ABSTRACT
Through the decade of the 1990s, from the vantage point of South Asian community organisations in New York engaged in challenging diasporan communal groups, it had seemed completely self-evident to overseas Indians such as myself that communal processes in our time are globalized. However, the scale and the significance of diasporan involvement in communal violence in India may not have been fully appreciated even by ourselves (and possibly still less by fellow activists based in India), perhaps not until the massacres of Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Although communal violence in post-Independence India has tended to be a largely urban phenomenon, Gujarat in 2002 saw the worst communal violence in rural areas since the Partition of 1947. It eventually emerged that a substantial portion of this coordinated violence was attributable to the labours of Hindu Rightsponsored NGOs, funded in the main by overseas supporters through such programmes as the RSS-affiliated Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram Scheme, which worked in the impoverished countryside or among disprivileged indigenous peoples. Since the carnage, there have been painstaking efforts by groups such as Awaaz – South Asia Watch in Britain and the Stop Funding Hate Campaign in the U.S. to track and make public the material and financial links between the votaries of Hindutva in India and their supporters abroad (see Awaaz 2004; The Foreign Exchange 2002). While these efforts are clearly invaluable, it is important to note that
Hindu nationalist organisations in India have never themselves pretended that their scope was merely national.2 The VHP’s founding document, its ‘Memorandum of Association’, signed by the Registrar of Societies in Delhi in October 1966, lists under Article 19 the provisions relating to ‘associations outside Bharat’, and refers to their fund-raising role. Again, the potentially powerful appeal of communal ideology in immigrant contexts was well understood many years ago by prominent Hindu Right functionaries, such as H. V. Seshadri, a former Sarsanghchalak, or leader, of the RSS, whose speeches in various Hindu fora in the West play on immigrant anxieties and offer easy forms of cultural absolution and group belonging (Seshadri 1990). In short, Hindu communal organisations have long understood their mandate to be global rather than national, and their embeddedness in global processes is
the outcome of conscious practice as much as it is the result of large-scale world historical and political economic shifts. What has been said about the global imagination of the Hindu Right is
surely also true of the other variants of communalism born in the South Asian region. Likewise, the imbrication of the postcolonial migrant in globally imagined communal flows is but one of the ways in which the processes of communalism and globalization intertwine; there are numerous other dimensions to their symbiotically propelled onward creep. It is this story that the present volume attempts to trace, of how communalism harnesses or rolls with global flows, or is itself entirely remade by globalization. The increasingly catastrophic nature of communal violence throughout South Asia in recent times lends a particular urgency to our project. The essays in this collection (some of which were first presented at a seminar series sponsored by the Institute for International Integration Studies at Trinity College Dublin in 2005-6) lead us through the conjoined histories of communalism and globalization in South Asian contexts. Encompassing different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, and methodologies that range from archival to oral historical to multi-sited ethnographic research, the essays in this volume are substantial scholarly analyses that root their arguments in close-up views of specific historical and contemporary phenomena. Grounded in research based in four South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) and various diasporan locations, these essays are written by some of the most notable scholars working on communalism in South Asia and its diaspora as well as a selection of challenging new voices. When the question of the relationship between communalism and globali-
zation has been raised in general debate, it is often cast in this way: has globalization (typically conceived of as a very recent phenomenon) amplified, or has it muted, the processes of communalism (typically conceived of as atavistic and inherently pre-modern)? However, having taken communalism as its central concern for at least the last two decades, South Asian scholarship approaches these issues with far greater care. Thus, the fine-grained work of numerous South Asian historians (Romila Thapar, Gyanendra Pandey and Partha Chatterjee, to name but a few) has helped dislodge the erroneous notion that contemporary communalism must be seen as the resurgence of ancient hatreds, pointing instead to the ways in which it is inlaid within the emergence of colonial modernity in South Asia. Given the extraordinary efflorescence of studies of communal processes
in South Asia, it is somewhat surprising, however, to find that there have been relatively few attempts (notable exceptions include Ahmad 2003) to explicitly chart the intertwined trajectories of communalism and globalization. Of the few recent efforts to theorise this relationship, a particularly striking contribution is Arjun Appadurai’s attempt to understand ‘the largescale culturally motivated violence in our times’ (2006). One of the theorists most closely associated with the exploration of the cultural dimensions of contemporary processes of globalization, Appadurai argues that the social
uncertainty generated by global processes can drive projects of ethnic cleansing, since ‘violence itself is one of the ways in which the illusion of fixed and charged identities is produced’ (Appadurai 2006: 7). Insightfully noting ‘the surplus of rage’ that seems to define the large-scale violence of the 1990s, he suggests that 9/11 ushered in a period of conflict between two kinds of global systems, the vertebrate (the system of modern nation states) and the cellular (that of non-state actors). Positing globalization to be a completely new and disjunctive phenomenon, the site of a new crisis of circulation, he argues that the clash between vertebrate and cellular systems against this backdrop has created ‘a virtually worldwide genocidal impulse towards minorities’ (Appadurai 2006: 40). It is undoubtedly a compelling account: horrendous violence unfolds endlessly in a landscape of proliferating novelty. As in his earlier writings, Appadurai continues to identify globalization as a
unique and unprecedented process, analytically separate from the long history of the rise and establishment of the global capitalist order and the making of the modern world. His continued and emphatic insistence on the novelty and distinctiveness of globalization raises the ghosts of late twentieth-century debates on the Left about whether or not the era of globalization could be said to represent an epochal shift. The so-called ‘Monthly Review position’ (Piven and Cloward, 1998: 11) at the time contested the very idea of globalization, not infrequently by quoting the relevant passage from The Communist Manifesto that describes very similar processes in the capitalism of one hundred and fifty years ago. Against such critics were ranged the votaries of epochal change, in their excitement sometimes taking recourse to straightforward determinisms. Thus A. Sivanandan wrote: ‘If “the handmill gives you society with the feudal lord and the steam mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist”, the microchip gives you society with the global capitalist’ (Sivanandan 1997: 20). Much heat and some light was generated by these debates, and the somewhat obvious conclusion generally drawn was that there is much that is distinctively new and much that is familiar about the processes of globalization. Similarly, there are ruptures and continuities in communal processes, and we would argue that the kind of general theory of advancing chaos proposed by Appadurai may be less useful than a historically based understanding of the trajectories of continuity and change in a specific context. This volume tries to pull together such grounded narratives: the essays
collected here attempt to offer historical depth and ethnographic texture, and on that basis, to begin to theorise the relationship between the processes of communalism and globalization. The fundamental goal is to understand how communal mobilisation and violence intersects with ‘the inconstant geography of capitalism’ (Storper and Walker 1989), and of how these intersections have played out in the different nations and regions of South Asia. These processes are best comprehended, we think, by ‘plac[ing] culture in time’ and exploring the ‘constant interplay between experience and meaning in a context in which both experience and meaning are shaped by inequality
and domination’, as well as through ‘understand[ing] the emergence of particular peoples at the conjunction of local and global histories’ (Roseberry 1989: 49). Coordinated by an historian and an anthropologist, this volume seeks to create a methodological dialogue between field and archive. It is our hope that our chosen manner of sequencing for the chapters will facilitate this analytical-methodological conversation. We have preferred not to group the contributors according to their formal disciplinary allegiances, choosing instead to pace this work according to the kinds of interventions being made by each of them.
