ABSTRACT
The anti-societal vision of the politics of self-expression was the result of an obsessive focus on the inner worlds of individuals, and of the conflation of these worlds with an imagined universe of meta-historical collectivities. This chapter is the first instalment of an enquiry into why middle-class people in North India were particularly prone to such forms of reductionism. Following in the footsteps of a ‘sociology of knowledge’, this book moves from an exposition of the political culture of self-expression to a survey of the wider socio-cultural milieu where such a political culture originated. The basic assumption is that lofty concepts such as interiority and self-hood have a firm basis in hard material realities; not in the sense of the inevitable pursuit of gain so favoured by the politics of interest, but more immediately and literally because selves do not exist for themselves, they dwell in bodies that perspire, digest, have sex and die. Central to the investigation is the matter of class, a form of social consciousness that was said to pervade the politics of self-expression, but – thanks to the prevalence of anti-societal modes of thought – did not find any clear form of articulation.
