To mark the publication of Akeel Bilgrami’s major recent book, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment
(Permanent Black, 2014, details below), we requested the political theorist, Uday Singh Mehta,
to converse with Akeel Bilgrami on issues
raised by his book and related matters. Uday Singh Mehta is the author of the pathbreaking Liberalism and
Empire: Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (1999), which won the J. David Greenstone Book Award 2001 for
the best book in history and theory.
It turned out to be a scintillating, deeply thoughtful discussion.
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| UDAY MEHTA |
It turned out to be a scintillating, deeply thoughtful discussion.
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| AKEEL BILGRAMI |
Q1
I think of you, especially in the essays that constitute
this book, as doing a rather particular kind of philosophy. It is a very
distinguished tradition of practitioners, including the late Richard Rorty,
Bernard Williams, and Alasdair MacIntyre in the Anglo-American tradition;
Michel Foucault, in the French tradition, Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the
German tradition, and of course several others. One of the things that marks
this way of doing philosophy (if that is the term we should use) is that the
familiar, and typically sharp lines, that separate philosophy from the
humanities and the social sciences are willfully and self-consciously breached.
I don’t mean that they are breached just for heck of it, but that questions are
posed in such a way that makes answering them reliant on such a breach. Bernard
Williams, as you know, proudly affirmed philosophy as a humanistic discipline.
Your own work is heavily informed by the Dissenting tradition of 17th century
thought and by contemporary history and social science. And, yet, in many ways
this way of doing philosophy is the minor key of contemporary Anglo-American,
and increasingly, even Continental philosophy. How would you describe what you
do? Does it matter to you if it is thought of as “doing philosophy,” or does
that description seem arcane to you, as it did for Richard Rorty?
A1
I must confess that my work has not been motivated by any
self-conscious effort towards trying to reorient the discipline of philosophy
nor even to follow a tradition set by the philosophers you mention, much as I
admire them all. Rather, it’s just
that certain issues grabbed my interest and I followed what I thought was most
important and urgent in them and when that led to having to read history and
intellectual history, and to study some political economy and politics and a
variety of cultural phenomena, I just followed that lead as best I could—mostly
for the sake of coming to some fundamental understanding of the issues. You are certainly right that most
philosophers do not have a capacious understanding of their subject and many
might even view this sort of outreach as contaminating their discipline. However, looking at things from the
other side, we mustn’t forget that the social sciences themselves, particularly
Economics, have manifestly abandoned the historical, the broadly conceptual,
and, above all, the value-oriented aspects of their pursuits. So it is possible that we are now at a
disciplinary moment when philosophy is poised to pick up that slack and pay close
attention to the very things that the social sciences have abdicated. This would, then, be an exciting time
to be doing philosophy.
Q2
One of the very striking claims you have been making for
several years, and which you make in these essays (and which has had a huge
influence on me), is that for a figure like Gandhi, politics in its many forms,
including in our agency as citizens, just was not the terms through which he
thought of bettering the world. This is a remarkable claim, especially since we
so often think of Gandhi as having inaugurated mass politics in India.
Encouraging a certain type of mass public action is one of his most enduring
influences all over the world. The idea that there could be something
profoundly wrong with the world; and that nevertheless, the redress to that
condition was not to be secured through political means, goes against the
dominant grain of modern thinking. Could you say more about this? Is this a way
of animating the category of ethics as something sharply distinct from
politics, rather than the way it is typically thought of as something tied to
politics?
A2
When I made the claim you cite, I was trying to understand what I
described as a “studied indifference” in much of Gandhi’s theoretical writing
(of course, we must not understand the
term “theoretical” here in any academic sense) to the kind of liberal,
constitutional, framework within which the very idea of politics was mostly
understood in the tradition of his colonial masters. I was trying to put that indifference together, on the one
hand with Gandhi’s incessant moralistic perspective on things and his
constantly avowed religiosity and, on the other hand, with his resistance to
political abstractions that took one away from the experiences of ordinary
people in their quotidian social habitat. In order to integrate these different aspects of his thought,
it seemed to me right to attribute to him a skepticism about the idea that what
is bad in human beings (a constant theme for Gandhi as for all religious
moralists) can be set right simply by making them over into some abstract form
of being called “citizens” in a form of polity that came to be associated with
the nation-building exercises in Europe since the Westphalian peace. That is what I meant when I suggested Gandhi
was an anti-political thinker.
This is quite compatible with viewing Gandhi as having inaugurated a
form of mass politics in India that was highly original and imaginative. You ask something slightly different: whether
he believed that a wrong in the world
(which is somewhat different from what is bad in us) could be redressed by political means. Well, for him, I think a lot depends on
what that wrong is or, better, what level of description you give it. It also depends on which phase and context of his thinking we
are talking about. So, for
instance, if you described the wrong in terms of what he opposed in very specifically
oppressive actions and policies of the British government in colonial India or
colonial South Africa, he certainly repeatedly appealed to mass politics of one
kind or other to resist such wrongs.
Clearly, in this sense, he believed in a politics of resistance. So also, as others have pointed out, when
it came to the resolution that was moved at the Karachi Congress in 1931, he
found himself in a context where he openly committed himself to a radical
(rather than an orthodox liberal) version of political principles and rights. Even on secularist politics he changed
his mind, as Bipan Chandra has documented, from the time of his early writings
to what he was saying by the 1940s. (I discuss some of this in my chapter on secularism in the
book.) But it is also well known that he believed that there was a great deal
in modern civilization of the West that was tied to capitalism and more
generally to attitudes of gain and profit and consumerism that you could not merely
constrain by liberal or even social-democratic conceptions of politics, i.e.,
by a familiar set of political, legal, and economic constraints. Rather one should shun the entire
mentality that underlies it. He certainly
did not have a socialist alternative that was supposed to follow upon a
transcending of capitalism in the way that Marx did; instead he wanted to preempt capitalism in India (not unlike
Marx in his very late phase when he was focused on the peasant communes in
Russia) and to do so by repudiating the mentality, the cognitive outlook, that
lay behind it. This required a
deeper reflection about what the corrosive moral and political effects of that
mentality are. Hind Swaraj, among other things, is a
harshly worded reflection about just that.
Q3
Staying with Gandhi, one of the ways in which Gandhi
strikes me as almost unique among colonial critics of imperialism is that his
challenge to the empire seems singularly unmarked by a sense of inferiority, or
a lack of self-confidence—itself so often a product of the empire. This does
not seem to me to be true of Nehru, Ambedkar Jinnah, or for that matter
Kenyatta or Nkrumah. They all appear not just to have been
influenced (as Gandhi clearly was too) by the ideas and practices of the
empire, but also in some way distorted, even disfigured, by them. I am not sure
you agree with this characterization of Gandhi (and the others), but it makes me
wonder if the reason for it might have something to do with what you argue,
namely that Gandhi’s opposition to the empire is ultimately a part, and only a
part, of a much larger critique of modernity. Gandhi (like Marx), as you point
out, is ultimately really concerned with a kind of alienation from nature and
from ourselves, which for both of them are the defining traits of modernity. In
that sense his critique of empire, even though very sharp, is almost a
secondary purpose, and because of that he can inoculate himself from the
distortions, such as those that stem from wanting to wrestle power from the
imperialists.
A3
The way I’ve put the point you are making is to say that Gandhi had a
very specific sort of confidence that later, even very powerful, anti-imperialist
voices such as Fanon or, say, Edward Said, did not possess. Your term “inferiority” is perhaps a
slightly misleading description to put on what the source of the lack of this
confidence in the others really is.
So take someone like Said, who is so widely read today. He wrote
eloquently about the distortions that “the West” has shown in its understanding
and conceptualizations of the cultures of
the global South (or what was called the “Orient”). But he never really asked what was
wrong in the West’s own civilizational tendencies, in its own
conceptualizations, in short what was wrong in the West’s understanding of itself. It requires a specific kind of confidence to ask that, a
confidence that comes not from overcoming a sense of inferiority so much as from
possessing a set of intellectual and conceptual reserves. It really comes, in my view, from being
a philosopher of a sort that I
believe Gandhi was and Said and Fanon were not. It comes from having deeply reflected on moral concepts and
the moral life and its relation to politics and economics and culture. That is really my primary reason for
being so interested in Gandhi and, as you say, for my placing him side by side
with Marx and looking at his ideas on nature, alienation, and so on. Your question, as you have formulated
it, makes it seem that if one sees this quality in Gandhi’s thought, one must
see his anti-imperialism as secondary and somewhat unimportant. I wonder if that can be right. It would be a bit like saying Marx’s anti-capitalism
is made less important because he believes that transcending capitalism is in
the service of freeing human beings into a new and liberated subjectivity that
is unalienated. I would prefer to
say that Gandhi’s anti-imperialism was supremely important to him but it nested within his eventual ideal of a
self-governing moral human subject, just as Marx’s critique of capitalism did.
Q4
You were a close friend and colleague of the late Edward
Said. By pure happenstance during the last conversation I had with Edward (on
the phone) he mentioned you with great affection and admiration and spoke of
the course you were teaching together. You write very movingly in your essay
about him. It is an essay about Edward but also about friendship. Your relationship
was clearly a friendship of many parts — shared intellectual passions,
political commitments, a deep love of music, and many other things. Reading
your essay on Said it made me think about friendships and the academy. How have
these and other ( I am thinking of Noam Chomsky and Prabhat Patnaik to
whom you dedicate this volume) specifically “academic” friendships molded your
life in the American academy and are there such friendships that link you with
India? Has friendship been important to the ideas that you cherish?
A4
It’s hard to talk about specific friendships in a public forum,
Uday. But, I do see the
point of your question. Speaking
generally (individuals apart), in the academy and in intellectual life more
broadly, when you learn about ideas from others they become friends in a way
that is closely tied to personal respect as much as intimate or amiable
relations. Anyone with any
experience in the academy will notice that intellectual ability is far more
common than intellectual character, and may even perhaps be less important than
it. I reckon all of us over a
lifetime of thinking and writing come across and, if we are lucky, come to know
a handful of people (if that) of whom one thinks: if he or she thinks I am alright, I must at least
approximate being alright. They may be one’s friends, of course, but they are
not merely so.
Q5
Finally, since this book is being published in America and
India, what are your thoughts about these two rather difference contexts in
which you are intervening? This is clearly not a book of policy
recommendations, but you are avidly engaged with public and intellectual life
in India. What are some of the points where you see your work as confronting
the new political dispensation in India following the recent elections?
A5
I do spend about six weeks in India each year and yes I do try and keep
up with Indian politics and occasionally, if asked, write about India in more
public spaces than books and learned journals. About the outcome of the recent elections, I can’t, in a
short space, do much more than say that there is nothing to do but to work as hard
as we can in the next few years to try and make sure that there is a very
different outcome next time. It
has never before been as frustrating for me to be away from India since it is
more urgent now than ever before (except perhaps the brief period of ‘the
emergency’) to put one’s effort in opposing the government and its policies.
Q6
Could you name 5 or 6 books outside your discipline that have influenced your work in recent
years?
A6
In no particular order and without too much reflection let me put down
the following:
1) Christopher Hill, The World
Turned Upside Down
2) Various writings of Marx that I have studied over the last few
decades including (what is often excluded by others influenced by Marx), the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844
3) Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
4) M.H. Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism
5) Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation
6) Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons:
The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
Akeel Bilgrami
Secularism, Identity, and
Enchantment
“Akeel Bilgrami, a leading analytical
philosopher, has over the years also engaged philosophically with contemporary
issues of Indian politics. The essays in this volume show him intervening with
great analytical skill as well as sagacity in the debates over secularism and
identity politics.”—Partha Chatterjee
“It is a
rewarding experience to read these thoughtful and penetrating essays, with
their wide-ranging, provocative, and challenging ideas and insights, deeply
informed and carefully reasoned, and reaching to issues of fundamental concern
in the contemporary world.”—Noam Chomsky
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| The jacket photo is of an installation by Manisha Bhattacharya |
Bringing clarity to a subject clouded by polemic, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment is
a rigorous exploration of how secularism and identity emerged as concepts in
different parts of the modern world. At a time when secularist and religious
worldviews appear irreconcilable, Akeel Bilgrami strikes out on a path
distinctly his own, criticizing secularist proponents and detractors, liberal
universalists and multicultural relativists alike.
Those who ground secularism in arguments that aspire
to universal reach, Bilgrami argues, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of
politics. To those, by contrast, who regard secularism as a mere outgrowth of
colonial domination, he offers the possibility of a more conceptually
vernacular ground for political secularism. Focusing on the response to Salman
Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Bilgrami
asks why Islamic identity has so often been a mobilizing force against
liberalism, and he answers the question with diagnostic sympathy, providing a
philosophical framework within which the Islamic tradition might overcome the
resentments prompted by its colonized past and present.
Turning to Gandhi’s political and religious thought,
Bilgrami ponders whether the increasing appeal of religion in many parts of the
world reflects a growing disillusionment not with science but with an outlook
of detachment around the rise of modern science and capitalism.
AKEEL BILGRAMI is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of
Philosophy and Director, South Asian Institute, Columbia University.
“Carrying on the critical spirit of Edward Said, Bilgrami
presents a profoundly original emancipatory
genealogy of secularism-and-religion, identity, and enchantment, and, in so
doing, of the hidden historical and conceptual connections between them. It is
emancipatory in bringing to light within them the possibility of a distinct
kind of radical politics today—one that draws on seventeenth-century English
radicalism, German romanticism, Marx, and especially Gandhi, among others. In
the conclusion he shows the striking affinities of this remarkable achievement
to Said’s critical humanism. This is a must-read for anyone who wishes to think
differently about these central problems of the present and respond
constructively to them.”—James Tully
“Bilgrami became known as one of the leading voices on
the problem of secularism long before the topic became fashionable in the
United States, and has continued to articulate a thorough and rigorous approach
to tough questions that are now very widely debated. One has a strong sense of
the continuity of position—and more impressively, the continuity of Bilgrami’s
recognizable voice, with its combination of seriousness about thinking, the
humanity of wide sympathies, and a certain argumentative ferocity—over a period
of some twenty years. This book has been eagerly anticipated by a wide
interdisciplinary audience as essays from a leading thinker in the field; it
will appeal broadly, and its lasting impact is assured.”—Michael Warner
Hardback / 412pp / Rs 895 / ISBN 81-7824-385-7
/ South Asia rights / Published May 2014
Copublished with Harvard University Press
