<i>Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology</i> by Himani Bannerji

Himani Bannerji , Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology . Toronto : Canadian Scholars’ Press , 2011 . ISBN 978-1-55130389-5 ( paper ) Over the last generation, Himani Bannerji has written from within the tension-ridden social spaces of two cities that in their very different ways still carry various traces of the British empire: Kolkata and Toronto. Situating herself in, and also between, these “points of entry” into the world (Bannerji 1995:55), she has helped us understand the workings of (multi-cultural) nationalism and (white settler) colonialism in Canada and provided sharp analyses of Orientalist historiography, patriarchal colonialism, and communist cultural practice in India. Her writing has pioneered a peculiarly Marxist strand of anti-racist feminism in Canada (in such volumes as Returning the Gaze[Bannerji 1993a], Thinking Through[Bannerji 1995] and The Dark Side of the Nation[Bannerji 2000]) while developing some of the finest feminist and counter-colonial historical materialist work on the Indian subcontinent (in, for example, The Writing on the Wall[Bannerji 1993b], Inventing Subjects[Bannerji 2001] and Of Property and Propriety[Bannerji, Mojab and Whitehead 2001]). In the best traditions of radical cosmopolitanism, Bannerji has taken very seriously the weight of the national in the modern world without reifying its power or accepting it as her ultimate normative horizon. In fact, her texts embody a commitment to revolutionary transformation that is worldwide in scope but accepts that in our neo-imperial world order, intellectuals with global ambitions cannot help but engage in struggles in, for and against the nation-state. Published in both Canada and India, Demography and Democracy brings together some of Bannerji's most original insights into politics, ideology, and nationalism, particularly, but not only in India. Generously framed with a long introduction, it is a collection of new and previously published essays, some of which, like “Making India Hindu and male: cultural nationalism and the emergence of the ethnic citizen in contemporary India”, have already become classics. Four chapters, including “Making India”, deal with the rise to prominence of Hindu nationalism—the BJP and RSS and their convergent commitment to Hindutva—and its wider effects and resonances. Some of these resonances Bannerji detects in key texts by Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty, whom she criticizes for failing to challenge the links between patriarchal essentialism and cultural nationalism. One chapter on Max Weber and disciplinary sociology rejoins Bannerji's longstanding interest in Orientalist historical representations of India. Two others deal with the wide-ranging work of Rabindranath Tagore, whom Bannerji considers an alternative to the cultural nationalist claims of Hindu fundamentalism. Demography and Democracy persuasively joins cultural critique and considerations of identity formation with political economy and class analysis. Whether focused on literary texts, academic treatises or wider configurations of state and civil society, Bannerji manages to suture economic, socio-cultural, and political aspects of life. Within the rich, multidimensional texture she weaves, distinct social positionalities (class, gender …) do not appear in abstract isolation or mechanical addition but relationally, in such a way as to allow for “the convergence of many determinations” (38). In her undertaking, Bannerji elegantly and effortlessly mobilizes a host of critical intellectual fellow travelers, including Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Dorothy Smith, Walter Benjamin, and Sumit Sarkar. The result: an integral Marxist counter-colonial, feminist orientation that is centred squarely on the historical materialist method and refuses the schism between Marxism (reduced to political economy) and cultural studies (coded as post-structuralism) that has misled so many theoretical debates since the 1980s. At the heart of Bannerji's understanding of historical materialism is a method of “decongealing” ideological formations. As she argues by developing arguments made by Marx and Dorothy Smith: Comparable to Marx's analysis of the concept of the commodity in Capital, the stereotypes, or discrete objects of ideology are conceptual congealations. They too involve the application of living on dead labour. Our task, following Marx, is to de-congeal them, to unravel the representational bundle, to disclose and deconstruct that which lies immanent in the type of categorical purpose served by the notions of “the hindu” or the “muslim” in the Indian hindu supremacist context or the “jew” in the Zionist one (36). Reified bodies of ideas cannot be understood simply in their isolated, thing-like state, which seems to rule over us; but also with respect to the material processes that produce and deploy them. The point is not to counterpose reified forms of consciousness to authentic representations or transparent totalities but to consider the content of ideology in relationship to the “overall process of knowledge production” (37): the division of labour, the market and specialized institutions such as universities. Interpretive strategies should thus historicize ideological formations and treat markers of social difference relationally so as to avoid the twin pitfalls of abstract universalism and excessive particularism. In Demography and Democracy, Bannerji's key target is the “interpretative paradigm of tradition versus modernity” (24). She shows that the purportedly anti-Western Hindu fundamentalisms in India have one thing in common with the Orientalism of classical sociology and Max Weber: a mode of thinking that emanates from and returns to the ontological dividing line of tradition and modernity. This becomes most evident when one analyzes how both mobilize women as figures for their respective demographic projects of domination. As Bannerji argues with respect to colonial administrators, who proved so influential for academic Orientalism: With regard to women, the colonial state and its cultural discourse is not actually employed in modernizing their world through real acts of social reform. As any student of colonial history can tell, indigenous women provide the colonial state with an occasion for characterizing their societies in racial/ethnocentric terms as barbaric, savage or traditional while actively inventing traditions for them or crushing pre-existing dynamics of resistance … What is also forgotten in the dualist schema of colonization versus nationalism is that the discourse of tradition is at the same time, in the first instance, a part of colonial discourse (122). In this longer view, current fascist claims to invented traditions like Hindu-ness appear as quintessentially modern operations that resurrect and recast both the homogenizing cultural assumptions of the colonial state and the deeply gendered and ethnicizing violence that helped build that state in the first place. In one of the most insightful analyses of the transfigurations of subaltern studies, Bannerji faults some scholars in this “school”, notably Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty, for failing to properly unbundle precisely the mutual imbrication of “woman”, “tradition” and “modernity” in (post-)colonial India. Bannerji locates this failure in Chatterjee's and Chakrabarty's increasingly culturalist analyses of colonialism, nationalism and subaltern community in India. This culturalist shift displaced the Gramscian elements which also influenced early subaltern studies. It left little room to discuss women's complex relationship to modernity in socio-politically nuanced, relational terms. Instead, women's agency (and their own specific subalternity) got subsumed under the “subalternity of the elite” (the Calcutta middle-class) (Chatterjee cited on p 157) and women's domestic “self-sacrifice” for the nationalist cause (Chakrabarty cited on p 163). In this context, the woman's question became “resolved”, as it were, in a “highly particularized hindu/brahimincal communitarian discourse” that places “the heart of moral purity … in the sacrifice of the woman for the family, the (religious) community and the nation” (169). Bannerji argues that Chatterjee's and Chakrabarty's limits lie in their refusal to break with the civilizational frames of their subjects of study, within which critiques of patriarchy are reduced to the civilizing claims of the colonizer. Bannerji's search for anti-patriarchal alternatives to Hindu nationalism and European Orientalism leads her away from subaltern studies and back to the decades of struggle, hope and creativity that preceded Indian independence. In Rabindranath Tagore's pedagogy and four of his novels—Gora, Gharebaire, Chaturanga, and Charadhyay—she finds a critique of communalist nationalism emanating from a humanism that, while universalizing in outlook and sensibility, was sensitively immersed in the specificities of Indian history and rejected the strictures of colonial rule. She suggests that: Rabindranath's developmental philosophy and practices were not only romantic and liberal, but that they were so in the teeth of colonialism. He not only sought to unbind the liberatory and creative potentials of children and adults, but had to steer a course between being mindful of colonialism and all that is entailed in it and yet not being caught in a simplifying reactive and referential relation to it. For a colonized subject to aspire to universalist humanism was indeed a project against the grain—a gesture and could be, and was, misunderstood by both the nationalists and the lofty pretension of the colonialists. His metaphysical modernism/humanism aspired to a universalist morality posited in the social background of a casteist and communalist society, inscribed and reinforced with colonialism. He called for a constant rejection of narrowness, chauvinism, binary world views and other forms of particularism, all of which become an easy reflex for colonized peoples. But this was no vacuous transcendence, as it retained the lineaments of strong specificities of its socio-historical origins and the political bondage of India. His dynamic social and aesthetic pedagogy marked a journey between what is and what ought to be (219). For Bannerji, those aspects of Tagore's work that are committed to an understanding of human nature as unfinished, open-ended potential, leave space for the development of women's emancipatory subjectivities while confronting the static notions of selfhood in colonial culture and reactive nationalisms. These reflections on Tagore are part of Bannerji's ongoing project on the Indian literary and artistic giant, who has recently become subject to burgeoning literature. For Bannerji, the distance between Tagore, liberal-capitalism and the historical forces converging in Hindutva opens up an opportunity for an intellectual war of position against the twin hegemonies of neoliberalism and fundamentalism in India today. Indeed, like other recent commentators (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2008), Bannerji detects enough resonances between Tagore and the Marxist and feminist anti-colonial lineages embodied in her own work (as well as those of Sumit and Tanika Sarkar, Romila Thapar, Aijaz Ahmad, Priyamvada Gopal, and Vijay Prashad) to claim Tagore for the left in an endeavor to wrest India not only from ethno-nationalism but also neoliberalism. Despite the differences between Tagore, Marxism and revolutionary projects for national liberation, Tagore's suggestion that true decolonization and the move towards a genuinely cooperative society has to entail a qualitative transformation of human subjectivities (against Western-colonial, capitalist-individualist, and ethno-traditionalist influences), is worth bringing into contact with the otherwise distinct dialectical critiques of liberal and Western humanism in Marx’ critique of alienation and Fanon's “new humanist” critique of European colonalism (225–226). In this light, Tagore offers two crucial lessons against ethno-nationalism. Claims to national independence need not all be cut from the same culturalist cloth. They can be avenues for broader social and economic emancipation. And critical modernism is not a property of Europe but a “homegrown” source that can be appropriated for anti-imperial purposes. Demography and Democracy offers manifold insights into what Marxist-feminist method can yield for those interested in tracing the relationship between class-based, patriarchal and (neo-)colonial dimensions of nationalist ideology. Readers of a radical geographical journal like Antipode may of course be curious how Bannerji's nuanced treatment of the national (not as a presupposition but as a historically specific product of social forces) would translate into an analysis of other scales and forms of spatial organization. The insights of her fellow travelers Gramsci and Fanon on the question of city and countryside as well as the relationship between inter/trans-national scales might be particularly useful starting points for a more decisively historico-geographical materialist analysis of nationalism and patriarchy. Such a socio-spatial extension of her work would also invite additional commentary on the links between the pitfalls of nationalism in India, on the one hand, and the explicit (and murderous) return of mono-cultural fascism in Euro-America, on the other. Judging by the breadth of Bannerji's past work, one may expect some of these topics to be addressed more fully in the future.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.