The Trajectories of the Indian State by Sudipta Kaviraj On the Enchantment of the State: Indian Thought on the Role

of State in the Narrative of Modernity

The modernity into Indian intellectual culture was the transformation of the idea of the state. As India is distinct from Europe so this chapter seeks to explain the fundamental ideational changes brought by modernity into Indian intellectual cultural was the transformation of the idea of the state. In understanding the different trajectories of the imaginary ideas of the India and Europe, the boundaries and content of the idea of the state are likely to vary between intellectuals and common people, and also between literate and illiterate actors in political world, between elites and underprivileged populations.

Subsidiary/Sovereignty- two conceptions of the state Pre modern Indian state- Manusmiriti, attributed to a legendary sage Manu who give detailed
description of rulers to be observed in Hindu life cycle i.e. raja-dharma( the kings power is simply the translation into human scale of the law, the logic of a divinely given natural and social order). Traditionally, nationalists illegitimately assimilated Indian forms of writing to European ones, often suggesting that texts like the Manusmiriti, Arthasatra and the santiparva of Mahabahrata were similar to European literature in relation to advice given to princes.

The Islamic state in India- Islam is the religion of book (Koran), unlike Hinduism, and its social
constitution. In terms of the historical long term, the entry of Islam into Indian society triggered highly significant changes in many other fields of social life, but not in the structure of its political order.

State of Sovereignty: Colonialism and the Early Modern State

According to a new strand of historiography there was a demonstrable impulse of indigenous modernity from the sixteenth century onwards which was a defeated and channeled in different directions by the triumph of British power in the mid- eighteenth century(peculiar fashion). The British were eventually able to conquer India precisely because they did not conquer it all at once; similarly nationalist torment about the loss of sovereignty to a distant and alien power was also based on a misdescription. In Europe, the rise of the modern state occurred within an intellectual context of major theoretical interventions which emphasized both the necessity of the modern state and expressed suspicion of its overexpansion into areas of civil society .But in contrast of Indian there was a disconnection between the earlier theory and the nature of the modern state. The controversy spilt Indian intellectuals and public opinion into three ideological camps:-

1. Supporter of abolition unconditionally and argued that since Hindu society was unwilling to abolish the practice, the only rational solution to the problem was to bring in the power of colonial state. And to allow the colonial state to rectify the

undoubted barbarism of indigenous society was to give it an illegitimate jurisdiction for interference without consultation and went against the fundamental notions of self-rule. 2. Hindu opinion was more coherently conservative: it opposed the jurisdiction of the state to initiate reform and rejected normative criticisms of sati as social practice. 3. This is the most interesting argument, in a sense and also contained an ambiguity as weather it was the states claim to interfere into social rules that was unacceptable, or the fact that the state was in the hands of alien power.
The distinction was fundamental. The first argument would merge into a Gandhian scepticism about the state in general; on the second would eventually evolve into the Nehruvian reliance on the nationalist state. The later periods, these would increasingly diverge into two separate strands of political reflectionone rejecting the foreignness of the intervention; of the other, more radical one, objecting to the power of the modern state to intervene in the rules of society. The discourse of Indian nationalism was thus born with a strangely contradictory relation with European nation-state; clearly the only way of prising open the colonial grip of the British nation state on its Indian empire was to generate a sense of nationalism, and the eventual creation of a Indian nation- state.

Thinking about the state Modern state was unprecedented devices by which the entire social universe in the colonies was restructured by European imperialism into form of society that was excessively materialistic, individualistic, and competitive, and eventually made any real conception of community unsustainable. The historiography of Indianan intellectual modernity, vernacular reflection has been relatively neglected in favour of authors who wrote in English. The discussion of Bhudev (writing period with French theories) shows that Gandhian starling intervention on the question of modernity and the state had a long indigenous pan- Indian history.

The discourse of disillusion- Gandhi

Gandhi asserted that the central feature of modern western society was the substitution of the traditional principles of moral restraint, in the desires of the individual and in the economic acquisitiveness of society, the human exploitation of nature by technology. He simply appealed innovatively to a concept deeply embedded in reformist traditions of Indic religion- Buddhism, Jainism and all versions of the Vaishnava sects. For Gandhi the primary principle of human life was restraint, which would calls swarj. In his though there was a distinction and inverse relation between internal and external government. But Gandhis theory of the government of the self and government of society failed to answer several questions. The modern form of the state was attractive to modern elites because they saw in it an immense expedient for the expansion of their own power over society; modern elites were not satisfied with segementary forms of domination; only the mediation of the modern state could provide it.

The enchantment of stet: the modernist political imaginary

After independence sociologically, the crucial reason for the states triumph in the Indian political imaginary was the manner in which it captured the imagination of the both elites and masses. Actually our comparison is always one sided- always measuring modern India against the history of modern Europe. The Indian nationalist state produced a new, powerful imagination for itself which reconnected it to popular aspirations, and which allowed the Indian state to continue its successful career despite disapproval from both camps in cold war. In the modern Indian political life the central conflict was two views of the state, representing broadly by Gandhi and Nehru. But now since 1990s successive Indian governments run by various political parties implemented expanding programmes of economic liberalization which necessarily wants to shrink the powers and the spheres of operation of the state.

Reading the state

All these confusing and conflicting aspirations and the inevitable disappointments that historical experience has brought along have impaired the legitimacy of the state, and done something strange to the exact location of its images in the political imagination, so they all lost some of their legitimacy in a rising tide of undirected and uncontrollable social aspiration, except for a distant, second order, spectral and moral idea of the modern state. In standard academic discourse, the sate comprises the army, bureaucracy and the government; in Indian popular imagination, it is made strangely distinct from all these institutions. The idea of the state has gone through an astonishing transformation so there is no end in sight of Indian societys strange enchantment with the modern state.