
Durham : Duke University Press, 2021, 336p. ill. en noir et en coul. 23 x 16cm, eng
Bibliogr. Index
ISBN : 9781478011392
Texte intégral
1This book, Gods in the Time of Democracy, is theoretically sophisticated. Based on research from 2007 to 2018, inter alios, with Hindu sculptors in north and south India, including fieldwork with Hindu diaspora in Trinidad and Mauritius, it examines the multilayered interrelationships amongst intensified construction of and visitation, from the 1990s on, to Hindu religious monuments, practices of democracy, economic reforms, aesthetic forms and modality of global capital. While concerned with the force and form of novelty of these relationships, Kajri Jain rightly does not allow her analysis to be seduced by the present and instead productively tethers it to the longue durée of colonial modernity and nationalism. With self-admittedly no “single overarching argument or central theme” (p. 13) instituted, she asks a “conventional” question: “why does this form [of Hindu religious icons, temples, statues and monuments] appear in India at this moment?” (p. 18). With no separate conclusion, the final fifth chapter dwells on three major statue sites in Mauritius, Trinidad and India. The last one is the world’s tallest statue (182-meter) of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, described as India’s “first deputy Prime Minister.”
- 1 Hazard, Sonia. "The Material Turn in the Study of Religion", Religion and Society: Advances in Rese (...)
2Pursued from the framework of art history, some concepts central to Kajri Jain’s analysis are dissensus (Jacques Rancière), sensible infrastructures, assemblage (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) and vernacular capitalism. Early on, she perceptively informs readers that by vernacular she does not mean local or Indian but minor juxtaposed to official or subaltern posited against dominant. Her two main non-overarching arguments are as follows. The proliferating big statue genre should be understood as “a vernacular capitalist-iconic-democratic-neoliberal-concrete-territorial-automative assemblage” (p. 12). Echoing “the material turn”1, rather than privilege humans, she accords equal weight to objects and spaces: statues of gods and goddesses, national highways, cars, cement, parks, rivers and so on. Her second argument is that the assemblage constitutes and is constituted by “the distribution…of the sensorium of caste and its hierarchical social ordering” (p. 13). Invoking Jacques Rancière, Kajri Jain proceeds to argue that the assemblage as consensus about the political-cultural Hindu hegemony with Brahmanism as its axis is met with dissensus. She takes Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a Dalit party, and its leader Kumari Mayawati, as “catalyzing dissensus” (p. 111) because in the public sphere pervaded with Hindu icons, statues, parks, she instead built grand Dalit statues and monuments (chapter 2).
3The promise of the theoretical sophistication, bringing as it does Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Walter Benjamin’s essay on art in the age of mechanical production and others together to understand Indian politics, however, does not securely endure throughout the analysis. First, a word or two about what I find additionally valuable in her book. Piercing is her proposition that symbolic and material are not antithetical; hence, her dismissal of criticism of Kumari Mayawati’s project of Dalit monuments by caste Hindus as unnecessary expenditure that should have been used instead for development. Likewise, she is right in proposing that sociopolitical movements are “integrally aesthetic, sensory and sensible” (p. 257). Notably, she also marks a tension in the caste Hindus-dominated media, which, while decrying Kumari Mayawati for erecting Dalit monuments praised her for building world class Formula One racing track (p. 181). Its theoretical ramification, however, remains under-explored.
- 2 Fazal, Tanweer. "Scheduled Castes, Reservations and Religion: Revisiting a Juridical Debate", Contr (...)
4To return to my critique, unlike her conventional question, I ask an unconventional one: what is this assemblage of Hindu religious icons, temples, pilgrimage theme parks packed with amusements and divinized statues of Hindu politicians for? Is this assemblage, put together —as she herself details, by supra-party Hindu politicians, tycoons of neoliberal economy, artists, automobile industry, tourism, religious gurus and clerics— morally good and politically uplifting? More importantly, what is the political other this assemblage at once hides and announces? Is this assemblage not aimed at actualizing the ethnic and assimilationist project of Indian nation-state scripted long ago in the catalogue of Brahmanized Hinduism? Rather than pose such questions, Kajri Jain is engaged instead in deconstructing secular-religious binary. In itself, this move is sound. However, the unsullied assumption of this binary in India is problematic. She writes about “official secularism during the Nehruvian period” (p. 42). When and in what respect was India secular under Nehru? The word “secular” was inserted into the Constitution long after Nehru’s death. Importantly, if India was secular under Nehru, his secularism backed those who had illegally installed in 1949 Hindu idols inside the Babri Masjid and, in 1950, the “secular” Nehru lent support to building of the Somnath temple. More to the point and at the heart of Kajri Jain’s concern with Dalits, it was under Nehru that the 1950 Presidential Ordinance appended to Article 341 of the Constitution barring Dalits from reservation benefits if they embraced Christianity or Islam was promulgated2. Such pro-Hindu policies of the regime Nehru himself presided over contests the myth of him as a secular icon. Furthermore, why is the critique of the religious-secular binary not extended to democracy-non-democracy binary? Or, is it that democracy is without its obverse?
- 3 Rancière, Jacques. Disagreements: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pre (...)
5As for Kajri Jain’s second argument about building of Dalit monuments by Kumari Mayawati as signifying dissensus, it seems incorrect. It is a misreading of Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus as well as of BSP’s politics. This is so because Jain’s reading of Indian politics is unhooked from political theory, in particular the history of ideas. To Rancière, policy rests on consensus concerned with distribution of roles and partition of senses, which sanctify the existing hierarchy. Unlike the abstraction of John Rawls’ proceduralism, politics, for Rancière, is about dissensus.3 To see BSP as catalyzing dissensus raises questions. Is BSP’s conception of economy, defense, international relations, to name only some, different from, let alone alternative to, either the Congress or the BJP? The dissensus Kajri Jain shows pertains to iconopraxis where BSP has built grand statues to signify domestic Dalit politics. Here too, a key dynamic of politics remains undertreated, if not elided. That is, Hinduization of Dalits.
- 4 Guru, Gopal. "Hinduisation of Ambedkar in Maharashtra", Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 26, no 7, (...)
- 5 Narayan, Badri. Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation, Delhi: Sage, 2009
- 6 Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, New York: Continuum, 2010, p. 36
6Scholars have written about concerted campaigns to Hinduize Dalit as well as their foremost intellectual emblem, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. In Maharashtra, there were “constant attempts on the part of the Hindu communal forces to ‘Hinduise’ Ambedkar for the subsequent assimilation of Dalits into Hindu fold”4. This Hinduization is not only of Dalits but equally of Buddhism to which Ambedkar converted in 1956, the year he died. A key consequence of Hinduizing Buddhism is to see it in terms of Samarasta rather than as a source of emancipation as Ambedkar viewed it. Similar campaigns of Hinduization are underway in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The basis of Hinduizing Dalits in these states is demonization of Islam and Muslims5. Hinduization of both Ambedkar and Buddhism, as political scientist Gopal Guru notes, had already gathered momentum in 1980s. The construction of monuments of Ambedkar and Buddha by the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh during the 1990s or later, then, is not a dissensus qua dissensus against what Kajri Jain calls “the sensible terms of a caste Hindu hegemony” (p. 107). Instead, it is a gradual assimilation into “the partition of the sensible”6. The partition of the sensible as consensus is so gripping that Jian replicates demotic tales of democracy as statistical majority rather than draft its possible alternative.
- 7 Jaffrelot, Christophe, "Hindu Nationalism and Democracy", Transforming India: Social and Political (...)
7In broaching the genealogy of spectacle as a concept, Kajri Jain thoughtfully takes readers to Aristotle (p. 209). A similar methodological move is absent in her treatment of the idea of democracy. She takes it as given that democracy is a form of rule by the majority. Thus, she observes that the attempts by caste Hindus to speak out against untouchability and giving access to Dalits to temples is “primarily driven by the numbers game of Hindu unification in opposition to non-Hindus” (p. 104). But how and when did this numbers game begin? Examining the evolution of Hindu political thought, Christophe Jaffrelot writes that Hindu intellectuals in the early twentieth century and later vouched for democracy for an entirely different reason. Not considering it as “alien,” they took “ancient” India as its locus. For Hindu nationalists such as Sri Aurobindo, democracy was indeed born in India and it was only making a comeback through the British. Hindus’ zest for democracy, Jaffrelot contends, is “because it is a convenient way to establish the domination of the majority community.”7 Since secularism, the debate on which has historically centered on “the Muslim question,” was inconvenient to establishing that Hindu domination, it continues to be critiqued in terms of its secular-religious binary.
- 8 Ober, Josiah. "The Original Meaning of “Democracy”: Capacity to Do Things, not Majority Rule", Cons (...)
8To come back to dissensus, a proper formulation of it should not just reproduce the statistical view of democracy but also offer an alternative. As Kajri Jain’s examination of spectacle takes her to Greece, so should the inquiry into democracy. Against the received wisdom, political theorist Josiah Ober argues that the original meaning of demokratia in Greek is “capacity to do things, not majority rule.”8 In contrast to monarchia (monos: one) and oligarchia (hoi oligoi: the few), demokratia has no reference to number. It connotes a collective body of people. If viewed from within this frame, the whole discussion about statues of gods and goddesses would, then, appear quite different, as would the understanding of consensus and dissensus around which Kajri Jain frames her exposition on democracy. It is the premise of intra-religion caste issue within Hinduism as the bone of contention in Indian politics that drives Jain to see Dalit claim in it as dissensus. Clearly, this assumption does not tell the whole story. Equally, perhaps more importantly, has historically been the inter-religious question. Jain herself writes that the public “festivals made Hindu and Dalit iconopraxis commensurable and competitive with Muslim public procession” (p. 178). If Dalit iconopraxis is dissensus against Brahmanical hegemony, how come they become commensurable such that both come together to compete with Muslim public procession? Jain’s formulation here is shot through with additional tension. Since statue building, especially of the divine, is forbidden and non-existent in Islamic traditions, she puts Muslim public procession of Muharram and Hindu or Dalit iconopraxis as parallels. Is the ritual procession analytically on a par with monuments and statues of Hindu gods or goddesses? That Muslims appear at best as only peripheral in Jain’s prose is striking. For instance, in Mauritius she did not even speak to Muslims. She only reproduced what Hindu leaders told her about Indian Muslims and Christians; that too relegated in endnote 30 (p. 298).
- 9 Singer, Milton. "The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization", The Far Eastern Quaterly, vol. 15, n(...)
- 10 Chattopadhyaya, B. D. "Cultural Plurality Contending Memories and Concerns of Comparative History: (...)
9To grasp the relegation of non-Hindus entails attending to the idea of India as a Hindu civilization rather than simply focus, as Kajri Jain does, on nation-state. My point is not to replace nation-state with civilization but to underline their constitutive conjunction. Enabled by the disciplines of Indology as a branch of Orientalism as well as anthropology, especially in writings by Milton Singer and G. S. Ghurye, considered as the father of Indian sociology, at the core of India as a civilization is Hinduism9. Notably, the border of India as a Hindu civilization was/is not limited to what contemporaneously is taken as India. As early as 1927, historian R. C. Majumdar wrote Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East. He followed it up, in 1944, with Hindu Colonies in the Far East. In his later formulation after Independence, Majumdar wrote about expansion of “Hindu colonies” and “Hindu colonization” at work “all over Asia,” particularly in South-East Asia.10 Majumdar’s idea of Hindu colonization was tied to the idea of “a Greater India.” Without accounting for this idea of a Greater India, Jain’s description of Mauritius by Hindus as “little India (chhota Bharat)” (p. 239) lacks in longitudinal depth.
- 11 Azad, Abul Kalam. India Wins Freedom, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1988
10The inattention to history of ideas is also manifest in Kajri Jain’s description of political figures whose monuments the book discusses. While justifiably balancing the earlier approach, which trumped humans over all others to undervalue the salience of objects in their own right, here her analysis tends to go to another extreme to nearly shun ideas that monuments and statues become invested with, including their divinization. For instance, why it is Vallabhbhai Patel and no one else who is the subject of world’s tallest statue? Jain describes Patel simply as India’s “first deputy Prime Minister” or Home Minister. Describing him also, as Abul Kalam Azad11, India’s first Minister of Education, did, as “the founder of Indian Partition” would have given a radically different insight to readers into the conduct and trajectory of the statue making. Furthermore, why the statue of Patel, “the founder of India’s Partition,” is projected as a “statue of Unity?” Is this projection disconnected from the majoritarian impulse of Hindu politics? Ergo, to what extent is it appropriate to call it a “secular” statue (p. 246)? Relatedly, why there is no statue, certainly of the grandeur of Patel, dedicated to K. F. Nariman (d.1948), a Parsi stalwart of the Congress party? Or, why not build a monument of a similar stature to honor Saifuddin Kitchlew (d.1963), an anti-colonial leader, advocate of Hindu-Muslim Unity and the hero of Jallianwala Bagh?
- 12 "PM Modi is God, Greater than Gandhi: New ICCR Chairman Lokesh Chandra", First Post, 4 November 201
11In the penultimate pages, Jain asserts that no “aesthetic form —no work, medium, or genre— is in and of itself inherently or permanently progressive or regressive, radical or reactionary” (p. 255-56). Is ghazal as a genre neutral vis-à-vis the prose or theatre? Is statue as a medium to the divine the same as connecting with the divine without anthropocentric medium? Note that unlike in Islam where no human can be God some Hindus believe that “Modi is God”12. A specific notion of the divine and its links with statues appears so strong that depiction of the divine, for instance, through calligraphy finds no treatment. Finally, is there nothing specific to and inherent in nation-state as a form in comparison to earlier political forms such as band, tribe, chiefdom or pre-colonial empire?
Notes
1 Hazard, Sonia. "The Material Turn in the Study of Religion", Religion and Society: Advances in Research, vol. 4, 2013, p. 58-78
2 Fazal, Tanweer. "Scheduled Castes, Reservations and Religion: Revisiting a Juridical Debate", Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 51, no 1, 2017, p. 1-24
3 Rancière, Jacques. Disagreements: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 ; "Ten Theses on Politics", Theory and Event, vol. 5, no 3, 2001
4 Guru, Gopal. "Hinduisation of Ambedkar in Maharashtra", Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 26, no 7, p. 339
5 Narayan, Badri. Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation, Delhi: Sage, 2009
6 Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, New York: Continuum, 2010, p. 36
7 Jaffrelot, Christophe, "Hindu Nationalism and Democracy", Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 362-363. Edited by Francine Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and Balveer Arora
8 Ober, Josiah. "The Original Meaning of “Democracy”: Capacity to Do Things, not Majority Rule", Constellations, vol. 15, no 1, p. 3
9 Singer, Milton. "The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization", The Far Eastern Quaterly, vol. 15, no 1, 1955, p. 23-36; van der Veer, Peter. "Sati and Sanskrit: The Move from Orientalism to Hinduism", The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994, p. 251. Edited by Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer
10 Chattopadhyaya, B. D. "Cultural Plurality Contending Memories and Concerns of Comparative History: Historiography and Pedagogy in Contemporary India", Time and History, New York: Berghahn, 2007, p. 167, note 13. Edited by Jörn Rüsen; Majumdar, R.C. Ancient Indian Colonization in South-East Asia, Baroda: The Maharaja Sayajirao University Press, 1955, p. 2, 4
11 Azad, Abul Kalam. India Wins Freedom, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1988
12 "PM Modi is God, Greater than Gandhi: New ICCR Chairman Lokesh Chandra", First Post, 4 November 2014
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Irfan Ahmad, « Kajri Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy », Critique d’art [En ligne], Toutes les notes de lecture en ligne, mis en ligne le 30 novembre 2022, consulté le 10 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/87861 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.87861
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