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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

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Afro-Asian solidarity and the “capital” question:looking beyond the last frontier

Aditya Nigam

To cite this article: Aditya Nigam (2016) Afro-Asian solidarity and the “capital”question: looking beyond the last frontier, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17:1, 33-51, DOI:10.1080/14649373.2016.1133390

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1133390

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Afro-Asian solidarity and the “capital” question: looking beyond thelast frontierAditya NIGAM

ABSTRACTThe argument in this paper is a continuation of an argument that I have beenmaking for some time, which questions the universal history of capital, crucial towhich are assumptions regarding its historical necessity. Capital is not onlyunderstood to be a historically unavoidable condition but one that hasalready colonized the world such that there is no outside to it. In developingmy argument regarding the “outside” to capital, where I find Kalyan Sanyal’swork very useful and significant, I claim that much of the problem withtheorizing capital today has to do not with the beast itself but with theinherited paraphernalia of western theory and philosophy. After a survey ofthe passive revolution debate in India, which I read as a sign of the actualimpossibility of “capitalist” development across different parts of the world, Imove on to argue that both “capital/ism” and the “logic of capital”(accumulation) are misleading concepts concealing an essential “emptiness,”which I work out through the idea of “dependent arising” taken fromBuddhist philosophy.

KEYWORDSCapital; universal history;passive revolution; westerntheory; dependent arising

The Bandung Conference was held in the wakeof one of the most significant developments ofthe 20th century – that of decolonization.There was widespread optimism, not onlyabout the last remaining outposts of colonialismbeing dismantled in the near future, but alsoabout the more distant future. The idea, thatonce the colonies were liberated from imperialrule and took their destinies in their ownhands, they would soon chart out their own dis-tinct paths of future development, was quitepervasive. There was one problem, however.The Afro-Asian world, notwithstanding notionsof African socialism or Arab socialism, was stillenchanted by the dream of catching up with theWest, desirous of virtually restaging the sametrajectory of capitalist development on its ownsoil, although in its own way and at its ownpace. Socialism, in this vision, turned out to belittle more than a way of short-circuiting the

long drawn-out history of capitalist develop-ment and putting ex-colonial societies on tothe high road of capitalist modernity.

Much has changed between then and now.With the collapse of actually existing socialismin the USSR and the Eastern bloc, the world-wide push towards neoliberalism became sopowerful that most postcolonial regimes fell inline with the new urgency with which the rheto-ric of “catching up” was now being peddled. Theold rhetoric of socialism was already quite dis-credited by this time and had begun to be per-ceived as an impediment to the actualdevelopment of these societies. Politically, theunity of the non-aligned movement, the inheri-tor of Bandung, was also in a shambles by theonset of the 1990s. The massive assault of neo-liberalism, backed by the power of global finan-cial institutions, ensured that, very soon, mostpostcolonial regimes fell in line with this new

© Aditya NIGAM 2016. All Rights Reserved.

CONTACT Aditya Nigam aditya@csds.in

INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES, 2016VOL. 17, NO. 1, 33–51http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1133390

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thrust. This meant among other things,countries such as India cozying up to the USand those such as China dedicating themselvessingle-mindedly to “catching mice” (with apolo-gies to Deng Xiaoping) all over the world –Africa being its latest playground. As a conse-quence, the project of Afro-Asian solidarityhas begun to look like an impossible one.

And yet I want to argue in this paper that thequestion of Afro-Asian solidarity is today moreurgent that it has ever been. There is a need tothink the possible bases of that solidarity afreshtoday – at a time when both nation-state andcapital stand in need of serious interrogationas the twin legacies and contributions of Wes-tern modernity that have colonized our minds.Afro-Asian solidarity today cannot be premisedon the violently oppressive structures of thenation-state, which in any case have lost theemancipatory possibilities that they once embo-died, at least for some time after decolonization.Equally importantly, this solidarity needs to bethought outside and beyond the inherited nar-rative of Capital as the relentlessly universaliz-ing force of our times.

For the purposes of this paper, I will leave outthe nation-state from the purview of my discus-sion and focus my attention on the question ofCapital as, in some senses, it is this that standsuninterrogated even today. It presents itself asthe unavoidable destiny of all humanity, evenin the face of the ecological disaster that staresus in the face today. Theorists and scholars, notto speak of policy-makers, tend to speak of italmost as if it is some kind of demiurge relent-lessly fashioning the world in its own image.That is why a Leftist philosopher such as SlavojZizek has often said that it is easier to imaginethe end of the world than imagine the end ofcapitalism (Zizek 2010, 2011).1

It may not be out of place to mention here arecent work by an Indian Marxist scholarbased in the US that has been lauded by a galaxyof Western thinkers ranging from Slavoj Zizekand Robert Brenner to Noam Chomsky. Thebook in question, Vivek Chibber (2013), is

conceived as a full-on attack on SubalternStudies scholars’ writings on capital and itslimits. Chibber’s attack on Subaltern Studies’on this question covers a series of issues, all ofwhich relate to their claim that the so-called uni-versal history of capitalismmeets its limits in thepostcolonial world. But centrally at issue is thequestion of the theoretical categories that onedeploys in understanding the history of capital-ism in these societies. Thus, says Chibber: “theuniversalizing categories of Enlightenmentthought are perfectly capable of capturing theconsequences of capital’s universalization andthe dynamics of political agency – indeed thesecategories are essential to their analyses” (Chib-ber 2013, 285, emphasis added).

This is hardly surprising, since it is preciselythe theoretical frames and categories that Chibberdefends, which produce “capitalism” as a univer-sal. It is these frames that make it impossible forus to see a possible end to it: It is almost as if capit-alism has become ontologically embedded in thehuman condition, defying all possibilities of his-toricization that Marxists are always so insistentabout. This is the corner into whichWestern the-orizations of capital, especiallyMarxist and quasi-Marxist ones havepainted themselves. The reasonCapital stands uninterrogated, I will argue, isbecause of our enchantment withWestern theoryand philosophy, beforewhichwe continue to gen-uflect today, even as we seek to break out of itsinfluence.

The question of “Western theory”

At this point, a word on what I mean by “genu-flecting to Western theory” is in order. I am cer-tainly not arguing for the rejection of “Westerntheory” – which itself is a term that calls forsome unpacking. Rather, my argument seeksto “put it in its place.”2 That is to say, there ismuch that is of great significance in it for ourunderstanding of the modern and contempor-ary world but it is not something we can simplytake for granted in theorizing our times, fromour own location in the third world.

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But before we turn our attention to contem-porary Western theorizations of Capital, I needto briefly outline what can possibly be meant bythe term “Western theory/philosophy” and whyI believe confronting the question of capitalinvolves confronting the apparatus of Westernphilosophy itself. In using the category of “Wes-tern theory” or “Western philosophy,” are we byany chance suggesting that it is an enclosedbody of knowledge, and something that is suigeneris? Are we suggesting that Western philos-ophy arose, at a particular historical moment ina particular geographical location, outside ofany prior history of cultural and intellectualtraffic? Such a position seems to me to be his-torically incorrect and unsustainable. As PeterO’Brien recently put it,

In their historic awakening at the end of theMiddle Ages that ushered in the Renaissance,Reformation, Scientific Revolution andEnlightenment, Europeans borrowed and aug-mented a vast array of ideas, institutions andpractices, particularly from the Islamic, butalso from the Indian and Chinese, civilization.(O’Brien 2011, 18)

O’Brien goes to great lengths to explore thewritings of medieval Catholics in Europe inorder to make the case that where all throughLatin Christendom, “all serious learning tookplace in monasteries under the supervision ofthe Roman Curia,” cultivated Muslims by con-trast “embraced ancient learning.” They didnot merely translate and preserve the works ofGreek masters such as Plato, Aristotle andEuclid that were lost to the Latins, but alongwith Jewish thinkers, augmented and improvedthe inherited storehouse of knowledge. Henames among them scholars and thinkerssuch as Musa al-Khw ārizm ī, al-Farabi, al-Ghazzali, Abu Ma’shar (Albumasar), Ibn Sina(Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroës), and Maimo-nides (O’Brien 2011, 21).

The capture of Toledo by the Crusaders in1085, says O’Brien, ironically proved to be oneof the most significant moments in their“exposure to the superior Islamic intellect.”

“Al-Ma’mun had compiled there one of the fin-est libraries in the medieval world, and when thevictors found its treasures, they encounteredhundreds of books and treatises of which theyhad neither knowledge nor understanding.” Heaffirms Dorothee Metlitzki’s description of theconquest of Toledo as “one of the most impor-tant events not only in the political but in theintellectual history of medieval Europe. At onestroke the Christian world took possession of acivilization next towhich the LatinWest seemed… provincial and barbaric” (O’Brien 2011, 21).

We know today that the range of knowledgesthat thus became accessible to Latin Christen-dom included the latest developments in math-ematics, astronomy and medicine, and includedimportant contributions of the Indians and Chi-nese and the Arabs.

In a recent essay, Laura Marks has exploredthe ways in which certain key philosophicalideas of Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sinawere adopted by thinkers such as Roger Bacon,Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus – the lastmentioned transmitting it to a contemporaryphilosopher such as Gilles Deleuze (Marks2012, 57). Late medieval Christian Scholastics,arguesMarks, acknowledged what they had bor-rowed from Muslim philosophers but “laterEuropean thinkers disingenuously claimed adirect link between European and Greekthought, disavowing the hundreds of years ofIslamic philosophy upon which emerging Euro-pean thought relied” (Marks 2012, 52).

Given this, we cannot really draw a sharpline between Western theory/philosophy andtheory/philosophy from any other part of theworld. The world of ideas has never been subjectto regimes of passports and visas; there has beenincessant traffic in ideas – even in the midst ofreligious wars, as the above instance of the cap-ture of Toledo by the Crusaders shows.

In the context of our own colonial history, weknow that Western knowledge was often enthu-siastically espoused by the colonized national-ists and even more enthusiastically by manylower caste movements and thinkers. Marxism

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and feminism as two significant bodies ofthought have also found enthusiastic followersin these societies. What is now being realized,in our contemporary moment of the decoloni-zation of knowledge, is that so far our relation-ship to these bodies of knowledge has been oneof veneration, of their institution as norms.Indian political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj callsthis phenomenon “Euro-normality” – that isto say that Europe became, thenceforth, thenatural North of the compass of social and pol-itical theory. These bodies of knowledge haveprovided the universal norm against which allother societies have been judged, even by intel-lectuals from those societies themselves.

Thus, nationalists in late 19th and early 20thcentury India spent a lot of time and energyproving that they too had had political theoryand a Machiavelli, in the figure of Kautilya,for instance. They tried to prove how Indianstoo had a theory of a “state of nature,” rightfrom the ancient times in their notion of mat-syanyaya.3 What happens typically, when suchclaims are made, is that Kautilya no longergets read as Kautilya but as a Machiavelli,even though he existed some 11 centuries beforethe latter. One could argue to the contrary, thatit is equally possible to read Machiavelli as amodern day Kautilya. Similar things happenwhen we try to understand the practices ofscience, mathematics and medicine in ancientIndia through the lens of the discourse ofScience and Reason in the modern West. It isnot that these other societies were simplymired in backwardness, ignorance and supersti-tion until the illumination of Enlightenment fellupon them. There were robust traditions ofscience and rationalism in most of thesesocieties. What they did not have was a dis-course of Progress and Modernity on to whichthese traditions got hooked.

In that sense, the question of “Western the-ory/philosophy” per se, is not the problem, tomy mind. The problem lies, more specifically,with the assumption, best expressed by Chibberin the quote above, that all that can possibly be

thought has already been thought by the West(or the Enlightenment, even more narrowly).It lies in the assumption that the only task ofa non-Western thinker can be one of applyingreadymade categories handed down byWesternthought.

Fundamentally, therefore, it is a question ofunderstanding our experience and ourhistories on our own terms. There are two levelsat which we might need to deal with such a pro-blem. The first is with respect to modern devel-opments and phenomena such as, say, capital/ism, where we can in principle re-examinedominant theoretical narratives, even whilestaying within the universe of Western theory/philosophy. Such was the attempt undertakenby Subaltern Studies’ scholars, who raised ques-tions about the supposed universality of capital-ism’s history from within the Marxist tradition.They did this by deploying some of AntonioGramsci’s theorizations that seemed to speakmore directly to their understanding of theIndian experience than did most other Marxistwritings. More recently, Partha Chatterjee haslaid out the task of postcolonial political theoryfrom this perspective by arguing that the normsestablished by Western thought actually beginto confront a series of exceptions as they beginto be applied to non-Western contexts. Theaccumulation of these exceptions must lead, atsome point, to a questioning of the verynorms themselves. He situates his own theoriza-tion of “political society” in this context (Chat-terjee 2011).

From this point of view, we could argue thatthere is really no other position from where wecan begin our task of theorizing, for we cannotapproach the question of “capital” or of that ofpolitical forms for that matter, without anytheoretical baggage. After all, we do not haveany access to these histories that is uncontami-nated by Western thought.

However, as we move towards gaining athicker understanding of the cultural-intellec-tual universes of the social agents, we areimmediately confronted with a problem. To

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take the example of early 20th century Indiannationalists again, it is important to recognizethat although they enthusiastically espousedWestern thought in many ways, they remainedequally embedded in their own traditions ofthought. Their project was to chart out a courseof modernity that would be different in signifi-cant ways from that of the West. As such, theyoften deployed categories that did not simplyreplicate the Western ones. Thus, even whileaccepting the idea of a democratic polity, forexample, when nationalist scholars such as K.P.Jayaswal (1943) traced an Indian genealogy ofdemocracy, they were essentially transformingthe very idea of democracy. Even though theiridea was to simply claim that “we too haddemocracy,” the very act of providing an alterna-tive genealogy, tearing it from itsWestern prove-nance and giving it another history, doessomething to the idea itself. Similarly, whenIndian nationalists translated the term “secular-ism” as dharma-nirpekshata (neutrality betweenreligions), it was not simply a case ofmisrecogni-tion or mistranslation. They were actually draw-ing from another set of histories of religiouscoexistence that go back many centuries.

This is where the second level at which wemight encounter the problem of theorizingnon-Western experiences comes in. The ques-tion it poses goes beyond what Chatterjee pro-poses in his programmatic statement referredto above.

Is there any way of reading the experiencesand histories of the non-West on their ownterms, perhaps in terms of categories of thoughtthat social agents themselves used? In the caseof pre-modern histories, it is increasingly com-ing to be accepted that we must try to enter theintellectual universe of that time and attempt tounderstand what exactly was going on in thosesocieties, instead of going prepared to find analready familiar Western history being playedout there. But the point is that even where itconcerns relatively modern concepts and prac-tices, it is possible to understand them simplyas derived from an exclusively Western history.

These are really the more difficult questionswhen it comes to elucidating our relationshipto Western theory/philosophy. The problembecomes more complicated because there areparticular modes of “doing philosophy” or“doing theory” in the Western tradition thatmay be entirely different from those in otherparts of the world. A lot of philosophizing inthe Western tradition is exegetical and keepsreturning to certain canonical philosophersand their texts in a mode of complete self-refer-entiality. Contemporary philosophers and thin-kers in the Marxist tradition provide anexcellent example of this mode where, unlikeMarx himself, they are far less interested instudying and understanding the changes incapital’s form and structure and more in endlessexegesis of Marx’s writings on capital. As a con-sequence, as Marxism suffers greater andgreater defeat and irrelevance in the realworld, their theorizations tend to becomemore and more metaphysical. Thus, to a philo-sopher such as Zizek, for example, the “prole-tariat” and the “proletarian position” nolonger bear any resemblance to any actuallyexisting proletariat or even to Marx’s proletar-iat; it is a pure thought-object with no empiricalreferent whatsoever.

It is here that I want to mark my differencefrom certain dominant modes of doing theoryin the West and underline that theory for usmust begin from themessy ground of the empiri-cal/historical world. This becomes all the morenecessary because, without this empirical-his-torical reference, all theory always-already refersback to some Western history or some stylizedform of that history.

It is interesting that writing on the historicalrole of Islam, way back in 1939, theIndian Marxist M.N. Roy, had observed thatthat role actually consisted of opening up theworld to “experimental science and rationalistphilosophy,”which were to become instrumentalin the promotion of the ideology of the new socialrevolution (Roy [1939] 1981, 21). In this text, Royclaimed:

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Capitalist mode of production rescued Europefrom the chaos of medieval barbarism. Itfought and in the long run vanquished Chris-tian theology and the spiritual monopoly ofthe Catholic Church with the potent weaponof rationalist philosophy. This weapon,invented by the ancient sages of Greece, cameto the possession of the founders of moderncivilization through the Arab scholars whonot only preserved the precious patrimony, butadded to it handsomely. The historical battlebegun by the nomads of the Arabian desertunder the religious flag of Islam, was foughtstep by step through a thousand years on fieldsscattered over the three continents, to be wonfinally in Europe under the profane standardof the eighteenth century Enlightenment andBourgeois Revolution. (Roy [1939] 1981, 21,emphasis added)

I will leave out for the moment the proble-matic conjunction that Roy makes betweenthe capitalist mode of production and ration-alist philosophy, as it is stamped by the domi-nant form of Marxism of its time. What I findinteresting in this passage is a recognition thatseems to have been completely erased fromour historical memory – of the great traffic ofideas that has always been part of a globalmovement of thought. Nationalism introducedin India – but perhaps elsewhere too – a periodof long amnesia by closing the borders ofthought in ways that left us with no alternativesbut the binary of a colonizing thought confront-ing defeated indigenous traditions. There isanother reason why I believe what Roy says inthis passage is important – and that has to dowith his gesture towards a methodologicaldebt that he too implicitly owes to the Arab/Islamic thinkers. There is a reference here totwo aspects of this debt – experimental science(based on observation) and rationalist philos-ophy that goes beyond mere inductivegeneralization.

Roy cites Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and suggeststhat the distinctive merit of the Arab scholarswas the zeal to acquire knowledge through obser-vation. Reason and rationalismmust stand on thefirm ground of observation and experimentation:

“They [the Arab philosophers] discarded thevanity of airy speculation, and stood firmly onthe ground known to them,” Roy goes on to say.

It is interesting that writing roughly aroundthe same period, Muhammad Iqbal, in his clas-sic The Reconstruction of Religious Thought inIslam, also underlined pretty much the samemethodological point. “The birth of Islam,”Iqbal proclaims, “is the birth of the inductiveintellect” (Iqbal 2011, 140). But then he goes on:

In Islam, prophesy reaches its perfection indiscovering the need of its own abolition.This involves the keen perception that life can-not forever be kept in leading strings; that inorder to achieve full self-consciousness, manmust finally be thrown back on his ownresources. The abolition of priesthood and her-editary kinship in Islam, the constant appeal toreason and experience in the Qur’an and theemphasis it lays on Nature and History assources of human knowledge, are all differentaspects of that same finality. (Iqbal 2011,140, emphasis added)

The inductive intellect, combined with reasonand experience, constitute for Iqbal, the ingredi-ents with which he intended to fashion a new,modern and rationalist Islam. Both Roy andIqbal were deeply philosophical minds. Whatthey were dismissing was “airy speculation”that often took the place of “theorizing” –which I take to be the more concrete practiceof working through empirical-historicalmaterials as opposed to “philosophizing” inspeculative mode. Both Roy and Iqbal speculatebut not quite in a metaphysical mode. Iqbal, infact, allows a special place for intuition as amode of knowing.

In a sense, this is the methodological stance Iwant to take away from the above discussion. Inour contemporary philosophical terms, it is per-haps useful to underline, the “empirical-histori-cal” refers to nothing other than context andlocation; to specificities of practices andmeaningmaking. Indeed, one can even argue that giventhe ways in which language, discourse andimagination shape and indeed constitute theempirical-historical, these too are rich areas of

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research and exploration that can allow us a wayof entering different worlds and see what goes onthere, rather than merely restage some abstractuniversal. In the next section of the paper, Iwill discuss the world of Indian “capitalism” –not by way of telling the specific story of a quaint“failure” but as amoment in a longer history thatmay help us theorize “Capital” differently.

Capital and its destiny

It is by now reasonably widely acknowledgedthat capitalism, which was expected to buildthe world in its own image, actually met witha very different fate as it traversed the globe,moving into different societies. The debate ofthe 1960s around the question of developmentand underdevelopment initiated, in particular,by dependency theorists of Latin America, hadalready pointed to the fact that capitalist devel-opment of “the peripheries” was not the inevita-ble consequence of the integration of thosesocieties into the global capitalist market; that“underdevelopment” was not merely the lackof development but a consequence of the devel-opment of the “metropolises” – to use AndreGunder Frank’s well known characterization.Terms such as “retarded capitalism” and“arrested development” were coined to capturethe failure of capital’s universalizing project inthe non-West at large. One of the key anxieties,especially among Marxists, was the issue of thisfailure. Was Marx then wrong in his prognosti-cations? Writing at the end of the 1970s, takingstock of this entire debate, Robert Brenner, aleading Western Marxist scholar of capital sta-ted in an important article that the “appearanceof systematic barriers to economic advance inthe course of capitalist expansion – the develop-ment of underdevelopment – has posed difficultproblems for Marxist theory” (Brenner 1977,25).

Brenner, of course, went on to castigate thosescholars who were making such critiques of notunderstanding Marx and his emphasis on classrelations, thus reducing “capitalism” to a mere

exchange-dominated phenomenon, à la AdamSmith. In the process, Brenner sought to estab-lish the primacy of “class relations” as the key toidentifying capitalism.

Scholars associated with the SubalternStudies group in India, however, conducteddeeper historical explorations into the ways inwhich forms of the community that existed insocieties such as India’s presented formidablebarriers to the expansion of capital, thus puttinginto question the “universal history of capital.”

In the 1980s, some Marxist scholars in Indiamade another argument about capitalism inpost-independence India. This argument out-lined a theoretical position that sought toexplain the specific trajectory of capitalist devel-opment in the peripheries of the world-econ-omy, so to speak. The Gramscian idea of“passive revolution”was especially appropriatedby them in order to accomplish this task,although it has subsequently been criticizedfor the teleology implicit in its “transition narra-tive” and its historicism.

I will lay out the argument and its context inbroad strokes followed by a sketch of an impor-tant critique that has been made almost fromthe very beginning but which has been fleshedout in much greater detail more recently. Iwill also outline my own critique – both of theargument as well as of the critique. In the finalsection, I will present an alternative narrativeof the story of capitalism in India, which I ammore sympathetic to and which, I hope toshow, allows us to understand the specificityof this experience, unencumbered by the over-whelming narrative received from the West.

The passive revolution argument drawsmainly on the writings of the Italian MarxistAntonio Gramsci, which brought in questionsother than “the economic,” into a discussionof the fate of capitalism – especially questionsof moral-intellectual hegemony. In understand-ing why capitalist development does not followthe logic of head-on confrontation with feudaland pre-capitalist forces, as was said to havehappened in England, Gramsci argued that the

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weakness of the bourgeoisie forced it into com-promises and alliances with those forces, whichnecessitated a kind of “revolution from above.”In this revolution, there was little place for pop-ular involvement. Rather it depended on theability of the bourgeoisie to slowly transformthe pre-capitalist relations into capitalist onesthrough a strategy of molecular transform-ations. As he put it, commenting on Croce’sHistory of Europe, “the ‘passive’ aspect of thegreat revolution which started in France in1789 and which spilled over into the rest ofEurope with the republican and Napoleonicarmies,” resulted “not in their immediate col-lapse as in France but in the ‘reformist’ cor-rosion of them which lasts up to 1870”(Gramsci 1971, 119). It is interesting, from thepoint of my own argument, that Gramsci actu-ally reads the entire history of Europe as a his-tory of the passive revolution, for it gesturestowards the fact that even in the “advancedWest,” the history of capital does not quite con-form to the classical Marxist thesis about capital-ist development. It is important to underline thatcrucial in Gramsci’s rendering was the pointthat because of this relative weakness, the bour-geoisie was forced to engage in a long-term “warof position” where it must slowly attempt toestablish its cultural-moral hegemony oversociety at large, for then alone could the passiverevolution succeed. The political form of thestate becomes central in achieving this hege-mony, as it does in the transformation of econ-omic relations.

This was precisely what was interestingabout the argument when it was made in theIndian context, in the 1980s. The transition tocapitalism was no longer a matter of the econ-omic logic of capital alone. The critique that fol-lowed, notably by Marxist economist KalyanSanyal, acknowledged this important point ofdeparture of the passive revolution argument,which in the Indian context, brought in the pol-itical-cultural level as an important terrain ofthe struggle for hegemony, into the debate.However, Sanyal pointed out, the proponents

of the argument failed to specify the exactnature of the capital/pre-capital relationship inIndia, which continued to be seen in the argu-ment as an instance that belonged to capital’spast. The analysis of the theorists of the passiverevolution faltered, it was argued, in not beingable to understand the specific heterogeneousnature of “the postcolonial economic.” This cri-tique too makes some very important moves,which I will discuss at some length later.

The “passive revolution”: argumentand critique

The idea of “passive revolution” was first putforward in the Indian context by Asok Sen(1976) and later taken up by Partha Chatterjee(1986, 1994) and Sudipta Kaviraj (1984,1987).4 Asok Sen (1988) and Kalyan Sanyal(1988), in their contributions to a special num-ber of the Economic and Political Weekly onAntonio Gramsci, further amplified on thistheme – and Sanyal’s contribution stands outas an early text that outlined a position thatwas quite distinctive in seeking to avoid the tele-ology inherent in this otherwise very importantidea. The point of the exercise was to theorizethe specificity of postcolonial capital which, itwas clear by the 1960s, was not living up toMarx’s (and Marxists’) prognostications. Pre-capitalist social forms refused to die. And aswe noted earlier, even in Europe, in Gramsci’sreading, the bourgeoisie was unable to carryout an open assault on such pre-capitalist socialforces.

We know of the story of capital’s arising astold by Marx: It appears towards the end ofCapital Vol. I, in the section entitled “The So-called Primitive Accumulation.” This is thestory of the expropriation of the immediate pro-ducers (i.e. peasants and artisans) and theirtransformation into free wage-laborers – some-thing that Marx sees as critical for the emer-gence of capitalism. Here, Marx traces thehistory of dispossession of the English peasantrythrough the late 15th and 16th centuries down

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to the 19th century. He sees in this process“nothing but the historical process of the separ-ation of the immediate producer from hismeans of production” – a history he says is writ-ten in blood and fire. Although he underlinesthat this process involves robbery and theft ofpeoples’ lands, he nevertheless bestows upon ita certain legitimacy by calling it the historicalprocess of the expropriation of the small produ-cer. What was, in Marx’s own rendering, a sagaof bloodshed and violence came to be written asan immanent objective process of history and thepain and tragedy inflicted by it then became thenecessary price to be paid for historicalprogress.

Interestingly, from our point of view, RobertBrenner’s essay, referred to earlier, makes a veryimportant point. This is about why peasant pro-prietorship turned out to be invulnerable to therise of trade, in stark contrast to the CommunistManifesto’s claim that “the cheap price of com-modities is the heavy artillery with which it[capital] batters down all Chinese walls…”The reason for this “invulnerability” (which isa partial lament for Brenner) is that historicallythere could be discerned a counter-tendency inoperation: “the peasants’ predilection to diver-sify their own production – rather than special-ize – in order to produce as many as possible oftheir necessities on their own plot, precisely toavoid market dependence” (Brenner 1977, 74,emphasis added). That such seemingly innocu-ous everyday practices of the peasants couldhold back the wheel of history, so to speak,says something about the grandiose schemesand models that had predicted the onwardmarch of capital.

It is perhaps necessary to open a parenthesishere, for this concerns one of the crucial pointsin our argument: theorizations of capital werenot simply about capital. They were equallyabout the larger universe within which thesetheorizations were taking place. Thus, forinstance, when virtues of thrift and spending,of consumption, of the desire to possess moreand more wealth and so on were pronounced

as virtues of the civilized, in opposition towhich the tendency to be satisfied with littlewas branded savage and barbarian, it was notsimply “capital” that was being talked of. Inthat post-Lockean universe, the discourse ofReason had to have already made its appearanceand it had to have already divided the worldneatly into the civilized on the one hand, andsavages and barbarians on the other. What ismore, it had to have delineated the featuresthat comprise civilization and barbarism. Simi-larly, when Marx pronounced capitalism to bethe force that would transform the world in itsimage, propelled by its inner logic, it is not dif-ficult to see in this prognostication, the image ofHegel’s Geist and its earthly journey. Like theGeist, capital’s movement represented theunfolding of an already immanent history.The end was always-already present in thebeginning. Hegelian ideas of Totality and con-tradictions had to have already been in the airfor Marx to have theorized capital the way hedid. In other words, “Capital” was being theo-rized not as something in itself but was ratheralready constituted as such by the theoreticaluniverse in which it was produced as an object.It can be argued with equal plausibility that ifone were to theorize capital in another historicaland therefore, theoretical universe, one couldget an entirely different theoretical object. Thisis a point I want to return to in the final sectionof my paper.

To return to our discussion, recall that whatBrenner was positing as the reason for theinvulnerability of the peasant to the heavy artil-lery of cheap commodities was an everydaypractice of self-provisioning in order to escapethe vagaries of market dependence. It is, tosome extent, in this context that we should seethe theory of the passive revolution as an attemptto explain the failure of capitalist development inthe peripheries of “world capitalism.” Gramsci,as we have seen, had suggested that in contextswhere capitalism is relatively weak, it does notdirectly attack those formations and liquidatethem. Rather, it enters into alliances with

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them and gradually transforms old kind oflandlords into capitalist landlords and old socialrelations into capitalist relations. The additionalpoint that we can make here is that not all pre-capitalist property is “feudal” and it is oftensmall peasant property that proves resistant tothe untrammeled expansion of the market.

In the Indian context, the idea of passiverevolution was deployed in order to deal withprecisely such a situation of a relatively “weakbourgeoisie” that was unable to perform itsworld-historical task of capitalist transform-ation. Partha Chatterjee’s rendering of thenationalist struggle itself was cast in suchterms – as a struggle where the Indian bourgeoi-sie made a series of compromises and allianceswith other pre-capitalist classes since the bour-geoisie did not represent the national-popular.This was true, in his view, not just with respectto the Indian case alone but as a more generalcondition. He therefore claimed:

The characteristic form of “passive revolution”in colonial countries follows the second path.That is to say, the “war of position” implies apolitical-ideological programme by which thelargest possible nationalist alliance is built upagainst the political rule of the colonialpower. The aim is to form a politically inde-pendent nation-state. (Chatterjee 1986, 48–49)

After the formation of the independentnation-state, he argues, the “reorganization ofpolitical order” is moderated in two ways: thebourgeoisie neither breaks up nor disturbs anyof the modern institutions set up under colonialrule; nor does it not “undertake a full-scaleassault on all pre-capitalist dominant classes,”preferring rather, to “limit their formerpower,” neutralizing them where necessaryand making them subsidiary allies within thestate structure (Chatterjee 1986, 49).

The strategy of economic development andaccumulation that was evolved, then, was onethat had to continuously balance the demandsof accumulation and the need for political legit-imation. The bourgeoisie could no longer carryout the business of industrial development by

resorting to the violent process of dispossessionthat the classic primitive accumulation modelinvolved.

Sudipta Kaviraj, unlike Chatterjee, locatesthe imperative of the passive revolution strategyin India, on a certain realignment that the Con-gress party went through in the period 1946–1950. “The departure of the reformist elementsfrom the Congress led to a feeling among thesmall elite around Nehru of being encircledwithin their own party. It provided the initialcondition for, and pressure towards, a ‘passiverevolution’ strategy” (Kaviraj 2010, 114).Kaviraj argues that the “Indian capitalist class”exercises its control over society through a strat-egy that is distinct from “a moral-cultural hege-mony of the Gramscian type” as well as of thepurely coercive type as seen in many newlyindependent countries. Rather,

It does so by a coalitional strategy carried outpartly through the state-directed process ofeconomic growth, and partly through the allo-cational necessities indicated by the bour-geois-democratic political system. (Kaviraj2010, 106)

Thus, the program of “serious bourgeois landreforms” was abandoned through a combi-nation of “feudal resistance, judicial conserva-tism, and connivance of state Congressleaderships” (Kaviraj 2010, 114).

Kaviraj further argues that while the Con-gress was willing to accept the continuance of“semi-feudal rural power,” it did adopt “massiveplans for capitalist development,” clearly reject-ing “a trajectory of satellite growth” that seemsto have become “a common destiny” of manynewly independent countries.

In an early critique, Kalyan Sanyal (1988)had argued against the implicit teleology ofthe passive revolution idea and the historicisminherent in the capital/pre-capital distinctionthat undergirded it.

Sanyal sets up his argument against “the con-cept of economic development,” which he seesas an expression of “bourgeois ideology,” thatpushes towards the “full transformation of the

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economy from pre-capitalism into capitalism”(Sanyal 1988, PE-27). “The main ideologicalthrust of bourgeois development economics,”he argues, “thus lies in its identification of econ-omic development with the expansion of thedomain of capital” (Sanyal 1988, PE-27).

As against this, Sanyal claims,

Even casual observations reveal that capitalistdevelopment in most of the third worldcountries has reinforced the capital/pre-capi-tal dualism rather than destroyed it… it hasfailed to incorporate the entire economy withinthe ambit of capitalist development: the rest ofthe economy remains outside the domain ofcapital. (Sanyal 1988, PE-28, emphasis added)

Sanyal does not see this as a transition pro-blem but rather as a structural limitation ofwhat he will later identify as postcolonial capit-alism. One of the key elements here is the way inwhich avenues for endless expansion for thethird world capitalism are limited by the gov-ernmental interventions for poverty-eradica-tion. The economy essentially stands dividedbetween a high accumulation enclave economyand a vast hinterland where needs-based con-sumption determines production (Sanyal 1988,PE-29).

Sanyal holds that as long as one continued tosee “precapital” as something that lies in a timeprior to capital, the question will continue to beposed in the way in which Chatterjee in particu-lar was posing it. In his more recent work,Sanyal (2007) has countered the “transition nar-rative” implicit in what he calls Chatterjee’sneo-Gramscian position, by underlining theneed to characterize capitalist development ina way “that theoretically rules out the possibilityof capital superseding pre-capital” (Sanyal 2007,39). In this work, Sanyal deploys the idea of“governmentality,” which he sees as tied to thediscourse of “development,” in explainingwhat he calls a reversal of the effects of primitiveaccumulation.

The strength of Sanyal’s argument is that itfocuses on a specific feature of postcolonialcapitalism that has been so far ignored in all

theorizations, including those of the SubalternStudies scholars, namely, the existence of avast sector of the relatively informal, “need-economy.” He sees this sector not as a remnantof an earlier time but produced by the workingsof capital. He points to the impossibility, in ourtimes, of doing away with surplus populationsas in the case of Europe. With nowhere to go,no “new worlds” to transport these surpluspopulations, they are condemned to remainin those very societies, constituting the waste-land of postcolonial capitalism. But govern-ments today cannot also get away with lettingthem perish. The logic of governmentalityintervenes in order to take these populationsunder its shade and provide for measures thatend up reversing the effects of primitiveaccumulation.

However, there are two problems withSanyal’s argument. The first is that he sees theentire process – primitive accumulation and itsreversal, as internal to “capital” itself – to postco-lonial capitalism, to be specific. We can see whyhe makes this move: by seeing “pre-capital”/non-capital as an internal other, as a product,of capital – he makes its supersession by capitalan impossibility. If noncapital is produced bycapital, as its necessary outcome, then there cannever be any point when capital entirely sup-plants noncapital. But in doing this, Sanyal hasto reinstate the idea of a totality or structure,one that is clearly governed by an “internallogic.” Indeed, he says as much: “In short pre-capital’s [i.e. de-capitalized forms] conditionsof existence flow from the internal logic of theexpanded reproduction of capital” (Sanyal 2007,39, emphasis added). Quite problematicallythen, “governmental rationality” and “develop-ment discourse” also become internal momentsof capital’s development in his argument.

While Sanyal’s intervention provides aninteresting way of reading the history of “post-colonial capitalism,” his insistence on seeingthe existence of noncapital as a product of post-colonial capital’s own logic immediately takesaway what he has gained.

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However, one can think of the impossibilityof capitalist transition in other ways as well –ways that move away entirely from ideas ofstructures/totalities and their internal logic. Iwill return to this towards the end of thepaper, drawing on an entirely different philoso-phical tradition in order to suggest a possibleway out.

The second difficulty with Sanyal’s argumentis that, like Chatterjee, he too holds “primitiveaccumulation” to be a necessary condition ofcapital’s arising. His modification of the logicis temporal – it is subsequently reversed throughthe logic of governmentality. Like Chatterjeeand Kaviraj, he too is unmindful of the waysin which capital’s drive is not merely delayedbut also subverted by the practices and formsthat it confronts in its onward journey, so thatit never quite comes to be – in the sense inwhich we understand it from its standardreceived history.

Before turning to that problem, a word isnecessary here in Sanyal’s defense against arecent criticism, since this directly relates tothe matter at hand. Vinay Gidwani and JoelWainwright (2014), in an otherwise sympath-etic engagement with Sanyal’s work, havetaken him to task for “his refusal to truck ineither Marxist dialectics or the law of value intheorizing postcolonial capital” (Gidwani andWainwright 2014, 45). Sanyal’s “refusal toengage Marx’s value theory” they say, “is thereal puzzle of Rethinking Capitalist Develop-ment”: had he done so, they claim, “he wouldhave had to confront how production withinthe ‘need economy’ can remain outside thepenumbra of value” (Gidwani and Wainwright2014, 45).

This is precisely the kind of argument that Ifind problematic for it is only by refusing togenuflect to that body of Marxist theory and“refusing to truck in it” that Sanyal is able togive the experience of postcolonial capitalismthe place it deserves in his alternative theoriza-tion. Gidwani and Wainwright’s argumentsimply reduces an important part of that

experience to a non-problem. Nothing need beexplained anymore. Since the object is, in a pro-found sense, constituted by the theoreticalframe and the categories deployed, it is hardlysurprising that a displacement or reconstitutionof the object would call for a break with the fra-mework itself.

A different narrative of capital/ism

Let us start with a contemporary question,namely, that of climate change and the ecologi-cal crisis. In the standard understanding, thelogic of expanded reproduction or accumu-lation is based on the presumption that oncethe costs of raw materials, costs of depreciationand wages of labor are paid, the capitalist is leftwith surplus value that s/he ploughs back intoproduction for purposes of technological upgra-dation and reproduction on an expanded scale.Surplus value, here is essentially unpaid labor.

Now, only in recent years has it startedbecoming clear that while capital has paid forthe costs of raw materials that it derives fromthe natural resources that any society possesses,it has never been made to pay the ecologicalcosts of production. That is to say, it hasnever been made to pay for the air and waterit consumes and pollutes, depriving local com-munities of their life-chances and if all the eco-logical costs of production were to be factoredin, there would be little left in terms of surplusvalue for accumulation. In India, in recentyears, since widespread struggles against landacquisition broke out, there has been a rethinkamong sections of the ruling elites and the pre-vious UPA government’s Minister for Mininghad been forced to place on the table in theupper house a proposal to the effect that 25%of the proceeds of mining (profits) should actu-ally be ploughed back for the benefit of localcommunities affected by the operations (Singh2010). The proposal was later opposed by themining corporate lobbies but the matter isnow there in the public agenda. A more con-crete recent development pursuing a similar

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line of thinking came up when the SupremeCourt decreed the setting up of a permanentfund from mining profits for the benefit oflocal communities in the case of mining oper-ations in Goa (Chari 2014). At the moment,the Supreme Court’s judgment stipulates that10% of the mining profits be put back in thepermanent fund. Although this is a small begin-ning, it opens the way for a whole new set ofclaims that can be made on the “surplusvalue” component of capital’s returns. In thelong run, these cannot but affect the capacityfor capital’s expanded reproduction. If thatwere to happen, and capital made also to payfor the ecological destruction that it causes,where would the logic of expanded reproduc-tion or accumulation stand?

The point then is that the so-called logic ofcapital accumulation is premised on a certain,now dated, idea of what constitute costs of pro-duction. If these costs are internalized, it is poss-ible to argue that what appears as the immutablelogic of capital no longer holds. In other words,what I am suggesting is that there is no essentiallogic of capital. In the final analysis, it is all amatter of the constellation within which weencounter it – and this constellation is cruciallytied to a range of knowledges, practices andmaterialities that emerge into view at anypoint of time.

It is in order to address this question that Ipropose to deploy an ancient philosophicalidea drawn from Buddhist philosophy – thetwin concepts of emptiness (sunyata) anddependent arising/origination (pratitya samut-pada). It is well known that in Buddhist philos-ophy the idea of sunyata or emptiness wasinvoked to argue against substantialist notionsof the Self (atma), against which Buddhist phi-losophers posited the idea of anatma or anatta(in Pali), that is non-Self. The Self – and byextension, all entities – according to this view,cannot be understood as substance. It is rathersomething that arises in a constellation. Theidea of dependent arising, basically, is meantto underline this idea and it involves the claim

that any entity exists in a particular formbecause it exists in a network of interdependentexistences. Its character is not intrinsic to itselfbut is the effect of such interdependent relation-ships. In the Indian Buddhist tradition, this ideaachieves its most sublime development in thework of the second/third century Madhyamikaphilosopher Nagarjuna (Kalupahana 1991).

This idea of dependent arising is actuallyprevalent, with some modifications, acrossdifferent traditions of Buddhism – the Tibetanor the Chinese Hua Yan for example. In theChinese Hua Yan tradition, the combinationof the ideas of emptiness and interdependenceachieve new heights, according to some scholars(Garfield 2015, 76–77). I read this idea here assomething fundamentally different from theidea of a structure or a totality, more as a net-work of relations or a constellation. Indeed,the metaphor of Indra’s net is one of ways inwhich this is explained in the Chinese traditionas well: “an infinite network, at each node ofwhich is a jewel that perfectly reflects all otherjewels in the net” (Garfield 2015, 76–77). Ifthis be the case then it can be argued that noentity would remain unchanged if other entitiesaround it change. A more dynamic idea of thenetwork of dependent existences can thusyield an interesting way of thinking aboutrelationships and interdependences for our con-temporary theorizations as well.

From this point of view, “capital” too cannotbe identified with reference to any specific posi-tive feature that defines it alone. We know thatmuch bloodletting and name-calling has takenplace between Marxists during the differentmoments of the various “transition” debatesthrough the history of Marxist engagementwith the history of capitalism. As the Brenneressay referred to earlier shows, all those whobelieved that capital has something to do withthe emergence of the global market – PaulSweezy, Immanuel Wallerstein and GunderFrank among them – were dubbed by him asNeo-Smithian Marxists. It is also worth recal-ling that the orthodox response to these

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positions was one that identified capitalism as amode of production, not reducible to exchange,leading once again to questions about whether,in that case, the very idea of a rising bourgeoisiewas possible: what was this class that could becalled capitalist, well before a capitalist modeof production even existed? Indian Marxistscholar, Jairus Banaji, has recently exploredthe networks of commerce and trade in theMediterranean and the important role playedtherein by Islam and Arab traders. Throughthis and some other writings, Banaji arguesthat “the contrast between capitalism as a ‘com-mercial system’ and capitalism as a ‘mode ofproduction’ is schematic and overstated, and amajor reason why Marxists have paid so littleattention to merchant-capital” (Banaji 2013,273). While Banaji’s explorations of the Arabroots of capitalism are fascinating, the problemwith this theorization is that once commercialcapital is brought into the picture, we cankeep taking the question of the “origins” ofcapitalism far back in time – right into late anti-quity as Banaji eventually has to.

My point here is that the Marxist debate itselfactually points towards the virtual impossibilityof defining what precisely constitutes “capital-ism.” There are therefore, as many ways ofunderstanding “capital”/“capitalism” as thereare Marxists. At some level, however, onceone decided to get out of these sticky questionsrelating to the “transition” issue, Marxistsseemed to agree that in the capitalist mode ofproduction, production would be based on thelogic of accumulation or expanded reproduc-tion. Now, it seems, this too could well havebeen an accounting problem and idea of thelogic of accumulation could be maintained sofar because capital escaped paying its truecosts. However, what I am proposing via theidea of dependent arising is that the constella-tion has changed. What we know as “capital-ism” is inserted into a network of relationsthat is no longer the same. What we know as“nature” that had, until the late 20th century,appeared to be simply a passive provider of

natural resources for the “economy,” has nowbegun to talk back. Philosophers today nolonger find it possible to talk of “nature” or,more generally, the non-human, as a passiveentity distinct and different from the human.New situations, new bodies of knowledge, newchallenges have arisen, transforming the fieldwithin which we encounter “capital” and itseems to be increasingly difficult to argue thatcapital will remain what it has “always” been.Indeed, the Marxist impasse referred to abovein defining what constitutes capital should itselfbe read as a symptom of the fact that “capital”has never always been the same, nor alwaysrecognizable as such. What we bring underthe rubric of “capital” and “capitalism” is itselfa fairly large and disparate range of practicesand forms – each of which can exist and hasexisted independently of “capitalism.”

However, it is not only in a global, “world-historical,” sense that we can talk of dependentarising. The story of capital’s development ineach context is a story of new and differentbeginnings, of its insertion into different net-works of interdependencies. What this yieldsis not always what we might recognize as capitalfrom its universal history.

In a book, widely acclaimed by a certainbrand of Marxist scholarship, Vivek Chibber(2004) examines the different trajectoriesadopted by the Indian and South Korean statesand their respective capitalist classes. The book,written at the beginning of the 2000s, at theheight of neoliberal triumphalism, seeks toexplain why the Korean state made the rightchoice of going the Export-led Industrialization(ELI) way, where the Indian state failed onceagain to rise to the occasion and not take thechance of abandoning its Import-SubstitutingIndustrialization (ISI) path, even when it couldin the 1960s (Chibber 2004, 39–42). It needsto be remembered that by the time this bookwas being written, the ISI model was already adiscredited option and so any state having pur-sued that option had to be seen as a failure.There are a whole series of problems with

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Chibber’s reading of the situation in which thetwo countries, but India in particular, madethe choice of adopting the ISI model, not theleast being the complete erasure of the Sovietbloc and its role in assisting the setting up keyinfrastructural and capital goods projects. Wecannot possibly go into them here. My purposein bringing up Chibber’s book is to think a bitabout his key argument from the point of viewof this alternative narrative of capital. Chibberpresents his argument in the form of a seriesof theses, of which Thesis 1 constitutes the core:

Thesis 1: State building in India was stuntedbecause of a highly organized and concertedoffensive launched by the business classagainst the idea of disciplinary planning,whereas it was successful in Korea becausestate managers were able to harness a leadingsegment of the business class to the develop-ment agenda. (Chibber 2004, 29)

The long and short of Chibber’s argument isthat the ELI model demanded a certain sub-mission of the capitalist class to the state’s disci-plining, given the degree of support it requiredfrom the latter in the business of playing inthe highly competitive global arena; on theother hand, the ISI model, being more protec-tive of domestic capital, defined a differentstate-capital relation where the state’s efficacywas highly reduced because of the power thatthis model gave the capitalist class. So far sogood. But the question that one is left with isprecisely why India chose one model whileKorea quickly moved to the other, more effi-cient one? Chibber gives us no satisfactoryanswer. His response is almost casual:

Why India chose to turn to ISI as the first stepin its developmental strategy is not a mystery.The fact is that in the countries which under-took rapid industrialization programs after theGreat Depression, it was simply taken forgranted that the road to success involved aperiod of import-substitution. (Chibber 2004,39, emphasis added)

It is almost as if there is a straight line thatconnects the Great Depression to the path

chosen by the independent Indian state. Andthe decision is almost entirely dictated by oneaspect of the global context – the role of thevery presence of the Soviet bloc being comple-tely erased by Chibber. From the methodologi-cal stance that I am proposing, that ofdependent arising, the picture cannot but bemore complex. It cannot but be connected toa whole range of other factors such as theinternal configuration of forces, of antecedentconditions, specific histories, existing bodies ofknowledge and so on. It does not suffice simplyto say that “the fractured and uncoordinatednature of the state itself made its efforts to sub-sidize exports quite ineffective…” (Chibber2004, 46), as Chibber does. At the very least,Chibber would need to explain why the natureof the Indian state remained “fractured anduncoordinated.” Is this side of the Indian staterevealed only in relation to capital, or does itconstitute a more general feature of this state?In fact, it can be argued that the failure of theIndian state has been a more pervasive one,revealed in a whole range of its interventionsin transforming social practices especially relat-ing to caste and gender.

It is here that we need to turn our attentionto a point made earlier about the ways inwhich institutions and practices emerge andare shaped by the way social agents imaginethem. This imagination, to be sure, drawsfrom earlier histories but is fundamentally anact of intervention in its own time. From themiddle of the 19th century, there emerged abody of thought in colonial India that arguedthat Indian society was organized around verydifferent principles from those of the British.Sudipta Kaviraj has recently pointed out thatthe leading Bengali intellectual, BhudevMukho-padhyay had argued as far back as the 1860sthat the distinctiveness of Indian society lay inthe fact that it was characterized by an interiororganization that was both interior, andanterior to the external authority of the state(Kaviraj 2010, 59). Kaviraj notes, correctly,that by Indian society, Bhudev basically meant

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“the Hindu social order based on caste” but wasnonetheless making a more fundamental pointabout the relationship of social order to politicalpower in traditional Indian society. That is per-haps why this argument begins to gain wideracceptability. Thus, says Kaviraj, “[I]t becomesa major argument in much social reflectionassociated with Indian nationalism, and isechoed, with appropriate inflections, by thin-kers like Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore”(Kaviraj 2010, 59).

Kaviraj, however, goes on to argue that eventhough this strand of thinking becomes impor-tant among figures such as Gandhi and Tagore,by and large, “the political imagination of mod-ern India turned decisively in the oppositedirection” (Kaviraj 2010, 67). Both the eliteand subaltern groups were “enchanted by thestate” and decided, in the event, to institute astrong state after independence. It is, however,an open question today as to what extent thismodern imagination succeeded, for all evidencepoints towards the fact that when it came toreforming the practices of dominant socialgroups (as in the case of caste), this powerproved to be quite ineffective. The state itself,being situated within a network of relationships,was hamstrung in its efforts to intervene intransforming dominant cultural social practices.

But the weakness of the state is not the onlypoint at issue here, although that may have hadsome connection to the adoption of the ISImodel by the independent Indian state. Couldthere have been some other logic at work inthis decision of the new political elites? It isinteresting, in this context, to note that amongthe entire range of economic thinkers in mod-ern India, starting with Rammohum Roy inthe 19th century to G.V. Joshi, Dadabhai Naor-oji and later Ranade, Romeshchandra Dutt andG.K. Gokhale, two tendencies coexisted side byside. While they were all eager to see Indiaadopt the path of capitalist/industrial develop-ment, none of them actually saw this as anti-thetical to the improvement of the lives of thepeasants and of agriculture in general. Poverty

was a central concern and industrial develop-ment made sense to these thinkers insofar asit was meant to improve the lot of the ordinarypeople of the country (Ganguli 1977). The ques-tion of the home market – as opposed to exportorientation – was naturally likely to receive pri-ority in any model that sought to develop thistradition of thought. Thus, as Ganguli puts it,

The response of Indian intellectuals to suchthemes as equality, socialism and ruralismwas not merely escapist speculation; it wasrooted in the anguish generated by mass pov-erty and degradation and the exploitativecharacter of British rule, particularly duringthe second half of the nineteenth century.(Ganguli 1977, 24)

Interestingly, this is a concern that goes rightup to the early years of the founding of theIndian republic, when Jawaharlal Nehru takescharge, and despite Nehru’s deep disagreementswith Gandhi’s vision, the state he comman-deered could never adopt the stance of violentdecimation of agricultural/pre-capitalist prop-erty that capitalism in the West did.5

In the 1940s, both Gandhi and Nehru,despite the emergence of very sharp differencesbetween them from the time of the FaizpurCongress (1936), began increasingly talkingabout a cooperative economy in agriculture. If,in 1942, Gandhi was talking about taking tocooperative farming to derive the full benefitsof agriculture (Ganguli 1977, 250), Nehru toowas thinking along similar lines and the Con-gress, on his initiative, adopted the term “coop-erative commonwealth” from the vocabulary ofFabian socialism (Ganguli 1977, 259).

In fact, themes of rural development basedon some reactivation of the panchayat system,combined with the idea of a cooperative econ-omy, were quite prevalent among a range ofthinkers on economic issues.

The question of pre-capitalist forms of prop-erty brings us to another interesting issue thattells the story of the formation that emergedin India. It gives an interesting dimension tothe question of the “dependent arising” of this

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formation. Right from the time of RammohunRoy, the push toward a modern industrial econ-omy was quite evident. However, people such asRammohun Roy were equally aware of the needto effect the transformation from within thegiven field. Roy therefore “used his deep knowl-edge of Hindu law in trying to interpret author-itative Hindu scriptures and commentaries andthe legal tradition, in defense of a progressiveeconomic philosophy of property and inheri-tance, designed to assist the process of econ-omic modernization” (Ganguli 1977, 50). Roywas more favorably disposed towards the day-abhag system of inheritance and consideredthe other, more widely prevalent mitaksharasystem, relatively retrograde. In the dayabhagsystem that was practiced mainly in the Bengaland Assam region, the male head of the familywas the owner of property and the sons couldbecome inheritors only on the death of thepatriarch. Further, it made no distinctionbetween ancestral and self-acquired property.On the other hand, in the mitakshara system,the property became the property of the sonsright from their birth so that in effect, the patri-arch was never the sole owner of the familyproperty. To Roy it seemed evident that econ-omic modernization entailed alienability oflanded property and dayabhag was eminentlysuitable for that task, given that it requiredjust the decision of the head of the family.Mitakshara however, placed an obstacle in theway of alienation of what was essentially familyproperty. Not surprisingly, Rammohun Royheld the mitakshara law to be responsible forthe “backwardness of the Upper Provinces”(Ganguli 1977, 52).

Today, it seems quite plausible that it wasthe widespread prevalence of the mitaksharasystem that perhaps also became one of thebiggest impediments in the establishment ofcapitalism in large parts of the country insofaras the alienability of property is concerned. Atany rate, this is what lends “Indian capitalism”some of its notable features after colonial legalinterventions reconstructed it in the light of

modern British law, as demonstrated by RituBirla (2011). As Birla puts it, where 19th cen-tury capitalism reconstituted the socialthrough “the legal codification of corporatelife,” bringing into view entities such as thelimited liability corporation, the nonprofitassociation, the registered society and thecharitable trust, in the Indian context thisprocess brings to the fore “forms of corporatelife” such as the joint family, “which did notquite fit contractual paradigms.” “The legalcoding of the mercantile firm as the HinduUndivided Family, and so as site of radicaldifference from the modern relations of con-tract, was one important effect of this asym-metry” (Birla 2011, 105).

It is not possible to explore the implicationsof these different transformations here. Sufficeit to say that these were not one-sided processesand the legal interventions did not simply suc-ceed in rewriting the social in the new languageof British law. The practices governed by themore traditional notions of family, propertyand inheritance now found new and differentways of being that were never fully in linewith the requirements of the modern bourgeoissubject. The state, after independence, was cer-tainly interested in pushing towards moderneconomic development but it too was perhapsnever too invested in a violent decimation ofthe older, now reconstituted forms of propertyand ownership until, in the 1990s, it finallymoved towards the dismantling of the ISImodel. That is another story, which we cannotgo into here.

To return to our initial question then, ifour above discussion tells us anything, it isthat there is really no such thing as capitalthat works according to sacrosanct laws, justas there is no God called Capital who needsto be propitiated at all costs. In fact, our dis-cussion should lead us to the recognitionthat the well-being of ordinary people hasno necessary connection to the capitalistdevelopment that comes to us in the form ofthe economic ideology of “growth.” On the

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contrary, if anything, we might be closer to arecognition today than ever before that capitalas we know it is, in fact, inimical to the inter-ests of people and society in general. Wemight need, therefore, to think of Afro-Asian futures afresh, outside of the “catch-ing-up” syndrome.

Acknowledgement

A version of this paper was originally presented atthe conference, “Bandung. Third World, 60 Years,”held in Hangzhou, China from 17–19 April 2015. Iam extremely grateful to participants of the confer-ence and Kuan-Hsing Chen, in particular, for theircritical inputs.

Notes

1. Often, this was said by him in a part serious andpart ironical way, but as in most of his writingsthis seems to be his way of evasion – of sayingand not saying something at the same time.

2. This expression has been used by T.N. Madan inrelation to secularism in his well-known essay,“Secularism in its Place.”

3. Matsyanyaya literally means the “logic” of thefishes – that is to say, the idea that big fish liveoff small fish. In a sense, it indicates a sort of“might is right” idea that operates in nature.

4. The dates above refer to the original publicationsalthough I have used the subsequent reprints inKaviraj 2010 – all reference henceforth shall beto that volume.

5. This is not to say that there were no cases of dis-possession of the peasantry. To be sure, therewere but mostly in cases where larger “nationalinterests” were brought in as justification forbuilding infrastructure. That, however, was a farcry from the Western, particularly British styleof decimation of agricultural communities.

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Notes on contributor

Aditya Nigam is a political theorist based at theCentre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.His recent work is concerned with histories of “capi-tal” from India and the non-West in general. Heexamines formations of the economic and the politi-cal, as twin aspects of the modern in the context ofcontemporary India by moving away from standardwestern theorizations. He is the author of The Insur-rection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular National-ism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: IndiaSince 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Uto-pia: Modernity and Socialism and the Postcolony(2010), and Desire Named Development (2011).

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