ABSTRACT
To bring together two such contentious concepts as ‘communalism’ and ‘globalization’, and to analyze them within the same framework, is a daunting task, particularly since the sheer scope of the latter concept has rendered it the new sublime: ‘awe-inspiring, enchanting, and terrifying; altogether too big’ (Larner and Waters 2004: 511). Like the late sixteenth century traveller J. H. van Linschoten, for whom encountering the sublime in India was an experience powerful enough to ‘“make a mans hayre stand upright”’, engaging with it – particularly when it comes to processes as complex as communalism – is a the very least an overwhelming, if not quite hairraising, undertaking (Mitter 1992: 21). But if ‘globalization’ is a sign of excess, ‘communalism’, on the other hand, is a sign of lack. For its British inventors ‘communalism’, like that other great marker of Indian difference, caste, denoted the impossibility of India’s ‘transition’ to modernity. For Indian nationalists (or rather the ‘fragment’ constituted by the Hindu middle classes that came to be envisioned as coterminous with the nation), as well as for scholars of India and other parts of South Asia – for all of whom the nation-state has been elevated ‘to the status of the end of all history’ – ‘communalism’ came, in turn, to signify those unable (thanks to the existence of primordial ties) or unwilling (due to their opposition to the rationalizing project of modernity) to live up to secular notions of citizenship (Pandey 1992: 28; Chakrabarty 2000: 33). Indeed, for the proponents of ‘secular’ nationalism in South Asia, virtually any expression of religion, or indeed almost any attribute of difference, appears invasive and menacing, particularly – as Ayesha Jalal, Barbara Metcalf and Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi all demonstrate in this volume – when made by Muslims. Thus, in spite of the fact that India fragmented into no less than three post-colonial nation-states – and that religion played a key role in these processes – it continues to be conceptualized as permanent and unchangeable, namely as secular, democratic, and non-violent (Pandey 1992: 29). A notable effort to challenge the master narrative of official nationalism
and restore both the people and memory to history has, however, been made by subalternists since the publication of the founding manifesto of Subaltern Studies a quarter of a century ago (Guha 1982). Indeed, subaltern scholars
have gone so far as to move towards what Sugata Bose has termed a ‘communitarian’ mode of historical writing, one that celebrates an indigenous religious ‘fragment’ as the nation’s true ‘essence’ and, since it is purportedly ‘uncontaminated’ by the influence of post-Enlightenment modernity, as the only authentic site of nationalist resistance (Bose 2003: 135). But in addition to betraying the same homogenizing ontology as secular nationalism, such an approach also equates all ‘communalisms’ and nationalist ‘fragments’ as essentially synonymous – an equation that, in the case of what Aijaz Ahmad terms an ‘extreme’ form of communalism such as Hindutva runs the risk of ‘accepting Hindutva’s description of itself ’ (Ahmad 2004: xxvi). Moreover, what makes such ‘extreme’ forms of communalism so dangerous is their ability to ally with ‘softer’ versions. To take the example of a Hindu Right group such as the RSS, such alliances have enabled it to draw upon preexisting traditions of political ideology (notably anti-imperialism) to legitimize its beliefs and even to perpetuate violence against Muslims without being identified with communalism by the educated middle classes – indeed, as Tanika Sarkar has illustrated here in the case of Hindutva women’s organisations, such organisations are often valued not for their communal ideology but for teaching deference and obedience and for inculcating ‘conservative values’ in young Hindu women.2
