Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Mukulika Banerjee

My thanks to Toby and Jonathan for this invitation that allows us to pause term time activities and reaffirm our common commitment to political anthropology, the broader discipline, and each other.

I hope to do my brief justice, and for me personally, writing this piece has also helped clarify just what a huge influence Jonathan’s work has been on mine; the arguments have worked their way into my subconscious, shaping the ways in which I apprehend the field and think with his ideas to find my own.  I hope this workshop and the publication of today’s presentations in POLAR Online will encourage more generations to read Jonathan’s work and let it shape theirs.

In the late 1970s in New Delhi, I remember witnessing a most extraordinary sight from the window of my school bus.  Hundreds of thousands of farmers gathered on Lutyens’s majestic avenues, filling every inch of space in front of India’s Parliament building and ministries.  Our bus had to be diverted, classes were delayed, and people talked of nothing else for subsequent days.  The farmers, dressed in turbans and long shirts, on their tractors, brought a different India to Delhi—to demand a more favorable agriculture policy but also to critique India’s industry-led policy of economic growth that scorned farmers as no better than potatoes in a sack (to paraphrase Marx 1994[1852]), and villages as dens of vice (to quote Ambedkar) even though most of India’s population still lived in rural spaces.  Having been dismissed thus, they chose to make their presence felt in the heart of the capital of an India that was still young and in its thirties.  As a child I had my nose pressed up against the window of the bus to make sense of this, and have continued to do this for most of my career, albeit metaphorically!

Studying the political sociology/anthropology of India in the following decade at the Delhi School of Economics we read the literature on village India, dominant castes, doladoli, factional politics, patronage structures, even political parties—but there was very little in that literature that would help you understand how those thousands of farmers had managed to organize themselves to take over Delhi’s streets. They came, after all, from socially divided societies that we had studied, but that was no help in understanding how solidarity across caste and religion was produced. It is as if the sociologists/ anthropologists of India, as Jonathan noted in his Malinowski lecture, “seemed to inhabit an altogether different universe” (Spencer 1997, 6). And yet if you lived in India, the farmer’s occupation was the most “political” event involving them. It is to this ethnographic deafness that the 1995 Malinowski lecture drew our attention, and also to our inability to scale up from the village to explain larger events.

I will return to both these points—our deafness to what is “political” and the issue of scaling up.

But allow me to provide another example of this deafness, when Badshah Khan or Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan died in January 1988. A close friend of Mahatma Gandhi’s, he had led the Khudai Khidmatgar (servants of God) movement, the longest civil disobedience movement in the world from 1930-1947 against the British Empire. The passing of this great non-violent soldier of Islam was deeply and widely mourned in the Indian papers and yet for a graduate student of political anthropology which I was at the time, the news caused consternation. The Khudai khidmatgars were Pashtun, Muslim and non-violent and yet nothing in Frederik Barth’s Political Leadership among Swat Pathans or indeed other anthropological texts of the region provided any clues to how this extraordinary movement was possible, dominated as their discussions were by blood feuds, honor codes, and famously individual transactional behavior.  Reading those texts, Pashtun society seemed to be suspended in time and space, with no history of colonisation, hard won independence or indeed as citizens of the new state of Pakistan. But this gap strengthened my resolve to understand how this movement came about as I chose to study it for my PhD.  It was a tough battle as an Indian citizen to get permissions to visit and live in Pakistan to look for aging revolutionaries of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, but I was driven by my interest in understanding the inexplicable politics of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement rather than my desire to correct the academic record. But when to my utter astonishment Jonathan cited my PhD in his Malinowski Lecture to illustrate Barth’s deafness to both history and politics, I realized that what had seemed to me a gap in the literature was symptomatic of a more profound gap in the anthropological imagination.

Both these examples_—thousands of farmers and non-violent Pathans/Pashtuns—illustrate some key contributions of Jonathan’s Malinowski lecture and his subsequent work, especially in his monograph, Anthropology, Politics and the State (Spencer 2007). I will briefly outline some of them here.

•     First, that anthropologists did not take seriously what their informants considered “political;” rather, anthropologists defined the outline of this subject by what they defined as “the political system.” The farmers, for instance, would of course include factionalism and patronage in the village as “politics” but joining hundreds of thousands of other farmers in a march on the country’s capital would also be their biggest experience of political action. The anthropological definition of what was “political” thus had to be more attuned to how their informants themselves defined as political.

•     The failure to write about the larger farmer’s movement may seem like the perennial anthropological bug bear of how to “scale up,” of how to square village politics and larger political processes such as democracy or social movements.

•     This was partly the result of a failure to study political institutions that were created in national post-colonial contexts, alongside the anthropological study of local village politics.

•     This was an important corrective because anthropology has a duty to be attentive to the political imagination of their interlocutors. In the case of the farmers protest, there was clearly a commitment to solidarity with other farmers, to organize themselves in huge numbers, find the resources for it—all to challenge the status quo that dismissed them as ignorant peasants. For such solidarity to emerge, farmers had to dig deep, draw on social imaginaries of fighting for a common good, cooperate across class and caste, maintain discipline, exercise patience, and show accommodation. I have shown in my recent book (Cultivating Democracy 2021) that these political values come as much from their agrarian life and the practice of cultivation than from any particular political ideology. For instance, kinship and friendship inculcate values of accommodation and compromise; the ritual of animal sacrifice reinforces a commitment to redistribution, and farming teaches hard work, vigilance, and hope. Charles Taylor’s (2003) term (I share Jonathan’s admiration for his work) “social imaginaries” captures this rather well. Political imagination can be expansive and reflect values but is also firmly rooted in the social.  This is why anthropology is key—because of all the disciplines that study politics, it is the one that takes the study of the social seriously.

•     And it is this interconnection between the ostensibly political and non-political aspects of society that is political anthropology’s unique contribution. Jonathan drew our attention to this through his use of the term “counter-political” in the final chapter of his monograph. He prefers “counter-political” (rather than anti-political) because it “aspires to disperse the divisive heart of politics” (177). If politics contains within it a core of agonism and competition, then the counter politics of ritual, friendship, neighborliness, cultivation etc. can provide reparative measures. This argument has inspired me to elaborate on the notion of the “counter-political” further, to include it within the idea of the political. Drawing on Arendt’s notion of politics as human action, the ability to come together (“natality”) is politics itself—anthropology expands our understanding of the political by showing that it is about competition and cooperation, about divisiveness and solidarity, about agonism and reparation.

•     But the case for a useful counter-political anthropology, we are warned, cannot then rely only on appeals to sentiment—it has to be firmly realist in aspiration. And it has to be grounded in the empirical and the social.

•     Finally, to my mind, Jonathan is able to make such an argument because he sees the village as a space that provides its inhabitants with a moral grounding—which allows for a range of political possibilities, from the pettiness of factional politics to the solidarity of a mass farmer’s movement. The vindication of this was provided recently again by the farmers in India when in November 2021 they were the ONLY political movement to score a win against the hubristic and anti-people Modi government in power, by forcing it to repeal three new laws they had imposed without consultation, after a 12 month sit-in on the borders of Delhi. It really IS time we consigned the sack of potatoes argument to the compost bin!

In closing, let me offer one example of where political anthropology could go further and where the challenge set by Jonathan has yet to be met. The overwhelming political truth of our times that seems to hold true across national contexts is the steady erosion of plurality and civility in public life. Majoritarianism, disrespect of norms, lying, and general back sliding on all fronts defines the politics of governments of many countries we belong to. Here in Britain, a home secretary from a South Asian/African immigrant family, serving in a cabinet led by a prime minster of the same heritage, can declare without irony that “Multiculturalism has been a failure.”  How do we as political anthropologists make sense of this or contribute to a public debate? How do we propose this, not just political, but moral degeneration, be stopped? Can our anthropological understandings of popular rough and ready civility, the zone of everyday pluralism as Jonathan called it, provide the social imaginaries to stop this backsliding? Have we been sufficiently attentive to political emotion in politics? Does progressive politics with its adherence to truth, evidence and plurality have the capacity to elicit emotions in a way similar to its opponents? In Political Emotions, Nussbaum (2013) makes the argument that political emotions are essential to “render stable” political concepts such as social democracy, progressive constitutions and rights (22). This is necessary for liberal projects, which unlike those of right-wing ideologies, are less attentive to the production of emotions that accompany concepts. If non-liberal projects induce emotions of hate, anger and disgust, she asks what the corresponding emotions of progressive politics are.  These questions will require “A moral science rooted in self-knowledge and systematic questioning of own self-definitions,” as Jonathan (2007, 185) writes, following Taylor (2003), and we hope today’s discussions will be a valuable contribution to it.

Mukulika Banerjee is the author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India(2021) OUP Why India Votes? (2014), The Pathan Unarmed (2001) and The Sari (2003, with Daniel Miller) and (ed) Muslim Portraits (2007). She studied in Delhi and Oxford universities and taught at Oxford and UCL before joining LSE where is she currently based. She was the inaugural Director of the LSE South Asia Centre from 2015-2020.

Works Cited

Banerjee, M. 2021. Cultivating Democracy: Politics and citizenship in agrarian India OUP: New York

Marx, Karl. 1994[1852]. The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York:  International Publishers.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2013. Political Emotions:  Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Spencer, Jonathan. 1997. “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(1):1-19.  https://doi-org.libproxy.wustl.edu/10.2307/3034362.

—.  2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge, U.K.:  Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Charles.  2003. Modern Social Imaginaries.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press.