is concerned, the experience with these policies has been that a wide gap still exists between promise and performance. By the late 1960s, it was realized that the benefits of development did not percolate to the poorer sections of society. In order to be effective, these programmes require suitable institutional linkages and the establishment of a number of intermediate institutions through which the new development message can be communicated and the necessary technology transmitted. In a society characterized by rampant illiteracy, poverty, a low level of civic consciousness, and poor communication facilities, the decision-making levels should not only be closer to the people but should also be devoid of formalism and cumbersome procedures. However, the administrative structures responsible for implementing these programmes are modelled on traditional administrative arrangements known for their complexity, cumbersomeness, elitism, centralization, legalism, red tape, and inertia.

Walter Benjamin wrote of history, whose face is turned toward the past and the storm from the heaven propels him forward. Politics also carries much the same imagery, at least in the way I am invoking the word here – by politics I am meaning politics of a political society. In the sense that I am invoking here, politics means some daily transactions of power, some actions on the past, yet it carries a sense of ‘making’ that is to say making future, new society, new politics.

Political society, as formulated by Partha Chatterjee, has undoubtedly been a very influential concept which scholars across continents have found useful for framing issues of power and politics, in post-colonial contexts. My initial thoughts on reading the subtitle of Chatterjee's ‘Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World’ was to regard its claims to represent ‘most of the world’ as rather exaggerated. I must confess, however, that I have hence revised my opinion after having discovered that scholars in Africa and Latin America were finding it extremely instructive and were carrying out intense fieldwork based on the insights and formulations by Chatterjee. Given that the nature of debate in India too has been both engaging and critical of the idea of political society, I decided to put together a selection of articles by scholars who have been part of this debate. These articles, as the reader will realize, cover theoretical aspects, both implicit and explicit, and test the concept empirically with their bases in intensive fieldwork. The articles also cover a diverse range of regions, bringing into relief the diversity and complexity of the political processes in India. This complexity, I hope, will enable the readers to better comprehend the process of democratization in post-colonial contexts, in general, and in India, in particular.

This volume would not have been possible without the support of my colleagues, who willingly contributed to the volume.