A Battle of the Books: Linguistic Antagonisms and the Crisis of Postcolonial Secularism

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In his contribution to a timely collection of essays entitled The Crisis of Secularism in India, Partha Chatterjee identifies a new in what is increasingly considered legitimate politics in contemporary South Asian contexts. This is idea, he writes, being voiced, not from extremist fringes but from very center of representative institutions, that constitutionally guaranteed rights of minorities must be negotiated afresh in political domain (142). I will return momentarily to an elaboration of what exactly has led to this need to renegotiate minority rights and what theoretical responses it requires from critical minds of our times. For now, let it suffice to say that in so far as his essay goes on to identify matters of minorities at very center of a process of modern secularization, Chatterjee suggests that, in contemporary context he is examining, a new brand of secularism likewise involves new means of recognizing and managing (minority) difference at a time during which national body is reconfiguring itself under widening auspices of neo-l iberal globalization. As several scholars have noted, Indian secularism has always involved neither simply a separation of political from religious institutions, nor merely a calling into of an everyday ethics of this-worldliness. Rather, as Shabnum Tejani succinctly puts it, secularism in South Asian situation emerged in an intimate alliance with formulations of nationalism that involved dovetailing liberal discourses around individual representation with definitions of democratic majority as broadly (14). It was precisely in this democratic imperative toward formation of a Hindu majority--accompanied by an entire dynamic of fitful inclusions and exclusions--that secular nationalism in India appeared most visibly as an instrument for regularizing difference. However, question is: how and in what ways has form of majority-minority structure (and therefore, discourse of secularism) changed in contemporary Indian scenario, and what does this have to do with issue of what I am calling linguistic antagonisms? Ethnic cleansing begins, and has begun in past, with struggles leading to ritual cleansing of language. (1) Thus, as several thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Dipesh Chakravarty (to name just a few) have reminded us, it is important first and foremost to understand that history is a linguistic rather than solely organic or referential event. To put this differently, one could say following Paul de Man most specifically of all these thinkers, that if time and history are first opened up by unensurability of semantic gravitations in language, then crisis of secularism in Indian context is a crisis of historical thinking as indexed in gradual institution of an ostensibly transparent linguistic code which forfeits precisely that unreliability of referential possibilities. As we shall see from developments of this essay, in this new environment of language, time as a medium of rupture, distance, and difference is reduced to a governable field of regularities and history is historical only in so far as it annihilates accidents and contingencies of time from its perfectly managed structure. In short, the new element in current Indian politics involves a technologization of language that takes as its object of attack not only complexities of history, but also messiness of difference as a vector for historical sense. To ignore idea that this new political environment is in fact a highly sophisticated matter of negotiating difference at very level of linguistic coincidences and semantic regularities is to mistakenly understand crisis of secularism as an effect of primitive impulses of faith-religion that merely await coming of modern forces of science-rationalism to correct themselves. …