Abstract
In his introduction to the works of Marx and Engels, Robert Tucker had famously remarked that Marx “wrote as though his pen were dipped in molten anger” (Tucker, 1978: xxxvii). Such passion is now frowned upon in social science writing, but Rohit Varman and Devi Vijay’s edited volume occasionally breaks through the walls of academic restraint to lay bare the particularly virulent forms of capitalism that underlay the landscape of India, and the manner in which vastly outgunned activists continue to take it on and imagine an alternative and more equitable nation.
Recently deemed the most populous country in the world, India now has a GDP of around $3.25 trillion, making it the fourth largest economy in the world. 1 Unfortunately, it is also among the most unequal, with over 40% of its wealth owned by the top 1%. 2 In the meantime, over 60 million Indians are pushed into poverty each year by the lack of healthcare alone. These bloodless statistics are inadequate to represent the hopeless squalor to which India’s poor have been condemned, despite the shiny claims of a growing economy and a nation that strives for global leadership.
Equally worrisome is India’s political climate. India ranks 150th in the world in press freedom 3 and 132nd in the Human Development Index developed by the UNDP. 4 Such indices are not a definitive way to evaluate a society, but it must be said that the past decade has not been kind to India’s economic and socio-cultural fabric. The state has systematically moved to deprive vast swathes of its minorities from citizenship rights, and dissent from protesting activists has been met with incarceration, harassment and restrictions on spaces to protest.
Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital it is tempting to find causal relationships between the ascent of specific political parties in India and the worsening of the situation of its most vulnerable citizens. But Varman and Vijay go a step forward and interrogate the regime of capitalism that enables such illiberal elements to seize the state. What makes capitalism so violent in the Global South? Why are the liberal and bourgeois protections won by the citizens of the western world not afforded to Indians? How did global and local capital in India succeed in enacting such a terrible bargain with its putatively democratic government, where the majority of state institutions function to shield the rich from the poor and rob the latter of any ability to organize? While Varman, Vijay and the contributors of this excellent book try and theorize these issues, their focus is on the organizational realm as well, yielding an impressive corpus of empirical data. [Those who wish to ask more fine-grained questions about the specificities of capitalist oppression in the Global South may choose to begin with Vivek Chibber’s treatise (Chibber, 2014)].
In their introduction, Varman and Vijay offer a stark description of the current Indian regimes of exploitation, environmental destruction, mass-incarceration, and thought control. But their project attempts more than just an enactment of despair, it is about highlighting ways in which creative acts of resistance are being imagined and enacted, to ensure that the dominant strand in the Indian polity never achieves the status of hegemony. In their ringing words, “this book provides accounts of resistance and hope. We offer neither a blueprint nor a manifesto. The plural approaches contained in this book speak to the need for organizing on multiple fronts and of the possibilities of interdependent collaborative survival” (Varman and Vijay, 2022: 29).
Kothari Apart from the introduction, the book is organized into three sections. The first, titled Alternative Imaginations of Social Relations, comprises three chapters. In “LETS and the Possibilities of a Twenty-First-Century Alternative Economic System,” Maidul Islam describes alternative modes of trade and exchange than the current regimes of cash, interest and debt (LETS is an acronym for local-exchange-trading-system developed by Michael Linton while running a cooperative in Western Canada in the 1980s). Islam describes the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani’s Marxist-anarchist take on LETS to produce workers cooperatives as well as consumer cooperatives based on the exchange principle of mutual aid. In “Democratic Socialism: A Challenge to Sectarian Plutocracy,” Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil analyzes the rise of “Hindutva,” the virulent form of sectarian Hinduism that has been engulfing India especially over the past decade, and offers democratic socialism as a framework under which rights-based groups can align and cooperate as an alternative. In “Grounded in Reality, a Radically Alternative Future,” Ashish Kothari begins with a fundamental question: How are people in India reacting to continued deprivation and discrimination and to new forms of displacement and dispossession? argues that resistance against the forces of state-enabled exploitation is ever present in India. He highlights several examples where the most oppressed and marginalized of society have fought in what seemed to be hopeless situations, and have created a revolution. It is an unprincipled act, he suggests to call it pointless. Those who resist do not have that luxury.
The second section, titled Alternative Visions of Rights and Representations, comprises four chapters. In “Harnessing Constitutional and Policy Spaces for Organized Resistance: Movement to Save Hasdeo Aranya Forests,” Priyanshu Gupta describes an indigenous community’s resistance against the auctioning of forest land for coal mining. Located in central India, the Hasdeo Aranya forests have become a significant critical battleground in India’s energy-conservation debate, pitting people against corporations, and the narrative of “we need fossil fuels” against “this is our homeland.” In “The Wire and Circuits of Resistance: Immersions in the Slowness of Democratic Time and De-naturalizing the Present,” Srinath Jagannathan and Rajnish Rai describe an alternative news portal The Wire as a possible site of resistance that reimagines citizenship in a society where majoritarianism is being normalized. Discussing The Wire’s coverage of protests at one of India’s premier educational institutions, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, they argue that the politics of witnessing based on nuanced lenses of gender, craft, and lament embed witnessing as a reflective act that deepens the possibilities of citizenship, hope, solidarity, and justice. In “People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) as an Alternative to Corporatized Media: The Public Sphere and Rural Silencing in India,” Apoorv Khare and Ram Manohar Vikas describe PARI, an open-source digital archive and a living journal dedicated to rural India. The authors show how PARI enables plural representations of India’s poor in their own words. In so doing, it partially resurrects the crumbling fourth pillar of democracy and creates an alternative imagination. Finally, in “LeftWord: A Heterotopic Space in Post-democratic India,” Rohit Varman and Devi Vijay describe the inner workings of a collective that publishes and distributes books on socialism, the lives of workers and issues of Marxism and socialism. They analyze LeftWord as a heterotopic space that resists capitalism and fascism in India through an alternative imagining of what it means to work together.
The third section is titled Alternative Interrogations of Subalternity, and comprises two chapters. In “Exploring the State within the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BOP) Terrain,” Suparna Chatterjee analyzes how the pernicious BOP concept has been deployed to accelerate commodification, privatization and expropriation of public resources in the name of efficiency. Through a close examination of the position of the state within the BOP metanarratives, she suggests that the BOP is a regime of neoliberal power, which simultaneously effaces the state as an actor in the world of firms and consumers, and re-presents it as a promoter and facilitator of market economy. In the final chapter “A Women-Inclusive Emancipatory Alternative to Corporate Capitalism? The Case of Kerala’s State-Instituted Kudumbashree Programme,” George Kandathil, Poornima Varma and Rama Mohana R. Turaga describe an ethnographic study of “Kudumbashree,” a women empowerment and inclusion program initiated in 1998 by the provincial government of Kerala, a state in South India. Their analysis present Kudumbashree experiences as discrete moments within a corporate patriarchal capitalist totality.
The French pacifist and activist Romain Rolland had coined the phrase “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” to describe the lonely struggle of activists who labored against dominant and resurgent forces of illiberalism and tyranny. In the face of shrinking spaces for dissent, Rohit Varman, Devi Vijay and the contributors to this volume have offered yet another example of how that phrase may be enacted.
In his chapter on the indigenous Adivasis who fought against the coal empire, Priyanshu Gupta ends by quoting a poem titled “Beautiful damaged people” by local poet Abhay Xaxa. That poem could well be a descriptor of all activists that this book honors: Among the doom and gloom they smile Mistaken for idiots by the mad rational world The Adivasis
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, beautifully damaged people! On the treasures of iron, gold and diamond they sit Poor and powerless, holding the curse of nature The curse of loving their land, water, forest Where they prefer to die as mad lovers Beautifully damaged people! With stars in their eyes, and moon in their minds Thoughts flowing like an undammed river With hearts unadulterated with twisted philosophies Religions, ideologies, lust and greed Their vision misunderstood as juvenility In the face of violence, loot and hopelessness they remain Dreamy, defiant and deviant Beautifully damaged people!
