Introduction

This essay investigates the nature of urban governance in a rural market town in India in order to understand the process of what political scientists often call the crisis of governability. The choice of a rural market town in this study is deliberate, as existing studies on urban governance in India generally focus on large cities. According to the 1991 census, nearly 34.8 per cent of urban dwellers in India reside in towns comprising populations ranging between 5,000 and 99,000 people. Most of these populations live in dispersed rural market towns. Politically, these towns constitute the lowest nodal point of the hierarchy of diverse types of institutions of the Indian state. Even panchayat (rural government) offices are located in these small market towns. These institutions link rural market towns with larger urban centres such as district towns, regional capitals and finally the national capital. Economically, rural market towns act as emporia of indigenous export-import trade: exporting rural products into the vast national market grid comprising larger urban centres and importing finished industrial products for rural consumers. Thus such towns constitute the crucial interface between rural areas and large urban political, administrative and economic centres.

These political-economic links are also informed and influenced by social and cultural nexuses between urban and rural areas through rural market towns.

Introduction

This essay discusses aspects of political integration in south India, focusing on the last quarter of the 20th century. In it I attempt to link issues of personal and group identity to discourses on a moral community which are implicit in the language of politicians.

The observation that ideology does not play a major role in political dynamics has often been found in both scholarly writing and journalistic commentary on Indian politics. In the early 1980s, Narain and Mathur noted that factional conflicts and party desertions, among other phenomena, had led to the widespread belief that ideological elements were negligible in political practice. James Manor, for example, went so far as to argue that political anomie, or ‘normlessness’, was evident from the years 1973–4 onward. He defined anomie as:

Atul Kohli characterised political developments in the 1980s in terms of the widespread focus on the personalities of political leaders in the midst of processes of deinstitutionalisation. In their article from 1984, however, Narain and Mathur took exception to the reigning opinion, arguing that ideology was a significant force in Indian politics. Even before the striking emergence of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party on the national stage, they found that nationalism, of various sorts, was a common theme throughout the country.

In this concluding essay I make no claim to originality. As I did in essay two, I shall selectively revisit earlier work by other scholars, but this time not to raise questions so much as to show how these scattered findings may be integrated into the model that I have suggested.

The chapter on The Brothers Karamazov shows that it is perfectly possible to read Dostoevsky convincingly through the prism of the Epstein model, once this model has been translated into synchronic terms and modified to take account of the fact that the Soviet experience had not yet occurred. In fact, this rather significant modification is less damaging than it might seem at first sight, since it explains why Dostoevsky is often said to have anticipated, or even prophesied, Soviet Russia and other atheistic totalitarian states of the twentieth century. The novel gives clear hints of that originary silence of darkness that may lead to the fullness and tranquillity of faith on the one hand or the desolation of the abyss of nothingness on the other; it puts the conflict between these two outcomes at centre stage in the persons and philosophies of life of Ivan and Zosima, and to varying degrees in those of their acolytes. It also presents us with evidence that the two responses are not necessarily polar opposites, but may interact and overlap, and that any individual may flip uneasily between the two.

On 28 February 2002, in Godhara, a little known railway station of Gujarat, in an unprecedented case of arson nearly fifty-eight passengers on the Sabarmati express lost their lives. Many of those who perished in this dreadful fire were volunteers of a militant Hindu nationalist organisation namely Vishwa Hindu Parishad (translated as World Hindu Council and popularly called VHP). These volunteers were returning home from a rally in Ayodhya where the VHP was trying to construct a Ram temple on the site of a sixteenth century mosque named after India's first Mughal emperor Babar.

The temple agitation, periodically orchestrated by Hindu nationalist organisations from 1989 onwards, has unfailingly provoked communal eruptions in the country resulting in large casualties. The February 2002 agitation was no exception to this trend: only this time the stakes were higher. As soon as news of the murderous arson spread, the VHP cashed in on the tragedy by calling for a total strike in Gujarat. The strike escalated into widespread wellorchestrated attacks on Muslim minorities, worsening – in the process – the relationship between India and Pakistan, already tense in the wake of the Kargil war, nuclear tests, and terrorist assaults in New Delhi and Kashmir. The Indian media, and politicians opposed to Hindu nationalist organisations, and human rights activists alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling political party in Gujarat and a sister Hindu nationalist organisation of the VHP, had used state power to assist the attacks on Gujarati Muslims.

This essay focuses on particular aspects of ‘public individualism’: autonomy and political rights. It analyses the significance of political rights in conditions of subordination and argues for a non-individualist formulation of moral agency. By ‘public individualism’, I refer to the public view of the person that informs the functioning and maintenance of political institutions that defend or guard specific rights of the individual. Political institutions informed by public individualism presuppose the autonomy of individuals or of (public) citizens who are expected to exercise the ‘rights’ maintained by these institutions and be responsible for the choices that they make. However, this public individualism is often in conflict with social doctrines that sanction private freedoms. There is thus a tension between individualism as a public view of the person informing the rights of persons, and the narrow agreement on social freedoms that characterise the private person.

Feminist theorising has shown the inadequacy of conventional philosophical conceptions of autonomy for both feminist philosophical practice as well as feminist politics, and has offered reconstructed accounts of autonomy. This essay builds on these reconstructed understandings while contributing an additional argument. It asks how we can understand agential capacities of persons within conditions of subordination. It suggests that ‘free action’ accounts of autonomy, i.e. the accounts of autonomy that privilege an agent's ability to commit free action, constitute the principle obstacle to this exercise. We argue that action does not exist in a social vacuum, and that there are reasons why people act in certain ways which are not always expressive of one's preferred judgements.

Introduction

At the beginning of the new millennium democratic states are facing some pressing problems. Among these are a more just representation of the different groups in society, be it ethnic minorities or women, and the decentralisation of the political decision-making process, which becomes increasingly important in a globalising world. The exclusion of women from positions of political power is especially widely lamented, and has emerged as a contentious political issue. Interestingly enough, India, otherwise classified as a ‘developing’ or ‘backward’ nation, is – at least from a constitutional point of view – at the forefront as concerns inclusion of marginalised groups in the political process and the devolution of political power.

The passing of the 73rd Amendment of the Constitution in December 1992 is considered by many as a milestone in the history of women's political participation in India. Besides providing the basis for the mandatory introduction of a system of rural local self-government in all Indian states, it laid down a reservation of seats and offices for women of not less than 33 per cent. Additionally, there is provision for a proportional representation of women in the existing Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) quotas. This system of local self-government, called Panchayati Raj (‘rule of the five’), was introduced in the 1950s, but lay dormant in most of the states. Since the ratification of the Act by the state Legislatures on 24 April 1994, all Indian states except Bihar have held elections, and in March 1997 there were 716,234 women representatives in office.

If the theses advanced in the preceding chapters are correct, then the evidence should be found in Dostoevsky's last novel. We should look there not only for what Epstein calls minimal religion, but also for signs that such phenomena tend to proliferate in a situation where the extremes of religious faith and atheistic conviction appear to have reached stalemate. We should also look for evidence that these extremes have a common origin in the nothingness where cosmic despair or an experience of a transcendent reality may equally be found.

When Epstein talks of minimal religion, of course, he has the Russian context specifically in mind, and he seems to use the expression to denote any manifestation of religion that falls short of a complete expression of Russian Orthodoxy. It could be argued that all manifestations of religion in The Brothers Karamazov, including Zosima's faith, and the conception of God against which Ivan rebels, fall into that category. The concept is an extremely broad one and, as we shall see, it encompasses many varied expressions of religious sensibility. Moreover, the expressions ‘minimal religion’ and ‘minimal religious experience’ are often used outside the Russian context simply to mean an experience of a transcendent reality unencumbered by all but the most rudimentary of interpretative traditions. In the pages that follow, we may have to distinguish Epstein's sense from the more usual sense.

A Perilous Threshold

In his contribution to Pattison and Thompson's recent book, Henry Russell cautions the reader:

In drawing attention to this vital distinction Russell, perhaps unintentionally, highlights the ease with which one may be confused with and slip into the other, not only conceptually but also, depending on the mood of the experiencing subject, experientially. In other words, the silence at the core of apophatic religion may be interpreted or experienced either as a fullness or as an absence, as glorious plenitude or as desolate abyss, as a Godcentred locus of meaning or as total chaos and meaninglessness. As we have seen, Dostoevsky experienced this himself and understood the slippage very well. Similar experiences may be observed in the experience of his individual characters, and also among them. As Thompson points out,164 characters as unlike each other as Myshkin and Ippolit quote the same phrase from the Book of Revelation, ‘there will be time no more’ (Rev 10: 6), the one in his epileptic ecstasy, the other in suicidal despair. This dual experience is not a modern discovery.

In 1990, CUP published my book Dostoevsky after Bakhtin. When the reviews began to appear, I was not surprised to find that what most troubled some otherwise sympathetic Western readers was that I had tried in my final chapter to relate Dostoevsky's religious insights to a narrative structure that in many ways anticipated a post-modernist sensibility. In particular, it was my reintroduction of the notion of an originary truth (‘The Whisper of God’) into critical discourse that gave offence. Clearly, I was thought to have failed to grasp something essential (if that is not a contradiction in terms) about the post-modernist enterprise. The fault may well have been mine, but I suspect that some readers still secretly prefer a Dostoevsky whose religious insights, as in Soviet days though for quite different reasons, have been suppressed, or translated into the sort of discourse that is politically acceptable to them.

I am afraid that I remained incorrigible, and in my introduction to the Russian edition (1998), I went further, stating that if I were to rewrite the book now I should expand rather than delete that section. I was also aware by that time that some of my Russian readers, themselves adherents of a resurgent Orthodoxy that regards Dostoevsky as a great Christian prophet with a unique word for the twenty-first century, might take the opposite view, and consider me culpably neglectful of the religious dimension of his work.

The previous two essays should have made a number of things clear. The first is that religious experiences and images of very diverse kinds play a very important role in Dostoevsky's life and work. The second is that, to do full justice to Dostoevsky's vision, we must extend the meaning of ‘religious experience’ to cover the whole spectrum from the fullness of belief to the desolation of unbelief, which itself has a mystical quality, and we must accept that these two extremes, though at first sight they may seem to be located at opposite poles of a continuum, often exist on each other's doorstep. This at least was Dostoevsky's own experience and, in different degrees, it is frequently replicated in the experience of his fictional characters. A third conclusion is that whatever certainty Dostoevsky might have longed for, and at times thought he had found, in the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church, to read his text exclusively through the lens of the Orthodox faith creates as many problems for the reader as it solves. Moreover, Dostoevsky actually banishes many central features of the Orthodox tradition to the very margins of his text. It is as if, at the level of ideal author, his text is telling us that a situation has arisen out of the conflict between belief and unbelief in the modern age in which the richness of that Tradition has to be put aside in order that personal faith may be allowed to blossom again.

If Christianity often went by default in educated Russian families in Dostoevsky's day (as it did, for example, in the Herzen, Tolstoi and Turgenev families), this was certainly not the case with the Dostoevskys. In 1873, now aged 52, Dostoevsky recalled that he had been brought up in a pious Russian family and had been familiar with the Gospels from an early age (XXI, 134). Both factors — the early memories and the pious family environment — were vitally important to his development. As a child, he would sometimes be called on to recite prayers in the presence of guests. His brother Andrei remembered that they would attend mass every Sunday, preceded by vespers the previous night, in the Church attached to the Moscow hospital where their father worked as a doctor. They would do the same thing on Saints' days as well. Their parents were evidently not just conventional observers of religious practice. Both, especially their mother, said Andrei, were deeply religious: every significant event in the life of the family would be marked by the appropriate religious observance. Dostoevsky himself received religious instruction from the deacon at the hospital. Before he even learned to read, his imagination had been fired by events from the ancient lives of saints (XXV, 215), who provided models of asceticism, compassion, suffering, humility and self-sacrifice, based on the example of Christ.

Until the 1990s, dissemination of news through print and the commercial cinema represented the most significant media presences in the Indian context. The factors that shaped the historical and political context of discussion in the public domain include: the limited nature of participation and access to print media for large segments of the population; the predominance of upper-caste agents, especially in the print media; the internal divisions, on the one hand, between English and regional language audiences, and between the regional language reading publics on the other. Within this larger scenario, the links between big business houses and Indian news media, especially the press, in the post-Independence period, have been fairly well documented. As Robin Jeffrey's work has well shown, the expansion in the market for political news and the consumer base from the 1980s onwards has resulted in a phenomenal rise in the circulation of regional-language newspapers. Significant as these trends have been, it is debatable if they have brought about any fundamental shifts in reversing the relations of power underlying the structure of the public sphere, especially those pertaining to the nature of ownership, participation and access.

Parallel to these connections, but less analysed in terms of their implications for the nature of the Indian public sphere, have been the relations between the entertainment media and speculative capital and the informal sectors of the money markets. Students of popular Indian cinema have long known that, with its nationwide markets and growing international audiences, the commercial film industry is an attractive area for the investment of unaccounted profits.