the political philosophies of antonio · terns/dalits in gramsci’s and ambedkar’s political...

The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar

Bridging two generations of scholarship on social inequality and modern polit-ical forms, this book examines the political philosophies of inclusion of subal-terns/Dalits in Gramsci’s and Ambedkar’s political philosophies. It highlights the full range of Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’ and presents a more critical appreciation of his thought in the study of South Asian societies. Equally, Ambedkar’s thought and philosophy is put to the forefront and acquires a promi-nence in the international context. Overcoming geographical, cultural and disciplinary boundaries, the book gives relevance to the subalterns. Following the lead of Gramsci and Ambedkar, the contributors are committed, apart from underscoring the historical roots of subalternity, to uncovering the subalterns’ presence in social, economic, cultural, educational, literary, legal and religious grounds. The book offers a renewed crit-ical approach to Gramsci and Ambedkar and expands on their findings in order to offer a present- day political focus into one of the most crucial themes of con-temporary society. This book is of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including political theory, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, comparative political philosophy, Dalit studies, cultural studies, South Asian studies and the study of religions.

Cosimo Zene is Head of Department in the Study of Religions Department at SOAS, University of London, UK. His publications include The Rishi of Bangladesh (RoutledgeCurzon, 2002) and a special issue of Culture and Reli-gion on ‘Religion in Gramsci’ (Taylor & Francis, forthcoming).

South Asia, with its burgeoning, ethnically diverse population, soaring eco-nomies, and nuclear weapons, is an increasingly important region in the global context. The series, which builds on this complex, dynamic and volatile area, features innovative and original research on the region as a whole or on the countries. Its scope extends to scholarly works drawing on history, politics, development studies, sociology and economics of individual countries from the region as well those that take an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the area as a whole or to a comparison of two or more countries from this region. In terms of theory and method, rather than basing itself on any one orthodoxy, the series draws broadly on the insights germane to area studies, as well as the tool kit of the social sciences in general, emphasizing comparison, the analysis of the structure and processes, and the application of qualitative and quantitative methods. The series welcomes submissions from established authors in the field as well as from young authors who have recently completed their doctoral dissertations.

1 Perception, Politics and Security in South Asia The compound crisis of 1990 P. R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema and Stephen Philip Cohen

2 Coalition Politics and Hindu Nationalism Edited by Katharine Adeney and Lawrence Saez

3 The Puzzle of India’s Governance Culture, context and comparative theory Subrata K. Mitra

4 India’s Nuclear Bomb and National Security Karsten Frey

5 Starvation and India’s Democracy Dan Banik

Routledge advances in South Asian studiesEdited by Subrata K. MitraSouth Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany

6 Parliamentary Control and Government Accountability in South Asia A comparative analysis of Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka Taiabur Rahman

7 Political Mobilisation and Democracy in India States of emergency Vernon Hewitt

8 Military Control in Pakistan The parallel state Mazhar Aziz

9 Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age Giorgio Shani

10 The Tibetan Government- in-Exile Politics at large Stephanie Roemer

11 Trade Policy, Inequality and Performance in Indian Manufacturing Kunal Sen

12 Democracy and Party Systems in Developing Countries A comparative study Clemens Spiess

13 War and Nationalism in South Asia The Indian state and the Nagas Marcus Franke

14 The Politics of Social Exclusion in India Democracy at the crossroads Edited by Harihar Bhattacharyya, Partha Sarka and Angshuman Kar

15 Party System Change in South India Political entrepreneurs, patterns and processes Andrew Wyatt

16 Dispossession and Resistance in India The river and the rage Alf Gunvald Nilsen

17 The Construction of History and Nationalism in India Textbooks, controversies and politics Sylvie Guichard

18 Political Survival in Pakistan Beyond ideology Anas Malik

19 New Cultural Identitarian Political Movements in Developing Societies The Bharatiya Janata party Sebastian Schwecke

20 Sufism and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh The Maijbhandaris of Chittagong Hans Harder

21 New Dimensions of Politics in India The united progressive alliance in power Lawrence Saez and Gurhapal Singh

22 Vision and Strategy in Indian Politics Jawaharlal Nehru’s policy choices and the designing of political institutions Jivanta Schoettli

23 Decentralization, Local Governance, and Social Wellbeing in India Do local governments matter? Rani D. Mullen

24 The Politics of Refugees in South Asia Identity, resistance, manipulation Navine Murshid

25 The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar Itineraries of Dalits and subalterns Edited by Cosimo Zene

The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. AmbedkarItineraries of Dalits and subalterns

Edited by Cosimo Zene

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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© 2013 Cosimo Zene

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The political philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and Ambedkar : subalterns and dalits / edited by Cosimo Zene. pages cm. – (Routledge advances in South Asian studies ; 25)

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Ambedkar, B. R. (Bhimrao Ramji), 1891–1956. 2. Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937. 3. Political science–Philosophy. 4. Social integration–Philosophy. 5. Equality–Philosophy. I. Zene, Cosimo. B65.P58 2013 320.092'2–dc23

2013017245

ISBN: 978-0-415-70446-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-76203-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Educate yourselves because we’ll need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we need all your enthusiasm. Organise yourselves because we need all your strength. The intellectual’s error consists in the belief that it is possible to know without understanding and above all without feeling or being passionate . . . that is, the intellectual can be considered as such if distinct and detached from the people- nation, i.e. without sharing the elementary feelings of the people, understanding them, and then explaining and justifying them within a given historical situation, and linking them dialectically to the laws of history. . . . Without this passion – this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people- nation – politics- history cannot be achieved.

Antonio Gramsci

Educate, Organise, Agitate! It is not true that entry into Hindu temples will solve your whole problem. Our problem is very broad. It extends into the political, social, religious and economic spheres. Today’s satyagraha is a challenge to the Hindu mind. From this true satyagraha we shall see whether Hindu society is ready to treat us as human beings. It might have been thought that the principle of equal justice would strike a death blow to the established order. As a matter of fact, far from suffering any damage, the established order has continued to operate. It might be asked why the principle of equal justice has failed to have its effect. The answer to this is simple. To enunciate the principle of justice is one thing. To make it effective is another thing . . .

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

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Contents

List of contributors xii Preface and acknowledgements xvi Editorial note xxi

1 Subalterns and Dalits in Gramsci and Ambedkar: a prologue to a ‘posthumous’ dialogue 1C O S I M O Z E N E

PART IThe emergence of subaltern/Dalit subjectivity and historical agency 33

2 Subaltern social groups in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks 35J O S E P H A . B U T T I G I E G

3 Revisiting interwar thought: stigma, labor, and the immanence of caste- class 43A N U P A M A R A O

4 The other prince: Ambedkar, constitutional democracy, and the agency of the law 59J O N S O S K E

PART IIThe function of intellectuals 73

5 Notes on Q6§32: Gramsci and the Dalits 75R O B E R T O D A I N O T T O

x Contents

6 Limits of the organic intellectual: a Gramscian reading of Ambedkar 87G O P A L G U R U

PART IIISubalternity and common sense 101

7 Living subalternity: Antonio Gramsci’s concept of common sense 103K A T E C R E H A N

8 Race, class, and religion: Gramsci’s conception of subalternity 116M A R C U S E . G R E E N

9 The Risorgimento and its discontents: Gramsci’s reflections on conflict and control in the aftermath of Italy’s unification 129A L E S S A N D R O C A R L U C C I

PART IVDalit literature, subalternity and consciousness 143

10 Hegemony and consciousness- building processes in Dalit literature 145M A U R O P A L A

11 Consciousness, agency and humiliation: reflections on Dalit life- writing and subalternity 158U D A Y A K U M A R

PART VThe religion of the subalterns/Dalits 171

12 Why does religion matter to politics? Truth and ideology in a Gramscian approach 173F A B I O F R O S I N I

13 Intellectuals and subalterns in the context of religion 185D E R E K B O O T H M A N

Contents xi

14 The place of ‘practical spirituality’ in the lives of the Dalit Buddhists in Pune 197T A M S I N B R A D L E Y W I T H Z A R A B H A T E W A R A

Conclusion: which itineraries for Dalits, subalterns and intellectuals? 209C O S I M O Z E N E

References 216 Index 233

Contributors

Zara Bhatewara is a PhD researcher at the University of Portsmouth. She is working on concepts of peace and reconciliation among the Tibetan Buddhist community in India. Her publications include ‘Buddhist engagements with social justice: a comparison between Tibetan exiled Buddhists in Dharamsala and Dalit Buddhists of Pune’ (with Tamsin Bradley), Economic and Political Weekly, 47(1): 69–76 (2012).

Derek Boothman teaches translation and linguistics at the University of Bologna. He has published about forty articles on Gramsci in various languages and is the author of two volumes on Gramsci, a translation of key passages of his work (Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and a study of his linguistic approach (Traducibilità e processi traduttivi. A. Gramsci Linguista, Guerra, 2004). He is a member of Rome’s Gramsci Seminar, contributing to the Seminar’s volumes Le Parole di Gramsci (Carocci, 2004) and the more recent Dizionario Gramsciano (Carocci, 2009). His English edition of Gramsci’s pre- prison letters is due out in 2014.

Tamsin Bradley is Senior Lecturer in International Development Studies, Uni-versity of Portsmouth. She has conducted research exploring the interfaces between gender, religion and development in India and more recently also in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. She is Co- director of the Dowry Project, a network of academics and practitioners working to eradicate dowry and related prac-tices. Tamsin has published a number of books and articles, most recently a volume documenting the life stories of Black Minority Ethnic women in the UK, Women Violence and Tradition: taking FGM and other practices to a secular state (Zed Press, 2011).

Joseph A. Buttigieg is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the Uni-versity of Notre Dame and a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute of European Studies. A specialist in modern literature and critical theory, his recent work focuses on the relationship between culture and politics. He is a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective, the author of A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective (Ohio University Press, 1987), editor of Criticism

Contributors xiii

without Boundaries: directions and crosscurrents in postmodern critical theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1987) and co- editor of Gramsci and Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He is the editor and translator of the multi- volume complete English critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Note-books (Columbia University Press, 1992, 1996, 2007). Several of his articles on Gramsci have been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. He is a founding member and the current president of the Inter-national Gramsci Society.

Alessandro Carlucci is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Oxford. He taught courses in Italian cultural history (especially the periods of the Risorgi-mento and Fascism) at Royal Holloway, University of London and at the Uni-versity of Exeter. He has published articles on Gramsci in various journals, including the Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia, the Quaderni di Storia dell’Università di Torino, Belfagor and the Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure. He is the editor of New Approaches to Gramsci: language, philosophy and politics, a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies (2012).

Kate Crehan is Professor of Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her publications include The Fractured Community: landscapes of power and gender in rural Zambia (University of California Press, 1997), Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (University of California Press and Pluto Press, 2002) and Community Art: an anthropological perspective (Berg Press, 2011). She is currently working on a book- length essay on Gramsci and common sense.

Roberto Dainotto is Professor of Italian and of Literature at Duke University, USA and teaches courses on modern and contemporary Italian culture. His publications include Racconti Americani del ’900 (Einaudi, 1999), Place in Literature: regions, cultures, communities (Cornell University Press, 2000) and Europe (in Theory) (Duke University Press, 2007), winner of the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies in 2010. His research inter-ests include: the Italian historicist tradition (Vico, Cuoco, Manzoni, Labriola and Gramsci); the formation of national identity between regionalism and European integration; and Italian cinema. Roberto Dainotto is currently work-ing on a book on Antonio Labriola.

Fabio Frosini, PhD in Philosophy (1998), is Senior Research Fellow at the Uni-versity of Urbino. Since 2004 he has been a member of the Board of the Inter- University Research Centre for Gramsci Studies (University of Bari), and since 2008 of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci (Rome). His research interests include the theory of hegemony, critical approaches to political mobilization and the relationship between philosophy of praxis and the philosophical tradition of immanence. He is author of three books and several articles on Gramsci, Marx and authors from the Italian Renaissance.

xiv Contributors

Marcus E. Green is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Otterbein Uni-versity, USA and Secretary of the International Gramsci Society. He is the author of ‘Gramsci cannot speak: representations and interpretations of Gram-sci’s concept of the subaltern’, Rethinking Marxism, 14(3): 1–24 (2002), co- author with Peter Ives of ‘Subalternity and language: overcoming the fragmentation of common sense’, Historical Materialism, 17(1): 3–30 (2009) and editor of Rethinking Gramsci (Routledge, 2011).

Gopal Guru is Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sci-ence, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He teaches Modern Indian Political Thought and Politics of Social Justice. His specific research focus is on the social and political ideas of B.R. Ambedkar. Guru has also been working on related themes such as the subaltern movements of peasants, Dalits and women. He has published widely on Dalit politics, Untouchability and social science in Economic and Political Weekly, as well as in international journals, e.g. Social Research, published by the New School, New York. In 2009, he edited a book on Humiliation, published by Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Udaya Kumar is currently Senior Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and Professor of English at the University of Delhi. He is the author of The Joycean Labyrinth: repetition, time and tradition in ‘Ulysses’ (Clarendon, 1991) and several papers on contemporary literary and cultural theory and Indian literature. His research interests include autobio-graphical writing, cultural histories of the body and the shaping of modern lit-erary cultures. He is currently completing a book on modes of self- articulation in modern Malayalam writing, and working on the emergence of new idioms of vernacular social thought in early twentieth-century Kerala.

Mauro Pala is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cagliari, Italy. In 2010, as Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, he was Visit-ing Professor for the PhD Program in Literature at the University of Notre Dame, USA and Visiting Professor at the University of Limoges, France. In 2011 he was Guest Professor at the University of Malta. He has published extensively on European Romanticism, critical theory, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. He has published books, articles and essays on Raymond Williams, Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci, among others, and he has also published on Romanticism and comparative studies, frequently cooperating with the Bologna centre for Romantic studies and lecturing for the Palermo European PhD programme in cultural studies.

Anupama Rao (Barnard College, Columbia University) is the author of The Caste Question: Dalits and the politics of modern India (University of Cali-fornia Press, 2009). Other recent publications include: Gender and Caste: issues in Indian feminism (Kali for Women, 2003); ‘Death of a kotwal: injury and the politics of recognition’, Subaltern Studies XII: Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment (co- editor, special issues of Gender and History, 2004) and Discipline and the Other Body (Duke University Press, 2006). She is

Contributors xv

currently working on a project entitled Dalit Bombay, on the relationship between caste, political culture and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.

Jon Soske is Assistant Professor of History at McGill University, Canada and a faculty associate of the Indian Ocean World Centre and Institute for the Study of International Development. His interests include twentieth- century African intellectual history, Indian Ocean genealogies of race, South Asian diasporas, the politics of biography and histories of the Global South. He is currently writing a book about African nationalism and the politics of the Indian diaspora in Natal, South Africa, entitled Boundaries of Diaspora.

Cosimo Zene is currently Reader and Head of Department in the Study of Reli-gions Department, SOAS, University of London. He has published on ex- Untouchables (The Rishi of Bangladesh, RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), on Gramsci (Rethinking Gramsci, ed. Marcus Green; LARES, 2013), a monograph on the work of the Danish anthropologist A.F.W. Bentzon in Sardinia (Dialoghi Nulesi, ISRE, 2009) and various articles on gift- giving in Sardinia, part of a forthcoming monograph (I percorsi del dono – Itineraries of the Gift).

Preface and acknowledgements

The present volume offers a collection of fourteen essays revolving around the political philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and their theoretical and practical commitment in favour of subalterns and Dalits. Following a preliminary exchange among colleagues, most of the authors of these chapters met in London in December 2010 to discuss the papers which are now here collected. Our initial question, ‘Why should we discuss jointly Gramsci and Ambedkar, on subalternity?’ provided an opening, basic frame of reference soon to be enriched by more specific and probing questions. Initially it seemed clear to us that if a Gramscian methodology of ‘integral history’ were to be applied to the study of ‘subalternity’ in South Asia, then Ambedkar and Dalits were to play a relevant role on various accounts:

1 the historical and political dimensions of subalternity, and the function of leaders/intellectuals were significant to both Gramsci and Ambedkar;

2 the position of Untouchables/Dalits in South Asian societies largely reflects the historical, social and cultural characteristics of subalterns as described by Gramsci, including different levels/degrees of subalternity (Q25);

3 Ambedkar’s reading of the ‘History and Experience of Untouchability’ pro-vided a clear example of ‘traces’ left in history by subalterns and considered of paramount relevance for the Gramscian ‘integral historian’;

4 we felt that the influence of Gramsci’s thought in South Asia, though inspir-ing to the Subaltern Studies project, had not reached its full potential, pre-cisely because it lacked the contribution of a substantial local reflection, such as the one provided by Ambedkar and other Dalit leaders, as the best expression of mediated self- reflexive thinking on subalternity;

5 both Gramsci and Ambedkar, being contemporaries, developed their polit-ical thought in similar international, critical circumstances – the interwar period – and they took into account a wider scenario (the development of international law and democracy) in the solutions they put forward;

6 they both sought a holistic response to subalternity and Untouchability, involv-ing a combination of theoretical reflection and practical, political commitment;

Preface and acknowledgements xvii

7 the solution of the crisis experienced within the formulation of ‘international concepts’ – equality, citizenship, legitimacy, democracy, the law, etc. – cannot be reached, according to them, without taking into account the pres-ence of subalterns/Dalits at the centre of this crisis, since their exclusion reveals the essential character of the crisis itself;

8 for both Ambedkar and Gramsci, religion is a crucial dimension of politics, and a decisive factor for the self- emancipation of the subalterns. Moreover, compared to the progressive thought of their time, both Marxist and liberal, the ‘national’ dimension plays a vital role and one not in opposition to the universalistic perspective of the ‘liberation’ of subalterns.

My own research among ex- Untouchables in Bengal and Bangladesh during the late 1980s motivated me to reread Gramsci and, tentatively, I sought to apply his thought to this milieu (Zene 2002, 2007). While I found inspiration in the experiment of the Subaltern Studies Collective, I remained critical of it for ‘domesticating Gramsci’s revolutionary thought’ (Ahmad 1993: 46), and for failing to deal with ‘deep- rooted subalternity’, thus not engaging more directly with Untouchability and the caste- class problem. This inability to see ‘caste’ (or gender) by Subaltern Studies still remains unanswered, and one very simple reason might be the unattended dialogue with other disciplines and areas dealing with history- in-the- making and everyday life, in which many traces of subalternity, often hidden in revealing metaphors, can be found. In my view, the Gramscian concept of ‘subalternity’, as a holistic approach involving a socio- cultural critique of subalternity, clearly points towards the ‘ex- Untouchables’ as the epitome of the ‘subaltern’, and more precisely towards the movement/journey of the Dalits from self- pity to self- consciousness, most forcefully expressed in the experience of Dalit women (Rao 2003; Rege 2003, 2006; Narayan 2006). In the concluding remarks to a recent article (Zene 2011: 102), while discussing the process from the awareness of oppression towards the mobilization of Dalit consciousness, I refer to the Dalit historic leaders as instrumental in this development. In particular, I underline there the vigilant role of Ambedkar as inspiring organizer, while prompting the Dalits to publi-cally burn the Laws of Manu (1927), and to defy the injunction not to enter Hindu temples (1930), thus challenging an age- long tradition concerning the religious and human discrimination of the Dalits from the rest of the com-munity. Even at that very early stage of not solely religious but ‘civil disobedi-ence’, Ambedkar had clear in his mind that the road to liberation and salvation (mukti) – political, social, legal, constitutional, religious and economic – was to be a long and painful journey ahead. All these elements joined together: my direct involvement with Dalits in South Asia, the influence I received from Gramsci and a closer approach to Ambedkar’s thought, prompted me not only to approach both Gramsci and Ambedkar in conjunction, but also to involve other colleagues to reflect together upon their political philosophy and lived experience of subalternity and Dalit-hood. With this in mind, I invited them to gather together and to share their ideas

xviii Preface and acknowledgements

and findings, thus promoting a common debate among experts, both Gramscian and South Asianists, coming from a variety of disciplinary fields including history, philosophy, anthropology, feminist and cultural studies, politics and development studies, philology and literary criticism. Assessing differences and similarities between the contrasting experiences of Gramsci and Ambedkar runs some obvious risks, the main one being to propose a flat scheme of convergence (Ambedkar like Gramsci) which would only uncover ‘common places’ thus nullifying the novelty and vibrancy of the pro-posed encounter. The second risk is to read this reality reaching the conclusion that the subalterns possess an autonomous culture. The issue seems again to be a problem of ‘translatability’: how can we translate the reality of the caste- class, the persistence of Untouchability, and the struggle to overcome this, with the system of subordination present in Gramsci’s Italy, not merely as a medieval residue, but totally integrated in a bourgeois, modern Europe? Perhaps, by apply-ing the notion of ‘integral historian’ as a running thread, we can better identify similarities and differences, thus avoiding the danger of losing the specificity of ‘Dalithood’ to a globalized subaltern. Another complementary way of tackling this is, as already pointed out, to privilege an interdisciplinary approach, so as to gain a wider perspective and to avoid a narrow disciplinary straightjacket. While the workshop intended to address some key questions referring to the historical background which motivated both Gramsci’s and Ambedkar’s choices, it attempted also to emphasize the bearing of their political philosophies into present- day scholarship and political activity among subalterns and Dalits. The challenge initiated by these scholars becomes, in Gramscian terms, ‘a continuous movement of reciprocal translatability . . . between East and West, between Italy and India’ (Dainotto, in this volume). Following the December 2010 workshop, dialogue among scholars intensi-fied so as to bring together, in not solely comparative terms, the political philo-sophies of Gramsci and Ambedkar. Notwithstanding inherent historical, geographical and cultural differences, both Gramsci and Ambedkar were moti-vated by an intellectual passion and a political commitment to take sides with the subalterns/Dalits: they learned from the subalterns’ history and welcomed their effort to be recognized as a full human person. The eagerness to achieve this is reflected in the five part subheadings which highlight the main concerns developed in the whole workshop and in individual chapters. Thus, ‘The Emer-gence of Subaltern/Dalit Subjectivity and Historical Agency’, in which the authors offer innovative ways to tackle a recurring topic in studies of subalter-nity, is followed by the analysis of a typical Gramscian theme, ‘The Function of Intellectuals’, which is duly examined by the authors and expanded in order to include the challenge of a different milieu, represented by the South Asian scene. The theme of ‘Subalternity and Common Sense’, though remaining a predominant reflection in Gramsci’s thought, offers the ideal way in to discuss ‘Dalit Literature, Subalternity and Consciousness’, in which the authors engage with this novel terrain of Dalit emancipation, by listening to Dalit voices with serious, scholarly and ethical commitment. The concluding part,

Preface and acknowledgements xix

‘The Religion of the Subalterns/Dalits’, manifests a growing interest in both Gramscian and Ambedkarite studies, since a reflection on the religions of sub-altern groups occupies a prominent place in their writings. This last part sug-gests a rejoinder with Part I, without representing a closure, but rather including ‘religion’ as an effort towards the emergence of new, different subjectivities. Like all edited volumes, The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar is the result of the common effort of many colleagues who have contributed generously to this endeavour. I am indebted first of all to the authors of each individual chapters who made it possible to bring together not only a fruitful reflection on Gramsci and Ambedkar but to do so with the choral parti-cipation of as many disciplinary backgrounds, within the wider setting of Gram-scian and South Asian scholarship. Our initial workshop was sponsored by a grant from the SOAS Art and Humanities Faculty Fund, and for this I would like to thank the former Dean of Faculty, Ian Brown, for his support and encouragement. We received a generous financial contribution from our colleague in the History Department, Shabnum Tejani, who collaborated also in the preparation of the workshop and acted as Chair in panel discussion. Many thanks go also to Peter Robb and Eleanor New-bigin from the History Department at SOAS and to David Mosse, from the Anthropology and Sociology Department, for their contribution to the workshop discussion. David is at present completing a key research project on Dalits and development (‘Caste Out of Development: Dalit rights and international civil society activism’), the result of which will no doubt enhance our present discus-sion. Among colleagues from other universities who joined us and gave their valuable input to the workshop and beyond, I extend my thanks to Peter Thomas, George Kunnath and Anne Sassoon. Other colleagues were not able join us on this occasion, but hopefully they will be part of future projects; among them I would like to mention Dilip Menon, Gail Omvedt, Valerian Rodrigues, Satish Deshpande, Adam Morton and Peter Ives. I received the most valuable collab-oration and assistance from Tullio Lobetti who took care of all organizational aspects of the workshop, made our guests very welcome and actively contributed to the development of the project. Following the search for a suitable publisher, I was pleased to be introduced to Subrata K. Mitra, the Series Editor for Routledge Advances in South Asia, by our Dean of Faculty, Gurharpal Singh. Subrata has shown me great encourage-ment both in welcoming this volume in his series and providing valuable feed-back. My deep- felt thanks go also to Dorothea Schaefter, Editor of Asian Studies, and Jillian Morrison at Routledge, for their kind assistance at all stages of the production of the volume. I also appreciate enormously the collaboration of Richard Bartholomew who offered his editorial skills to review the chapters and to compile the final list of references and index. Last but not least, my warmest gratitude to Gabriella and Stefan, for their understanding and patience, for the many weekends spent away from them, and also for their encouragement at all stages of the project.

xx Preface and acknowledgements

Although the finalising of every book seems to signal the end of a journey, at times this feeling has the potential to spark the beginning of new itineraries, and of this here I feel optimistic. Taking the cue from Pasolini’s poetry in Gramsci’s Ashes, I like to believe that different itineraries are destined to meet and that even the most desperate of experiences can emit a hopeful ray of light:

Poor as the poor, I clinglike them to humiliating hopeslike them, I fight each dayto stay alive . . .But just as I own history,history owns me; it enlightens me . . .

Editorial note

Texts by Ambedkar are referenced to the multi- volume collection Dr. Babasa-heb Ambedkar: writing and speeches, cited as BAWS followed by the volume number. Texts are dated according to their original publication or public pre-sentation, given in square brackets. Other editions are also referenced where appropriate, in particular two one- volume collections: EW refers to The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, and PSE refers to B.R. Ambedkar: perspectives on social exclusion and inclusive policies. Texts by Gramsci have been translated by the authors or drawn from English- language editions of Gramsci. Passages from the Prison Notebooks are cited according to the consecutive order and numbering established by Valentino Ger-ratana’s critical edition of 1975, Quaderni del Carcere, and they are cross- referenced to versions in English where appropriate. PN1, PN2 and PN3 denote the three volumes of Buttigieg’s ongoing integral translation, SNP denotes Selec-tions from the Prison Notebooks and FSPN denotes Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Full details can be found in the References.

1 Subalterns and Dalits in Gramsci and AmbedkarA prologue to a ‘posthumous’ dialogue

Cosimo Zene

IntroductionThis introductory chapter sets out the rationale for the ensuing chapters and their division into different parts. It also provides an overall and comprehensive pro-logue to the Gramsci–Ambedkar encounter. Indeed, ‘parallels are strong and very striking for two thinkers who are otherwise so different – in political experi-ence, philosophical background, and ideas of effective strategy’ (Jon Soske, per-sonal communication). Nevertheless, the moral fabric of their human and political commitment to Dalits/subalterns brings them very close, particularly in the upholding of Gramsci’s ‘intellectual and moral reform’ and Ambedkar’s ‘social and moral consciousness of society’. Gramsci and Ambedkar were contemporaries – both born in 1891 – and although operating in very different environments, the similarities of their strat-egies and political philosophy to empower subalterns/Dalits are indeed striking. Their activity as leaders, always combined with solid theoretical reflection, springs out of their own and others’ lived experience of subalternity. Both found inspiration in Marxism, both were critical of religion, but considered religion culturally and politically relevant; both assessed the presence of subalterns through social, cultural and historical critical analysis, and sought to negotiate a rightful place within the state, society and history/historiography for these ‘excluded’ individuals. For both of them, the solution would come from the effort of the subalterns themselves, as active protagonists of their own destiny, to achieve ‘consciousness’, and ‘collective will’ aided by the role of leaders/intel-lectuals. Their ‘holistic’ approach – which is a global critique to culture and to the structures of subalternity – enlightens the present- day ‘Dalit Question’ as a challenge posited not simply to Dalits and concerned scholars, but to societies/states and to the international community. Gramscian studies are currently flour-ishing in Italy and elsewhere. Although ‘Ambedkar has never really been taken seriously as a thinker in India’ (Omvedt 2006: 438), recent studies invite us to reflect on his fundamental intuition of the Untouchable subject becoming a Dalit (Guru 2009; Omvedt 2003; Rao 2009; Zelliot 2004). In this chapter, following a summary of Gramsci’s reception in South Asia, I briefly discuss both Gramsci’s demise and Ambedkar’s silencing, to then

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reaffirm the relevance of their being discussed in conjunction with each other. In conclusion, I offer a reflection proposing an introductory presentation of the articles offered in this volume.1

Gramsci in India: in dialogue with Ambedkar?Recently it has been speculated that Ranajit Guha and Enrico Berlinguer prob-ably met in 1949 in Budapest, on the occasion of the Second World Festival of Youth and Students. Apparently at that time Berlinguer gave Gramsci’s booklet Il Risorgimento to Guha. This, containing almost the entire Notebook 25 of the Quaderni del carcere, entitled ‘On the margins of history (the history of sub-altern social groups)’, was seemingly to motivate Guha’s future commitment with the Subaltern Studies Collective. However, the author of this literary ploy concludes that ‘Perhaps it didn’t really happen that way’ (Filippini 2011: 99–101). Indeed, the ‘arrival’ of Gramsci in India came about in other ways, as Guha himself experienced as a student at Presidency College in Calcutta, under the guidance of Susobhan Sarkar (1900–82):

Sarkar, to whom Guha dedicated his first book, A Rule of Property for Bengal, provided the first comprehensive reception to Gramsci’s writings in India. During the late 1950s, at a time when most Marxists in the West were un familiar with Gramsci, Sarkar began discussing Gramsci with his students . . .

(Chaturvedi 2000a: viii)

No doubt that the ‘reception of Gramsci in India’ happened at a time when there was an intense confluence of many other academic and scholarly pursuits – espe-cially in social, economic and political history – including the diverse reception of Gramsci’s thought in Britain, represented by scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson (New Left Review), Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. Of par-ticular relevance for the Subaltern Studies Collective was the initial influence of E.P. Thompson (see Chandavankar 2000) and other British Marxist historians writing ‘histories from below’. In India, the period of Maoist peasant insurgency of Naxalbari, together with the ‘Emergency’ years (1975–7) under Indira Gandhi, provided a closer background to mediate and rearticulate ‘these intellec-tual influences stemming from Britain’ (Chaturvedi 2000a: x). According to commentators, Gramsci’s influence on Subaltern Studies soon faded away – perhaps just lingering in the background – giving space to Foucault, post- structuralism, postcolonial theory, Derrida, textual and discourse analysis, all resulting in ‘the construction of a critical theory of subalternity’ (Chaturvedi 2000a: xiii). Although Guha rightly recognized that ‘The histori-ography of peasant insurgency in colonial India is as old as colonialism itself ’ (Guha 1999: 1), one of the main criticisms levelled at the collective was that ‘Subaltern Studies launched itself with an act of rejection, denying South Asia’s “history from below” ’ (Ludden 2002a: 15). At the same time, almost suggesting a double paradox, Gramsci seemed to have lost appeal, because ‘the project

Subalterns and Dalits in Gramsci and Ambedkar 3

made itself original by divorcing itself from Gramsci to invent a distinctively Indian subalternity’ (ibid., emphasis in the original). In a sense, the rejection of ‘history from below’ and Gramsci’s loss of influence coincided as part of one and the same choice which, though fully legitimate, cannot justify invoking Gramsci as guarantor of a particular interpretation of subalternity. If we look back at the trajectory of Gramsci’s presence in South Asia, apart from the limited impact due to a lack of translation of primary sources, it has often been applied in a sketchy way, almost to provide a veneer of ‘respectabil-ity’ to an otherwise vanishing Marxism. In the case of the Subaltern Studies Col-lective it provided also an opposing stance to mainstream Marxism. Given this premise, we should not be surprised that Gramsci himself gradually vanished from the Subaltern Studies project, despite affirmations to the contrary. The early comment made by Ludden (2002a: 15) on the invention of ‘a distinctively Indian subaltern’, is matched by a recent remark by Young: ‘In a sense, it was Spivak, not Gramsci, who invented “the subaltern” ’ (2012: 31). Young maintains that by stressing ‘the subaltern’ as individual, ‘Spivak definitely introduces the singular figure of the subaltern woman’ (see Spivak 1988), to then conclude that ‘This contemporary emphasis [Spivak’s] on the subaltern has nevertheless come a long way from Gramsci himself, who remains firmly anchored to the political possib-ilities offered by the construction of hegemony through the articulation of the subaltern classes’ (Young 2012: 32). Notwithstanding the difficulty, if not impossibility, of recovering individual subjectivity from a deconstructionist – and at time Lacanian – perspective, Young seems first to fail to recognize the difference between the concepts class/individual within Gramscian heterodox Marxism, particularly when applied to ‘subaltern groups’ (Q3 and especially Q25), and second to appreciate Gramsci’s original discussion of concepts like individual, individualism, etc.2 Most recently, The Postcolonial Gramsci (Srivas-tava and Bhattacharya 2012) includes, but is not limited to, papers on South Asia but does not really address the earlier criticism of the ‘Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies’ (Sarkar 2000). In an early critique to Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments, Sumit Sarkar lamented that

There is not much interest in how women struggled with a patriarchal domi-nation that was, after all, overwhelmingly indigenous in its structures. Even more surprisingly, the book tells the reader nothing about the powerful anticaste movements associated with Phule, Periyar or Ambedkar . . .

(Sarkar 2000: 310)

Although these critiques need to be elaborated further and with further evidence, it seems apparent that, ‘as the Subaltern Studies project became increasingly influential, its relationship to the heterodox Gramscian Marxism which had informed its founding theoretical charter became increasingly distant’ (Chaturvedi 2000a: vii). Moreover, if we look at the interventions of the two major contributors belonging to the Subaltern Studies Collective to The Postco-lonial Gramsci, Chatterjee and Spivak, this mood seems to persist, given that

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Gramsci still plays a marginal and limited role.3 On the contrary, the article by Sunder Rajan (2012) in that same volume, not only finds major inspiration in Gramscian theory – even in the light of the ‘historical defeat of the untouchable intellectual’ and the ‘profound pessimism about organised resistance’ (2012: 186) – but it does so precisely by reflecting on the Dalits as subalterns and bring-ing together Gramsci and Ambedkar, while analysing Anantha Murthy’s novel Bharathipura. For instance, when discussing the political significance of the temple entry movement, Sunder Rajan comments: ‘It is interesting and surely significant that in Bharathipura, Anantha Murthy combines a Gramscian–Ambedkarite interest in the strategic aspects of subaltern mobilisation of this kind, with more specific ethical issues surrounding subaltern representation’ (Sunder Rajan 2012: 176, emphasis in the original). Despite efforts of a late recovery, Gramsci’s demise from the subaltern and to some extent postcolonial studies in South Asia coincides, not surprisingly, with a major absence during this period: Ambedkar and the Dalits. In a very recent critical edition of Ambedkar’s The Buddha and his Dhamma (Ambedkar 2011), the editors dedicate their whole Introduction (Singh Rathore and Verma 2011) to a discussion of Ambedkar’s exclusion from academic Buddhist discourse in India, on the grounds that his writings deliver a ‘political message’ (‘theologis-ing his own political view and politicizing Buddha’s views’ – p. xi), thus assum-ing that ‘religion’ is inherently apolitical. The authors denounce the sarcasm of some – who derisively label Ambedkar’s The Buddha and his Dhamma a ‘liber-ation theology’ (Shourie 1997)4 – and condemn others for their silence:

Here, the ‘subtle’ strategy is silence. It would be nice to be in a position to cite references regarding the justification for excluding Ambedkar’s work from the academic canon, but the whole point is that there are no examples to cite . . .

(Singh Rathore and Verma 2011: x, note 2)

Ambedkar’s silencing here has far- reaching implications when this is extended to the ‘silenced Dalits/subalterns’.5 A very significant, almost singular trait in Ambedkar’s work is underlined by Singh Rathore and Verma: with ‘a great number of scholars who resist reducing the scope of Ambedkar’s mission to one specific community’, since ‘Ambedkar worked simultaneously for the downtrodden, for Indians in general, and with the larger mission of serving humanity as a whole’ (2011: xiv–xv).6 They continue: ‘Indeed, even the liberation of the Dalits was meant as a contribution to human-ity as such, and not simply an expression of “class interest” ’ (ibid.: xv).7 While the major thrust of The Postcolonial Gramsci is to show the relevance of Gramsci’s work within postcolonial studies at a global level, the present col-lection has a more specific objective which becomes also – in the word of an anonymous reviewer – an ‘engagement with substantive focus specifically on topics raised by bringing together scholarship on Gramsci and the crucial author Ambedkar’. My argument is that for both Gramsci and Ambedkar the ‘inclusion


of the excluded’ in civil, democratic society is not an appendix to political engagement but belongs at its very core, if our continuous effort for ‘being human’ (see Rao 2009) is the task that humanity sets itself. For as long as some members of the human race remain excluded from belonging to humanity – for whatever reason, at diverse levels, in any part of the world – this humanity is incomplete and the political struggle must continue. Hence, the significance of the Gramsci–Ambedkar encounter goes far beyond the ‘Southern Question’ or Dalit emancipation, and indeed far beyond Italy and South Asia. However, the globality of the task does not diminish the relevance of local-ized experience and history. Indeed, this full scholarly double- engagement with these localities becomes the real strength behind the ever challenging and thought- provoking political philosophies of Gramsci and Ambedkar. Moreover, given that our two authors have reached their conclusion independently of each other, it would be out of place to invoke Gramsci simply to validate Ambedkar’s work or to offer an external (western) platform to an otherwise supposedly defi-cient (South Asian) political philosophy. In my eyes, the collection aims at returning his voice to a ‘silenced’ Ambedkar as much as to reaffirm Gramsci’s valuable contribution to the caste- question in South Asia. In this sense, the scholarly contributions to the volume are directed to both sets of readers who would otherwise be interested in either Gramsci or Ambedkar. According to this rationale, Gramsci and Ambedkar must be read and re- interpreted together, above all taking into account the historical circumstances in which their political thought developed: i.e. the interwar period and the crisis in Europe. Rather than archaeological history, this exercise sheds light on how we address fundamental questions regarding ‘humanity’ at present. As I try to show below, there is a con-tinuity between the ‘Jewish Question’, the ‘Southern Question’ and the ‘Caste- Dalit Question’ which, above and beyond their specific milieus, are questions related by the substantive (even ontological) question of ‘recognition’ as a task for global ethics and philosophy. It is my conviction that Gramsci and Ambedkar offer us an excellent path to reflect seriously on this. There is a further common trait which unites Gramsci and Ambedkar to their shared ‘reduced relevance’ by certain groups within academia: their joint view of ‘modernity’ and humanism derived from a particular understanding of ‘enlightenment’ (as Aufklärung), as a result of the French Revolution and the civic achievements of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Commenting on the ‘ambivalent’ use of enlightenment made by Ambedkar, Singh Rathore and Verma affirm: ‘Ironically, Ambedkar’s modernist- rationalist inclinations had made him inassimilable to radical left (anti- enlightenment) postcolonial political theory for decades’ (2011: xxiii). Having lamented Ambedkar’s exclusion from Buddhist studies owing to his unorthodox interpretation of Buddhism, ‘as if to add injury to insult’ – Singh Rathore and Verma conclude – ‘the trope of Ambedkar’s “enlightenment” also led to his exclusion by postcolonial scholars, incapable of countenancing his ostensibly Eurocentric leanings in their attempt to liberate India from the “colonisation of the mind” ’ (cf. Thiong’o 1986) (2011: xxiii). More recently, Chatterjee’s effort (2004) to dedicate a chapter to

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Ambedkar has been described by Singh Rathore and Verma as ‘likely motivated by Sarkar’s critique of the absence of Dalits as a “fragment” of India’ (ibid.). Prior to highlighting some thematic concepts which will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters, I wish to point out a relevant and, to some extent, common environment within which Gramsci and Ambedkar operated at the peak of their activity as leaders and thinkers: the interwar period, a time of deep unrest, turmoil and crisis which marked the end of the First World War and the start of the Second World War. Both leaders were fully aware that, if they wished to put forward a successful solution to the situation of subalterns and Dalits, they needed to overcome a restricted, limited view, in favour of operating at a higher political level. In other words, ‘The Southern Question’, dealt with by Gramsci during this period and still being discussed at the time of his imprison-ment (1926), were to become a constant reminder, during the years that fol-lowed, of the need for a holistic solution. Indeed, ‘Gramsci’s larger political aim mapped out in “The Southern Question” forms the testimony of a man who envisaged the intellectuals, proletariat and peasantry working together to bring about a fundamental political emancipation for the country as a whole’ (Young 2012: 30–1). As already pointed out, Ambedkar operated with a similar mindset when proposing a solution for ex- Untouchables, since ‘liberation of the Dalits was meant as a contribution to humanity as such’ (Singh Rathore and Verma 2011: xv). While this very standpoint reaffirms both Gramsci’s and Ambedkar’s commitment to operate with Enlightenment values in mind, we should at least appreciate their efforts to not subscribe blindly to a vision of Modernity, but, while challenging Modernity itself, to seek to address those questions that Modernity had left unanswered. We should bear in mind that the universalism sought by the Enlightenment transcribes the universalism present in the political- religious demands of the subalterns – such as democracy, fraternity, equality, etc. – into the ‘superior culture’. This motivates Gramsci’s reflections on the nexus between modern utopias, illuminist culture and popular religion.

Thematic concepts 1: ‘religion, common sense, philosophy’Religion, common sense, philosophy: finding connections among these three intellectual orders . . .

(Q8§204; PN3: 352)

‘Philosophy’ is for Gramsci primarily ‘traditional philosophy’, underscoring the way this has managed to achieve unity with ‘common sense’, given that ‘philo-sophy’ is, from an integral and organic point of view, the accrual of ideological representations which, ordered together, constitute a given epoch, a historical period. For Gramsci, ‘Philosophy’ = philosophy + common sense (in the same way as State = state + civil society). These traditional philosophies, though repre-senting the avant- garde of common sense, have established, in his opinion, an unsuccessful (in the last instance) relationship with common sense, thus explain-ing the bankruptcy of European civilization. Upon this ‘failure’ Gramsci


envisages the intervention of the ‘philosophy of praxis’, proposing an ‘organic solution’: a project of interaction not external and peripheral, but destined to rev-olutionize common sense from within, taking advantage of those forms of resist-ance which are present in common sense, even when these forms are fragmentary and incoherent, as in the case of folklore. In short, while traditional philosophies seek to transform and assimilate common sense, the philosophy of praxis pro-poses a mutual transformation of intellectuals and popular masses, of ‘critical stance’ and ‘religion’. Gramsci maintains that a moral and intellectual reform is needed in order to transform common sense into ‘good sense’, defined by Gramsci also as ‘new common sense’ or ‘critical common sense’. The role of ‘intellectuals’, to make people think critically, brings about this transformation so as to reach ‘consapev-olezza’ (self- consciousness), thus moving from general philosophy to the philo-sophy of praxis. Given that the philosophy of praxis is itself a theoretical tool focused towards the attainment of political hegemony by the party, self- consciousness (coscienza, consapevolezza) cannot be confined to the sphere of intersubjectivity (as for Croce and Gentile), but must be understood as a col-lective reality. This, however, does not imply that individual consciousness is not relevant for Gramsci. Through communal self- consciousness (‘presa di con-sapevolezza’), people acquire the ability to act collectively by means of achiev-ing a common knowledge and a common ideological strategy borne out of the re- elaboration of the sporadic resistance present in folklore, popular religion and utopian movements. The ‘philosophy of praxis’ – being itself a ‘new religion’, necessarily imma-nentist and secular – is opposed to official religion and wishes to replace both religion and ‘common sense’. Gramsci’s initial reflection on the ‘traditional philosophies’ (Croce and Gentile), leads him to emphasize the novelty of Marxism as a higher, ‘independent and original philosophy’ (Frosini 2003). Moreover, when Gramsci envisages the ‘intellectual and moral reform’ positing the ‘question of philosophy as religion’, he underlines the political vitality of ‘religion’ which, when understood as in this case as ‘credence’ able to motivate action, becomes above all a ‘conception of the world’ (Frosini 2010: 40). Ambedkar’s association with Marxism has been widely discussed (e.g. Desh-pande 1987; Kasbe 1985), but his ‘ambiguities’ remain still at the centre of aca-demic debate. Recently, Kinsey (2009) has argued that contemporary Buddhist revival in India would be better understood as ‘Marxist Buddhism’. A study of the connection between Gramsci and Marxism (Frosini 2009a; Thomas 2009), but also between Ambedkar with Marxism will highlight the tensions with their respective states and societies (i.e. Ambedkar/Gandhi). If we wish to formulate one working hypothesis which would motivate and inspire a possible encounter between Gramsci’s and Ambedkar’s experiences, I would suggest we take into account that just as Gramsci felt the need to over-come the reduction of Marxism to a ‘sociology of history’ by Bukharin, so did Ambedkar need to find an ‘Indian philosophy’ (namely Buddhism) which would allow him to implement, in terms of praxis, his political endeavours in favour of

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Dalits. While ‘vulgar materialism’ (Bukharin) and the Marxism in India as experienced by Ambedkar left the subalterns and Dalits in ‘a state of ideological subalternity’ (Dainotto 2009b: 312), both Gramsci and Ambedkar sought, in dif-ferent ways and with different means, to overcome this impasse. The novelty offered by our position is that, rather than postulating a ‘theoretical strength’ coming from the West, and a ‘subaltern experience’ in the East, we propose an encounter of two different realities and experiences where both theory and praxis are present and meet across geographical and epistemic barriers. Gramsci’s distinction between ‘official’ institutional religion, as historical formation able to exert hegemonic power, and the religion of the masses and subalterns – through which they express their ‘common sense’– is relevant when compared to Ambedkar’s view of religion, including his lifelong opposition to Brahmanism and his choice to convert to Buddhism. Ambedkar’s conversion seems to respond to Gramsci’s idea of a Marxism attentive to ‘people’s spiritual needs’; these intended not as a mystification but as ‘a combination of rationality, morality, and social consciousness, to take action out of reasoned volition’ (Viswanathan 1998: 231). Indeed, ‘[F]or Ambedkar, the return to Buddhism was a project of political self- definition’ (Rao 2009: 155). The ‘question of religion’ in Gramsci has occupied a relevant place in Gramscian studies in the recent past (e.g. Boothman 1995; Díaz-Salazar 1991; La Rocca 1991, 1997; Portelli 1976). This now needs to be readdressed, but with an innovative slant if it is to be made relevant in comparative terms to a different milieu, such as South Asia. Equally relevant is the relationship of religion and communism in India (Menon 2002), in particular if we wish to establish a stronger connection with Ambedkar’s thought on religion ([1957], BAWS 12):

For Ambedkar, soteriology also had to include sociopolitical aspects, and thus for him the spiritual man should be ‘socially and politically committed to justice’ (Fitzgerald 2000: 128). Indeed a focus on social and political justice is arguably considered the height of spirituality in Ambedkar’s philo-sophy. He felt that popular religions tended to remove themselves from humanistic morality and reason, in favour of transcendental concepts and dogmas . . .

(Bradley and Bhatewara: in this volume p. 199)

Thus, some of the questions to be addressed in this context: was Gramsci wrong in assuming that ‘religion’, as a lower form of the ‘philosophy of the masses’, was destined to disappear and to be replaced by the ‘philosophy of praxis’ through education and the advancement of a new ‘modernity’? (Frosini 2010). Does Gramsci’s proposal to promote an ‘immanent religion of modern man’ – through ‘intellectual and moral reformation’ – have a future within postmoder-nity and the demise of all meta- narratives? Was Ambedkar right in postulating that ‘religion’ was to remain and would become necessary to Dalits as a viable tool for self- affirmation and emancipation? And if so, was this the best way to overcome the religious tyranny of Brahmanism (i.e. to acquire freedom from


religion via another religious discourse), without transforming the process into a ‘war of religions’? Was Buddhism ‘ready’ to deliver the promised equality and freedom, or was this conversion – like conversion to other religions – unable to keep promises?

Thematic concepts 2: the role of educationThe theme of education occupies a prominent place in all of Gramsci’s writings, both as pedagogical concept and as lived experience derived from his role as journalist, factory- councils organizer, party leader, etc. In opposition to Gentile (Fascist Minister for Education), who postulated a functional and immutable division of mankind between leading/ruling class and popular masses, and who reserved philosophy and critical thinking for the former, confining the latter to the universe of the Catholic religion, Gramsci proposes a philosophy of educa-tion which helps people grow into mature and responsible adults, thus favouring the intellectual development of all and not of a chosen few (Q11, Q12). For this to happen, the role of organic intellectuals (and ‘integral historians’) in society becomes paramount. These topics have attracted the attention of several scholars (Capitani and Villa 1999; Salmeri and Pignato 2008; Mayo 2010). In order to understand Gramsci’s writings on education one must not ignore

Gramsci’s two- pronged refutations of positivism and idealism, or his copious reflections on folklore, religion, language, journalism, popular liter-ature, Americanism and Fordism, the role of the political party as educator in civil society, the state of Italian culture, the history of subaltern groups and the ‘Southern question’.

(Buttigieg 2002: 69)

In addition to this, the concept of hegemony is vital in order to appreciate the role of education in Gramsci since: ‘Every relationship of “hegemony” is neces-sarily an educational relationship’ (Q10[2]§44). Gramsci’s ‘holistic approach’ to education (Borg et al. 2002) is pertinent to highlighting Ambedkar’s views on education:

The backward classes have come to realise that after all education is the greatest material benefit for which they can fight. We may forego material benefits, . . . but we cannot forego our right and opportunity to reap the benefit of the highest education to the fullest extent.

([1927a] BAWS 2: 62)

A slogan on the front page of the weekly L’Ordine Nuovo, co- founded by Gramsci (1919), reads thus: ‘Educate yourselves because we’ll need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we need all your strength’ (in Buttigieg 2002: 83). This is indeed remarkably close to Ambedkar’s slogan ‘Educate, Organise, Agitate!’

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Years later, Dalit students gave rise to the namantar (renaming) movement, ‘a demand for the right to be represented in the symbolism of the institution by renaming the university [Marathwada] after B.R. Ambedkar’ (Rao 2009: 205–13). The violence endured by Dalits on that occasion goes deeper than class antagonism or symbolic politics. It is a matter of ‘understanding the relation between violence and politics, and between political violence and symbolic pol-itics embedded in material and spatial practices’ (ibid.). My hypothesis is that similarly to Gramsci who resisted, as a thinker and as a human being, the condition of remaining ‘trapped’ in a Fascist prison – for that very reason was he put into jail, ‘to stop this brain from thinking’8 – Ambedkar opposed the constraints of being ‘trapped’ into caste and Untouchability. Indeed, in the same way as Gramsci ‘succeeded in transforming the discomforts and forced illness of prison into a momentous contribution to twentieth century thought’ (Francese 2009a: 2), Ambedkar’s consciousness and activity to over-come Untouchability succeeded in motivating many Dalits to find a reason in themselves to transform subalternity into counter- hegemony. One fruitful line of inquiry developed around the educational ideas of Paulo Freire and Gramsci (Mayo 1999) might prove that the association between Gramsci and Ambedkar on this score is no less rewarding. One possible line of inquiry in this respect – after investigating the writings of Gramsci and Ambedkar on education, including relevant secondary sources – would be an empirical- theoretical research on the role of education among selected Dalit groups in South Asia and the role/politics of present- day Dalit leaders and intellectuals in promoting education within their communities. This, of course, could be extended to investigate into educational advancements among subaltern groups in other countries.

Thematic concepts 3: language, popular culture, folklore, narrativeGramsci’s former studies in philology gave him a sensitivity to problems con-cerning the nature of language (Boothman 2004; Ives 2004), and its relevance for different groups and classes. The ‘language’ of the subalterns, as for others, expresses their ‘conception of the world’, their culture, often communicated through the medium of ‘folklore’ (‘something very serious and to be taken ser-iously’, Q27§1; SCW: 191). In this respect, Gramsci characterizes ‘common sense’ as the ‘folklore of philosophy’, linking it with concepts such as vision of the world, religion, good sense, conformism, tradition, morality and ideology. While he does identify some negative elements with folklore (‘disaggregated, picturesque, petty’), he also sees a potential progressive function in it, brought about by the ‘organic intellectuals’ who influence civil society thus promoting a ‘new common sense’ (cf. Crehan 2002). These analytical tools would be of immense value when investigating the different layers of ‘language’ (economic, legal, religious, political, etc.) utilized by Ambedkar to achieve concrete results for Dalits, his mediating role in ‘translating’ the language of hegemonic power


into the ‘common language’ of the subalterns, and vice versa. ‘Translation’ and ‘translatability’ (Boothman 2004) also figure prominently in Gramsci’s writings, and respond to the need to safeguard differences and to give space to those voices which are muted by the coercion of hegemonic ‘monolingualism’. The ‘politics of language’ (Ives 2004), which shape social and cultural formations, are of utmost concern to the subalterns/Dalits in their quest to translate their ‘fragmented language’ (Green and Ives 2009) into political action for emancipa-tion and recognition and the construction of subaltern subjectivities (Smith 2010). To be sure, particularly in the case of Dalits but also of other subaltern groups, the construction of subjectivities happens as a collective effort, given that subalternity can hardly, if ever, be overcome at an individual level. The problem, rather than being centred around the question of subalternity/subject-ivity, should focus on subalternity/collective- will, thus challenging, for instance, the separation of politics and economics. Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding Dalit life narratives for ‘bring-ing an undesired past into the present’, I agree with Rege that ‘they are one of the most direct and accessible ways in which the silence and misrepresentation of dalits has been countered’ (2006: 13). There is a process of ‘translation’ in act here which goes far beyond the literary engagement of the feminist- scholar, to the point of questioning and challenging the politics and ethics of feminist stand-points themselves, in order to generate a different level of feminist commitment: ‘As a non- dalit woman, the process of translating the testimonios of dalit women has meant addressing my own ignorance about their histories, preferred social relations and utopias’ (ibid.: 387). In this sense, my own reading of the Dalit experience does not wish to superimpose Gramscian categories, but rather to translate those categories into ‘Dalit language’, so that my re- translation of their experience is anything but a betrayal.

Political and ethical commitment: the ‘translatability’ of Ambedkar’s significanceFor both Gramsci and Ambedkar serious theoretical reflection is intimately con-nected to active political commitment. The combination of theory and praxis, of deep historical analysis with concrete intervention in the present gives to their con-ceptual systems a revolutionary openness and a ‘fragmentary’ trait which is not carelessness or indecision, but rather intellectual honesty. From this perspective, ‘history in the making’ is not accomplished until the subalterns/Dalits are allowed to be part of the making of history. They help us to understand that the greatest aspirations of humanity to create a feasible civil society will remain frustrated until the time when these ‘losers of history’ are able to participate, with equal rights, in the social life and history of their ‘nations’. Indeed, there is little doubt that the enquiry into the ‘Subaltern Question’ in India today cannot ignore the ‘Dalit Ques-tion’ as ‘the political unconscious of Indian society’ (Rao 2009: xiii). Although their vision of history takes into account great currents of thought, scholarly publications and commentators on both Gramsci and Ambedkar concur

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that their commitment finds implementation in very specific instances. One such instance is the ‘Southern Question’, where Gramsci discusses the need to address the condition of southern Italian farmers in conjunction with the factory workers of northern Italy, as part of one ‘national question’. I propose to return to the ‘Jewish Question’, in which Marx appraises the role of religion in relation to the political emancipation of the Jews. The progress from political emancipation to ‘human emancipation’ passes through the attain-ment of equality in the eyes of the law, encompassing also social and economic justice. This unity of intents, postulated by Gramsci for the ‘Southern Question’, can be verified also in the ‘Caste Question’ as posited by Ambedkar. His starting point was precisely his enormous contribution to the compilation of the Consti-tution of Independent India, which rejected the label of ‘Untouchability’. Fol-lowing the victory of the legal battle, more than sixty years on, the struggle is far from over: ‘It is unfortunate that in the unabashed pursuit of political power today the holistic vision of Ambedkar is completely forgotten’ (Jaiswal 2008: 22). There are some recurring elements which, already present in the ‘Jewish Question’, crop up again in the ‘Southern Question’ – the formation of ‘histor-ical blocs’, the function of religion, the role of the intellectuals, the persistence of and strategy to overcome subalternity, the need to investigate into the history of subaltern groups – which are also found in the ‘Caste/Dalit Question’. Contemporary South Asian scholars are propelling the ‘Dalit Question’ to be recognized as a national and international question: ‘Becoming “Dalit” is the process through which the caste subaltern enters into circuits of political com-mensuration and into the value regime of “the human” ’ (Rao 2009: 264). This is particularly accentuated by the commitment of feminist scholars working with Dalit women who propose to adopt a Dalit Feminist Standpoint (DFS, Rege 2003), or to create new Dalit narratives resulting in the construction of an altern-ative Dalit history (Narayan 2008). It is in the name and the ‘value regime of the human’ that the Dalit Question appeals to global humanity even when remaining a circumscribed and local experi-ence. In this sense, the boundaries of subalternity are overcome, but the pertinence and poignancy of the Question does not solely belong to India or South Asia, but to humanity at large, in the same way as the ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Southern Question’ – both real and metaphorical – concern the international community. The ‘Dalit Question’ does not come here at the end of a dry, intellectual inquiry. It appears rather as a persistent question destined to illuminate the two previous ques-tions (Jewish and Southern) and to clarify that the generic name ‘subaltern’ obtains a geographical, historical and social specificity in the name ‘Dalit’. Thus, the ‘Dalit Question’, as posited both by scholars and Dalits themselves (or perhaps, even by the Dalit scholar) returns not solely as ‘raw experience’ utilized to provide support and empirical evidence to a master, western theoretical reflection, but as burning theoretical- empirical engagement to ‘disturb’ new western and eastern, northern and southern questions on subalternity. Taking the above into account, my willingness to propose a reflection which springs from the ‘Jewish Question’, and moves into the ‘Southern Question’ to


then reach the ‘Caste/Dalit Question’, needs to be further researched, analysed and supported by more coherent considerations. Only in a very schematic way can we advance here that the common thread which unites the three questions is the question of ‘subalternity’ and its reversal, which put forward also a solution: emancipation. The Jewish Question underlines mainly the ‘political subalter-nity’, given the opposition between State and civil society, which implies in this case a distinction between juridical equality and economic inequality. Hence, the Jews become a metaphor for all (political) subalterns. The Southern Question is primarily conceived as a ‘territorial subalternity’ since, despite the unification of Italy, the North exercises its hegemony over the South, hence southern peasants turn out to be a metaphor for all (territorial) subalterns. The Dalit Question emphasizes a ‘social subalternity’, derived from the persistence of caste- Untouchability, despite its abolition, with Dalits becoming a metaphor for all (social) subalterns. In all three cases we obtain universal metaphors, respectively of political, territorial and social subalternity. They become ‘universal’ because in each the main aspect overcomes the specific situation and, as such, affects the ‘modern’ world, in that (a) political equality does not annul economic inequal-ities; (b) territorial unification does not end territorial imbalances; (c) juridical equality does not dispel social hierarchies and inequalities. All three cases reveal a limit of emancipation ‘coming from above’, as a given: while some differences are eliminated, others subsist. In short, all three cases show that people’s eman-cipation must become auto- emancipation. Jews, peasants and Dalits are bearers of emancipation, and in all three cases the ‘religious question’ becomes para-mount: it holds mechanisms of exclusion, separation and segregation: exclusion and segregation from the ‘modern’ world and from the dynamics of industrial society. However, religion holds within it also the essential elements to overturn from within the new exclusions nurtured in the new sociality, which is in fact only apparently egalitarian.9 In recent years, following the international congress on ‘Gramsci in the World’ at Formia in 1989, there has been a stream of initiatives around this theme, starting with John Cammett’s International Gramscian Bibliography (over 19,000 books and articles on or by Gramsci in forty languages, now online10) and the creation of the International Gramscian Society. In 2007, as part of the seventieth anniversary of Gramsci’s death, various international conferences were organized. The congress in Rome on ‘Gramsci, cultures and the world’ (Schirru 2009), was marked by a panel on ‘Gramsci in the Indian Subaltern Studies’, with an article by Guha (2009) giving some indications on how to make use of Gramsci’s ‘open writing’ in India today, a topic widely discussed by Baratta (2009). Both Capuzzo (2009) and Green (2009) highlight the limits of the Subaltern Studies project. I have addressed these shortcom-ings in my own work (Zene 2011), including Spivak’s analysis of the ‘sub-altern’ (1988). Many other publications also show the need felt to acknowledge the incidence of a ‘global Gramsci’. The tensions between new adaptations of Gramsci’s thought, especially to International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE), and the ‘faithfulness’ to his legacy promoted by

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Gramscian philologists is palpable in many scripts. Rather than trying to make sense of a neo- Gramscian or even a post- Gramscian stance (McNally and Schwarzmantel 2009), I propose to accept the challenge posited by our two political leaders thus enlightening our reflection on present- day subalternity. The ‘Southern Question’, be it geographical or metaphorical, still awaits an answer, new subalterns have populated Europe, Untouchables are still present all over South Asia and fascism can take many new forms and shapes (Ahmad 1993), including on the Italian scene (Landy 2008). All this prompts us to con-sider how, for Gramsci, ‘hegemony and civil society remit to unequal power relations’ and that Gramsci ‘highlights the limits of modern democracy’ (Butt-igieg 1998: 55; see also Buttigieg 2005). As part of our comparative effort, I propose to reread Ambedkar’s experi-ence in the light of Gramsci’s Notebook 25, ‘On the Margins of History (The History of Subaltern Social Groups)’, not with the intent to validate Ambed-kar’s activity, but rather to probe Gramsci’s methodology in a different milieu. My hypothesis is that, given Ambedkar’s total dedication to the Dalit cause, he represents an outstanding example of the Gramscian ‘integral historian’, one who, despite the fact that Dalits’ history is ‘necessarily fragmented and episodic’ (Q3§14; PN2: 21), is able to discover within history those ‘traces’ that point towards self- awareness and emancipation (Q25§2; SPN: 54–5). Like the Gramscian ‘integral historian’, Ambedkar is eager to retrace the concept of ‘subalternity’ as ‘interwoven with his political, social, intellectual, literary, cultural, philosophical, religious, and economic analyses’ (Green 2002: 3); like Gramsci, Ambedkar ‘wants to understand how the conditions and rela-tions of the past influence the present and future development of the subal-tern’s lived experience’ (Green 2002: 8).

Contemporary Dalits’ global awarenessFrom the discussion thus far, it is clear that there is a vast amount of excellent scholarly work being carried out both on Gramsci and Ambedkar. The origin-ality and significance of our present research is that by bringing the two together, a wider and productive dialogue might be generated so as to better serve the cause of the subalterns/Dalits. Moreover, this will prompt us to learn from the Dalits’ experience in order to revisit and rewrite our conceptual tools in line with a present- day ‘philosophy of praxis’. One strategic choice, in order to implement an effective ‘philosophy of praxis’, must take into account the extensive work being carried out by scholars in India reflecting on local, even regional, issues, but with widespread repercussions at global level. I refer, for instance, to ques-tions concerning definitions and redefinitions of caste (Menon 2006), of the iden-tity of the ‘disadvantaged’ (Dudley Jenkins 2003), of Hinduism and Hindutva (Natrajan 2012), but also the persistence of caste and inequality in the post- Mandal era (Deshpande 2003) and the way ‘caste’ has been ‘translated’ within India itself (Basu 2002). This undoubtedly helps us to better grasp the way Ambedkar is interpreted, perhaps appropriated or even misappropriated, in con-


temporary India by different groups and parties, often reducing him to a ‘polit-ical’ icon and thus nullifying him as a revolutionary and radical thinker. We could read, perhaps, the increasing Dalit engagement with ‘global history’ as an opposition to the way Ambedkar has been misappropriated and ‘iconized’ in his own country. Since the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism (United Nations 2002), it has become indispensable to recognize the movement of Dalit con-cerns into global forums ‘by appropriating ideas about caste and religion that have been long used to mystify the local and “native” inhabitants’ (Reddy 2005: 543). Dalits lost the battle to include ‘caste’ in the official charter of the Conference, given the strong opposition of the Indian Government. However, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in August 2002 stressed the ‘Eradication of segregation of descent- based com-munities’. That small victory was the result of many years of activism and lobbying started in the 1980s by NGOs and Dalit groups. In 1983 Minority Rights Group (MRG, London) organized a conference on Untouchables in New York, and Dalit presence has been constant at world conferences on human rights. In 1999 Human Rights Watch published Broken People, a research movement which gave rise in 1998 to the Indian advocacy network National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR). In that same year the First Dalit Convention was held in Kuala Lumpur and in 2000 the Inter-national Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) was created. This network, with a secretariat located in Copenhagen, comprises international and national asso-ciates in India (NACDOR and NFDW) and Nepal (FEDO), besides national advocacy platforms in caste- affected South Asian countries. Being less numer-ous than in India, the Dalits in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are more vulnerable, more exposed to exploitation and less organized in fighting for their own civil rights (see Zene 2011). As a practical outcome, our findings could motivate further research in other countries besides India, including Dalit diaspora, as well as research in Dalit theology and Dalit–Bahujan discourse.

Plan of the bookSince the initial workshop, individual authors have not only reviewed their ori-ginal scripts but also communicated with each other, thus intensifying the dia-logue around the political philosophies of Gramsci and Ambedkar. The subtitle of the volume itself – Dalits and subalterns – is a result of this exchange. While the division of the book into five parts is meant to offer a methodological tool in the progressive reading of chapters, the parts themselves are not intended as sep-arate and monolithic blocks, but rather focus on one specific aspect while bearing in mind the totality of the volume. In this sense, to a synchronic reading of the chapters, we must supplement a diachronic interpretation of themes and ideas which are found disseminated, but interrelated – as I will show below – within the entire volume.

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Part I: ‘the emergence of subaltern/Dalit subjectivity and historical agency’

Joseph Buttigieg’s chapter on the category of subaltern social groups in Gramsci sets the pace for the ensuing chapters, recalling our attention to one fundamental, but often forgotten, moment in the composition of the Prison Notebooks: this ‘original theory’, though appearing late in the Notebooks, was a recurrent theme in previous Gramscian writings such as ‘The Southern Question’ and ‘Socialism and Culture’ (1977 [1916]). Derived from the fact that ‘[I]t is futile to search for an attempt to formulate a precise definition of “subaltern” or “subaltern social groups/classes” ’ – given the ‘fragmentation of subaltern groups’, their various degrees of subalternity and marginality, their political inability to give ‘a central-ized expression to their aspirations and needs’ – Buttigieg finds a common trait to all these groups in that their ‘spontaneous rebellions . . . are doomed to failure’. In fact, these rebellions are ‘ineffectual and counterproductive’ if a ‘conscious leadership’ does not intervene to transform spontaneity into ‘real political action of the subaltern classes’. Hence, Gramsci’s political activity to bring an end to subalternity starts precisely with a necessary ‘first stage’ in the struggle: ‘the progressive acquisition of awareness of one’s historical identity’. Following a Vichian interpretation of history, while critiquing Bukharin’s historical deter-minism, Gramsci maintains firmly that ‘revolutions do not occur spontaneously’. To better understand Gramsci’s ‘historiographical project’, Buttigieg pro-poses a reflection on the way Gramsci perceived both the success of the bour-geoisie in the French Revolution and that of the Moderates who came to power following the Italian Risorgimento. In both cases, success was secured not solely by acquisition of power at state level, but also by exercising control over civil society. It is, however, in Q25 – also often referred to in the ensuing chapters – where Gramsci proposes to look into the history of subaltern social groups, as the place to discover ‘every trace of autonomous initiative’, as in the case of David Lazzaretti’s millenarian movement (discussed also by Green in Chapter 8 and at length in Chapter 9 by Carlucci). In a further two notes, Gramsci con-siders subaltern social groups in Rome and the Middle Ages, and ‘utopian and philosophical novels’, which, according to Gramsci, reflect ‘the basic aspirations of subaltern social groups’ (Gramsci 1975: 2290). Gramsci was extremely crit-ical of Italian intellectuals who contributed to the marginalization of subaltern social groups ‘by erasing the political and historical significance of their thoughts and actions’, classifying them, as in the case of Lazzaretti, as ‘bizarre, unbal-anced, atypical’. Buttigieg concludes by enunciating one of Gramsci’s most significant insights, worth repeating here, given its contemporary relevance: ‘one of the greatest difficulties that subaltern social groups face in challenging the prevailing hegemony is finding a way past the barrier that prevents them from being heard’. Indeed, this remains, even at present, one of the main challenges subaltern social groups have to face: having acquired awareness of historical identity, towards conscious leadership, their struggle remains how to make them-selves audible and visible within state and civil society.


Some of the challenges underlined by Buttigieg are highlighted, and indeed dramatized, by Anupama Rao in the second chapter, in revisiting ‘Dalit Marxism’ and, in particular, Ambedkar’s ‘complex engagement with caste- class’, and by creatively bringing together Gramsci’s innovative Marxism and Dalit Marxism in western India to tackle the ‘incommensurable experience of caste and class’. Initially, Rao discovered the ‘longstanding caste- class debate’ in Anand Patwardhan’s film Jai Bhim Comrade, itself ‘an archive of Dalit Marxism’ in its ‘critique of labor as exploitation and caste as degradation’, and in its depiction of the complexity of Dalit political subjectivity caught between caste- as-labour and caste- as-identity. Although she revised this part of her chapter, I prefer to preserve it here, as a felicitous combination of writing and sound: in the film ‘Dalit critique lives as sound, and especially as song’, in the same way as Rao’s script lends its ‘voice’ to ‘an insurgent Ambedkar, who remakes Dalit self and community’. By staging the apparent binarisms of class–caste, labour–stigma, Buddhism–Brahminism, Dalit history–shared histories, Indic past–Hindu history, . . . Rao also challenges the simple structuralism that has substituted for the more difficult project of exposing the struggle between incommensurable categories which marks the violence of caste as ‘body history’. Rao is very attentive to uncovering and recovering those ‘integral historians’ – such as Phule, Valangkar and Kamble – who, preceding Ambedkar, found ‘traces’ of resistance in the history of ‘Untouchable’ groups, so as to provide a possible explanation for a historical genealogy of violence, submission, degrada-tion and humiliation of these ‘carrion eaters’, a trait which made them a ‘race set apart’. Ambedkar, however, takes a different turn, by refusing to play the ‘race card’, and attributing instead ‘the emergence of caste as a perverse and involuted form of class’ as a result of historical evolution. Rao stresses how Ambedkar, while dealing with Hindu juridical texts (Dhar-mashastra) that ‘legitimized . . . the violence of caste’, also responds to colonial accounts of the caste system and to the ‘turn to biological racism’ of German National Socialism, culminating in the Holocaust. Ambedkar was well aware of the painful experience inflicted upon many Untouchable groups by the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (Lieutenant Governor of Bengal in Council, 1871), as part of a process in which the juridical power of the state accredited the ritual- juridical stance of Brahminical civil society in order to deem those belonging to these ‘tribes’ as ‘born criminals’. Indeed, the underlining philosophy of these Indian intellectuals had much in common with the Italian intellectuals who dealt with Lazzaretti, as well as with British colonial administrators in India and those behind the biological racism of National Socialism. On these grounds, the ‘shared (imbricated) history’ of Dalits, Shudras and Brahmins – notwithstanding Dalit singularity – becomes the ‘shared history of humanity’ in which castes explain a ‘political’ rather than ‘racial’ antagonism. When Rao tells us that for Ambedkar ‘castes . . . were divided according to a class principle’, she is alerting us to a significant detail of past Indian history which has escaped the attention of many historians and anthropologists: the role of the Shudra ‘as both within and without the caste order, an aggressor turned victim marked by a politics of

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resentment’. The Shudras thus become the ‘relevant link’ and raison d’être between ‘touchable Hindus’ and the Untouchables, the Avarnas, those without a caste, the Dalits, or Broken Men of wandering tribes who turned to Buddhism, once ‘degraded, homeless, and fated to inhabit the margins . . . history’s detritus’. Their ‘stigma’ was attached to eating carrion, for survival, but, according to Ambedkar, their real stigmatization ‘lay in their refusal to accept Brahmin hegemony’. The deeper question, even at more generalized historical level, that both Ambedkar and Rao posit is: ‘Is there always a “created” stigma – of one form or another – attached to all those subalterns who refuse to accept hegemony?’ If Dalits are ‘inserted into global history’, are they meant to incarnate the epitome of subalternity, given that the logic of hegemonic powers is to keep the subal-terns as subaltern? Hence, despite all the ‘internal contradictions within caste society’, the stigma of defilement and impurity – not as labour but as ritual- symbolic expenditure – positioned the Dalits in ‘that place of structural negativ-ity that gave to caste its coherence by uniting all castes in their repulsion of the untouchable’. This became true to such an extent that even foreign ‘faiths’ and philosophies, when they did not adopt, they did at least sympathize with this very structural negativity. According to other parameters, we could say that Brahmin purity and Dalit impurity are the extreme poles of a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ in which the opposites can never meet. Therefore, given that stigma resists abstraction, especially the stigma attached to the labour of the Dalits, Ambedkar appeals to a regime of rights, by laying claim to the political universal ‘as a way to insert Dalits into a global history of dehumanization’. While this engagement with ‘global history’ becomes a potent tool in Ambed-kar’s hands, it tells us also that India (or South Asia) is not the only place where stigma flourishes. This engagement with ‘global history’ does not, however, diminish the value, highlighted by Rao, of the centrality of Dalits as figures of urban modernity in the colonial city which resulted in Dalits’ association with class- thinking, given their exposure to modern sites of labour. One of Rao’s ori-ginal suggestions is that ‘Dalit thought was truly experimental, and was among the first to take up and creatively transform, or vernacularize Marxism’. In this sense, she points towards a reading of Ambedkar and Gramsci as two of the most creative reinterpretations of Marx under colonial conditions, if the presence of ‘coloniality’ within the Southern Question is indeed acknowledged. Some of the issues highlighted by Rao return in the discussion proposed by Jon Soske in Chapter 4, with a particular focus on Ambedkar’s role as an expert of jurisprudence and constitutional law. In his final remarks Soske reaches a dra-matic conclusion: although being ‘one the most creative and powerful cham-pions of constitutional democracy’ of the twentieth century, at the end of his life, Ambedkar lost hope in ‘the law’s capacity to effectuate meaningful social change’ and sought to find a solution in a ‘new political community’: Buddhism. This apparent contradiction can only be explained by retracing, as Soske does so aptly, the complex journey of Ambedkar’s political career. To the more explicit references made by Soske on analogies between Ambedkar and Gramsci


(passive revolution, consent, the prince) there are others, more latent, but equally relevant, such as the crisis in Europe during the interwar period, with the rise of fascism, which prompted Ambedkar to formulate ‘a global critique of legal for-malism’, but also a general mistrust in parliamentary democracy. But the real thread which runs through all of Ambedkar’s political activity as a leitmotif and a common denominator of his guiding principles is, similar to Gramsci’s, a con-stant choice to find a viable solution to the oppression of minorities by a united majority. Despite a personal interest in upholding the plight of Dalits, Ambedkar was convinced that the former would be able to overcome subjugation only if they were to achieve unity among themselves and with similar minority groups in India. Furthermore, he reflected also on the hardship of minorities elsewhere in Europe and the USA. While he strove to adapt western- style institutions to the Indian context – thus making in one move a universalizing claim of liberal democracy and accomplishing at the same time a universalization of Untouch-able demands – Ambedkar remains equally critical, as Soske maintains, of a western conception of democracy which ‘failed for many reasons but the fore-most cause was its refusal to address the question of social inequality’. Although learning from Europe’s mistakes, Ambedkar saw many of his own efforts frus-trated, when wanting to solve the problem of representation – even broadening political representation with minority presence within state and civil administra-tion – and recognizing the Untouchable as ‘legal subject’. All came to a halt when facing ‘substantive inequality’ or a quest for ‘caste equality’, when he real-ized that ‘caste equality’ belonged to the order of incommensurability – as much as the Dalits themselves were incommensurable, as emphasized by Rao. From this perspective, Soske’s chapter highlights the double struggle conducted by Ambedkar: on the one hand a reconfiguration of liberal democracy, to the point of conceiving it as ‘social democracy’ very close to Marxian socialism, and on the other a struggle to subvert the oppression of the state towards minorities so as to achieve a share of power of subaltern groups within the state. At this point, the almost rhetorical questions asked by Soske, return again, even for us, as a contemporary predicament: ‘Why would caste Hindus [or any other majority] adhere to any countermajoritarian dispensation?’ Ambedkar’s ‘disillusionment’ must have been all the more greater than we can now perceive, since, having personally reached the high position of first Law Minister of independent India, he was then prevented from effectively extending this ‘power’ to minority groups, as he had advocated. We can only presume that disillusionment turned into a deep sense of failure or, at least into total loss of hope with reference to the law not being ‘of any help with regard to violation of liberty and equality’. This certainly comes close to a Levinasian position which postulates that ‘there is violence in justice’, and we could add that Ambedkar experienced ‘violence even in nonviolence’. This crisis of ‘disillusionment’ and ‘sense of failure’, which in Gramscian terms recalls the ‘pessimism of the intel-lect’, did not stop Ambedkar from searching for a new route in his itinerary to discover an alternative type of democracy in which ‘shared commitment

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to equality’ would produce ‘an absence of rigid social barriers’. Soske has undoubtedly proved that it was the lack of agency of both the law and the con-stitutional structure of the postcolonial state which prompted Ambedkar to look elsewhere for an alternative form of agency which would uphold a different set of values – not part of the law and the state – but belonging to the ‘moral order’: a ‘civic religion’ which would allow ‘the creation of a new socio- cultural com-munity as the power capable of producing social consciousness and a shared moral order’, through ‘rationalization and ritualization of social values’. Now-adays it might surprise us that Ambedkar’s historical quest to empower those ‘at the margins of history’ resulted in him converting to Buddhism. In my view, his choice was not in favour of ‘a religion’ qua religion, but in favour of Dalits and other minorities enduring the struggle to survive with dignity. In a sense, Bud-dhism was yet another route in the long itinerary towards political, legal, eco-nomic and overall integration of subalterns into the community of humankind, not very dissimilar, in fact, to the ‘moral and intellectual reformation’ endorsed by Gramsci who, equally, defended the right to support the ‘paradox’ of ‘secular religion’ for the philosophy of praxis. Following Ambedkar, as we shall see in the very last chapter, some Dalit groups seem to have found Buddhism relevant to their daily struggle for betterment.

Part II: ‘the function of intellectuals’

Reflecting on an apparently insignificant, almost forgotten note in the Prison Notebooks, Q6§32 (FSNP: 122), Dainotto offers, in Chapter 5, an insightful ana-lysis of Gramsci’s thinking on colonial India and his comparison of the Indian and Italian (and broader European social milieus), with particular reference to the role of intellectuals in both countries. Gramsci’s note is occasioned by an interview with Aldous Huxley in 1930 by Frédéric Lefèvre, the editor of the Nouvelles Littéraires, often consulted by Gramsci during this period. Dainotto is mindful to disclose the various layers of interaction contained in Gramsci’s note, but he also takes the chance to unravel this otherwise partial note, given the limited sources available to Gramsci in prison. Both Lefèvre and Huxley represent the type of Gramscian ‘democratic intellectual’ who is capable ‘of reconciling high culture with the necessities of vulgarization’; unlike Italian intellectuals, perched in their ivory towers of ‘scientific detachment’, a syndrome Gramsci associated with the economist Achille Loria (see Imbornone 2009). The whole note, and relative commentaries, offer grounds to discuss the ‘the goal of intellectual labour’, both as transformation of subaltern culture, so as to eradicate subalternity, and as the democratization of the role of intellectuals. In fact, while Huxley sees the ‘danger’ in local westernized intellectuals because they could ‘take government from British hands’, Gramsci welcomes this presence as a challenge to the existing hegemony. Gramsci too is interested in comparing the Indian to the Italian milieu, in which ‘southern intellectuals’ often play a role similar to westernized Brahmins in India, notwithstanding the function staged by ‘race and racism’ dividing the North of Italy from the South. The comparison of


India–Europe is problematized even further by Dainotto, when, recalling ‘the strikes in England’, he quotes Huxley equating the acquiescence to subordina-tion of Untouchables in India to the miners in the UK. To Huxley’s almost ‘Orientalist’ attitude in reading the Indian events, Dain-otto counters Gramsci’s frank question regarding the role of Indian caste intel-lectuals as either ‘isolated’ or ‘organic’ – ‘organic’ meaning in fact ‘progressive and revolutionary’. The question, of course, originates from Gramsci’s interest in (his) present- day Italian and European situation, and on how Europe could learn from the Indian experience. Providing pertinent references from the Note-books, Dainotto shows how the term ‘caste’ is almost exclusively used to qualify the ‘intellectuals’, particularly after the restoration of 1848, at a time when hege-mony of the bourgeoisie was in crisis. In fact, Dainotto alerts us that for Gramsci the Marxian notion of ‘class’ might not be sufficient to describe this impasse, and hence the effort to offer ‘an interpretive horizon that goes well beyond the classical notion of class’, finding in the ‘spirit of caste’ the debacle of the ‘organic’, revolutionary intellectuals both in India and in Europe. While we might say that ‘the Indian situation . . . becomes illuminating for Europe’, within India itself even the process of ‘translatability’ seems to be unable to overcome the ‘incommensurability’ of the binomial class–caste. In other words, while a common ‘class’ seems to be unable to unite the colonized against the colonizer, European traditional intellectuals revert to the ‘spirit of caste’, thus operating an ‘involution’ which would, nevertheless, exclude others from ‘belonging’. In Gramscian terms, we could say that, the Italian/European traditional intellectuals have found a way to achieve a ‘closed- class’ or a class–caste, often having recourse to emphasis of racial differences. Even though the effort of translatability in itself remains somehow unaccomplished, it has resulted in problematizing the notion of class. The ‘closure’ of caste and its impenetrability, for those external to it, is dis-cussed at length in Gopal Guru’s Chapter 6, in particular with reference to the virtual impossibility for Ambedkar to achieve the status of ‘universal thinker’ or, in Gramscian terms, of being considered an ‘organic intellectual’. Caught in between ‘Brahminical hegemony’ and ‘colonial modernity’, Ambedkar embarks on seeking, according to Guru, ‘epistemological transgression’, which he equates to Gramscian counter- hegemony, in particular when opposing Brahminical hege-mony. Ambedkar is aware that the Shudra/Ati- Shudra groups adhere to and even support the hierarchical society which places them at the bottom (as seen in Huxley, above). The journey from the ‘creation of a negative consciousness among the subalterns’ to a fully grown Dalit consciousness passes through the deployment of Sanskritization ‘as a cognitive condition for arriving at a more mature politically transformative consciousness’:

As the social history of Dalit assertion shows, repeated attempts have been made to subvert the tormentor through imitating the tormentor’s cultural symbols; the subaltern seeks to annoy the master through the imitation of the master’s lifestyle. Imitation denies the dominant an exclusive hold over

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the cultural power that flows from cultural symbols. Thus, the emergence of negative consciousness is the initial subjective condition needed to chal-lenge the hegemonic class.

(Guru: in this volume p. 95)

Although this seems to suggest that Guru is in agreement with the line previ-ously taken by a number of anthropologists, particularly in South India (Dumont, Moffatt, Deliège, etc.), who stress that Untouchables replicate the caste system and support it, in Guru’s case this becomes, in fact, the starting point for a differ-ent outcome including ‘epistemological transgression’. Despite the fact that Ambedkar’s achievements were recognized by high- caste Hindus ‘through denial’ (or ‘negative intellectual exceptionalism’), thus preventing him from becoming an ‘organic intellectual’, Ambedkar did manage to subvert Dalits’ consensus to the caste system, through, among other means, ‘the right of temple entry’ so as ‘to deflate the ideological cover that had been built through the process of Sanskritization’. His failure to create a united (historical) block (Q4§33) between Dalits and Bahujan masses through the Independent Labour Party in 1936 does not diminish his ability to act as a true integral historian, having recognized that a real solution for the Dalits and other subaltern groups would be achieved only through alliance and unification of strength.

Part III: subalternity and common sense

Part III is mainly concerned with clarifying typical Gramscian concepts related to ‘subalternity’. Although the word ‘Dalit’ in this part is hardly mentioned, I see it as my task to tease out of the reflection those elements which in fact can illuminate the Dalits’ experience of subalternity, not as a superimposition of a theoretical apparatus generated elsewhere, but as a legitimate challenge to these theories coming from the many questions posited to Gramsci by Dalit history and reflection. I will do so by following the mood set out in this direction by Gopal Guru who, as we have seen above, puts into question the feasibility of calling Ambedkar an ‘organic intellectual’ given his limited impact within a structure which excludes him from its ‘totality’, thus confirming his (permanent) ‘status of subalternity’. In Chapter 7, Kate Crehan provides an original analysis of Gramscian ‘common sense’, proposing at the outset a ‘re- translation’ of this concept into English, thus highlighting differences with its common usage, to then find common grounds between the concept and the task of anthropology when dealing with culture, tradition, community, history. In this way, Crehan emphas-izes the distance between the fixity of cultural traditions originating in Romanti-cism and narratives of national identity, and the fluidity of ‘common sense’ as the ‘product of history’ and as ‘a disparate bundle of taken- for-granted under-standings’ underpinning any given conception of the world. The fluidity of common sense is further underlined when compared to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, defined as a ‘principle that generates practices’, as an (unconscious)


‘mechanism shaping a way of life’, and as a ‘system of dispositions’, necessarily stressing ‘the fixity of certain ways of being’. Although Crehan recognizes that the Kabyles’ habitus described by Bourdieu did not prevent them from fiercely opposing French colonialism, thus showing flexibility, it does not set in motion historical transformation. For collective (rev-olutionary) action to happen, habitus should renounce its ‘systematic character’, thus contradicting itself. Hence, ‘the potential for change comes not from within habitus itself, but from external events’. Crehan finds a valuable alternative pro-posing Gramscian common sense as both ‘constitutive of our subjectivity’ and confronting us ‘as an external and solid reality’, while acknowledging its ‘con-tradictions, fluidity and flexibility’. In other words: ‘this is a concept from which the ghost of the bounded culture, existing outside history, has been exorcized’. Given Gramsci’s concern for the transformation of ‘fundamental inequalities’ within society, but also for how subalterns could actively participate in this transformation, Gramsci is attentive to recover from common sense – as ‘the spontaneous philosophy of the masses’ – those seeds of critical thought which could provide ‘the beginning of a counter- hegemonic narrative’. Though very critical about the ‘chaotic and incoherent’ nature of folklore and popular culture, Gramsci, rather than labelling these as ‘false consciousness’, focuses on their progressive character, on how subalterns may offer to the integral historian traces of historical transformation. Considering our specific case, the very first question that springs to mind is: What is the Dalits’ common sense, or their ‘traditional popular conception of the world’? When Crehan writes that ‘subalterns come to see the hierarchies of the world they inhabit as inevitable and inescapable’, she might not be thinking about Dalits. However, her statement is close enough to Gopal Guru’s portrayal of Dalits who would abide willingly to caste hierarchy. Hence, even the ‘common sense’ of Sanskritization could represent mere mimicry, if it not were for the disruption it causes to the status quo, with the Dalits’ attempt ‘to subvert the tormentor through imitating the tormentor’s symbols’, as Guru maintains. With this mimicry of disruption and contempt, ‘the subaltern seeks to annoy the master through the imitation of the master’s lifestyle’ (Guru: in this volume p. 95). For as much as Ambedkar would not entertain the idea of adopting himself a Sanskritized lifestyle, he nevertheless deployed it ‘as the cognitive condition for arriving at a more mature politically transformative consciousness’ (Guru: ibid.). This certainly responds to Crehan’s comment that, in order to have effective counter- narratives which oppose existing hegemony, a ‘historical bloc’ of intellectuals and subalterns is needed. Indeed, ‘intellectuals need to be edu-cated by the subaltern’ (Crehan: this volume p. 106). In Ambedkar’s case, as intellectual, he would learn from other subalterns as well as from his own experi-ence as a subaltern, thus providing a striking example of philosophical praxis. In this way, the temple entry movement led by Ambedkar became not only an ingenious operation to enhance an otherwise ineffective Sanskritization exercise, but it turned out to be a highly symbolic idea/action meant to represent, in Ambedkar’s intention, not solely ‘religious’ ostracism but all kinds of exclusion

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endured by Dalits, including the economic, cultural, geographical, educational, social, political and juridical spheres.11

Despite being overlooked by some Gramsci commentators, the inclusion in Chapter 8 by Marcus Green of ‘race’ and ‘religion’ to complement the ‘class’ component of subalternity adds to the complexity of this central concept in Gramsci’s political philosophy. The obsession of some Italian intellectuals with scientific positivism prompted Gramsci to oppose this trend which motivated, starting with the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy, the racist ideology of ‘Southernism’, discussed by Gramsci at length in ‘The Southern Question’. The alleged racial, biological and intellectual inferiority of the southerners encour-aged ‘biological determinism’. This, according to Green, ‘replaced political ana-lysis: Southern uprisings and resistance to Northern colonization were dismissed with racial and biological explanations’ (Green: this volume p. 121). If, on the one hand, this reveals a form of ‘reversed Orientalism’, on the other it uncovers the presence of colonialisms which in fact had already existed in Europe for a long time prior to being ‘exported’ to Asia, Africa and the New World. Indeed, the ideological roots of colonialism, together with the racial, biological and intel-lectual inferiority of ‘others’ was forged at home by European intellectuals oper-ating in ‘centres of knowledge and power’, to then find a fertile ground elsewhere when this ‘ideology of inferiority’ manufacturing subalternity accom-panied the troops of the colonizers. It is fascinating to note here how the ‘strategies’ used by twice- born caste intellectuals in order to obtain hegemonic consent from Shudra/Ati- Shudra groups – motivating the latter by creating and recreating subalternity, according to a specific plan (as pointed out by Gopal Guru) – are not dissimilar to the strat-egies employed in Europe by ‘caste intellectuals’ to prompt hierarchies of subal-ternity, both within and outside of Europe and the West. As hinted above, there is a clear line of analysis, in need of deeper consideration, uniting the Jewish Question, the Southern Question and the Caste/Dalit Question, together with the most recent question of the ‘Many Souths of the World’ (Baratta 2003 – Le Rose e i quaderni . . .). When all the plausible social, historical, legal and religious reasons to ‘manu-facture subalternity’ have been exhausted by ‘caste intellectuals’ and their allies, there is always a final strategy used to transform the ‘stigma’ into a permanent mark of identification, as Green, quoting Gramsci, points out: ‘For a social élite, the members of subaltern groups always have something of a barbaric or a path-ological nature about them’ (Q25§1). Gramsci’s remarks would acknowledge the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, serving the purpose of colonizers and local élites in India, as responding to this precise strategic manoeuvre. This is more noticeable in particular when concocting the ‘pathology of insurgency’, as in the case of Lazzaretti, used by Gramsci to highlight the suppression by the state against movements of discontent in Italy after 1870. According to Gramsci, explanations to dismiss this case were ‘restrictive, particularistic, folkloristic, pathological etc. The same thing happened with “brigantage” in the South and the islands’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 51).


The second part of Chapter 8 is dedicated to the religion of the subalterns, taking into account those elements – such as common sense, folklore, spontane-ity and even rebellion – which are indispensable in order to appreciate the frag-mentary character of this ‘religiosity’. On the other hand, this cannot be separated from an analysis of the role of the intellectuals, in this case the hier-archy of the Catholic Church, whose ‘doctrine’ and ideology reinforced both the status quo of subalterns and their fatalistic abiding to it. Despite obvious differ-ences between the Italian and the Indian experience and historical milieu, reli-gion seemed to play a relevant role for the subalterns in both countries at this point in time, almost as a double- edged sword, being on the one hand the source of their misery and on the other a resource with which to rebel, by making use of those ideas and symbols which subjugated them in the first place. But even the rebellion of ‘religious subalterns’, as in the case of Lazzaretti, becomes incon-sistent, given the lack of intellectual leadership and the misreading of traditional intellectuals. The ‘dominant intellectual representations of the subalterns’ becomes a central theme of Chapter 9, in which Carlucci, following a description of socio- historical conditions experienced by Gramsci at that time, provides a Gramscian interpretation of Lazzaretti’s movement. These two lines of thought, running in parallel, illuminate each other, while disclosing a common setting of the Italian Risorgimento and its aftermath. Gramsci came to understand by experience many of the situations he described and upon which he later reflected and wrote: the repression of the Italian army against Sardinian peasants and miners, the living conditions of the poor, the loss of communal land (Edit of ‘Enclosures’ of 1820), the exploitation of Sardinia, treated as a colony, and above all ‘the inter-pretation of Sardinian inferiority given by positivist scientists (being) intolerably simplistic, deeply unfair, offensive and humiliating’ (Carlucci: this volume p. 132). However, rather than choosing to support an ‘independent Sardinia’, Gramsci foresaw a solution for Sardinia and the South which involved the constitution of the bloc between workers in the North and peasants in the South. Carlucci is critical towards the partial views of certain contemporary ‘new historiography’ and the way Gramsci’s writings are interpreted as supporting in an exclusive way either the leadership of the Northern working class, or libera-tion of the South from colonial occupation, rather than looking at the overall picture presented by Gramsci. This is further developed and made more trans-parent in his interpretation of Lazzaretti’s movement. Even though the ‘ethnic or racial stigma’ was not applied to Lazzaretti, all other characteristics used to coerce subaltern groups – including ‘ferocious cruelty’, violent repression, discrediting and silencing the leaders – were utilized as a means to obtain ‘the enforcement and defence of bourgeois political and economic interests’ (Carlucci: this volume p. 140). Indeed, in Gramsci’s view, while making use of spiritual and religious symbolism, Lazzaretti’s ‘preaching’ involved an alternative social order, with doses of republicanism, socialistic ten-dencies, shared land ownership: in one phrase, ‘The Republic as the Kingdom of God’. Hence, ‘the socioeconomic context and conflicts of the time’ needed to

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be analysed in order to explain the reasons which led the new state to crush the movement. In other words, Lazzaretti’s movement, starting with an ideological ‘reli-gious’ (even if not theological) interpretation of Christianity, reached opposite conclusions to the ideology supported both by Church leaders and bourgeois intellectuals regarding not solely the sphere of the religious but most importantly the establishment of a new social order of which these peasants/subalterns wished to be an active part. Their exclusion from social, economic, cultural life and history is what motivates their ‘intrusion’, as a subaltern movement. Permit me to make a very risky metaphor: I would say that Lazzaretti was forcing a kind of ‘temple entry’ – into the ideological temple defended by Church leaders and bourgeois intellectuals – precisely in Ambedkarite fashion: not simply in religious terms but making use of religious discourse in order to achieve a wider solution to the problems of subalterns. The words of Ambedkar testify to this:

It is not true that entry into Hindu temples will solve your whole problem. Our problem is very broad. It extends into the political, social, religious and economic spheres. Today’s satyagraha is a challenge to the Hindu mind. From this true satyagraha we shall see whether Hindu society is ready to treat us as human beings.12

There is a potency in these words which has been underestimated, not least because of the subversive appropriation of Gandhian satyagraha, underlined with oxymoronic tones.

Part IV: ‘Dalit literature, subalternity and consciousness’

Many of the themes discussed in the preceding sections find concrete grounding and development in Part IV, dedicated to the Dalits’ own consciousness – for lack of a better word – of subalternity from the point of view of different styles of narrativity. In Chapter 10, Mauro Pala concentrates on the consciousness- building process through literature. Through a refusal of other- ascribed cat-egories coined by colonial, Hindu or Indian nationalist discourses, Dalit writers have rejected not solely inequality – marked by the stigma of impurity and pol-lution – but, having adopted tactics of ‘cultural resistance’, they aim to attack dominant discourses, despite many limitations and a ‘fragmented state of being’. Pala engages in an intensive dialogue between chosen examples of Dalit liter-ature and Gramsci’s writings, in an attempt to establish a productive parallel connecting ‘The modern prince’ with the struggle for emancipation present in Dalit stories. The ‘experience of suffering’ recounted first in songs and poetry, now takes a new written form in which the ‘anonymous author’ (as Bama in Karukku) is not writing for herself, but whose ‘trauma’ belongs to the whole community. It ceases to be a personal event and becomes the shared experience of a (not- imagined) community, invited to resist the paralysis of trauma and stigma: ‘we must dare to stand for change’. This Dalit woman, and former


Catholic nun, has discovered that the Church in Tamil Nadu is no different, as Gramsci pointed out, from the Church in Italy, when it invites ‘the poor’ to accept their lot with ‘resignation’. Her ‘writing’ stands for change, similar to other Dalit writers who are now saying that they do not wish to be represented by others, not certainly the way they have been represented thus far by myths, sacred writing and ‘learned’ historians; but, finally, they wish, want to and will represent themselves. Pala returns time and again to underline the new- found emancipation of most Dalit writers who, having achieved a new dimension beyond self- pity, are prim-arily concerned with ‘community identity formation’, including the relevance of the place where a community lives and struggles, not as a given, but as a long journey towards the politics of a ‘collective consciousness’. Perhaps, a new dis-covered meaning of the word ‘Dalit’ is, in this sense, the recognition that the ‘real being broken’ is not a personal, individual situation, not even the separation of Dalits from human community, but much more, and first and foremost, the shattering of the very Dalit community itself, atomized by others to be reduced to individual ‘trauma and stigma’. This certainly runs against Spivak’s idea that ‘Subalternity is a position without identity’, as Udaya Kumar reminds us in Chapter 11 while providing a significant summary of Gramsci’s swinging fortune in India, which was perhaps not least because of limited availability of relevant translations of his work. Questions of subjectivity and agency remain central to the whole chapter, while Kumar takes us on a fascinating journey, starting with Ambedkar’s interrogation of history and moving on into Dalit autobiographical and testimonial writings. Despite many differences, we can appreciate many similarities between the two men, including their starting point, their wanting to write a ‘history of subalter-nity’ while disrupting history as a ‘discipline’, their looking for traces ‘where there are no texts’, but ‘gathering survivals of the past’, and their having recourse to the metaphor of the archaeologist in an attempt to make sense of those ‘traces’, thus challenging a positivist historiography which left subalterns and Dalits ‘on the margins of history’. Rightly, Kumar places Ambedkar’s dealing with history close to Nietzsche and Freud. I would add to the latter also Michel de Certeau (The Writing of History, 1988) whose discussion of the historiograph-ical operation alters our concept of historical knowledge by introducing frag-ments and traces of alterity into ‘learned history’, thus providing another helpful means of linking the thought of Gramsci and Ambedkar. Aiming at understanding ‘alternative modes of articulating the historicality of subaltern experience’, and the ‘notion of agency in the context of subaltern his-toriography’, Kumar turns to Dalit life writing, soon making the ‘experience of humiliation’ a central trope of his analysis, while problematizing Dalit agency at the onset as ‘the impossible subject whose agency is constantly annihilated’. Thus the question remains, can this complex, humiliated and paradoxical subject ‘reject the rejection’? Or better still, can this Dalit self- writing assume ‘new forms of agency and thus reclaim or create new idioms of selfhood’, especially when we add ‘shame’ to humiliation? Kumar’s sensitivity is very attentive to

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this interplay, further linking shame to dispossession and to the visibility of shame, or the ‘unwelcome visibility’ and the exposed, shameful nakedness – borrowed from Levinas – thus making shame intrinsic to humiliation. As an accomplished Talmudic scholar, no doubt Levinas was very familiar with that first page of Genesis describing Adam and Eve in Eden, when, having disobeyed God for eating the ‘forbidden fruit’, for the first time they felt ashamed of their nakedness. There is always a primordial myth which reminds us of ‘our own nakedness’ but, while in this case the myth is meant to refer to the whole of humanity, other myths are produced to target specific groups, Dalits included. I think it would not be out of place to read this mythography as part of the ‘history of Untouchability’ and as contributing to a wider apparatus in which the lacunae of positivistic history are filled in with popular folkloric tales, the very stuff of ‘common sense’. There is a crescendo in Kumar’s analysis increasing in intensity from humili-ation, to shame, and culminating in stigma, as exemplified in the autobiography of Limbale, a Mahar Dalit, unable to write an essay in class, following a humiliating picnic. The abusive humiliation at the hands of his teacher develops into shame, when leftovers are offered by high- caste classmates, to then become a stigma through the lingering shame of a ‘beef- eater’, as his teacher brands him. He and his family might even all be vegetarians, as other ‘Sanskritized’ Dalits are, but the teacher knows the ‘history’ of his group and, above all, he knows the myths, marking him and many other Dalits as ‘beef- eaters’, as an indelible stigmatic sign, an original sin without redemption. Kumar transmits this durable pain of silence, this trauma spanning a lifetime, while mainstream literary circles fail to acknow-ledge ‘the deep disorientation in Dalit writings in relation to language and agency’ (Kumar: in this volume p. 170). Kumar closes his chapter with a series of questions revolving around ‘the perilous figure of the subaltern subject’.

Part V: ‘the religion of the subalterns/Dalits’

The central theme in Part V further extends some of the arguments regarding religion already discussed in previous chapters. In Chapter 12, Fabio Frosini offers a most comprehensive discussion of the Gramscian notion of ‘religion’, seen necessarily in conjunction with other concepts, particularly common sense, philosophy, language and folklore. Having expanded a restricted definition of philosophy – as practised by ‘professional’ philosophers – to incorporate all forms of thought, Gramsci sees religion as totally embedded in the realm of culture and language. By way of a very tight explanation and multiple intercon-nected layers, Frosini provides a faithful but original reading of Gramscian sources concerning religion, in particular for the subalterns. The ‘common regime of meaning- production’ occupied both by dominant classes and subal-terns, finds an explanation in two contrasting examples: the French Revolution, which provides a certain unity between high and popular culture, and the Italian Risorgimento, with the intellectuals who ‘have delegated the unification of the popular masses to the Catholic Church’, thus assigning to the subalterns a purely


‘instrumental function’. This situation is not resolved in bourgeois society nor even with the abolition of ‘feudal castes’ – the erosion of borders between dominant and subaltern groups – since this society remains dependent ‘on a pol-itics that still intervenes on common sense’, as the case of the Jacobins’ ‘religious initiative’ shows. Indeed, Frosini is adamant to remind us that for Gramsci, even for the ‘secular State’ at this initial stage, hegemony is fought not solely on polit-ical grounds, ‘it is, instead necessary to become involved with religious language, which is the only language capable of constituting “a form of total social praxis” ’ (Frosini: this volume p. 179). In the ‘liberal State’ – as a result of German ideal-ism (1815–70) and representing a reaction to Jacobinism – there is an intention to keep the public sphere (the State) and the private one (civil society) separate, thus ‘preventing the masses from irrupting into politics’, and furthering the separation between people and intellectuals. The paradox of this ‘aporia’ results in people – farmers and workers – supporting reactionary figures (‘caesarism’), as in the case of Louis Bonaparte, General Boulanger and fascism in Italy. It is at this juncture where Frosini, aptly, locates the ‘interplay between pol-itics and religion . . . deeply exploited thanks to the suppression of the liberal dis-tinction between State and civil society’. It is during the interwar period – already underlined by Rao, Soske and Dainotto – in which Gramsci locates the ‘democratic- bureaucratic regime’, or the coexistence of fascism and constitu-tional regimes, producing an alteration to what Gramsci defined as ‘war of posi-tion’ (passive revolution), by uniting State and civil society ‘in new and flexible forms’. Though in different ways for different countries ‘religion and politics form a new type of intertwining that turns again religion into a fundamental element of aggregation and political ruling’. With the breaking down of the barrier between public and private spheres ‘religion performs a key role from the viewpoint of power and from the one of resistance against it’. Following the bourgeois revolutions (1789–1871) and the totalitarian integration of subaltern classes (the First World War and Soviet Revolution), something relevant happens, according to Frosini, ‘a sort of inver-sion of perspectives’:

The bourgeoisie, reduced to the role of pure preservation . . . takes hold of the religious myths of the subalterns and uses them as the engine of the passive inclusion of the masses in the state: the politics of total mobilization absorb the vindication of the people’s participation to power, the politics of colonial expansionism replies to the socialist egalitarian demand. Bourgeois universalism, devoid of any proper content, absorbs the common sense of the subalterns and re-organizes its meaning. In this way bourgeois power incorporates the utopian energy of popular religious universalism, rendering it functional to its own expansion . . .

(Frosini: in this volume p. 183)

This long quote is necessary to make sense of the concluding remarks reached by Frosini, which do not solely look to the past, but are projected to the future,

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since the subaltern perspective – borne out of this ‘incorporation of the religious discourse of the people’ – offers a struggle for resistance by disrupting bourgeois values from within and pointing towards ‘universal liberation’, simply because both ‘people’ and ‘democracy’ ‘are already present in the religious representa-tions that support the struggle of resistance by the subalterns’. Lack of space here prevents me from providing a pertinent connection between these conclu-sions and the perspective offered by those authors who have underlined Ambed-kar’s struggle to re- appropriate the religious discourse, including religious myths, by which the Dalits can affirm their humanity. Indeed, Ambedkar’s experience provides an outstanding example of ‘re- inversion of political- religious perspectives’ in which religion not only ceases to provide the justifying reason for the subjugation of subaltern Dalits by high- castes, but becomes the drive for subverting the status quo and asserting an affirmative Dalits’ conscious-ness as a ‘cry of passionate urgency’. Derek Boothman in Chapter 13 concentrates on one specific aspect – namely the role of religious intellectuals and their relation to subalterns – by retracing in Gramsci’s writings the historical development of this role, in particular within the Catholic Church. The conclusions reached by Boothman are already present in the initial quote from the Notebooks: the analysis of the role of Cath-olic intellectuals becomes a research methodology to assert the presence in every type of society of different kinds of intellectuals (‘traditional’ or ‘organic’) as ‘articulators’ of various, contrasting ideologies and hence becom-ing the mouthpiece both of subaltern or hegemonic groups and classes. Beyond the Italian Catholic example, ‘intellectuals emerge as key groupings in all forms of society’ and they ‘are never neutral but play an essential role either in binding together a society or societies or, alternatively, creating the premises for a scission within them’. Boothman reaches these conclusions through a presentation of various histor-ical phases, from the early Greek period (‘the authors of the utopias’) and primi-tive Christianity, where intellectuals cared for the ‘subaltern strata’, but later becoming ‘traditional intellectuals’ in post- imperial societies, following the Edict of Milan: ‘ecclesia’ ceased to mean ‘community’ and became identified with ‘the church as an institution’. The development of early desert monasticism provided also ‘organic intellectuals’, with monks being invited to become leaders and bishops of urban communities, but soon becoming ‘a burden on the economic life of societies’, until the advent of Benedictine reform with a wider division of labour within monasteries. The period of Feudalism was marked, according to Gramsci, by ‘a progressive detachment from the people’ and ‘a fracture between the people and the intellectuals’, marked by a linguistic dicho-tomy, particularly during the Renaissance and the defeat of the Communes: the use of Latin by clergy/intellectuals and vernacular by the people. Protestantism, on the other hand, through vulgarization and ‘translation’ of the doctrine into popular language, gave rise to ‘a vast national- popular movement’, providing Gramsci with a model for a secular ‘intellectual and moral reform’ following the example of the Protestant Reformation.


During his own time, Gramsci made a distinction between the clergy in Northern Italy, originating mainly from among artisans and peasants, and the Southern clergy ‘bound up with the gentry . . . themselves oppressive landown-ers, even usurers’, and detached from subaltern groups. This period was also characterized by Modernism giving rise to parties and movements (Christian Democracy and Popular Party, 1919–26) within the Church, tending ‘to bring the church back towards the popular classes’. Another relevant movement ana-lysed by Gramsci is Catholic Action, operating in many different countries and representing the involvement of the laity in social spheres, including politics. Gramsci saw this movement as recognition by the Church that, having lost ideo-logical supremacy, it needed a ‘party’ to put forward its own agenda. As a con-sequence, Boothman rightly points out, ‘the laity within the church is subaltern to the priestly intellectuals, who in turn are subaltern to other, external, forces’. Relevant of note was at this time the presence of ‘leftist’ leaders among Catholic movements and parties and their collaboration with the Italian Communist Party, a tendency which continued long after the Second World War. Boothman high-lights also the role of ‘religious’ intellectuals in other settings such as India, the Islamic world and the United States, where Calvinism had become ‘a lay reli-gion, the religion of the Rotary Club’, and the ‘fragmentation’ of religion with ‘around two hundred different sects’. Gramsci noted also the development among American intelligentsia of literature and cinema ‘as a means of forming and exerting cultural, and indirectly possibly political, hegemony, i.e. of aiding the subaltern strata to find their voice’ (Boothman: in this volume p. 195).13

In the final chapter of Part V and of the whole work, Bradley and Bhatewara provide an analysis of field research carried out in Pune among Buddhist Dalits, thus offering a ‘testing ground’ for the preceding chapters, exemplified by this specific group. What clearly transpires from this chapter is the strong influence of Ambedkarite Buddhism, based on active political commitment for social action and justice, motivating these Dalits to erase caste and promote social change. Conversion to Buddhism in itself is only the first step towards a more radical commitment: Dalits themselves seem to be aware that it is not enough to refuse Untouchability so as not to be considered Untouchables by the rest of society. They do recognize the novelty of a diverse self- perception according to which they refuse Untouchability, even when having to endure its persistence, and reflected in their chosen name, Dalits. This seems indeed to be a clear example of Gramsci’s observation that, ‘Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up’ (Q15§10; SPN: 244). Until ‘permanent victory’ is achieved, they still wish to be recognized as Dalits, and hence to adhere to a sociopolitical and secular soteriology. However, Bradley and Bhatewara are very critical of the situation, and despite the achieve-ments gained in many aspects of life, from education to development – including the Dalits’ shrewdness to play the ‘donor/aid game’ – there remains in the group ‘a crisis of leadership’, represented by ‘a continuous reliance on figurehead . . . counter to the objective of the Dalit struggle that stresses social equality’, and ‘the symbolic image of male authority [that] limits the life expectations and

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ambitions of women’. This seems to recall the difficulties experienced by Ambedkar with regard to the agency of the law and the constitutional state, and his hope of finding a solution in Buddhism. However, while Buddhism for him was a point of arrival, at the end of his life, these Dalit groups seem rather to take Buddhism as a starting point and to reorient it towards the initial goals pros-pected by Ambedkar.

Notes 1 A comprehensive ‘Chronology’ for Gramsci can be found in Buttigieg (1992a [PN1]).

An outline of Ambedkar’s ‘Life- Sketch’ and ‘Works’ is available in Rodrigues (2002, especially 6–17).

2 See the entries: ‘classe’, ‘coscienza’, ‘individuo’, ‘individualismo’, ‘persona’, and related entries in Liguori and Voza (2009).

3 Spivak in particular, despite mentioning both Baratta and Buttigieg, seems more pre-occupied with putting forward her own alternative concept of ‘subalternity’ rather than confronting her experience with a Gramscian stance. In her interview, she hardly replies to the pertinent questions of the interviewer and, at times, ‘forgets’ the main, central point contained in the question: e.g. ‘Does your experience allow you to rethink the Gramscian notion of the “organic intellectual”?’ (Spivak 2012: 229).

4 ‘The epithet of “liberation theology” to Ambedkar’s work comes out of genuine, valu-able scholarship from the 1990s (Bellwinkel- Schempp 2003; Contursi 1993; Queen and King 1996), but ironically has served to help continue to exclude BHD [The Buddha and his Dhamma] from academic consideration at premier institutions in India’ (Singh Rathore and Verma 2011: xiii).

5 Wagner (2012: 99), through various case studies, provides evidence that ‘performing silences could resist oppression without assuming an underlying well- articulated sub-jectivity’, while enhancing ‘the force of silence, its conditions of possibility, and its position with respect to representation’. See also Capuzzo and Mezzadra (2012) on the silencing of Gramsci’s work to serve PCI plans in Italy.

6 ‘[Ambedkar] intended to reconstruct Buddhism not only as a religion for the untouch-ables but as a humanist and social religion, which combined scientific understanding with universal truth’ (Bellwinkel- Schempp 2004: 234).

7 ‘His Buddhism projected a religion for a modern, civic society’ (Fuchs 2001: 250–73); ‘Ambedkar’s importance clearly transcends the Dalit issue – he intended to reconstruct human society’ (Beltz 2004a: 4).

8 Pubblico Ministero, Michele Isgrò, when delivering the prison sentence to Gramsci, said: ‘We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years . . .’ (‘Per vent’anni dobbiamo impedire a questo cervello di funzionare’ – Il P.M. nella requisi-toria del processo contro Antonio Gramsci, Roma, 2 giugno 1928).

9 My thanks to Fabio Frosini for his contribution in reaching this partial synopsis.10 See: www.fondazionegramsci.org/5_gramsci/ag_bibliogramsci.htm.11 From the speech of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, 2 March 1930, at the Kala Ram Mandir, in

Nashik (Maharashtra), in the presence of 15,000 Dalits ([1930a] BAWS 17 (1): 181–2).12 See note 11.13 A recent study examines how the Catholic Church during the 1930s in the USA

sought to influence film production and censorship, through Catholics in position of influence in Hollywood (McGregor 2012).

http://www.fondazionegramsci.org/5_gramsci/ag_bibliogramsci.htm

Part I

The emergence of subaltern/Dalit subjectivity and historical agency

2 Subaltern social groups in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

Joseph A. Buttigieg

In his pre- prison writings and letters, as well as on certain occasions in the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci uses the terms ‘subaltern’ and ‘subalternity’, either in their most obvious sense or in a relatively uncomplicated (though not always con-ventional) figurative manner.1 These cases merit attention insofar as they might clarify some important Gramscian idea or amplify our understanding of his way of thinking – as, for example, in Notebook 1 where he draws an analogy between certain types of intellectuals and ‘subaltern officers in the army’ (Q1§43; PN1: 133). Such instances, however, are distinguishable from and not to be conflated with those moments in the Prison Notebooks that mark the emergence and gradual elaboration of the basic lineaments of an original theory concerning various aspects of the relations between the dominant classes and subordinated social groups in political as well as in civil society. The essential elements of this theory are laid out, albeit sketchily and unsystematically, in one of the later and shorter thematic notebooks – specifically, Notebook 25 – under the general heading ‘On the margins of history (history of subaltern social groups)’. In Notebook 25, Gramsci reproduces and consolidates, with some amplifica-tions, thirteen notes from Notebooks 1 and 3, all of them composed in 1930, and one note from Notebook 9, written in 1932. It is the only thematic notebook on a subject that does not appear among the ‘main topics’ on the first page of Notebook 1 or the ‘principal essays’ and ‘groupings of subjects’ listed in Notebook 8. Since the last of these three lists was drafted in the spring of 1932, it appears that Gramsci recognized the importance of studying the specific character-istics of subalternity within the political and social order rather late in the course of composing his notebooks. Several other notes, besides the ones assembled in Note-book 25, are pertinent to Gramsci’s treatment of subaltern social groups (or classes, as he calls them in the earlier notebooks), including some that deal with closely related issues such as the detachment of Italian intellectuals from the people, education reform, common sense, folklore, and representations of the ‘humble’ in literary works. In a particular instance, the connection is explicitly pointed out by Gramsci himself. A note on Alessandro Manzoni’s portrayal of characters of humble birth in The Betrothed concludes with the observation that the novelist’s treatment of subalterns, ignored in historiography, should be included in the cluster of notes devoted to the ‘history of subaltern classes’ (Q14§39; SCW: 294).

36 J.A. Buttigieg

It is futile to search for or attempt to formulate a precise definition of ‘sub-altern’ or ‘subaltern social groups/classes’ as conceived by Gramsci: he does not regard them as a single, much less a homogenous, entity. It is precisely why he always refers to them in the plural. The category of ‘subaltern social groups/classes’ encompasses many other components of society besides the ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat’. Gramsci does not employ ‘subalterns’ as a substitute or a cipher for ‘proletariat’, whether to evade the prison censor or for some other reason. It is likely, however, that the change to ‘groups’ in Notebook 25 from ‘classes’ in the original versions of the same notes reflects Gramsci’s increasingly cautious attitude toward the surveillance apparatus in the Formia clinic to which, still a prisoner, he was transferred from the prison at Turi di Bari in November 1933. A distinguishing characteristic that Gramsci identifies in subalterns and subaltern groups is their fragmentation. Not only are there multiple subaltern social classes or groups, but they are also disconnected and quite different from one another. While some of them may have achieved a significant level of organization, others might lack all cohesion, and within the groups them-selves there exist various degrees of subalternity and marginality. A look at past revolutions, Gramsci points out, would reveal that ‘various subaltern classes took part and were ranked according to their economic position and homogeneity’ (Q3§48; PN2: 52). The disjointedness of the subaltern strata of society was a preoccupation of Gramsci’s since his days as a journalist and party leader. In ‘Some aspects of the Southern Question’, the last major essay he wrote prior to his arrest, Gramsci described the Italian South as ‘a great social disintegration’ with a large, amorphous and inchoate mass of peasants (Gramsci 1978 [1930]: 454). Lack of cohesion and organization renders the subalterns politically impotent; ‘incapable of giving a centralized expression to their aspirations and needs’ (Gramsci 1978 [1930]: 454), their rebellions are doomed to failure. To be sure, the revolutionary actions of the well- organized factory councils in Turin that Gramsci helped establish and guide also resulted in defeat, but he attributed that failure to the divisions fomented among the industrial working class by the promoters of corporate reformism. In his essay on the Southern Question, Gramsci does not use the term ‘subaltern(s)’, but in it he provides a concrete illustration ante litteram of his observations in the note on ‘Methodological criteria’ (originally titled ‘History of the dominant class and history of the subaltern classes’) in Notebook 25:

The history of the subaltern classes is necessarily fragmented and episodic; in the activity of these classes there is, undoubtedly, a tendency towards unification, albeit in provisional stages. This tendency, however, is continu-ously broken up by the actions of the dominant groups. . . . Subaltern groups are always subject to the initiative of the dominant groups, even when they rise up and rebel.

(Q25§2; SPN: 54–5)

Subaltern social groups in the Prison Notebooks 37

The outward expression of the subalterns’ discontent with their exploitation, impoverishment and marginalization often takes the form of spontaneous rebellion. Spontaneity, by itself, is not only ineffectual but counterproductive. Gramsci explains the negative effects of ‘so- called “spontaneous” movements’ in a note on ‘Spontaneity and conscious leadership’ (not included in Notebook 25):

It almost always the case that a ‘spontaneous’ movement of the subaltern classes is matched by a reactionary movement of the right wing of the dominant class, for concomitant reasons: an economic crisis, for example, produces, on the one hand, discontent among the subaltern classes and spon-taneous mass movements and, on the other, conspiracies by reactionary groups, who take advantage of the objective enfeeblement of the govern-ment to attempt coups d’état.

(Q3§48; PN2: 52; SPN: 199)

This does not mean, though, that the spontaneous feelings of the subaltern classes should be ignored, much less repudiated; rather, Gramsci maintains, spontaneity needs to be harnessed by and integrated with conscious leadership. This is the task of the political party or formation that struggles for hegemony alongside the subalterns – a party, furthermore, that aims at the unity of theory and practice. Gramsci recalls how ‘this element of “spontaneity” was not neglected, much less disdained’ by the Turin workers’ movement associated with the Ordine Nuovo, the paper that he helped launch and edited; on the con-trary, ‘it was educated, it was given a direction, it was cleansed of everything extraneous that could contaminate it, in order to unify it by means of modern theory [i.e., Marxism] but in a living, historically effective manner’. This unity of spontaneity and conscious leadership, Gramsci goes on to explain, ‘is pre-cisely the real political action of the subaltern classes, insofar as it is mass pol-itics and not a mere adventure by groups that appeal to the masses’ (Q3§48; PN2: 50, 51; SPN: 198). The core issue for Gramsci – not only in his notes on the subalterns, but also in countless other pages of the Prison Notebooks, including many of those devoted to his reflections on philosophy, the modern prince, and the intellectuals – is how to bring an end to subalternity, that is, to the subordination of the majority by a minority. Obviously, this cannot be achieved as long as ‘subaltern groups are subject to the initiative of the dominant groups’. The condition of subalternity can only be overcome through the attainment of autonomy and that, according to Gramsci, can only come about through a lengthy process and a complicated struggle. In order to engage in a successful struggle against the existing power structure, it is necessary, first of all, to understand precisely what makes it so resilient and durable. The dominant classes in modern states do not hold on to power solely, or even primarily, because they control the coercive apparatuses of the government. As Gramsci explains in one of the most quoted passages of the Prison Notebooks, the modern state is buttressed by ‘a succes-sion of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’ – i.e., civil society (Q7§17; PN3:

38 J.A. Buttigieg

169). In the modern liberal democratic state, the governing class does not – and, certainly, does not want to appear to – have exclusive or absolute control over civil society; if it did, it would not be able to claim that it governs with the freely given consent of the people. What it has, instead, is a formidable array of institu-tional and cultural mechanisms that enable it directly and indirectly to dissemi-nate its worldview, inculcate its values, and mold public opinion. Gramsci calls this ‘the ideological structure of a dominant class, namely the material organiza-tion meant to preserve, defend, and develop the theoretical or ideological “front” ’ (Q3§49; PN2: 52; FSPN: 155–6). To be effective, then, the struggle against the configuration of power that per-petuates subalternity needs to be directed against this ideological front; hence, the proper strategy is not a frontal attack against the seat of power (the toppling of which alone does not result in fundamental change) but a ‘war of position’ on the terrain of civil society. In light of this, Gramsci poses the following question: ‘What can an innovative class set against the formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the dominant class?’ His answer: ‘The spirit of cleavage, that is, the progressive acquisition of one’s historical identity, a spirit of cleavage that must aim to extend itself from the protagonist class to the classes that are its potential allies’ (Q3§49; PN2: 53; FSPN: 156). The innovative, progressive class to which Gramsci refers in this passage is the organized industrialized working class, itself a subaltern group, but one that emerged out of the most advanced structure of capi-talist production. As Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, one of the unintended effects of industrial modernization and capitalist competition is to intensify the forging of ties among workers. The best- organized workers’ association or party, the one that has achieved the highest degree of autonomy from the dominant social groups, is best- positioned to assume the leading role in the struggle for hegemony. This, of course, is the kind of party Gramsci undertook to construct, first through his work within the Ordine Nuovo group and subsequently as a co- founder and leading member of the Italian Communist Party. His convic-tion that the necessary first stage in the struggle against subordination is the pro-gressive acquisition of awareness of one’s historical identity motivated much of his political activity. It is a conviction that he articulated forcefully and with great clarity in ‘Socialism and culture’, an article he published in Il Grido del Popolo in 1916, when he was only 25 years old. Some of the phrases he employs in the article are almost identical to the ones he uses in the Prison Notebooks. ‘Socialism and culture’ merits reading alongside the notes on the subalterns in the notebooks, not so much because it foreshadows the ideas expressed in them but because in some important respects it helps elucidate them. Socialist culture, Gramsci writes in his article, is

a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obli-gations. But none of this can come about through spontaneous evolution.

(Gramsci 1977 [1916]: 11)


Pursuing a decidedly Vichian interpretation of history, Gramsci goes on to explain how through the gradual growth of a consciousness of their own value, humans gained independence from the laws and social hierarchies imposed by minorities in previous historical periods.2 Furthermore, this development of con-sciousness does not come about as an imposition by some law of psychological necessity but as a result of intelligent reflection on the prevailing conditions and on how to transform them advantageously. Gramsci draws an important lesson that can be read as a succinct expression of the political program that gave shape to his life’s work:

This means that every revolution has been preceded by an intense labor of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses of men who are at first resistant, and think only of solving their own imme-diate economic and political problems for themselves, who have no ties of solidarity with others in the same condition.

(Gramsci 1977 [1916]: 12)

Revolutions do not occur spontaneously, Gramsci never tired of repeating, nor are they the inevitable consequence of immutable economic or other laws. (The many pages in the Prison Notebooks devoted to the critique of Bukharin are motivated by the impulse to eliminate the notion that subalterns will be liberated from their misery by the unstoppable march of history.) Revolutions are con-sciously prepared and made by humans who, having gained a deep awareness of their value and worked hard at cultural transformation, succeed in organizing fellow humans and inculcating in them the same ideas and values so that they can establish a new social order. In ‘Socialism and culture’, Gramsci illustrates this process by reference to the successful bourgeois revolution: the French Revolution. The Enlightenment brought about a unified consciousness – ‘a bour-geois spiritual international’, Gramsci calls it, citing Francesco De Sanctis – which prepared the way for the final acquisition of power.

The bayonets of Napoleon’s armies found their road already smoothed by an invisible army of books and pamphlets that had swarmed out of Paris from the first half of the eighteenth century and had prepared both men and institutions for the necessary renewal.

(Gramsci 1977 [1916]: 12)

Gramsci’s account of the French Revolution is meant to serve as an illustration of the path that the proletarian party needs to follow; i.e., to give priority to dis-seminating its own worldview and transforming the way people regard them-selves and interpret their world. One indication out of many that Gramsci was still thinking along the same lines when composing the notebooks is his numer-ous notes on the kind of journalism and publishing initiatives that were needed to enable the party to reach the widest possible readership among the popular classes.

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In Notebook 25, Gramsci proposes a study of the ‘the innovative forces that led the Risorgimento in Italy’ in order to understand the process by which ‘innovative forces’ that were at first ‘subaltern groups’ succeeded in becoming ‘the ruling and dominant groups’ (Q25§5). Of particular interest to Gramsci are the

phases through which [the innovative forces] acquired autonomy from the enemies they had to defeat and the phases through which they acquired the support of those groups that actively or passively helped them; the entire process was historically necessary for them to become consolidated into a State.

(Q25§5; SPN: 53)

The copious notes that Gramsci composed on the Risorgimento in other parts of the notebooks constitute, in fact, the groundwork for this historiographical project. One note is especially pertinent. It appears very early in the first note-book and is entitled ‘Political class leadership before and after assuming govern-ment power’ (Q1§44; PN1: 136–51); it is also the starting point of Gramsci’s development of his distinctive concept of hegemony. Why, he asks, were the Moderates in a position to come to power after the Risorgimento and what were the causes of the Action Party’s failure? He arrives at four conclusions in par-ticular that, as one can readily see, constitute the nucleus of his thinking on the cultural- political strategy that his party had to adopt if it were to lead success-fully all subaltern social groups in the struggle for hegemony: (a) the Moderates were organically linked to the class they represented and were its intellectual avant- garde; (b) even before they acquired government power, the Moderates had achieved ‘political hegemony’ by establishing themselves as the leaders of the allied classes and attracting to them other intellectuals from different strata in the camps of education and administration: they achieved this on the terrain of civil society; (c) the Action Party failed to establish organic links with the social groups it putatively represented and, in fact, ‘did not found itself specifically upon any historical class’ (Q1§44; PN1: 136), nor did it satisfactorily articulate the aspirations of the popular masses and, especially, of the peasantry; (d) far from assuming a position of leadership, the ‘oscillations that [the Action Party’s] leading organs underwent resolved themselves, in the final analysis, according to the interests of the Moderates’ (Q1§44; PN1: 136) –which is another way of saying that the Action Party lacked ‘the spirit of cleavage’ and, in this respect, resembled subaltern groups that remain ‘subject to the initiative of the dominant groups’. The program of research on the history of subaltern classes that Gramsci out-lines in Notebook 25 is by no means limited to the study of those groups and classes that emerged out of subalternity and became hegemonic. He is also inter-ested in the history of subaltern struggles from antiquity to the present. History, however, is written from the viewpoint of the victors, which is why the historical archive does not readily yield reliable information on the topic; the history of


subaltern social groups, one might say, is a subaltern form of historiography. Hence, Gramsci writes, ‘Every trace of autonomous initiative by subaltern groups should be of inestimable value to the integral historian’ (Q25§2; SPN: 55). The notebook contains three notes that pertain to this aspect of the history of subaltern groups: one on David Lazzaretti; another on the ‘development of subaltern social groups in the Middle Ages and in Rome’ which, among other things, deals with the rise of the popular classes in the medieval communes on which Gramsci also wrote elsewhere in the Prison Notebooks; and a third, on utopias and philosophical novels which, in Gramsci’s view, indirectly and unin-tentionally reflect ‘the deepest and most basic aspirations of subaltern social groups’ (Q25§7; SCW: 238). The note on Lazzaretti, which Gramsci places first in this thematic notebook, brings into relief most directly one of Gramsci’s central theses: the dominant culture marginalizes subaltern social groups by erasing the political and historical significance of their thoughts and actions.3 At the very beginning of the note, Gramsci alludes to two works on the leader of the Lazzarettist movement – Andrea Verga’s Davide Lazzaretti e la pazzia sensoria (David Lazaretti and Sensory Madness) and Cesare Lombroso’s Pazzi e anor-mali (The Mad and the Abnormal) – and then makes the following observation:

This was the cultural custom of the time: instead of studying the origins of a collective event, the reasons why it spread, and its collective character, they isolated the protagonist and focused solely on producing his pathological biography, all too often making assumptions about motives that had not been ascertained or that could be interpreted differently. In the eyes of the social elite, components of subaltern social groups always have something barbaric or pathological about them.

(Q25§1; FSPN: 50)

The explanations of the social elite and its intellectuals have a double effect: they conceal the roots and the seriousness of the general social, economic, and political malaise of which the rebellions and uprisings of subaltern groups are an expression, and they consign the subalterns themselves to the periphery of culture and politics by classifying them as bizarre, unbalanced, atypical – mere curiosities. Herein lies one of Gramsci’s most significant insights: one of the greatest difficulties that subaltern social groups face in challenging the prevail-ing hegemony is finding a way past the barriers that prevent them from being heard.

Notes1 This essay is a slightly modified English version of the paper ‘Subalterno, subalterni’,

in G. Liguori and P. Voza (eds), Dizionario gramsciano, Rome: Carocci, 2009, pp. 826–30. All translations from the Italian original of the Prison Notebooks are mine.

2 In the third paragraph of ‘Socialism and culture’, Gramsci paraphrases a section of The New Science in which Giambattista Vico traces the emergence of democracy back to Solon, who enjoined

42 J.A. Buttigiegthe plebeians, who believed themselves to be of bestial origins and the nobility to be of divine origin, to reflect on themselves and see that they had the same human nature as the nobles and hence should claim to be their equals in civil law.

(Gramsci 1977 [1916]: 10)

Gramsci had made a similar point even earlier in an essay, ‘Oppressed and oppressors’, he wrote while still in secondary school:

The French revolution abolished many privileges, and raised up many of the oppressed; but all it did was replace one class in power by another. Yet it did teach us one great lesson: social privileges and differences, being the products of society and not of nature, can be overcome.

(Gramsci 1977 [1916]: 5)

3 David Lazzaretti, the leader of a millenarian movement, convinced himself and his numerous disciples that he was the messiah who would establish the Republic of God. The peaceful Lazzaretti and some of his followers were shot dead, and several others wounded, in a confrontation provoked by the carabinieri in 1878. The persecution of the Lazzarettists did not end with the killing of their leader. As Eric Hobsbawm explains:

His leading apostles and Levites were tried and sentenced, the court attempting vainly to prove that they had hoped to sack the houses of the rich or to make a worldly revolution. But of course they had not. They were setting up the Republic of God.

(Hobsbawm 1965: 70)

3 Revisiting interwar thoughtStigma, labor, and the immanence of caste- class

Anupama Rao

This essay is concerned with the reach, applicability, and appropriateness of the term ‘subaltern’ – and the Gramscian legacy with which it is associated – to tra-jectories of Dalit, or outcaste subject formation, and practices of Dalit critique. What conceptual impasse is generated when we think of the Dalit, rather than the peasant, or the semi- proletariat as the figure of subalternity, and the subject- position from which critique is enunciated? What is the relationship between thought about subalternity and its thinkers? Might caste subalternity, defined by a complex combination of inhabiting and desiring the annihilation of stigma require its own distinctive practices of conceptual engagement? Caste poses a peculiar set of problems. Its ‘provincialization’ into a form of cultural exceptionalism has allowed both European theory and South Asian history/anthropology to ignore histories of anticaste thought. The former tends to address caste as a form of nonpolitical difference, while South Asia scholarship has typically localized (and thus parochialized) caste critique: their combined effect is to reproduce caste as subcontinental ‘difference’, and to foreclose atten-tion to powerful efforts at caste annihilation. B.R. Ambedkar made two important points in this regard. He argued that, ‘There will be outcastes as long as there are castes’ ([1933] BAWS 17 (1): 230), thus emphasizing the necessity of the negated element in constituting the domain of the social. Elsewhere he would argue that the annihilation of caste required the aboli-tion of Hinduism. Taken together, these statements predicate the birth of Hindu social order on the principle of Untouchability as what gives ‘caste’ its coherence as system and structure, while the historical violence of ritual outcasting marks the Untouchable as being within and without the order of caste signification. It is thus unsurprising, perhaps, to assert that the birth of the Indian political coincides with the outcaste’s struggle to enter the regime of political value and social recognition. In Ambedkar’s hands the outcaste became the Dalit, a subject identified as ‘ground down’, ‘broken’, and ‘crushed’, and the figure through whom India was to be humanized by the practice of Buddhist civility. Indeed, ‘Dalit becoming’ was corre-lated with the birth of subcontinental politics more generally, while the complex immediacy of Dalit dispossession was addressed through a range of remedial meas-ures: inclusion, political separation, religious conversion, emancipation through political citizenship, cultural alterity, and state protection of minority rights.

44 A. Rao

Ambedkar thus inaugurates a way of thinking for which he is both figure and ground.1 He is an ‘epistemic individual’ around whom are constellated forms of thought that precede and exceed him. How are we to address this Dalit thinker of (Dalit) universality when confronted with an elision of his centrality to the corpus of Indian political thought? How should we relate to this theorist of the annihilation of caste, when his activism is either preordained Dalit, or when Ambedkar’s remarkable engagements with (global) histories of dehumanization are ignored because they are incommensurable with the nationalization of crit-ical thought? What new adjacencies between ‘Dalit’ and ‘subaltern’ are possible if we recall that Ambedkar and Gramsci were each interested in this quality of a ‘negative’ consciousness, and the power of the negated or incomplete political subject as historical actor? The relationship between historical context and the capacity of concepts to transcend spatiotemporal location (and social class) is a persistent problem in the history of ideas more generally. We can distinguish two major ways in which the issue has been addressed. The first is that strand of conceptual history typically associated with the work of Rheinhart Koselleck, who focuses on how institu-tions and practices shape the horizon of expectations of concepts themselves. This position assumes the nonsynchronicity of thought: that is, it associates the totality of concepts with the co- presence of multiple (if unevenly distributed) temporalities in a given historical period. For this reason concepts – though they are universal (and transhistorical) – can only be apprehended retroactively. The other strand comes from Anglo- American traditions of studying the history of political thought by relating the emergence of new conceptual vocabularies with their legitimating contexts and with a theory of linguistic performativity (see, for example, Kosseleck 2002; Tully 1988). To this we might add Jacques Ranciere’s longstanding work on ‘intellectual emancipation’, which brings to the preoccu-pation with historicizing ideas an abiding interest in the question of what might be termed ‘subaltern thought’: subaltern thought not as an exception in the history of ideas, but as that process by which the dispossessed and the disenfran-chised lay claim to the universal. For this reason Ranciere has consistently emphasized the need to separate ‘orders of thought’ from ‘social order’ to avoid both a sociological conception of ‘the social’, which associates thought with social location and identity and the turn to periodization to explain conceptual transformations. Ranciere’s interest in subaltern universality offers a point of comparison with an important text, which articulated an explicit challenge to European political and intellectual history: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. Chakra-barty’s concern in this text was not with the systematicity and internal consist-ency of subaltern thought so much as its obverse; with (antihistoricist) forms of life and apparently anachronistic survivals whose very existence challenged the violence of European reason. However, Chakrabarty’s injunction to ‘put thought in its place’ was predicted on two points that are often overlooked. The first is his sophisticated understanding of the impossible (yet necessary) project of taking down the geohistorical universality of European thought. Even more

Revisiting interwar thought 45

significant, however, was the observation that a renewed engagement with the universal would have to emerge from Europe’s margin. I take up the spirit of this last remark to argue that unlike the term ‘subaltern’, which was imported into South Asian critique to name varying relations of domination and subordi-nation, we might more fruitfully engage the specific geohistories of ‘Dalit’, a concept that emerges in subcontinental history but whose claim on the political universal outlines a rather different relationship to the project of provincializing Europe. Indeed, it is around the project of ‘provincializing Europe’ that one might also turn to the renewed exploration of something like a Gramscian affinity with Ambedkarite praxis. That is, I am explicitly rejecting the necessity of under-taking an exploration of the emergence and decline of the figure of Gramsci for the project of Subaltern Studies as the way to mark the expansion, or ‘stretching’ of the concept of subalternity. Nor do I believe that the colonial and proto- colonial contexts of India and Italy, respectively, provided a unique historical context for comparison, as postcolonial readings of Gramsci’s ‘Southern Ques-tion’ have tended to assume.2 This essay brackets the necessary detour through Subaltern Studies as the most relevant paradigm for apprehending the vicissi-tudes of Indian Gramsci. Rather, I suggest that it is in the critique of ‘Europe’ – and Europe’s subsequent provincialization of Marx – that we might most usefully find affinities between Gramsci and Ambedkar. The terms ‘subaltern’ and ‘Dalit’ thus also provide the occasion to address the contingency of the polit-ical in contrast to a politics predicated on the assumptions of labor universalism. These practices of naming also function as political performatives: they conjure up or produce the social realities (and political identities) they purport to describe. My point of entry into this volume’s invitation to think creatively about the affinities between B.R. Ambedkar and Antonio Gramsci consists of the follow-ing: I allow the example of Gramsci’s creative engagement with, and enlarge-ment of, Marxist praxis to guide an analysis of the genealogies of Dalit Marxism in western India which formed around the problem of understanding the neces-sarily entangled, yet simultaneously incommensurable, experiences of caste and class. Ambedkar’s engagements with Marx and Marxism were fraught and con-tentious, and they have remained an unresolved issue for those interested in the itineraries of his thought. The critique of labor exploitation, predicated on the universality of ‘labor’ as salient political antagonism, had an important role in organizing interwar political discourse, including in enabling anticaste critique. Ironically, if not unexpectedly, narratives of class enabled their opposite, a more complex representation of the ‘difference’ of caste. Ambedkar took recourse to terms such as class and labor (as well as race and minority) in the struggle to specify caste (and Untouchability) as a peculiar kind of body history and to address its complex and elusive forms of dehumanization but always in the interest of distinguishing the social experience of those untouched, and cast out. My argument proceeds by exploring how critiques of labor essentialism arose contiguously with the availability of labor as political subjectivity. Ambedkar

46 A. Rao

and Gramsci are central to this account, albeit in distinctive ways that require both ‘close’ and ‘far’ readings of interwar Marxist thought. Roberto Dainotto’s exciting discovery of Gramsci’s discussion of caste (and/as intellectual labor) in this volume – and his argument regarding the ‘reciprocal translatability’ between East and West in Gramsci’s work – parallels my own arguments here with regard to the importance of interwar European thought and history in Ambedkar’s efforts to locate the Dalit in a global history of dehumanization.

The influence of Marx and the event of laborHow to address the question of ‘influence’? What evidence do we have of the associational forms and practices of public and political culture that produced Marathi Marx and Dalit Marxism? These provide a glimpse into the mobile itin-eraries and the creative transformations of Marxist internationalism as it traveled east, and set the stage for exploring the conceptual engagement of stigma with labor. Further, the radical equality conceived through labor universality requires strategies of ‘far reading’, briefly considered here, as much as it does the close readings of Ambedkar’s own text. The point is not to reproduce the social histor-ians’ desire for context, but, rather, to emphasize incommensurability across dif-ferent orders of abstraction (and translation) as formative in the social life of concepts. (1) Ambedkar’s interwar engagements with the Communists were fractious.3 This struggle carried over into postcolonial Dalit politics in Maharashtra as it tried to maneuver between a Congress Party controlled by dominant caste Mar-athas; the Communists, who stigmatized Dalit politics as a politics of identity and upward mobility because they saw in Ambedkar’s success a danger to their own constituency; and, by 1966, the rise of the Shiv Sena, defined by a ‘sons of the soil’ ideology, and among whose early recruits had been Dalit youth from the ‘slums’ of north- central Bombay.4 However, the origins of a social history of caste- class take us back to the formation of the Independent Labour Party on 15 August 1936, during the period described by Gail Omvedt as the ‘years of radicalism’. The election manifesto of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) noted that ‘The word Labour was used instead of the words Depressed Classes because labour includes the Depressed Classes as well’ (Independent Labour Party 1936: n.p.; see also 1937). The Party advocated state management and ownership of indus-try and supported credit and cooperative societies, tax reforms to reduce the burden on agricultural and industrial labor, and free and compulsory education. A workers’ union of the Bombay municipality, the Mumbai Kamgar Sangh, was formed in 1935, and efforts were also made to organize dockyard workers and railway workers in 1948. Like connected efforts at land reform and abolition of hereditary privileges in the countryside, these organizational efforts sought to forefront caste as a crucial factor for the working- class movement. Relations with the Communist leadership in Bombay were always fragile, however. Ambedkar threatened to break Bombay’s historic mill strike of 1928


unless Untouchables were employed in all departments, a demand to which the Communists reluctantly agreed. The 1929 textile mill strike saw Ambedkar encouraging Dalit workers to return to work to avoid boycott and discrimination by powerful moneylenders.5 Communists’ entry into the nationalist movement – some Communists joined the Socialist Party in 1934, and the Socialists were folded into the dominant Congress in 1937 – further diluted regional alliances and foreclosed common economic programs. The exclusion of the Scheduled Caste Federation from discussions regarding minority rights preceding transfer of power was accompanied by street- fighting between Ambedkarites and Com-munists in Bombay’s working- class neighborhoods such the Matunga Labour Camp, and between Congress and Scheduled Caste Federation supporters during the historic 1945 elections. These hardened political cleavages. The Marx–Ambedkar problematic would be resuscitated with the birth of the Dalit sahitya movement focused on literary and cultural production, and with the formation of the Dalit Panthers, modeled on the Black Panthers of the United States, in 1972. The movement aestheticized politics, and laid claim to a Dalit humanism that ran counter to the labor theory of value and the centrality of the proletariat in Marxist politics. Instead, it was the lumpenproletariat, a collective Marx instinctively feared and decisively derided, which came to be associated with one important strand in postcolonial practices of Dalit civility.6 (2) A social history of the proximity of Dalit and Marxist organizing in western India is predicated on the spatial concentration of Dalit life and labor in central Bombay, an area typically associated with working- class radicalism: it is in this sense that central Bombay was also Dalit Bombay. Ambedkar lived here until he moved to Dadar’s middle- class Hindu Colony, and almost all of his organizational and publishing efforts were localized in the area. The chawls [ten-ements] of the Bombay City Improvement Trust [BCIT], established in 1898 and later the Bombay Development Directorate (1919–26), were important sites of Dalit activism.7 These include: marches and political processions of the Samata Sainik Dal (formed in 1924 by Dalit military pensioners to protect Ambedkar); the first celebration of Ambedkar Jayanti (Ambedkar’s Birthday) on the open grounds of the B.D.D. chawls; study circles organized by Dalit Communists associated with the Delisle Road Friends’ Circle; performances of Ambedkari jalsa, a form of pedagogic folk theater, by the Scheduled Caste Federation (formed in 1942), and the establishment of the offices of the Independent Labour Party and the Municipal Kamgar Sangh (Municipal Workers’ Union) in the area. The Delisle Road B.D.D. chawls were important sites of political activism and carried deep association with an earlier phase of urban Dalit history.8 The localities of Central Mumbai – Byculla, Worli, Naigaon, Agripada, Bombay Central, and Delisle Road – had mobilized Dalits for the Mahad water and temple- entry satyagrahas (1927–35). These areas had seen the growth of early Dalit- led or Dalit- focused associations such as the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (Society for the Amelioration of the Boycotted); the Mahar Samaj Seva Sangh, an early organization of the Mahar Dalit subcaste which had taken up struggles of public access and education; the Depressed Classes Mission, which started

48 A. Rao

separate schools in response to Dalit students’ continued inability to enter mixed government or government- aided schools; and the Bombay Mill Workers’ Union, formed in 1894 by a non- Brahmin leader, N.M. Lokhande. Additionally, the area was home to Non- Conformist missionaries, and the nondenominational Prarthana Samaj (which was modeled on Bengal’s Brahmo Samaj). The Dalit Communist R.B. More began to conduct classes on Marxism and Leninism in this area during the 1930s in the Lal Chawl [Red Tenement] or Building Number 14, with Communist leader S.V. Deshpande, and his comrades Govind Tam-hankar, Baburao Garud, and Bhargav Sonawane (More 2003: 15).9 The Delisle Road Friends’ Circle was thus formed in an area historically associated with anticaste and antipoverty activism, but now focused on drawing Dalit youth into the working- class movement. (3) In the case of print and publication, the standard translation of Capital appeared in Maharashtra in the 1960s, though many were aware of S.V. Desh-pande’s earlier unpublished translation of the text.10 However, Ambedkar’s newspaper, Janata, reprinted translations of ‘Wage, labour, and capital’, trans-lated as ‘Mol mazuri bhandval’, from Communist pamphlets well before this, during the mid- 1930s. Janata also published Soviet social realism in serialized form, especially Gorky’s Mother, which attained iconic status. The relationship also ran vice versa. The Kamgar Vangmay Prasarak Mandali (Organization for the Spread of Workers’ Literature) began to publish Marathi pamphlets in 1931, including a translation of the Communist Manifesto (Communist Jahirnama).11 The aim of the organization was described as providing orthodox (shastrashud-dha) knowledge about workers’ struggle. Members were encouraged to join by paying a rupee, which also entitled them to the Mandali’s publications. The KVPM published on Lenin’s life and the Russian Revolution, as well as the Paris Commune, but there was little direct engagement with India or Indian conditions among its publications.12 It was in and through the act of translating the Manifesto, however, that forms of life, including the political collectivity of caste- class, was addressed. Simply put, class was rendered legible as a new form of political collectivity through association with the social experience of hard-ship by drawing on terms such as kashta (hard work), daridryata (impoverish-ment, destitution), bekaar (unemployed, worthless), bhukekangal (pauperized); and through association with social forms such as the degraded Dalit classes, dalit varga, Pathans (popularly associated with the ‘flesh trade,’ moneylending, extortion, and other parasitical activities that further impoverished working people), and the wild, rowdy mavali, associated with the communities of the hilly Sahyadri mountain range and their traditions of banditry and guerrilla warfare. Each of these was imprecisely identified with class, and constituted something like an excessively dispossessed multitude, visually identifiable rather than class- specifiable. (Indeed, their association with the slum, as slum- dwellers, ran deep.) Yet the power of these forms of life was precisely this: to connote and conjure intimacy with the emergent category of ‘class’.13 ‘Labor’ was thus underspecified and overdescribed: it was an organizational element in union activism, a category on whose behalf the Communist Party spoke, and a key


category of governance and legal regulation shaped by the joint requirements of industrial capital and the resistances of strike action.14

(4) We know, too, that Ambedkar had a lifelong engagement with Marxist thinking. Two brief examples will have to suffice here. His 1916 Columbia essay, ‘Castes in India’ (BAWS 1: 3–22; EW 241–62), describes caste as an ‘enclosed class’, its social reproduction dependent on solving the problem of ‘surplus’ women through the regulation of marriage and the model of sacrificial death, sahamarana (dying with), or sati, commonly translated as ‘widow immolation’. Ambedkar’s interest is in the complex biopol-itics of caste: he argues that caste is reproduced through a dual structure of regu-lation and control. Laws of exogamy manage the incest taboo writ large, because they prohibit marriage with blood kin as well as sagotra, or those who stand in the position of fictive kinship. Caste endogamy is laid over this exogamous structure as a way to manage the availability of women:

Nevertheless, this encircling to prevent marriages from without creates problems from within which are not very easy of solution. . . . In other words, if endogamy is to be preserved conjugal rights from within have to be pro-vided for, otherwise members of the group will be driven out of the circle to take care of themselves in any way they can.

([1916] BAWS 1: 10; EW: 247)

All the women of a caste are available to its men as potential partners in mar-riage and reproduction. Patriarchy regulates the availability of women, and excess or ‘surplus’ women face violent regulation (from the social death of wid-owhood, to the requirement of sati, and the marriage of underage girls). The regulation of (female) sexuality thus functions as the ‘enclosure’ of caste, which gives to castes their social coherence. One could go so far as to argue that the sexuate haunts Ambedkar’s accounting of the social from this first essay, to his final efforts to codify a new Hindu Code around the project of gender equality. Like the figure of the Dalit, the surplus woman is that shadowy, negated pres-ence who fuels the caste machine.15

Ambedkar’s penultimate text, ‘Buddha or Karl Marx’ ([1987a] BAWS 3: 441–62; EW: 173–89) predicates Buddhist enlightenment on ahimsa, nonviolence, and maitreyi, the spirit of friendship. These twin principles structured the Buddhist sangha, with its commitments to asceticism and the voluntary dis-possession of the self. Ambedkar counterposed this to the model of labor- organizing and the discourse of class war, which was predicated on a model of mimetic violence where the victim becomes perpetrator.16 But he also marked Buddhism’s radicality within the Indic tradition, by arguing that Buddhist civil-ity was a historical response to rajadharma, the king’s duty to kill, which had applied to the Buddha himself as leader of the ‘tribal’ Sakyas. Ambedkar’s engagements with Buddhist nonviolence challenged nationalism’s renewed focus on the Gita as an indigenous text of political ethics. Unlike Arjuna of the Gita, whose duty to kill was removed from the domain of individual culpability

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and instead posited as detached conformism to caste ethics, Ambedkar noted the Buddhist kings gave up arms and thus de- casted themselves to bring about a cessation to human suffering. (The most significant historical example of the training up of Buddhist karuna, compassion, is the Mauryan emperor, Ashoka. Ambedkar goes to great pains to emphasize the priority of Ashokan ethics to the text which instantiates genocidal Hinduism in the name of varnadharma, the Gita.) Between the early effort to produce a sociology of caste, and the later writ-ings which return to the place of caste and Untouchability in the India tradition, Ambedkar drew on and distinguished the model of class – as a collectivity formed around shared interest and the experience of exploitation – from the pas-sivity of caste, in his efforts to bring Dalits into bureaucratic visibility as distinc-tive sociopolitical subjects. (Ambedkar uses the term Dalit varga, or Dalit class in his Marathi journalism, though it is the governmental category of the Depressed Classes, which organized his public, political engagements with Con-gress nationalists, and the colonial state.) (5) Finally there is the issue of Eastern Marxism. Sudipta Kaviraj’s essay, ‘Marxism in translation’ (2009), takes up the disjuncture between categories derived from European experience and their application to Indian realities to explain the conundrums faced by the theory (and its practitioners). If these were problems proper to the party, it is also the case that Marxism was thoroughly vernacularized by the time it came to India via its successes in a noncapitalist country (Russia), and earlier still, by its transformation into a critique of imperi-alism via Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and M.N. Roy. Also, Marxist critique was borne across by deeply religious figures ‘keyed to political Islam’, for whom Marxism and Islam offered complementary, rather than competing, ways to understand colonial dehumanization. Thus I would suggest a more expansive interpretation of Marxism, which offered something like an ethical critique of power, and only minimally a critique of labor exploitation in the classical sense. The crucial disjuncture between Marxism as a form of thought, and as the sanc-tioned ideology of the various Communist Parties of the global South must be maintained, if one is to understand the heterogeneous histories of ‘Eastern Marxism’. The excellent, if under- acknowledged Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics (Seth 1995) – which follows the career of Marxist anticolonialism from the Indian Communist Party’s formation in 1925 in the aftermath of the famous Roy–Lenin Comintern debate, to the embarrassment of 1942 when Communists supported Britain during the ‘Quit India’ movement because empire was a bulwark against European fascism – illustrates this point well.17 Seth’s book is concerned with two issues. The first is with how a European idea found its apotheosis in the global South. The second, related question is about how a theory that privileged political universality (not to mention universal history) became territorialized, and mired in debates about particularism and authenticity. Seth notes that Marxism was embraced as a more robust variant of nationalism in its commitment to social equality, self- determination, and territorial sovereignty, making possible a dual


commitment to internationalism and national liberation. In contrast to Partha Chat-terjee’s argument with regard to the bifurcation between the thematic and the prob-lematic in nationalist thought, Seth argues:

In accepting anticolonialism, the difference between national form and class substance was also blurred, so that in form and substance, nationalism was declared nationalist. Thus anticolonialism in this perspective was more than bourgeois- democratic struggle, and socialism would be achieved through that form. Thus did Marxism itself become a form of nationalism, not in practice and due to constraint, but as theory, because it could not maintain the divide between form and substance.

(Seth 1995: 229, emphasis in the original)

This accounting of Marxist ‘elsewheres’ posits Marxism’s greatest success to lie in its transformation as radical anticolonialism. I would extend the argument further and note that the twin forces of Marxist internationalism and anticoloni-alism effected a key transformation of the global history of modernity, and that they did so by making the ‘East’ central, rather than derivative to the history of Marxism as a distinctive form of thought. Viewing early Indian Marxism as shaped by the critique of imperialism explains why distinctions of ‘right’ and ‘left’ carry little traction as shorthand for describing Indian political affiliations. After all, the antecedents of anticolonialism lie in the radical violence of reli-gious revolutionaries from members of the Anushilan group and Swadeshi intel-lectuals, to B.G. Tilak, and V.D. Savarkar (see Manjapra 2010; Sartori 2008). This social fact illuminates apparent anomalies such as the affinity of the popular Communist leader, S.A. Dange, for Bal Gangadhar Tilak (as a labor leader), and for the historian V.K. Rajwade, whose investment in scientific history also included a deeply Brahminical understanding of the historical past. Ambedkar himself expressed early admiration for the Hindu nationalist V.D. Savarkar, who advocated Vedic marriage and the upanayanam, or thread ceremony, for Dalits. The question of Marx and Ambedkar cannot be resolved through the question of influence, however. At best one might utilize the kind of historical evidence I have provided to adduce that caste and class were mutually entailed by the contradictory life of colonial capital in British India’s urban hub, Bombay. This is neither unimportant nor insignificant. However, to assume caste and class as pre- existing categories, and note their apparent supplementarity, cannot resolve the problem of historical transition: ‘did caste become class?’ is the way the question is typically, if unhelpfully, posed. Nor can it adequately address the matter of cultural- linguistic translation, of the perceptual gap between them. Ambedkar’s engagement with Marx’s thought (and what it meant for his obses-sive attention to those untouched and cast out) requires a different kind of engagement. As a first step, it requires that we ‘scale down’ from the abstraction of class thinking, which assumes ontic equivalence among classes (class as cat-egory) as the prelude to outlining the social inequalities between them (class as social experience). Revisiting the materialities of class and caste (and their

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relationship to different conceptions of the body) can instead illuminate how it is that the political subjectivity of (caste) stigma could be said to resist the cultural-ism of caste and the abstractions of capital.

Thinking with and against MarxHinduism haunts Ambedkar, but it is Marx he must engage: at stake is the differ-ence between the past and the future, and between the political subjectivities of outcaste and Dalit. In his later writings, Ambedkar would argue that Dalit identity emerged from a conflictual relationship with Hindu history, and that the Dalit was a negated subject of historical violence: she was that form of remaindered, detritus life pro-duced by the historic conflict between Buddhism and Brahminism in subconti-nental history. From earlier efforts to specify the civic disability of caste (and Untouchability), Ambedkar’s writings thus expanded to cover a millennial frame: Dalit dehumanization was located in the Indic past, but disaggregated from what might appear to be the shared history of Buddhism and Brahminism in order to give the Dalit an agonistic role in Hindu history.18

Ambedkar distinguished his account from Shudra history, which was a story about the identity of the Shudras as a class of degraded Kshatriyas excluded from the right to perform the upanayanam (thread) ceremony. Ambedkar under-stood Shudra identity to be unstable because Shudra critiques of caste indexed a desire for incorporation in caste Hinduism, unlike Dalit critique, which emerged from the space of symbolic negation. Dalit critique was also unstable, but for a different reason: Dalit history could only become grounds for a Dalit future as negative example. Stigmatized iden-tity produced a gap between history and the future because stigma could not become the grounds for political organization; unlike labor, it could not be ‘in’ and ‘for’ itself. Or, one might argue that stigma is a limiting concept in Ambed-kar’s thought because it is a form of embodiment that cannot be abstracted, or universalized.19

Elsewhere I have argued that Ambedkar took recourse to Marx’s argument about the fetishism of commodities in his own efforts to focalize untouchability as the secret of caste. We will recall that for Marx, abstract labor (labor power) is realized in the exchange value of the commodity, which is a form of congealed labor. Capital thus necessarily includes labor even though labor is necessarily invisible, displaced onto the fetish value of the commodity.20 The hidden central-ity of labor to capitalist social relations is what allows Marx to assume a unique, ethical relationship between labor and political subjectivity. The relationship rests on Marx’s prior deconstruction of dead and living labor, with surplus value being that ‘extra’ which attaches to the body of dead labor, and transforms it into commodity.21 In turn living labor, the proletariat as political subject, compensate for the misrecognition of (their) dead labor – its commodification – through the work of politics. It is in this important sense that history is also always a history of labor: of labor as either dead or dying, and its resuscitation through politics.


Though ‘labor’ is antagonistic to the global and universalizing logic of capital, labor is also produced by it: a history of consciousness must assume their entan-glement. (Class war is thus predicated on a form of mimetic violence where the victim becomes perpetrator.) The analogy between caste and class, stigma and labor, could only go so far, however. Marx could assume that ideas of abstraction and equivalence, not to mention human equality, had attained the status of intellectual common sense in the Western history of ideas. Ambedkar could assume no such thing. Unlike cap-italist relations of production to which labor was central, caste society was not organized around bourgeois accumulation. Rather, caste focalized ritual action as symbolic expenditure, or sacrifice: it fueled the socioeconomic exchange and interdependence of caste, though this process was obscured. In this schema the Untouchables’ labor did not ‘count’; it was extraneous because it was already defined as defiled and impure. In brief, the problem Ambedkar confronts involves the collision of two kinds of body history, of the body as value, and the body as dispossessed and disposable life.

The Gandhian detour

Gandhi began to demand universal Shudrahood before he named the Untouch-able as Harijan, or person of god, thereby erasing the historical memory of (his-toric) violation that was so central to Ambedkar’s critique. Gandhi argued: ‘If everyone regarded himself as a Shudra, religion would be well rid of the concept of high and low.’ The principle of (voluntary) manual labor, of service, that characterized Shudra dharma ought to be the governing principle of everyone’s ‘varnadharma’ (Gandhi 193322). A generic conception of Shudra labor (unlike, say, the specialized labor of Brahmin, or Untouchable) most closely resembled Marxist conceptions of the universality of labor. Though Shudra labor stood for manual labor in general, it was incapable of becoming abstract labor power, however: labor as such was subsumed within a theory of social action and sacrificial economy from which it was not easily disentangled. We will recall that castes were produced through the dismemberment of Purusa, originary man, and the association of distinctive body parts with the function of each caste. The history of labor was embedded in a theory of duty, varnashramadharma, predicated on the division of laborers. (Because the outcaste was invisible in this origin myth, Gandhi could later main-tain that Untouchability itself was a belated and baneful addition to the caste order.) It is important to recognize Gandhi’s redefinition of Shudra labor as social care, as seva, or service to the social body: this underscored the difference between seva, on the one hand, and accumulative logic on the other. By translat-ing the problem of accumulation into the performative politics of service and sacrifice, Gandhi redefined labor as social gift. Gandhi was certainly playing on the same field as Marx as regards the signifi-cance of subaltern agency – whether Shudra, or proletariat. Furthermore, Gandhi was positing the occupational order of caste against the social totality of labor

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and capital, the logic of the gift against the violence of commodity fetishism. A generous reading of Gandhi might explore his focus on the repetition of small acts – toilet cleaning, spinning, nursing – as ethical enactment, and the practice of ahimsaic nonviolence. If nonviolence is to be a critique of violence, it must engage violence fully. That is, it must collapse the possibility of doing violence to others onto the self, and resignify self- violence as sacrifice. This is sacrifice as annihilation, rather than sacrifice as restoration. In the latter case, the logic of substitution prevails: animals are sacrificed ‘as if ’ they were humans, to reestab-lish cosmic order in a violent, vengeful world. In Gandhi’s case, service is a ‘giving without return’.

The immanence of caste- class

Ambedkar rejected empathetic inclusion in caste Hinduism, and the Dalit passiv-ity on which it was predicated. Among his many responses, the negative descrip-tion of Dalit as non- Hindu, and a form of political potentiality, was surely distinctive. More broadly yet, Ambedkar’s response to historical stigma marked its distance from the political life of value- producing labor. Rather than deriving a model of emancipation through labor as Marx proposed, Ambedkar turned to the universality of rights. The response to Dalits’ dilemma did not call for politi-cizing labor as such via the general strike. Rather, it required, as a first step, the dissolution of stigma through the inclusion of Dalits in capitalist social life. Cap-italist modernity was to be applauded because the ideas of abstraction and equiv-alence that were central to it also enabled Dalits to cast off stigma: by bringing Dalits within a field of abstract mediation, capital also took them outside the cul-turalism of caste. For this reason, Ambedkar supports socializing capital and redistributing resources, rather than annihilating the capitalist state; he understands the wage labor contract, like liberal rights more generally, as an instrument that abstracts and universalizes. The claim to the universal, as with the demand for wages rather than customary rights, brought into view what resisted abstraction, or scaling up: the stubborn materiality of stigma. By laying claim to the universal, Dalit politics also marked the nonidentity of the subaltern subject of rights from the normative, universal rights- bearing subject. We may note here that Ambedkar is a profound thinker of the power of the negative: he marks the intimacies of caste by describ-ing the Dalit as non- Hindu; as a subject who is dehumanized through contact with caste Hindu ideology; and as negated existence, or detritus life. Ironically, Ambedkar engaged the political universal to locate the Dalit in a global history of dehumanization. In addition to addressing caste in a millennial frame, Ambedkar made repeated reference to slavery in the Greco- Roman period, and to American plantation slavery; he would often use the example of Balkaniza-tion in the interwar period to discuss the perilous politics of minority rights. These efforts speak to his sense that a global, comparative perspective opened up critical possibilities foreclosed by a resolutely Hindu, upper- caste cultural nationalism. Though important, the critique of nationalism (and its sociological base) was not


enough: Ambedkar’s commitments to eradicating Dalit subalternity in all its mani-festations required engaging a global history of ‘stigma’, if by this we understand a form of embodied antagonism situated somewhere between the biologism of race, and the affective claims of territorial nationalism. On another plane, the engagement with the idea of proletarian emancipation was critical, but it was also not sufficient. Labor was political because the iden-tity of labor derived from its antagonism to capital. Thinking stigma through labor appeared to be productive and useful. Yet to fully transform caste into class would ignore caste’s history as (Hindu) violence. Like religion (and Hindu-ism), labor, too, was ultimately only a partial force in accounting for Dalit dis-possession. Here we should recall that Ambedkar would have been well aware of the tradition of Eastern Marxism, for instance, Lenin’s extension of the model of class struggle to anticolonialism based on arguing that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. This foreclosed the question of politics within aspir-ing nations in colonial territories, as much as it appeared to create novel, global linkages among them with respect to the imperial center. While new political connections were forged between colonized nations, the internal problem of how to render caste ‘political’ – that is, of how to think its proximity to labor without rendering ‘caste’ into ‘class’ – became impossibly difficult.23

Labor offered a metaphor – but not a formula – for associating the identity of a collective with its experience of dispossession.24 Instead it was naming that became a technique for specifying social oppression: from Ambedkar’s descrip-tion of the class- like character of the Depressed Classes, to addressing them as Dalit or paddalit (crushed underfoot), non- Hindu, and Buddhist, naming con-nected diverse social experiences through approximation and analogy, rather than equivalence. Dalit and subaltern supplement each other and reflect the productive power of the politics of naming in interwar thought: they make available global imaginar-ies of connection and comparison, but they also enable accounts of failed com-mensuration and the resistant materiality of social lives and languages. It is in this sense that a genealogy of caste- class is also an accounting of the productive encounter between Ambedkar and Gramsci in their time, and in ours.

Notes 1 See Foucault (1980); this conversation between Deleuze and Foucault features signifi-

cantly in Spivak’s critique of the disappearance of the colonial theater in the work of the engaged Western intellectual. What would it mean to think of Ambedkar, a sub-altern thinker of the political universal, as an exorbitant example of Foucault’s ‘uni-versal’ intellectual?

2 Indeed, Eastern Marxism had already focalized the centrality of the ‘colonial ques-tion’ to interwar Marxism via Rosa Luxemburg’s writings on this issue, and later, in the debate between M.N. Roy and Lenin over their divergent views on the revolution-ary agent of anticolonial politics. This is a debate to which Gramsci contributed with his own distinctive understanding of the self- generative politics of anticolonialism (see Young 2012). For an exploration of Roy’s affinities with the Spartacists, see Manjapra (2010).

56 A. Rao 3 The Indian Communist Party was formed in 1925 in Kanpur, and grew out of several

regional Workers and Peasants’ Parties that existed at the time. Its precursor was the Indian Communist Party founded in Tashkent in 1920 by Indian exiles and émigrés including M.N. Roy. In Bombay, party activity was only partially visible through union organizing, while the Girni Kamgar Union (Textile Mill Workers’ Union) – control over which had divided along radical and reformist positions, with the former gaining dominance and eventually affiliating it with the Communist Party – func-tioned ‘above’ ground, and relatively autonomously from the Communist Party. The Meerut Conspiracy Case (1928–33) transformed this fuzzy relationship between the Party and the variety of activism undertaken in its name by specifying Communism as a threat to imperial sovereignty and distancing ‘true’ Communists from those with merely socialist inclinations (including Congress members such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who was elected Secretary of the League Against Imperialism in 1927, and with whom Indian Communists including many Meerut prisoners had links), and marked the beginnings of greater control of the national Communist Parties by the Stalinist Comintern. In Bombay, non- Brahmin Communists increasingly aligned themselves with the rural populism of the Shetkari Kamgar Paksha, while Socialists, affiliated with the Hind Mazdoor Sabha, often organized an informal labor force, and took on issues of housing and tenants’ rights. Though it is not an issue that can be addressed here, the relationship between the Socialists and Communists forms an important, if underexplored legacy of Maharashtrian thought.

4 For an important discussion of Dalits and Communists in late colonial Bombay, see Omvedt (1973).

5 Bahishkrit Bharat, 3 May 1928. Omvedt (1994: 80–1) notes that across the 1920s and the 1930s, the All- India Kisan Sabha and the All- India Trade Union Congress refrained from engaging caste issues.

6 For an analysis of the divergences between Buddha and Marx in this period, see Rao (2009: 182–216).

7 The notorious plague of 1896 provided colonial officials and urban planners with an alibi to demolish large swaths of the central city, and to aggressively use eminent domain rights, in the form of the 1894 Land Alienation Act, to expropriate land for poor housing. Though it is little known, the BCIT incubated what would become the standard paradigm for the development of the land and real estate market in Bombay/Mumbai: the public- private partnership. The BCIT raised funds and generated polit-ical acquiescence for the constructing of industrial housing by offering large tracts of land outside the limits of the Island City for the creation of middle- class townships, where the obstacles to gridding – in the form of encumbered tenures, awkward subdi-vision of land, and congested plots – could be overcome. Today’s famous middle- class (and largely Maharashtrian) areas like Dadar, Sion, and Matunga were the result of these efforts, predicating middle- class housing (and urban expansion) on the hyper- exploitation (and planned informalization) of its laboring classes.

8 Chawls for the working poor were usually three to five storys high, comprising single- rooms typically 10′ × 10′ in size with a nahani, or small drain, inside each room. They are a distinctive built form, recognizable by the open gallery running along the length of each floor. Since chawl construction could never keep up with housing demand, the chawl became the built space around which all manner of informal inhabitation would proliferate.

9 Wandana Sonalkar and I have just completed a translation of this rare autobiography.10 Sadly, Tulpule devotes a mere three pages to problems of translation, and admits that

he relied on Marx in English translation. See also Paranjpe (1984).11 The Lal Bavta Girni Kamgar Union (Red Flag Textile Workers’ Union), Tarun

Kamgar Sangh (Young Workers’ Association) and the Marxist League were associ-ated with the KVPM. Gangadhar Adhikari – who later compiled the ten- volume Documents of the Communist Party of India – translated the Manifesto while jailed in

Revisiting interwar thought 57the aftermath of the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Adhikari was trained in Berlin as a physicist, where he came under the influence of Marxism, and joined the Communist Party. This reflects the importance of Germany (not to mention German idealism) – and the circle created around the Bengali Marxist M.N. Roy – as an important conduit for radical ideas. Unlike the translation of Capital, which relied on the text’s English translation, Adhikari translated the Manifesto from the German. The text was pub-lished in 1931, and proscribed in 1933. See Maharashtra State Archives, Annual Lists of Proscribed Literature, Home (Political), 543 series, ‘Labour unrest and Commu-nists’ activities’; and the India Office Library and Records collection Publications Proscribed by the Government of India, at the British Library.

12 A listing of the KVPM includes: Communist Jahirnama; Russian Krantica Itihas (History of the Russian Revolution); Comrade Lenin; Ase ka (‘Why it is so’, a pam-phlet for children); Paris Commune Arthat Lal Bavtyance Pahile Rajya (Paris Commune: the first kingdom of the red flag); Ai Bhag [Look Mother (Gorky)]; Com-munistanca Jabab (a short account of the Meerut testimonies); Molmajuri ani Bhand-val (Wage, Labor, and Capital); Kon Kasa Charitartha Calavitho Arthat Kamkaryance Arthashastra (Who Makes Things Happen, Or The Workers’ Political Economy), and Russian Krantica Sankshipta Itihas (A Short History of the Russian Revolution). See British Library, Vernacular Collection of Proscribed Literature.

13 Marx’s description of the heterogeneity of the working poor in the Eighteenth Bru-maire undergirds his exploration of the disjuncture between class position and radical politics. The literary theorist Peter Stallybrass (1990) has argued that the lumpenpro-letariat function here is a sartorial category for Marx. We will recall that Frantz Fanon views the lumpenproletariat as ‘one of the most spontaneous and radically revolution-ary forces of a colonized people’ (Fanon 1963: 129).

14 The period between 1921 and 1931 saw a growth in industrial labor together with epi-sodic retrenchment and rationalization. Preceded by the 1907 Factory Labour Com-mission, this period witnessed the implementation of the 1922 Industrial Disputes Act, and ended with the 1928/9 Strike Inquiry Committee, which followed the famous Meerut Conspiracy Case, which saw the incarceration of Bombay’s important Com-munists: S.A. Dange, S.S. Mirajkar, G.A. Ghate and Gangadhar Adhikari, in addition to the important Bengali Marxist, Mazaffar Ahmad, and others, were accused of treason, and imprisoned between 1929 and 1933 in Meerut Jail. The aftermath of Meerut saw caste contradictions coming to the fore within the Communist Party. This was produced by greater coordination between rural non- Brahminism, and Kunbi- Maratha Communist leaders in the city, and a focus on rural exploitation, e.g., the anti- khot [landlord] agitation in the Konkan, which had direct impact on the Kunbi peasant- cultivators who constituted the bulk of Bombay’s industrial workforce. Ambedkar played an important role, together with the Communist leader S.V. Parule-kar, in organizing the anti- khot agitation (For Muzaffar Ahmad’s later repudiation of Dange, and his claim that Dange informed on his colleagues after the Kanpur Con-spiracy Case of 1923, see S.A. Dange and the National Archives, British Library, Ver-nacular Collection of Proscribed Literature.)

15 For an argument relating gender with anticaste critique, and non- Brahmin polemics, see Rao (2009: 50–6).

16 Ambedkar’s account of the struggle between Buddhism and Brahminism as the endur-ing contradiction of Hindu history certainly echoes Marxist constructions of history as the history of labor versus capital. However, its antecedents lie in the work of earlier anticaste radicals such as Jotirao Phule, who drew on the model of Atlantic- word slavery (and race war) as a way to specify the distinctive material and ideological basis of caste oppression.

17 Sudipta Kaviraj’s essay on Roy is a key forerunner to Seth; see Kaviraj (1986).18 Ambedkar was especially keen to challenge accounts, such as by the Hindu national-

ist B.G. Tilak, regarding the role of Vedic and Puranic Hinduism in incubating ideas

58 A. Raoof social equality, and nonviolence (see, e.g., Tilak’s Gita Rahasya, and Arctic Home in the Vedas). Thus Ambedkar dates the Bhagavid Gita to the post- Buddhist era, in ‘Revolution and counter-revolution in ancient India’ (([1987b] BAWS 3: 151–437), to mark the primacy of Buddhist compassion.

19 Thus efforts to define waste management as Dalit labor, and offer government protec-tion for safai karamcharis (municipal sweepers and scavengers) is violence commit-ted in the name of labor abstraction: its effect is to universalize Dalits’ association with waste, rather than defining all laborers as Dalit. Ambedkar’s struggle was for the latter, of course, beginning the establishment of the Independent Labour Party in 1936.

20 Recall that for Marx, abstract mediation is the process by which the concrete particu-larity of labor is redefined as abstract labor power via the universalization of money- equivalence.

21 A great deal of interpretive labor has gone into exploring how the heterogeneity of real labor is related to its abstraction, including by Marx himself in Grundrisse. For South Asia, the most important engagement with the untranslatable at the heart of the concept of capital has come from Dipesh Chakrabarty, who traces those cultural forms that resist abstraction. A recent noncultural accounting of the gap is to be found in Sanyal (2007), where what is coevel with, yet outside of capitalist logic is simply called noncapital to mark a relationality of nonsubsumption. We will see that Dalit critique has more in common with this latter position.

22 This essay is an argument translated from the Gujarati- language Harijanbandhu newspaper. The argument that Untouchables were Shudras can be found in Young India, 5 February 1925.

23 The writings of Maharashtrian Marxists – from S.A. Dange to D.D. Kosambi, D.K. Bedekar, and more recently, the Marx–Phule–Ambedkarvad of Sharad Patil – have involved efforts to historicize caste and/as capital. Gail Omvedt’s extensive writings on the topic also belong to this tradition.

24 No doubt Phule’s category of the Shudra- Atishudra already encoded within it a cri-tique of labor exploitation, e.g., in Shetkaryacha Asud. Ambedkar’s Dalit was distin-guished from the category of Shudra- Atishudra partly through his engagement with theories of value, abstraction, and equivalence, not to mention the explicit insertion of Dalits into global history.

4 The other princeAmbedkar, constitutional democracy, and the agency of the law

Jon Soske

Beginning with his submission to the 1919 Southborough Committee, B.R. Ambedkar’s career as the first pan- Indian Dalit leader was in many respects defined by a program of legal and constitutional reform. Frequently depicted in Mahar artwork holding the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar qualified at Grays Inn in 1919, practised and taught law in Bombay, and eventually served as the chair of India’s constitutional drafting committee and the independent country’s first Law Minister. Over the course of nearly four decades, he produced a substantial body of writing on the nature of constitutional structure, affirmative action, and the social preconditions for substantive and participatory – versus merely formal – democracy. Newer scholarship has shed considerable light on the intellectual foundations of Ambedkar’s juridical worldview (Rao 1993), his policy vision of political inclusion (Thorat and Kumar 2008), and the central role of subjectivity, violence, and redress in his understanding of caste and law (Rao 2009). Yet the image that emerges through these and other accounts is largely synchronic and holistic. The name ‘Ambedkar’ has come to stand for a determinate set of posi-tions, or even a particular mode of theoretical analysis. Not only does this process minimize the significant discontinuities in Ambedkar’s intellectual biog-raphy, it also tends to divorce his political thinking from practical and contingent questions of strategy. To a certain degree, Ambedkar himself encouraged this type of reading by redeploying his earlier ideas and rhetoric in new configura-tions, thus masking shifts in his constitutional philosophy. In his writings on the law, Ambedkar’s overriding concern was the relation-ship between constitutional form and social structure: how can representative democracy function in a society characterized by the degradation – the system-atic marginalization and oppression – of minority groups by a communal major-ity? The fundamental difficulty of this problem lies in the fact that if ‘popular rule’ simply entails ‘majority rule’ through individual suffrage, the dispossession of minorities will become permanent. Ambedkar believed that a solution to this dilemma must accomplish three aims: the democratic self- governance of the country as a whole; the protection of minority communities through ensuring the capacity to exercise individual citizenship rights; and collective empowerment of minorities within the state apparatus in order to secure the equitable adminis-tration of the law. Two major strands of thinking interwove within this overall

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argument. First, Ambedkar confronted the problem of how political institutions could work democratically within a society defined by social, economic, and educational inequality. As a result, he designed a series of mechanisms – includ-ing reservations within the civil service, separate electorates for Dalits, and nonterritorial electorates – that were meant to neutralize the influence of caste within the government and state. Second, Ambedkar recognized that the actual functioning of the law was profoundly conditioned by social life. Increasingly, he stressed concepts like socioeconomic equality, constitutional morality, and civic religion as preconditions for democratic governance. While these lines of reasoning embodied different approaches to the same dilemma, their relationship was uneasy, and their implications contradictory. A latent impasse existed between supporting a state- driven process of democratic transformation and rec-ognizing the socially determined character of the law’s functioning in practice. In this essay, I argue that Ambedkar’s thinking about the question of the law divides into three main periods, separated by two moments of significant reori-entation. Of course, these breaks were not absolute: he remained driven by the overriding question of untouchability’s eradication and he often returned to the same fundamental principles. During the first period (from 1919 to the early 1940s), Ambedkar concentrated on advocating particular constitutional mecha-nisms designed to ensure the independent power of minorities in the state. This programme of ‘shared sovereignty’ corresponded with his efforts to triangulate between the Indian National Congress and the British colonial power in order to ensure the recognition of Dalits as a minority in any constitutional settlement. Although he continued to pursue this strategy until the British Cabinet Mission’s 1946 rejection of separate electorates for Untouchables, the focus of his legal writings began to shift in the early 1940s following his experience leading the Independent Labour Party and the triumphs of European fascism. At this point, Ambedkar began to stress social consciousness and the egalitarian foundations of democracy over and against constitutional structure. This position – which drew on a Romantic tradition dating back to Coleridge – guided Ambedkar’s intervention into the Constituent Assembly. Yet, despite his historic role in draft-ing the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar lacked the political support necessary to incorporate his characteristic legal ideas into the final document. At the end of his life, Ambedkar advocated mass conversion to Buddhism not only to remove the stigma of untouchability, but also as a solution to the crisis of political agency created by the law’s grounding in the social.

The 1919 Southborough CommitteeAmbedkar’s first systematic statement of his legal philosophy appeared in a sub-mission to the 1919 Southborough Committee. His evidence was, first and fore-most, an intervention into the pitched debates between the colonial establishment and the Indian National Congress over the meaning of ‘responsible government’. Paraphrasing the final words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Ambed-kar emphasized that it is not enough for government simply to ‘transmit the force

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of individual opinion and preference’; it must also allow individual participation in the process of government. ‘That is to say’, Ambedkar wrote, employing the American President’s words as his own, ‘Government is not only government for the people, but by the people’ ([1919] BAWS 1: 247; PSE: 65). The task of the committee, he instructed, was to transform a situation where many were represented by others into a system where people were empowered to represent themselves. This foundation laid the basis for a lengthy and subtle discussion of personal liberty, community, and suffrage, drawing extensively on Ambedkar’s former Columbia University professor, John Dewey. Following Dewey at times to the letter, Ambedkar argued that the main function of political rights, includ-ing suffrage, was to provide the opportunity for active and direct participation in setting the terms of associational life. No people could develop its broader capa-cities if it lacked this basic power. The precondition for normal social and polit-ical life was like- mindedness: a community of ‘aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge, [and] a common understanding’ ([1919] BAWS 1: 248–9; PSE: 67). This line of reasoning allowed Ambedkar to defend the legitimacy of minority rights based on a normative liberal conception of the individual’s relationship with society. In a situation of majoritarian dominance, the exercise of self- government required special forms of representation for minorities precisely because individual suffrage alone would result in the majority’s domination of the government, and perforce the ‘representation’ of one faction by another. The ‘people’ could govern only if every person was truly enfranchised. By abstracting his argumentation from the context of British India, Ambedkar was thus able to pose the problem of representation in general terms, foreclosing the colonizer’s argument that the particularities of India – especially communal and caste divisions – precluded the introduction of a fully representative govern-ment. In effect, Ambedkar inverted this imperial exculpation: only active parti-cipation within political life would enable Untouchables to challenge their many- sided oppression and collectively, and therefore individually, advance. But as the second half of Ambedkar’s submission made clear, this critique was aimed equally at the attempts of Hindu reformers and the Indian National Congress (which he denounced as ‘social Tories’ and ‘anti- national’, i.e., defenders of caste Hindu privilege) to speak on behalf of Untouchables. Ambedkar bitterly inveighed that such paternalist assertions deepened the subjugation of Untouch-ables by denying their need for self- organization and independent political influ-ence ([1919] BAWS 1: 263–4; PSE: 79–81). The main juridical question that emerged in Ambedkar’s submission con-cerned the relationship between de jure representative institutions and the de facto realities of social structure. Democratic governments needed to develop mechanisms that both anticipated and counteracted the forms which communal and caste conflict would assume within the electoral process. In advocating this position, he elaborated an early version of an argument that would become a staple of his speeches and articles. Western political theory assumed that the majority in an electoral system was a political majority, i.e., the temporary outcome of competition and compromise among differing views and interests.

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In contrast, Ambedkar convincingly showed that election results in India mir-rored communal divisions, resulting in a permanent monopoly of caste Hindu candidates and, given the fact they virtually constituted the intelligentsia, the predominance of Brahmins. ‘In India, the majority is not a political majority’, he wrote in 1945, ‘In India the majority is born; it is not made’ ([1945a] BAWS 1: 377; PSE: 260). Territorially defined constituencies therefore produced a situ-ation anathema to democracy: the permanent exclusion of members of minority groups from office. In his view, proportional representation would fair little better, since the outcome would mirror group loyalty rather than political views. Ambedkar’s conclusion was characteristically bold: the situation of different minorities required separate and distinct remedies. In the case of Muslims, he suggested that the angularity of existing communal antagonisms could be mod-ulated through their participation in general elections for reserved seats – although he conceded that nothing was likely to dislodge the existing system of communal electorates. Conversely, he motivated a targeted reduction of voting requirements to correct the underrepresentation of non- Brahmin groups like Lingayats and Marathas on the general voters’ role ([1919] BAWS 1: 252–4; PSE: 71–4). These examples provided the scaffolding for Ambedkar’s paramount claim: Untouchables were a discrete minority with interests antagonistic to the caste Hindu majority, and their condition of subordination within Indian society entailed a unique and indeed privileged entitlement to participation within the government. The logic of this argument was quite radical. Its implication was that social oppression – what contemporary legal theorists would gloss as sub-stantive inequality – produced a special form of political right within the context of representative democracy. Moreover, a greater degree of disenfranchisement manifested a stronger rights claim. At one level, this argument revealed just how profoundly Ambedkar’s thinking had been shaped by the juridical terrain of the 1909 Indian Councils Act. He predicated his entire strategy on securing the recognition of Untouchables as a particular kind of legal subject, a minority in a sense parallel to Muslims. But Ambedkar also stressed the limits of this analogy by insisting on the total and unparalleled disempowerment of Dalits (Rao 2009: 124). In effect, he held that a legal category such as ‘minority’ derived its meaning from the social context of its application, and in different contexts the same concept could and should have very different ramifications. The South-borough submission advocated separate electorates and reserved seats for Untouchables, but he would revise (and return to) this proposal several times in his career. Such mechanisms were subordinate and instrumental. They did not inhere within the category of ‘minority’ itself.

Ambedkar and constitutional liberalismHow do Ambedkar’s ideas relate to an earlier tradition of legal thinking? The dominant paradigm in British jurisprudence since Jeremy Bentham’s 1776 Frag-ment on Government was both positivist and utilitarian. Enumerated in the work

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of John Austin in the nineteenth century, this outlook defined law as an actually existing system of decisions, statues, and directives whose force derived from the authority of a sovereign. Legal positivism was generally associated with a progressive, rationalist, and reformist outlook. The value of a law derived from its social consequences, not its degree of correspondence to a natural or universal ideal. As Hart observes, this tradition was hostile to the notion of inalienable human rights propagated by the American Declaration of Independence and the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Although Bentham’s particular form of utilitarianism was widely criticized in the nineteenth century, no British philosopher did so in terms of the doctrine of innate rights (Hart 1983: 183). By the late nineteenth century, this general suspicion of ‘natural law’ had become widespread in American legal and philosophical circles as well. Dewey, for example, postulated that the idea of self- evident and inalienable rights was best understood symbolically, i.e., as a metaphor necessary to the development of political thought at a certain stage (Dewey 2008 [1928]: 99). In a discussion that influenced Ambedkar enormously, Dewey insisted that the word ‘liberty’ signified nothing other than the institutionalized and socially diffuse conditions for effective, individual action (Dewey 1983 [1908]: 394). Ambedkar’s repeated invocation of inalienable rights placed him outside of the prevailing tradition of early twentieth- century Anglophone liberalism. Rights, he understood, were the product of legal regimes, and he sometimes described them as regulative fictions. However, he believed that a democratic legal system acquired its legitimacy through the promotion of individual human capacity and therefore necessitated a principle of respect for personal dignity before the law (Rodrigues 2002: 18–21). In other words, Ambedkar held that the legal construct of rights possessed a transcendental foundation in the sanctity of the individual – ‘one man, one value’ in the words that he appropriated from the British parliamentary debates over universal male suf-frage. In the context of caste domination, this position led Ambedkar to a reconfiguration, rather than a rejection, of the liberal democratic project. On the one hand, his overarching framework – a general program of social reform driven by the emancipation of a disempowered minority – challenged an axio-matic tenet of liberalism from Bentham and Jefferson and which has since continued to John Rawls: a society of persons with some minimal degree of shared values and interests. Ambedkar repeatedly insisted that the hierarchal structure of Indian society had not only prevented the formation of solidarity between Hindus and Untouchables (as well as Muslims and other minorities), but also among caste Hindus themselves. ‘Hindu Society as such’, he wrote in 1936, ‘does not exist. It is only a collection of castes’ ([1936] BAWS 1: 50; EW: 267). On the other hand, Ambedkar’s mode of argumentation presup-posed the rights- bearing individual as a universal norm. It was the underlying principle that organized how he elaborated Dalit political claims. This concep-tion also sharply distinguished his legal reasoning from later versions of mul-ticultural liberalism based on value pluralism. While Ambedkar embraced a broad vision of cultural, linguistic, and religious freedoms, he rejected a

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species of political rights based solely on the coexistence of distinct religious or cultural groups ([1947] BAWS 1: 391–450; PSE: 298–332). Dalits were united not by a common language or set of cultural practices, but through a form of oppression. Ambedkar’s version of the democratic project therefore contained a funda-mental difficulty. It demanded a governmental structure that could neutralize and eventually overturn the beliefs and practices of India’s Hindu majority. At one level, Ambedkar understood this requirement: ‘the political structure must be so framed that it will contain mechanisms that will bottle the prejudices and nullify the injustice which social forces were likely to cause if they were let loose’ ([1943a] BAWS 9: 424; PSE: 252). And yet it is not clear that he had a compel-ling vision of how such a political system would or even could function. Since the framing of the American Constitution and the appearance of the Federalist Papers, liberal political theorists have struggled with the possibility of two forms of ‘tyranny’ under a system of elected government: usurpation of power by elected representatives and the oppression of minorities by a united majority. The foremost architect of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, famously worried that explicit guarantees of individual rights, such as freedom of con-science, were ‘parchment barriers’ incapable of restraining the real power of democratic government, i.e., ‘the majority of the community’ (Madison 1995 [1778]: 255–6). The authors of the U.S. Constitution sought to design an institu-tional structure that would check an inherent tendency toward the abuse of power by simultaneously balancing different branches of government against each other and encouraging political competition between different factions of the popula-tion. They thus attempted to entrench long- term commitment among the citi-zenry to an overall political order whose agonistic structure would defend basic liberties from abrogation by the state or electoral majority. But, as the legal scholar Daryl Levinson argues, this solution presupposed that dominant social forces accepted the utility of these constraints (Levinson 2011: 69). Ambedkar endorsed something far more profound than a mechanism to inval-idate a repugnant act sanctioned by a political majority. His strategy necessitated a constitution with the ability to counteract not only a defining feature of Hindu social life, but also its informal ramifications within the everyday functioning of the state. In other words, Ambedkar proposed a governmental structure that was itself countermajoritarian. He sometimes expressed this program as shared power, or – turning the agitation of the Congress for independence against itself – self- determination for Untouchables ([1930b] BAWS 2: 503–9; PSE: 131–5; also Rao 2009: 136). In practice, the program of shared sovereignty entailed a separate electoral mechanism for Dalits and weightage to compensate for their social disenfranchisement; independent and stable representation in executive, parliamentary, and administrative bodies; and elements of a distinct state appar-atus (a welfare bureau and separate police chiefs, for example). Given the means of social and economic coercion at the disposal of caste Hindus, Ambedkar argued that direct power within the state was needed to protect the very capacity to exercise rights ([1930c] BAWS 2: 554; PSE: 152; EW: 381). But Ambedkar

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never resolved the problem of how these components would function within the overall architecture of government. Even if implemented collectively, such reforms may have qualified Untouchability in some spheres, but caste Hindus would still have constituted the largest part of the elected government and cadre of state institutions. The resulting system would have incorporated representa-tives of minorities into a state apparatus which they neither controlled nor had the power to transform. Such a constitution may have contained powerful and binding guarantees for the protection and educational promotion of Untouch-ables, but should the majority brush these aside, recourse to a neutral arbiter would have been absent. In a May 1945 speech to the All- India Scheduled Caste Federation, Ambed-kar proposed a representational schema that potentially addressed some of these issues. Citing examples from the jury system, the League of Nations, and the U.S. Constitution, Ambedkar established that majority rule was not an invariable principle of democratic institutions: unanimity and supermajority were recog-nized standards in a number of contexts. Moreover, he denied that Hindus con-stituted a majority in a political sense and therefore could legitimately invoke a (nonexistent) right to majority rule. Given the social and economic hegemony of caste Hindus, Ambedkar argued, their interests could be served through a rel-ative – rather than absolute – majority in the government. He added a number of further qualifications, including that this majority should not be so large as to be able to govern with the support of the smallest minority alone and minorities should be given weightage in ‘inverse proportion to their social standing, eco-nomic position and educational condition’ ([1945b] BAWS 9: 257). In effect, Ambedkar sought to engineer the conditions for political competition and col-laboration within the state itself – Madison’s mutually balancing ‘multiplicity of interests’ – that he claimed were absent in Indian society. It was his single most audacious constitutional proposal. Uncharacteristically, he emphasized the exploratory nature of these propositions. Yet even with such provisos, this plan made visible an even more funda-mental difficulty for Ambedkar’s overall project. Why would the Hindu majority submit to this or any other version of shared sovereignty? Politically, he still hoped that the British government would include separate electorates and protec-tions for Dalits in the framework for constitutional negotiations, thus forcing the Congress to accept a fait accompli as part of securing independence. It was a strategy of triangulation between the colonial state and the Congress – and some-times other minority parties like the Muslim League – that Ambedkar had pursued since the first Round Table Conference in 1930 ([1930b] BAWS 2: 503–9). But such an outcome would still not resolve the deeper, structural problem of the new constitution’s popular legitimacy. Why would caste Hindus adhere to a countermajoritarian dispensation? Although he did not pose this question explicitly, Ambedkar’s increasing preoccupation with the social pre-conditions for democratic governance suggests that he was aware of this problem. By the early 1940s, his focus began to shift from the law to society as the primary locus of rights and their protection.

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Grounding the law in the socialAmbedkar never accepted the rationalization that political independence must precede social reform. Even after decisively rejecting the possibility of the amelioration of caste by Hindus themselves in the early 1930s, he continued to insist on the structural priority of social transformation over and above political change. As he wrote in his legendary 1936 text Annihilation of Caste: ‘History bears out the proposition that political revolutions have always been proceeded by social and religious revolutions’ ([1936] BAWS 1: 43). But he also held that Dalits faced a fundamental problem of agency. Not only were they a small minority segregated on the outskirts of villages spread across India, but the stric-tures of caste society had ensured that Untouchables were economically dependent, overwhelmingly excluded from educational institutions, illiterate and unarmed. ‘Who will raise the Scheduled classes from the distress in which they are groveling?’ he pleaded to the central government in 1942; ‘It is certain that they cannot do it by their own effort’ ([1942] BAWS 10: 440–1; PSE: 234). Moreover, Ambedkar held that the graded inequality of the caste system – based on ‘an ascending scale of reverence and descending scale of contempt’ – divided Untouchables from lower caste Hindus and rendered collective social revolt from below unrealistic ([1936] BAWS 1: 46–7). Ambedkar had long promoted different forms of self- help, educational movements, and Dalit uplift (including, from 1942, the demand for land reform), but he did not believe that such efforts could eradicate Untouchability in the absence of far- reaching social reconstruc-tion. The force ensuring the destruction of caste would come from outside of Indian society: a state dedicated to empowering minorities and eliminating civic disabilities. When he produced memoranda in 1942 and 1943 in response to the constitu-tional impasse between the Congress and Muslim League, Ambedkar’s predomi-nant theme was once again the need to adapt Western- style institutions to the Indian context. He recognized various limitations of European parliamentary systems in practice, but his overall emphasis on the particularities of India rein-forced the universalizing claims of liberal democracy ([1942] BAWS 10: 402–42 and [1943a] PSE: 235–53). However, Ambedkar’s mode of argumentation began to shift by the beginning of 1943. In an address entitled Ranade, Gandhi, and Jinnah, he insisted that political theorists had erred in understanding democracy primarily as a form of government rather than the expression of a social order characterized by a shared commitment to equality and an absence of rigid social barriers ([1943b] BAWS 1: 222; EW: 122; 2008 reprint: 32). Tellingly, he dis-missed out of hand the notion that constitutional guarantees could protect minor-ities: ‘What is the use of fundamental rights to the Negroes in America, to the Jews in Germany, and to the Untouchables in India? As Burke said, there is no method found for punishing the multitude’ ([1943b] BAWS 1: 222; EW: 122; 2008 reprint: 31). If the reference to the U.S. reflected Ambedkar’s longstanding identification with aspects of Black American history, the invocation of the Third Reich

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signaled his increased preoccupation with European political developments. The triumph of fascism in Italy and Germany, the consolidation of the Stalinist bur-eaucracy, and the Nazi conquest of the continent revolutionized Ambedkar’s understanding of the intellectual tradition of European parliamentary democracy. By the late 1930s, as Bruce Ackerman remarks, the prospects for constitutional-ism internationally were truly ‘grim’ (Ackerman 1997: 771). ‘There has been a revolt against parliamentary democracy’, Ambedkar diagnosed, ‘although not even a century has elapsed since its universal acceptance and inauguration’ ([1943c] BAWS 10: 106–12). Yet the collapse of democratic regimes in Europe did not lead him to reject the normative project of liberalism based on the rights- bearing individual. In reaction to the apparent triumph of totalitarianism, Ambedkar mounted a vigorous defense of representative government by gener-alizing from his earlier discussion of minority rights in India to the consequences of sociopolitical inequality for the parliamentary system as such. He urged that countries like India – who were in the process of fighting for self- rule – should not only learn from the mistakes of European governments, but bear a certain responsibility for the future of the democratic ideal. He was, in a very real sense, fighting to preserve the historical project of constitutionalism and ‘democratic civilization’. Developed in his polemical opus What Gandhi and Congress Have Done to the Untouchables (1945b, reprinted in BAWS 9), Ambedkar’s analysis of the European crisis reflected the increased influence of Marxian terminology – although not Marxist political strategy – on his approach. The single greatest deficit of earlier legal thinking, he argued, lay in its embrace of formalism. Universal suffrage and constitutional morality (Grote’s ‘habits of respect for the form of the constitution’) were necessary preconditions for the preserva-tion of a parliamentary form of government, but the equation of constitutional form with actual democracy was ‘fallacious and grossly misleading’ ([1945b] BAWS 9: 203). The Western conception of democracy (which he now isolated to a particular historical experience) failed for many reasons, but the foremost cause was its refusal to address the question of social inequality. ‘The recogni-tion of the existence of a governing class as a fundamental and crucial fact confronting democracy and self- government’, he wrote, ‘is the only safe and realistic approach to those who wish for democracy and self- government to come into their own’ ([1945b] BAWS 9: 204). In contrast to Marx, Ambedkar defined the governing class in cultural and political rather than economic terms: its power derived from the capacity to capture and entrench control over the state and thus circumscribe society’s philosophical and even psycho-logical outlook. Caught in a web of ideological and institutional forces, the ‘servile classes’ endorsed their own disenfranchisement by acceding to this grouping’s right to govern. The resulting system violated the basic tenants of democracy and as a result proved incapable of protecting the ‘liberty, prop-erty, and pursuit of happiness’ of the masses ([1945b] BAWS 9: 445–7). More-over, political oligarchy protected the dictatorship of capital. Under the mantle of ‘freedom of contract’, Western states had legitimized the dominance of the

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strong over the weak by ignoring the initial economic disparity between employer and worker. For representative government to survive, he insisted, legal regimes would have to be designed that prevented the emergence of a new hereditary sovereign. The term ‘freedom of contract’ was employed by nineteenth- century thinkers such as Henry Maine to describe the transition to modern societies based on individual liberty rather than status (Atiyah 1979). Ambedkar knew this tradition well. However, his invocation of Locke’s language of liberty and property – something of a rarity in his writing – suggests that his target was not liberal capitalism as such, but a particular justification for laissez- faire policies. ‘Freedom of contract’ was the virulently pro- business doctrine of the Progres-sive Era (Lochner) U.S. Supreme Court, whose concept of ‘economic due process’ had been widely criticized – and finally overturned – in the context of adjudicating the New Deal’s constitutional validity during the late 1930s (Scheiber 1998). Ambedkar’s argumentation echoed much of the criticism leveled against the court for nullifying the National Recovery Act and other Roosevelt- administration measures, and demonstrated his growing interest in the legal dimensions of large- scale state intervention into the economy. He now advocated the urgency of establishing a socioeconomic basis for democratic governance: ‘The formal framework of democracy is of no value and would indeed be a misfit if there was no social democracy’ ([1943b] BAWS 1: 222; EW: 122; 2008 reprint: 32). As Omvedt observes, this position brought him to the threshold of Marxian socialism (Omvedt 1994: 230). But rather than abandon liberalism, Ambedkar attempted to expand the scope, instruments, and character of constitutional law. He postulated that some degree of state ownership and central planning were necessary preconditions for the democratic functioning of government, and he consequently redefined the domain of constitutional law to include the organization of a country’s produc-tive forces. As he wrote in his 1947 memorandum to the Constituent Assembly:

For what is the purpose of prescribing by law the shape and form of the eco-nomic structure of society? The purpose is to protect the liberty of the indi-vidual from invasion by other individuals [the capitalist class] which is the object of enacting Fundamental Rights.

([1947] BAWS 1: 409; PSE: 310)

The resulting theory configured a particular form of economy as both the pre-condition and essential instrumentality of the law, a conceptualization that retained the central agency of the state in the protection of individual freedoms. In an effort to resolve the impasse of the law’s grounding in the social, Ambed-kar extended the reach of government to the comprehensive regulation of eco-nomic life. Nevertheless, this impasse persisted. Ambedkar’s means of social transformation still required the intercession of a third force: something to break the hold of the dominant classes and establish the power of subaltern groups within the state.

The other prince 69

Until the mid- 1940s, Ambedkar continued to petition the Crown to introduce independent representation for Untouchables as a part of resolving India’s constitu-tional impasse (Jaffrelot 2005: 79–83). The weak showing of his Schedule Caste Federation in the 1946 elections and the British Cabinet Mission’s decisive rejec-tion of separate electorates for Dalits destroyed any remaining hope for the program of shared sovereignty. Reconciliation with Congress was essential if Ambedkar hoped to have any influence within the 1947 Constituent Assembly. Famously, Ambedkar’s appointment as India’s first Law Minister resulted in his nomination as chair of the constitutional drafting committee. In this capacity, Ambedkar not only contributed to determining the architecture of the Indian consti-tution; he also wrote significant portions of the document. As Marc Galanter observes, the mere fact that the constitution included forms of compensatory dis-crimination for Untouchables was a direct result of Ambedkar’s thirty- one year struggle (Galanter 1984: 39). Nevertheless, this extraordinary achievement should not obscure the reality that none of Ambedkar’s characteristic legal ideas appeared in either the draft or final constitutions (Anand 2009). Article 16 (4) did establish the principle of reservations for ‘backward classes’; however, the rejection of separ ate electorates severed this mechanism from Ambedkar’s broader framework of shared sovereignty. It was a significant victory for Ambedkar, but only a frag-mentary materialization of his constitutional vision. For over thirty years, he had insisted that universal suffrage and rights guarantees would only function demo-cratically if oppressed groups wielded robust power within the state apparatus. That clearly had not come to pass.

Conclusion: constitutional revolutionsIt is important to underline the radical character of the problem that drove Ambedkar’s legal thinking: under what constitutional arrangement could a liberal democratic state perform the historic tasks of abolishing caste and creat-ing a unified India? An analogy can be made between this question and Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the problem of national unity in Italian history. Ambedkar sought to prevent a ‘passive revolution’ in which Congress would assume polit-ical power under the banner of national liberation and use the state to entrench the social dominance of caste Hindus, thus ensuring the continued fragmentation of Indian society along caste and communal lines. But since Ambedkar doubted the possibility of a sustained coalition between Dalits and other oppressed groups (although he pursued such alliances when they appeared feasible), he sought another force with the strength to neutralize the aspirations of the Con-gress, an alternate ‘prince’ capable of giving form to the collective will of an inchoate Indian nation. He found this agency in the constitutional structure of the state itself: a dispensation of shared sovereignty that would allow minorities to wield independent power in the development and administration of the law. Some of his most brilliant pages elaborated both legal- philosophical justifica-tions for this system and the specific representational mechanisms necessary for its implementation.

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Despite its audacity, this schema of joint power contained two insuperable difficulties. The first dilemma, which Ambedkar addressed explicitly, concerned the agency of its implementation. Since he rejected the feasibility of caste’s amelioration by Hindu reformers and collective social revolt from below, Ambedkar sought to pressure the colonial state to impose a constitutional settle-ment from outside of Indian society. Much of his political activity was dedicated to establishing a political counterweight to the Congress in order to compel the British to recognize Dalit claims for representation within the state. The second problem concerned adherence or (to use another Gramscian term) consent: Why would the Hindu majority abide by a countermajoritarian constitution? Propelled by the crisis of European democracy, Ambedkar generalized from his analysis of India in order to produce a global critique of legal formalism. Although he did not abandon the strategy of power- sharing, Ambedkar came to privilege the socioeconomic preconditions for substantive democracy – the absence of rigid social barriers, the socialization of major industries, and the elimination of a per-manent governing class – over constitutional structure. In effect, this vision resolved the problem of consent by projecting its resolution into the future. In order to guard fundamental liberties, a social democratic constitution would pre-scribe key aspects of society’s economic organization, therefore preventing the consolidation of an entrenched elite which would subvert the functioning of democracy. These modern reflections on the problem of ‘faction’ anticipated the later writings of C. Wright Mills and Pierre Bourdieu. Ambedkar concluded that the main obstacle to liberalism was the social and cultural power of a stratum capable of inverting the democratic process into a system that institutionalized its permanent imperium. After the experience of the Constituent Assembly and serving as Law Min-ister in Nehru’s government, Ambedkar abandoned hope for the abolition of caste and other forms of oppression by legal means. ‘I deem the place of law very low’, he stated on All India radio in 1954, ‘because I am not confident to say that law would certainly be of any help with regard to violation of liberty and equality’ (translated in Naik 2003: 2; see also alternative translation [1954] BAWS 17 (3): 503). Returning to his earlier espousal of the mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism, Ambedkar’s writings during the final years of his life pro-moted the societal role of religion, and much of his argumentation concerned the importance of a shared belief system for the functioning of substantive demo-cracy (Rodrigues 1993). Ambedkar’s interpretation of Buddhism cleansed the religion of theological doctrine and hierarchies: its essential characteristic was that it shaped individual disposition through ritual and the inculcation of col-lective values. The absence of this foundation, he concluded, had resulted in a fundamental crisis of Europe’s secular projects of political emancipation (1987a BAWS 3: 462; EW: 189). Ambedkar moved away from his expanded ideal of state- driven transformation not because he rejected its presuppositions: many of them reappeared in his advocacy of Buddhism as a civic religion. Despite his continued insistence on the importance of political organization, Ambedkar con-cluded that no agency existed to implement a project like shared sovereignty

The other prince 71

within the context of postcolonial India. In the law’s place (and as the necessary condition for its efficacy), he advocated the creation of a new socio- cultural community as the power capable of producing social consciousness and a shared moral order. Unquestionably, Ambedkar was one of the twentieth century’s most creative and powerful champions of constitutional democracy. All the more extraordinary, then, was his eventual rejection of the law’s capacity to effectuate meaningful social change.

AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Dilip Menon, Gopal Guru, Rachel Berger, and Ritu Birla for feedback at different stages of writing this article.

Part II

The function of intellectuals

5 Notes on Q6§32Gramsci and the Dalits

Roberto Dainotto

Note 32 of Notebook 6 (PN3: 25–6; FSPN: 122) is occasioned by Frédéric Lefèvre’s interview with Aldous Huxley following the French translation of the novel Point Counter Point (1928). Printed in the ‘Une heaure avec . . .’ section of the Nouvelles Littéraires edited by Lefèvre, the interview was published on 1 November 1930 – long before Huxley’s association with the Vedanta society of Southern California in 1939, but testimony already of his special interest in Indian spiritualism, and (as we shall see) distaste for Indian reality. Gramsci had started following the Nouvelles Littéraires already in Notebook 1, and several prison notes are no more than bibliographical commentaries on reviews and interviews that had appeared in that journal. The entry immediately following Note 32, in praise of Lefèvre and entitled ‘The Intellectuals’, gives sense and reason to Gramsci’s abiding interest in the Nouvelles: Lefèvre, as Gramsci points out, was able to translate the ‘way of thinking’ of intellectuals (not merely literary and artistic thoughts, qualifies Gramsci, but ‘political, eco-nomic, ideological etc. in general’) into popular common sense: the form of the colloquial interview adopted by Lefèvre exposed such ways of thinking ‘with greater spontaneity and clarity’, as Gramsci put it, ‘than in their books’ (Q6§33; PN3: 26). In short, the Nouvelles Littéraires were exemplary of that ‘type of period-icals’ sorely lacking in Italy: tightly connected to publishing industry and eco-nomic conglomerates; addressing literature and the arts in the wider social context of science, politics, and economy; not nationalistically parochial but comparative in ambition – not only did the Nouvelles participate in ‘a unitary organization of culture’; they were also a fruitful way of reconciling high culture with the necessities of vulgarization. They were capable, in short, of ‘satisfying the needs of that mass of public, which is intellectually more active and which it matters most to think of and to transform’ (Q1§35; PN1: 121). Lefèvre thus represented for Gramsci the sort of modern and democratic great intellectual he mused on earlier in the notebook:

The great intellectual, too, must take the plunge into practical life and become an organizer of the practical aspects of culture, if he wants to remain a leader; he must democratize himself, be more in touch with the

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times. Renaissance man is no longer possible in the modern world, at a time when increasingly large masses of humans are participating actively and directly in history.

(Q1§10; PN1: 103)

Huxley too was the object of an, albeit more qualified, admiration. Following notes 26 and 29 on the inability of the Italian intellectual class to turn popular into national culture (Pirandello), or national culture into something popular (Father Bresciani), Huxley, as he was presented in Lefèvre’s introduction, was an intellectual deeply rooted in the British national- popular, and yet cosmopol-itan in reach (Lefèvre 1933: 152–3). Moreover, when compared to the aspira-tions of scientific detachment typical of the Italian intelligentsia still enamored with the scientism of Comte and Spencer (a disease Gramsci named after eco-nomist Achille Loria), Huxley seemed to approximate Gramsci’s vitalist ideal of an intellectual led by ‘the impassioned fervor of one who is committed, one who has strong moral and political commitments and does not hide them nor even attempt to’ (Q23§3; SCW: 94). Passion, as Lefèvre had noted, was exactly what defined Huxley’s ideal intellectual:

The scholars and men of letters that Aldous Huxley presents in his novel always remain men with passions, contradictions, vices, virtues, tics, ridicu-lous fads; like any other man. They are not merely story tellers that describe life after having observed it more or less well; they live life, most often with intensity, even in a disordered, exasperated fashion.

(Lefèvre 1933: 154)

If something sullied this otherwise perfect picture of Huxley, it was, as we will see in a moment, not only his profoundly colonial outlook on the Indian situ-ation, but also his bizarre idea that intellectual passions, in themselves, are always in the service of constituted power. They turn revolutionary only in the face of intellectual unemployment (Q6§32; PN3: 25–6; FSPN: 122). This, Gramsci thought, reminded him too much of the abhorred Achille Loria (Ottaviano 1985: 275–6)! The general context of the miscellaneous Notebook 6, in sum, continues a lengthy reflection on the role of intellectuals begun in Notebook 4; their for-mation through schooling (Q6§37 [PN3: 28], 94 [PN3: 80], 162 [PN3: 120–2], 171 [PN3: 127], 179 [PN3: 130–1; FSPN: 143–4]); and the cultural institutions (journals, novels, symposia, etc.) that communicate intellectual ideas and passions to the ‘mass public’. The goal of intellectual labor is defined in these pages as a twofold task: first, ‘to transform’ the popular masses and elevate their subaltern culture to one that could become hegemonic, so as to ‘eradicate subalternity’ (Brennan 2002: 170); and, second, to ‘democratize’ the role of the intellectual itself, who should become aware that those masses are not passive recipients of superior wisdom but are ‘intellect ually . . . active’.

Notes on Q6§32: Gramsci and the Dalits 77

The specific passage of the Huxley interview transcribed in Note 32 is indeed central to both concerns. After having announced the imminent French trans-lation of his Indian memoirs, and having peremptorily declared that ‘India is the most depressing country in the world’ (Lefèvre 1933: 158), Huxley answers Lefèvre’s question hinting at the Salt March and the massacres in Peshawar – ‘What do you think of the revolts and of all that is happening in India?’ – with the following words:

I think that in India civilization was built upside down. They have created universities of higher learning, but instituted no basis for primary schools. It was believed that it was sufficient to enlighten a caste to elevate the whole of the masses, but I do not see that the results obtained have been very good. Those people who benefited from Western civilization are all chattryas or Brahmins. Once educated, they remain unemployed and become even dan-gerous. They are the ones who want to take government from British hands. It was while visiting India that I better understood the difference there might have been in the European Middle Ages between a peasant and a cardinal. India is a country where the superiority of divine right is still accepted by the untouchables who acknowledge their own unworthiness.

(Lefèvre 1933: 158–9)

Note 32 therefore introduces some fairly new elements in the general reflection on the role of intellectuals. The idea of an educational system that operates on two different tracks – primary schools for the laboring classes; institutions of higher learning for the education of the dominant elites – is not in itself a new one in the Notebooks. Already in Notebook 4, Gramsci had noted: ‘the voca-tional school [scuola professionale] for the instrumental classes; the classical school for the dominant classes and the intellectuals’ (Q4§49; PN2: 208). The two, interrelated elements of novelty are, first, the colonial context in which this discussion on schooling is contextualized, and, second, the shift from a discus-sion of ‘instrumental’ or ‘subaltern class’ (Q3§14; PN2: 21) to one of ‘caste’. In India, the issue of schooling and the caste system had come to the fore, through Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, already in the Bombay Presidential debates of 1927 and 1928, and more explicitly in Ambedkar’s memorandum to the Indian Statu-tory Commission of 1928 (Chalam 2008: 36–7). For Gramsci, however, the issue had a more general – let’s say theoretical – implication. Colonial rule – this is what Gramsci could deduce from Huxley’s words – has, by necessity, to create a local elite of managers and intellectuals capable of directing the ‘instrumental classes’ in the far- away colonies. This gives rise, in turn, to a new group – more problematically, a ‘caste’ – potentially capable of organizing a new hegemony. While Huxley, exemplary of the colonial perspective of the European intellec-tual, is still caught in the reformist illusion of maintaining colonial rule by extending education – presumably primary schooling – into the lower classes, Gramsci gleans in his preoccupied words the emergence of a new group of colo-nial intellectuals that threatens – ‘dangerous’ is Huxley’s word – to transform

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other classes too into the personnel for its own future ascent to governmental power: this new group, in Huxley’s alarming words, wants ‘to take government from British hands’. It became a matter of interest for Gramsci, at this point, to see if this situation could be translated into the Italian context, so as to deduce some practical strat-egies from the Indian case. Italy, after all, presents a set of circumstances in which the North has subjugated the southern parts of the country as ‘exploitable colonies’ (Gramsci 1978 [1930]: 442). The racial dynamics that divide in India along the lines of colonizer and colonized seem to be at work in Italy too. Con-trary to Stuart Hall’s suggestion that ‘Gramsci did not write about race’ (Hall 1986: 33), in fact, Gramsci establishes a strict correlation between race and intel-lectual groups in Italy (Q4§49) that is reminiscent of the one between chattryas or Brahmins ‘who benefited from Western civilization’ and Untouchables without even primary schooling. Soon following Note 32, Gramsci asks expli-citly: ‘Does “racism” exist in Italy?’ (Q6§35; PN3: 27). In the seventh notebook, he further hints at the ‘concezione biologica della «barbarie» attribuita ai Meridionali’ by recent Italian anthropology (Q7§30; PN3: 179–80; FSPN: 187–9). More importantly, just as in the Indian case there are two separate intel-lectual classes – British intellectuals, of which Huxley is himself a representa-tive, and the Westernized chattryas or Brahmins – so it is in the case of Italy: colonized ‘southern intellectuals’ seem at times a category apart from that of the Italian intellectuals tout court (Q1§150 [PN1: 229–30]; Q10§61). While tempting, however, this translation from the Indian to the Italian case is also problematic. Omitted from Gramsci’s quotation of the Huxley interview is Lefèvre’s query – ‘But what about the strikes in England?’ – that tries exactly to link the Indian situation to a European one, while establishing an immediate parallelism between caste and class relations. The implications of Lefèvre’s question are not lost on Huxley: just as the Untouchables ‘accepted’ and ‘acknowledge[d] their own unworthiness’ under the system of ‘divine right’, for instance, so did the miners of northern England, in Huxley’s response, ‘seem to accept their mediocre and limiting life existence’ (Lefèvre 1933: 160). The exchange taking place on the pages of the Nouvelles offered then an example of that phenomenon of ‘subordination’ that had concerned Gramsci since Notebook 1: the culture of a hegemonic group – Gramsci wrote in a note on ‘Political class leadership before and after assuming government power’ – exercised a power which went beyond mere coercion, a power that produced a willingness on the part of other groups to acquiesce in their own subordination ‘spontaneously’, as Gramsci put it (Q1§44; PN1: 136–51). But with one quali-fication: this spontaneous acquiescence could last only as long as the hegemonic group remained progressive – that is, in Buttigieg’s words, ‘only as long as it looks beyond its narrow corporate class interests, seeks to advance the whole of society, and continues to expand its presence in the “private” sphere’ (Buttigieg 1995: 22). This qualification is in my opinion the very reason why Gramsci stops quoting from the interview at the very moment at which Lefèvre and Huxley seem


engaged in establishing a quick parallelism between the Indian and the European situation. The strikes in England were certainly symptoms of a crisis of hege-mony determined by the narrow corporate interests of the leading classes: indus-trial and agrarian rule was being contested through the strike. Yet strikes remained, as noted à propos Sorel’s general strike, but ‘a “passive activity”, so to speak, of a negative and preliminary kind . . . [A]n activity which does not envisage an “active and constructive” phase of its own’ (Q13§1; SPN: 127). This was especially true in the case of England, where ‘there is no formal party antag-onistic to the one of the industrialists’ (Q15§2; SPN: 156). However, the case of India could be radically different: ‘There is some element of truth here’, Gramsci replies to Huxley,

but not much. How could they create elementary schools for the masses in India without producing the adequate personnel? And in order to produce the personnel, is it not necessary at the outset to turn to the already existing intellectual classes?

(Q6§32; PN3: 25–6)

The British colonial system had of necessity formed a colonial intellectual class turning to the already existing Brahminical intellectual caste; but these colonial intellectuals had now acquired an ‘active and constructive’ force of their own, a progressive and revolutionary impetus aimed at expanding their presence in the ‘private’ sphere, from the bottom of elementary education, onto a whole national society: they threatened British hegemony with their own national movement (Q2§48; PN1: 291–3). Moreover, they even had the spontaneous consent of other classes too, down to the Untouchables who ‘still accepted’ their own subordination. In short, compared to the strikers of England who accepted subordination and demanded merely the satisfaction of corporate interests – higher salaries, shorter work hours – through the strike, the Brahmins of India threatened British colonial rule with a truly hegemonic program – national liber-ation – that spoke to the whole of Indian society, including last but not least the Untouchables. Sure enough, it was to be seen if this Brahminic elite could maintain its pro-gressive and revolutionary force in time: if, in other words, it could continue to expand its hegemony by expanding the rewards of national liberation on the Dalits too. The risk, implied already in Huxley’s words, was that the Brahmini-cal elite, like the bourgeoisie of Europe, would implode into a narrow defense of its own corporate, caste interests. In Notebook 7, Gramsci poses explicitly the question: Will India too suffer the same ‘rupture between the people and intel-lectuals’ that has plagued the whole history of Italy (Q7§62; PN3: 201; FSPN: 123–4)? Before, in Notebook 4, ‘Indian religion’ was singled out as potentially productive of an ‘enormous distance’ between intellectuals and people (Q4§49; PN2: 207). Could national revolution overcome the limits imposed by religion and unite castes that religion kept instead separate? By 1933 – after Gandhi’s protest to oppose Ambedkar’s separate electorate for the Dalits, and at the time

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of Gandhi’s controversial reformism of the Harijan – Gramsci’s look at the Indian question will turn to a pessimistic answer: Gandhism had become a naive theorization, with religious hues, of passive revolution (Q15§17; SPN: 106–8). Gandhism had become incapable of including the Dalits in the project of national liberation, and could only lay claim to ‘continuing centrality for itself in the newly independent nation’ (Sunder Rajan 2012: 166). However, during the first period of the writing of the Notebooks, Gramsci’s look at India seems character-ized by a cautious optimism. In the national movement he sees, at least poten-tially, a revolutionary impetus not limited to the ‘negative and preliminary character’ of British strikes, but fully organized into a political strategy for the conquest of governmental power:

India’s political struggle against the English . . . knows three forms of war: war of movement, war of position, and underground war. Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which becomes war of movement at certain moments and an underground war at others . . .

(Q1§134; PN1: 218–20; SPN: 229)

Only once the substantial difference between India and Europe had thus been established could a translation from one case into another become instructive. At this stage of the struggle, however, and given the information available to Gramsci, subordination of the Dalits was but a structural need. As there was no ‘existing intellectual’ in the Dalit subordinated group, this remained a fact to be accepted. Gramsci’s position, as Rajeswar Sunder Rajan puts it, may have been ‘lacking in the kind of political correctness we have come to expect in represen-tations of the subaltern’ (Sunder Rajan 2012: 177). But the issue could certainly not be solved by Huxley’s easy moralizing:

it is only lower- caste mobilization that can effectively challenge [hege-mony], but . . . this revolution will require the initiative and organizational leadership skills of the Gramscian ‘organic intellectual’ to transform both the passivity as well as the intransigence of the untouchables into political discontent.

(Sunder Rajan 2012: 165)

Huxley’s perspective, in short, must have sounded to Gramsci to be a liberal understanding of the relationship between Dalit and high- caste intellectuals. According to such liberal understanding, as summarized by Anupama Rao, ‘caste . . . functioned as the symbol of India’s backwardness, and an impediment to its realisation of modernity and democracy’ (Rao 1997: 2835). Or, in the words of Gopal Guru:

There is a ‘liberal’ trend among a group of scholars, who believe that it is the ancient Hindu reactionary traditions and the deep- rooted prejudice against dalit by the upper castes that has led to the protest from the dalits.


Thus, this trend views dalit protest as a necessary outcome of an obscuran-tists Hindu tradition. This liberal view also has a strong tendency to assume that the dalit movement is limited to achieving the partial advance that it has in the socioeconomic, civic and political fields within the existing social order.

(Guru 1993: 570)

For Huxley, in fact, the situation of the Dalits immediately generated an image of backwardness: ‘It was while visiting India that I better understood the differ-ence there might have been in the European Middle Ages between a peasant and a cardinal.’ This sort of archaizing move prevented the possibility of understand-ing Indian insurgencies – reduced by Huxley to the amorphous category of ‘dan-gerous’ – as a response to British colonial rule or to the modern re- articulation of capitalism: as Guha put it in his Elementary Aspects, ‘a perception of Indian society in caste categories fails to understand even the most explicit evidence about the class character [of insurgencies]’ (Guha 1999: 183). Gramsci’s retort astutely reframes the whole problem of caste in the context of ‘economic devel-opment’: ‘Are these [Brahmin] intellectuals “isolated” ’ – writes Gramsci – ‘or have they not become, rather, the expression of the middle and industrial classes that economic development has produced in India?’ (Q6§32; PN3: 25–6; FSPN: 122). The question mark at the end of Gramsci’s Note 32 is not, as I take it, purely rhetorical. The issue to understand – an issue that Gramsci cannot unravel from a prison cell in Italy – is whether Indian caste intellectuals are ‘isolated’, or whether they are instead ‘organic’ to an industrial economic development. If these intellectuals are ‘isolated’, what is happening in India is then that same kind of ‘passive revolution’ that had begun in Europe after 1848, and whose emblematic case was the Italian Risorgimento, the ‘revolution without a revolu-tion’ (Q1§44 [PN1: 136–51; SPN: 55–84]; Q19§24). As Gramsci argued, Italy’s hegemonic bourgeoisie of 1870, similar in this case to the British colonial class, could produce a passive revolution ‘in forms that can be called “liberal” ’: it did exercise ‘a powerful attraction, in a “spontaneous” way, over the whole mass of intellectuals who existed in the country in a “diffuse” and “molecular” state to fulfill, albeit minimally, the needs of public education and administration’ (Q1§44; PN1: 136–51). Were British intellectuals exercising now a similar powerful attraction (the sort of attraction that Huxley called ‘Western civilization’) over the diffuse, molecular, and isolated Indian intellectuals? In this case, the Italian case could be instructive: hegemonic British intellectuals would not only subordinate the Indian intellectual, but also create ‘an environment of solidarity among all the intellectuals [both British and colonial], with ties of a psychological (vanity etc.) and often of a caste . . . character’ (Q1§44; PN1: 136–51). The words here quoted register in fact the first appearance of the word ‘caste’ in the whole of the Prison Notebooks. We will return to Gramsci’s use of this word in a moment. Beforehand, let us notice that the hypothesis just sketched is

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not entirely tenable in the case of India in 1930: the civil disobedience move-ment – registered by Huxley as chaos – shows in fact that the hegemony of British rule has reached its twilight. A second hypothesis then emerges: that the new intellectuals of India are rather ‘the expression of the middle and industrial classes that economic development has produced in India’ – the expression, that is to say, of an Indian bourgeoisie still in its revolutionary, progressive mode. In this case the asymmetry between Brahmin intellectuals on the one hand, and Untouchables on the other, would correspond to a normal division of labor that tends to develop in all revolutionary groups. As Marx had written in The German Ideology:

The division of labour . . . manifests itself also . . . as the division of mental and material labour, so that within [one] class one part appears as the think-ers of the class . . . while the others have a more passive and receptive atti-tude to these ideas and illusions because they are in reality the active ones and have less time to make up ideas about themselves. This cleavage within the ruling class may even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, but in the event of a collision in which the class itself is endangered, it disappears of its own accord and with it also the illusion that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular age presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class.

(Marx and Engels 1972a: 35)

Whether Indian intellectuals of the 1930s were isolated or organic, the problem of caste, for Gramsci, was not one of ancient or backward Hindu traditions, but of the specifically Indian national expression of either a modern liberal passive revolution of the British bourgeoisie attempting to preserve its hold of India by incorporating molecularly its intellectuals, or of a modern national revolution of India. This does not mean that Gramsci was not aware of the historical or religious roots of the caste system; rather, the caste system too is simultaneously a ‘museum of fossils of past life’, and a ‘living thing’ of the present:

When I use the word ‘disaster’ no one can accuse me of believing in astrol-ogy, and when I say ‘by Jove’ no one can suppose I adore pagan deities. Yet these expressions demonstrate that modern civilization is also a develop-ment of paganism and astrology.

(Q4§17; PN2: 159)

Inversely, when Gramsci deals with the word ‘caste’ as a modern division of labor or as the by- product of a British passive revolution, no one can accuse him of believing that capitalism created the caste system; yet, Gramsci is intent to suggest, first, that caste is not merely a cultural/religious construct devoid of material content, but rather, as Gopal Guru writes in this volume, a ‘socio- cultural order’;


and, second, that an ancient caste system too develops and transforms under new conditions to become immanent to capitalism, which, through colonialism, came to dominate non- Western societies as well (Chakrabarty 2000: 20). Capitalism, in the East as in the West, shows in the 1930s a crisis of its hegemony: the ‘illu-sion that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class’ is broken – for the subaltern groups in the West, as for the colonial subjects in the East. It is from this crisis of capitalism, which is also a crisis of colonialism, that ‘dominance without hegemony’ came (Guha 1997: 72) – fascism and two world wars in the West; Peshawar fires, Calcutta riots, and the Qissa Khwani bazaar massacre in the East. This point should perhaps be made more explicitly: there is no ‘antinomy’ (Anderson 1976) of Antonio Gramsci’s setting apart East and West, but a continuous movement of reciprocal, if at times problematic, translat-ability. The question of the Indian intellectual echoes Gramsci’s concern with the Italian intellectual; schooling in colonial India parallels that in the Italian south; the Risorgimento fades into British colonial rule. It is not only a matter of what Aijaz Ahmad has called ‘those uncanny resemblances and resonances between the respective pasts of Italy and India’ (Ahmad 1993: 33), and Sunder Rajan calls the ‘relatively effortless portability of Gramsci into Third World con-texts’ (Sunder Rajan 2012: 168); more than that, there is in Gramsci a positive will – to use Derek Boothman’s word – of ‘translatability’ between East and West, between Italy and India. I do not mean only ‘translation between national cultures’ (Boothman 2004: 61), but translatability, rather, as ‘interpretation/translation of terms . . . with the goal of incorporating that term into a different discourse’ (Boothman 2004: 79). What happens when Gramsci translates and retranslates the (Marxian) discourse on the intellectual division of labor from the European concept of class to the Indian concept of caste? Does he simply establish what Ajit Roy calls an ‘inter-linked view’ of the two terms – which for Roy would be ‘a common element of Ambedkar’s and Gramsci’s political strategies’ (Roy 1979)? As I have implied before, Gramsci is trying to avoid exactly Huxley’s and Lefèvre’s immediate translation of caste into class: the two terms are not equivalent, and when ‘caste’ emerges in the Notebooks to interpret the Italian (or European) situation, it does so by offering an interpretive horizon that goes well beyond the classical notion of class. As we have seen, it is already in Notebook 1 that the term ‘caste’ appears, in reference to Italian intellectuals. Before the reference to India in Q6§32 (PN3: 25–6), Gramsci mentions Italian language as ‘the language of a closed caste’ (Q1§73; PN1: 179–80); the clergy as a ‘class- caste’ (Q1§154 [PN1: 234]; Q3§56 [PN2: 56–7; FSPN: 16–17]). Italian intellectuals are described as a ‘caste’ (Q1§44; PN1: 136–51), a ‘class- caste’ (Q2§45; PN1: 289–91), a ‘cosmopolitan caste’ (Q5§123; SCW: 234), or a formation of molecular individuals discon-nected from the nation- people and united only by a ‘tradition of caste’ (Q3§63 [PN2: 61–5], 76 [PN2: 72–6]), or a ‘spirit of caste’ (Q3§82; PN2: 80–2; SCW: 257). The case of an intellectual caste, rather than being limited to Italy, is a

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common European affair: ‘The Prussian Junkers resemble a priestly caste that carries on a basically intellectual activity but at the same time has its own eco-nomic base’ (Q4§49 [PN2: 205]; Q5§105 [SCW: 278–9]). The intellectual as a caste becomes ‘A strange and interesting aspect of [the] issue of the division of labor’ (Q4§53 [PN2: 221]). Throughout the Notebooks, this peculiar reference to an intellectual caste pervades. Is Gramsci’s use of the word metaphorical? Certainly so, if by metaphor we understand what is meant in Notebook 1:

In reality, every political movement creates a language of its own, that is, it participates in the general development of a distinct language, introducing new terms, enriching existing terms with new content, creating metaphors, using historical names to facilitate the comprehension and the assessment of particular contemporary political situations.

(Q1§43; PN1: 126)

What remains to understand is then how the word ‘caste’ enriches an existing discourse of class with new content, or how this historical name belonging to Hindu tradition facilitates, as a metaphor, the comprehension and the assessment of the particular contemporary situation in Italy and in Europe. What is at stake, in other words, in the translatability of class into caste? An obvious answer would be that the introduction of caste opens up the pos-sibility, as hinted above, of racializing the discourse of class. The real crux of the matter, however, is that the notion of class, in and by itself, fails to explain the transformations of the function and role of the intellectual in the period between 1860 and 1900 – a period that Gramsci calls ‘trasformismo’. To sum up: until 1848, the bourgeoisie is for Gramsci still a revolutionary class; it keeps subsuming civil society in the general, integral structure of the capitalist state. At this stage of the bourgeois revolution, society is certainly divided into classes. Class differences, however, are historically contingent, and can thus be over-come, as class mobility, contrary to feudal and aristocratic birthright, allows access of lower into higher classes. In short, at this moment in history that stretches from the French Revolution to roughly 1848, ‘society . . . does not lean on caste differences and presumes equality of all its members’ (Fabio Frosini in this volume). The State, in this situation, does not dominate ‘over’ civil society, but subsumes all levels of society to an extent never before imaginable: it becomes a network for the production of consent, and the intellectual has a central, organic role in it. By 1848, however, the hegemony of the bourgeoisie is in crisis:

this process [of progressive enlargement of hegemony] comes to a halt, and the conception of the State as pure force is returned to. The bourgeois class is saturated; not only it does not expand, it also starts to disintegrate; it does not assimilate new elements, it loses part of itself.

(Q8§2; PN3: 234; SPN: 260)


It is at this moment that a passive revolution begins. Class mobility is hindered if not stopped altogether. Social hierarchies become static, and no presumption of universal equality holds any longer: classes have become ‘castes’ – untouchable and unchangeable orders whose origin and legitimacy, as Ambedkar would say, is supposed to lie ‘buried in a dead past which nobody knows’ (Ambedkar 2003: 117). The State, as the expression of one such caste, dominates ‘over’ a civil society that has become external to it. The intellectual, in the meantime, under-goes a thorough transformation: once the leader of an organic process whose task was to create consensus and organize the possibility for the subsumption of all classes into the universal revolutionary project, the intellectual finds him- or herself relegated now to a series of technical, juridical, academic functions. S/he becomes embedded in a machinery that s/he helps to govern, certainly, but on behalf of a bourgeois State that still leads and rules, and to which the intellectual is no longer organic. S/he becomes, in short, a ‘traditional’ intellectual. The problem is that this traditional intellectual too, no longer organic to any class, cannot be understood through the Marxian category of class anymore:

The ‘restoration’ is the most interesting period from this point of view. . . . The old classes are demoted from ‘ruling’ to ‘governing’ but they are not eliminated and much less physically suppressed; they pass from being a class to becoming a ‘caste’ with specific psychological traits . . .

(Q1§151; PN1: 231)

It is here, precisely, that the Indian situation, in a peculiar case of a reverse appropriation model, becomes illuminating for Europe. If for Ambedkar caste was ‘a perverse and involuted form of class’ (Anapuma Rao in this volume), the transformation of the European intellectual after the restoration of 1848 was a similarly perverse and involuted process of caste formation. By the time of his writing of the Notebooks, the European intellectual, for Gramsci, had become a caste. If Huxley had seen India, within the typical paradigm of Orientalism, as nothing more than ‘a distant European past’ (Said 1979: 85), Gramsci saw in it a parallel to the present of the European situation from 1848 on: ‘This situation does not exist in Italy alone; to a lesser or greater extent, it exists in all countries of old Europe, and in more radical forms in India too’ (Q22§2; SPN: 285). The parallel, as of the writing of Notebook 7 (drafted around 1932, the epoch of the rise of Ambedkar as an intellectual organic to the Dalit movement and his participation at the Second Round Table Conference in London), could still suggest the hope that the growing distance between Gandhi’s intellectual caste and the people could ‘accelerate the fracture between people and intellectuals, and thus produce, on the part of the people, the creation of new intellectuals formed in the sphere of historical materialism’ (Q7§62; PN3: 201; FSPN: 123–4) and supporting Ambedkar’s project. After May 1933, however, once the fric-tions between Gandhi and Ambedkar had become irreconcilable on the issue of Dalit political rights, and the ‘Hindu upper caste . . . failed Ambedkar in support-ing the radical version of [his] bill in the parliament’ (Gopal Guru in this

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volume), the parallel starts sounding more ominous. Gramsci feels that the British are keeping control of India by exploiting exactly the distance between the Dalit masses and the Hindu elite. Once the Gandhist intellectual is no longer organic to the Dalit masses, and the Ambedkarian organic intellectual is isolated by the colonial elite, the power of attraction of British hegemony would, Gramsci fears, become insurmountable. The British have their followers among the Indians, not only among those who always ally with the strong, but also among those who follow with full ‘awareness’, consciousness, etc. What is not understood is that in every political situation the active part is always a minority. If this minority, when it is followed by the multitudes, does not carefully organize this same multitude, their strength will soon be lost. An adversarial minority will take advantage of the propitious situation: one political machine falls apart, and a new one is built, which will make sure that the old multitudes will not count for anything at all, and will no longer be able to move and operate. What is called ‘mass’ will be pulverized in many atoms without will nor orientation and a new ‘mass’ will be formed, even if smaller than the first, but more compact and resistant. Its function will be to prevent the original mass from reforming and becoming efficient again (Q15§35). In this brief summary of the whole theory of passive revolution, Gramsci makes the Indian case paradigmatic of the Italian and European one. Against Huxley’s liberalism, Gramsci insists that ‘in every political situation’ an intellec-tual minority ought to organize a multitude. In India, a Brahmin minority should have organized the subaltern multitude of Dalits. One goal of such ‘organiza-tion’ was indeed the production of an intellectual minority out of the subaltern masses themselves; or, to put it differently, to ‘transform’ those masses from subaltern to hegemonic, capable in short of producing a mass consensus. Because the masses, let us remind ourselves, are not passive, but ‘intellectually . . . active’ (Q1§35; PN1: 120–1). The goal is then to ‘transform’ this activity into a hegemonic one. Once Gandhism had lost this opportunity, the British adver-sary seemed now ready to capitalize on the mistake: the revolutionary machine of national liberation was broken, pulverized and atomized. A new machine was built, ‘which will make sure that the old multitudes will not count anything at all, and will no longer be able to move and operate’. This was being made pos-sible by the power of attraction that British colonialism could now operate on the Indian intellectual minorities themselves – those who ‘follow with full “awareness”, consciousness, etc.’ and feel ‘solidarity’ for the British minority ‘with ties of a psychological (vanity etc.) and often of a caste . . . character’ (Q1§44; PN1: 138). The intellectual minority, in the end, had been transformed, in India as in Europe, into an intellectual caste.

6 Limits of the organic intellectualA Gramscian reading of Ambedkar

Gopal Guru

The self- assertion of the Dalit community across India has prompted increasing scholarly interest in understanding Ambedkar from a range of perspectives, includ-ing comparative political thought. This attentiveness is all the more pleasing in that it offers us an expansive view of Ambedkar’s intellectual calibre, as scholars are now applying to Ambedkar the same evaluative and methodological standards that are applied to other leading thinkers. In recent years, scholars have meaningfully compared Ambedkar with Benjamin (Ganguly 2002; Kumar 2010), with Foucault (Jaware 2006), and with Agamben (Baxi 2006). These welcome attempts at com-parison help us to liberate Ambedkar from the narrow parochial depiction con-veyed by his visual representation and in some of the rhetorically repetitive writings through which Ambedkar has been spread horizontally, if not vertically. The vertical dissemination of an idea requires a certain discursive height in the realm of understanding and imagination; a comparative approach may or may not achieve this height, although it can secure a place for a thinker – in our case, Ambedkar – in the intellectual pantheon. The comparisons made up until now have taken us far, but the possibilities are not yet exhausted and we can also compare Gramsci and Ambedkar. In fact, as I argue in the course of this chapter, such a comparison is much more illuminating, as it can help us to understand the role of Indian society and politics in shaping and orienting Ambedkar’s thought and its application. Further, re- contextualizing Gramsci in this way also helps us to assess both the ethical stamina and the political calibre of Indian society vis- à-vis Ambedkar’s career as an organic intellectual. However, I must admit here that this is not the maiden attempt to re- contextualize Gramsci in order to gain a better understanding of the political and intellectual dynamics of Indian society. Scholars have already made pioneering efforts to deploy a Gramscian theoretical framework to explore critical impulses that would otherwise remain hidden within the complex process of thinking and politics. Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj undertook the earliest efforts to apply Gramsci to India, resulting in a far greater creative understanding of Indian history, politics and society. Guha, a leading subaltern historian, found in Gramsci a radical point of departure for understanding how the socioeconomic dynamic unfolded historically (Guha 1999: 39), while for Chatterjee, Gramsci opens up an analytical window through which to view

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Gandhi in a much more creative way than is found in the work of many Gandhi scholars (Chatterjee 1996: 59). Chatterjee’s work demonstrates that Gandhian thought was incapable of unfolding on its own, and required Gramsci. Sudipta Kaviraj is another leading scholar who is interested in an Indian re- contextualization of Gramsci, but he takes a slightly different view and also uses Althusser to formulate a radical understanding of Indian politics. Kaviraj argues that Gramsci helps us to arrive at the most creative moment in Indian politics (Kaviraj 2010: 8), but he also makes us alert to the methodological problems of attempting to apply universally a concept borrowed from an intellectual tradition that has developed within a particular history (Kaviraj 2010: 8). It is, however, possible to defend such borrowing in the context of the inegalitarian intellectual traditions that continue to exist in India. In India, the field of thinking and scholarship was not formally open to a large section of the population, including women and the Shudra/Ati- Shudra communities. Knowledge- making was limited to a small section of Indian society which, as we shall see in the follow-ing section, lacked the democratic motivation to acknowledge the other’s claim to knowledge or to share its own knowledge with others. Although the methodo-logical problems noted by Kaviraj do have relevance in the sense that a concept from particular historical background may not be universally applicable, it may be possible for scholars to use a concept in a range of specific contexts, and in this way we can gain confidence in its universal applicability. Taking my cue for situating Ambedkar in context from Kaviraj, I would like to argue that Gramscian concepts, particularly those of the organic intellectual and of hegemony, have a creative bearing on understanding both the ethical and the political character of Indian civil society. The re- deployment of these ideas to the context of India enables us to judge whether Indian civil society is hostile or hospitable to the idea of recognizing Ambedkar as an organic intellectual, and it opens up the possibility of evaluating whether Indian civil society has developed the ethical stamina and acquired the political imagination to accept Ambedkar as a thinker of universal status. To put it differently, I am interested in using Gramsci as a vantage point from which to foreground Ambedkar’s intel-lectual and political career. To express the central question of this paper: to what extent can Ambedkar achieve the status of being an organic intellectual, in the Gramscian sense of the term?

The Gramscian concept of the organic intellectualAccording to Gramsci,

every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essen-tial function in the world of production, creates together with itself, organ-ically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.

(Q12§1; SPN: 5)

A Gramscian reading of Ambedkar 89

As has been further argued by Sassoon, in Gramsci’s thought the creation of organic intellectuals within the working classes spans a process which begins with class organization under capitalism and culminates in the creation of a new mode of production and a new socialist organization of society in general. It describes the very transition to socialism (Sassoon 1987). Gramsci thus makes at least two important things clear to us. First, organic intel-lectuals have a role in history of bringing the systemic crisis to a head, in order to pave way for the transition to socialism. They have a transformative agenda before them. Second, they also have a moral challenge, to develop both intellectually and politically from being ‘specific intellectuals’ to becoming ‘universal intellectuals’. The question we need to address, therefore, is where to locate Ambedkar: in specif-icity, or in universality? Was his purpose to provide an alternative vision of eman-cipation, or was it just to destroy the existing universal intellectual in Indian society by standing at a specific location, in the way that Foucault would suggest (Rad-hakrishnan 1997: 37)? Second, did ‘epistemological transgression’, on which he certainly embarked, constitute an essential part of his conceptions of what Gramsci called the organic intellectual and counter- hegemony? These are two core ques-tions that I would like to address in the following pages. There are two mutually exclusive intellectual conditions that seem to have led Ambedkar to embark on epistemological transgression. These are Brahminical hegemony and colonial modernity. As I shall argue in the following sections, Brahminical hegemony is a constraining factor on Ambedkar, while colonial modernity is an enabling factor. This has bearing on Ambedkar as an organic intellectual, and helps to explain why Ambedkar was seeking transgression.

Ambedkar’s concept of Brahminical hegemonyAmbedkar defined Brahminical hegemony as the socio- cultural order in which lower castes had to express increasing levels of reverence towards higher (known as ‘twice- born’) classes and to internalize a diminishing sense of self- esteem ([1938] BAWS 18 (2): 162). The Shudra/Ati- Shudra caste did not object to the discriminatory treatment that they received from the upper caste, because Brah-minical hegemony also gave them a relative sense of social superiority over other caste groups which were immediately below them on a scale of continuous hierarchy, as defined by Louis Dumont (1979). That is to say, caste groups on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy found it quite morally (in caste terms) comforting to follow the logic of continuous hierarchy, in that it gave them some degree of social essence that emanated from the asymmetrical, and hence less interactive, protocols. A relative sense of social dominance in everyday forms of interaction provided the grounds for social essence. As Kaviraj observes:

Hegemony is . . . a relational idea; for it is a condition which cannot be described without inscribing in every part of the equation of subordination and domination. The nature of the superordination of the dominant groups

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also contains the description of the mode of subalterneity of the masses. The two- sidedness is conceptual, and not descriptive. Its use does not mean that every stage both sides of this world have to be portrayed, it is a manner of portraying in which from a description of one side the condition of the other can be inferred, in however undetermined a way. On one reading, hegemony is a term which is an antonym, or a continuum, opposite of repression.

(Kaviraj 2010: 48)

Kaviraj seeks to import the Gramscian notion of hegemony in order to under-stand and interrogate the imperial hegemony (Kaviraj 2010: 48). Here, I am interested in deploying the Gramscian concept of hegemony to reaffirm Ambedkar’s critique of Brahminical hegemony; a re- contextualization of Gramsci is relevant not only to the subaltern critique of the colonial config-uration of power, but also to the Dalit critique of the local configuration of power constitutive of Brahminical hegemony. The two core Gramscian categories of hegemony and the organic intellectual provide the context for an expansive understanding of Indian society which can form the basis for a comparative per-spective between Gramsci and Ambedkar. I would like to reaffirm that Ambed-kar and Gramsci are both subversive, and that Ambedkar and his own caste background do not sabotage Gramscian categories. Caste categories give consti-tutive content to Brahminical hegemony, which, in turn, constructs both women and non- Brahmins in such a way that the latter become willing partners in their own subordination within the cultural framework of Brahminical hegemony. This can be illustrated by examples.

The hegemonic construction of women

Ambedkar acquired a command of jurisprudence and constitutionalism with the aim of addressing the question of the position of women in India, and he invested all of his intellectual energy into drafting a Hindu Code Bill that would benefit Hindu women. However, it was not only upper- caste Hindu males who failed to support his radical Bill in parliament, but, most shockingly, also upper- caste Hindu women, who expressed opposition in the streets of Delhi (Khairmode 1996: 67). In more recent times, the political activism of women who are fight-ing for social justice has lacked a unified sense of history, as can be seen from their choice of symbolic site at which to protest for a 33 per cent allocation for women in the lower house of the Indian parliament. The site they chose was Gandhi’s statue, despite the fact that it was Ambedkar who pioneered reserved allocations for disadvantaged sectors of society, including women, and that the credit for a reservation provision in the Indian constitution must go to Ambed-kar. But he does not even receive the symbolic attention of these women, who draw cultic patronage from Gandhi even though a statue of Ambedkar is placed very close to Gandhi in the same vicinity of Parliament House.1 One may under-stand this ‘feminist prejudice’, given the pragmatism of choosing a ‘charismatic figure’ such as Gandhi, who enjoys political support inside parliament, even at


the cost of ignoring Ambedkar’s achievement as the embodiment of the principle of social justice. However, one cannot but judge that such a stance, however radical it may be, is not completely without prejudice. Upper- caste Hindu women thought that while Ambedkar was qualified to frame the Indian constitu-tion, he was not sufficiently qualified to legislate on Hindu patriarchy. Ambedkar was puzzled about the role of state and parliament as a forum that could inter-vene in the most complex issues, such as the Hindu Code Bill. At one level, he thought that state and parliament would intervene effectively in the process of social transformation, but at another level he was deeply disappointed, particu-larly as regards the Hindu Code Bill. It is important to note here that Gramsci shared Ambedkar’s puzzlement over state and parliament (Kiernan 1972: 12). However, Ambedkar did get some symbolic support for his intellectual leadership from women who had taken to the streets. This is clear from the fol-lowing song that a peasant woman from Kokan sang for Ambedkar:

Shetat raboto Dinrat Shetakri,Aayat Bilat Khot hoai watekari,Shetkari dada tu hou nako adhir,Tuzya hitasathi zate Ambedkar veer.[Peasants toil day and night, but the landlords share the product as freeload-ers, hey! Peasants, do not lose your confidence, Ambedkar is with you in your fight against the landlord.]

(Gaikwad 1999: 40)

But this was an isolated instance. The reality was that a section of the Congress did not like peasant men and women supporting Ambedkar in his struggle against the ‘Khoti’ system that was so exploitative of peasants from the Kokan region, and Congress is said to have used women to turn peasant males against Ambedkar’s universal appeal. Congress leaders are reported to have carried out what has been described as a mischievous campaign against Ambedkar, accus-ing him of being interested in the Independent Labour Party not so much for political purposes, but in order to marry upper- caste daughters to Untouchable youth (Khairmode 1998: 56). This patriarchal cunning, treating upper- caste women as emotionally explosive material, was deployed to achieve a double purpose: first, to defuse the impact of egalitarian appeals such as Ambedkar’s, and second, to insulate patriarchy from Ambedkar’s organic passage. This denial of women’s subjective freedom to associate organically with a critical intellec-tual tradition has its own history, which connects modern patriarchal intentions to those of seventeenth- century Maharashtra. The upper- caste male not only withheld intellectual recognition from Ambedkar, but imposed a patriarchal limit on the cultural and intellectual practices of upper- caste women. One example cited by Sanskrit scholars is that of Bahinabai Choudhury, an eighteenth- century female poet from Maharashtra. She was tortured by her husband, who opposed her decision to accept Tukaram, a lower- caste traditional intellectual, as her mentor (Kulkarni 1992: 40).

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The hegemonic construction of intellectuals

Brahminical patriarchy continued to refuse to give recognition to thinkers from the Shudra/Ati- Shudra caste, even in the twentieth century. This was also noted by Ambedkar, and he showed that this need to deny the intellectual/ epistemo-logical capacity of the lowest castes arose in the wake of the onslaught of colo-nial modernity. In pre- colonial days, there was no need for a Brahmin to deny the intellectual claims of a Dalit; the hegemonic impact of the Brahminical social order on the non- Brahmin was so complete that Brahmins had no need to deny the intellectual claims of the Shudra/Ati- Shudra caste. However, with the emer-gence of Dalit intellectuals with trangressive capacity, upper- caste intellectuals were forced to take cognizance of the intellectual calibre of Dalit thinkers. This upper- caste recognition was expressed through denial; Ambedkar himself cites the example of Ramdas, a seventeenth- century saint from Maharashtra, who in his Dasbodh asked, ‘Can we accept an Antyja (untouchable) to be our guru because he is Pandit [knowledgeable]?’ Ramdas, according to Ambedkar, answers this question in the negative (Ambedkar [1936] BAWS 1: 37). Ambedkar argued, from this and from other examples out of the countless to choose from, that lived history shows that the general intellectual mood in India continues to be parochial, in the sense that upper- caste males are either unenthu-siastic about or totally against recognizing lower- caste members as intellectual leaders of society. Ambedkar saw the impossibility of the emergence of an organic intellectual in a totally hierarchical society which lacked the moral stamina either to nurture or to appreciate a new class of intellectuals emerging from within the Dalit community, and he argued that the emergence of this new class was being thwarted by the arresting role of caste ideology. We can see that caste ideology in the pre- modern period definitely denied what can be called an ‘epistemological transgression’ to any Dalit or woman who aspired to move from a specific to a universal intellectual position. Ambedkar elaborates on his observation further:

would a Hindu acknowledge and follow the leadership of a great and good man? The case of Mahatma apart, the answer must be that he will follow a leader if he is a man of his caste. A Brahmin will follow a leader only if he is a Brahmin, a Kayastha and so on. The capacity to appreciate merits in a man apart from his caste does not exist in Hindu society. There is apprecia-tion of virtue but only the man is a fellow caste man.

([1936] BAWS 1: 57; EW: 275)

This observation is echoed by Edward Shils, who observes that ‘the Indian intel-lectuals are caste conscious. They are sensitive to the caste of their fellow intellec-tuals’ (Shils 1961: 69). Shils further argues that Brahmins are natural intellectuals, and hence they need not earn their prominence; it is already given (ibid.). Shils’s observation about Brahmins regarding themselves as being naturally talented is confirmed by a Sanskrit Pandit, Damodar Satwadekar from


Maharashtra. In 1935, Satwadekar stated matter- of-factly that ‘Ambedkar’s intellectual achievement is more due to his rootedness in caste background rather than his hold over the larger intellectual field’ (Kamble 1992: 25). Satwadekar further argued that for a person such as Ambedkar, it was easy to acquire schol-arly recognition, because the mass of Dalits are far behind him (ibid.). Sat-wadekar is here doing two things: first, he is linking Ambedkar’s achievement to a notion of negative intellectual exceptionalism, in the sense that Satwadekar uti-lizes ‘Dalit’ as a limited reference point from which to judge Ambedkar’s intel-lectual status. Thus caste, rather than a wide epistemological field, forms the basis for his judgment. Satwadekar is suggesting that the collective growth of the lower- caste community is sociological only, rather than intellectual. In a way, he is taking an anti- Gramscian stance, opposing Gramsci’s finding in the subaltern the intellectual potential to transform a society’s intellectuals. Second, Satwadekar by implication is suggesting that members of the upper caste have to compete among themselves to acquire intellectual recognition. For Satwadekar, the scholarship of the upper caste is located purely on an epistemological terrain, disconnected from its originators’ caste background. Thus upper- caste intellectu-als can acquire a universal status, in which they can even think on behalf of the Dalits. However, Satwadekar denies the same possibility to Ambedkar; the thinkers of the twice- born castes are part of the ruling order, while Ambedkar remains a stigmatized exception and cannot intellectually represent the twice- born. In conclusion, it can be said that for Satwadekar, Ambedkar can never become an idea to be followed by everyone. Satwadekar rules out Ambedkar as a thinker who can even compete with others in the domain of a male- dominated intellectual field.

Colonial modernity and transgressionIt is essential to foreground the concept of epistemological transgression within the context of colonial modernity. Ambedkar’s growth as an organic intellectual is certainly not located in the dark shadow of western epistemology. Nor does it progress due to the courtesy of so called ‘desi’ epistemologies produced by the highest members of the twice- born, the Brahmins. Rather, Ambedkar’s status developed on its own authentic terms, emanating from the historical need to produce a counter- hegemony against Brahminical hegemony, and finding affir-mation in the intellectual practices of the subaltern groups: women, Dalits, and the OBC (designated ‘Other Backward Classes’) castes. I would like to argue that India’s type of colonial capitalism did open up the possibility for Ambedkar to become a universal intellectual. However, it did try, in its own interest, to produce conditions that could be conducive to the emer-gence of intellectuals from the lowest strata of Indian society, engineering what could be termed an ‘epistemological transgression’ which empowered Ambed-kar to break out from the intellectual encirclement of the Dalit community by Brahminical hegemony. As a part of this transgression, Ambedkar, like Jyotirao Phule, tried to create a counter- hegemony by posing a challenge to the

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intellectual dominance of the highest members of the twice- born, who allowed the Dalits to exist as a silent, and hence inferior, other in their own hegemonic discourse. This reading of Ambedkar comes very close to Kaviraj’s interpreta-tion of the Gramscian notion of hegemony. It is interesting to ask whether, once the Dalits had extracted themselves from their position as mute object within Brahminical hegemony, the Brahmins made a fresh attempt to bring them back under their hegemonic influence. Did the Brahmins invoke an inverted form of ‘epistemological transgression’ against the Dalits, with the Brahminical intellec-tuals making the Dalits an object of their hegemonic discourse? And did Ambed-kar succeed in producing counter- hegemony among the subaltern group?

Ambedkar’s project of counter- hegemonyIn recent years, the debate over civil society has acquired a certain degree of prominence within Indian academic circles, with leading social scientists arguing that caste provides a necessary social basis for the constitution of civil society (M.N. Srinivas, letter to André Béteille quoted in Béteille 2005: 283). This debate followed a particular trajectory, and developed into a discussion of the general meaning of civil society in India, although the notion of civil society under discussion is markedly different from the Gramscian understanding. For Gramsci, civil society is a complex structure, resistant to the catastrophic ‘incur-sions’ of immediate economic factors such as crisis or depression (Q13§24; SPN: 235). Civil society in the Gramscian sense is a superstructure, serving the same purpose as a trench system in modern warfare (Q13§24; SPN: 235). Gramsci treats civil society as the sphere in which the hegemonies of the ruling class are formed and challenged by the counter- hegemony of the subaltern (Q13§24; SPN: 235). According to the Gramscian framework, the challenge to the hegemony of the ruling class is basically a challenge that of necessity is ori-ented and articulated at the cultural level through the formation of a negative consciousness among the subaltern. This understanding has been embraced by subaltern studies in India. Taking his cue from Gramsci, the pioneer subaltern historian Ranajit Guha argues that:

Indeed the authority of all superordinate classes and groups was secure only so far and as long as he was reconciled to that condition. However, paradox-ically enough, his revolt against that authority, when the hour struck, derived much of its strength from the same awareness.

(Guha 1999: 19)

Taken by itself, this did not of course constitute a mature and fully evolved class consciousness. Indeed, it would be wrong to regard this awareness as being even at the very beginning of that consciousness; Gramsci instead characterizes it as ‘merely as the first glimmer of such consciousness, in other words, merely as the basic negative, polemical attitude’ (Q12§1; SPN: 19–20). Thus Guha, in his study of peasant insurgency, finds a negative class consciousness to be an


important subjective element in the emergence of more mature class conscious-ness. I argue that negative consciousness plays an important role in shaping the fully grown Dalit consciousness. The process of ‘Sanskritization’, I would further argue, is reflective of this first glimmer of a politically more mature con-sciousness that finds its definite expression in the Dalit subaltern. This is thanks to the concerted political interventions made by Ambedkar to deploy Sanskriti-zation as the cognitive condition for arriving at a more mature politically trans-formative consciousness. In the Indian social context, the process of Sanskritization acquires a negative power which can then be deployed to challenge the cultural power of the socially dominant. As the social history of Dalit assertion shows, repeated attempts have been made to subvert the tormentor through imitating the tormentor’s cultural symbols; the subaltern seeks to annoy the master through the imitation of the master’s lifestyle. Imitation denies the dominant an exclusive hold over the cul-tural power that flows from cultural symbols. Thus, the emergence of negative consciousness is the initial subjective condition needed to challenge the hege-monic class. One can make perfect sense of the cultural movement led by Ambedkar within the context of negative consciousness. However, unlike the European societies with which Gramscian thought is concerned, Ambedkar had to chal-lenge a different kind of hegemony: Brahminical hegemony. The social proto-cols that Untouchables were forced to adopt while dealing, in a very limited way, with the highest members of the twice- born, required a servile attitude entailing self- contempt. Brahminical hegemony could retain its hold over the non- Brahmin caste and even over Dalits, because the latter consented to Brah-minical superiority. The Dalits participated in their own social degradation because Brahminical hegemony provided some of the Untouchables with a sense of relative superiority over those even lower within the system of continuous social hierarchy. The cultural aspiration of associating with Brahminism and dis-sociating from socially inferior groups on the scale of continuous hierarchy involves the cultural pacification of the lower castes; Sanskritization as a pacifi-catory process of cultural containment helped the socially dominant class to contain the overflow of Dalit consciousness that was potentially subversive of Brahminical social order. The need to disconnect Dalits from this hegemonic ideology inspired a radical response from Ambedkar, who consequently launched social struggles such as demanding the right of temple entry, in order to create negative consciousness among the Dalits and the other non- Brahmin castes. Non- Brahmins associated with Ambedkar not because they were social reformers or philanthropists, but because they were also the victims of Brahmin-ical hegemony at the objective level (Kamble 1999: 28). But what were the factors that allowed the Dalit–Bahujan masses to arrive at a more radical version of political consciousness through transcending a servile consciousness – a consciousness that reflected a diminishing sense of self- worth and hence loss of agency? It could not have been achieved without acquiring negative

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consciousness as an initial subjective condition. Gramsci’s idea of negative con-sciousness is as important here as it is for subaltern studies. In order to create negative consciousness among the Dalit–Bahujan masses, Ambedkar used the movement to demand the right of temple entry not to create upper- caste Hindus, but to deflate the ideological cover that had been built through the process of Sanskritization (Srinivas 2009: 235). Ambedkar led Untouchables into sacred Hindu temples in order to show that touchable Hindus were not yet ready to accept Untouchables as their equals, and that touchable Hindus retained an interest in protecting and perpetuating hierarchical difference. In other words, the temple entry movement led by Ambedkar aimed to convert the sacred into the profane, in that the profane is egalitarian. The resistance of the upper castes to such a ‘poison weapon’ would create negative consciousness, first by chal-lenging the upper castes’ social dominance, and second by generating the evalu-ative capacity of the protagonists, who would then progress from a negative state of consciousness into political consciousness. Thus Ambedkar used the temple entry movement to create a negative consciousness among Untouchables in western India in the 1930s, and the cultural mobilization of the Dalits seems to have achieved both political maturity and stability by the middle of that decade. This was evident when the Dalits started interrogating both their own caste as Hindus and the Indian National Congress ([1951] BAWS 18 [1]: 230). The emer-gence of negative consciousness among the Dalits, and to some extent among other non- Brahmins, was articulated against the cultural hegemony of the Brah-mins. As discussed above, the joint Dalit–Bahujan struggle for the right of temple entry during the colonial period provided an initial subjective condition for their emancipation from the local configuration of power (Shetji Bhataji). The Dalit–Bahujan unity that was consolidated at the cultural level was progres-sively transformed into a political force, as an essential condition for struggle against the material interest of the governing class. This paper addresses several questions concerning Ambedkar that arise from this. First, was Ambedkar’s intellectual calibre such that his work can be regarded as socially necessary intellectual labour? Further, was it politically ade-quate to gain, in Gramscian terms, organic passage into different social constitu-encies? And did the subaltern take advantage of the situation by throwing in their lot with Ambedkar in a common project of collective emancipation? The answer to these questions cannot be given clearly in the affirmative. The social character of Indian society would not allow subjective conditions to mature to the level where the subaltern would accept claims to universal leadership that arise from the lower rungs of Indian society. As was acknow-ledged by Ambedkar himself ([1936] BAWS 1: 37), the caste- ridden socioeconomic structures of Indian society created serious impediments both to the expansion of Indian capitalism and for the resultant growth of organic intellectu-als – either subaltern or bourgeoisie. The Indian capitalism that was emerging in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century did not provide favourable material conditions that would rip apart the caste fabric and thus allow a new class to emerge freely. In the following section, I argue that


Ambedkar found his organic passage blocked by the caste system. The system actively blocked the organic passage that was unfolding slowly and gradually, depending upon the material interest of capitalism and cultural interest of Brah-minism in India.

Ambedkar and a bumpy organic passageAccording to Gramsci, the organic passage of an intellectual involves enlarging the class sphere both technically and politically/ideologically (Q8§2; SPN: 260). In a Gramscian understanding, then, an organic intellectual is supposed to gain an organic passage into other classes. However, before we discuss why Ambed-kar was unable to gain organic passage into other social constituencies, it is important to ask a question: is an organic intellectual unilaterally responsible for his or her failure to gain this access? Gramsci provides us with an important lead here in his discussion of a ‘superior “demagogy” ’ in contrast to the ‘reprehensi-ble “demagogue” ’:

[I]f the leader does not regard the human masses as a servile instrument – useful to attain one’s own aims and then to be discarded – but aims, instead, to achieve organic political results (of which these masses are the necessary historical protagonists), if the leader carries out a constructive ‘constituent’ task, then his is a superior ‘demagogy’. . . . The political leader with a lofty ambition . . . is inclined to create an intermediate stratum between himself and the masses, to foster potential ‘rivals’ and peers, to elevate the capabil-ities of the masses, to produce individuals who can replace him as leader

(Q6§97, PN3: 82–3)

Here Gramsci is vesting a moral role with the masses that are supposed to achieve this transformation. Let me quickly add here that this mutually exchangeable responsibility is constitutive of moral hegemony (Q19§24; SPN: 59). Gramsci thus suggests the groundwork for the organic link between the masses and the intellectuals. However, the organic link between the masses and Ambedkar could never become stronger, and remained weak even though his intellectual and political project had emancipatory promise. As Gramsci explains, gaining organic passage is a precondition for producing broad solid-arity. Let us now consider to what extent Ambedkar was able to gain organic passage within the subaltern social classes. Ambedkar’s formation of the Independent Labour Party in 1936 showed some promise for facilitating his organic passage into other subaltern classes. Ambed-kar founded the party to consolidate the subaltern class politically with a larger social constituency of non- Brahmin peasant castes in western Maharashtra, forging a broader unity between the peasants (non- Brahmin) and the workers (consisting broadly of Untouchables) through the category of exploitation. Non- Brahmin caste members, particularly from the coastal areas of Bombay State (kokan), followed Ambedkar on the land question (the ‘Khoti’ system). This

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Dalit–Bahujan solidarity was endorsed by the non- Brahmins in both formal and cultural politics. In formal politics, the ILP as led by Ambedkar was able to win fifteen seats out of seventeen in the provincial council elections held in 1937 (Khairmode 1997: 23). In the realm of symbolic politics, the non- Brahmins elevated Ambedkar over Gandhi, seen in his characterization as the ‘Rashtra Guru’ (‘Teacher of the Nation’) in the non- Brahmin universal imagination ([1938] BAWS 18 (2): 162). Interestingly, this was distinct from the patronizing attribution of ‘Rashtra Pita’ (‘Father of the Nation’) that was showered on Mahatma Gandhi. However, the attribution of ‘Rashtra Guru’ did not stay long with Ambedkar, and the hold of his organic intellectual leadership over the non- Brahmin sensi-bility during the late 1930s was short- lived. Non- Brahmins, and even some Dalit sub- castes, refused to link organically to Ambedkar. Non- Brahmins had a mixed and partial response to Ambedkar’s leadership: some of them flatly refused to grant Ambedkar universal qualities, while others gave only partial recognition to his intellectual qualities (Bhole 2006: 212). As an example of the latter, many non- Brahmins wanted to hire Ambedkar to fight their legal battles against the Brahmins. Thus Ambedkar was offered only limited organic passage into the non- Brahmin constituency. This was completely against the Gramscian under-standing of the organic passage of an intellectual; as noted above, according to Gramsci, organic passage involves enlarging the class sphere both technically and politically, but also ideologically (Q8§2, PN3: 234; SPN: 260). However, the non- Brahmins allowed Ambedkar only a half- way passage, insofar as that they acknowledged his skill in jurisprudence. The questions that need to be answered are: why did non- Brahmin intellectuals allow Ambedkar only half- way passage into their social constituency, and why did some totally reject Ambed-kar’s leadership claims? First, non- Brahmins did not want to associate themselves with a heterodox tradition that involved continuous confrontation with orthodox traditions; non- Brahmins such as Ambedkar did not take the moral initiative to listen to history seriously, and failed to express continuous association with the historical ques-tion and with the critique of those who produced questions for the Dalits. Ambedkar, on the other hand, found it historically and morally necessary to associate himself with a heterodox tradition that had begun with the Buddha. Ambedkar’s political identification was with Tukaram (a seventeenth- century non- Brahmin saint from Maharashtra) rather than Chokha Mela (a fourteenth- century Untouchable); in Gramscian terms, Tukaram was a traditional intellec-tual, and this fully explains Ambedkar’s art of listening to the historical call and his readiness to relate to the heterodox intellectual traditions. Second, caste, according to Ambedkar, actively prevented the possibility of attaining wider leadership: ‘castes prevent people from following a leader from another caste even if the latter is much more superior. They tend to follow the leaders of their own caste, even if he is not competent’ ([1928] BAWS 19: 388). Third, the project of capturing political power or state power through the election of 1937 was not preceded by an overcoming of the social power that


non- Brahmins continued to enjoy in the sphere of civil society. This reading of Ambedkar is very much closer to Gramsci’s view, that ‘there must be hegemonic activity even before the rise of power, and . . . one should not count on the material force which power gives in order to exercise effective leadership’ (Q19§24; SPN: 59). This lag in social consciousness, especially within the non- Brahmin social group and about which Ambedkar was aware (Khairmode 1998: 5), seriously damaged the possibilities for forging broader unity. The condition-ality imposed by the dominant section of the non- Brahmin caste, particularly during the Mahad struggle for water in 1927, adversely affected the anticaste struggle. It was alleged that the Congress leaders took advantage of this lag in the social consciousness of non- Brahmins and tried to demobilize them from the broader struggle that the Independent Labour Party had launched under the leadership of Ambedkar. The non- Brahmin masses were persuaded by the campaign, not because they had fallen victim to the cunning of the Indian National Congress, but rather for two interrelated reasons. First, they saw in the INC a future promise of new material advantages should the party gain political power after the end of colonial rule. Second, the non- Brahmin masses perceived that once they had achieved stability in terms of improved economic conditions, this would then help them to maintain social superiority. Thus, this double ambition, nurtured among the non- Brahmin caste, had a constraining effect on the radical ization of political consciousness and meant that the masses did not make common cause with Ambedkar. Ambedkar himself made a profound observation about the lag in non- Brahmin consciousness:

Firstly, they had not been able to realize exactly what their differences were with Brahminical sections. Though they indulged in virulent criticism of Brahmins, could any one of them say those differences had been doctrinal? How much Brahminism had they in them? . . . Instead of abandoning Brah-minism, they had been holding on to the spirit of it as being the ideal.

([1944] BAWS 17 (3): 319; quoted in Khairmode 1998: 5)

To put it more dramatically, the non- Brahmins would like to gain from tradition whatever is lost to Ambedkar in the sphere of modernity. Thus, the non- Brahmin masses failed to sustain Ambedkar as an organic intellectual.

ConclusionWhile it is true that both Gramsci and Ambedkar have produced ideas of uni-versal calibre, there is a basic difference between the two thinkers in the sense that the social contexts of their universal calibre are starkly different. In case of Gramsci, his ideas enjoy a context- free status and hence the subaltern in India finds no problem in re- contextualizing Gramsci in order to name local resistance as ‘subaltern’. Ambedkar’s ideas are context- bound not because they lack

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universal calibre, but because the cognitive condition of their receptivity and articulation was superimposed by the social conditions of caste division, of which Gramsci himself was quite aware. Thus from within the Gramscian frame-work, one can find certain concepts, such as hegemony, subalternity, passive revolution and the organic intellectual to be much more readily applicable, because the social character of western society is less complex than that of India, which continues to suffer from the phenomenon of continuous hierarchies. This special social context of India makes the wider use of Ambedkar’s concepts almost impossible.

Note1 See the cover of Frontline 25 (11), published on 6 June 2008.

Part III

Subalternity and common sense

7 Living subalternityAntonio Gramsci’s concept of common sense1

Kate Crehan

‘Common sense’, i.e. . . . the traditional popular conception of the world – what is unimaginatively called ‘instinct’, although it too is in fact a primitive and ele-mentary historical acquisition.

(Q3§48; SPN: 199; PN3: 51)

‘Senso comune’, normally translated into English as ‘common sense’, is a central concept in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Here I explore the usefulness of Gram-sci’s concept for the mapping of the everyday realities into which subalternity translates. For Gramsci, a committed revolutionary, common sense is a crucial terrain on which the struggle to bring into being effective counter- hegemonic narratives – narratives with the power to supplant existing hegemonic narratives – is waged. But what exactly is common sense for Gramsci? One problem for those, like myself, who read Gramsci in English, is that the English term ‘common sense’ is not a simple equivalent to senso comune. Senso comune is a more neutral term which lacks the generally positive connotations of the English ‘common sense’; senso comune refers simply to beliefs and opinions supposedly shared by the mass of the population. Given the lack of a better translation, and its accepted usage in the Gramsci literature, I use the term ‘common sense’, but the reader should bear in mind that Gramsci’s senso comune is not ‘common sense’ as this is normally understood in English. As an anthropologist, I am struck by the way Gramsci’s concept of common sense both does similar work to the anthropological concept of culture (a concept which has reached out far beyond its anthropological roots) and at the same time is significantly different. It is similar in that part of what common sense repres-ents for Gramsci is the conception of the world into which we are born; we are born into common sense, just as we are born into a culture. We all begin, Gramsci writes, with ‘a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the conscious world’ (Q11§12; SPN: 323). But while the anthropological tradition has primarily been concerned with describing cultures, Gramsci’s primary concern is how

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individuals and groups can escape or transcend common sense’s narrow horizons. To begin such an escape it is necessary

to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s personality.

(Q11§12; SPN: 323–4)

It should be noted that Gramsci sees common sense as taking many forms: ‘there is not just one common sense’; common sense is always ‘a collective noun’ (Q11§12; SPN: 325). And it is not only subalterns whose conception of the world Gramsci sees as defined by common sense: we all inhabit some form of common sense. The limited horizons of common sense are, however, a particular problem for subalterns, subject as they are to the hegemonic narratives of dominant groups. Gramsci’s concept of common sense is closely linked to his concept of culture, and if we want to understand what common sense is for Gramsci, it is instructive to contrast his notion of culture with the anthropological notion of culture (culture, that is, understood as a particular way of life2). A good place to begin is with the history of the term ‘culture’, since it is in that history3 that certain underlying assumptions, which continue to inform how culture is com-monly understood, have their roots.

Culture, nationalism, and communityThe anthropological view of humankind as comprised of a diversity of cultures, each with its own way of life, has its origin in Romanticism and nineteenth- century narratives of nationalism. At the heart of these narratives is the claim that a nation represents a specific ‘people’ born of a specific territory to which, by virtue of this special kind of belonging, they have an inalienable right. Actual nation- states may be quite recent creations, in historical terms, and their bound-aries may in reality be far from fixed, but nations themselves – those imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson termed them, that underpin the concept of the nation- state – seem almost to inhabit a realm outside time. They both ‘loom out of an immemorial past’ and ‘glide into a limitless future’ (Anderson 2006: 11–12). This assumption of a fixity and permanence rooted in ‘tradition’ is inex-tricably entwined with the anthropological concept of culture. And, in line with this way of imagining cultures, there has been a tendency for history to be seen as something that happens to cultures, rather than cultures being seen themselves as the ever shifting products of history. An important strand in the broader discourse of nineteenth- century national-ism, as Anderson’s use of the term community indicates, is a fundamental opposition between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. And this dichotomy has left

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its legacy in the anthropological understanding of culture. The opposition was first formalized by Ferdinand Tönnies in his enormously influential Gemein-schaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Tönnies defines Gemeinschaft as an authentic, usually relatively small, community, woven together by ties of kinship, and often a common religious affiliation, into a tight- knit web of moral cohesion. Gesell-schaften, by contrast, are the impersonal, conflict- ridden, and essentially artifi-cial, associations characteristic of the modern industrial world. The allure of an often very vaguely defined notion of community remains powerful. Tellingly, unlike other terms of social organization, such as ‘state’ or ‘society’, ‘com-munity’ is a term that seems, as Raymond Williams noted, ‘never to be used unfavourably’ (Williams 1983: 76). Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting that contemporary anthropologists think of the cultural worlds they study in the Romantic terms of nineteenth- century nationalism. My point is simply that the notion of culture remains marked by its emergence within this context and that the anthropological concept of culture continues to be haunted by the ghost of the enduringly traditional, and the pervasive warm glow of gemeinschaft. In line with its stress on the nature of the ties binding social groups together, the anthropological notion of culture tends to assume, whether explicitly or implicitly, that cultures are essentially systems. In 1871, some sixteen years earlier than Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the early British anthropol-ogist, Edward Tylor, began his magisterial Primitive Culture with a definition of culture that would continue to be cited for the next century. Culture, according to Tylor, is ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (1871: 1). Anthropologists over the years have had many different understandings of the precise nature of ‘that complex whole’ as a theoretical entity, but the assumption that cultures are in some sense systems remains a common thread. Anthropologists today may no longer think of cultures as bounded entities, but an a priori, if often implicit, assumption that the different elements of a culture, while sometimes conflictual and contradictory, neverthe-less constitute some kind of system tends to linger.

Culture and common sense in GramsciGramsci (whose concern with culture stems from roots quite other than those of anthropology) offers us a very different notion of culture; one that completely rejects the assumption that cultures are systems. The origins of the anthropologi-cal project can be traced to an expanding Europe’s confrontation with new and unfamiliar worlds – a confrontation bound up with a determination to dominate these new worlds – it also reflected, however, the would- be dominators’ aware-ness that if they were to be successful they needed to understand those with whom they were now having to deal. Understanding these unfamiliar ‘others’ demanded that they be seen not simply through the prism of the observers’ cat-egories, but through their own. Colonial anthropologists may not have always

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lived up to this ideal, but whatever their faults, they tended to be more interested in understanding and preserving the ‘cultures’ they studied than in transforming them – one reason why colonial administrators often found the work of anthro-pologists of little practical use. Gramsci, however, was not an anthropologist, but a political activist commit-ted to the revolutionary transformation of his society; and for him such trans-formation necessarily involves not simply the seizing of state power, but radical cultural change. Cultural change is necessary because the realities of power bring into being specific cultures of subalternity with their associated common sense; subalterns come to see the hierarchies of the world they inhabit as inevit-able and inescapable. They may not like their subordination, but they cannot see how things could possibly be other than as they are. Any revolutionary trans-formation both brings about, and depends on, the transformation of the common sense at the heart of subaltern culture. There is no simple recipe, however, for achieving this transformation; it is a complex historical process in which there needs to be an active dialogue between intellectuals and non- intellectuals. For Gramsci, those who live the harsh realities of subalternity, however capable they may be of everyday resistance, cannot by themselves come up with the coherent, effective counter- narratives necessary to overcome the existing hegemony. But intellectuals too cannot devise these narratives unaided. Intellectuals need to be educated by the subaltern. Only a genuine dialogue between intellectuals and non- intellectuals can produce the effective counter- hegemonic narratives neces-sary for the emergence of an effective political force, a ‘historical bloc’, capable of transforming society. As Gramsci writes,

If the relationship between intellectuals and people- nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohe-sion in which feeling- passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the rela-tionship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force – with the creation of the ‘historical bloc’.

(Q11§67; SPN: 418)

To be effective, revolutionaries need narratives that both arise out of the con-cerns of the subaltern and make sense in their cultural world. And this means it is crucial for progressive intellectuals to pay attention to the common sense which is so basic to subaltern understandings of reality. Gramsci was a Marxist, and for him, as for Marx, the ultimate shaping forces in human history are basic economic structures, and it is their systematic and persistent inequalities that give rise to distinct classes. But while he sees cultures as fundamentally shaped by economic forces, Gramsci is no crude economic determinist. He recalls, for instance (Q13§18; SPN: 162), Engels’ caution that, ‘According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining


factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this’ (Marx and Engels 1975: 394, emphasis in original). One way of characterizing Gramsci’s approach to culture is by thinking of ‘culture’ as how the realities of class are lived.4 We all of us come to consciousness as members of specific cultural worlds at specific historical moments, and we tend to experience the particular ‘realities’ of our cultural world as fixed and unalter-able, no more than simple reflections of the way the world is. Such realities as dis-parities of wealth and power, for instance, may be thought of as the manifestation of the laws of economics or of divine will, and they may be celebrated or railed against, but to those whose everyday reality they are, they appear unchangeable. Only a fool or a madman would even try. The emblematic figure here is Don Quixote charging windmills. Gramsci uses the notion of common sense to capture the solidity and apparent ‘naturalness’ cultures have in the eyes of those who inhabit them – windmills are windmills and it is useless to fight them. The extent to which, in any given instance, a particular ‘culture’ or ‘tradi-tional popular conception of the world’ (to quote Gramsci’s definition of common sense from my epigraph), may indeed constitute some form of whole is, for Gramsci, an empirical question which can be answered only by careful empirical study. What he rejects completely is any assumption, explicit or implicit, that culture or common sense are, as it were, by definition some form of system. And it is this rejection that helps make common sense such a potentially useful concept for the mapping of the lived realities of subaltern worlds. To begin to explain why, I want to look briefly at another way of naming the taken- for-granted in everyday life, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. While habitus is undoubtedly a powerful and useful concept, there are also ways in which it is problematic. It is problematic, for instance, if what we want to map is social change, in part, I would argue, precisely because of an inherent assumption that what it names are essentially systems. Teasing out why this is problematic can help demonstrate the potential usefulness of the far more open concept of common sense.

HabitusThe concept of habitus was introduced into sociology by Marcel Mauss in his essay ‘Techniques of the body’, but it is Bourdieu’s somewhat different formula-tion that has been most widely embraced by anthropologists, sociologists, histor-ians, and other social theorists. Although Bourdieu would come to define himself as a sociologist, he began his intellectual career as an anthropologist and, as he notes in ‘A reply to some objections’ (first presented in the mid- 1980s), most of his theoretical concepts, including habitus, had their origin in his early anthropo-logical fieldwork among the Kabyles in Algeria. ‘Notions that I developed gradually, such as the notion of habitus, came from the desire to recall that beside the express, explicit norm, or the rational calculation, there are other prin-ciples that generate practices’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 76). His explication of habitus

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in Outline of a Theory of Practice can be seen as rooted in the very anthropolog-ical project of attempting to understand the structuring mechanisms shaping a way of life (in this case that of the Kabyles), which those who live it, simply live, without apparently having any need to be consciously aware of these mech-anisms. Habitus provides for Bourdieu a way of naming the all- important, but submerged, mechanisms orchestrating how the members of a given group go about their daily lives. He defines it as follows:

The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representation which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presuppos-ing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to obtain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.

(Bourdieu 1977: 72, emphasis in original)

Note here how habitus is defined as comprising systems of dispositions. I shall come back to this point. For Bourdieu, the term ‘disposition’ captures the crucial but unarticulated knowledge that in the course of socialization has embedded itself not only in patterns of thought, but in the very bodies of individuals. The term ‘disposition’, Bourdieu argues, ‘seems particularly suited to express what is covered by the concept of habitus’. First, because it conveys the idea of ‘the result of an organ-izing action, with a meaning close to that of words such as structure’. Second, ‘it also designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body)’ (Bourdieu 1977: 214, emphasis in original). This acknowledgement of the power of embodied knowledge as largely unmediated by language and simply lived, is one of the strengths of habitus as a theoretical concept. The dispositions of habitus, concerned as they are with ‘ways of being’, ‘habitual states’ embedded deep within the subjectivity of individuals, neces-sarily stress the fixity of certain ways of being. It is not coincidental, I would argue, that it was Bourdieu’s Kabyle fieldwork that gave rise to the concept of habitus. As Bourdieu describes in Sketch for a Self- Analysis (an account of his intellectual formation written at the end of his life and published in 2008), his fieldwork was carried out in the 1950s in extraordinarily difficult circumstances at a time when the Algerians were engaged in an often brutal liberation struggle against the French colonial state. Nonetheless the account of the Kabyles in Outline of a Theory of Practice – which builds its theoretical schemas on the basis of Bourdieu’s Kabyle data – portrays a people locked into a traditional pas-toralist life. Bourdieu’s well known essay on the Kabyle house (first published in French in 1970; a slightly modified version was published in 1980, available in


English in Bourdieu 1990b: 271–83) provides a similar picture of an unchanging peasant way of life; one in which each dwelling is constructed according to the same strict rules which determine the arrangement of every inch of living space, down to the storage of even the smallest item of household equipment. Within the world of the Kabyles, according to this account, any deviation, however minor, is quite literally unthinkable. It is perhaps not surprising that a man so fiercely opposed to French colonialism and so deeply sympathetic to the Algeri-ans fighting for their independence should stress the autonomy of Kabyle culture and its profound difference from the culture of the French colonizers. Something that is not apparent from Bourdieu’s account of the Kabyles is that the Kabylia was in fact a hotbed of Algerian nationalist struggle.5 It is important to emphasize that while habitus may focus on fixity, Bourdieu does not see it as rigid and unchanging; in certain respects it is highly flexible. As a system of dispositions guiding behaviour, this system of ‘lasting, transpos-able dispositions’ is continually having to adapt to specific, and in a sense, unique circumstances: ‘[I]ntegrating past experiences, [this system] functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitively diversified tasks’ (Bourdieu 1977: 83, emphasis in original). Nonetheless this flexibility has its limits. We can see habitus as something like a language that, while allowing its speakers to come up with an infinite number of different utterances, maintains an essentially unchanging grammatical structure. But what about more fundamental change? How is it possible for this ‘system of dispositions’, woven into the very being of individuals, to change in fundamental ways? And since human history is a story of transformations, in certain circumstances this must happen. Significantly, for Bourdieu, the seeds of change lie not within habitus itself, but in the dialectical relationship between a specific habitus and objective events that demand a response beyond that of the given habitus:

collective action (e.g. revolutionary action) is constituted in the dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, a habitus, understood as a system of lasting, transposable dispositions . . ., and on the other hand, an objective event which exerts its action of conditional stimulation calling for or demanding a determinate response. . . . [This stimulation is conditional because it only acts on] those who are disposed to constitute it as such because they are endowed with a determinate type of dispositions (which are amenable to reduplication and reinforcement by the ‘awakening of class consciousness’, that is, by the direct or indirect possession of a discourse capable of securing symbolic mastery of the practically mastered principles of the class habitus).

(Bourdieu 1977: 82–3, emphasis in original)

Habitus, it would seem, does not contain within itself the potential for trans-formation; there needs to be, as it were, another habitus waiting in the wings ready to displace the existing one and take its place on the stage.

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As a theoretical concept, therefore, habitus provides a powerful account of how and why cultures persist through time, reproducing themselves from gener-ation to generation, but it does not tell us much about the dynamics of change. This is in part, I would argue, because of Bourdieu’s insistence on the systematic character of habitus. As he writes in one of the passages quoted above, habitus refers to ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the gen-eration and structuring of practices and representation . . .’ (Bourdieu 1977: 72, emphasis added to show systematic character). Given habitus’s systematic char-acter, it makes sense that any fundamental transformation involves the shift of one habitus to another, and that the potential for change comes not from within habitus itself, but from external events. Habitus provides a persuasive account of the power of the taken- for-granted substructure of embodied and other forms of knowledge that play such an important role in the shaping of day- to-day life. If we want, however, to under-stand not only why things stay the same, but why they sometimes change, Gram-sci’s notion of common sense, I suggest, offers a more fruitful approach.

Culture, common sense, and historyCommon sense for Gramsci, far from being any kind of system, is a hetero-geneous jumble:

Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. . . . [It] takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental charac-teristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and [inconsistent6], in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is.

(Q11§13; SPN: 419)

As a result, ‘Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one likes’ (Q11§13; SPN: 422). There may be systematic elements within the confusion of common sense, but they cannot be assumed to exist a priori. A central focus of Gramsci’s Notebooks is the dynamics of historical change. How and why has social transformation occurred, or not occurred, in the past; how might it be brought about in the future? And for Gramsci, common sense plays a key role; it helps both to maintain and reproduce existing power regimes, and contains within its confusion seeds of transformation. I noted above how Gramsci uses the notion of common sense to capture the solidity and apparent ‘naturalness’ cultures have in the eyes of those who inhabit them. Gramsci’s common sense, however, has none of the fixity of Bourdieu’s habitus. Neither does Gramsci ever oppose common sense to history in the way that anthropology has sometimes opposed culture and history. It is true that there has been much fruitful collaboration between anthropologists and historians in


recent years, and many contemporary anthropologists do deeply historical work, yet within the discipline a sense that history is something that happens to cul-tures has not been completely banished. Marshall Sahlins, for one, continues to be a fierce defender of the distinction between history and culture, as in his 2004 collection of essays, Apologies to Thucydides. The heterogeneous jumble of common sense is for Gramsci the product of history. It is an assemblage of disparate beliefs and opinions that have come together over time. Inherently unstable, it is continually changing in piecemeal ways and cannot be defined by whatever systematic elements it may contain. As with the material debris that gradually accumulates in any area of human habitation, new ideas are continually drifting down to join the existing agglomerate of common sense. Some may only remain there momentarily, others for somewhat longer, while some manage to embed themselves in seemingly more secure ways. In any given time and place common sense provides a disparate bundle of taken- for-granted understandings of how the world is, and these understandings constitute the basic landscape within which individuals are socialized and that they use to chart their individual life courses. The analyst’s task, like that of the archaeologist, is to sort through this mass of beliefs and opinions: identifying the very different elements it contains and the social realities to which they are linked, exploring just whose common sense they are (men’s, women’s, poor people’s, the better off, the more educated, the less educated, the old, the young, and so on), and mapping out the linkages between the different elements. As with material strata, there are reasons why some elements persist and some do not, but the forces acting to consolidate or destroy are multiple and the results of their interactions are always unpredictable. Understanding this process in a given time and place requires empirical analysis of how particular elements of common sense are disseminated, and how they are lived; for instance, the mechanisms through which specific individuals do, or do not, internalize them: What does it mean to internalize them? To what extent do the different elements hang together? Do individuals pick and choose between them? Do they accept given elements in certain contexts, while rejecting them in others? None of this can be known a priori; it requires careful investigation. What Gramsci’s concept of common sense offers, I would argue, is a way of thinking about the texture of everyday life that encompasses its givenness: how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as an external and solid reality, but that also acknowledges its contradictions, fluidity, and flexibility. Continually modified by how actual people in actual places live it, its enduring fixity is an illusion. This is a concept from which the ghost of the bounded culture, existing outside history, has genuinely been exorcized.

Common sense and good senseGramsci devoted many pages of his notebooks to the question of how we might discover, or recover, how subalterns – those who leave so few traces in the official record – see the world. Fundamental social change, as he saw it, necessarily

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involved the radical transformation of common sense. If such change were to be achieved, it was crucial that progressive political activists neither simply celebrated nor condemned the world of common sense; rather, they needed to understand it in all its contradictory complexity. Gramsci’s approach here – his refusal either to romanticize or demonize popular culture, and his insistence that what is claimed as ‘tradition’ must always be rigorously scrutinized and unpacked – is free of any notion of the traditional, authentic gemeinschaft. Gramsci’s careful, analytical attitude to common sense is illustrated by his scathing assessment of one of the leading Italian intellectuals of his time, Gio-vanni Gentile. Gentile had claimed that philosophy could be thought of

as a great effort accomplished by reflective thought to gain critical certainty of the truths of common sense and of the naive consciousness, of those truths of which it can be said that every man feels them naturally and which constitute the solid structure of the mentality he requires for everyday life,

(quoted in Q11§13; SPN: 422)

For Gramsci this was simply ‘yet another example of the disordered crudity of Gentile’s thought’. Honing in on Gentile’s formulation: ‘the truths of common sense’, Gramsci asks:

And what does a ‘truth of common sense’ mean? Gentile’s philosophy, for example, is utterly contrary to common sense, whether one understands thereby the naïve philosophy of the people, which revolts against any form of subjectivist idealism, or whether one understands it to be good sense and a contemptuous attitude to the abstruseness, ingenuities and obscurity of certain forms of scientific and philosophical exposition.

(Q11§13; SPN: 422–3)

For Gramsci, precisely because it is not any kind of systematic whole, the messy conglomerate that is common sense needs to be teased apart and its separate ele-ments analysed. Only if this is done can progressive activists build on the ‘good sense’ it contains. Gramsci elaborates on this concept of ‘good sense’ in several Notes, writing in one:

In what exactly does the merit of what is normally termed ‘common sense’ or ‘good sense’ consist? Not just in the fact that, if only implicitly, common sense applies the principle of causality, but in the much more limited fact that in a whole range of judgments common sense identifies the exact cause, simple and to hand, and does not let itself be distracted by fancy quibbles and pseudo- profound, pseudoscientific metaphysical mumbo- jumbo.

(Q10(2)§48i; SPN: 348)

In another note he reflects on the ‘good sense’ to be found in certain popular expressions, such as being ‘philosophical’ about something. This expression,


while it may contain ‘an implicit invitation to resignation and patience’, can also be seen as an ‘invitation to people to reflect and to realise fully that whatever happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such’. This appeal to use reason rather than blind emotion is ‘the part of [common sense] which can be called “good sense” and which deserves to be made more unitary and coherent’ (Q11§12; SPN: 328). In sum, good sense, for Gramsci, comprises the elements within common sense that reflect rational, critical thought, however naïve and raw a form this may take. It is important to stress that whatever else it may be for Gramsci, common sense is never ‘false consciousness’. The bringing into being of new, genuinely counter- hegemonic narratives – a crucial part of any social transformation – has to start with the world inhabited by the mass of the population. And that world is the world of common sense: ‘the starting point must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made ideologically coherent’ (Q11§13; SPN: 421). As this comment makes clear, while Gramsci insists on common sense’s chaotic and incoherent character – and incoherence is always negative for Gramsci – he is far from simply negative. Rather, he sees common sense as a multi- stranded, entwined knot of, on the one hand, clear- sightedness – which, like the little boy in the story, is not fooled by the sophistry of the Emperor’s tailors – but, on the other, blinkered short- sightedness clinging defensively to the comfortable and familiar. Common sense is both ‘crudely neophobe and conservative’ (Q11§13; SPN: 423), and represents the raw beginnings of a genuinely counter-hegemonic narrative:

Is it possible that a ‘formally’ new conception can present itself in a guise other than the crude, unsophisticated version of the populace? And yet the historian, with the benefit of all necessary perspective, manages to establish and to understand the fact that the beginnings of a new world, rough and jagged though they always are, are better than the passing away of the world in its death- throes and the swan- song that it produces.

(Q11§12; SPN: 342–3)

As this passage indicates, for Gramsci, the task facing serious revolutionaries was the transformation of popular culture; in no way was he a disinterested, ‘objective’ observer. His often critical approach to popular culture comes through very clearly in his observations on folklore. The original nineteenth- century collectors of folk tales, such as the Grimm brothers, tended to see these tales, and folklore in general, as an embodiment of the authentic and ancient nation; Gramsci did not. Folklore was important to study for Gramsci because of the traces of oppositional world-views it contained. By definition, subalterns tend to leave few traces in the official historical record; any evidence of subaltern narratives, however fragmentary, is therefore valuable. Folklore should be studied because it represents:

a ‘conception of the world and life’ implicit to a large extent in determinate (in time and space) strata of society and in opposition (also for the most part

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implicit, mechanical and objective) to ‘official’ conceptions of the world (or in a broader sense, the conceptions of the cultured parts of historically deter-minate societies) that have succeeded one another in the historical process. . . . This conception of the world is not elaborated and systematic because, by definition, the people (the sum total of the instrumental and sub-altern classes of every form of society that has so far existed) cannot possess conceptions which are elaborated, systematic and politically organized and centralized in their albeit contradictory development. It is, rather, . . . a con-fused agglomerate of fragments of all the conceptions of the world and of life that have succeeded one another in history. In fact, it is only in folklore that one finds surviving evidence, adulterated and mutilated, of the majority of these conceptions.

(Q27§1; SCW: 189)

It is clear that Gramsci’s concern is with how understanding history better can help progressive forces bring about fundamental change, not with the celebration or preservation of ‘authentic cultures’. Indeed, throughout the Prison Notebooks we find Gramsci combining a deep interest in folklore and popular culture with an uncompromisingly critical stance towards it: subalterns, he insists, need to transcend the cultures that have formed them. At the beginning of this chapter I quoted a passage from a note where Gramsci stresses the importance of tran-scending the culture into which we have been born. The savage indictment of the rural world into which he himself was born which leads up to that passage is a good example of just how scathing he could be about the parochialism of Italian rural culture. Gramsci asks:

[I]s it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the conscious world (and this can be one’s village or province; it can have its origins in the parish and the ‘intellectual activity’ of the local priest or ageing patriarch whose wisdom is law, or in the little old woman who has inherited the lore of the witches or the minor intellectual soured by his own stupidity and inability to act)? Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s personality?

(Q11§12; SPN: 323–4)

Gramsci’s palpable disdain here for rural society is likely to discomfort both anthropologists, a hallmark of whose discipline has long been an empathetic identification with those studied, and social historians raised on E.P. Thompson’s strictures against the ‘condescension of posterity’ towards ‘the poor stockinger,


the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand- loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott’ (Thompson 1968: 13). We should remember, however, that Gramsci’s overriding concern was always with how the fundamental inequalities of his society might be transformed. Such transformation, in his view, demanded that subalterns transcend their subalter-nity and begin to ‘take an active part in the creation of the history of the world’, and this required that they reject the hidebound and conservative societies that produced and reproduced a culture of subalternity. In this chapter I have tried to show how Gramsci’s concept of common sense offers a potentially fruitful approach to any theorist interested in mapping the lived realities of subalternity. Even those who reject Gramsci’s essentially pro-gressivist understanding of history, I would argue, can still benefit from his pro-foundly empirical approach to the mapping of the common sense assumptions and narratives subalterns use to make sense of their world. Unlike Gentile, who knows in advance ‘the truths of common sense’ (Gramsci 1971: 422, quoted above), Gramsci is always aware of the myriad forms ‘common sense’ can assume. As a theoretical concept, Gramsci’s common sense provides us with a way of approaching the raw data of subaltern conceptions of the world that encourages us to pay careful attention to their contradictory and shifting com-plexity. Unlike traditional anthropological notions of culture or Bourdieu’s habitus, common sense does not assume that the assemblages that make up common sense constitute any kind of system. Rather, common sense is, as Gramsci puts it in one of the formulations quoted above, ‘a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one likes’ (Q11§13; SPN: 422). This is also a concept quite free of the roseate gemeinschaft glow that still tends to radiate from the notion of culture.

Notes1 A version of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16 (2),

2011, pp. 273–87, as ‘Gramsci’s concept of common sense: a useful concept for anthropologists?’ I am grateful for permission to publish this amended version here.

2 Raymond Williams, in his invaluable Keywords (1983), maps out the complicated history of the term ‘culture’ and the different ways it has come to be used. My focus in this chapter, however, is on culture understood as a way of life, one of the three main meanings Williams identifies.

3 Crehan (2002) discusses this at greater length.4 Crehan (2002) examines Gramsci’s general notion of culture in more detail.5 See, for instance, McDougall (2008: 88).6 Gramsci writes ‘inconsequente’, which Hoare and Nowell Smith translate here as

‘inconsequential’. ‘Inconsistent’ would be a better translation in this context. I am grateful to Frank Rosengarten for drawing my attention to this mistranslation.

8 Race, class, and religionGramsci’s conception of subalternity

Marcus E. Green

Often, subaltern groups are originally of a different race (different religion and different culture) than the dominant groups, and they are often a mixture of dif-ferent races . . .

(Gramsci, Q25§4)

Antonio Gramsci’s conception of subalternity is one of his major contributions to social and political theory. He conceived the category of subalternity to identify and analyze subordinated social groups whose political activity was either ignored, misrepresented, or on the margins of dominant history. Though Gramsci’s writings have generated new ways of rethinking nationalist history and postcoloniality (Guha 2011; Srivastava and Bhattacharya 2012), limited readings of his Prison Notebooks have concealed the complex nature of his understanding of subalternity. As the epigraph above illustrates, Gramsci con-ceived subalternity in terms of race, culture, and religion – among other factors. However, many scholars have interpreted the meaning of the ‘subaltern’ in the Prison Notebooks solely in terms of class, asserting that the word is code for ‘proletariat’, borne out of prison censorship (e.g., Beverley 2004; Brennan 2006; Chaturvedi 2007; Spivak 1992, 2000). Others have argued that Gramsci did not write on race, ethnicity, or racism (Hall 1986), that race was not a central concern of Gramsci (Mignolo 2012), and that his ‘unraced’ concepts actually perpetuate racist antagonisms (Wilderson 2003). Such interpretations overlook the complex nature of Gramsci’s understanding of subalternity and how sociopolitical elements, such as race and religion, feature in his analysis. Far from being simply a code or cypher, the concept of the subaltern is a major component of Gramsci’s critical investigation of the forces and relations of politics (Green 2011a). This investigation includes the analysis of the relation between dominant and subordinate groups and the ways in which political power is organized, expressed, institutionalized, maintained, and transformed. In Gram-sci’s overall investigation of politics, the concept of the subaltern constitutes a category of political investigation itself, intended to provide insights into the relations of power and hegemony. In many ways, the intricacies of subalternity can be understood in dialectical relation to the complexity of hegemony – that is,

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subalternity functions within an ensemble of economic, political, ideological, cultural, and social relations, which are manifested in political institutions as well as in morality, customs, religion, folklore, and common sense.1 Gramsci’s analysis of subalternity is ultimately linked to political praxis, for it is his intent to uncover the factors and conditions that contribute to subordination, as well as the impediments that prevent subaltern groups from achieving political power. The concerns of race, class, and religion all appear in Notebook 25 – the ‘special notebook’ Gramsci devoted exclusively to the topic of subaltern, which he entitled ‘On the margins of history: history of subaltern groups’. The major notes in the notebook include discussions of class divisions and class politics, but Gramsci does not reduce subalternity to class. The significance of his com-ments on race and religion in Notebook 25 are not immediately apparent, but when his observations are viewed in relation to major motifs in his work, such as the Southern Question, the Risorgimento, Lorianism, and common sense, the concerns of race and religion as they relate to subalternity are brought into relief. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci makes the point that the Risorgi-mento constituted a non- national popular movement that excluded the active participation of the masses and institutionalized the North’s authority over the South. A stratum of Italian intellectuals – which Gramsci labeled as ‘Lorian’ and who were associated with absurd pseudoscientific notions – reinforced the undemocratic and semi- colonial nature of the Italian state with racist theories of Southern inferiority. Given the extremely narrow political space for peasants to act in this context, many considered religion as a source to overcome their con-ditions, but as Gramsci points out, the Church’s own worldview reinforced the subordinate position of subaltern groups. The interconnection of these separate lines of inquiry demonstrates how subalternity is intertwined with national and colonial processes, as well as with the power of intellectuals in shaping culture and political discourse.

Lorianism, the southern question, and raceIn the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci coined the term ‘Lorianism’ after the Italian positivist economist Achille Loria to identify the stratum of Italian intellectuals who were obsessed with devising scientific understandings of society – albeit flawed and bizarre – and who considered themselves leftists.2 Loria, for instance, promoted a theory connecting mysticism and syphilis; he believed there was a correlation between morality and altitude; and he suggested that workers would be able to escape capitalism with the advent of aviation. He espoused a natural-istic, evolutionary, and determinist interpretation of Marxism, which received criticism from Frederick Engels and Antonio Labriola, among others, but he was nonetheless accepted by currents within the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and favorably received by many Italian intellectuals, some of whom considered him as a ‘substitute’ for Marx.3 For Gramsci, Loria was the supreme example of the outlandish nature of scientifically obsessed positivist intellectuals. Lorianism, in general, in his view, contributed to the ‘absence of a systematic critical spirit’ on

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the part of Italian intellectuals and culture, and contributed to the subordination of subaltern groups (Q28, introduction, §1). The concept of Lorianism is specific to the Prison Notebooks, although Gram-sci’s criticisms of Loria and positivism are common themes in his pre- prison writ-ings. In particular, in his 1926 essay ‘Some aspects of the Southern Question’, Gramsci criticizes a number of positivist intellectuals, who were affiliated with the PSI, for disseminating racist ideology. In the essay, Gramsci addresses the general historical ‘question’ of the political and economic relationship between Northern and Southern Italy that developed out of the Risorgimento. The specific political ‘question’ Gramsci addresses in the context of 1926 is the political relationship between the Northern industrial proletariat and the Southern agrarian peasants. In his view, a tradition of Northern superiority – or more specifically, the ideology of Southern racial inferiority, i.e., ‘Southernism’ – hindered political solidarity between Northern workers and Southern peasants. The analysis Gramsci initiates in the ‘Southern Question’ directly connects to his analysis of subalternity in the Prison Notebooks and to the problem of Lorianism. The ideology of ‘southernism’ largely originates from events in the wake of the Risorgimento (1861). After Giuseppe Garibaldi’s expedition drove out the Bourbon army from Southern Italy, the peasant uprising that initiated the move-ment for independence radicalized and began to threaten the existence of the Southern landed aristocracy. Under the threat of democratic revolution, Northern administrators and Piedmontese security forces replaced fleeing Bourbon offi-cials with the purpose of taming the uprising and subjugating the South to the power of the North. Southern peasants revolted against the new order in the form of tax strikes, urban riots, arson, land seizures, and occupations. Organized groups of brigands assassinated officials, mayors, councillors, and national guardsmen of the new regime, and they destroyed town hall archives that con-tained newly created property titles for land that was usurped from common ownership (Clark 2009: 92). In response, the Italian government deployed over 100,000 troops to violently suppress the revolts and the brigands, which was supported by Northern conservatives as well as progressives and liberals. According to Harry Hearder, in the decade after the Risorgimento (1861–71), more people were killed in the suppression of the peasant uprisings and the brig-ands than in all the wars of independence between 1848 and 1861 (Hearder 1983: 240–1). Due to these events and to the political differences between the North and South, in the words of Martin Clark: ‘Northerners came to despise their southern fellow- citizens as superstitious and barbaric; southerners resented and detested their arrogant northern rulers’ (2009: 92). Dominant history portrayed the Risorgimento as a process of national unifica-tion in which the South was liberated from foreign control. The Southern revolt was left out of the nationalist narrative of unification. Instead, peasant revolts were characterized as being ‘abnormal’ or ‘criminal’. In Gramsci’s view, although the peasants were initially active, the Risorgimento did not constitute a national- popular movement, like the French Revolution, because it failed to unite and empower the populace in the process of national unification. Instead of


a movement composed of and supported by the masses, the Risorgimento was led by the Moderate Party, which represented an alliance of the Piedmont mon-archy, the Northern urban bourgeoisie, and large landowners. The Action Party, which was composed of the petit bourgeoisie and proclaimed to represent the people, held a paternalistic attitude toward the peasant masses and failed to acquire their support in the movement to develop a democratic state (Q1§43; PN1: 133–6). In Gramsci’s view, therefore, the Risorgimento achieved ‘revolu-tion without revolution’ or a ‘passive revolution’ in that the dominant classes consolidated their power and territorially unified the state without a mass base and without fundamentally altering the previous social relations (Q1§44 [PN1: 136–51]; Q19§24). ‘They said that they were aiming at the creation of a modern State in Italy, and they in fact produced a bastard’, which did not integrate the masses into a unitary political framework (Q19§28; SPN: 90). In this sense, the idea of Risorgimento as a process of national and political unification was a myth. It was not a rebirth or resurgence of Italy’s independence from foreign rule but the North’s colonization and subjugation of the South. In contrast to the nationalist narrative, the Risorgimento actually constituted the North’s coloniza-tion of the South. The nationalist metanarrative of the Risorgimento as the culmination of Italian unity was reinforced by a number of Lorian intellectuals who promoted the racist ideology of ‘Southernism’. Many of the leading promoters of this ideo-logy were followers of Cesare Lombroso, the father of the Italian school of posi-tivist criminology. As professor and chair of Legal Medicine and Public Hygiene at the University of Turin, Lombroso was highly respected as a leading intellec-tual in Italy and abroad. He was a member of the PSI and a Turin city council member (Gibson and Hahn Rafter 2006: 3). As a nationalist, Lombroso con-sidered Italy ‘united, not unified’, divided between North and South, with divi-sions in dialects, physiognomy, race, and crime (Lombroso 1888), and in his classic work Criminal Man he developed a biological determinist view of crimi-nology, claiming that crime and deviance were primitive forms of human behav-ior that corresponded to atavistic bodily characteristics. By comparing the physical, physiognomic, and cranial attributes of prison inmates and non- Western people, he argued that ‘criminals resemble[d] savages and the colored races’ (Lombroso 2006 [1876–97]: 91). He argued that the high rate of crime and brigandage in the South was due to the mix of atavistic and foreign races in the region, including those of Albanian and North African Arab descent, who were less horrified by crime and brigandage than by those with Aryan blood (Lombroso 2006 [1876–97]: 115, 118). His work influenced several generations of disciples and public officials, who implemented his theories, and his writings were disseminated among Italian workers, which shaped the discourse of the socialist movement and the Southern Question. The socialist daily, Avanti!, an organ of the PSI, published Lombroso’s major works, as well as the writings of other positivist criminologists, in a special series aimed at workers, entitled ‘Philosophy, Biology, and Criminology’. By 1914, Avanti! had published five of Lombroso’s books in serialized form (Gibson 2002: 45).

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Lombroso and his followers attempted to create a racial map of Italy based upon skull dimensions and skin color. The Lombroso school essentially con-structed a Social Darwinist theory of race and criminology. In Gramsci’s words, ‘[they] were so obsessed with the problem of criminality that they constructed a worldview out of it, or they almost did’ (Q3§47; PN2: 48). Under the façade of science and a theory of racial hierarchy, the Lombroso school legitimized and naturalized the ideology of ‘Southernism’. They considered Southerners less evolved, in some cases closer to animals than humans, with a propensity for immorality and criminality. This created a major obstacle to worker–peasant unity. As Gramsci writes in the ‘Southern Question’:

It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in innumerable ways by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie among the masses of the North: the South is the ball and chain that prevents a more rapid progress in the civil development of Italy; Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either semi- barbarians or out and out barbarians by natural destiny; if the South is under-developed, it is not the fault of the capitalist system, or any other cause, but of the nature that has made Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric. . . . The Socialist Party was in great part the vehicle for this bourgeois ideology among the Northern proletariat; the Socialist Party gave its blessing to all the ‘southernist’ literature of the clique of writers of the so- called positive school, such as Ferri, Sergi, Niceforo, Orano and their lesser followers, who in articles, in sketches, in stories, in novels, in books of impressions and memoirs, repeated the same tune in different form. Once again, ‘science’ was used to crush the wretched and abused, but this time it was dressed in the colours of Socialism; it claimed to be the science of the proletariat.

(Gramsci 1995: 20–1)

The positivists Gramsci cites in this passage – Enrico Ferri, Giuseppe Sergi, Alfredo Niceforo, and Paolo Orano – were members of the Lombroso positivist school of criminology, and in the Prison Notebooks he identifies them as Lorians.4 What troubles Gramsci is not just the fact the positivists criminologists promoted ‘Southernism’ as a ‘scientifically’ proven theory, but the fact that many of them were major figures in the PSI. Ferri, for instance, who described himself as a ‘socialist and as a criminal anthropologist’ (1900: 41), was a major leader of the PSI. He was a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and editor of Avanti! In his view, following Lombroso’s, the ‘barbarian’ nature of the South was due to race and biology, not due to political conditions (1917: 43–5, 66–7, 325–30, 534–7). In the mid- 1920s, Ferri embraced fascist policies and published two pamphlets praising Mussolini (1927a, 1927b). In 1929, Mus-solini appointed him as a senator, although he died before taking his seat. Sim-ilarly, Orano, who was originally a socialist, converted to fascism, and in the mid- 1930s Mussolini commissioned him to write a critical analysis of the Jewish Question, which provided the intellectual basis for the fascist anti- semitic racial laws (Bernardini 1977; Harrowitz 1994).5


In relation to the ‘Southern Question’, in Gramsci’s view, the Socialist Party’s adherence to the positivist school’s professed scientific formulation of ‘South-ernism’ was symptomatic of the lack of critical rigor on the part of Italian intel-lectuals in general, not just elite or bourgeois intellectuals. The fact that supposedly radical and socialist intellectuals promoted such racist theories con-tributed to the depolitization, disempowerment, and subordination of Southern-ers. Under the façade of science and a theory of racial hierarchy, the Lombroso school confirmed and legitimized the Northern myth that Southerners were racially, biologically, and intellectually inferior. Thus, according to the Lom-broso school, the revolts and brigandage in the South after the Risorgimento were forms of criminal behavior caused by the biological inferiority and racial make- up of the South itself. Following this view, therefore, the ‘Southern problem’ was not the result of Southern resistance to Northern colonialism but the result of the inherent biological defects of Southerners themselves. The logic of the Lombroso school precludes a critical or political interpreta-tion of the South, since race is considered the determining factor of the ‘South-ern problem’. In effect, the Lombroso school depoliticizes Southern revolt by replacing politics with racial and biological determinism, in the sense that the construction of social life and the cause of social antagonisms are determined by biological, racial, and physical characteristics, not political forces. Positivist criminology coupled with the nationalist metanarrative of the Risorgimento pro-duced a cultural normalization of subordination based upon racial, spatial, and class hierarchies that depoliticized the political activity of Northern and South-ern peasants alike. The process of depoliticization, in this instance, involved construing the inequality, exclusion, and resistance of subaltern groups, which require political analysis, as racial, biological, and natural.6 Biological determin-ism replaced political analysis: Southern uprisings and resistance to Northern colonization were dismissed with racial and biological explanations. Following the logic of Lombrosian biological determinism, Southerners cannot represent themselves, since their race and biology already ‘speak’ for them, to use Spi-vak’s (1988) language. Whatever they do is considered abnormal or less than human in comparison to Northern standards. Therefore, according to this view, Northerners should represent Southerners for the benefit of Southerners. This aspect of Gramsci’s analysis on the political significance of intellectuals influ-enced Edward Said’s (1979, 1993, 2000) understanding of ‘Orientalism’ – the theory and practice in Western thought of representing the ‘East’ in prejudiced and biased terms – which in turn influenced Italianists who have described Italy’s Southern question as ‘Orientalism in one country’ (Schneider 1998) and ‘Orientalism Mediterranean style’ (Dainotto 2006).

David Lazzaretti and religionIn Notebook 25, Gramsci continues his criticism of Lombroso and the flawed practices of Lorian intellectuals with respect to the way that the history of David Lazzaretti and his political movement were interpreted in light of the

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metanarrative of the Risorgimento as a process of national unification. The note on Lazzaretti is the first note that appears in Notebook 25, and in addition to his critique of Italian intellectuals, the note highlights some of Gramsci’s reserva-tions regarding the capacity of religion to provide a foundation for political organization and struggle. To provide some historical background, David Lazzaretti (1834–78) was a commoner, born in the southeastern corner of Tuscany. He worked with his father as a carter and volunteered in the national army in 1860. In 1868 he experienced religious visions and underwent a spiritual conversion. He claimed that a prophet would liberate the people from the despotism and misery of their conditions. Reports of his religious- political visions attracted many supporters, who were mostly peasants, and he established a number of congregations and communist colonies. The movement was partially a mani-festation of the Vatican’s Non Expedit, which declared it ‘not expedient’ for Catholics to participate in Italian politics, because the state’s expansion of power through the Risorgimento dispossessed the Church of its temporal authority. Thus, with the lack of political participation in dominant political institutions and the absence of regular political parties, the rural masses sought political leaders who were drawn from the masses themselves, which allowed Lazzaretti’s movement to generate a large following. Eventually Laz-zaretti convinced his supporters that he was the messiah of a new moral and civil order and that he was going to establish ‘The Republic and Kingdom of God’, which would include land and crop redistribution. However, on the day Lazzaretti ceremoniously proclaimed the establishment of his new order in a peaceful procession with thousands of supporters, including women and chil-dren, he was assassinated by Italian military police (Hobsbawm 1965: 65–73). Gramsci draws many insights from the Lazzaretti case, but one of his major interests is the way in which Italian intellectuals interpreted and portrayed Laz-zaretti’s movement. Several of the books and articles written on Lazzaretti, at the time – including a book by Cesare Lombroso entitled Pazzi ed anomali [The Mad and the Abnormal] – viewed Lazzaretti from a psychological perspective, invalidating, ignoring, and ultimately depoliticizing the significance of the polit-ical movement. In typical Lorian fashion, Lombroso considered Lazzaretti mad and abnormal, as if political or religious dissent signifies inadequate racial and intellectual characteristics. As Gramsci writes:

Such was the cultural habit of the time: instead of studying the origins of a collective event and the reasons why it spread, the reasons why it was col-lective, the protagonist was singled out and one limited oneself to writing a pathological biography, all too often starting off from motives that had not been confirmed or that could be interpreted differently. For a social élite, the members of subaltern groups always have something of a barbaric or a path-ological nature about them.

(Q25§1; SPN: 50)


Through a ‘scientifically’ conceived notion of abnormality and barbarity, Lom-broso explained away the popular movement with psychological explanations and disregarded the violence perpetuated by a supposedly liberal and united state, ultimately failing to align himself with the people. Similar to his other cri-tiques of positivism, Gramsci criticizes Lombroso for not understanding the ‘origins’ of Lazzaretti’s movement and for not historicizing and understanding political phenomena genetically and contextually. Gramsci also discusses Giacomo Barzellotti’s book on Lazzaretti (entitled Mount Amiata and its Prophet, 1910). In contrast to Lombroso, Barzellotti viewed the murder of Lazzaretti as indicative of the government’s barbarity, not Lazzaretti’s, and of the government’s inability to contend with a religious move-ment (Barzellotti 1894, 455, note). However, Barzellotti viewed the Lazzaretti case as an isolated incident of a ‘totally special character, due solely to the state of mind and culture of the people living there’ and just ‘a little through [the people’s] natural love for their own fine native places’.7 Gramsci responds to this with an exclamation mark, and writes:

It is instead more obvious to think that Barzellotti’s book, which served to mould Italian public opinion about Lazzaretti, is nothing more than a mani-festation of literary patriotism (for the love of one’s country! – as they say) which led to the attempt to hide the causes of the general discontent that existed in Italy after 1870 by giving explanations for the individual out-bursts of this discontent that were restrictive, particularist, folkloristic, path-ological, etc. The same thing happened on a bigger scale with regard to ‘brigandage’ in the South and the islands.

(Q25§1; SPN: 51)

Barzellotti moves slightly beyond Lombroso’s analysis in that he views the Laz-zaretti case as a religious movement, but he nonetheless resorts to a naturalistic interpretation with a mixture of Italian nationalism. And here Gramsci notes how the general discontent in Italy after 1870 is overshadowed by the narrative of the Risorgimento as a process of national unification. This applies to the Lazzaretti case, as well as with the case of ‘brigandage’ in the South. Thus, in dominant discourse, the acts of resistance in the South as well as Lazzaretti’s movement in the North were considered abnormal, pathological, and isolated. The elements of Italian nationalism and ‘literary patriotism’ that Gramsci mentions relate to his larger argument that the Risorgimento, and the unification of 1870 that followed, constituted a ‘passive revolution’ or non- national-popular movement, in that the dominant classes did not exercise hegemony, failing to mobilize the popular masses in a unitary movement. Because the Risorgimento was not a popular movement – but in the end actually the juridical suppression of a potential popular movement – it reinforced the non- national popular aspects of Italian culture that actively excluded subaltern social groups from participat-ing in dominant political institutions. In Gramsci’s words, ‘in Italy the liberal- bourgeois always neglected the popular masses’ (Q19§3).

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The Risorgimento was a movement of the dominant classes, not the masses, but the history of the Risorgimento was written as if it were a popular move-ment. Therefore, the metanarrative of national unity overruled the counter- narratives of mass discontent and revolt on the part of subaltern groups. According to this metanarrative, the brigandage and revolts throughout the South, as well as Lazzaretti’s movement in the North, could be explained away as isolated events caused by the natural tendencies of abnormal, inferior, bar-baric people. Peasant and mass movements were considered outbursts caused by inherent biological or mental defects; they were not considered as indications of differing political projects or counter- political forces. In Gramsci’s view, there-fore, the political history of the subaltern had not been written, since subaltern history had been absorbed into the dominant narrative of the Risorgimento, in this case, and into dominant narratives of ruling groups in general. Thus, to draw from the title of Notebook 25, subaltern groups exist ‘on the margins of history’, or to use Spivak’s language once again, ‘the subaltern has no history and cannot speak’ (1988: 287). The significance of Gramsci’s focus on historical narratives that depict the subaltern in passive, humble, or subordinated positions is to show that such work actually reinforces the positions of the subaltern and contributes to their further subordination. The dissemination of such views contributes to the consciousness and common sense of the masses to an extent that they do not question such views and accept them as fact rather than opinion.

Common sense and religionIn his critical interpretation of the conditions of subalternity, Gramsci surveys the factors that contribute to the subordination of social groups, such as their modes of thought, worldviews, levels of political organization, and culture. In his analysis, Gramsci attempts to identify the factors that prevent subaltern groups from acting as effective political agents and from overcoming their subordination. Subaltern groups in modern Italian history, in his view, are characterized by ineffectual polit-ical activity. Although the history of their spontaneous political activity illustrates their discontent and their will to generate political change, the political activity of subaltern groups rarely goes beyond certain limits, and the groups appear to be incapable of achieving permanent victory or maintaining a level of political power. One of the major impediments preventing subaltern groups from overcoming their subordination is the lack of conscious leadership and organization that provide the groups with coherence and direction. Gramsci attributes the lack of coherence and direction to subaltern groups’ composition of culture and limited historical con-sciousness. In Gramsci’s view, the subaltern’s common sense (or worldview) tends to lack the critical elements required to provide conscious and organized leadership. He observers that within spontaneous political movements ‘there exist a “multiplic-ity” of elements of “conscious leadership”, but none of them predominates or goes beyond the level of the “popular science” – the “common sense”, that is, the [tradi-tional] conception of the world – of a given social stratum’ (Q3§48; PN2: 49; SPN:


196–7). Because of this, Gramsci contends that common sense is an inadequate foundation for establishing an effective political movement capable of producing political change. Thus, common sense constitutes one of the factors that hinders the ability of subaltern groups to assert political autonomy and to overcome their subordination. Gramsci suggests that in the Italian context the contradictory nature of common sense is a reflection of the contradictory nature of the ensemble of social relations, which were largely produced by the incompleteness of the Risorgimento, the non- national popular aspects of Italian intellectuals, and the cultural influence of the Catholic Church. These factors contributed to a passive culture that developed among the people, particularly peasants, who were encouraged to accept their sub-ordinate position as natural. The hierarchical authority of the Church and state – through the mediation of intellectuals – politically and ideologically contributed to the subordination of workers and peasants. Because the Risorgimento constituted a ‘passive revolution’ in which the dominant classes consolidated their power without exercising hegemony among the masses, without promoting a national culture, and without fundamentally altering previous social relations, the popular masses were excluded from participating in state institutions (Q1§44; [PN1: 137]; Q19§24). Additionally, as Gramsci begins to address in ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Ques-tion’, the peasantry lacked and continued to lack its own category of organic intel-lectuals to provide it with coherence and political direction. In turn, the popular masses existed within a social and political environment they did not create, and because of the cultural tradition of Italian intellectuals, they lacked their own cat-egory of intellectuals to provide coherence and political direction to their activity. Because of the practical separation of intellectuals from the masses, common sense and the philosophy of the masses gravitated toward folklore and traditional concep-tions of the world. In several notes, Gramsci addresses how aspects of Catholicism provide a foundation for common sense and paternalistic portraits of peasants and the masses. According to Gramsci, ‘The main components of common sense are provided by religions – not only by the religion that happens to be dominant at a given time, but also by previous religions, popular heretical movements, scient-ific concepts from the past, etc.’ (Q8§173; PN3: 333). Gramsci observes that in Italy Catholicism functions in a dualistic manner, in which there is the ‘religion of the people’, composed of common people, of ‘simple’ circumstances, as well as the religion of the intellectuals, composed of people from the ‘cultured’ classes. This dualism allows the church to ‘to retain its ties with the people and at the same time to allow a certain aristocratic selection (Platonism and Aristotel-ianism in the Catholic religion)’ (Q4§3; PN2: 143). Gramsci contends that the ‘religion of the people’ contains elements of Christianity and a mixture of folk-loric elements, such as mechanistic and materialistic views of reality, custom, morality, superstition, and witchcraft (Q4§3 [PN2: 143]; Q27§1 [SCW: 190]). The Church embraces some of these elements and distances itself from others. These elements become absorbed into common sense and actively inform the masses’ worldview. Gramsci points out that materialism dominates common

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sense, especially religious forms of materialism (e.g., spiritualism, witchcraft, superstition, mysticism, etc.), which happen to be ‘close to the people’, in that the masses often believe that supernatural or external forces determine the con-ditions of life (Q4§3 [PN2: 141–4], §48 [PN2: 198]; Q8§173 [PN3: 333]). With respect to the Italian context, this presents a two- sided issue. Due to the contra-dictory nature of the ensemble of social relations, the condition of mass poverty, and the lack of access to political institutions, the masses often turn to supersti-tion, faith, and the Church out of despair and a sense of hopelessness. However, Church doctrine tends to reinforce the condition of the masses, since the Church praises the faithfulness and humble circumstances of the ‘simple’ and does not encourage their active participation to transform their circumstances. As Gramsci points out in the very first note in the Prison Notebooks, Catholic doctrine itself promotes and justifies the continual condition of poverty among the masses as an aspect of the Church’s worldview.

This general question should be examined within the whole tradition and doc-trine of the Catholic Church. The principal assertions made in the encyclicals of the more recent popes, that is the most important ones since the question assumed historical significance: 1) private property, especially ‘landed prop-erty’, is a ‘natural right’ which may not be violated, not even through high taxes (the programs of ‘Christian democratic’ tendency for the redistribution – with indemnity – of land to poor peasants, as well as their financial doctrines are derived from these assertions); 2) the poor must accept their lot, since class distinctions and the distribution of wealth are ordained by God and it would be impious to try to eliminate them; 3) almsgiving is a Christian duty and implies the existence of poverty; 4) the social question is primarily moral and reli-gious, not economic, and it must be resolved through Christian charity, the dictates of morality, and the decree of religion.

(Q1§1; PN1: 100)

Thus, the Church tends to reinforce the materialistic views of the masses and conditions them passively to accept their social position as natural or as a result of the will of God. Similarly, Gramsci makes reference in Notebook 6 to a popular Sicilian tale that appeared in ‘Venetian prints in which one sees God imparting the following orders from heaven: to the Pope: “pray”; to the Emperor: “protect”; to the peasant: “and you toil” ’. Thus, as Gramsci writes, ‘The spirit of popular tales conveys the peasant’s conception of himself and of his position in the world, a conception that he has resigned himself to absorbing from religion’ (Q6§48; PN3: 38; SCW: 335). Gramsci admires Catholicism’s ability to maintain continuity and social cohe-sion among the disparate social groups, given that it is able to contain and unify the practical operation of the ‘religion of the people’ (or the ‘simple’) and the religion of the intellectuals.8 As he points out, ‘The Roman church is the most relentless in the struggle to prevent the “official” formation of two religions, one for the intellectuals and another for the “simple” ’ (Q8§213, I; PN3: 359). For


practical and political reasons such a ‘split cannot be healed by raising the simple to the level of the intellectuals (the Church does not even envisage such a task, which is both ideologically and economically beyond its present capa-cities), but only by imposing an iron discipline on the intellectuals so that they do not exceed certain limits of differentiation and so render the split catastrophic and irreparable’ (Q11§12; SPN: 331). Thus, although the Church maintains unity between the masses and the intellectuals, the intellectuals are not organically aligned with the masses to practically address their interests or to raise them to a higher intellectual understanding. Thus, without practical direction and leader-ship, in moments of political activity, the masses are inclined to draw upon their faith and religion in attempt to understand and ameliorate their conditions. For instance, in the note on David Lazzaretti, Gramsci mentions how the ‘bizarre mixture of prophetic and religious elements’ in the movement illustrate its ‘popularity and spontaneity’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 51). Lazzaretti’s vision con-tained a contradictory and inconsistent mixture of religious and political ele-ments, such as his proposal for establishing ‘The Republic and the Kingdom of God’. In the context of the Vatican’s Non Expedit, the lack of political participa-tion in dominant political institutions, and the absence of regular political parties, the rural masses ‘mix[ed] religion and fanaticism up together with the set of demands that were brewing in an elementary form in the countryside’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 52). Such religious- based common sense notions were incapable of addressing the issues of political power, such as the military’s violent response to the Lazzaretti movement, the Church’s own decrees that excluded peasants from participating in politics, and the reasoning behind the Church’s effectual support of the government’s indifference to the poverty of the peasants in the countryside. For these reasons, following Gramsci’s analysis, the religious ele-ments that enter into common sense often present inadequate solutions to social problems and provide an ineffectual foundation for developing a liberatory polit-ical movement. In other situations, religion often breeds passivity among the masses, who accept their conditions as natural or justified. In contrast to current interpretations, the ‘subaltern’ is not simply a code word devised out of prison censorship. When Gramsci’s notes in Notebook 25 are understood in relation to the recurring themes in the Prison Notebooks, it becomes apparent that race, class, and religion are central to his understanding of subalternity. As the interconnection of his writings on the Southern Question, Lorianism, Lazzaretti, and common sense demonstrate, subalternity is consti-tuted within an ensemble of sociopolitical, cultural, and economic relations that produce marginalization and prevent group autonomy. His analysis of subalter-nity initiates a line of investigation that examines the political function intellec-tuals perform in perpetuating, legitimizing, and reinforcing the subordination of one social group by another through the dissemination of national, colonial, racial, and religious narratives. The significance of Gramsci’s conception of subalternity is that it brings into relief the ways in which ruling groups maintain power over subordinated groups and presents new ways of conceiving political praxis in the struggle to overcome subalternity.

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Notes1 On the complexity of hegemony, see G.A. Williams (1960) and R. Williams (1997).

On the dialectical relation of hegemony and subalternity, see Fontana (2010).2 Achille Loria and the notion of ‘Lorianism’ first appear in Q1§25 (PN1: 114–16) and

soon became a recurring theme throughout Notebook 1 and the Prison Notebooks as a whole. Gramsci devoted Notebook 28 exclusively to the topic of ‘Lorianism’. On the sig-nificance of Lorianism in the Prison Notebooks, see Buttigieg (1990).

3 On criticisms of Loria, see Engels (1981 [1894]: 105–9) and Labriola (1907: 19–20).4 For the connection between Lombroso, Ferri, Orano, and Lorianism, see Q1§25–27

(PN1: 114–17), §30 (PN1: 119), and Notebook 28. Q1§27 later appears in Q25§8.5 For Gramsci’s analysis of Orano, see Q1§30 (PN1: 119); Q3§66 (PN2: 237–40), §132

(PN2: 112–13); and Q28§4.6 On depoliticization, see Barthes (1972: 142–5) and Brown (2006: 1–24).7 Here Gramsci is paraphrasing and quoting the words of Domenico Bulferetti taken

from a review article on Lazzaretti (Bulferetti 1928).8 Gramsci makes this point in several different instances. See, for example, Q1§89 (PN1:

186–7); Q8§156 (PN3: 323–4), §213, I (PN3: 359–60); Q27§1.

9 The Risorgimento and its discontentsGramsci’s reflections on conflict and control in the aftermath of Italy’s unification

Alessandro Carlucci

The history of Italian unification (the Risorgimento) is essential background for understanding the life of Antonio Gramsci. His intellectual and political profile was shaped by experiences and situations that were deeply rooted in historical phenomena such as the North–South divide, the representation of southern Ital-ians as culturally, and even racially, inferior, the emergence of the Southern Question, the repression of dissent and social unrest and, more generally, the sense of disillusionment that followed the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. In turn, Gramsci’s personal biography introduced original aspects into his perception and interpretation of these phenomena. The religious sect of David Lazzaretti (1834–78) emerged out of the same historical background, and it is against this background that Gramsci’s notes on Lazzaretti need to be understood, as part of the former’s interpretation of the Risorgimento and its aftermath. These notes constitute a significant example of Gramsci’s politically motivated study of the history of subaltern and dominant social classes.1 Indeed, recent research on Gramsci has accu-rately shown how his interest in the history of religions was ‘functional to his reconstruction of the way in which the masses were mobilised, organised, involved in national life and at the same time pushed back into subordination’ (Frosini, forthcoming). The study of ‘politico- religious utopias’, and of ‘those heresies which have periodically called into question the unity between the intellectuals and the popular masses (as in the case of Protestantism)’, enables ‘the philosopher of praxis to cast light on what remains outside the processes of unification’ (Frosini, forthcoming). Thus – as we shall see with reference to the emblematic case of the Lazzarettists – Gramsci was able to gauge ‘popular democratic aspirations that are implicitly cosmopolitan and truly “humanis-tic” ’, and to show that similar aspirations were strong in post- unification Italy but could not ‘be satisfied within the stratifications of the national state’ (Frosini, forthcoming; cf. Frosini 2010).2

In this chapter I will discuss the biographical roots of Gramsci’s views on the Risorgimento, arguing that these roots provided much of the nourishment for his criticism of dominant intellectual representations of the subalterns. Then I will assess his views in the context of recent debates, and against the findings of

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research on Lazzaretti’s movement which was carried out only some decades after Gramsci wrote his notes.

Gramsci’s lived experience of Italian unificationIf we look at Gramsci’s family, the above- mentioned roots take us as far back as the revolutionary events of 1848, which led to the creation of short- lived demo-cratic governments in Italy (as in the case, most notably, of Mazzini and Garibal-di’s Roman Republic). The ‘Year of Revolutions’ manifested itself even in marginal, rural areas of southern Italy, including the town of Plataci, inhabited by a long- established ethnic minority – the Arbëresh – who came originally from Albania. Peasant insurrections took place in this part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and were eventually crushed by the troops that the Bourbon king sent from Naples. One of the officers who distinguished himself in the repression of the insurrection was himself from Plataci and of Albanian origins. His name was Gennaro Gramsci (1810–73), and he was Antonio’s grandfather (Brunetti 2003). Further north, the politically turbulent spring and summer of 1848 were the background of Lazzaretti’s first religious vision, which also took place in a poor rural area, the Maremma. This was a marshy, malaria- ridden territory in the south of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, between the Tyrrhenian cost and the foot of Mount Amiata, where Lazzaretti had been born and where he and his fol-lowers would later be repressed by the Italian state. ‘My story began in 1848’, Lazzaretti (2007: 13) would later recall with reference to this first vision. Gennaro Gramsci spent much of his life in the fortified town of Gaeta, with his wife, who was ‘descended from an Italo- Spanish family from southern Italy (like many who remained in Italy after the end of Spanish rule)’ (Gramsci 1994a, II: 87). Gramsci’s father, Francesco (1860–1937), was born there:

It was indeed not pure chance that Francesco bore the name of the last monarch of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Francesco II. He was born at Gaeta not long before the Italian army laid siege to it, and his father – Colonel Gramsci of the Bourbon gendarmerie – was there to the last, stoutly defending the ancien régime’s only remaining stronghold against General Cialdini. The story was often told in [Antonio’s] family of how grandmother Teresa Gonzales had crossed the enemy lines on foot, fleeing with Franc-esco in her arms along the coast towards Formia.

(Fiori 1970: 41–2)

The siege of Gaeta was the military event that marked the final collapse of the Bourbon monarchy. It caused hundreds of casualties, due partly to pitiless bombing by the artillery of General Enrico Cialdini, and partly to a typhoid epi-demic that broke out inside the besieged town. The capitulation of Gaeta in February 1861 constituted a highly symbolic event, with the last King of Naples going into exile, and his army having to face disorientating – and in some cases humiliating – experiences (Di Fiore 2004, 2010; Barbero 2012). For those who

The Risorgimento and its discontents 131

were not sufficiently prompt in joining the new Italian army, and especially for those who were less willing to do so, these experiences included internment and temporary imprisonment in the North (where former Neapolitan soldiers suf-fered from poor food and clothing, and from often inadequate housing and unhy-gienic conditions), military demotion and questioning by special military commissions created to judge their reliability. It was a gloomy prologue to the atrocities that the Italian army was to commit in the following months and years, during the repression of ‘brigandage’. With the capitulation of Gaeta, Garibaldi’s triumph in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was completed, through the decisive help of the Piedmontese troops that the prime minister, Count Cavour, and the king, Victor Emmanuel, sent to the South. They advanced along the Adriatic Coast and invaded the Papal States (except for the area round Rome). Among the volunteers who joined these troops was David Lazzaretti, a carter by trade at the time. He fought against the Pope’s army at Casteflidardo, took part in the military operations against the Bourbons in the area around Naples and during the siege of Gaeta, and then remained in the army during later operations across southern Italy.3 At the time, Lazzaretti was an enthusiastic supporter of the ideals of national renovation and unification. Like many other young men who had believed in those ideals, he would later become disillusioned as he came to realize that Italian political and social life had experienced no significant ‘rebirth’ (this is the literal meaning of the word Risorgimento), while inequalities remained as deep – and perhaps became even deeper – as a result of unification. Even though the movement he would later found was essentially religious and preached detachment from earthly goods, its communistic nature could be seen as a response to unsolved social issues. A few years after the siege, Francesco Gramsci left Gaeta for the island of Sar-dinia, to take a job in the public administration. There he married a Sardinian woman, Giuseppina Marcias (1861–1932). Antonio was born in this poverty- stricken periphery of the Western world in 1891. Since the eighteenth century, Sar-dinia had been part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was ruled by the Turin- based Savoy royal family and had its core territory in the region of Pied-mont, from where the vast majority of its ruling groups came. As we have seen, under Victor Emmanuel II the Savoy monarchy was one of the driving forces in the events that led to the unification of Italy. During his early life, Gramsci was a close witness of the corruption and unscrupulousness that dominated political life in the new country, and of the often brutal repression that the Italian army inflicted on Sardinian peasants and miners. After his father was arrested (as a result of adminis-trative irregularities in his office, which were purposely exposed by a rival political group), Gramsci directly experienced not only symbolic humiliation, but also the material hardship that characterized the lives of so many Sardinians at the time. Especially in rural areas, the dismantlement of the ancien régime, with its basic forms of social security, meant worse living conditions for the poor. Defor-estation and the loss of communal land had particularly negative consequences, which were aggravated by the protectionist policies that the Italian government adopted to safeguard northern industrial production. Thus the impoverished rural

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population, in Sardinia and in most of the South, was reduced to a state of per-manent hunger and poor health. Peasants had to produce foodstuffs cheaply for the cities, and had to provide equally cheap raw materials for industry. They had to allow the soil and subsoil of their own regions to be exploited for the benefit of ‘civilization’ and economic growth. In return for all this, they experienced soil erosion and alterations in rainfall patterns, with stagnant water in low areas causing more malaria. The dominant bourgeois and aristocratic groups in Turin had long treated Sardinia as ‘a colony of exploitation’ (Gramsci 2008b [1919]: 72), and the Italian state treated Sardinian shepherds, peasants, miners and arti-sans worse than it treated ‘the Eritrean colony’ (2008c [1919]: 75). Military officers who were sent to Sardinia to repress strikes, as well as anthropologists who went there to conduct research, perceived Sardinians as ‘uncivilized, bar-baric, blood- thirsty . . . apes wearing untanned skins’ (2008d [1916]: 52). And the famous criminologist Cesare Lombroso (whom I shall mention again for his role in Gramsci’s discussion of Lazzaretti’s movement) presented Sardinians as a dolichocephalic (or long- headed) people, highlighting possible links between racial features (including this type of cranial shape and size) and the presence of crime and backwardness in the island (Lombroso 1897). In this context, Gramsci could directly understand and ‘feel’ – not just ‘know’ (cf. Q4§33; SPN2: 173; Q11§67) – that the interpretation of Sardinian inferiority given by positivist sci-entists was intolerably simplistic, deeply unfair, offensive and humiliating. Despite material difficulties, Gramsci was able to study and eventually moved to the island’s biggest city, Cagliari, to complete his secondary education – something that few students from rural areas could access. Yet he always retained a deep love for the traditional outdoor games, adventurous wanderings and bizarre encounters typical of the Sardinian countryside. Later in his life, his descriptions of his own ‘somewhat savage and primitive childhood’ (Gramsci 1992: 289) would almost seem to echo Rudyard Kipling’s descriptions of Kim’s life, and of his travels through India while on holiday from the madrissah.4 On the whole, however, rural life did not emerge as an idyllic alternative to the evils caused by social and political innovations. Gramsci’s childhood opened deep wounds in his personality, which took years to heal, and left scars that would never go away. During an episode which he vividly recalls in a letter from prison, he was overwhelmed by the comparison of his own misery as a hunch-back child with that of another young human being:

One Sunday morning, around ten o’clock, I was sent to [a] woman’s house; I was supposed to deliver some crochet work and pick up some money. I found her as she was closing the door to her house, dressed in her best to go to attend the solemn mass; she carried a satchel under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated a little, then she made up her mind. . . . She led me outside the village, into a small truck garden cluttered with debris and chunks of broken plaster; in one corner there was a shed used as a pig sty, one meter twenty in height, without windows or shutters and only one heavy entrance door. She opened the door and we immediately heard a bestial muling; her


son was in there, an eighteen- year-old youth with a very strong physique who could not stand up and so was always seated and hopped toward the door on his behind, as far as was allowed by a chain that clasped his waist and was attached to a ring sunk into the wall. He was covered with filth, only his eyes blinkered reddish, like those of a nocturnal animal. The mother poured the contents of her satchel into a stone trough, some chicken feed mixed with leftovers from the house’s table and she filled another trough with water, then she locked up and we left. I did not tell my mother any-thing about what I had seen. . . . Not even when I heard more talk about the sorrows of that poor mother did I intervene to correct that impression and to tell about the misfortune of that poor human ruin fallen into the hands of such a mother. On the other hand, what could that woman have done?

(Gramsci 1994a, II: 261–2)

In 1911 Gramsci left for Turin, the former Piedmontese capital, to study at the local university. When he arrived (in October), rent prices had become far too high for a poor Sardinian student like him, as a consequence of the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of Italy’s unification. It was the beginning of Gramsci’s financial and accommodation odyssey, which emerges in all its harshness from the letters he wrote to his family back in Sardinia. It would be hard to imagine a more tangible, embittering, and ironically emblematic manifestation of the failures of the Risorgi-mento. In addition, cultural and linguistic gaps must also have contributed to Gramsci’s difficult integration. He soon realized that, even in the most advanced and modern urban centres, the local dialect was the only language the large major-ity of the population could use comfortably and effectively (Gramsci 1980a [1916]: 805; 1980b [1916]: 820). But in Turin local dialects were different from both Sar-dinian and Italian, with which Gramsci was already familiar. Hence the sense of cultural displacement he initially experienced, taunted by unfamiliar speech as much as by the noise of trams and traffic in the middle of the cold, roaring city. Unsurprisingly, after having harboured ephemeral sympathies for Sardinian bandits (Gramsci 1994a, II: 32), he instinctively came close to Sardinian nation-alism (1992: 271; reprinted as 2008a: 105). Only after a few years in Turin was he able to reflect critically on his own background, and to put forward an overall interpretation of the position in which Sardinia, and the South as a whole, had come to find themselves. This interpretation, as we shall see, caused him to take a different path from that of Sardinian independentism, or indeed from any inter-pretation of recent Italian history as an act of conquest and oppression against southern peoples on the part of the North.

Piedmontese crimes or capitalist oppression?During the past few decades,

the ‘brigand war’ has become one of the most hotly contested episodes in the early history of united Italy. To contemporary nationalist scholars the

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brigands were the foolish instruments of black reaction, almost a separate, regressive criminal ‘race’ to be extirpated.

(Beales and Biagini 2002: 157)

In contrast, recent revisionist historians ‘have celebrated the brigands as the “freedom fighters” of the “southern people” against a “northern colonialism” and a repressive military state worse than the Bourbons’ (Beales and Biagini 2002: 157). This new historiography has also given rise, especially in the run- up to the 150th anniversary of Italian unification (2011), to a large number of books by vociferous journalists and publicists. These interpretations tend to focus on the crimes of one royal family against the other, of one region against the other, of northern civilization against southern civilization, of fanatic modernizers against gradualists, of Piedmontese generals against southern soldiers and civilians. One the one hand, some exponents of the new historiographical trends reject Gramsci’s views on the South for their emphasis on ‘class boundaries’, and for his assumption that ‘the only possible salvation lay in accepting the solid leader-ship of the Northern working class’ (Gribaudi 1997: 104).5 On the other hand, however, Gramsci’s writings are sometimes quoted to support interpretations of the Risorgimento as the colonial occupation of the South by the North; that is, by the Kingdom of Sardinia under the Savoy royal family, or, in the most radical versions, as the conquest of a peaceful and prosperous South by the unscrupu-lous and nearly bankrupt North (Del Boca 2003: 233; Aprile 2010: 67, 125–6;6 Guerri 2010: 62, 260). In fact, Gramsci’s emphasis on the brutal exploitation of the South (including Sardinia) does take regional prejudices and resentments into account; and it is well known that Gramsci criticized the proliferation of anti- southern prejudices within the northern working class and the Italian Socialist Party itself. In the early 1920s, he explained that:

the Italian bourgeois state was formed under the impetus of capitalistic nuclei in Northern Italy which wanted to unite the system of relations of production and exchange of the national market, which was divided into a multiplicity of tiny regional and provincial states. [This led to . . .] a fero-cious dictatorship which put southern Italy and the islands to the sword and the fire – crucifying, quartering, burying alive the impoverished peasants whom salaried writers attempted to defame by branding them ‘brigands’.

(Gramsci 1994b [1920]: 148–9)

Thus, ‘the Northern bourgeoisie subjugated the South of Italy and the islands, and reduced them to colonies of exploitation’ (1987 [1920]: 377). These views, however, do not make Gramsci a forerunner of revisionist interpretations. In the same years, he referred to the Bourbon kingdom as an outdated form of govern-ment, which had failed to keep pace with historical developments and social transformations (1966a [1921]: 23; 1966b [1921]: 364–5). And as much as he remained attached to the language and culture of his native island (Carlucci 2007), Gramsci repeatedly and unambiguously explained that Sardinian


subaltern groups could only expect empowerment and better living standards if they joined forces with the industrial workers and other subaltern groups in mainland Italy.7 Later, in his 1926 essay ‘On some aspects of the South Southern Question’, Gramsci recalled what was, from his point of view, an extremely revealing episode. This had taken place in Turin in 1920, when a new association was formed

to unite all Sardinians – both on the island itself and on the mainland – into a regional bloc capable of exerting effective pressure on the government, to ensure that the promises made during the War to the soldiers were kept. . . . The constituent assembly held in Turin, for Sardinians living in Piedmont, saw an impressive roster of interventions. . . . The Sardinian communists, who numbered precisely eight, attended the meeting, presented a resolution of their own to the Chair, and asked to be allowed to make a counter- report. After the fiery rhetoric of the official report . . . it was very difficult to ‘pitch’ the counter- report right. . . . However, the counter- report, though it provoked great astonishment, was in fact listened to attentively. And once the spell had been broken, the revolutionary conclusion was reached swiftly and methodically. The dilemma – Are you poor devils from Sardinia for a bloc with the gentry of the island, who have ruined you and who are the local overseers of capitalist exploitation? Or are you for a bloc with the revolu-tionary workers of the mainland, who want to destroy all forms of exploita-tion and free all the oppressed? – this dilemma was rammed into the heads of all those present. The vote, by division of the assembly, was a tremendous success: on one side, there was a handful of smartly dressed gentry, top- hatted officials, professional people, livid with rage and fear, with a circle of forty- odd policemen to garnish the consensus; on the other side, there was the whole mass of poor folk, with the women dressed up in their party best, clustered around the tiny communist cell.

(Gramsci 1978 [1930]: 445–7)

Lazzaretti’s movement: a Gramscian interpretationGramsci’s reflections on the repression of the Lazzarettists clarify – and offer further opportunities to develop – his interpretation of the Risorgimento and its aftermath. In his prison notes on Lazzaretti, Gramsci points to ‘the general dis-content that existed in Italy after 1870’, and links the cultural denigration and military repression of Lazzaretti’s sect to what ‘happened on a bigger scale as regards “brigandage” in the South and the islands’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 51). Another historical element highlighted by Gramsci is the coming to power of the ‘His-toric Left’, with its vague alternatives to the heavy fiscal policies and centraliz-ing tendencies of the ‘Historic Right’, in 1876.8 The Left was willing to introduce ‘a pinch of “democracy” ’ (1994b [1920]: 149), and this gave rise to popular ‘hopes and expectations that were to be deluded’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 52). Finally, Gramsci points out that ‘the drama of Lazzaretti’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 53)

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must be linked up with the insurrectionary attempts (involving leading anarchists such as Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero) that took place in villages on the Matese mountains (to the north of Naples) in the spring of 1877. In trying to understand the history and nature of Lazzaretti’s movement (which began as early as 1868), Gramsci focuses on its epilogue, and on the ‘ferocious . . . cruelty’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 51) that characterized its repression and the death of its leader.9 The repression of the Lazzarettists can be explained on the basis of various factors, from local enmities to anti- heretical (or simply anti- religious) feelings, from the unstable relations between Italy and the Vatican to ‘radical, mutual incomprehension’ (Pitocco 2009: 45) between Lazzarettists and state authorities (ethnic or racial stigma does not apply in this case, since Lazza-retti, a Tuscan, could not be classified as a southerner). Gramsci takes into account various cultural and religious factors of political relevance. He notes that Lazzaretti could easily be ‘depicted as a reactionary, a clerical, a papist etc.’ and, in particular, he argues that the Vatican’s refusal to recognize Italian political institutions created the conditions for the spontaneous emergence of ‘local leaders . . . mixing religion and fanaticism up together with the set of demands that were brewing in an elementary form in the countryside’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 52). However, Gramsci suggests that the reasons that led the new state to crush Laz-zaretti’s movement can only be grasped if one looks at the socioeconomic context and conflicts of the time, and at the strategies of the dominant social class in a precise moment of Italian history. As in the case of the merciless repression of the Paris Commune a few years earlier, the bourgeoisie, at a time when the liberal state was not assisted by a fully operating hegemony over society as a whole, showed its readiness to use coercion to remove any obstacle to the expansion of capitalism. In many poor areas of southern and central Italy, capitalism was not yet grounded on the hege-mony of liberal institutions and bourgeois values. Here the weak development of capitalism and the moderate strategy of the Italian bourgeoisie, with its endorse-ment of monarchic rule and its readiness to reassure traditional land- owning elites, had produced a political context that was different from that of France. While in France the most alarming forms of opposition to liberal government, and to capitalist socioeconomic relationships, came from the radicalized urban proletariat, with secular values and advanced political goals, in Italy, at least for the moment, the most serious challenges to bourgeois hegemony continued to be posed by the South and the countryside. Unsurprisingly, in Lazzaretti’s practice, liberal institutions and propertied elites saw a threat to bourgeois order, all the more dangerous as it was propagated through the captivating and potentially inflaming language of religious myths and millenarianism. To make things worse, Lazzaretti’s preaching included slogans of a ‘tendentially republican character’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 51), as well as ‘a good dose of vaguely socialistic maxims’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 54). Between 1870 and 1872, Lazzaretti created a series of interconnected institu-tions that had their ascetic headquarters on an impervious peak called Monte Labbro, near Arcidosso (Lazzaretti’s native village) and Mount Amiata.10 These


institutions had primarily spiritual, religious aims; but in practice, they involved shared ownership – from the collective self- management of workforce, land, money and other resources, to some forms of communal production and use with respect to tools, buildings and food. A Lazzarettist community, along the lines of the institutions of Monte Labbro, was also set up in two villages (Montorio and Scandriglia) in the Lazio region. Moreover, far from seeing his mission as con-fined to Italy, Lazzaretti often adopted a universalist approach in both his writ-ings and his preaching (as reflected by the fanciful flags and symbols referring to various ‘nations’, which his followers displayed during the fatal procession of 18 August 1878). These spontaneous social experiments caught the attention of various political groups in Tuscany, Lazio and also further away. Initially, legitimist and clerical elements, but also other groups, sought to influence and use Lazzaretti’s move-ment for their own political aims. Towards the end of 1873, a judge with juris-diction over Sabina had Lazzaretti

arrested and charged with vagrancy, fraud and conspiracy. At his trial before the Perugia Assize Court, however, he was defended by no lesser a person than the future Minister of Justice, P.S. Mancini. This suggests that the attacks on the Lazzarettist movement by the clergy had already attracted the attention of anticlerical liberals who sought to make political capital from the affair. An even more determined attempt at political manipulation came in 1875, however, when Lazzaretti was invited to Lyon by a French legiti-mist lawyer named Leon Du Vachat who was planning to use Lazzaretti in some form of reactionary clerical conspiracy.

(Davis 1988: 200)

These attempts reveal the difficulties and interferences that subaltern groups encounter when trying to act as effective political agents, and to create their own autonomous leadership. The Lazzarettists were in a typical situation of subalter-nity, in which their indistinct aspirations for an alternative social order could easily be absorbed, and depoliticized, by the dominant worldviews of more edu-cated and more influential political movements. Yet, Lazzaretti’s movement had two specific features that largely compensated for its subalternity. First, its leader did not break his ties with the traditional ways of life of his peasant followers, and retained a high degree of autonomy in front of the dominant religious and political groups that tried to rectify his views.11 Second, Lazzaretti’s rural com-munistic experiment had a startling sociopolitical potential that went beyond local customs and peculiarities, not only in terms of values (religious, evangelic collectivism, as opposed to economic individualism) but also in terms of life practices and material relations of production. The hundreds of peasants who joined Lazzaretti’s institutions – especially the Società delle famiglie cristiane (Society of Christian Families), created in 1872 and fully organized during the following year – were implicitly proving that large landowners were not necessary for the purposes of agricultural production and socioeconomic

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improvement. The Society created local schools, to which all members could freely send their children, and organized evening classes for adults (thus provid-ing a remedy to illiteracy and to the inadequacies of public schooling in rural, mountainous areas). Female members had the right to vote and could take on roles of responsibility within the Society. In practice, these peasants were learn-ing that, in carrying out their activities, they did not need the guidance of those who owned the means of production. As producers, they could organize their own work in a more effective and beneficial way if they created bodies that directly owned and controlled the means of production. For a while, this process of autonomous organization ran smoothly and gener-ated strong enthusiasm among Lazzaretti’s followers. In fact, significant dif-ficulties quickly and repeatedly emerged, due to external factors as well as insufficient internal cohesion, with individual members illegitimately appropriat-ing communal goods and earnings during those periods when Lazzaretti was away from Monte Labbro. But despite these setbacks, Lazzaretti’s initiatives remained alarming and caused increasing concern among local authorities and landowners. In preparation for the imposing procession of August 1878, during which Lazzaretti was shot dead by police forces, a red flag had been run up to the top of the Nuragic- looking tower that the Lazzarettists had built on Monte Labbro. Lazzaretti, who had recently returned to Monte Labbro, chose ‘The Republic is the Kingdom of God’ as one of the main slogans for the procession; but he also specified that this forthcoming republic ‘will not be that of ’48’, thus drawing ‘a dividing line between himself and the [bourgeois] ’48, which was anything but positive in the memory of the Tuscan peasants’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 53). Some sharecroppers told their landlords that crops would no longer be divided in the usual way, but that Lazzaretti himself would administer them, and some peasants, when approached by tax collectors, expressed their firm conviction that taxation would soon be lowered, and possibly abolished altogether (Petacco 2003: 164–7). In sum, despite its limits and contradictions, Lazzaretti’s move-ment succeeded in generating widespread aspirations for an alternative social order, and also embryonic practices that were already setting the ground for the implementation of this alternative order. Revealingly, it did so once again on the verge of its violent repression.

Concluding remarksIt is no surprise that Gramsci did not dismiss a figure like Lazzaretti simply as marginal, inconsistent, unrefined, ridiculous, fanatical, or as altogether mad. Unlike most intellectuals and politicians of the time, Gramsci had shared the life of the subalterns intimately, concretely and unselfconsciously. Perhaps like Kipling, and certainly like those of Kipling’s characters that he admired the most, Gramsci had some sort of dual nature: he was a man who had grown up among the wolves – half a humble ‘Hindu’, half an educated ‘Sahib’ whose father, though down on his luck, nonetheless came from a distinguished family.12 This particular biographical background contributed to shaping Gramsci’s


rejection of the alleged inferiority of Sardinians, of southerners, of peasants and of the subalterns in general. Thus his family history and personal experience helped him to gain insight not only into the Southern Question, but also into the fate of the Lazzarettists. Even historians who question the socially and politically revolutionary nature of Lazzaretti’s movement, nonetheless recognize that this nature existed in the eyes of liberal institutions. In this respect, a Gramscian interpretation of the events that took place in Arcidosso, in the summer of 1878, can largely and con-vincingly be extended to documents that are now widely accessible – that is, beyond the limited knowledge of those events that Gramsci had while in prison. For instance, the local propertied elites invoked repressive measures as neces-sary to control the ‘pure socialism’13 that Lazzaretti was allegedly preaching. And the fact that local authorities were concerned about Lazzaretti’s revolution-ary plans – including possible assaults on the houses of the wealthy, burning of tax registers, land redistribution and the collectivization of property – emerged again during the trial of Lazzaretti’s followers, in 1879.14 Indeed, available docu-ments also confirm that such worries were especially exaggerated by local (broadly defined) intellectuals, both lay and clerical, whose attitudes in rural areas were often characterized by ‘instinctive’ and ‘crazy fear of the peasants with their destructive violence’ (Gramsci 1978 [1930]: 454–5).15

The role of intellectuals (writers, scientists, teachers, priests, educated profes-sionals, and also military officers and state officials) in discrediting ‘the members of subaltern groups’ by presenting them as ‘pathological’ (Q25§1; FSPN: 50), and in cultivating and spreading consent for the actions of the state, should not be seen as unimportant (Q4§49 [PN2: 199–210]; Q12§1 [SPN: 5–9]). It was in fact essential, then and in later years, to make sure that liberal values and institu-tions could eventually exercise a far- reaching hegemony over Italian society. At the same time, the relative autonomy of the ‘cultural moment’ (Q10§44) should not be overlooked either, in that the depiction of Lazzaretti as mentally ill did not necessarily call for repressive responses: on the one hand, it was rejected by the experts who reported on Lazzaretti’s mental health when he was first taken to court, in 1874 (Cavoli 1989: 70);16 on the other hand, Lazzaretti’s alleged insanity was turned to different ends by the lawyers who successfully used it to defend his followers in 1879 (Colao 2009: 30–7). In this respect, Gramsci, and especially some recent Gramscian scholars, may have gone too far in claiming that Lombroso and his followers, through their ‘psychological explanations’, ‘disregarded the violence perpetuated by a supposedly liberal and united state’ (Green 2009: 67). In fact Lombroso unambiguously condemned the govern-ment’s repressive action (Bulferetti 1981). He argued that, instead of killing Laz-zaretti, the state should have tried a more inclusive approach, and should have encouraged the widespread altruism and ‘uncommon virtue’ (Lombroso 1897: 625) generated by Lazzaretti’s movement. In any case, the role of cultural legitimization needs to be analysed in connec-tion with Gramsci’s views on the relation between consent and coercion. This will help us avoid two dangers that are, perhaps, not always in contradiction with

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each other: economic determinism, which neglects the complexity and relative autonomy of cultural superstructures, and, above all, idealist culturalism, which by exaggerating the role of cultural factors overshadows the material conditions of production. For Gramsci, during certain critical conjunctures, the defence of capitalism manifests itself in the form of heavy- handed control over ‘those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively’ (Q12§1; SPN: 12); and sometimes, as in the case of the Lazzarettists, even over groups who are simply perceived as potential proponents of political programmes weakening the dominant groups. Gramsci’s interpretation both of the atrocities in southern Italy (including Sardinia), and of the repression of Lazzaretti’s movement, focuses on the enforcement and defence of bourgeois political and economic interests, albeit without neglecting the different combinations of persuasion and repression that shielded those interests at different times, and under different circumstances. It is important not to lose sight of the interconnections between coercion and consent, if we are to avoid the transformation of Gramsci into a cultural theorist whose ideas could freely be adapted to representations of political conflict that marginalize, or completely overlook, class- based capitalist oppression.

Notes 1 See also Buttigieg’s and Green’s chapters in the present volume. 2 See also Frosini’s chapter in this volume. 3 Lazzaretti recounts his military life in a manuscript which he probably wrote between

1869 and 1870. This autobiographical account presents some interesting features. Numerous passages focus on his uneasiness at the other volunteers’ anticlericalism and frequent use of blasphemies. Elsewhere, however, his retrospective disillusion-ment seems to have also a different political character, as he criticizes the attitude of socially privileged military officers towards rank- and-file soldiers. Moreover, in one of the most significant episodes recalled in the manuscript, Lazzaretti describes his pious gesture of burying the body of one of Garibaldi’s red- shirted volunteers, which had remained on the ground after the Battle of the Volturno (1 October 1860). A ser-geant in the Piedmontese army ridiculed Lazzaretti’s behaviour and told him that ‘Garibaldi’s revolutionaries’ deserved to be ‘eaten by dogs’ (Lazzaretti 2011: 50). The two men had a quarrel and physically clashed, with Lazzaretti being taken before a military court as a result. He was acquitted of the charge of insubordination.

4 See, inter alia, his letter of 26 December 1927 (Gramsci 1994a, I: 163–4). His interest in Kipling’s works (which are often referred to in positive terms in Gramsci’s letters, as well as in his prison and pre- prison writings) has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves, but this falls outside the current chapter and will be developed separately.

5 The idea of a ‘solid leadership’ does not really reflect the complexity of Gramsci’s thought on hegemony as a relationship of mutual education between leaders and led (see Gramsci 1975: 1330–2).

6 Aprile’s tract is especially poor from a scholarly point of view, lacking analytical accuracy and presenting various arguments without deep critical discussion or clear progression of ideas. Yet its impact should not be underestimated: it was a bestseller in Italy and received substantial attention from the media, and an English translation has recently been published in the US (in a book series which also includes a trans-lation of Gramsci’s 1926 essay on the Southern Question).

The Risorgimento and its discontents 141 7 As an interesting example of how Gramsci came to criticize ‘Sardinian, Sicilian, Val-

dostan, Friulian’ separatism, see Gramsci 2008e [1919]. 8 ‘The new Prime Minister was Agostino Depretis, a cautious, grey- bearded former

Mazzinian of progressive principles but conservative instincts’ (Duggan 2000: 161). 9 Lazzaretti’s death was followed by tens of arrests among his followers, one of whom

died in prison before the court trial began. At the same time, the Chief of Public Security who had commanded the troops when Lazzaretti had been shot dead was awarded a medal for valour by the central government.

10 For an accurate reconstruction of the development of Lazzaretti’s movement, and a discussion of how his preaching became remarkably influential in the Mount Amiata area, see Moscato (1978).

11 This aspect emerges especially from his letters, and from various accounts of his life and works: for instance, Arrigo Petacco (2003: 89) states that Lazzaretti never lost touch ‘with the reality of the environment in which he operated’.

12 All of Francesco’s brothers had access to relatively prestigious careers in the institu-tions of the new Italian state: ‘one became a treasury official; another was an inspec-tor of railways, after being station- master at Rome; and a third [one] became an army officer [stationed in Sardinia]’ (Fiori 1970: 10).

13 Letter of the Mayor of Santa Fiora to the Prefect of Grosseto (6 August 1878), quoted by Moscato (1978: 88–9). It is worth recalling that local government was, at the time, the preserve of notables and propertied groups.

14 See the documents discussed by Colao and Pitocco; see also Cavoli (1989: 87–8).15 From the evidence we have, it seems possible to infer that Gennaro Gramsci, his wife

and his sons were by no means immune to instinctive forms of conservatism (see Fiori 1970; and also Gramsci 1994a, I: 305).

16 For the full text of the psychiatric report see Petacco (2003: 129–32).

Part IV

Dalit literature, subalternity and consciousness

10 Hegemony and consciousness- building processes in Dalit literature

Mauro Pala

Every city, every village that was covered by the tree was dug up for its rootsThe whole nation was bulldozedFinally they found the roots of the treeIn the palatial villas of the Zamindar landowners and their Mehfils.Finally the roots of the tree were foundIn the safety vaults of capitalists and monopolitists.

(Dhasal 2008: 187)

While Dalit emancipation is predicated on both the existential and political reordering of Indian society, its literature specifically focuses on an innovative kind of political subject. Dalit literature converts a negative description, inscribed in the very word ‘Dalit’, into an antagonistic identity. As such, it includes various examples of individuals who, in writing their biography, find the strength and motivation to demand inclusion within Indian society at large, while, at the same time, asking for a new form of citizenship. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is particularly apt at grasping the deep, polit-ical sense of the issues present in this mostly autobiographic literature. His work can also be very useful in exploring the political organization of the subordinate masses in postcolonial India. Gramsci uses the term ‘subaltern’ – which origin-ally meant both ‘of inferior position or rank’ in military terms and, in logic, the particular as opposed to the universal – to denote a group without class con-sciousness. As Ranajit Guha explains, the Subaltern Studies Group employs the term ‘as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender, and office or in any other way’. Guha’s Subaltern Studies group has focused on historical agency located in the Indian peasantry who were equally instrumental, although under-represented, in India’s history. ‘Subaltern’ refers to these people, to their hidden history, and to the historiographers who study them. As Guha observes,

The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism – colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism . . . sharing the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of

146 M. Pala

the consciousness – nationalism – which confirmed this process were exclu-sively or predominantly elite achievements. In the colonialist and neo colo-nialist historiographies these achievements are credited to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions and culture; in the nationalist and neo nationalist writings – to Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas.

(Guha 1982a: 1; cf. Prakash 2000a, 2000b)

An application of Gramsci’s theory of the subaltern would necessarily include an analysis of the concrete processes of social transformation within the Dalit community; specifically, it would track how revolutionary forces proceeded from a subordinate condition within political and ideological hegemony to a moment in which this bloc of historically excluded classes might – and still may – contest and win power. The writing of Dalit history from the perspective of caste politics throws light on ‘a wider set of relationships – those between state, caste and community, between nation and minority and, ultimately, between the religious and the polit-ical’ (Rao 2009: 7). It is my contention that resorting to Gramscian categories of subalternity and hegemony helps us to understand the formation of a Dalit con-sciousness through literature. This approach also yields positive results as con-cerns the colonial and postcolonial experience, taking into account the just- quoted permanent tension between the religious and ‘the political’ that char-acterizes this process. In fact, Gramsci’s contribution to our understanding of what he called ‘the Southern Question’ informs much of the current critical work on Dalit emancipation and, in particular, it illuminates the phenomenon of Dalit literature within the general discourse of postcolonial debate. Specifically, Gramsci argues that political independence does not necessarily lead to political autonomy. Since there was nothing hidden about the violence against the Dalits in the 1930s, Gandhi himself thrust their struggles into the centre of the Indian national movement. But Ambedkar, with reference to Gandhi’s attempts at social reform, maintained that it was wrong to consider the problem of the untouchables as a social problem. Rather, Ambedkar argued, the problem ‘is fundamentally a political problem [of minority versus majority groups]’ ([1945b]: 190, reprinted in BAWS 9). While Article 14 of the Indian Constitu-tion guarantees equality before the law, the Courts refused to interpret this as absolute and unequivocal equality, and thus prevented the notion of equality from being used as a real means to freedom. Already by the mid- 1960s these state actions, known as ‘compensation schemes’, began to suffer due both to the economic and political crises that followed the various conflicts in which India was engaged, and to the recurrent monsoon failures. Over time, the Dalits raised serious doubts about the State’s commitment and ability to provide the conditions for equality. A 1969 Department of Social Welfare report found that in effect, ‘untouchability was still being practiced in virulent forms all over India’ (Prashad 2008: 140).

Hegemony and consciousness-building processes 147

According to Ambedkar’s studies Castes in India: their mechanism, genesis and development ([1916]; BAWS 1: 3–22; EW: 241–62), Annihilation of Caste ([1936]; BAWS 1: 23–96; EW: 263–305) and Who Were the Shudras? ([1948a]; BAWS 7: 1–227), Hindu society in its early stages was divided on the basis of class, each of which later became a closed unit, accessible only by birth; in other words, a caste. This development, unique to India, is described by Ambedkar as an infection of society. Ambedkar further argues that, in order to understand the development of the caste system, it is necessary to view it as a result of the sociopolitical conditions prevailing at the time and to disassociate it from its religious context:

On 26 January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life, we will have inequality . . . we must remove this contradiction at the earliest moment.

([1949]: BAWS 13: 1216)

Dalit literature is the multifaceted mirror of this oppressing condition:

I could take it no more: ‘Patil will you kindly tell me what you meant when you accused us of forgetting religion, abandoning our caste and of polluting the gods? And if a religion cannot tolerate one human being treating another simply as a human being, what’s the use of such an inhumane religion? And if our mere touch pollutes the gods, why were the Mahars and Mangs created at all?’ At my retort, Patil exploded: ‘Look here, boy! Simply because you’ve had a little education, don’t think you can teach me. You should know that God intended to have a definite hierarchy when he created the Brahmin, the Maratha, the fisherman, the weaver, the Maher mang, the Dhor and the cobbler in that order. Everyone must abide by this scheme and act accordingly.

(Bandhumadhav 1992: 148–9)

This brief but brutal exchange of views exemplifies the unique feature of Indian caste society and the alienating effects this division has on the individual. Caste division diminishes and eventually annihilates the possibility of emancipation through education, thus blocking what can be seen as an internal conflict between the Dalits and the majority of the Indian population, as formulated in Gramsci’s famous partition of war into three forms: ‘war of movement, war of position and underground warfare’ (Q1§134; PN1: 219; SPN: 229). The Dalit Lekhak Sangh (DLS), founded in Delhi in the late 1990s by a small group of writers, has provided a forum for contemporary Dalit literature and its criticism. The corpus of literary production is, then, closely associated with the hopes for freedom of a group of people who, as untouchables, were – and continue to be – victims of social, economic and cultural inequality. In essence, Dalit liter-ature comprises a body of writings characterized by a feeling of rebellion against the Indian establishment and is, therefore, profoundly negative in nature.

148 M. Pala

Following Ambedkar, the Dalits questioned and rejected categories such as ‘untouchables’, ‘depressed classes’, ‘scheduled castes’ and Harijans, all terms coined by colonial, Hindu or Indian nationalist discursive practices. This rejection of such disparaging categorization served not merely to contest dominant expres-sions of Dalit identity but also, and more importantly, to reject the notion of impu-rity and pollution attached to their community, identity and history. And so, from the very beginning, Dalit activism described a unique path, where a series of initia-tives may be viewed as stages in the evolution of a complex Dalit perspective (Rawat 2008: 31). According to this perspective, ‘the interrelated spheres of the body, emotions, imagination, and everyday practice become the ensemble of ethical substances for a utopian poetics to work social and political transformation, adumbrating an as- yet unimaginable collective subjectivity’ (Sahota 2008: 197). The study of Dalit literature and its role from an exclusively literary or aca-demic point of view can render only an incomplete understanding of its import-ance and meaning. Moreover, neither a sociological nor a political assessment has yet been realized as part of Dalit literary output. Such an undertaking would surely demonstrate that ‘this literature is intimately related to social reality and is not imaginary or entertainment- oriented’. In fact, most of these narratives transcend their plot, since

these autobiographies became famous for several reasons. An autobiography was not restricted to the life of a Dalit writer. It was a delineation of the social system, communalism, injustice, exploitation and of the lives of people who had been subjected to these evils

(Dangle 1992a: 255)

Only since recently, according to Ajay Navariya, who is media representative for the DLS, has ‘the group’s discussions about literature focus[ed] largely on issues of content, and authentic representation of the Dalit experience. These ele-ments combine in the ideal of Dalit consciousness (chetna), the fundamental component of an emerging Dalit aesthetics (saundaryashastra)’ (quoted in Brueck 2008: 153–5). The Dalits, however, did not feel an affinity for the orthodox Marxist literature of dissent. In independent India the upper caste leadership, although inspired by the Russian Revolution, did not revolt against the caste system; this was because of a misunderstanding about intellectuals, who were thought exclusively to belong to the upper classes. Nor did they perceive that a revolt was necessary in order to eradicate the internal contradictions among the exploited classes. As a consequence, progressive writers did not even try to permeate to the lowest stratum. Perhaps in this case we might speak, in the Gramscian sense, of a cos-mopolitanism among Indian intellectuals, who could not detach themselves from the influence of their traditional upbringing, whatever philosophy they professed to espouse. This is partly true even today. The fault does not lie with the author’s philosophy. The fault, if any, lies with the authors’ psychological and social weaknesses.


Such an analysis paves the way to a ‘reconceptualization of historical materi-alism understood as nothing less than a refutation of idealism’ (Dainotto 2009a: 56). As Gramsci (Q11§30; SPN: 465–6) argues, ‘Matter should not be con-sidered as such, but only insofar as it is socially and historically organized for production and therefore . . . as an essentially historical category, as human relation.’ Seen in retrospect, Dalit literature seems to represent a case study for gauging the cogency of Gramsci’s ideas about subalternity as human relation; that is, for understanding a specific hegemony as part of a national conflict. Since the ‘Dalits were a territorially dispersed community of suffering’ it has been ‘the critique of caste ideology as well as the efforts to narrate the Dalit self [that] has marked their exceptional status’. In continuation, let us attempt to answer Anupama Rao’s (2008: 19) question: ‘What is the best mechanism for redressing a history of humiliation and discrimination?’ In Q3§14 (PN2: 21), Gramsci first uses the term ‘subaltern’ with regard to social class. He writes that ‘Subaltern classes are subject to the initiatives of the dominant class, even when they rebel; they are in a state of anxious defence.’ It is in this sense that subaltern groups are subject to a ruling group’s policies and initiatives (Green 2011b: 69). However, Guha’s work has often been perceived as an anthropological venue although its conclusions are far- reaching in scope and politically crucial in revising traditional historiography. Even progressive and postcolonial historians have in fact duplicated the exclusions of imperialism by seeing resistance almost exclusively in terms of nationalism, as a mirror response to imperialism: they have thus ignored other histories and other kinds of resistance, of which Dalit literature provides the best evidence (Childs and Williams 1997: 160–1). Gramsci’s critique of the subalterns leads him to two important points: first, he argues for a strategy that moves from retrieving subaltern consciousness and, second, he charts subject positions and their effects; positions constructed not only by an historiography ‘from above’, but also by other antagonistic sources (Dalit literature, for example). The collective will is thus conceived by Gramsci as the outcome of a new historical discourse. As a consequence of this mapping, Dalit literature can be read in Gramscian terms as the attempt to feature a col-lective consciousness: thus the silenced voice of a group can be assimilated to ‘a form of deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson 2006: 7) that ultimately defines the condition of an imagined community – or a nation within a larger nation. Such mapping or, rather, reconfiguration is, however, no easy task: taking Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism as their starting point, unconventional critics such as Chandavarkar (1998: 50) and Prakash (2000a) have in fact moved through a range of approaches for the study of Indian society, showing how each has inherited and reproduced some of Orientalism’s key assumptions and tech-niques or representation. Indian nationalist historiography, for example, has been unable to transcend Orientalism’s preoccupation with essences and related teleologies of modernity.

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Official Indian historians have understood knowledge as a more or less adequate representation of the real, and therefore accept the concept of India itself as having an existence independent of its representations. They envision India as an undivided subject struggling to transcend colonial backwardness and to realize itself as a modern national state (O’Hanlon and Washbrook 2000: 192). In the last few decades, Dalit literature has managed to evolve beyond any of those humanist depictions of the oppressed, depictions that easily fell prey to western exoticism. In addition to this formal aspect, Dalit authors have clearly assimilated that Gramscian notion according to which

a class can and must lead even before assuming power . . . there can and must be a ‘political hegemony’ even before assuming government power, and in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely on the power and material force that is given by the government.

(Q1§44; PN1: 137)

These Dalits authors have, accordingly, adopted strategies of cultural resistance. Dalit literature foresees that, given the correct conditions, the subalterns may eventually achieve sociopolitical power. This work represents the alternative to a passive subject unable to escape the pressure of national caste- oriented ideo-logy. In a word, this literature attacks the dominant discourse in a strategy of ‘self- fashioning’ and subtle, confrontational self representation. Despite the fact that the first Dalit literary conference (1958) went almost unnoticed in mainstream literary circles, Dalit literary production continued to gather momentum in the next two decades. Furthermore, as Arjun Dangle asserts, Dalit literature is not simply literature but is associated with a movement to bring about change:

Just as the Russian writers helped the revolution by spreading Lenin’s revo-lutionary ideas through their works, our writers should spread Dr. Ambed-kar’s philosophy to the villages. . . . Politics is just one way of attacking the opposition. Unless we attack from all sides we cannot defeat those who have inflicted injustice on us for the last thousands of years.

(Dangle 1992a: 242)

The readings in Poisoned Bread, a collection of Dalit short stories, reflect many of the theoretical and philosophical concerns of the movement. There is tre-mendous value placed on literacy and education, along with recognition of the activists’ limitations as agents of social change. Within this complex reality, strategies for relating to or confronting Hindu society coexist. Thus, an enduring tension is maintained concerning the nature and aims of political action; unlike the novel, the short story does not offer narrative continuity. Accordingly, the short stories typical of Dalit literature portray only significant moments in Dalit everyday life. Moreover, these writers focus, in the final narrative instant, on the characters’ psychological – and sometimes physical – dissolution. Hence, the


concluding moment is essentially tragic because the protagonists experience the lure of modernity but are subsequently punished and become fragmented in the process of seeking to transcend their actual state of being. This conundrum brings to mind Gramsci’s interest in Machiavelli’s riddle concerning how to establish a new state in which ‘the unity of philosophy and history (or what Gramsci calls “absolute historicism”) is made concrete through political action in the hic et nunc. “Political” is understood in its integral and classical sense of the unity of theory and practice’ (Fontana 1993: 21). In both cases – the Dalit exemplary short stories and ‘The modern prince’ – the chal-lenge is how to intervene in a concrete reality in order to bring about a change. ‘The modern prince’ is not utopian, according to Gramsci, for the implicit project expressed in it is the link that binds political initiative with the objective situation in order to change the latter. The element that Gramsci emphasizes above all else is the true effectiveness of the party owing to its ‘determining force in having contributed to bringing certain events about and in having pre-vented other events from taking place’ (Q13§33; SPN: 151). The Sardinian intellectual envisages a working- class party that successfully wages a political struggle on a whole range of fronts so that a new state and a new historical bloc may be formed:

In the modern world, a party is such – integrally and not, as happens, a frac-tion of a larger party – when it is conceived and led in ways and forms such that it will develop integrally into a State (an integral State, and not into a government technically understood) and into a conception of the world.

(Q17§51; SPN: 267)

And yet Gramsci never articulates in detail this new, integral State. Analogously, in Dalit literature, the endless search for a just community clashes with concrete external entities under the form of feudal religious con-straints, although now in their colonial and postcolonial incarnations. The overall magnitude of the shared effort within the Dalit community, in the end, overshad-ows the features of that very community. Even when the question of emancipa-tion – the Dalits’ goal and that of the Gramscian modern ‘prince’ – is not made explicit within the narrative structure, it looms large as an encoded imperative. Like Gramsci’s hegemony, it remains the focus of the political action. The experience of suffering is what motivates Dalit narrative, and it not only constitutes another form of resistance based on the widespread sharing of pain or satyagraha, but also represents a Dalit version of the ‘war of position’, which for Gramsci is ‘the concept of hegemony’ itself:

Go away from here, my son. That a mother should say this to her son! It was impossible to believe. No one would have believed if he had told them. . . . He had to come to grips with the turmoil in his mind, and turned to look back just once. But the village was out of sight. The trees and the bushes had obliterated it. It was as if nothing had happened. There was no village,

152 M. Pala

and there were no people, no animals. . . . He smiled to himself. What was his life anyway? Was it not a feat of trying to keep his balance, standing in the mire of slimy customs for twenty- one years? The tenuous fold of casteism would hem in his mind every now and then, but it would still strug-gle to break out. Cursing, he walked on, barefoot. He was surprised to realize that he could use such ugly words of abuse, and spoke to himself: ‘my name itself is a curse’.

(Dolas 1992: 216)

This literature records how the ‘pressures of a given form of domination are experienced and in practice internalized’, so that the entire question of class rule and opposition to it is eventually transformed. Dalit narratives confirm ‘Gram-sci’s emphasis on the creation of an alternative hegemony, by the practical con-nection of many different forms of struggle, including those not easily recognizable as and indeed not primarily “political” and “economic” ’ (Williams 1977: 110–11). Gramsci maintains that the degree of hegemony that any sub-altern group can establish before attaining state power is limited, and he points out that one of the historical problems Marxism had to face was the low cultural level of the masses. Since a lived hegemony is always a process, alternative forms of cultural politics must be developed. The first step in this process is to sensitize the masses to their condition. In Dalit literature this form of counter- hegemony is concretized through the narrative of trauma. In the majority of Dalit autobiographical writings, trauma is a structure that induces the destruction and provokes the reconstruction of the Dalit self. Bama’s Karukku presents an apt example in its disparity between its stated goals and present reality. This autobiographical novel explores the experience of the female author, Bama, who, born a Tamil, becomes a nun. While striving for equality and social justice, she discovers that caste oppression exists also within the Catholic Church:

We who are asleep must open our eyes and look around us. We must not accept the injustice of our enslavement by telling ourselves it is our fate, as if we have no true feelings: we must dare to stand for change. . . . Life is dif-ficult if you happen to be poor, even though you are born into the upper castes. When this is the case, the condition of those who are born into the Paraya community, as the poorest of the poor struggling for daily survival, doesn’t need spelling out.

(Bama 2000: 25, 66–7)

Bama is eventually forced to return to her native village, where, at last, she does not feel alienated and finds new strength to raise an acute awareness of Dalit oppression. As testimonio, Dalit writings (Nayar 2006: 83) are narratives of trauma, pain, resistance, protest and social change. Trauma is not simply an effect of destruction. Its portrayal also enables the revelation of the structure of caste oppression; at the same time, the expression of trauma constitutes a


dramatization of the ways in which the victims have fought, overcome and sur-vived negative events. Karukku is a powerful critique of Indian civil society in that it condemns the complicity between class and caste in modern India, stretch-ing from the educational system to the Church and state bureaucracy. The testimonio is the voice of one who witnesses the trauma and who gives voice to that of all those who are victims of social marginalization. It is therefore significant that the first noun in Bama’s narrative is not a unified subject, ‘I’, but a collective one, ‘our/we’: ‘Bama’ is a pen name and we are not told what her real name is. The name ‘Bama’ is a pseudonym that in no way reflects the author’s actual identity. Thus emphasis is placed upon her social reality as both a Tamil and a Dalit woman rather than on her personal circumstances. Just as the Gramscian party has the potential to expand into ‘a movement to create a new civilization, a new type of man and citizen, to determine the will to construct within the husk of political society a complex and well articulated civil society’ (Q8§130; PN3: 310; SPN: 268), so too the historical task of the Dalits (according to the vast plan Ambedkar associated with emancipation) would be ‘to create a society in which politics in its narrow sense decreases and in which politics in its widest sense, including civil society or “self- government” becomes the norm’ (Sassoon 1987: 130). Clearly, this kind of politics rests on a new hegemony intended to unite a whole spectrum of the population, notwithstanding individual differences of class and income. Dalit literature is meant to expand the consensus regarding a shared cause, drawing upon knowledge that is validated by means of an eviden-tiary process. Testimonio, like the genre of legal testimony, is the presentation of evidence to which readers, viewers and listeners are asked to bear witness. Thanks to this expanding community of witnesses and potential activists, Dalit writing takes the form of a brief narrative that detotalizes – the term is Geoffrey Hartman’s – the official narrative of India. ‘Detotalizing’ literature is one that attacks ‘common sense’ as a constella-tion of shared social representations on which caste discrimination thrives. In effect, this literature counters the rhetoric of ‘common sense’, which insists upon the substantial continuity between colonial and postcolonial Indian history. And, so, we understand the importance of Gramsci’s claim that ‘a popular belief often has the same strength of a material force and, as such, it is very significant’ (Q7§20). Gramsci is here equating common sense with ideo-logy. But neither common sense nor ideology owe their effectiveness to being consistent and true. Rather, they are legitimized by the simple fact of never being questioned. Therefore, since common sense is exclusively concerned with what is known, it does not generate surprise and nor does it breed suspi-cion. Precisely because common sense is not subjected to scrutiny, over time it comes to be perceived as natural. Bourdieu argues that the dominant class adopts common sense, in order to maintain its hegemony. It thus shapes the state structure and defines a ‘field’ as a network of objective, historically defined relations (Bartoli 2008: 28). These relations in turn are determined by both Bourdieu’s ‘distinction’, and Gramsci’s

154 M. Pala

‘ideology’, both of which prompt individual decisions in everyday life. These decisions are shaped by the hegemonic class struggle and, just as informally, are uncritical choices because they are influenced by an ingrained ‘need for a social identity’ (Liguori 2004: 147, my translation). Dalit literature and Ambedkar’s strategy share, in this regard, a concern with an essentially educational – and, as such, very Gramscian – project, whose ulti-mate goal is to create conditions which would transform the Indian state and society through the nurturing of an innovative type of consciousness. In a class society where there are basic inequalities between classes and castes, Williams notes that Gramsci

introduces the necessary recognition of dominance and subordination in what has still, however, to be recognized as a whole process. . . . It is in just this recognition of the wholeness of the process that the concept of hege-mony goes beyond ideology. What is decisive is not only the conscious system of ideas and beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings and values.

(Williams 1977: 108–9)

Thanks to this lived social process, corresponding to the wholeness of culture that makes hegemony possible, the subaltern can locate the symbolic order – as Lacan also sees it – that the dominant system has built around him. But, accord-ing to Fontana, this mapping of the conditions of subordination should also take into account the ‘rhetorical (that is, speech and language) elements’ (Fontana 2002: 26) of that subordination. Gramsci states it as follows:

The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge). . . . One cannot make politics without this passion, without this sentimental connec-tion between intellectuals and people- nation.

(Q11§67; SPN: 418)

And it is precisely this passion that resonates in Ambedkar’s speeches: ‘The task of removing untouchability and establishing equality that we have undertaken, we must carry out ourselves. We all know at every turn, untouchability muddies and soils our whole existence’ (Ambedkar 1992 [1927]: 231; see also [1927b]: BAWS 17 [1]: 23–4). Both in small narratives and political speeches it will be, in the end, hegemony that provides a discursive space in which testimony and self revelation will establish a sense of agency, to articulate a personal history and the resulting resistance against the texts of traditional casteist culture. Just as the proletariat, according to Gramsci, can achieve hegemony only to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of alliance capable of mobilizing the masses, neither can the Dalits be successful unless they reach a distinctive form of consciousness that, together with related forms of subordination, is


accurately ‘identified and objectively understood by those who aspired to trans-form them’ (Arnold 2000: 27). As Brueck observes:

Since its origin as a modern form of social resistance literature among the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra in the 1970s, Dalit literature has been princip-ally concerned with community identity formation. In recent decades, this has proved an increasingly complicated goal, since political and economic changes among many segments of the Dalit population contribute to an expanding definition of the ‘Dalit experience’.

(Brueck 2008: 151)

In contrast to Marx’s definition, ‘civil society’ for Gramsci does not correspond to economic structure, but rather to a geographically specific intersection of private hegemony apparati that have their origin in the processes of political socialization. As Coutinho (2011: 200) perceptively observes, civil society is at the same time the cause and the effect of a growing complexity of social stratification. Vasant Moon’s autobiography is, in this sense, a good case in point. It begins with a topographical description of the place where the community is formed and lives:

It was built in a square made by four roads. No one can say when people first settled here. Old people used to tell how the generation before them could hear from their rooftops the sound of the cannon on top of Sitabardi hill when the Bhosle kingdom was defeated in 1857. Now this generation also is ready for its end. . . . This community in a square of two- hundred by two- hundred yards made by north–south and east–west roads has been established for generations; people have never built their huts or tried to carry on their daily affairs beyond the roads. If the family grew, if space became insufficient, they would rent a room in a neighbor’s house, but never leave the community.

(Moon 2000: 1)

Moon’s description is reminiscent of Naguib Mahfouz’s emotional ties to his native city as portrayed in The Cairo Trilogy. The same may be said of Edward Said’s description of his youth in Palestine when he claims that: ‘All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate and even a language’ (1999: 3). In both cases, the narrative of a community is rooted in a shared space and confirms Gramsci’s view that, contrary to Lenin’s cosmo-politanism, ‘we cannot talk about the idea of a nation without referring to the territory’ (Q15§32, my translation), and that a national consciousness should rely on its knowledge of folklore and popular culture as antidotes, as in the case of Italy, to the endemic evils in national history of ‘municipal parochialism’ and ‘catholic cosmopolitism’ (Q15§41; FSPN: 104). Moon’s Dalit community represents a ‘marginalized social group, a group not to be pitied. Prejudice and violence are not absent from their life, but they do

156 M. Pala

not destroy their spirit.’ Dalits here live in a ‘vasti’, a Marahti word which, when translated into Hindi with ‘bustee’, means an ‘urban slum’. According to Eleanor Zilli (2000: xi) this urban reality adds ‘a new dimension to our understanding of India’s Dalits’ because in those slums the Dalits were, already in the colonial period, offered new occupations in the army and the railroad. It was these new opportunities that attracted them to the city, where they acquired a greater mobil-ity than many other untouchable castes. This new urban reality and the related embryonic form of nation prefigured in the Dalit vasti represent ‘the first stage of the modern nation- state and something more ancient and nebulous – the natio, a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging’ (Brennan 1990: 45). Moreover, ‘In the [postcolonial] autobiographies, the public figures recount their personal journey as a paradigm which encourages the citizens of the new state to align themselves with them, and thus identify themselves with the nation in formation’ (Innes 2007: 57). This development of an individual into a collective consciousness and eventually into an institution mirrors ‘the Gramscian methodology based on particular events, pieces of information, and observations’ (Buttigieg 1992b [PN1]: 48). To para-phrase Zene (2011: 91), all of this enables the translation of the elements of historical life into theoretical language. We find a parallel approach in Dalit literature, whose exemplary episodes and narratives, during the last several decades, have recorded this evolution from the initial outcry exemplified in Karukku

to a carefully mediated body of texts that are increasingly forcing their way into mainstream Indian literature, . . . to create jan chetna, mass conscious-ness, . . . and to include issues such as feminism, literary self- consciousness and individual introspection, while increasingly wrestling with the question of how mainstream literature may become without losing its authentic Dalit identity.

(Brueck 2008: 152–3)

Over the years, Dalit authors have performed very much like Gramsci’s ‘integral historian [who] must record, and discover the causes of, the line of development towards integral autonomy, starting from the most primitive phases’ (Zene 2011: 91). For both the Gramscian philosopher of praxis – as Baratta sees it – and the Dalit author, history and philosophy must be placed in their proper political context. That is, a text should not present a fixed or immutable politics, but rather an analysis arising from specific relations between a local and an inter-national context (Baratta 2003: 53). As Coutinho observes, for both the philo-sopher and the Dalit writer, it is once that is established that wills are concretely determined:

such wills, after all, undergo a process of universalisation – ‘associationism’ – that leads to the creation of collective subjects . . . moved by a will that tends to universalise itself, tending to go beyond merely ‘economic- corporatist’


interests and directing itself toward an ‘ethico- political conscience’. But we can also say that Gramsci, on the other hand, viewing participation in these hegemonic apparatuses as consensual and defining the apparatuses as moments of an ‘enlarged’ state, introduced a clearly contractual dimension into the core of the public sphere.

(Coutinho 2011: 201)

It is precisely this contractual dimension aspect that lies at the core of Ambed-kar’s strategy and that Said identifies with Gramsci’s philological approach, in which the meaning of a text is not determined by an omniscient authority but rather by ‘a mode of social presence’. Like the Gramscian secular intellectual, the Dalit writer, too, works ‘to show the absence of divine originality and, on the other side, the complex presence of historical actuality. The conversion of the absence of religion into the presence of actuality is secular interpretation’ (Said 2000: 131).

11 Consciousness, agency and humiliationReflections on Dalit life- writing and subalternity

Udaya Kumar

Encounters between ideas from distant neighbourhoods of thought are often complex affairs. Such is the conversation at the heart of this volume: between Ambedkar’s concept of the ‘Dalit’, developed in a context of resistance against Hindu caste oppression, and Gramsci’s concept of the ‘subaltern’, proposed in his cryptic jottings in prison. This chapter aims to gloss these concepts from a site of public, personal enunciation: that of Dalit autobiographical writing from India. Drawing on Dalit autobiographical writing, I shall argue that the testimo-nial mode adopted in several Dalit personal narratives, by foregrounding com-plexities of subaltern subjectivity, provokes a productive review of notions of agency and consciousness developed in historical and political- programmatic accounts of the subaltern. The figure of the subaltern has attracted much critical attention in recent years, especially after the emergence of the Subaltern Studies collective in India in the early 1980s, Latin American subaltern studies a decade later, and the extensive theoretical engagement with the figure of the subaltern in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The concept’s provenance in Gramsci’s writings, in spite of frequent acknowledgement, has not led to comprehensive engagement with Gram-sci’s uses of the concept, most of which – notably, Notebook 25 – have remained unavailable to English- reading scholars (Green 2011a: 68). This has made the career of this concept in South Asian studies intriguing and complex. Marcus Green, elsewhere in this volume, has suggested that for Gramsci, sub-alternity was not solely a matter of class; it was conceived ‘in terms of race, culture, and religion – among other factors’. Ranajit Guha’s preface to the first volume of Subaltern Studies used the ‘subaltern’ as ‘the general attribute of sub-ordination in South Asian society, whether this is expressed in terms of class, age, gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha 1982b: vii). In a striking formulation, Spivak defined subalternity as a ‘position without identity’ and linked its specificity not to a binary opposition between subordination and domi-nation but to a difficult relationship with the possibility of action:

Subalternity is a position without identity. It is somewhat like the strict understanding of class. Class is not a cultural origin, it is a sense of economic collectivity, of social relations of formation as the basis of action.

Dalit life-writing and subalternity 159

Gender is not lived sexual difference. It is a sense of the collective social negotiation of sexual differences as the basis of action. ‘Race’ is not origi-nary; it assumes racism. Subalternity is where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognisable basis of action.

(Spivak 2005: 476)

The unavailability of idioms of collective action was important for Gramsci too. While outlining his plan for the history of the subaltern classes, he famously argued:

Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise: only ‘permanent’ victory breaks their subordina-tion, and that not immediately. In reality, even when they appear triumphant, the subaltern groups are merely anxious to defend themselves. . . . Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should there-fore be of incalculable value for the integral historian.

(Q25§2; SPN: 54–5)

The task of the ‘integral historian’ is not simple: she is to identify instances of independent initiative even when they are interrupted and historical cycles do not culminate in successes. For Gramsci, the complexity of the task was exacer-bated as subaltern initiatives were always ‘subject to the activity of the ruling classes’, and their traces would need to be recovered from idioms that neither originated in nor belonged to subaltern classes. This demanded a complex concept of agency that worked under conditions of heteronomy. In Gramsci’s writings, the problem was at times formulated as a contradiction within forms of subaltern consciousness and as a distinction between an inner will and its outer forms of expression. In a history of subaltern resistance, Gramsci suggested, ‘fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position’ (Q11§12; SPN: 337). The intimate proximity of contradictory idioms and meanings thus marked subaltern enunciation. The Subaltern Studies project initiated by a group of historians in India in the early 1980s rehearsed Gramsci’s proposal for a study of subaltern historical ini-tiatives, in the South Asian context. In his preface to the first volume of Sub-altern Studies, Guha modestly stated that ‘it will be idle for us, of course, to hope that the range of contributions to this series may even remotely match the six- point project envisaged by Antonio Gramsci in his “Notes on Italian History” ’ (Guha 1982b: vii). The preface moved on to spell out an oppositional distinction between the subaltern and the elite, and concluded by stressing the critical thrust of the project in relation to elitist historiography:

Indeed, it will be very much a part of our endeavour to make sure that our emphasis on the subaltern functions both as a measure of objective assessment of the role of the elite and as a critique of elitist interpretations of that role.

(Guha 1982b: vii)

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The second volume’s preface saw Guha suggesting that the focus on the sub-altern provided ‘a new orientation within which many different styles, interests and discursive modes may find it possible to unite in their rejection of academic elitism’ (Guha 1983a: vii). A historical account of subaltern agency was thus a critique of elitist historiography and its silencing of marginalized and dominated subjectivities. Guha’s seminal volume on Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983b) drew more clearly on Gramsci’s reflections on subaltern consciousness. Gramsci identified a ‘negative rather than a positive class posi-tion’ in instances where the ‘people’

have no precise consciousness of its own historical identity, it is not even conscious of the historical identity or the exact limits of its adversary. The lower classes, historically on the defensive, can only achieve self- awareness via a series of negations, via their consciousness of the identity and class limits of their enemy; but it is precisely this process which has not yet come to the surface, at least not nationally.

(Q3: 46; SPN: 273; PN2: 44–5)

Guha developed Gramsci’s reflections on negation into a notion of ‘negative consciousness’. Subaltern insurgency gave expression to this negative conscious-ness through modalities such as ‘discrimination’ and ‘inversion’. The second volume of Subaltern Studies also contained Guha’s essay ‘The prose of counter-insurgency’, perhaps his most sustained reflection on the recovery of subaltern agency from elite historical sources. Through a detailed differentiation of docu-ments into primary, secondary and tertiary, according to the ‘order of their appearance in time and their filiation’, Guha attempted an epistemology of the ‘blind spot’ of colonial historiography: its invisibilization of subaltern conscious-ness, and its non- recognition of insurgency as a ‘motivated and conscious under-taking on the part of the rural masses’ (1983c: 2). The question of the autonomy of subaltern consciousness and agency con-tinued to be a conceptual concern for the practitioners of the project. Partha Chatterjee, in an early essay on Gramsci, argued that situations when persuasion by the elite does not manage to elicit collaboration from the subaltern classes – cases where hegemony fails – ought to be seen as instances

where subaltern consciousness occupies a different cultural space from that of elite consciousness. In such a situation, the simple structure of hegemony will not apply. What the elite must attempt here is an appropriation of ele-ments of collaboration in subaltern consciousness which spring from an autonomous cultural space.

(Chatterjee 1988: PE- 24)

Many of the essays in the early volumes of Subaltern Studies stressed the auto-nomy of the subaltern sphere and sought to identify the distinctive idioms of


subaltern agency. Revolt and rebellion often assumed unorthodox forms in this domain, and the task of the historian was to recognize them as instances of historical agency. These moves, one might say, formed the kernel of the response of Subaltern Studies historians to the tasks that Gramsci had set for the integral historian. They also revealed a problem at the heart of the project: is critical historiography neces-sarily predicated on the translation of distinct, autonomous domains of conscious-ness into a common language? Can the historian of subaltern initiatives trade with ease in the conceptual currency of ‘agency’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘resistance’, or do these terms require radical revision in the study of subaltern subjects? Rosalind O’Hanlon discerned in a review essay on the early volumes an ironic restitution of the liberal political subject in the figure of the subaltern (O’Hanlon 1988: 196). Spivak, in her ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing His-toriography’ proposed a more complex critique of the project and suggested that the real value of its intervention was, contrary to appearances, critical and decon-structionist. Spivak identified the concept of consciousness in Subaltern Studies as an important site of contradictions:

[A]lthough the group does not wittingly engage with the poststructuralist understanding of ‘consciousness’, our own transactional reading of them is enhanced if we see them as strategically adhering to the essentialist notion of consciousness, that would fall prey to an anti- humanist critique, within a historiographic practice that draws many of its strengths from that very critique.

(Spivak 1985: 334)

Spivak was to revise this characterization of the project later (Spivak 2005: 477). What are the consequences of renouncing anchorage to subaltern histori-ography in a distinct form of consciousness? What other idioms are possible for writing a history of subaltern initiatives? How would such histories impact on the kind of programme sketched by Gramsci as well as the histories written by Subaltern Studies historians? What new grammars of subjectivity and agency would they reveal to us? For a preliminary and indirect consideration of these questions, this chapter will turn to Ambedkar’s reflections on history and to structures of enunciation in Dalit autobiographical writing. A history of the Untouchables was for Ambedkar, no less than subaltern history was for Gramsci, a task of utmost urgency fraught with unremitting methodological difficulty. Ambedkar repeatedly turned to this issue, from his 1916 essay on ‘Castes in India’ (BAWS 1: 3–22): to later texts such as The Untouchables: who were they and why they became untouchables ([1948b] BAWS 7). In his inquiries into the origins of Untouchability, Ambedkar made a distinction between ‘the ideal which a historian should place before himself ’ and the actual predicament of the historian in his time. Separating the ideal from the real were what Ambedkar called ‘missing links’ where ‘no direct evidence of connected relations between important events [was] available’.

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‘The present attempt to explain the origin of Untouchability’, Ambedkar wrote,

is not the same as writing history from texts which speak with certainty. It is a case of reconstructing history where there are no texts, and if there are, they have no direct bearing on the question. In such circumstances what one has to do is to strive to divine what texts conceal or suggest without being even quite certain of having found the truth. The task is one of gathering survivals of the past, placing them together and making them tell the story of their birth. The task is analogous to that of the archaeologist who con-structs a city from broken stones or of the palaeontologist who conceives an extinct animal from scattered bones and teeth or of a painter who reads the lines of the horizon and the smallest vestiges on the slopes of the hill to make up a scene. In this sense the book is a work of art even more than of history.

([1948b] BAWS 7: 244; EW: 116–17)

The origin of Untouchability, Ambedkar went on to say,

lies buried in a dead past which nobody knows. To make it alive is like an attempt to reclaim to history a city which has been dead since ages past and present it as it was in its original condition. It cannot but be that imagination and hypothesis should play a large part in such a work. But that in itself cannot be a ground for the condemnation of the thesis.

([1948b] BAWS 7: 244)

This discussion of the method, different from Guha’s method of reading the prose of counterinsurgency, is curiously flanked – as if placed in parenthesis – by two quotations from the world of literature: Goethe’s remarks, which Ambed-kar considers to be an image of the ideal historian’s practice, and Gorky’s arguments on the significance of imagination and the common ground shared by science and literature. For Ambedkar, however, the role of imagination was con-fined to filling the missing links in a positivist historiography: where direct evid-ence on actual events was not available, one might need to resort to hypotheses formulated on the basis of probability. It is the use of speculation, hypothesis and probability that introduced a literary mode into Ambedkar’s treatise. Yet the language adopted by Ambedkar in this passage seems to reveal a curious ambivalence. On the one hand, it speaks in a juridical language on the discipline of history, valorizing evidence and permissible inference; on the other, the reference to an originary moment that defied the protocols of historiography and the invocation of literary fictionality, intuition and imagination resonates far more intimately with the idioms of a Nietzsche or a Freud than with positivist historiography. Freud invoked the image of the archaeologist to characterize his own inquiries into the preservation of the past in psychic life (see, for instance, Freud 1961 [1930]). Could it be that Ambedkar was dealing not merely with


missing links caused by the passage of time? What if, to follow Freud’s reason-ing, the unavailability of the origin of Untouchability was a condition of the very existence of history? What if the positivistic and rationalistic modes of reasoning through which Ambedkar arrived at his audacious critical project made it diffi-cult to see what he was inquiring into, making it imperative for him to turn to the world of imagination and intuition? What if history as a cognitive project became available only through an originary sacrifice of access to certain modes of relating to the past and to certain constitutive conditions of our historical life? If this were so, Ambedkar’s phrase ‘work of art’ acquires a new legibility. Could art – in this expanded sense – indicate an alternative relation to historicity? Is art a disavowed double of disciplinary history, to adapt Ashis Nandy’s telling phrase (Nandy 1995)? This is not to valorize the aesthetic mode and its institutions; it would be dif-ficult to attribute to Ambedkar any claim that intrinsic features of art elevated it above scientific discourses in its access to truth. ‘Art’ or fiction operates here rather as a placeholder for non- verifiable modes of survival of the past. Qualities Ambedkar assigned to this domain were an important part of alternative historio-graphy, especially in relation to caste and Untouchability. Jyotirao Phule’s Gulamgiri staked its claims to veridiction not through positivistic means, but through the critical possibilities enabled by speculative narratives. Phule’s reading of the high Hindu mythology of the ten avataras of Vishnu may be seen as mobilizing two contrary modes: a sceptical idiom that revealed in mythology a strategy of concealment; and an invented alternative narrative that did not seek positivistic validation (Phule 2002). These methods were not confined to Phule; several vernacular histories of caste written in the nineteenth and the early twen-tieth centuries drew on speculative and mythographic modes; in campaigns for rights and caste consolidation, these circulated alongside discourses that high-lighted information generated by modern governmental technologies such as the census. One of the aims of this chapter is to understand alternative modes of articulat-ing the historicality of subaltern experience and the role that artistic, fictional and speculative idioms play in these. Dalit literature and, in particular, Dalit life- writing, has been among the most powerful instances of this in contemporary India. It has often been argued that Dalit literature is largely autobiographical. However, the centrality of autobiography is not really an empirical matter; it has less to do with quantitative preponderance than with what may be called auto-biography’s ‘paradigmatic’ status in Dalit literary production. The prominence of personal narratives in the canon of Dalit writing has given rise to the view that Dalit writing needs to be read not in accordance with the aesthetic categories of the literary institution, but in reference to the authenticity of ‘experience’. It has also prompted the criticism that Dalit literature is no more than mere ‘reportage’ devoid of the aesthetic mediations that define realism. There is another view according to which the autobiographical mode is seen as paradigmatic: this iden-tifies the enunciative modality of Dalit writing as truth- telling, and looks at the first- person testimonial mode of veridiction as shaping all Dalit writing,

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regardless of the diversity in generic forms and the organization of voices in various texts. It is important to recall that Dalit literature is not unique in its use of forms of life- writing as tools of historiography. Life- writing – and autobiographical writing in particular – has been an important form of history writing in India, especially outside the professional sphere. Many personal narratives written in India in the nineteenth or the first half of the twentieth century – or perhaps even now – have surprisingly little focus on the ‘personal lives’ of their authors; the writing subject inserts itself into acts of enunciation as a witness to history rather than as a subject of unique private experiences. Often the forms and idioms of these life narratives are shaped by professional historical writing, through analogy, opposition or adaptation. It is useful to understand these writings in terms of a logic of publicness and exposure rather than as expressions of an inner personal domain, defined in opposition to the public (Kumar 2008). In contrast to disciplinary histories, many such autobiographies reveal – on a closer look – a lack of fit in the ways in which subjects inhabit the social domain. This sense of incongruence arguably marks the specific salience of life- writing, especially autobiography, as a mode of historiography. The following paragraphs examine this dimension of Dalit life- writing, i.e. its participation in public memory- making through a specific form of disjunction. This has a bearing, this chapter argues, on our understanding of the notion of agency in the context of subaltern historiography. The status of the ‘Dalit’ as a new political subject is often understood in terms of a transformation of identities: for instance, Omprakash Valmiki was per-suaded to write his autobiography as a contribution to a collection entitled From Harijan to Dalit (Valmiki 2008: xiii). The category of the Harijan appears in this narrative as a false resolution of the question of Untouchability, as a pseudo- transformation of stigmatized caste identities. The movement from ascribed to assumed identities recurs in the narrative structure of several Dalit autobio-graphies. This is paralleled at times by a developmental delineation of the life of the protagonists: after suffering grave injustice as a child and young adult in a discriminatory caste society, the protagonists often go on to assume their place in the world through education and the cultivation of personal autonomy. The acquisition of formal educational qualifications, employment and social recogni-tion form important milestones. Some of these narratives also show a gradual distancing of the protagonists from the community, and the emergence of new, more enlightened and politically active conceptions of a collective. One often comes across criticism not only of the oppression of the Dalits by upper caste Hindus and the state machinery, but also of the tyrannical domination of the community from within by a selfish and unenlightened group of elders. All this would seem to place Dalit autobiographies within approbatory narratives of modernity. The sequential emplotment of adversity, struggle and self- formation has indeed been among the most enduring modern autobiographical plots. It under-girds the narrative structures of agentive individualism, with which the history of


the autobiographical genre has come to be closely associated. Not surprisingly, autobiography theory has often linked the capacity for self- narration with the autonomous agential capacity of the subject. Michael Mascuch, in his discussion of the individualist self, drew on the work of Charles Taylor and Alisdaire Mac-Intyre for whom ‘narrative is the medium of human agency’, to argue that ‘the concept of a routine resort to a narrativized script . . . enables (and constrains) the personal agency of the individualist self ’ (Mascuch 1997: 21, 22). However, the force of the intervention made by Dalit literature in general and Dalit autobiographies in particular in the literary public sphere in India does not arise from any simple valorization of autonomous individual selves or of the values of modernity. Many Dalit self- narratives, in fact, highlight the discipli-nary dimension of modernization, by focusing on the alienating experience of institutions such as the school and government offices. Even as they trace the emergence of the modern Dalit citizen, these autobiographies open up a critical space by presenting a complex account of the subject’s inhabitation of the world. The experience of humiliation recounted in many of the Dalit self- narratives and which forms an important marker of Dalit subalternity in literature opens onto this space. Ambedkar’s six autobiographical sketches, written initially under the title Waiting for a Visa ([1993]: BAWS 12: 661–91; also published as Autobiographi-cal Notes in 2003), thematized instances of humiliation, fear and pain. In his prefatory note, Ambedkar considered them as an effective way of illustrating, for foreign readers, ‘the way untouchables are treated by caste Hindus’ ([1993] BAWS 12: 663; 2003: 4). It is in the recounting of moments of abjection that per-sonal narration connected with a history of Untouchability. In an important essay on a short story by the Marathi novelist Baburao Bagul, Susie Tharu discussed the problematic specificity of the Dalit subject’s location, under the title ‘The impossible subject’. ‘It is the symbolic that gives birth to subjects, and tempts their dreams with agency while it watches ceremoniously over their many and rapid deaths’, Tharu wrote:

In addition, the subject in this nether world is not ‘impossible’ simply because agency is an effect of discipline, or because it is in- process, or because it is not affirmed in citation- reiteration, or indeed because one and one can never actually make a One, an integral whole, and there is always a remainder. It is impossible because it is constantly annihilated.

(Tharu 1996: 1313)

This figure of the impossible subject whose agency is constantly annihilated is not unique to Bagul’s story; it may serve equally well as a theoretical character-ization of Dalit testimonial writing. The challenge that Dalit autobiographical writing poses to the critic is to track how the subject is revealed in its impossibil-ity in a form of writing that is predicated on the existence of an enunciating subject. The trope of humiliation, with its complex and paradoxical figurations of the subject, merits closer probing in this context.

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Gopal Guru’s important collection of studies on humiliation in the Dalit context has incisively interrogated a set of issues central to this (Guru 2009). In a penetrating discussion, Sanjay Palshikar has argued that the verbal avowal of one’s humiliation amounted to the making of a claim or a complaint about having been humiliated in an undesired way. He argues that

every complaint of humiliation implicitly operates with a pair of opposites. The opposite of whatever one is forcibly made out to be is either already present in the institutions and practices of the society, or, it is posited as a goal to be realized.

(Palshikar 2009: 84)

On the basis of this, Palshikar broadly distinguishes between the humiliation felt by the elite when customary privileges are withdrawn and that felt by the under-privileged: the former invokes a past state of affairs which was more desirable for the complaining subject, while the latter posits the idea of a future society with more equitable and dignified treatment. Palshikar treats humiliation as cru-cially linked to the exercise of power and contends that

the claim, ‘I am humiliated’, is only half a claim, or no claim at all. There is nothing in it to suggest what is to follow by way of the subject- agent’s response. . . . In short, if ‘humiliation’ is a claim which is made complete only by incorporating in it the proposed response to the alleged humiliation, then those who are making that claim must face a situation of choice and attain to the clarity required for making the choice. It is then that ‘humiliation’ becomes more than a language used to make sense of a disagreeable situation.

(Palshikar 2009: 87–8)

Palshikar’s analysis has the merit that it does not ground its arguments on humili-ation so much in the inherent human worth of individuals, but rather traces them to contrasting structures of normativity and to configurations of power. Power is con-ceived in this analysis, as in much of the scholarship on humiliation, as sovereign domination, producing tormentors and victims. Humiliation is understood as an effect rather than as a mode of power. This view may not allow us to see the experience of humiliation as producing its own structures of subjectivity. The humiliated subject is understood as lacking in agentiveness; agency is to be found in the response to humiliation, in the choice the subject makes in the face of the humiliating act. Without the latter moment, humiliation remains half, an incom-plete act of communication. ‘Revenge, retribution, and forgiveness’, says Palshikar, ‘are the main historically evolved responses to humiliation’. While violent retali-ation leads to a weakening of the conditions of normativity as such, forgiveness comes up against the temporality of the victim’s healing and mourning. Palshikar’s analysis concludes with a non- discursive act that seems to indicate a positive response to humiliation: the image of a Dalit procession in Mumbai on Ambedkar Jayanti, characterized by V.S. Naipaul as ‘rejecting the rejection’.


If we follow Palshikar, humiliation as a performative claim remains incom-plete unless the humiliated subject confronts the agential choices opened up by this experience before him or her. Viewed from this angle, the developmental narrative of Dalit self- writing may appear as a response to experiences of degradation and humiliation foregrounded usually in the autobiography’s early chapters. The initial divestment or denial of agency leads the subject to assume new forms of agency and thus reclaim or create new idioms of selfhood. However, as I tried to suggest earlier, the power of Dalit autobiographies, and much of Dalit writing, resides in their exceeding an economy of amelioration and restitution. The social realm where the Dalit subject is placed remains inade-quately, or as Tharu suggests, impossibly inhabited. How do we understand the social realm in terms of a symbolic which, in Tharu’s words, ‘gives birth to sub-jects, and tempts their dreams with agency while it watches ceremoniously over their many and rapid deaths’? How do we thematize ‘the constant annihilation of the subject’ that Dalit literature presents before us, even as it resorts to patterns of emplotment that work against this? Is it possible to develop a reading of the trope of humiliation that takes this impossibility – the deep and irremediable incoherence in the figure of the humiliated subject – as its point of departure? Some of the recent work on shame offers a resource for enriching our under-standing of humiliation. It may be argued that shame is not identical to humili-ation, and that while shame often has its source in one’s low estimate of oneself, humiliation often has an external, and what the subject sees as an unjustified, origin. While this is of crucial consequence in a juridical frame, which is con-cerned with the question of culpability, it is important to recall that, regardless of accountability, acts of humiliation succeed in producing an effect akin to or identical with shame in the recipient subject. A stoic, as Margalit (1996) points out, would argue that humiliation which arises from an external source is impossible by definition in that one’s moral self- worth is independent of other people’s evaluation of oneself. However, humiliation is precisely that instance where shame can be produced in the subject not only without desiring it, but also without deserving it. Shame as an effect is closely linked to special instances of exposedness and dispossession. This is reflected in the link established in discussions on the subject between shame and visibility. Erik Erikson (1950: 252), for instance, understood shame to involve a situation where ‘one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at’, where one is ‘visible and not ready to be visible’, and Bernard Williams (1993: 78) suggested, in very similar terms, that ‘[t]he basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition’. The improper exposure of shame deprives the subject of its sense of self- possession and inner coherence. Important theoretical attempts at thematizing shame and self- articulation are found in the early work of Emmanuel Levinas and in its later invocation by Giorgio Agamben (1999). In an early text written in 1935, Levinas argued for the necessity to free the analysis of shame from being invariably linked to ‘morally bad acts’ (Levinas 2003: 63). The moral interpretation suggests that

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shame is ‘the representation we form of ourselves as diminished beings with which we are pained to identify’. However, Levinas argues, ‘shame’s whole intensity, everything it contains that stings us, consists precisely in our inability not to identify with this being who is already foreign to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer comprehend’ (2003: 63). Levinas’s own description of shame links it to an unwelcome visibility of the subject:

Shame arises each time we are unable to make others forget (faire oublier) our basic nudity. It is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up. The timid man who is all arms and legs is ulti-mately incapable of covering the nakedness of his physical presence with his moral person. Poverty is not a vice, but it is shameful because, like the beggar’s rags, it shows up the nakedness of an existence incapable of hiding itself. This preoccupation with dressing to hide ourselves concerns every manifestation of our lives, our acts, and our thoughts.

(Levinas 2003: 64)

Levinas stresses that ‘under the poignant form of modesty, shame is connected to our body’ and that we seek to hide ‘shameful nakedness’ not only from others but from ourselves, and that an emphasis on the social aspect of shame often prevents us from seeing that its deepest manifestations are an eminently personal matter: ‘If shame is present, it means that we cannot hide what we should like to hide. The necessity of fleeing, in order to hide itself, is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself ’ (64). This leads Levinas to conclude that ‘What appears in shame is . . . precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself ’ (64). Nakedness, which one expects to experience as neutral in situations of medical examination and desirable in erotic contexts, becomes shameful when ‘it is the sheer visibility (patence) of our being, of its ultimate intimacy’ (64). The humiliated naked body tries to remove itself from the field of visibility by gestures of impossible cowering. Shameful nakedness is thus marked by the simultaneous experience of an inability to inhabit the body and to escape from it. If we see this account of shame as intrinsic to instances of humiliation, the subject produced therein is to be understood in terms of an impossible attempt to escape the field of vision, anchored not just in an external other but in the very position of the fleeing subject. It is not accidental that several Dalit self- narratives record the sense of surprise and unease in situations of reciprocity that cut across castes or religions; Narendra Jadhav’s autobiography, for instance, notes his scepti-cism and suspicion while abroad that others extended cordiality to him only because they did not realize that he was an Untouchable (Jadhav 2003). The strength of Levinas’s analysis lies in the separation of the experience of shame from moral and juridical frames. Moral righteousness, or a sense of innate human worth, does not seem to guarantee the immunity of the subject against


shame. Any analysis of shame – and humiliation – that seeks to place its final anchor in moral estimations runs the risk of predicating an anterior moral subject to whom the degrading experience remains secondary and external. Levinas’s understanding of shame as an unstable but inescapable instantiation of corpor-eality is important for understanding humiliation in contexts of ‘stigma’. Sharankumar Limbale’s Outcaste, as several other Dalit autobiographical and literary texts, stages this configuration of stigma and shame. Limbale’s text opens on a school picnic, organized around contrasting caste groups: upper caste children with their hampers of fried dishes which they share with the teachers, and the lower caste Mahar children with their meagre bundles of unexciting insufficient food. Hunger becomes the first site of bodily self- intuition in Lim-bale’s autobiography: ‘My stomach was like a way to the graveyard that contin-uously swallows the dead’ (Limbale 2003: 2). The picnic is contrasted with the day after in school, when students are asked to write an essay on their day out.

When the teacher noticed me, apparently doing nothing, he grew annoyed and shouted, ‘You, son of a bitch, come on, start writing! You like eating an ox, don’t you?’ I picked up my slate and pencil, spat on the slate, smeared it and wiped the slate with my shirt which was already dirty having been used like this so many times before. I didn’t know how and what to write. I kept think-ing of how we had squatted in a circle under a tree in the forest, eating. I remembered the hands of high- caste boys and girls offering us their leftovers, the withered tree in whose shade we sat, the bundle of leftovers, the question my mother had asked, and the teacher calling me a son of a bitch and a beef- eater. How should I start writing the essay my teacher had asked for?

(Limbale 2003: 2–3)

The composition that remained impossible in school eventually is written as the first chapter of his autobiography, as the story of an impossible, humiliating writing and an impossible, humiliating picnic. Many lower caste autobiographies share the sense of distance that characterizes descriptions of the body and actions in Lim-bale’s narrative (see Dangle 1992b). In Lakshman Gaikwad’s Branded, descrip-tions that evoke disgust are untouched by redeeming experiences of tenderness, solidarity or love (Gaikwad 2000). In Limbale’s own narrative, love appears in an impossible configuration, as if that too were a part of the uninhabitable surround-ings. Moments of humiliation, such as the teacher’s abuse, are not made into prom-inent objects of condemnation in Limbale’s text. Even in other Dalit autobiographies where this is done, speech plays the role of a retrospective com-mentary, and serves to stress the silence or inarticulateness that marked the moment of humiliation. A similar inadequacy marks Limbale’s text as a whole, as if the dif-ficulty of producing a narratable life is insurmountable and the labour for that incessant. In this hollowing out of language, in the difficulty of inhabiting it to tell one’s story, one may discern the mark of desubjection encountered in humiliation. The work of humiliation in Dalit autobiographies, thus, may not solely be that of a performative claim about an undesirable situation or choices for future

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action. Its more important role may be to function as the sign under which the unaccommodated subject may appear in language. In contrast to the level of the narrative that involves choices of action, humiliation may be seen as marking a less accessible ground of the subject’s figuration. It makes visible, without direct presentation, a level that is anterior to the figuration of political agency. Humili-ation foregrounds a situation where agency is closely tied to and difficult to sep-arate from the condition of passivity. The responses that Dalit writing has elicited from mainstream literary circles have been symptomatic: while some critics criticize the lack of aesthetic and formal excellence in Dalit texts, others praise them for their appeal to humanist empathy. Both strands ignore the deep disorientation in Dalit writing in relation to language and agency. Humiliation and desubjection often appear in Dalit autobiographies within a narrative frame of progress and emancipation. However, as the discussion in this chapter has shown, they reveal a structure of deep unaccommodation which cannot be contained in an emplotment of emancipation. Therefore, we may need to see Dalit autobiographical writing – and Dalit testimonial literature in general – as working with two narrative frames. While the first locates disorientation in a temporal frame of progressive emancipation, the latter refuses this temporal accommodation. It works by challenging and threatening the narrative of pro-gress by re- invoking the stigma in the midst of the modern social domain. While the first narrativizes pain and trauma, the second resists narrative overcoming. The discursive assemblage of Dalit autobiographical writing often works with these two indissociable elements. The narrative frame of emancipation and sub-jectivation is essential for the presentation of constitutive moments of desubjec-tion; however, the political force of such moments challenges and survives the narrative frames which made their presentation possible in the first instance. One of the challenges of Dalit historiography, as well as subaltern histori-ography in general, concerns the structure of historical agency. Do all social groups, dominant as well as subaltern, evidence the same structures of agency? Would it be a mistake to universalize humanist notions of the subject and look for figures of agency that correspond to this? The discursive assemblage that we found in Dalit self- writing needs to be seen as complicating the figure of the subject for subaltern historiography. Do figures of the unaccommodated subject flash for a moment only to disappear within the narrative frames of histori-ography? Would it be possible to forge idioms of historiography that can make visible, against the grain of narrative containment, the perilous figure of the sub-altern subject? When Gramsci discussed the methodological difficulties that the integral historian would face in writing the history of the subaltern classes and when Ambedkar invoked the figure of an artistic or fictional archaeology as a necessary supplement to positivist historiography in writing the history of the Untouchables, were they too perhaps touching upon this problem of the histor-ical subject that Dalit testimonial and literary accounts insistently foreground?

Part V

The religion of the subalterns/Dalits

12 Why does religion matter to politics?Truth and ideology in a Gramscian approach

Fabio Frosini

Religion, common sense and philosophy

The starting point for any reflection on the notion of religion in the Prison Note-books is the assessment of the partial comparisons that Gramsci establishes around this notion.1 At the beginning of Notebook 11 he writes that ‘philosophy’, as well as being a professional endeavour, exists as ‘spontaneous philosophy’ in three dif-ferent realms: in language, in common sense and in popular religion, the last of which is, in turn, a part of the ‘beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of “folklore” ’ (Q11§12; SPN: 323). As can be seen, Gramsci broadens enormously the meaning of the term ‘philosophy’ (the conception of philosophy as an activity reserved for professionals is for him a ‘widespread prejudice’). ‘Philosophy’ is thus stretched out to make it coincide with all forms of thought, from the trained and coherent to the common and incoherent, and popular religion is defined, together with language and common sense, as a ‘spontaneous philosophy of the masses’. What knowledge do we gain from this re- formulation? Let us try to unravel this tangle. Religion, Gramsci writes, is ‘a component of disjointed common sense’ (Q8§204; PN3: 352), which is, in turn, ‘the more widespread conception of life and human’ (Q24§4; SCW: 420–21). The notion of ‘common sense’ includes, therefore, all possible ideological forms in which ‘the moral individuality of the average man is developed’ (Q11§13; SPN: 419). In turn, as we have seen, popular religion is part of folklore. Common sense and folklore can be distinguished from philosophy not as a matter of principle, but on the effective- real terrain of historical dynamics, since they are less coherent and more disjointed (Q1§65; PN1: 173). The same can be said of language, about which Gramsci writes that ‘it means also culture and philosophy (even if at the level of common sense)’ (Q10(2)§41]).2 The notions of folklore, common sense and philosophy are thus relative to one another: that is, they can be defined only in their reciprocal relations, on a vertical axis (reproducing social stratification) that goes from the maximum of disruption and incoherence – but also diffusiveness – of popular religion, to the minimum of disruption and incoherence – but also of diffusiveness – of profes-sional philosophies. From this spatial reciprocity it follows also that popular

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religion and professional philosophies, for opposite reasons (on the one hand, inertia, and on the other, critical control) both tend to be stable; that is, they change either in molecular and disorganized ways (popular religion, folklore) or thanks to self- conscious innovations resulting from complex theoretical strat-egies (philosophy). Standing between these two extremes, common sense repres-ents a sort of evanescent threshold in permanent transformation: ‘it changes constantly’ (Q1§65; PN1: 173).3 Differently from folklore, in fact, common sense is directly subjected to the action of philosophy: the historical reality of philosophy consists precisely in the fact that it has modified common sense in some way. But common sense, an element of which – we must recall – is popular religion, is always also an attempt, even if merely spontaneous, to give some order to the most widespread ideas that emerge from historical experience. Common sense is the most prominent form of the spontaneous philosophy of the masses (‘philosophy of the non- philosophers’; Q11[2]§12; SPN: 419), and the place where we can find the greatest tension (a political tension) between trends towards rationalization and unification coming from the dominant class and the resistance – although passive and underhand – of subaltern classes.4 Common sense is thus the place where the popular layers of society try to ‘give order’ to the general directing principles of their own form of life, in a way that is differ-ent – if not alternative – from that proposed and imposed by ruling classes (philosophy). The definition of philosophy (of any philosophy in general) as the transforma-tion of common sense, that I have presented here in its systematic framework, is in the Notebooks the result of a gradual development that leads Gramsci, in the third series of the ‘Appunti di filosofia’ (‘Notes on philosophy’, Q8; PN3: 231–383), to settle a triple interrogation recurring from the beginning of his work: how to account for the ideological nature of all traditional philosophy, how to account for its political efficacy and how to envisage the way in which Marxism, radically separating itself from the traditional way of doing philo-sophy, remains nonetheless a philosophy; that is, it is a general conception of the world, and cannot be reduced to knowledge of history, economics or politics (cf. Frosini 2009b).

Language as ‘collective noun’ and the redefinition of universalityIn order to understand how the relationship between folklore, common sense and philosophy works, it is necessary to take into account language as the epistemo-logical model that Gramsci adopts to think about reality in its dynamic form. In fact, Gramsci equates the concept of language and that of ideology:5 con-sequently folklore, common sense and philosophy are languages- ideologies, and they must be studied as such. One of the immediate consequences of the reduction of the whole of social prac-tice to forms of language is the transformation of the notions of universality and truth. Yet, the fact that we always find a series of ‘languages’ ranging from folklore

Truth and ideology in a Gramscian approach 175

to philosophy does not mean that the identity between them is a simple one. We already mentioned that, for Gramsci, these elements are characterized both by a variable degree of unification and intensive organicity and, respectively, by differ-ent degrees of diffusivity and extensiveness. The respective differences among the various ‘linguistic’ levels are articulated according to these axes, which relationally define all that is included from philosophy to folklore. Moreover, by adding the idea of the linguistical- ideological nature of the fabric through which all these forms of activity are intertwined and kept together, one can explain the thesis according to which common sense, religion (see Q11[1]) and language, generically understood as common language (Q10(2)§41), are ‘collective nouns’. Now, a collective noun is a singular noun indicating a homogeneous multi-plicity of individuals, such as, for example, ‘army’, ‘team’, ‘flock’, ‘bunch’, etc. Thus, by referring this formulation to the terms ‘language’, ‘religion’ and ‘common sense’, Gramsci uses it in an improper way, although he has two reasons for doing so. In general, once social practice is rethought as language, the reality of each ‘form’ is consequently identified with its expression,6 and this expression exists only in a concrete modality, more or less individual. Specifi-cally, however, Gramsci’s definition of ‘collective noun’ refers to the fragmented and spontaneous or not critically controlled nature of common language, common sense and popular religion (which could be called ‘common religion’), and therefore to their composite nature. In other words, what these expressive forms have in common is not only the concretely individual nature of each single linguistic act, but their compositeness; that is, the fact that they are incoherent or only partially and accidentally coherent aggregates.7 According to Gramsci,

The fact of ‘language’ is in reality a multiplicity of facts more or less organ-ically coherent and co- ordinated. At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, which is his own par-ticular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other’s mode of expression in differing degrees, etc.

(Q10(2)§41])

Thus, ‘culture’ is the way through which a determined ruling class linguistically unifies a given society within specific historical and political circumstances. Therefore, it is by adopting the linguistic model that Gramsci can materialisti-cally translate universality into the politics of linguistic- cultural-social unifica-tion. Culture is the way in which philosophy intervenes on the material reality of common sense, common religion, folklore, etc., and therefore on the whole of common language. Culture is, then, at the same time, a synonym of unity and of diffusivity; that is, it is the moment in which philosophy ceases to be unified (and merely individual) language, and starts to become common language. And yet, for this reason, philosophy will not fall to the level of a ‘collective noun’, but will instead preserve the critical strength of individual philosophies, at least in

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part (but, obviously, the nature of this ‘part’ is a decisive point, to which we will return later in this essay). Thanks to this redefinition of universality in linguistic terms, Gramsci can deepen his fundamental thesis on the concept of truth, which he takes from the ‘second thesis on Feuerbach’ and makes even more precise (Marx 1969 [1888]: 5),8 because he lays down the nexus between ‘demonstration’ (beweisen) and ‘practical activity’ (praxis) on the linguistic terrain. Leaving this link on a generic level would mean running the risk of sharing a discourse of mere affir-mation of power. On the contrary, if the demonstration of the truth- reality-power of thought is a linguistic fact, only secondarily can this fact assume the features of a mere violence. Therefore it will be, first of all – as we have already seen – a cultural fact (naturally, this does not exclude the moment in which force is used; it simply means that this use is not enough, alone, to explain the power of resist-ance of existing societies).

Meaning regime and religionThe multiplicity of languages amounts to a multiplicity of truth productions, with different degrees of power. This difference is because different languages are traceable to different social classes, which are in conflict. Gramsci studies the power gap between them, taken onto the linguistic terrain, through resorting to the notion of ‘metaphor’: ‘Current language is metaphorical in relation to the meanings and the ideological content that words have had in preceding periods of the civilization’ (Q11[2]§12; SPN: 450), and, given that in every moment of every civilization there is a co- presence of different temporal layers, it follows that language ‘is always metaphorical’ (ibid.); that is, it is traversed and inspired by a tension between the reciprocal metaphorical meanings of languages belong-ing to various moments of the same civilization. It also follows that common sense becomes the decisive place in which the literal meaning of words – i.e. the particular meaning that brings together the various co- existing temporalities – can be established. This is because, as we have seen, common sense is the threshold at which resistance of the oppressed and attempts at unification by the dominant classes meet and clash. If universal-ity is the unification of the various social layers in a coherent culture- language, so that meanings have an equal (or almost equal) validity for the oppressors and the oppressed, then common sense is the only place where this universality can be produced. Up until to this point, I have sketched a general outline that Gramsci uses to identify and evaluate the current way by which modern Western civilization functions. A civilization can be identified through the way that, by constantly transforming common sense, it creates a historical unity between the dominant and the subalterns under a common regime of meaning- production. It does this by reducing communication obstacles as much as possible between the various social layers, and through the related necessity of resorting to metaphors. On this basis, we can make at least three considerations.


First, in the various European national contexts this kind of unification has been accomplished in widely diverging ways. France and Italy are paradigmatic cases in this respect: whereas, in France, intellectuals have produced a certain unity of high and popular culture on the terrain of common sense, inventing what Gramsci calls the ‘people nation’, Italy has taken the opposite path. The French Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento represent two opposed modalities through which the bourgeoisie has achieved a united civilization. In Italy, in par-ticular, intellectuals have delegated the unification of the popular masses to the Catholic Church, resulting in the persistence of a ‘medieval’ type of condition for the great majority of the Italian population up to the beginning of the twenti-eth century, as well as the perpetuation of a situation of ‘dual power’ (the ‘Vatican Question’; see Gramsci 1971: 140).9 Thus, in Italy, professional philosophy did not transform the popular common sense in a direct way. It served rather

as an external political force, an element of cohesive force exercised by the ruling classes and therefore an element of subordination to an external hege-mony. This limits the original thought of the popular masses in a negative direction, without having the positive effect of a vital ferment of transforma-tion of what the masses think in an embryonic and chaotic form about the world and life.

(Q11[2]§13; SPN: 420)

The gap between the culture of the dominant and that of the subaltern groups crosses all spheres of social life, including religion. Thus, ‘it is politics that assures the relationship between the Catholicism of the intellectuals and that of the simple’ (Q11[1]§12; SPN: 331). Second, the Italian case is just an extreme exemplification of a deadlock which exists in every bourgeois state. The French case shows how, in the end, the push towards the universality of meanings must at a certain point become autonomous from actually spoken languages, and boil down into a form of abstract universalism (the Jacobin rhetoric of 1848). If, in fact, the universalizing push were taken through to its ultimate implications, it would end up removing class differences, and thus the very foundations of bourgeois society itself. A really unified culture could not subsist without suppressing all material differ-ences between classes and, together with these, national states themselves. Third, the co- presence of various times compels members of society, includ-ing those who fight for an integral unification, to resort to those ‘metaphors’ without which communication between different social groups is impossible. The ‘philosophy of praxis’ itself, according to Gramsci, ‘since it sets up to reform intellectually and morally the culturally backward social layers, makes resort to metaphors at times “gross and violent” in their popularity’ (Q11[6]§1). From the preceding considerations we can draw a fourth: the bourgeois form of cultural- social unification is structurally fragile and unstable, because it is always caught between two opposite trends: on the one hand, the need for

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unification through the transformation of common sense, which is the basis of the solidity of a society that does not rely on caste differences and presumes the equality of all its members (naturally, with many exceptions that remain part of the problem); and on the other hand, the need to push subaltern groups towards passivity and disruption, reducing them to a function that, as Gramsci writes, is purely ‘instrumental’ (Q27§1; SCW: 189). This double boost is not unique to a particular geographic area or to a defined stage of civil- bourgeois society’s development, since it pertains fully to the hegemonic logic of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, it is the variety of concrete circum-stances that determine whether one of the two trends, or some combination of both, ends up prevailing. However, although it is the case that the trend towards unification prevails during expansive stages of economic accumulation, and the trend against subaltern groups prevails during times of stagnation, the factors determining how both trends combine are far more numerous, and their interplay is not reducible to the linearity of a developmental process. And, indeed, one can say that the diffusive instance itself contains an element of exclusion, since the construction of a regime of unified meaning does not erase the gaps that exist between the classes. Yet, the creation of a unified meaning, by making these gaps fluid in order to preserve them, fosters the process through which juridical emancipation is overturned into effective political passivity (in the sense of polit-ical initiative), and therefore fuels the process through which popular masses’ autonomous initiative is crushed. Now we can better understand the knowledge gain implied in the adoption of an expanded notion of ‘philosophy’ along an axis of individual philosophy–spontaneous philosophy. This notion allows us to think about the degree of indi-vidual and group creativity existing in every form of life, together with the practical efficacy that different degrees of unification and coherence can reach. At this level, relationships are not univocal. If individual philosophy is a coher-ent thought, its degree of accomplishment is not automatically given, but is mediated by political relations with common sense: this implies an educational system (public and private) that is both effective and diffuse. On the other hand, the spontaneous philosophy of the masses (‘spontaneous’ not in the sense of lacking direction or reflection, but in the sense that ‘the elements of “conscious leadership” cannot be ascertained, simply because they have left no verifiable document’ ([Q3§48; PN2: 49; SPN: 196]) is certainly limited by internal inco-herence, but has a practical power infinitely superior to that of any individual philosophy. This power comes from the fact that the subalterns are almost the totality of the nation, and that without their support or, alternatively, their non- hostility, the nation (as a structure that always also has to measure itself interna-tionally with respect to or against other nations) could not exist.

Politics and religionMarx writes in the Communist Manifesto that the continued revolutionizing of production instruments and therefore of ‘the whole relations of society’ is the


premise of the existence of the bourgeoisie as a social class, and this implies that ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last com-pelled to face with sober senses [mit nüchternen Augen] his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’ (Marx and Engels 1972b [1848]: 465). The dynamics explained in the Manifesto in all their ‘purity’ (and that will lead Engels to assert in his essay on Feuerbach (1962 [1886]) the thesis of the ‘growing proletarianization’ of the ‘great mass of the people’10), however, find no correspondence at the concrete- historical level, where the political form of bourgeois unification gets the masses involved in a way that, as we have shown above, tends to erase the clear border between dominant and subaltern classes. Gramsci’s position on this point partially differs from that of Marx: although for Gramsci, like Marx, bourgeois society is a ‘permanent revolution’, Gramsci does not think that the abolition of feudal castes is followed by the ‘profanation’ of social relations, but rather by their different ideological loading. For this reason, Gramsci connects each disintegration of old social relationships to the formation of new ones and to the rearrangement of the relationship between reli-gion, common sense and philosophy. The end of a society organized according to castes does not make society’s functioning any simpler, but makes it dependent on a politics that constantly intervenes on common sense. This is shown by the way Gramsci reads the ‘Jacobin initiative of instituting the cult of the “supreme Being” ’. Namely: not as the (impossible) attempt of replacing the real unity of society with the delirium of an imaginary unity, but, on the contrary, as

an attempt to create an identity between state and civil society, to unify in a dictatorial manner the constitutive elements of the State organically and more broadly (the state, in the rigorous sense, and civil society) in a desper-ate effort to tighten their grip on the life of the people and the nation as a whole. Yet it also appears to have been the first root of the modern secular state, independent of the church, seeking and finding within itself, within its complex life, all the elements of its historical personality.

(Q6§87; PN3: 74–5; SPN: 18)

The religious initiative of the Jacobins takes the same direction that the secular state will later follow. This state is characterized by the fact that it absorbs within its politics all forms of life, by instituting a terrain – i.e. civil society – on which common sense can be made to conform and where, therefore, a regime of unified meaning – or, in one word, hegemony – can be instituted. This hegemony can only come to light when the terrain of common sense is both run through and transformed. Yet, for this to happen, politics, conceived as the art of the state, is not enough; instead, it is necessary to become involved with religious language, which is the only language capable of constituting ‘a form of total social praxis’ (Fulton 1987: 206). The ‘total’ perspective is the only one that can facilitate the formation of a stable hegemony. However, as we have seen already, for the bourgeoisie this is impossible, at least in a direct form. The

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unification of the masses within the modern state could never assume a purely popular form of equality, conceived as a permanent movement that nullifies inequalities. The exception, perhaps, is the Jacobins’ ‘excesses’, although in this case, it occurred only in an episodic way. Rather, unification has been combined with the national dimension since the beginning; that is to say, with a territorial, and therefore particular, perspective that limits the space within which equality can be claimed, and which diverts social conflicts outwards. The national overdetermination of social antagonism also occurred during the Jacobin experience. Yet, it is during the wars of libera-tion of the nineteenth century, which led to the triumph of the bourgeoisie and its liberal forms, that this form of overdetermination dominated. Indeed, in the Notebooks, Gramsci gradually develops the thesis that the over-determination of social and national conflicts explains the shift from the ‘war of movement’ to the ‘war of position’. This leads him to define, in the spring of 1932, the ‘war of position’ as a form of ‘reaction- overcoming’ of the Jacobin ‘war of movement’ and, in the end (1933), to align its meaning with the category of passive revolution (cf. Q15§11; SPN: 108). This definition is made possible by the elaboration of the notion of ‘integral state’, viewed as an organism capable of neutralizing political conflicts thanks to the construction of a robust system of private institutions that form and give a direction to public opinion according to national interests. This complex struc-ture is defined throughout the nineteenth century as the liberal state, which was based on a distinction between state and civil society. This distinction, by separ-ating the terrain of religion (in a broad sense) from that of politics, served the goal of preventing the people from acting as the protagonist within the dimen-sion of the state itself. Thus, in 1932, Gramsci defines the period ‘from 1815 to 1870’ as ‘a long war of position’ (Q10(1)§6; SPN: 120), re- elaborating and clarifying a hint already present in Notebook 1. In this Notebook he identified German philosophical ide-alism, and more precisely Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (cf. Q10(1)§6 [FSPN: 341], §62), as the base of the elaboration of the liberal state ‘as “reaction- national overcoming” of the French Revolution and of Napoleonism’ (Q1§150; PN1: 230). Between 1930 and 1933, Gramsci therefore defines a unified model that holds together both the construction of the liberal state, viewed as a reaction to Jacob-inism, and German classical philosophy. In the light of this model, the distinc-tion between state and civil society, between the public sphere and the private, can be explained as a barrier the bourgeoisie created in order to prevent the masses from irrupting into politics. But this barrier is very fragile, since, as we have already shown, it makes possible, at the same time, the project of creating a regime of unified meaning. And, yet, this barrier also makes this project in the last analysis impossible, given that the regime works due to the separation of the intellectuals and the people – a separation that occurs to different degrees within the various national contexts. One can therefore say that an insuppressible aporia is always present within the ‘war of position- passive revolution’, as a synonym


of the triumph of the bourgeoisie. And this aporia is what allows the ‘war of movement’, that is, the participation of the popular masses in direct action, to arise again. The questions of if and where this participation has occurred is something Gramsci deals with by reconsidering the classical scheme of popular democratic revolts.11 As well as this, however, he also asks questions about paradoxical phe-nomena in which the people supported reactionary figures, such as the farmers’ support for Louis Bonaparte or the workers’ support for General Boulanger.12 Gramsci defines these phenomena, together with that of Napoleon Bonaparte, as ‘caesarism’, which can be distinguished as ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive’ (Q9[d]§15). He links such phenomena to situations of a demagogic and plebisci-tarian nature (Q6§97; PN3: 81–3), and he moreover implicitly compares them to the new form of caesarism embodied by fascism. Yet, in 1932, Gramsci also defines fascism as the new form of ‘war of position- passive revolution’ that per-forms, in the twentieth century, the same function of ‘reaction- overcoming of revolution’ carried out in the previous century by German classical philosophy (Q10(1)§6, [FSPN: 341–3], §9 [SPN: 399–402]). In fact, there exist two further analogies between Bonapartism and fascism, besides the presence of a leader figure. First, in Notebook 4, Gramsci recalls these phenomena as processes of popular will formation that do not reflect immediately the distribution of social classes, and that consequently need the class question to be transferred ‘onto the terrain of the concept of hegemony’ (Q4[b]§39; PN2: 188). Second, these phenomena coincide with a temporary return to the ‘war of move-ment’. That is: they coincide with the extreme politicization of struggles and with the destruction of ‘democratic- bureaucratic structures’, which the popular masses felt as being extraneous. This happened, for example, in France during the First Republic in the case of Napoleon, during the Second Republic in that of Louis Bonaparte and during the Third Republic in the (failed) case of General Boulanger, and, in Italy, under Giolitti in the case of fascism. Thus, the ‘war of movement’ arises again within the aporias of bourgeois hegemony not only in a revolutionary form, but also in a reactionary one; and this is what fascism shows in such a clear way. Yet, the structure of these ‘movement- regimes’,13 which, in the end, is internal to the horizon of bourgeois hegemony, does not allow the mobilization out of which they were born to be maintained, thus condemning such movements to revert, sooner or later, back into forms of depoliticization and of neutralized mass- politics. Mobilization instead is directed outwards, through a series of expansionist wars. In all these cases, the respective national bourgeoisies need the formation of a national unified collective will, whose protagonist is the people, though its forms are established by authoritarian means. What is important to note, however, is that in these cases the interplay between politics and religion, already present in the Jacobin patriotic war, is deeply exploited, thanks to the suppression of the liberal distinction between state and civil society. This kind of political arrangement played a marginal role until the First World War. It became central when, because of the generalized crisis of the liberal state

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and the formation of the ‘massive structure of modern democracies’ (Q13§7; SPN: 243), ruling a mobilized and politicized mass population became a crucial question for how to maintain bourgeois hegemony. It is no coincidence that Gramsci defines the contemporary world as a ‘democratic- bureaucratic social system’ (Q12§1); this is a formula he coined to describe the regime created by Caesar, which in its original form was a ‘democratic- bureaucratic regime’ (Q8[c]§22; PN3: 250). In other words, when the post- war crisis occurred, a common ground came into existence that can be defined as ‘democratic- bureaucratic’, and into which one can place both fascism and constitutional regimes. And given that, according to Gramsci, fascism is the ‘representative – both practical (for Italy) and ideological (for Europe)’ (Q10(1)§6; SPN: 120), of the current ‘war of position’, one can see that there is a sort of exemplariness of the totalitarian ruling model, which also works in the case of regimes that are not totalitarian from a formal point of view. If this is true, it follows that in the era of democratic- bureaucratic social regimes the notion of ‘war of position’ itself changes its meaning. In other words, this notion does not consist in obtaining hegemony by separating the public from the private sphere any longer, but in unifying them in new and flex-ible forms. Thus, religion and politics form a new type of intertwining that turns religion into a fundamental element of aggregation and political ruling. This occurs in different ways, from one country to another. Yet, these oscillations are symptomatic because they show how the intervention aimed at the transforma-tion of common sense – given the structure of the national state – necessarily coincides with the depoliticization of conflicts, whereas the politicization of common sense necessarily assumes nationalistic (‘religious’) appearances that divert conflict from classes to nations.

What is a politics of the subalterns?As we have seen, the politics of the bourgeoisie assumes a new form in democratic- bureaucratic regimes. This politics is not any longer that of the oscil-lation between liberalism and caesarism. In fact, a sort of fusion is realized between the ‘war of position’ and the ‘war of movement’, between mass politics as a means of control, and control exercised through the preparation of public opinion before the state is created. This fusion has become possible thanks to the total mobilization of the masses that already took place through structures that are no longer classifiable according to the traditional distinction between public and private sphere. With respect to this new terrain, religion performs a key role both from the viewpoint of power and from that of resistance. In this respect, two closing remarks are needed: first, with the cycle of bourgeois revolutions from 1789 to 1871 the estrangement between bourgeois universalism and that of the popular masses is completed; second, with the First World War and the Soviet Revolution a phase of ‘frenetic’ and ‘totalitarian’ integration of subaltern classes14 is opened, where ‘liberal’ modalities will be, in various degrees, abandoned or downsized, passing to


the politics of permanent mobilization of the whole population. With these two pas-sages a sort of inversion of perspective takes place. The bourgeoisie, reduced to the role of pure preservation, of which the massacre of the Paris Commune is the most eloquent example, takes hold of the religious myths of the subalterns and uses them as the engine of the passive inclusion of the masses into the state: the politics of total mobilization absorb the vindication of the people’s participation in power, the politics of colonial expansionism replies to the socialist egalitarian demand. Bour-geois universalism, devoid of any proper content, absorbs the common sense of the subalterns and re- organizes its meaning. In this way bourgeois power incorporates the utopian energy of popular reli-gious universalism, rendering it functional to its own expansion. Every antago-nism will have to start from this ambivalent position, of which populism, in its opposing political variations, is the political digest. In short, twentieth- century populism is the accomplishment of a unitary regime of meaning, not any longer on a rational- emancipatory basis, but directly on a political- religious basis, in the sense that diffuse passions at the level of the masses become the grammar for the construction of political identity (see Laclau 2005; Balsa 2010). It seems, then, that bourgeois power has acquired and monopolized the practical criterion of universality, turning the terms of the problem upside down: politics is no longer emancipation from immediate passions towards a universal perspective, but rather the practical assertion of a concrete universal that, in turn, emerges: race, nation, class or the people. Nevertheless, this is not at all the last word. In fact, through the incorporation of the religious discourse of ‘the people’, bourgeois politics is forced to abandon universality to the fate of an empty category, and to identify partiality with the basis of conservative politics. On the other side, on the side of ‘the wretched of the earth’, the struggle for resistance merges immediately and spontaneously, on the very same religious basis as that of its bourgeois antagonist, empirical con-creteness and abstract universality, in the sense that in each singular moment of this struggle universality is embodied in its entirety. A subaltern perspective (which is not given substantially in a privileged ‘subject’, but only as an unfixed function) becomes decisive, in order to bend the signifier ‘people’ towards a meaning of universal liberation. All the elements necessary to unify the signifiers ‘people’ and ‘democracy’ are already present in the religious representations that support the struggles of resistance by the subalterns. What the subalterns are lacking is not a class con-sciousness adequate to their practical function, but the coherence of those repre-sentations that already operate, fuelling their resistance to domination and that for the moment do not find a concrete, political, mediation between local strug-gles and universal projection. Also, Gramsci believed that in the modern world, an updated equivalent of Machiavelli’s prince would have to present itself ‘as a creation of concrete fantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will’ (Q13§1; SPN: 126). In this way, he intended to re- propose the caesarist–populist function in a new and original way; that is, neither as a function separated from the dynamics of human passions nor

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as a simple extrinsic appropriation of this dynamic. On the contrary, he con-ceived it as a form of work inside the utopian representations of the subalterns, aimed at making the modern prince become an ‘auto- reflection on the part of the people – an inner reasoning worked out in the popular consciousness, whose conclusion is a cry of passionate urgency’ (Q13§1; SPN: 126–7). Indeed, this is the most relevant frontier of the struggle and the decisive challenge for the future (see Semeraro 2006).

Notes 1 Where possible, I have used existing English translations, modifying them when

necessary. 2 Obviously, the word ‘language’ here means ‘common language’, otherwise it would

be preposterous to say that philosophy is not a language. 3 As stated by Kate Crehan, common sense is ‘continually modified by how actual

people in actual places live it’ (in this volume, p. 111). 4 On the ‘ensemble of sociopolitical, cultural, and economic relations that produce

marginalization and prevent group autonomy’ see Green’s contribution in this volume (pp. 116–28).

5 See Gramsci (Q5§123; PN2: 373–4; SCW: 226): ‘every language is an integral con-ception of the world’; also Q5§131 (PN2: 384); Q6§71 (PN3: 51–53; SCW: 176–8); Q8(b)§39 (PN3: 260–1) ‘every “language” is a philosophy’; Q11:1°; Q10(1)§6: between philosophy and ideology ‘the distinction is impossible, . . . they are not two categories, but one and only historical category and . . . the distinction is only of degree’.

6 On this notion see Lacorte (2012). 7 See Schirru (2008: 783–4) on the link between the definition of language as a ‘col-

lective noun’ and Gramsci’s critique of a unified and generic notion of ‘human nature’.

8 Gramsci’s translation in the Notebooks is published now in Gramsci (2007: 743). 9 On the opposition between Jacobinism and Risorgimento see Carlucci’s article in this

volume (pp. 129–41).10 ‘This industry produces . . . an ever- increasingly proletarianization of the great mass

of the people [der gesamten großen Volksmasse]’ (Engels 1962 [1886]: 300).11

In reality the internal contradictions which develop after 1789 in the structure of French society are resolved to a relative degree only with the Third Republic; and France has now enjoyed sixty years of stable political life only after eighty years of convulsions at ever longer intervals: 1789, 1794, 1799, 1804, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1870.

(Q13§17)

12 ‘One could take as a model the Boulangist movement (from 1886 to 1890 approxi-mately) or the Dreyfus trial or even the coup d’état of 2 December’ (see Q4[b]:§39 (PN2: 186–7; SPN: 180).

13 The concept of ‘movement- regimes’ is taken from Tucker (1961).14 See Q3§18 (PN2: 18–20), Q25§4, respectively first and second draft.

13 Intellectuals and subalterns in the context of religion

Derek Boothman

[The pope] understands the processes of cultural reform of the popular- peasant masses better than many members of the secular Left. He knows that a great mass cannot be converted molecularly; in order to hasten the process, one has to win over the natural leaders of the great masses, that is, the intellectuals, or, one needs to form groups of intellectuals of a new type.

(Gramsci, Q7§71; PN3: 207; FSPN: 123)

IntroductionReligion is the most widespread of all ideologies and as such deserves the highest degree of attention from all, believers and non- believers alike. On Chris-tianity alone Gramsci’s observations in the Prison Notebooks range from the state of primitive Christianity and the birth of Western monasticism, through popular religion, what might be termed ‘pure’ forms of spirituality, the prot-estant Reformation and so on, up to the most organized hierarchical structures and conservative tendencies, and also, naturally, the opposition of many believ-ers to the conservatism of the hierarchy. His reflections, frequent though they are, are scattered throughout the Prison Notebooks and, in general, not ‘organic’, or as ‘polished’ as in certain other fields, contemporary trends in Catholicism excepted. The limited sources available to him in prison meant, for example, that he lacked the necessary detail to deal with a subject of an encyclopaedic nature, such as the natures and roles of religious intellectuals. So vast is the field that a work solely on the papacy, quoted by Gramsci from indirect sources – Ludwig Pastor’s History of the Popes – runs into forty volumes, while Nicola Turchi’s 600-plus- page Storia delle religioni, also cited, seems to have been consulted only for the definition of religion given right in the first few pages: ‘a relation of dependence that binds man to one or more superior powers on whom he feels he depends and to whom he renders acts of worship of both an individual and a col-lective nature’ (Q6§41; FSPN: 9; PN3: 31–2). The task of reconstructing Gramsci’s interpretation of the roles of religious intellectuals, then, presents somewhat greater difficulties than for other subjects in the Prison Notebooks, among other things because one of his stated aims was an analysis of the intellectuals in general, and not religious ones in particular. What emerges is a fairly strong and well- defined methodological approach,

186 D. Boothman

basically more important than the fact that there exist wide uncovered areas. The most widely known aspects of his approach are probably his analyses of the roles of ecclesiastical intellectuals in Italy in the formation of traditional intellec-tuals, as famously discussed in Notebook 12 on the history of the intellectuals, and the religious intellectuals in the Protestant Reformation. But the role of reli-gious intellectuals also appears under different guises elsewhere, in rather less- well-explored parts of the Notebooks, and it is also to these places that attention will be paid in this contribution.

Religion in early timesThe earliest historical period, at least in the so- called ‘Western’ world, for which Gramsci mentions ‘intellectuals’ and religion is in a reference to Plato. He says first of all that, when Plato speaks of philosophers in the phrase ‘republic of phi-losophers’, historically what is actually meant, translating ‘philosophers’ into modern terms, is a republic led or governed by intellectuals, in the sense of the ‘great intellectuals’. He goes on to observe that ‘the intellectuals who governed . . . were specifically the intellectuals closest to religion’, where the activity of the intellectuals, as a function of their religiosity, is understood in a social sense of ‘improvement and education (and intellectual direction, thus having a hege-monic function) of the polis’ (Q8§22; PN3: 249; Bellini et al. 2010: 16).1 This role ‘prefigures’ that of ecclesiastical intellectuals under medieval feudalism. However, as the reverse side to this, Gramsci observes in a late notebook (Q25, dedicated to the ‘history of the subaltern social groups’) that the intellectuals who wrote the various great utopias of the Renaissance and early modern times often formally followed Plato’s ‘Socratic rationalism’ in producing what in effect were ‘political manifestos’, outlining the ‘optimal State’ and in essence reflecting ‘in a highly deformed way, the conditions of instability and latent rebellion of the great popular masses of the era’. In the best cases, through the utopias, individual author- intellectuals were seeking a solution to problems of the ‘humble people’, the subaltern strata, seeking in other words ‘a link between the intellectuals and the people’. As such, with all the limitations of their times and circumstances, they were in some ways ‘historical precursors of the Jacobins and the French Revolution’ (Q25§7; SCW: 240). An interesting parallel suggests itself here between the authors of the utopias and at least some of the leaders within primitive Christianity and its heirs. These latter leaders, i.e. the intellectuals within such movements, had to respond to the needs of the faithful, largely the subaltern strata. This is perhaps well expressed in a paragraph from Notebook 20 (1934–5) headed ‘Catholic Action – integral Catholics – Jesuits – modernists’, dealing largely with modern (and modernist) religious intellectuals. The early twentieth- century lay tertiary Franciscans, whose origin and tendency is defined by Gramsci as ‘democratic- popular’, represented – tendentially again – a return to ‘the ways of life and belief of prim-itive Christianity – the community of the faithful and not just of the clergy’ (Q20§2; FSPN: 34). The original Franciscans, Gramsci observes elsewhere, like

Intellectuals, subalterns and religion 187

other popular religious movements of the Middle Ages, were part of the relation-ship of the ‘political impotence of the great masses vis- à-vis oppressors that are smaller in number but battle- trained and centralized’ (Q6§78; PN3: 61; FSPN: 120). These masses entrench themselves in ‘primitive evangelical pacifism’ just, Gramsci claims, like the followers of Tolstoy or, even more so, the masses sup-porting Gandhi’s anti- British struggle in India, whose subaltern nature is emphasized by Gramsci’s description of them as ‘humiliated and offended’, in an implicit reference to Dostoyevsky’s novel often known in English as Humili-ated and Insulted. The same subject re- emerges in the claim that Tolstoy’s theory of non- resistance to evil, and his and Gandhi’s ‘naïve theorizations of “passive revolution” with religious overtones’ (Q15§17; SPN: 107) yet again bear similarities to the ‘first phase of Christianity (before the Edict of Milan)’.

The leaders of the subalternsDivorced from their context, the role of the leaders of the subalterns – either ‘organic’ intellectuals springing from the subaltern groups, or intellectuals coming in some way from outside – is unpredictable. For example, at the time Gramsci was writing the Notebooks, there existed a difference between the clergy of the North and South of Italy, the Northern clergy having origins typic-ally among the ‘artisans and peasants’ and therefore being possibly more open politically to the demands of the peasantry, while the Southern clergy were more bound up with the ‘gentry’ and sometimes themselves were oppressive landown-ers, even usurers, backed moreover by both spiritual and temporal weapons (Q1§52; PN1: 163; FSPN: 12). Incorporation into the institutions, as here exem-plified by the Southern clergy, and a growing detachment from the subaltern groups, has long roots in Christianity and is ever- present in both religious and in non- religious movements, including those claiming to represent the subalterns themselves. In the first phase of Christianity, the leaders of the communities had the task of combating external forces as well as internal pagan, and indeed Jewish, influ-ences. How the leaders were chosen and what their role was is well put by Judith Herrin. In the urban centres of the Empire that saw the expansion of the new faith, Herrin explains that – just as happens now in many Protestant churches – the ‘groups of Christian believers chose their own elders or welcomed people recommended to them as leaders’, going on to add that ‘like most dissident soci-eties, they found it necessary to have a spokesman who could deal with the often hostile authorities’ (Herrin 1987: 57–8). These early leaders often represented, then, the interests of the subalterns, although the extent to which slaves and most women had their interests safeguarded is, to say the least, a moot point. The spokesmen gradually took on the role of what in Catholicism and in various other churches is now the bishop, often thereby changing their role from ‘spokes-men for’ the subalterns to a more oppressive one, ‘organically bound’, as Gramsci says of the ecclesiastical ‘traditional’ intellectuals in Italy, ‘to the landed aristocracy’, although he adds the rider that ‘a high proportion of

188 D. Boothman

traditional intellectuals are from the peasantry’ (Q12§1; SPN: 7 and 6 respec-tively). And this role change is mirrored in the change of ‘ecclesia’ from its ori-ginal prevalent meaning of ‘community’ to that of ‘the church’ as an institution. By implication, Gramsci appears to partially connect these changes to events after the fall of the Roman Empire of the West and, rather tentatively,2 he links the formation of the traditional intellectuals in Italy to the question of slavery and the position of the freedmen (liberti) ‘of Greek or Oriental origin in the social organisation of the Roman Empire’. He then adds that this type of national and ethnic separation ‘is repeated after the fall of the Empire in the division between Germanic warriors and the intellectuals who, by origin, were Roman-ised’. And it is this social phenomenon that is intertwined with

the birth and development of Catholicism and of the ecclesiastical organisa-tion which for many centuries absorbs the major part of intellectual activ-ities and exercises a monopoly of cultural direction [in the sense of ‘leadership’] with penal sanctions against anyone who attempted to oppose or even evade the monopoly.

(Q12§1; SPN: 17)3

Perry Anderson backs this up in a characteristically brilliant and insightful observation, in noting that, in the European transition to feudalism, the efficacy of the church lay not so much in ‘economic relations or social structures . . . but in the cultural sphere above them’ (Anderson 1996 [1974]: 136), bringing in forcefully the various roles played by religious intellectuals as leaders and mediators in this process. In holding society together at all levels, while not neglecting the economic role of the church, it is perhaps the cultural level that is of most interest here. Taking the argument of this ‘binding’ function one step further, in Gramsci’s analysis of the role of Lutheranism, religious intellectuals fulfil the dual function of dealing both with doctrinal matters and with the ‘coarsening’ essential for the popularizing and ‘vulgarization’ of these same doctrinal issues for the masses of the faithful. And, as he comments, it is on the basis of an initial vulgarization that a new and higher culture may arise among the ‘masses’ through the necessary intermediate step of ‘translation’ from a ‘high’ to a more appropriate ‘popular’ language, in order for Lutheranism and Calvinism to give rise to ‘a vast national- popular movement where they became widespread’. But ‘only later did they create a higher culture’ (Q16§9; SPN: 394)4 through a ‘cultural translation’ in the opposite direction, Gramsci’s well- known position here being that there was a need for a modern secular ‘intellec-tual and moral reform’, analogous to the Protestant Reformation. It is, however, surprising that, while paying tribute to the Lutheran reform’s positive features, on the negative side he merely states that ‘the Protestant reform coincided in fact with a peasant war in Germany’ (Q19§5), not going into the consequences of Luther’s relation with the sociopolitical hierarchy of his time and, together, their suppression of the popular peasant movement (Engels 1955 [1850]: 99–118, especially 105–8). Given Gramsci’s general approach of considering


both positive and negative sides to movements, popular and subaltern cultures included, his glossing over of the reactionary side to Luther is a gap and pos-sibly a weakness in his treatment.

From monasticism to the free communesWhile class divisions characterize all historically recent forms of society, their nature changes as therefore also does the nature of the intellectual strata. In the transition from Late Antiquity, Gramsci sees an impetus towards such changes with the development of monasticism within Christendom. Monasticism had existed in the very early centuries of Christianity, often taking the form of ascetic, sometimes isolated, desert communities. Sometimes, however, a leader of such a community was elected to head an urban Christian community or even to be appointed to a bishopric, rapidly going through all the stages of ordination if need be (Herrin 1987: 62–3). Thus it was that a spiritual leader of a rural Christian community could be transformed into a spiritual – and political – leader of an urban community, an interesting switch of roles for an ‘organic intellectual’ of those times. But the originally self- sustaining type of monasti-cism underwent evolution and the religious – clerics, monks and nuns – who were not engaged in economically productive activity began to increase to such an extent that, after Constantine’s promulgation of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, they started to become a burden on the economic life of the societies in which they lived (de Ste Croix 1983: 495). At this point, however, the Benedictine rule and practice were introduced, fundamental in Gramsci’s view for the subsequent development of feudalism (Q5§74; PN2: 331). While emphasis was placed on both mental and manual labour in early (fourth- century) Egyptian and desert monasticism (Herrin 1987: 61–2), in the later Benedictine monasteries – greater in size (and in Gramsci’s view having a ‘more humane owner than the individual proprietor’) – a division of labour began to evolve. The ‘monk- farmers’ were gradually substituted by ‘coloni’5 to allow the monks to attend to their religious duties while, within the monastery, there was also a growing division of intellectual labour. Here, among the religious that Gramsci lists are ‘priests, intellectuals concerned with ideas, copyists, worker- artisans’, the priests serving the surrounding countryside and the copyists being in part occupied with intellectual work, albeit with its more ‘manual’ side of actually writing (Q5§78; PN2: 333). Over a period of centuries, then, a gradual change came about in the nature of the leaders of the Christian communities. Initially they represented the spiritual interests of overwhelmingly subaltern strata of the new religion within the Empire – witness the Pauline letters. However, the successors of important frac-tions of these organic intellectual leaders of the subaltern faithful gradually detached themselves from their social strata of reference and are to be found, some centuries later, as the traditional intellectuals of what had then become the accepted official religion of the post- imperial societies. It was in this process that Western monasticism played an important role, both ‘superstructurally’ and, as

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Gramsci is at pains to point out, ‘structurally’ at the economic level. Further-more, when in the course of history the traditional intellectuals of Western Chris-tianity do begin to emerge in full force, they are bound up with the aristocracy of the feudal system. The beginning and end points of this process seem fixed in Gramsci’s scheme, namely primitive Christianity at the start and, at the end, some period subsequent to the Benedictine reform, perhaps to be identified with first the technical development in the early Carolingian period, followed by the full sociopolitical development of feudalism around the tenth century CE (cf. Anderson 1996 [1974]: 182). In broad outline, the details in this process, includ-ing the specific changes in the intellectuals and their socio- religious-political (and economic) functions, must however be sought in sources to which Gramsci had no access, both through the limitations placed on the prisoner and also, indeed, because much research has been carried out only since his lifetime. The growing diversification of the religious intellectuals is dealt with under another aspect in Notebook 3, in a paragraph written only about two to three months before the above- mentioned Q5§78. In the earlier notebook, Gramsci draws attention to a particular aspect of their progressive detachment from the people: the use of Latin as a liturgical language while, in the Italian peninsula, the people were using vernaculars stemming from Latin, but ever more distant from it. The Latin used crystallized into the language ‘of the learned, of the intellectuals – so called Middle Latin’, which was neither a fully living, spoken language, nor an artificial one like Esperanto (Q3§76; PN2: 73; SCW: 168). Beyond the Alps the case was, however, different and Gramsci quotes Gustave Lanson’s history of French literature to the effect that, while Latin was used for sermons to the clergy down to its lowest orders, male and female alike, the ninth- century Councils of Tours and Reims ordered ‘priests to instruct the people in the language of the people’. And this practice carried on at least up to the twelfth century (Q8§109; PN3: 296–7) simultaneously with an increasing ‘flourishing’ of Latin culture, in Paris in particular (Q5§123; PN2: 364; SCW: 224–5). The linguistic dichotomy, found in Italy partially due to what in Q3§76 Gramsci calls ‘Catholic cosmopolitanism’, was even more extreme outside the areas of the neo- Latin languages. In all cases, there was a fracture between the people and the intellectuals, and since religion was the prevailing element of culture, the fracture was also between the people and culture (op. cit.) for a period that, in Italy, lasted for over six centuries until the literary flowering of the various vernaculars in the thirteenth century.6 The continuing split between Latin and the vernacular tongues in the era of the Communes reflects, and indeed expresses, the split between the aristocratic- feudal world on the one hand and the bourgeois- popular one on the other (Q5§123; PN2: 366). After the defeat of the Communes, since the Renaissance aristocracy as an intellectual caste was wedded to the cultural values of the past, it is not surprising to Gramsci that the Italian Renaissance found its outlet in the counter- Reformation. And, in passing, another – apparently minor, albeit indicative – aspect of the detachment of the religious leaders from the subaltern strata is shown in the vestments worn by the


greater part of the Christian clergy and hierarchy: a more or less straightforward evolution of those of the community’s original oppressors, namely the Roman upper classes and the Senate in particular. This type of detachment explains Gramsci’s periodic return in the Note-books to the foundation of religious orders aiming to reform the church and restore at least some of the values of primitive Christianity, or of the ‘apos-tolic life’ as he says in Q5§123 (PN2: 363). Ostensibly this seems progressive, especially in the light of Engels’ citation of the opinion of Ernest Renan that, if one wanted an equivalent in his time of primitive Christianity, there was no need to look any further than the International Working Men’s Association (Engels 1955 [1850]: 205–6 and 318). However, it must be borne in mind that those who supported the values of primitive Christianity may also have criti-cized the economic society of their times from a regressive standpoint. Caution must always be exercised in assessing stances taken within the Chris-tian churches, by other religions or, for that matter, by the subaltern strata themselves, with progressive stances on some issues sometimes being allied to reactionary ones on others.

Religious modernism and left CatholicsGramsci very ably links up religious modernism, in the meaning of an opening to change in contemporary society, with developments especially in the rural world in Italy among the peasantry and other agricultural workers. In one of his very first extended notes written in prison, he comments that ‘the phenomena of Modernism and, later, of Popularism resemble the “liberal- Catholics” of the Risorgimento; they are in great part a result of the power of “spontaneous” attraction exercised by the modern workers’ movement’ (Q1§44; PN1: 138). And indeed, rather than to religious orders, modernism gave rise to political parties and movements, the first Christian Democracy movement (Q8§220; PN3: 370) and, after the First World War, the Popular Party. The mass character of the modernists stemmed ‘from the contemporary birth of a rural Catholic democracy’ due especially to socioeconomic changes in the fertile Po valley area and, as a second wave of liberal Catholics, they were ‘much more widespread and more popular’ than their equivalents before and after the social upheavals of 1848 (Q10II§41IV; FSPN: 472). Modernism was multifaceted and, in its politico- social manifestation, ‘tended to bring the church back towards the popular classes’ with the consequence that it was ‘favourable to reformist socialism and to democracy’ (Q15§52; FSPN: 98). This was certainly positive in one sense, but it must be remembered that the Italian Communists in the 1920s were divided, some maintaining that the reformists represented the right wing of the workers’ movement and others the left of the bourgeoisie; in the latter case they would be in the enemy camp. Overall, then, what seems to emerge from the Notebooks is an attitude of caution, or even ambivalence, towards Catholic modernism as possibly deflecting the Catholic masses away from their genuine class interests.

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It might be thought that modernism would have been favoured against other tendencies in Catholicism by one of Gramsci’s main polemical targets, Bene-detto Croce, but it seems that, in the latter’s rather ‘aristocratic’ approach, dis-trusting mass involvement and action, the mass phenomenon of modernism was considered a potential danger to his increasingly conservative brand of liberal-ism. Gramsci argues that, since Croce could not envisage a passage of the popular masses ‘from the religious to the “philosophical” stage, and since mod-ernism was in practice gnawing away at the Church’s massive practical- ideological structure’ his approach to modernism served to ‘consolidate the Church’s position’ (Q10I§1; FSPN: 334). All this means that, somewhat para-doxically at face value, what Croce regarded as his modern philosophical approach found itself in contrast with a Catholic modernism that was striving, against other tendencies within the church, to come to terms with society. The initial phase of modernism saw a diversification of the roles and of the per-sonnel constituting the religious intellectuals. Lay intellectuals began to emerge quite markedly in the political field after the papacy had fully accepted the legiti-mate existence of the young Italian state. The new Catholic political and trade union intellectuals were autonomous of the hierarchy but, if they went far to the left, either political or ecclesiastical sanctions intervened, as touched on below.

Catholic ActionWhile the modernists were trying to redirect the church and the faithful, ana-logous tendencies were also at work outside the church as an institution within ‘civil society’. The main organization was Catholic Action, which operated and still operates in many different countries. In the very first notebook, Gramsci writes that Catholic Action in Italy could not be considered as separate from the short- lived Popular Party (1919–26) and the trade unions of the White Confeder-ation of Labour (Q1§38; PN1: 123, with a more sophisticated formulation in Q20§1; FSPN: 30). These organizations and their equivalents in other countries represented an attempt by the Catholic Church at the purely political level to accept the ‘socioeconomic basis of modernism’ – and make it ‘the pivot of its world policies’ while, paradoxically, at the same time combating modernism as a reforming tendency within the church itself (Q19§24; SPN: 62). Wherever Catholic Action operated, an important characteristic was the presence of intel-lectual strata of some type, including priests, in directing the activity of the laity, including workers (cf. the discussion of the ‘workers’ retreats’ in Q5§133; FSPN: 47–8; PN2: 385–6). In a country with no nominally Catholic party, the lay organizations that, overall, Gramsci sometimes classifies generically as ‘Catholic Action’ attempt to give a lead to the faithful outside the narrowly reli-gious sphere. In other circumstances, it seems more to have been the so- called Catholic political party that attempted to lead the faithful. In the two sentences immediately above, ‘lead’ and ‘attempt’ are used advisedly. First, ‘lead’ implies that there are leaders, often the bishops, as the ‘long arm’ of the Vatican. And second, ‘attempt’ implies a division, here between a largely conservative


hierarchy and left Catholic forces, with outcomes that are not easily predictable. Further, to speak – as is often done – of a ‘Catholic party’ is more than a little hypocritical when whole sections of the faithful oppose such a party. It may however be observed in passing that the existence of a so- called Catholic party means that the hierarchy often tends to act more cautiously and discreetly through the politicians they trust, rather than intervening directly, and – as has often happened in Italy – clumsily, in national politics. In a way, Gramsci sums up his ideas on Catholic Action, and to a certain extent the Catholic- based, but not strictly speaking confessional, Popular Party in Italy at that time, in the above- cited paragraph from Notebook 20. Catholic Action in his view signalled a new era in the history of Catholicism in so far as the church realized it was no longer self- sufficient as an institution, could no longer dictate the agenda and needed a ‘party’ to defend its interests and attempt to turn the tide of ‘the apostasy on an imposing scale of whole masses’. The church was on the defensive and found itself ‘no longer a world ideological force, but merely a subaltern one’ (Q20§2; FSPN: 34). This leads to the interest-ing situation that the laity within the church is subaltern in regard to the priestly intellectuals of the church, who in turn are subaltern to other, external, forces. There are seen to exist different degrees and grades of subalternity, just as there are, for example, in an army. Catholicism for Gramsci is a social, not only a religious and political, force and, with the limited amount of material available to him, he pays considerable attention to how the church trained its lay cadres. The chief events he mentions are the so- called ‘Social weeks’ (Semaines sociales) held at the time principally in France and which, according to Civiltà cattolica, the authoritative Jesuit review he read regularly, represented ‘one of the most renowned schools of Christian sociology today’ (Q4§90; PN2: 260; cf. also Q5§9; PN2: 275; FSPN: 107; and Q15§40; FSPN 105–6 for other comments). These were influential enough to spawn offspring in other countries, among them the above- mentioned workers’ retreats in Italy. While the hierarchy strove to keep ‘its’ Catholic- based parties and move-ments away from a left position, such positions could and did develop within them. Such was the case of Guido Miglioli, the leader of the Catholic peasants and, for a short time, of the extreme left of the Popular Party. It comes as no sur-prise that, after his declared support for the Peasant International (the Krestin-tern) and other Comintern- sponsored bodies, Miglioli was expelled from the Populars and, after the Second World War, was also refused membership of the Christian Democrats. Similar disciplinary measures, this time in the ecclesiasti-cal sphere, were also taken after the Second World War, when a number of left Catholic leaders and intellectuals collaborating with the Italian Communist Party were subject to a ‘personal interdict’ and refused communion within their church. The predominant conservatism characterizing the Catholic hierarchy masqueraded as religion; if this seems a harsh judgement, suffice it to compare the behaviours of that hierarchy with those, for example, of the Waldensian (Valdese) community in Italy.

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The role of religious – and other – intellectualsAll this brings us back to the intellectuals, their value in training cadre forces, and thence to how to influence masses of people, not just in the Catholic world. One of the techniques used to great effect by the Vatican was indeed that of first converting those who were considered among the natural leaders of the people, and using them as influential ‘stepping stones’ towards converting the masses (Q7§71; PN3: 207; FSPN: 123: see the quotation at the start of this chapter). And religious leaders could, if for example brought over to an anti- imperialist position, act as the ‘leaven’ necessary for training the next lower level of leader-ship (Q5§133; PN2: 385; FSPN: 47–8). Gramsci’s most interesting comments on this possibility refer in the main to India, with relatively minor comments on the Islamic world, and less explicit statements on the United States. On both India and the Islamic world, in the space of probably only a day or two, Gramsci uses words with the Italian root ‘torpid- ’ (‘torpor’) to describe their respective societies. As regards India it is implicit in what he writes that, given the centuries- old social torpor and the ‘ossified stratification of society’, the middle- level intellectuals, especially eccle-siastical in origin, were playing an exceptionally conservative role and acting as a brake on the formation of a ‘public opinion’ based on a ‘critical spirit’ (Q2§86; FSPN: 120–1). On the Islamic world, probably generalizing too much, Gramsci speaks of a society made ‘torpid’ by ‘centuries of isolation’, possibly referring mainly to the ex- Ottoman Empire, and observes that it was faced with having to make the same progress, in a very brief time span, that Christianity had taken nine centuries to accomplish7 (i.e. since the reawakening, the ‘first Renaissance’, around the year 1000, one of Gramsci’s reference points: cf. in particular Q7§68; PN3: 204; and Q19§3; FSPN: 82). And once again, one possible vehicle of pro-gress is provided by certain types of intellectual. As a case in point, Gramsci quotes with some approval the opinion of a leading Islamic scholar of the time, Bruno Ducati, first on the importance of the Muslim ‘theological universities’, especially in Cairo, for training ‘ecclesiastical intellectuals’, and then the role played by the Marabouts much further West along the North African coast. The latter could, for example, act as judges of the peace and could be the vehicle of a superior type of civilization; what is more, they could head insurrections against the Europeans. Ducati concluded his article, quoted without further comment by Gramsci, by saying that the leaders whom he calls the ‘saints’ of Islam consti-tuted a power that either was potentially the greatest obstacle to the spread of ‘Western civilization’ or, if exploited to the full, could represent a precious aux-iliary help to ‘European expansion’ (Q5§90; PN2: 346; FSPN: 136). The last thing to mention in this section is the question of the intellectuals in the United States. Gramsci considered that, given the historically short existence of that country, his category of ‘traditional intellectuals’, represented predomi-nantly in Italy by ecclesiastics and lawyers, and later by philosophers – which had taken centuries to form – did not and could not occupy the same important position in America. A discussion of religious intellectuals in the United States


does not appear in the prison writings, although Rotarianism does appear almost as a surrogate: Calvinism, for Gramsci, had become ‘a lay religion, the religion of the Rotary Club’ (Q1§51; PN1: 163; FSPN: 11). Religion was not a unifying factor there and was dispersed into what, according to Gramsci’s unnamed sources, were around two hundred different sects, although some of them were attempting to create a sort of unity to oppose the Catholic Church (Q5§17; PN2: 282; FSPN: 113). Instead, in the United States, he considered the predominant type of intellectual to be technical, linked to production. In as yet little- studied notes, what he does pay attention to is what were the growing, important, strata of literary intellectuals and, by implication, he perhaps attributes to them the sort of unifying function that in other countries may be played by religion. At the time he was writing, the intelligentsia was minuscule and, according to one source of information (a newspaper article by the literary scholar Giuseppe Antonio Borgese),8 largely limited to the East Coast. Borgese’s comment that the American intelligentsia, however, ‘occupied a historical position like that of the Encyclopedia’ in eighteenth- century France was in Gramsci’s view ‘very acute’ and ‘capable of being developed’ (Q8§89; FSPN: 260). The point to note here is the interest Gramsci shows in the development of literature – and, to a growing extent through the Notebooks, of the cinema, centred this time on the West Coast – in the post- First World War United States as a means of forming and exerting cultural, and indirectly possibly political, hegemony, i.e. of aiding the subaltern strata to find their voice. In addition to Gramsci’s few comments in the main body of the Notebooks, his evaluation of the American intelligentsia is influenced by what he read in a whole issue, and more, of the German review Die literarische Welt, dedicated to the contemporary developments in North American literature. The articles were translated by him as an exercise while awaiting permission to write what became the Prison Notebooks,9 and it may be noted that the novelists dealt with were all, or nearly all, at that time, voices in some way aligned with critical or leftish tendencies in society. While we remain at the stage of hypothesis, it seems likely that, as part of his argument on Ameri-canism, Gramsci was examining another precise way in which United States society was evolving and how the role and influence of this sector of society was assuming increasing importance.

Conclusions: the role of Catholic intellectuals as a paradigmIn whatever society, the intellectual of whatever type, ranging from pure ‘organic’ to pure ‘traditional’, is the articulator of various ideologies, subaltern or hegemonic as may be, that give voice to the aspirations of the groups and classes composing society, and provide its particular social group of reference with a ‘homogeneity and an awareness of its own function’ (Q12§1; SPN: 5). And it must be recalled and emphasized that ‘aspirations’ may also be of a conservative nature. Intellectuals thus emerge as key groupings in all forms of society that have emerged from pre- history. In the passages cited and com-mented here from the Prison Notebooks, it is seen that the intellectuals are never

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neutral but play an essential role either in binding together a society or societies or, alternatively, creating the premises for a scission within them. And it is this latter aspect that is strategically uppermost in Gramsci’s thoughts. As shown by the quotation at the head of this chapter, the approach of the Catholic hierarchy was for him an object lesson in method. When masses shift their position, they are won over more effectively and more permanently if, besides the fundamental contribution of intellectuals produced from within those strata, other intellectuals from outside, in other words the ‘traditional intellectuals’ of a given society (Q6§10; SPN: 270 and PN3: 9), are first won over so that, through the formation of ‘groups of intellectuals of a new type’, a culture may be elaborated originat-ing in, and consonant with the needs of, the subaltern groups and classes.

Notes1 An alternative wording is found in Bellini et al. (2010), which brings together various

paragraphs on the subaltern groups, not all of them yet published in paper form in English.

2 The tentativeness is apparent from a note added here by Gramsci, but on editorial advice, his warning – found also in a couple of other places in the Notebooks – that what he had written had to be checked and sometimes might be mistaken, was not included in SPN.

3 The SPN translation is slightly modified since Gramsci has ‘Romanized’ agree gram-matically with ‘intellectuals’, not with ‘origin’; the distinction is a fine one.

4 The published translation is modified here. The original (‘dove si diffusero’), refers to the places where Calvinism and Lutheranism spread, not to the national- popular move-ment ‘through which their influence spread’ (SPN translation).

5 The word ‘peasants’ is used by Joseph Buttigieg to translate ‘coloni’, who in the later stages of the Roman Empire were bound to a plot of land or to a village, although tech-nically being free (de Ste Croix 1983: 158–9). Later, this ‘colonate’ became a form of serfdom, with its heirs still appearing centuries later as the ‘coloni’.

6 There are important exceptions in this period of six centuries without written use of the vernacular, which include legal documents and the famous ‘Oath of Strasbourg’, administered to the troops by Charlemagne’s heirs, as well as occasional inscriptions, notably in the Church of San Clemente in Rome (cf. Q5§123, QdC: 646; PN2: 367).

7 As regards the Islamic world, at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, attended by Gramsci, the Dutch communist Willem Van Ravesteyn made a report on the ‘Eastern Question’: see Inprecorr, English version 22 December 1922, for the integral version. Gramsci was almost certainly aware of the positions of both Tan Malaka (Indonesia) and M.N. (Manabendranath) Roy on the Muslims in India.

8 Although subject like almost everyone to Gramsci’s criticism, Borgese was one of the extremely few Italian university staff who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the regime, losing his job in consequence.

9 Notebook A, first published in Volume 1 of the National Edition of Gramsci’s writings (Gramsci 2007).

14 The place of ‘practical spirituality’ in the lives of the Dalit Buddhists in Pune

Tamsin Bradley with Zara Bhatewara

Introduction

In Pune, the historical sociopolitical context of caste has driven Dalits to seek a coherent strategy to fight the injustices that they have long suffered. Buddhism as interpreted by Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar provides a practical system of morality which underpins a strong sense of social justice, thereby underpinning struggles for caste eradication. The distinct applications of Buddhism in Pune have impacted on local, national and now international political campaigns for social justice. This chapter reflects on how the Dalit campaign for justice has changed over time and is now articulated through a human rights discourse that also covers wider issues of social development and inclusion. In other words the Dalit activists leading and coordinating the work of Buddhist community organ-izations in Pune have taken a distinctly ‘developmental turn’ in their approach and language. Increasingly, Dalit activists are highly educated and are drawing on social media technologies as a means of promoting knowledge about con-tinued caste oppression. Organizations are also becoming more adept at securing funding from a wide array of development donors, both Buddhist and secular, which in turn is influencing the type of projects they are implementing. However, the effectiveness of Dalit activism in Pune is limited by a lack of autonomy and leadership confidence. The two main Buddhist NGOs in Pune form part of a wider international Western Buddhist network, the largest funder being the Karuna Trust. Although Karuna’s ultimate vision is to see Dalit NGOs operating independently of them, this has not yet happened. Interviews with members of the Karuna Trust reveal concerns that unless this next generation of Dalit activ-ists claim autonomy from the Triratna Buddhist Community, and more immedi-ately from the Indian branch of the network the Jambudvipa Trust, Ambedkar’s vision of empowered, self- determined Dalit communities will not materialize. The findings presented in this paper were gathered between November 2008 and October 2009 during a total of eight weeks of fieldwork. Three periods of fieldwork were conducted by the two authors with the support of local interpret-ers. We did not conduct formal interviews but some semi- formal interviews with members of the NGOs and the Karuna Trust were carried out and with local Dalit people. A total of approximately one hundred interviews were conducted,

198 T. Bradley with Z. Bhatewara

varying in length and formality. Interviews with Dalit activists and NGO workers were conducted in English, inside the slums interpreters were used to enable more detailed discussion in Marathi. The fieldwork focused on two slum settlements: one near the suburb of Dapodi and a second in the Vishwantwadi area of Pune. The work of two Ambedkar- influenced organizations was explored and documented: The Deepak Project (part of Bahujan Hitjay) and Manuski. Employees from these organizations introduced us to members of the slum com-munities in which they worked and helped us establish connections with inform-ants, who then invited us to spend time with them in their homes. This enabled us to gather something of an insight into how people view Ambedkar’s teachings now and observe the impact these organizations are having on how people talk about their struggles for justice and wider development concerns. This chapter is structured as follows. The first section provides a basic intro-duction to Ambedkar’s teachings and the Dalit communities this research is based on. The second part looks at the developmental turn that has occurred in the work of Buddhist organizations in Pune. The section maps out the emergence of two main local organizations and the network of both Ambedkar supporters and Western Buddhist trusts they are linked to. The impact of the wider trans-national network on the work of these local organizations is considered. In this second section we explore the problems facing the two NGOs because of their positioning within a wider Buddhist network. The last section focuses on one local Buddhist organization and looks at how it manipulates its external identity in order to ‘play the aid game’ and secure development funding for a range of projects, not all of which are obviously focused on furthering Dalit rights. The conclusion discusses the problems with leadership authority and autonomy of the two local Dalit NGOs, problematizing their activism in the context of the constant negotiation necessary for them to move their campaign forward.

Ambedkar’s influence and core Buddhist teachingsIn Pune, Dalit Buddhists are influenced by the teachings of Dr B.R. Ambedkar. He aimed to foster a sense of self- esteem and autonomy among Dalits, who had been oppressed in economic, physical and psychological terms by higher castes (Keer 1962; Zelliot 1992). He attacked caste- based discrimination from every corner, including economic and cultural facets of caste inequality ([1936], [1948b]). His own conversion to Buddhism, followed by the conversion of innumerable Dalits, is by now so well documented that it seems unnecessary to repeat the details here. However, it must be emphasized that Ambedkar’s approach to Buddhism was extremely focused: he drew out only those aspects of the teachings that applied directly to his political struggles, and made those aspects into the fundamentals of his own religious interpretation (Beltz 2004a; Queen 1996). In particular, he aligned himself absolutely with the traditional Buddhist stance of anti- Brahminism. Buddhism rejects notions of a hierarchy, which stems from the Buddhist focus on loving kindness (metta) and compassion for all beings (karuna).

‘Practical spirituality’ and Dalit Buddhists 199

However, the notion of spirituality was refashioned by Ambedkar and his fol-lowers to take on an inherently active character which criticized the ‘selfish’ notions of self- reflection and personal enquiry believed to be associated with spirituality in Indian traditions. Despite this change of emphasis his spirituality remained decidedly Buddhist in as much as it was based on belief in compassion and the inter- connectedness and equality of all beings. Ambedkar synthesized these Buddhist teachings, with a focus on rationalism, thereby promoting his vision of a secular, free and classless society. Above all he presented his Buddhism as founded on egalitarian morality and ethics, and in an effort to concretize the Buddhism that he promoted for his followers, Ambed-kar compiled a book entitled The Buddha and His Dhamma ([1957] BAWS 11 [republished in 1984]; see also Contursi 1989; Fitzgerald 1999, 2000; Queen 1996; Sumant 2004; Zelliot 2004). This book is clearly intended to provide an all- encompassing guide for Dalit converts. In it Ambedkar very effectively presents his own interpretation of Buddhist teachings, an interpretation that is obviously geared towards enabling Dalit people to pursue social action.

Ambedkarite Buddhism and practical spirituality

Fitzgerald (2000) notes that as a soteriology (doctrine of salvation), Buddhism has traditionally been geared towards the liberation (nirvana) of the individual from the cycle of rebirths (samsara) through his/her adherence to the four noble truths and the eightfold path. Ambedkar sought a system that encouraged social activism, and therefore had little sympathy for traditions of Buddhism dominant in South and South East Asia which emphasize individual detachment from worldly processes. For Ambedkar, soteriology also had to include sociopolitical aspects, and thus for him the spiritual man should be ‘socially and politically committed to justice’ (Fitzgerald 2000: 128). Indeed a focus on social and polit-ical justice is arguably considered the height of spirituality in Ambedkar’s ([1957] BAWS 11) philosophy. He felt that popular religions tended to remove themselves from humanistic morality and reason, in favour of transcendental concepts and dogma (Sumant 2004). Liberation, or salvation, was therefore seen through Ambedkar’s eyes as the achievement of an egalitarian society that frees Untouchables from the clutches of their oppressors. This interpretation of Buddhism as embodying what may in the west be termed ‘secular morality’ (Fitzgerald 2000) is clearly discernable among Ambed-karite (Navayana) Buddhists today. The influence of Ambedkar’s teachings among Pune’s slum- dwellers is unquestionable. During interviews and informal conversations, both slum- dwellers and Buddhist NGO workers explained to us their understandings of spirituality in terms of helping others and spreading justice. One staff member of the NGO Manuski stated, for example, that Bud-dhism ought to be understood primarily as a system of ‘practical spirituality’. Although prayer and ethereal thoughts are not unworthy, he argued, there is little value in those things while the world is suffering. Buddhists believe in the primacy of human beings and their needs, he explained: ‘Untouchables, Dalits,


or we may say the Buddhists, understand real spirituality. Real spirituality is about making people human and activating them for the social cause.’ Virtually all of our informants in Pune echoed these sentiments. In the slums, men and women, old and young, all stated that while prayer is an important and desirable part of a ‘good’ life, it should not be considered the essence of spiritu-ality: ‘a begging sadhu is less spiritual than I am, if he does not help others, and thinks only of his own self, his own enlightenment’, said one thirty- year-old woman during one of our visits to her slum. A very small percentage of our informants (three out of more than one hundred interviewed) stated unprompted that more orthodox aspects of Buddhism (prayer, meditation, etc.) provide them with hope and strength, each of which is undeniably important in both the caste struggle and the related war on poverty. The rest stated instead that Buddhism is a tradition of practicality, politics and social change. Spirituality in this context is understood to represent a compassion for people generally, rather than quiet self- reflection. It is displayed through activism and the struggle for the elimina-tion of suffering. What our Dalit informants explained as ‘spirituality’ is there-fore markedly different from the common understanding of the term. The Dalit practical view of spirituality is clearly founded on the essential Buddhist belief in equality and compassion for others; a belief which has in this context been interpreted in light of the struggle for caste equality.

Conversion as the first step

The words of a Dalit NGO worker highlight how religious conversion is seen only as the first step in a much longer struggle for freedom: ‘all we Buddhists are Dalits. This religion is the first step in our struggle.’ As we cover in the next section, Dalit activists and community workers have arguably moved the strug-gle onto a second stage. This second stage rearticulates Ambedkar’s teachings in the context of human rights discourse, but also recognizes the need to improve daily life for people living in the slums primarily by responding to their basic needs and providing education and skills to build a more sustainable life. Our observations of The Deepak Project and Manuski reveal their conformity to the standard operational structures and project model of many NGOs. Additionally, they both work with international donors, some of whom support their cause for social justice and share their Buddhist perspective. In the third section we dem-onstrate how the Jeevak Project, part of Bahujan Hitay, in particular has learnt how to ‘play’ the donor aid game presenting multiple identities in order to attract funding from non- Buddhist sources. To return to the focus for this section, during our fieldwork, Dalit Buddhists stated at every given opportunity that ‘Buddhism erases caste’, and as such enables converts to move forward in their struggle for justice. Buddhist inform-ants stated ‘we no longer have caste’, and ‘because of Buddhism, we are not Untouchables anymore’. Repeatedly we were told that our informants’ opportun-ities had increased because of their religious conversion, and that the quality of their lives had substantially improved. Our informants insisted that Buddhism


had improved their lives, that it had provided them with an elevated, caste- free position in society and thereby opened various new avenues for socioeconomic advancement. However, such statements were generally invalidated in the same conversation; as people went on to bemoan the continued oppression that they still face as Dalits. Although they claim to have caste no longer, they tell stories of continued discrimination with passionate fervour. Indeed, discussions of dis-crimination, from extreme examples like the Khairlanji massacre1 to common accounts of low- level ‘everyday’ discrimination, seem to form the basis of an identity of suppression in the Pune slums.2 Conversion to Buddhism has clearly effected a shift in their own senses of self, but this has not yet translated into a shift in how wider society views them.3 The term ‘Dalit’ remains an important self- descriptor that carries political intent, enabling these people to distinguish themselves from others who do not participate in the same fight for social justice. Numerous slum- dwellers, as well as employees of Buddhist NGOs, stated that Untouchability operates on many levels; thus they do not put all of their faith in religious conversion. However, they do see conversion as the first and most important step in their battle for social equality. It represents an assertion of their views, a demand for their rights and a promise that they will persist in their struggle. Our research findings pointed, perhaps predictably, towards a more subtly positive effect of conversion than straightforward/outright caste eradication. We recognize that conversion is a political statement of intent on the part of Dalits, that through their religious affiliation they challenge caste discrimina-tion. As we have noted, the frequent, almost scripted assertions that people make about Buddhism’s elimination of their caste problems can seem contra-dictory. People are extremely vocal about ongoing oppression, and so their comments about how Buddhism has saved them from subjugation are con-flicting. These comments are, however, extremely meaningful. The purpose of aligning oneself to Buddhism, we suggest, is more to do with a psychologi-cal freedom than a practical one. In this light Dr Joseph D’Souza, inter-national president of the Dalit Freedom Network, states that ‘Changing their religion means they – and more important, their children – think of them-selves differently. . . . This mental change impacts on their behaviour as they attempt new careers or fight for dignity by embracing their legal rights’ (quoted in Duke 2008). Thus despite their claims, for many Ambedkarite Buddhists conversion appears to be less about immediate practical change and more about a deeper shift in attitudes related to self and community worth (Singh 2008). These new feelings of increased self- esteem are likely to impact (to at least some degree) on final outcomes in relation to economic, political and social spheres of life. We would argue therefore that Ambedkarite Buddhism, as a system of ‘prac-tical spirituality’, provides people with hope and strength. This strength, however, does not generally come from an inner peace or quietude gained through meditative practices, as we may expect from something that people refer to as ‘spirituality’. In fact, Ambedkarite Buddhism’s primary achievement is


arguably the provision of a socially respectable language with which to argue for social justice. Pradeep,4 a well- educated Dalit NGO worker, talks about the importance of conversion as follows:

You see, Indians have a long history of religion. Hinduism is the oldest reli-gion in the world, and the Indian people have always been pious people. Now, some say this is changing . . . maybe it is, but not as quickly as they say. In fact the respect that Indians have for religion still goes further than anything else. In that way, Buddhism has given us [Dalits] a way to fight fire with fire. If we fight caste with just our own words, will they listen? No. But thanks to Babasaheb [Ambedkar] we can fight it with Buddhism, with words coming from Buddha himself. Even Hindus say Buddha is Vishnu, so they must respect what he says. We put our trust in these words. They are everything for us, they will eventually help to save us from the evils that we face as Dalit people.

From statements such as this it is clear that the general interpretation of Ambed-karite Buddhist values (despite what Ambedkar may or may not have intended) can reasonably be likened to a pragmatic approach to achieving secular morality (Fitzgerald 2000). In other words, there is nothing distinctly Buddhist about the vision of social equality they aim for, but Buddhism enables them to demand that vision. What is clear from the Pune case study is that Ambedkar’s Navayana Bud-dhism was created specifically to address issues of social injustice in an active fashion. Since Ambedkar deliberately constructed his Buddhism with social justice in mind, he made sure to emphasize that non- duality should be recog-nized by all people. In this sense, low- caste people who experience discrimina-tion are encouraged to actively protest; to demand equal and fair treatment. They should be able to demand both equality and the compassion of others. Dalit Bud-dhists cite this reasoning regularly in order to justify their vocal activism, and to justify their assertion that the rest of society ought to assist in Dalit socioeconomic development.

The developmental turnThis realization that social justice has not been achieved merely through conver-sion has motivated a new developmental agenda that seeks to combat caste oppression on various levels; human rights and political activism but also through social and economic development. The promotion of Dalit rights remains central to Buddhist organizations in Pune but so too does working with slum communities to improve their daily lives by providing maternal health care, education and employment opportunities. The two key organizations this research has focused on recognize the importance of tapping into transnational networks both in order to raise the visibility of caste oppression but also to secure development funding.


Transnational networks

In Pune, development activities targeting Dalit communities are primarily funded and organized through a network of Buddhist organizations, one of the key funders being the Karuna Trust, the development wing of the ‘Friends of the Western Buddhist Order’5 (FWBO) now called The Triratna Buddhist Com-munity. Karuna works in Pune through the Jambudvipa Trust, which supports the work of two further community/development organizations, Manuski and Bahujan Hitay. Local Buddhists supposedly now run all the work of both the main trust and Manuski and Bahujan Hitay, but for twenty years a western convert known as Lokamitra was the main figure leading the fight for social justice in Pune. Lokamitra is still a leading figure coordinating the work of the Trailokya Bauddha Mahāsan·gha Sahayaka Gana (TBMSG), the Indian wing of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, which has now been renamed Tri-ratna Bauddha Mahāsan·gha (TBM). TBMSG was founded in 1979 by Sanghar-akshita, a western convert influenced and respected by Ambedkar, hence the merging of the Dalit movement in Pune with that of TBMSG. Although Lokami-tra refocused his mission on promoting Buddhist social ethics to an international audience he has recently been requested by local Buddhist activists to resume some of his coordination responsibilities. The impact of his day- to-day leader-ship for Dalit empowerment and autonomy of leadership will be considered later in this chapter. The Jambudvipa Trust was founded in 1998, and while fully independent with its own identity, in principle it is part of the wider FWBO/TBMSG family and still assists with many TBMSG and Bahujan Hitay projects. The two main organiza-tions working in Pune’s slum settlements, and which became the focus for our research are Manuski, which means ‘humanism’ in Marathi, a term used by Ambedkar and Bahujan Hitay, meaning ‘for the welfare of the many’. Both organi-zations were founded in the 1980s prior to the Jambudvipa Trust. Bahujan Hitay was set up by Lokamitra and represents a network of projects across Buddhist India, largely hostels housing disadvantaged Dalit youth. In Pune a project known as Jeevak is female- led and focuses on responding to the needs of Dalit women.

Manuski

According to its website6 the core objectives of this organization are:

• Transcending caste barriers through Social Development Program;• Fighting social discrimination through legal and constitutional ways;• Developing Dalit Women leadership;• Sustainability of the social projects and building solidarity among the indi-

viduals and organizations.

The most vocal activists working for Manuski focus mainly on raising trans-national awareness of the continued caste oppression and have social- work


Masters degrees from Mumbai; they are confident and highly articulate. Their language is politicized and they push at every opportunity the need to eradicate caste oppression as the main barrier to social equality and development more widely. We were challenged on our first meeting with coordinators of Manuski:

what do you know about Ambedkarji? Before you proceed any further you need to study his teachings and understand the oppression he fought to erad-icate, our primary fight is to remove caste: poverty and gender inequalities will not be challenged unless caste divisions are abolished.

For them, working alongside other, less- educated, Dalits on a daily basis enables them to enact Buddhist compassion as Ambedkar taught, practically and mean-ingfully. Witnessing and responding to oppression daily also maintains their motivation to continue Ambedkar’s work. They do so by making use of social media technologies with a blog, Facebook page and regular video postings.

Jeevak Project, Bahujan Hitay

In contrast, the Jeevak Project (JP), part of Bahujan Hitay, focuses less on tapping into transnational social media networks, and instead it works to improve the daily lives of women and children by pursuing a series of social development projects. The women who ran the project stated that women felt caste oppression more acutely, with a double suffering because they were Dalits but also women. Programmes supported by the JP include maternal and primary health projects, a crèche, self- help groups, vocational courses (primarily sewing and IT), adult education classes, karate and other sport classes, and study sessions for slum children. The education provision supported by the JP focuses primarily on adult women, but support is also given to younger groups. The JP supports two kindergartens for children living in slums. One is a small room inside a slum settlement and the other is a larger class in the headquarters of the JP in Dapodi. Around thirty children benefit from these kindergartens and the state government provides a small grant to support them. The kindergartens were primarily set up to provide free and low- cost childcare to allow mothers to pursue vocational education and employment. Those children living in the slums who cannot afford tuition fees are offered supplementary education classes, which the JP calls ‘study classes’. These classes are designed to ‘help children to solve difficulties related to studying and to gain confidence in their own ability. In this way children are encouraged to remain at school and not drop out.’ An important part of the work of the JP is self- help groups designed to raise consciousness, to make women aware of why they have suffered oppression in wider society but also within the home in the form of domestic violence. The impact of this work can be seen in the stories of two Dalit women. Rekha is a thirty- four-year- old married woman and domestic worker with three young chil-dren; she has little free time. However, during one of our early visits to her slum, we encountered her at the local Buddhist shrine, taking great pains to decorate


its bars with flowers that she had bought herself. We spoke to her on a few occa-sions during later visits and also visited her home a couple of times, where we would chat to her and her mother- in-law and drink tea. Rekha described her family’s adherence to Buddhism in the following words:

This family became Buddhists in the last generation – it was the same also with my own [natal] family. We are benefitting slowly from the change . . . of course we are still living here! But it is true that my own children are better educated and we have higher hopes for their future because of Bud-dhism. We have belief now that things can change – and this is only pos-sible because we are not Untouchables anymore. Our parents broke free of that. . . . So my own life – no maybe it is not much better than theirs [her Hindu neighbours . . .] but my children are definitely doing better because we believe it is possible. We are not Untouchables, we are Buddhists and we know that we can come up. We can demand what is fairly ours. In that way only our children are doing better . . . I go there [to the community Buddhist shrine] because it reminds me to keep the right attitudes . . . life is still not so easy. My husband is not always working, my father- in-law is also not well. She too [indicating her mother in- law] complains of pain in the legs often. I mostly have to take care of all these people. . . . So I go there to the shrine and I put flowers or say some prayer. That helps me remember what he [Ambedkar] did for us, the hard work he did. He set us free, so we can also work hard to become something now. We are free now to work for our own progress.

Rekha’s neighbour, Mala, told us a similar story. Like Rekha, Mala is in her mid- thirties, and is married with two school- going daughters:

I have two jobs. I am working as a servant- maid [domestic servant] in two houses. My employers are good – I eat there in the mornings, I play with the children sometimes also. They have given me nice saris at the festivals, and when their sons got married. . . . They are good people. Sometimes I help with cooking also. . . . One earlier employer was not good – she did not permit me to enter the kitchen. She also shouted if I entered her bedroom without her, because she was thinking I will take something. She had a different woman to cook, I cleaned the floors only. She did not allow me to enter the kitchen because she is a Brahmin. You see, earlier we people [Dalits] had to suffer this treatment, it was the normal thing. Now we are not Untouchables, now we do not accept it. If we accept it then how can we keep his picture [indicating Ambedkar’s portrait] in our homes? We are not Untouchables, we are Bud-dhists. There is no caste for us. So I did not stay in that house long, and now I have better people [employers . . .] they talk to me like human being.

Both of these women are frank about the fact that they continue to suffer some form of discrimination because of their caste status. As stated in the first section,


conversion to Buddhism has not necessarily changed the way that other people perceive them, and has subsequently not impacted much (if at all) upon the ways in which they are treated by prejudiced members of society. Both women referred to Buddhism (represented by Ambedkar rather than Buddha) as a reason why they should not accept discrimination, and as inspiration for their struggle against unfair treatment. The JP believe that providing women with the language to articulate their oppression is an important step in encouraging them to demand rights for themselves both in wider society but also within the home. It also spurs motivation in women to pursue vocational and other educational classes and to seek a better life for their children.

Bahujan Hitay playing the donor/aid gameBahujan Hitay is well versed in how to attract donor funding outside of the Western Buddhist network. The team, encouraged by Lokamitra, sought donor funding beyond the Karuna Trust. One example of a project funded by the Gates Founda-tion, via Concern International, is the ‘Sure Start’ programme. Sure Start aims to reduce infant and maternal mortality. The JP created a new project aimed at train-ing Dalit women as community health workers. The health workers went door- to-door teaching women about how to look after themselves while pregnant and also their newborn babies. The JP were conscious that the Gates Foundation and its intermediaries may not want to work with a religious organization and created a sub- group inside its main building that worked separately from its other pro-grammes. In an encounter with international visitors from Concern International, it was clear they were unaware of the JP’s Buddhist identity and the influence of Ambedkar’s teachings over the work of the organization. The JP team demon-strated acute awareness of how to package and present themselves to donors. The Sure Start sub- group were aware that the Gates Foundation fund mainly health pro-jects linked to the MDGs and thereby talked about the benefits of their work in relation to improving maternal and infant mortality. Members of this sub- group were not Dalits or Buddhist and had experience working for other NGOs in Pune. The group had been specially recruited by the JP/BH in order to secure funding through a specific donor stream. BH were wary of how their close association to Ambedkar and his politicized Buddhist teachings may appear to secular donors and so were careful to present a more typical/’mainstream’ identity. BH’s website does not display obvious association with Ambedkar or Buddhist teachings compared with that of Manuski. Yet, to their main donor the Karuna Trust, BH freely talks about the influence of Ambedkar.

ConclusionTo a large extent these case studies demonstrate a defiant and confident group of Dalit activists who seem to be taking control of running NGOs furthering Ambedkar’s vision of social justice. Karuna is keen to see this autonomy continue into complete control and independence from the wider Buddhist


network of which they are currently tied into. Lokamitra also recognizes this autonomy as the necessary next step, but has been the driving focus for develop-ment among Pune’s Dalits for over two decades. A significant further shift in self- belief and leadership independence among Dalit activists needs now to be the next stage in achieving Ambedkar’s vision. The case studies, in particular the Jeevak Project, highlight how attention has also been given to improving their positioning within wider social development networks. By tapping into aid networks and forming partnerships with donors increased funding has become available. However, despite the new developmental features of how these Dalit organiza-tions present themselves and operate, there remains a crisis of leadership. These organizations are run by Dalit activists but are still led by a western convert whose commitment to the Dalit cause is highly admirable but whose presence maintains an uncomfortable relationship of dependency. It is as if Ambedkar’s physical pres-ence has been replaced by another male figure of authority. The symbolic and prac-tical support these visionaries provide is clearly an important factor in maintaining the motivation and energy within these organizations. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, continued reliance on a figurehead also leaves intact a hierarchal decision- making structure that seems counter to the objectives of the Dalit struggle that stresses social equality. Furthermore, the fact that the Dalit movement in Pune continues to be led by men does little to push forward the empowerment of women in these communities. Replacing a male leader with a female figurehead may not be the answer; the same hierarchal structure would remain, but the extent to which the symbolic image of male authority limits the life expectations and ambitions of women must be considered. The practical adaptations of Buddhist spirituality to the Dalit cause has brought these communities to an interesting point. New global platforms are opening up that offer opportunities to make the injustices experienced by Dalits more visible and provoke a wider outcry and stronger demands for social change. These new avenues also increase an organization’s access to funding. Increased funding is being used in two ways; to meet the daily material needs of Dalit communities, but also channelled into the growth of a global human rights cam-paign. However, a wave of self- confidence and independence is needed to accompany these opportunities, without which the full, complete empowerment of Dalit people will remain a dream.

Notes1 In 2006 a Dalit family was attacked and several family members brutally murdered in

Khairlanji, a village in the Bandhara region of Maharashtra. Dalit protests against the murders were widespread, for it was claimed that the killings were based to a large extent on caste- based hatred. The final court verdict was announced in 2008, with eight people found guilty of murder.

2 In particular these stories tend to highlight the vulnerable position of poor women, who relate tales of abuse (usually psychological, although occasionally physical) at the hands of their employers (see also Rege 1998).

208 T. Bradley with Z. Bhatewara3 Other evidence also exists to suggest that conversion from Hinduism to other suppos-

edly egalitarian religions does not necessarily eradicate caste distinctions (e.g. Bahrain 2005; Kelly and Hendersen 2005; Moses 1997).

4 This is a pseudonym; this informant preferred not to be named.5 www.karuna.org/editorial.asp?page_id=234.6 www.manuski.org/.

http://www.karuna.org/editorial.asp?page_id=234

http://www.manuski.org/

ConclusionWhich itineraries for Dalits, subalterns and intellectuals?

Cosimo Zene

Years ago, I presented a paper on Bengali/Bangladeshi Dalits at the Forth Decennial ASA Conference (1993),1 and a member of the audience commented: ‘So, you are telling us that these ex- Untouchables are a bunch of losers?’ The remark was perhaps provoked by my cautious way – at times dictated by anthro-pological prudence – not to overemphasize the positive achievements of the group. My memory of much of the discussion has since faded, but I do remember my reply to that very rhetorical question: ‘You might think they are losers, some of them indeed think that they are losers, others think that they have been made losers, but all of them believe that they are human beings, and that they deserve to be treated as such.’ Twenty years hence, I still ask myself whether my own ‘writing on Dalits’ in fact contributes to ‘making them losers’, rather than it being a faithful interpreta-tion of what they so eloquently transmitted to me, including at times through their silence, regarding their ‘being human’. It is to them that I owe my reread-ing of Gramsci and my discovering that Gramsci and Ambedkar can indeed be read in conjunction. It is to my colleagues who contributed to this volume that I owe the shared feeling of being part of an intellectual journey which has laid open a diverse multiplicity of itineraries in the history of Dalits and subalterns. The journey is far from over and, for sure, different and new trajectories will eventually come to light. Meanwhile, I intend to recall here just a few themes which have resurfaced time and again in the chapters of this book, to awaken our thoughts and often to challenge our own way of thinking and writing. I hope to manage this without prospecting a closure, or providing an overall system of interpretation – quite the opposite – so that our attitude remains attentively open to listen to Dalit and subaltern voices, putting into praxis what we have learned thus far from both Ambedkar and Gramsci. There is little doubt that Dalits and subalterns are facing tremendous chal-lenges at present and that their feasible reaction to these will determine future itineraries. One such challenge, as pointed out by Buttigieg, is ‘finding a way past the barriers that prevent them from being heard’, i.e. to overcome those obstacles placed by dominant ideologies to silence, and possibly erase, Dalit and subaltern voices. Silencing, however, does not usually happen with the support of raw hegemonic power and ‘insolence’ of state apparatuses and the law, but

210 C. Zene

rather within the more subtle but still ‘formidable array of institutional and cul-tural mechanisms that enable it . . . to disseminate its worldview, inculcate its values, and mould public opinion’, thus achieving overall control over civil society. One way of rendering this silencing more effective is to extend it to those intellectuals who lend their ‘voice’ to Dalits and subalterns, as Gopal Guru so fittingly demonstrates in Chapter 6, with regards to Ambedkar. This corrobo-rates my point highlighted in Chapter 1 vis- à-vis Ambedkar’s silencing by certain academia and, to some extent, Gramsci’s demise during that same period. However, I am not interested at this stage in ‘undertaking an exploration of the emergence and decline of the figure of Gramsci’ (Rao, in this volume) in South Asia, or indeed ‘to mark the expansion, or “stretching” of the concept of subal-ternity’ (ibid.) as such, or even in comparing ‘the colonial and proto- colonial contexts of India and Italy’. What makes the affinities between Gramsci and Ambedkar relevant is their singularity in concentrating not solely on ideas and concepts (subalternity), notwithstanding the relevance they give to theoretical reflection, but precisely making theory and political praxis, in conjunction, signi-ficant to those who have been ignored by the reigning theory- and policy- makers. In order for silencing to produce the desired result – i.e. nullifying and ‘erasing’ the targeted people – it must be tactically planned and systematically executed via a series of ‘mechanisms’. The most effective of these is humili-ation, according to those who experience this in the first person, as in Limbale’s case reported by Kumar. Here we are not talking about isolated cases of humili-ation, but the constant stream of humiliation which engulfs a person and his/her group as the ‘constant annihilation of the subject’, for whom there can be only shame, both inner and physical, leaving the Untouchable ‘bereft of being’ and enduring ‘ontological hurt’ (Gheeta 2009: 107). I refer in Chapter 1 to the shame felt by Adam and Eve, discovering their ‘nakedness’, having eaten ‘the forbidden fruit of knowledge’. This narrative, similar to others found elsewhere, helps us to make sense of ‘shame’ derived from total ‘ontological dispossession’, including, in the end, preclusion to achieve knowledge by those who inflict humiliation, as a weapon to exercise a continuous control, while the flow of humiliation persists. Usually, the authors of Dalit myths of origin – highlighting a former nobility of the group and justi-fying its low status at present – belong to the priestly caste, as probably did the author of the biblical account. Not only do they manufacture religious scriptures and ritual rules, interpreting them to their own advantage, but they manipulate also popular ‘common sense’, thus gaining a deeper, wider control over subal-terns, as both Buttigieg and Frosini underline.2 This generates a persistence of humiliation procuring in turn shame and culpability, all flowing into stigma, as a permanent sign and seal of the whole cycle. As we have seen in various chapters, stigma can take many different forms, be they racial, physical or religious, but they always justify an ideology of supremacy over the stigmatized, including attitudes of paternalistic ‘compas-sion’. When all scriptural and pseudo- historical interpretations are depleted, a

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more direct and material ‘explanation’ is employed so as to justify the stigma, such as labelling Dalits ‘carrion eaters’, a categorization often derived from the activity of a group, or branding the group ‘vultures’,3 comparing Dalits to scav-engers. Thus, the ‘theological’, ritualistic and ideological impurity and its pollut-ing qualities are in this way rendered more factual and visible. It is as if the ‘invisibility of the Dalit subject’ must be replaced by another visible and dam-aging (imposed) subjectivity. Moreover, the stigma is reinforced by myths, popular culture and folklore, often ‘stolen’ from the stigmatized themselves and used against them, as a group, thus becoming a social stigma and a collective experience of suffering and trauma. This being the case, it would be almost impossible to support that ‘Subalternity is a position without identity’, as Spivak sustains, and it would make more sense to say that ‘subalterns have been robbed of their true identity’.4 Taking into account the heavy burden Dalits and subalterns have had to endure, it is not surprising that their history is characterized not by great events and success but by mere survival. But, what if, at some point, a resolute intellec-tual comes on the scene to awaken the group and motivates them to affirm ‘we must dare to stand for change . . .’, as Bama does in Karukku? What if, even after his death, this intellectual, his words, his writings and, above all his life, still inspire many to say ‘We are not Untouchables anymore’, as Rekha and Mala assert? Not simply as individuals, but as a group, as a ‘collective subject’ search-ing for a ‘community identity- formation’ beyond self- pity, in order to create ‘jam chetna, mass consciousness’, as Pala and also Bradley and Bhatewara remind us? Perhaps the dominant ideology does not give weight to this ‘newly acquired consciousness’ and nothing has changed in the way society sees them; but it is they themselves who have changed, since now they know and are adamant to uphold that they are not Untouchables, not non- humans any longer, but Dalits; that is, humans and crushed. This reconstituted collective (albeit humiliated) subject, has itself been inspired by Ambedkar who, having had the chance to find an individual solution to his Untouchability, never accepted to be made an individual ‘honorary touchable’. It is not surprising that Dalits find it so challenging to overcome obstacles and social prejudices dictated by petty ‘common sense’ when even scholars can comment: ‘What is, for instance, the meaning of being converted to Buddhism apart from trying to insult the Hindus?’ (Deliège 2010: 28).5 Hindus may or may not be insulted, but Dalits certainly are by such a statement. It is all the more ironic that this comment has been pub-lished in a book bearing the title From Stigma to Assertion. If nothing else, one of the major findings the present volume can claim is that while dominant discourse manages to appropriate people’s common sense so as to transform this into a new hegemonic, repressive tool in order to exercise even more power over the people – while staging people’s consent – Ambedkar managed to unmask this ‘trick’ and to re- appropriate people’s common sense, to be used, this time, in favour of the people themselves. The 1927 ‘powerful symbolic act’ (Valmiki 2008: xxvii) of burning the Manusmirti (Laws of Manu) has not remained unanswered, because it did not

212 C. Zene

stop at this ‘act of destruction’, but it has produced a ‘new scripture’ with a dif-ferent set of laws, flowing from a different range of life- stories, testimonios, recounting the life of real human beings and imposing itself on mainstream Indian literature. Kumar has brilliantly portrayed the pain of desubjection in Dalit texts. However, no one can negate that Dalit life- writing is appropriating the rites of literature as a secular religion, imposing itself as écriture and graphé, the latter being the Greek word for writing derived from the use of a pointed instrument (stylus) to engrave the letters on wax tablets. A similar, pointed instrument, such as a nail, was also used to procure a stigma, a permanent wound. Hence, this act of writing becomes itself an affirmation of wounded sub-jectivity, and a powerful challenge to the ‘centres of power and learning’ which prevented Dalits from acquiring knowledge. From the total dispossession pro-cured by stigma, this writing portrays an act of re- possession of the means by which one reaffirms oneself as human, and even more so, the power of asserting oneself in the plural ‘We are!’, thus ‘translating’ the burnt scriptures into a dif-ferent text, or ‘a scripture with a difference’. Equally, the 1930 vigorously symbolic act of claiming temple entry still moti-vates Dalits to demand full access not solely into the ‘religious’, nor even to have returned what in terms of religion was always theirs, but also to gain access into other spheres of state and civil society. The clarity and cogency of these symbolic events suffice to expand Ambedkar’s claim to ‘the political universal as a way to insert Dalits into a global history of dehumanization’ (Rao, this volume), to recognize him as organic intellectual and integral historian not solely for India, but universally, despite the strong opposition from those who would silence also this aspect of Ambedkar’s work. The efforts made to silence him are yet another sign of his status as a world intellectual, no less than the status achieved by Gramsci despite the machinations put in place to silence him, at a time when Italian workers and peasants needed his leadership most. Turning to a different narrative, developed far from India and Italy but concern-ing both, I would like to recall a small episode recounted in the Gospels and known as The Anointing of Bethany, not to provide a biblical, exegetical explanation – there seem to be many contrasting variants to the story – but simply to attempt a disrupting meta- poiesis of a religious writing. A few days prior to his death in Jeru-salem, Jesus pays a visit to Simon the leper in Bethany (meaning ‘house of the poor’ or, in Aramaic ‘house of suffering’). A woman (‘sinful’, according to some versions) enters Simon’s house, breaks a vase of alabaster containing pure nard perfume and anoints Jesus, as a sign of his imminent death. Jesus’ disciples lament the squandering of this expensive perfume which could be ‘spent for the poor’ – the value given is 300 denarii, the equivalent of a year’s salary for a labourer. Leaving explanations to competent biblical scholars, I concern myself only with the gesture of extravagant expenditure by this woman, who reveals love and devo-tion towards the one who is soon to be crucified by the powers of Rome and the ‘priestly caste’. Jesus made himself ‘Untouchable’ by associating with lepers and sinners, and was considered dangerous by claiming ‘knowledge of God’ and ‘entering the temple’ as a master. The precious perfume, nard, or spikenard

Conclusion 213

(Nardostachys Jatamansi, in Sanskrit), came from India, probably with plants har-vested by ‘Untouchables’ and now being used by an (unnamed) woman (a sinner, a prostitute and herself an ‘Untouchable’?) who will be remembered for this kind gesture towards the one condemned to death on a cross. I like to think of the nard as a metaphor of something precious and beneficial coming from India, destined to ‘anoint’ the suffering of subalterns elsewhere, in the form of Ambedkar’s thought and work – and of present- day scholars and Dalits – shedding light with their critical reflection on the life of other subalterns, in dif-ferent places. I find an apt example of this, for instance, in the film documentary Jai Bhim Comrade by Anand Patwardhan6 on the life and death, poetry and music of Dalits, first of Bhimrao Ambedkar himself. It took fourteen years for Patward-han to put this film together and in that time he became acquainted with everyday caste oppression, exploitation and the inequalities suffered by Dalits, as well as with class- caste struggle, communalism and corrupted civil servants and politi-cians, even among Dalit political leaders. He lets the images captured by his camera do the talking, with the voices of Dalits recounting and singing. The Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), a group of young Dalit ‘protest’ singers and poets from Pune, feature prominently in the film. At present some of them are in jail and the remain-der have had to go underground, accused of being part of the Naxalites, thus being silenced for singing poetry- songs ‘uncomfortable’ to the powerful, and now doubly stigmatized, as Dalits and as ‘terrorists’. Perhaps hegemonic powers have since realized that artists and poets are as dangerous to them as ‘terrorists’, and that their poetry can do more damage than arms, but, at this point, even their silence is per-ceived as successful and meaningful. If Dalits and subalterns stop reciting their poems, playing their music, per-forming their dances, singing their songs, humanity would be at loss and the consciousness of our troubled democracies would be impoverished. On the other hand, why should they have to suffer, so as to produce their invaluable art? This can only be a warning to those among us who write about them, to be vigilant not to transform their art and suffering into a steppingstone to progress our own career with our writing. This would certainly be a total negation of the purpose of our endeavours. I am aware of the utopian flavour of these few pages and so, with the help of a good Gramscian scholar and a friend, Francisco Fernández Buey, I will try to justify my resistance to ‘the end of utopia’:

To call ‘utopian’ systematically all those who are the losers of history means to negate half of this history. It is precisely this other half- history which the- friend-of- the-people must recover so that the people itself will come to know that the rights they enjoy today – considered utopian in the past by those in power at that time – are owed primarily to these (momentary) losers of history. The history of utopia of the xx century should teach us, in sum, to distinguish between wishful thinking [hacerse ilusiones] and holding illu-sions [tener ilusiones].

(Buey 2007: 329)

214 C. Zene

Moreover, if to some readers these concluding remarks appear to be dictated by rhetoric or perhaps even by ‘passion’, I can justify myself, not for the rhetoric but for the passion, with a pertinent quote of Gramsci, the very same passage appearing on the opening page of this volume:

The intellectual’s error consists in the belief that it is possible to know without understanding and above all without feeling or being passionate . . . that is, the intellectual can be considered as such if distinct and detached from the people- nation, i.e. without sharing the elementary feelings of the people, understanding them, and then explaining and justifying them within a given historical situation, and linking them dialectically to the laws of history . . . Without this passion – this sentimental connection between intel-lectuals and people- nation – politics- history cannot be made.

(Q11§67)

Finally, I maintain that the challenges of our present times are no less demand-ing than those confronted by Ambedkar and Gramsci during the interwar period. With rampant neo- liberalism dictating its ideology in all spheres of life, includ-ing intellectual labour, and a loss of direction by alternative political–ethical thought, Gramsci’s call for ‘intellectual and moral reformation’ and Ambedkar’s demand for ‘social and moral consciousness of society’ remain as urgent as ever. The diversity of themes tackled in this volume concerning the encounter between Gramsci and Ambedkar on Dalits and subalterns by no means exhausts the full spectrum of possible itineraries which the present dialogue has brought to light. Perhaps the questions raised are as numerous as the tentative answers we have sought to give. Among these questions, one above all should guide our future intellectual and ethical commitment: the conviction that until those ‘at the margins of history’, the ‘crushed people’, become full part of the history and political engagement of their countries and of humanity, our ‘democracies’ will be incomplete and will need to find new ways to welcome ‘the excluded’.

Notes1 The Fourth Decennial ASA Conference on Global and Local Knowledge was celeb-

rated at Oxford in 1993.2 In the Notebooks (Q9§135 – ‘National- popular literature. The “humble” ’), Gramsci

comments on ‘humiliation’ making a crucial distinction between ‘the humble’ (a nominal adjective used in the plural, gli umili) and the ‘humiliated’ (gli umiliati), with reference to the attitude of Italian ‘traditional intellectuals’ towards the people.

3 The term used in Bengali is shokun, a word which is associated with omen, sign and presage.

4 Incidentally, even the negativity of ‘stigma’ can be translated into a positive, ‘soterio-logical’ event, when referring to ‘stigmata’, the signs left on Jesus Christ’s body, fol-lowing the crucifixion. This is hardly the case for the stigma applied to Dalits and subalterns, unless the pernicious law of karma is invoked to justify their suffering, which will eventually procure a better, future life. Meanwhile, the present stigma con-stitutes a reason for humiliation and culpability rather than salvation.

Conclusion 2155 Deliège does however recognize that ‘Untouchables . . . may become a major force

within Indian politics’ (2010: 28).6 On 23 February 2013, Anand Patwardhan, while discussing his film at SOAS, made it

very clear that the issue of caste- class still dominates Indian civil society, that equality for Dalits is still a distant dream, that movements such as KKM are a ‘soft target’ and are ‘accused for thinking aloud’, and that Indian secularism is ‘Hinduism in disguise’.

References

Works of AmbedkarBAWS refers to the collected edition Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: writings and speeches,

which brings together previously published or presented items (original dates indicated here in square brackets) and unpublished works. The publication dates for BAWS volumes used here are as follows: 1 (1979); 2 (1982); 3 (1987); 7 (1990); 9 (1991); 10 (1991); 11 (1992); 12 (1993); 13 (1994); 17 Parts 1 and 3 (2003); 18 (2002); and 19 (2005). Volumes 1–16 were edited by Vasant Moon and published by the Education Department of the Government of Maharashtra, Mumbai; volumes 17–19 were edited by Hari Narke, M.L. Kasare, N.G. Kamble, and Ashok Godgate for the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Source Material Publication Committee of the Government of Maharashra. Material reprinted from BAWS can be found in EW and PSE, and some items have also been reprinted under separate cover.

EW refers to V. Rodrigues (ed.) The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

PSE refers to S. Thorat and N. Kumar (eds), B.R. Ambedkar: perspectives on social exclu-sion and inclusive policies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008.

The references also include some works which have been published in different versions than found in BAWS.

[1916] ‘Castes in India: their mechanism, genesis and development’, BAWS 1: 3–22. Reprinted in EW 241–62.

[1919] ‘Evidence before the Southborough Committee’, in BAWS 1: 247–77. Reprinted in PSE: 65–87.

[1927a] ‘On the Bombay University Act Amendment Bill 4’, in BAWS 2: 61–3.[1927b] ‘Muhad Satyagraha not for water but to establish human rights’, in BAWS 17 (1):

3–48. Text of the speech was also translated in Dangle (ed. 1992).[1928] ‘Hinduche Dharmashtra, tyanche Kshetra, tyanche adhikari’, in BAWS 19:

388–400.[1930a] ‘Concentrate energy and resources on politics and education’, in BAWS 17 (1):

181–2.[1930b] ‘Need for political power for depressed classes’, in BAWS 2: 503–9. Reprinted in

PSE: 131–5.[1930c] ‘A scheme of political safeguards for the protection of depressed classes’, in

BAWS 2: 546–54. Reprinted in PSE: 143–53; EW: 369–81.

References 217[1933] ‘Nothing can emancipate the outcastes except the destruction of caste system’,

BAWS 17 (1): 230.[1936] Annihilation of Caste, in BAWS 1: 23–96. Partially reprinted in EW: 263–305.[1938] ‘Khoti Nashta Karanyche Mi hati kankan Bandhale ahe’, in BAWS 18 (2): 161–2.[1942] ‘Grievances of the scheduled castes’, in BAWS 10: 404–42. Reprinted in PSE:

206–34.[1943a] Mr Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables, in BAWS 9: 396–433.

Reprinted as ‘Problems of the Untouchables in India’, in PSE: 235–53.[1943b] ‘Ranade, Gandhi, and Jinnah’, in BAWS 1: 203–40. Reprinted in EW: 121–9 and

republished separately in 2009 by Siddharth Books, Delhi.[1943c] ‘Labour and parliamentary democracy’, in BAWS 10: 106–12.[1944] ‘Unity is of supreme importance’, in BAWS 17 (3): 319–21.[1945a] ‘Communal deadlock and how to solve it’, in BAWS 1: 355–79. Reprinted in

PSE: 254–62.[1945b] What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, in BAWS 9: i–387,

437–89; Chapter 11 ‘Gandhism’ is reprinted in EW: 149–72.[1947] ‘States and minorities: memorandum submitted to the constituent assembly on the

safeguards for the scheduled castes’, in BAWS 1: 391–450. Reprinted in PSE: 298–332.[1948a] Who Were the Shudras?, in BAWS 7: 1–227.[1948b] The Untouchables: who were they and why they became Untouchables, in BAWS

7: 333–83. Preface is reprinted in EW: 114–18.[1949] ‘Adoption of the Constitution’, in BAWS 13: 1161–219.[1951] ‘Asprusha Samajawar honarya Julumana dalit Pratinidhini wach fodali pahije’, in

BAWS 18 (2): 230–2.[1954] ‘My philosophy of life’, in BAWS 17 (3) 503. Also translated in Naik (2003).[1957] The Buddha and his Dhamma, published as BAWS 11. Also published in 1984 by

Siddharth Publications, Bombay; also 2011 critical edition.(1987a) ‘Buddha or Karl Marx’, in BAWS 3: 441–62. Reprinted in EW 173–89.(1987b) ‘Revolution and counter- revolution in ancient India’, in BAWS 3: 151–437.(1992 [1927]) ‘Speech at Mahad’, in A. Dangle, (ed.) Poisoned Bread: translations from

modern Marahti Dalit Literature, Mumbai: Orient Longman. Translated by R. Sirkar, previously translated in [1927]: BAWS 17 (1): 3–48.

(1993) Waiting for a Visa, in BAWS 12. Republished in 2003 as Autobiographical Notes.(2003) Autobiographical Notes, Pondicherry: Navayana. Originally published in 1993 as

Waiting for a Visa in BAWS 12.(2011) The Buddha and His Dhamma: a critical edition, ed. A. Singh Rathore and A.

Verma, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Ambedkar’s text previously published as BAWS 11.

Works of Gramsci

Prison Notebooks

In Italian

(1975) Quaderni del carcere, ed. V. Gerratana, 4 vols, Turin: Einaudi.(2007) Quaderni del carcere volume 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), ed. G.

Cospito and G. Francioni, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.

218 References

In English translation

FSPN refers to Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. D. Boothman, London: Lawrence and Wishart and Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995.

PN1 refers to Prison Notebooks Volume 1, ed. and trans. by J.A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. A translation of Notebooks 1 and 2.

PN2 refers to Prison Notebooks Volume 2, ed. and trans. by J.A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. A translation of Notebooks 3–5.

PN3 refers to Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, ed. and trans. by J.A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. A translation of Notebooks 6 and 8.

SCW refers to Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. D. Forgacs and G. Nowell- Smith, trans. W. Boelhower, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

SPN refers to Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell- Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart and New York: International Publish-ers, 1971.

Other works

SPW1 refers to Selections from Political Writings: 1910–1920, ed. Q. Hoare, trans. J. Matthews, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

SPW2 refers to Selections from Political Writings: 1921–1928, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.

(1966a [1921]) ‘Negazione di Dio’, in Socialismo e Fascismo. L’Ordine Nuovo 1921–1922, Turin: Einaudi.

(1966b [1921]) ‘Un partito di masse’, Socialismo e Fascismo. L’Ordine Nuovo 1921–1922, Turin: Einaudi.

(1971 [1930]) ‘Alcuni temi della Quistione Meridionale’, in La costruzione del Partito comunista. 1923–1926, Turin: Einaudi. Translated as Gramsci 1978, 1995.

(1977 [1916]) ‘Socialism and culture’, in SPW1.(1978 [1930]) ‘Some aspects of the Southern Question’, in SPW2. An alternative trans-

lation was published under separate cover in 1995. Translated from Gramsci 1971 [1930].

(1980a [1916]) ‘Buscaje’, in Cronache torinesi 1913–1917, ed. S. Caprioglio, Turin: Einaudi.

(1980b [1916]) ‘Le Mare’, in Cronache torinesi 1913–1917, ed. S. Caprioglio, Turin: Einaudi.

(1985) Selections from the Cultural Writings, ed. D. Forgacs and G. Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

(1987 [1920]) ‘Operai e contadini’, in L’Ordine Nuovo 1919–1920, ed. V. Gerratana and A.A. Santucci, Turin: Einaudi.

(1992) Lettere 1908–1926, ed. A.A. Santucci, Turin: Einaudi.(1994a) Letters from Prison (2 vols), ed. F. Rosengarten, trans. R. Rosenthal, New York:

Columbia University Press.(1994b [1920]) ‘The drunken solider’, in Pre- Prison Writings, ed. R. Bellamy, trans. V.

Cox, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(1995 [1930]) The Southern Question, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera. Translated by P.

Verdicchio. An alternative translation is available in SPW2.(2008a) ‘Lettera a Giulia Schucht, 6 marzo 1924’, in Scritti sulla Sardegna, ed. G. Melis,

Nuoro: Ilisso.

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Ackerman, Bruce 67Action Party (Italy) 40, 119Adhikari, Gangadhar 56–7n11Agamben, Giorgio 87, 167Ahmad, Aijaz 14, 83Ahmad, Mazaffar 57n14Albanians 130Althusser, Louis 88Ambedkar, B.R.: autobiographical

writing 165; compared with Gramsci 1–2, 4–5, 14, 18–19, 27, 45–6, 55, 87, 90, 91, 99–100, 153, 209, 214; as intellectual 5–6, 21, 22, 85–6, 88, 91 (and counter-hegemony 93–6; epistemological transgression 89, 93, 94; organic passage of 96, 97–9; universal thinker 21, 55n1, 89); and hegemonic language 10–11; as inspiration 204, 205, 206, 207, 211; reception in India 3, 4, 5, 14–15, 44, 210 (call to spread his writings 150); see also Buddhism; caste; constitutional law; education; hegemony; Marxism; politics; religion

Anand, S. 69Anderson, Benedict 104, 149Anderson, Perry 2, 83, 188, 190anthropology 103, 104, 105, 110–11; and

Sardinia 132Aprile, Pino 134, 140n6Arnold, David 155Ashoka 50Atiyah, Patrick 68Austin, John 63Avanti! (newspaper) 120

Bagul, Baburao 165Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha 47Bahrain, Joseph E. 208n3

Bahujans 95–6, 98; Bahujan Hitay 200, 203; see also caste

Balsa, Javier 183Bama (author of Karukku) 26–7, 152–3,

156, 211Bandhumadhav, Bapu 147Bangladesh 15Baratta, Giorgio 13, 24, 32n3, 156Barbero, Alessandro 130Barthes, Roland 128n6Barzellotti, Giacomo 123Basu, Tapan 14Baxi, Upendra 87Beales, Derek 133–4Bedekar, Dinkar Keshav 58n23Bellini, Camilla 186, 196n1Bellwinkel-Schempp, Maren 32n4, n6Beltz, Johannes 32n7, 198Benjamin, Walter 87Bentham, Jeremy 62–3Berlinguer, Enrico 2Bernadini, Gene 120Béteille, André 94Beverley, John 116Bhagavad Gita 49–50, 58n18Bhattacharya, Baidik 3, 116Bhole, B. 98Biagini, Eugenio 133–4Bombay: activism in 47–8, 56n3; Bombay

City Improvement Trust (BCIT) 47, 56n7

Bonaparte, Louis 29Borg, Carmel 9Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio 195, 196Boulanger, Ernest 29Bourdieu, Pierre 22–3, 70, 107–10, 115,

153bourgeoise: bourgeois states 177, 179–82;

and religion 29–30; see also class

Index

234 IndexBrahmanism 8, 17, 18, 99, 198; see also

Dalits; Hinduism; religionBrennan, Timothy 76, 116, 156Bresciani, Antonio 76Britain: Marxist historians in 2; strikes in

78, 79, 80; see also colonialism; Hobsbawm, Eric

Brown, Wendy 128n6Brueck, Laura R. 148, 155, 156Brunetti, Mario 130Buddhism: and Ambedkar 4, 5, 7–9, 18,

20, 32, 57n16, 60, 70–1, 98, 197, 198–9 (‘Buddha or Karl Marx’ 49–50; and Sangharakshita 203); and Brahmanism 17, 198; and Dalits 8–9, 20, 31–2, 43, 52, 55, 60, 70, 198–202, 205 (and developmental turn 202–3, 206–7); and Marxism 7, 56n6; see also Hinduism; NGOs; religion

Buey, Francisco Fernández 213Bukharin, Nikolai 7–8, 16, 39Bulferetti, Domenico 128, 139

caesarism 181, 182; see also fascismCafiero, Carlo 136Calvinism 195Cammett, John 13Capital (Marx) see Marxismcapitalism 54–5, 58n21, n23, 82–3, 89, 96,

140; see also class; communism; labor; Marxism

Capitani, Lorenzo 9Capuzzo, Paolo 13, 32n5caste 17; abolition of 178, 179 (in

Buddhism 200, 204); Ambedkar on 43, 50, 85, 89–90, 98–9, 146–7, 148, 154 (caste-class 17–18, 48, 49, 51–2, 53–4, 55, 147); ‘Caste-Dalit Question’ 5, 13, 24; class-caste 17–18, 21, 48, 51–2, 53, 55, 77, 81, 82, 85, 153, 215n (applied to Europe 78, 83–4, 85); Gramsci on 81, 82–3, 194 (intellectuals as 83–4, 85, 86, 190); in Indian politics 56n5, 62, 64–5, 67, 69–71, 96, 98–9; and intellectual hegemony 92–3, 148; see also Bahujans; Brahmanism; class; Dalits; Shudras

Catholic Action 186, 192–3Cavoli, Alfio 139, 141n14Cavour, Camillo Benso di 131Chakrabarty, Dipesh 44–5, 58n21, 83Chalam, K.S. 77Chandavankar, Rajnarayan 2, 149Chatterjee, Partha 3, 5–6, 51, 87–8, 160

Chaturvedi, Vinayak 2, 3, 116chawls 47, 56n8Childs, Peter 149Chokha Mela 98Choudary, Bahinabai 91Christian Democrats 193Christianity 30, 31, 186, 187–96; see also

Jesus Christ; Roman CatholicismCialdini, Enrico 130cinema 31, 32n13civil society 29, 37–8, 94, 99, 153, 155,

179, 180, 181Clark, Martin 118class: class-caste 17, 21, 45, 48–9, 51–2,

53, 55, 77, 81, 82, 85, 147, 153, 215n (applied to Europe 78, 83–4, 85; distinguished 50); and culture 107, 121, 175, 176, 177; and habitus 108; and hegemony 123, 150, 152, 153–4, 181; subalternity 36, 37–8, 106, 114, 116, 117, 127, 145, 149, 158–9, 160, 183 (and capitalism 140); see also bourgeoisie; caste; intellectuals; revolutions; subalterns; working class

Colao, Floriana 139, 141n14Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 60colonialism 17, 18, 20–1, 24, 25, 26,

55n1–2, 145–6, 149, 150; in Algeria 108–9; anticolonialism 51, 55; and anthropology 105–6; and Brahmins 77–8, 79–80, 81, 83, 86, 89, 93–4; continuity with postcolonial India 153; and southern Italy 132, 134; see also postcolonialism; southern Italy; ‘Southern Question’

common sense 22–3, 25, 103–4, 106, 107, 110–15, 117, 124–7, 176–8, 179, 182, 210, 211; and detotalizing literature 153; and folklore 10, 23, 28, 113–14, 125, 173–4, 175; and philosophy 6, 7, 112–13, 179; and religion 8, 125–7, 174; see also Sanskritization

communism 50; in India 46–7, 48, 50, 51, 55n2, 56–7n11; Italian Communist Party (PCI) 31, 32n5, 38; in Russia (Leninism 48, 50, 55, 155; Soviet Revolution 29, 182; Stalinism 67); see also Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl; Marxism

Comte, Auguste 76Congress Party (India) 46, 47, 50, 56, 60,

61, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 91, 96, 99constitutional law 18–19, 59–62, 69–71;

constitutional liberalism 62–5; social

Index 235reform 66–9, 70, 90–1; see also democracy; law

Contursi, Janet A. 32n4, 199counter-hegemony 93–6Coutinho, Carlos Nelson 155, 156–7Criminal Tribes Act (1871) 17criminology 119–20, 121Croce, Benedetto 7, 192culture 9, 103, 104–5, 111, 115n2, 154;

and Christianity 188; culturalism 140; and Gramsci 105–7, 112, 113, 115, 124, 152, 175–6 (rural 114–15); and meaning regime 176–7; ‘Socialism and culture’ 16, 38–9, 41–2n2; see also common sense; habitus

Dalit Lekhak Sangh (DLS) 147, 148Dalit Panthers 47, 155Dalits 1, 4–5, 6, 8–9, 11, 12, 31, 80–1, 87,

148, 156; and Buddhism 8–9, 20, 31–2, 43, 52, 55, 60, 70, 198–202, 205 (and developmental turn 202–3, 206–7); caste-class 17–18, 48, 49, 51–2, 53–4, 55, 147; and common sense 23, 210; consciousness 21–2, 26–7, 95–6, 148, 154–5, 156; Dalit Question 1, 5, 11, 12, 13, 24; and education 10, 147; and Gandhi 79–80, 146; as global 14–15, 46, 54–5, 58n24 (other minorities 19, 22); in independent India 146–7 (Khairlanji massacre 201, 207n1; present day 201, 208n3, 213, 215n); and law 58n19, 59–60 (representation 60–2, 63–5, 69; social reform 66–9, 70); literature of 26–8, 145, 146, 147–8, 149, 150–3, 154–7, 158, 163 (criticism 163–4, 170; and detotalization 153; self-narratives 164–5, 167, 168, 169–70, 212); and Marxism 17, 18, 45, 46, 47, 148 (communism 46–7, 48, 56n4); as non-Hindu 54, 55; NGOs 197–8, 199–200 (Jeevak Project 200, 204, 206, 207; Manuski 198, 199, 200, 203–4); sahitya movement 47; transformation 86); origins of untouchability 147, 161–3, 170; as Shudras 53, 58n24; silencing 209–10; and stigma 18, 24, 27–8, 54–5, 58n19, 210–11, 212; as subalterns 4, 11, 12, 14, 43, 44, 45, 55, 145–6, 150, 158, 213; see also Ambedkar, B.R.; caste; Sanskritization; untouchability, origins of

Dange, Shripad Amrit 51, 57n14, 58n23Dangle, Arjun 148, 150, 169

Davis, John A. 137de Certeau, Michel 27De Sanctis, Francesco 39de Ste Croix, G.E.M. 189, 196n5Debjani, Ganguly 87Deepak Project 198, 200Del Boca, Lorenzo 134Deleuze, Gilles 55n1Deliège, Robert 22, 211, 215nDelisle Road Friends’ Circle 47, 48demagogy 97democracy 19–20, 41–2n2; and

Sankritization 23–4; see also constitutional law; temple entry movement

Depressed Classes 47–8, 55Depretis, Agostino 141n8Derrida, Jacques 2Deshpande, G.P. 7, 14Deshpande, S.V. 48Dewey, John 61, 63Dhasal, Namdeo 145Di Fiore, Gigi 130Díaz-Salazar, Rafael 8discourse analysis 2Dolas, Avinash 152Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 187D’Souza, Joseph 201Du Vachat, Leon 137Ducati, Bruno 194Dudley Jenkins, Laura 14Duggan, Christopher 141n8Duke, Joseph 201Dumont, Louis 22, 89

economics 11, 14, 106–7, 140; see also capitalism; class; communism; Lorianism; Marxism

education 9–10, 77, 79, 178; and NGOs 203–4

Engels, Friedrich 38, 82, 106–7, 117, 128n3, 178–9, 184, 188, 191; see also communism; Marx, Karl; Marxism

enlightenment (modernity) 5, 6, 39Erikson, Erik 167

factory councils 36; unions 48, 56n3Fanon, Frantz 57n13fascism 9, 14, 19, 29, 60, 66–7, 181, 182;

National Socialism 17; and positivists 120

feminism 11, 12; see also gender; womenFerri, Enrico 120, 128n4feudalism 30, 186, 188, 189, 190

236 IndexFeuerbach, Ludwig 176Filippini Michele 2Fiori, Giuseppe 141n12, n15First World War 182Fitzgerald, Timothy 8, 199, 202folklore 6, 9, 10, 23, 25, 28, 113–14, 115,

125, 155, 173–5; see also common sense; religion

Fontana, Benedetto 151, 154Fordism 9Foucault, Michel 2, 55n1, 87, 89France 136, 184n11; see also French

Revolution; JacobinsFrancese, Joseph 10Franciscans 186–7Freire, Paulo 10French Revolution 16, 28, 29, 39, 42n2,

177, 180, 186; see also France; JacobinsFreud, Sigmund 27, 162–3Friends of the Western Buddhist Order

203; see also Western BuddhismFuchs, Martin 32n7Fulton, John 179

Gaeta 130–1Gaikwad, Lakshman 169Gaikwad, R.D. 91Galanter, Marc 69Gandhi, Mohandas K. 26, 53–4, 79–80,

85–6, 88, 90–1, 98, 146, 187Garibaldi, Giuseppe 130, 131Garud, Baburao 48gemeinschaft 104, 115gender 57n15, 159; see also feminism;

womenGentile, Giovanni 7, 9, 112, 115gesellschaft 105Ghate, G.A. 57n14Gheeta, V. 210Gibson, Mary 119Goethe, Johann 162Gorky, Maxim 48, 162Gramsci, Antonio: activism 11–12, 36, 37,

38; and Ambedkar 1–2, 4–5, 14, 18–19, 27, 45–6, 55, 87, 90, 91, 99–100, 153, 214; applications of 13–14 (as world intellectual 212); imprisonment 10, 32n8; on India 20–1 (caste 81, 82–4, 85; politics 69, 70, 79–80, 81–2, 83, 86, 187); and Italian unification 118–19, 129–30, 132, 134–5 (and Gramsci’s lived experience 130–3, 138–9); methodology 156; reception in South Asia 2–4, 13, 27, 87–8, 99, 100, 210

(Subaltern Studies 2–3, 13, 45, 158, 159, 160); see also bourgeoise; civil society; class; colonialism; common sense; culture; education; folklore; hegemony; integral historians; intellectuals; language; Marxism; modern prince; nationalism; organic intellectuals; philosophy; religion; subalterns; war of position

Gramsci, Francesco 130, 131, 141n12Gramsci, Gennaro 130, 141n15Gribaudi, Gabriella 134Grimm, Jacob and Wilheim 113Grote, George 67Grundrisse (Marx) 58n21Guerri, Giordano B. 134Guha, Ranajit 2, 13, 81, 83, 87, 94–5, 116,

145–6, 129, 158, 159–60, 162

habitus 22–3, 107–10, 115Hahn Rafter, Nicole 119Hall, Stuart 2, 78, 116Harijan identity 164Harrowitz, Nancy A. 120Hart, H.L.A. 63Hartman, Geoffrey 153Hearder, Harry 118Hegel, G.W.F. 180hegemony 9, 40, 100, 116–17, 140n5,

181–2; Brahminical 89–90, 93–4 (and intellectuals 92–3; Lorianism 117; and women 90–1); and class 150, 151, 152, 153–4, 183; consent 24, 78, 79, 139–40, 157, 178; and counter hegemony 95–6, 152 (failed hegemony 160); crisis of 84–5; and language 10–11; and religion , 179–80, 182 (see also Brahmins; colonialism); and silencing 209–10 (see also common sense); and Southern Question 13, 14, 125; and stigma 18, 24

Hendersen, Christian 208n3Herrin, Judith 187, 189Hind Mazdoor Sabha 56n3Hinduism 14, 17, 26, 43, 49–50, 51, 52,

54, 57–8n18, 80–1, 163, 211–12; see also Brahmanism; Buddhism; Dalits; religion; temple entry movement

Hindutva 14historiography 2–3, 27, 44–5, 159–61,

162–4, 165, 170; see also integral historians

Hobsbawm, Eric 2, 42n3, 122Holocaust 17

Index 237Human Rights Watch 15humiliation 28, 165–7, 168, 169–70, 210,

214n; see also Dalits; stigma; subalterns; trauma

Huxley, Aldous 20–1, 75, 76, 77–9, 80–1, 82, 83, 85, 86

idealism 9, 180, 181identity 27, 38, 211–12; see also inter-

subjectivity; subjectivityImbornone, Jole S. 20imperialism see colonialismIndependent Labour Party (India) 46, 47,

60, 91, 97–8, 99India: communism 46–7, 48, 50, 51, 55n2,

56–7n11; constitution 12, 60, 69, 146; Dalits in 146–7 (present day 201, 208n3, 213, 215n); intellectuals in 75–6, 81–2, 92–3, 148–9, 157 (see also Ambedkar, B.R); and Italy 20–1, 78, 83, 84–5; nationalism 26, 44, 145–6, 149–50; see also Brahmanism; Buddhism; Dalits; Hinduism; postcolonial theory; subalterns

Indian Communist Party 46–7, 56n3Innes, C. Lyn 156integral historians 9, 14, 23, 41, 159, 161,

170; Ambedkar as 14; and Dalits 17, 156; see also historiography; intellectuals; organic intellectuals

intellectuals 7, 12, 20–1, 29, 30, 75–6, 88–9, 106, 125, 154, 214; as caste 81, 83–4, 85, 86, 190; in India 82, 92–3, 148–9, 157; positivists as 117–18, 119–20, 121, 122–3, 12, 127; and religion 30, 31, 125, 126–7, 177, 185, 186, 187–91, 192–3, 194–6; and subalterns 23, 24, 25, 28–9, 41, 76, 106, 125, 129, 139, 211 (and Southern Italy 117–18, 119–21, 122–4, 139; and hegemony 90–3); and the USA 194–5; see also Amedkar, B.R.; integral historians; organic intellectuals; Lorianism; philosophy

International Dalit Solidarity Network 15International Relations 13–14inter-subjectivity 7; see also subjectivityinterwar period 5, 6, 29, 45–6Islam 50, 194, 196n7; Muslims 62, 63;

Muslim League 65, 66Italian Communist Party (PCI) 31, 32n5,

38Italian Socialist Party (PSI) 117, 118, 119,

120, 121, 134

Italy: politics of (Action Party 40, 119; Communist Party (PCI) 31, 32n5, 38; Socialist Party (PSI) 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 134; Moderates 40, 119; Popular Party 191, 192, 193; and Roman Catholicism 191–3); translatability with India 78, 83, 84–5; see also fascism; Lazzaretti, David; politics; religion; Risorgimento; southern Italy; Southern Question

Ives, Peter 10, 11

Jacobins 177, 179, 180, 181, 186; see also French Revolution

Jadhav, Narendra 168Jaffrelot, Christophe 69Jaiswal, Suvira 12Jambudvipa Trust 197, 203Janata (newspaper) 48Jaware, A. 87Jeevak Project 200, 204, 206, 207Jefferson, Thomas 63Jesus Christ 212–13, 214; see also

Christianity‘Jewish Question’ 5, 12–13, 24, 120;

Holocaust 17

Kabir Kala Manch (KKM) 215nKabyle people 23, 107, 108–9Kamble, Shivram J. 17Kamble, Z. 93, 95Kamgar Vangmay Prasarak Mandali

(KVPM) 48, 56n3, 57n12Karukku (Bama) 26–7, 152–3, 156, 211Karuna Trust 197, 203, 206–7Kasbe, Raosaheb 7Kaviraj, Sudipta 50, 57n17, 87, 88, 89–90,

94Keer, Dhananjay 198Kelly, Laura 208n3Khairlanji massacre 201, 207n1Khairmode, C.B. 90, 91, 98, 99Khoti system 91, 97Kiernan, Victor G. 91King, Sallie B. 32n4Kinsey, John 7Kipling, Rudyard 132, 138, 140n4Kosambi, D.D. 58n23Koselleck, Rheinhart 44Kulkarni, R. 91Kumar, Aishwary 87Kumar, Narender 59

La Rocca, Tommaso 8

238 Indexlabor 45–6, 47, 48–9, 50, 51– 54, 55,

58n21; see also class; Marxism; working class

Labriola, Antonio 117, 128n3Lacan, Jacques 3Laclau, Ernesto 183Landy, Marcia 14language 9, 10–11, 28, 173–6, 184n2, n5;

n7; Latin 190, 196n5; vernacular 30, 190

Lanson, Gustave 190law 18–19, 59–60; representation of Dalits

60–2, 63–5, 69 (social reform 66–9, 70); see also constitutional law

Laws of Manu 211–12Lazzaretti, David 16, 17, 24, 25–6, 41,

42n3, 121–4, 124, 127, 128n7, 129–30, 138–9, 140, 141n9, n10, n11; early years 130, 131, 140n3; Gramscian interpretation 135–8; see also millenarianism; religion; Roman Catholicism

Lefèvre, Frédéric 20, 75, 76–7, 78, 83Leninism 48, 50, 55, 155Levinas, Emmanuel 19, 28, 167–9Levinson, Daniel 64Liguori, Guido 32n2, 154Limbale, Sharankumar 28, 169, 210Lincoln, Abraham 60–1literature: Dalit 26–8, 145, 146, 147–8,

149, 150–3, 154–7, 158 (criticism 163–4, 170; and detotalization 153; self-narratives 164–5, 167, 168, 169–70, 212); philosophical novels 16, 41; popular 9

Locke, John 68Lokamitra 203, 206, 207Lokhande, Narayan Meghaji 48Lombroso, Cesare 41, 119–20, 121, 122–3,

128n4, 132, 139Lorianism (Achille Loria) 20, 76, 117–18,

119–20, 121, 122–3, 127, 128n2, n3; n4Ludden, David 2–3Lutherism 188–9Luxemburg, Rosa 50, 55n2

McDougall, James 115n5McGregor, Alexander 32n13Machiavelli, Niccolò 151MacIntyre, Alisdaire 165McNally, Mark 14Madison, James 64, 65Mahad water struggle 99Mahar Samaj Seva Sangh 47

Mahfouz, Naguib 155Maine, Henry 68Malakas, Tan 196Malatesta, Errico 136Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao 137Manjapra, Kris 51, 55n2Manuski 198, 199, 200, 203Manzoni, Alessandro 35Marcias, Guiseppina 131Marx, Karl 38, 45, 106–7, 155, 178–9;

Loria a substitute for 117; see also communism; Engels, Friedrich; Marxism

Marxism 1, 2, 3, 7, 174; and Ambedkar 7–8, 18, 19, 45–6, 47, 51–2, 67, 68 (and Communists 46–7, 48); and Buddhism 7, 56n6; of Dalits 17, 45, 46, 148; ‘Eastern’ 48, 50–1, 55, 56–7n11, 58n23; and Gramsci 7–8, 18, 37, 45, 46, 47, 149, 152, 174 (Gramscian form 3, 45, 176, 179; and PCI 32n5); and Jewish emancipation 12; and labor 47, 48–9, 50, 51– 54, 55, 58n21; see also class; communism; Engels, Friedrich; labor; Marx, Karl; working class

Mascuch, Michael 165Mauss, Marcel 107Mayo, Peter 9, 10Mazzini,‎ Giuseppe 130Meerut Conspiracy Case 56–7n3, n11, n14Menon, Dilip M. 8, 14Mezzadra, Sandro 32n5Mignoli, Guido 193Mignolo, Walter D. 116millenarianism 16, 25–6, 122–3, 124,

135–6, 138–9, 140; see also Lazzaretti, David

mimicry 21–2, 23minority rights 47, 59, 60–2, 63–4; see

also constitutional law; NGOs; subalterns

Minority Rights Group 15Mirajkar, S.S. 57n14Moderates (Italian political party) 40, 119modern prince 26, 151, 183–4Moffatt, Michael 22Monasticism 30, 189–90Moon, Vasant 155More, Ramachandra 48Moscato, Antonio 141n10, n13Moses, Brindavan C. 208n3Mother (Gorky) 48Mumbai see BombayMurthy, Anantha 4

Index 239Naipaul, V.S. 166Nandy, Ashis 163Narayan, Badri 12National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights

15nationalism 54–5, 104–5, 155; Indian 26,

44, 49, 50–1, 145–6, 149–50; see also Risorgimento

Natrajan, Balmurli 14Navariya, Ajay 148Nehru, Jawaharlal 56n3Nepal 15New Left Review 2NGOs: and Buddhism 197–8, 199–200,

201; funding 197, 198, 200, 206Niceforo, Alfredo 120Nietzsche, Friedrich 27, 162nonviolence 54, 58n18Nouvelles Littéraires 75

O’Hanlon, Rosalind 150, 161Omvedt, Gail 1, 46, 56n4, n5, 58n23, 68Orano, Paolo 120, 128n4, n5organic intellectuals 9, 10, 80, 84, 85,

88–9, 92, 100, 125, 187; Ambedkar as 21, 22, 85–6, 88, 91, 212 (epistemological transgression 89; organic passage 96, 97–8); monks as 30, 189

Orientalism see Said, EdwardOttaviano, Chiara 76overdetermination 180

Pakistan 15Palshikar, Sanjay 166–7Paranjpe, Suhas 56n10Paris Commune 136Parulekar, S.V. 57n14passive revolution 19, 29, 69, 80, 81, 82,

85, 86, 100, 119, 125, 180–1Pastor, Ludwig 185Patil, Sharad 58n23patriarchy 49, 90Patwardhan, Anand 17, 213, 215npeasants, in India 94–5, 97–8, 145–6Periyar E.V. Ramasamy 3Petacco, Arrigo 138, 141n11, n16philosophy 14, 184n2, 186; Gramsci’s

view of 6–7, 173–5, 173–6, 177, 178, 179, 184n5, 186, 192 (and folklore 10; philosophy of praxis 7, 8, 14, 20, 23, 156, 177); see also idealism

Phule, Jotirao 3, 17, 57n16, 93, 163Pignato, Rosario 9

Pirandello 76Pitocco, Franco 136, 141n14Plato 186politics 11, 14; Indian (and Ambedkar

11–12, 19–20, 43, 58n19, 59–65, 69, 146; and caste 56n5, 62, 64–5, 67, 69–71, 96, 98–9; Communist Party 46–7, 56n3; Gramsci on 69, 70, 79–80, 81–2, 187; Independent Labour Party 46, 47, 60, 91, 97–8, 99; Socialist Party 48; unions in 48, 56n); Italian (Action Party 40, 119; Communist Party (PCI) 31, 32n5, 38; Socialist Party (PSI) 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 134; Moderates 40, 119; Popular Party 191, 192, 193; and Roman Catholicism 191–3); see also Congress Party; communism

Popular Party (Italy) 191, 192, 193Portelli, Hugues 8positivism 9, 24, 117–18, 119–21, 123,

132; and historiography 27, 28, 162, 163, 170; and law 62–3

postcolonial theory 2, 5, 45, 116, 146, 149; see also colonialism

Prakash, Gyan 146, 149Prarthana Samaj 48Prashad, Vijay 146Prison Notebooks see Gramsci, Antonioproletariat see working classPune see Buddhism

Queen, Christopher S. 32n4, 198, 199

race 21, 24, 78, 84, 116, 117, 159, 183; racism 17, 24, 117, 118, 119–21, 127, 159, 210

Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan 89Rajwade, Itihasacharya V.K. 51Ramdas 92Rancierem, Jacques 44Rawat, Ramnarayan S. 148Rawls, John 62rebellion see revolutionReddy, Deepa S. 15Reformation 30Rege, Sharmila 11, 12, 207n2religion: Ambedkar’s view of 1, 4, 5, 7–9,

14, 30 (see also Buddhism); and anticolonialism 51; and the bourgeoisie 29–30; and common sense 125–7, 177, 179; fascist view of Catholicism 9; Gramsci on 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 27, 28–9, 116, 117, 127, 185–7, 194–6

240 Indexreligion continued (Catholicism 9, 27, 28, 30–1, 117, 155,

185, 186–8, 189–94; Indian 79–80, 194; Jacobin 179; millenarianism 16, 25–6, 122–3, 124, 135–6, 138–9, 140); and intellectuals 30, 157, 185–6, 187–91, 192, 195–6; and Italian politics 191–3; and Jewish emancipation 12, 13; the modern state 179, 180, 181, 182–4; and nationalism 105; and ‘Southern Question’ 12, 13, 24; secular religion 16, 157; and subalterns 25, 28–9, 30, 158 (Lorianism 117, 122–3); in the USA 194–5; see also Brahmanism; Buddhism; common sense; Dalits; Hinduism; Lazzaretti, David; Roman Catholicism

Renan, Ernest 191revolution 36–7, 36–7, 39–41, 84–5; and

habitus 109; French Revolution 16, 28, 29, 39, 42n2, 177, 180, 186; Soviet Revolution Soviet Revolution 29, 182

Risorgimento 16, 24, 25, 28–9, 81, 117, 118–19, 125, 177; and Gramsci’s experience 130–3; and hegemony 40, 81; and Lazzaretti 122, 123–4, 125, 129–30; see also nationalism; southern Italy

Rodrigues, Valerian 63, 70Roman Catholicism 9, 25, 27, 28, 31,

187–8; Catholic Action 186, 192–3; as cosmopolitan 155, 190; intellectuals 30, 125, 177, 185, 186–91, 192, 194, 195–6; and Lazzaretti 26, 122, 127, 136, 137; modernism 191–2; and subalternity 117, 193 (and caste oppression 152; and common sense 125–7); in USA 32n13, 194; see also Christianity; Lazzaretti, David; religion

Romanticism 104, 105Rome, Classical 41Roy, Ajit 83Roy, M.N. 50, 55n2, 56n3, 57n11, n17,

196

Sahlins, Mashall 111Sahota, Guriqbal S. 148Said, Edward 85, 121, 149, 155, 156Salmeri, Stefano 9Samata Sainik Dal 47Sangharakshita 203Sanskritization 22, 23, 28, 95–6; see also

common sense; DalitsSanyal, Kalyan 58n21

Sardinia 25Sardinians 131–3, 140; in Turin 134–5Sarkar, Sumit 3, 6Sarkar, Susobhan 2Sartori, Andrew 51Sassoon, Anne Showstack 89, 153sati 49Satwadekar, Damodar 92–3satyagraha 26Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 51Scheduled Caste Federation 47, 69Scheiber, Harry N. 68Schirru, Giancarlo 13Schneider, Jane 121Schwarzmantel, John 14secularism, in India 215nself-consciousness 7, 38–9Semeraro, Giovanni 184Sergi, Guiseppe 120Seth, Sanjay 50–1, 57n17shame see humiliationShetkari Kamgar Paksha 56n3Shils, Edward 92Shiv Sena 46Shourie, Arun 4Shudras 17–18, 21, 24, 52, 53, 58n22, n24,

88, 89, 92; see also castesilencing 209–10Singh Rathore, Aakash 4, 5, 6, 32n4Singh, N.K. 201Smith, Kylie 11Socialist Party (India) 48, 56n3Solon 41–2n2Sonalkar, Wandana 56n9Sonawane, Bhargav 48Southborough Committee 60–2southern Italy 78, 118–19; brigandage

133–4, 135; intellectuals in 20–1; and the north 24, 118, 119–21, 125, 129, 134–5, 136, 139 (Sardinia 131–3); subalterns in 36; uprisings in 118, 141n7; see also Italy; Risorgimento; ‘Southern Question’

‘Southern Question’ 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14, 24, 36, 117, 118, 119, 120; application to Dalits 146; as historiographical project 16; postcolonial readings of 45; see also colonialism; southern Italy

Soviet Revolution 29, 182; see also communism; Leninism

Spencer, Herbert 76Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 3, 13, 27,

32n3, 55n1, 116, 121, 125, 158–9, 161, 211

Index 241Sri Lanka 15Srinivas, Mysore Narasimhachar 94, 96Srivastava, Neelam 3, 116Stallybrass, Peter 57n13stigma 18, 24, 28, 52, 53, 54–5, 169, 170,

210–11, 212, 214n; see also Dalits; humiliation; subalterns

strikes 78, 79, 80Subaltern Studies 145–6, 160–1; and

Gramsci 2–3, 13, 45, 158, 159, 160; see also Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty; subalterns

subalterns 1, 3, 16, 24, 31, 35–6, 100, 116–17, 127, 145, 146, 149, 158–9, 209, 210; and agency 27–8, 158, 159, 160, 161, 170; as class 36, 38, 117 (and colonialism 83); consciousness 159, 160–1; Dalits as 4, 11, 12, 14, 43, 44, 45, 55, 145–6, 150, 158, 213; and hegemony 18, 146 (civil society 37–8; common sense 107, 111–12, 117, 124–7, 174, 176, 177–9; culture 104, 106, 107, 114–15, 152, 154; folklore 113–14, 125; and religion 182–4, 186, 187); history of groups 9, 36, 40–1, 161 (origins of untouchability 161–3); and identity 27; and intellectuals 23, 24, 25, 28–9, 41, 76, 106, 125, 129, 139, 211 (and Southern Italy 117–18, 119–21, 122–4, 139; and hegemony 90–3); and race 24, 116, 117, 158; and religion 25–6 (in modern state 182–4); and language 10–11; overdetermination 180; rebellions 36–7, 39–40, 125; universality 44–6, 213; see also Dalits; humiliation; stigma; Subaltern Studies

subjectivity 11, 23, 32n5, 59, 161; see also identity; intersubjectivity

Sumant, Yashwant 199Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari 4, 80, 83Sure Start 206

Tamhankar, Govind 48Tarun Kamgar Sangh (Young Workers’

Association) 56n11Taylor, Charles 165temple entry movement 23–4, 26, 47, 95,

96, 212textual analysis 2Tharu, Susie 165, 167Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 5Thompson, E.P. 2, 114–15Thorat, Sukhadeo 59

thread ceremony 51, 52Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 51, 57–8n18Tolstoy, Leo 187Tönnies, Ferdinand 105Trailokya Bauddha Mahāsangha Sahayaka

Gana (TBMSG) 203translation 11; see also languagetransnational networks 202–3, 204, 206,

207trauma 152–3; see also humiliationTriratna Bauddha Mahāsangha (TBM)

197, 203; see also Western BuddhismTriratna Buddhist Community 197Tukaram 91, 98Tully, James 44Turchi, Nicola 185Tylor, Edward 105

united blocks 22, 106United Nations 15untouchability, origins of 147, 161–3, 170;

priestly myths of 210; see also caste; Dalits

USA 9, 31, 32n13, 194–5; Black Americans 66 (slavery 54); constitution 60–1, 63, 64; pro-business 68; religion in 194–5

utopian movements 7; see also Lazzaretti, David

Valangkar, Gopalbaba 17Vālmīki, Omaprakāśa 212Van Ravesteyn, Willem 196vasti (slum) 156Verga, Andrea 41Verma, Ajay 4, 5, 6, 32n4Vico, Giambattista 16, 39, 41n2Victor Emmanuel 131Villa, Roberto 9Viswanathan, Gauri 8Voza, Pasquale 32n2

Wagner, Ro 32n5Waldensians 193war of position 29, 80, 147, 151, 180–1,

182Washbrook, David 150Western Buddhism 197, 198, 203Wilderson III, Frank 116Williams, Bernard 167Williams, Gwyn A. 128n1Williams, Patrick 149Williams, Raymond 2, 105, 115n2, 128n1,

152, 154

242 Indexwomen 3, 32, 49, 88, 90–1, 207; abuse of

207n1; leadership 203, 207; see also gender; women

working class 36, 37, 38, 46, 47, 50, 89, 136, 151; see also class; labor; subalterns

Wright Mills, C. 70

Young, Robert J.C. 3, 6, 55n2

Zelliot, Eleanor 1, 198, 199Zilli, Eleanor 156