RIGHT-WING POLITICS, AND THE CULTURES OF CRUELTY 25
Partha Chatterjee, the most influential of the subalternist theorists, alongside Ranajit Guha. See, in particular, the chapter on Nehru in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1986. The attack on Nehru* s emphasis on industrial modernization within a framework of central planning converges, in not altogether agreeable ways, with similar attacks coming from the Right, including the international agencies advocating "liberalisation." Chatterjee seems much perturbed by planning and "modernity" but not much by the market itself. His identification of Gandhi with "tradition" and of Nehru with "modernity" only repeats the conventional wisdom of Indian social science and paves the way for subalternism' s later turn toward a full-scale anti-rationalist, indigenist postmodernism. The historic premises of the Indian state as it arose after decolonisation, with its twin emphases on secular democracy and economic nationalism, were fully under siege by the mid-90s, as the country got overwhelmed by the IMF-inspired "liberalisation" and the RSS-inspired "Hindu nationalism." It was in the midst of this historic shift toward the Far Right that Partha Chatterjee published his well-known essay "Secularism and Toleration" (Economic and Political Weekly, XXIX, 28) which questioned the very idea of secularism, a civic virtue enshrined in the Indian Constitution, and affiliated the author explicitly with Ashish Nandy who had by then had a rather extensive red-baiting career. In deed, Chatterjee was to state that his own essay was a mere continuation of the argument begun by Nandy in his "The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance," in Veena Das (ed.) Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, NewDelhi, Oxford University Press, 1992. Subalternism has had a curious career, starting with invocations of Gramsci and finally coming into its own as an accomplice of the anti-communist Right.
