Pluralism, Civil Society and Subaltern Counterpublics

Pluralism Working Paper no. 9

Reflecting on Contemporary Challenges in India through the Case-Study of the Pasmanda Movement. By Khalid Anis Ansari

This interesting paper, written by Khalid Anis Ansari, can be connected to two earlier papers in our series which both explore and problematize salient issues on pluralism that are emerging from the India Pluralism Knowledge Program. The first one is ‘Human Rights, Pluralism and Civil Society; Reflecting on contemporary challenges in India’ by Prof. Sitharamam Kakarala (2010/ No.6). In this paper, Kakarala discusses contemporary struggles in the realm of social theory development and pluralism. In addition, he analyzes the context of communal violence and conflict  in contemporary India with a particular focus on religious pluralism in relationship to caste, gender and ethnicity. The current paper by Khalid Anis Ansari, exemplifies the efforts by the India Pluralism Knowledge Program to reframe the debate on pluralism in ways that allow us to go beyond communal violence and constitutional governance questions, and thus help us to rethink ways and means of strengthening the pluricultural societal fabric. The second paper in our series which is connected to the current work of Ansari is the conversation with himself and Shahrukh Alam, titled ‘Exploring new Sites of Social Transformation, Conversations with the founding members of the Patna Collective in India (2010/ No.7). Both are founding members of the Patna Collective, a research-activist collective based in India. Their primary focus is to explore new ways of engaging with social transformation and its impact on Indian politics of identity. One of their areas of special attention is the pasmanda movement. This is a lower caste movement within the Muslim community in India, which aspires to forge new caste solidarities, by exceeding traditional religious identities and by challenging the hegemony of the upper-caste Muslim elite.

In this paper, which is based on his Doctoral research at the Centre for the Studies of Culture and Society (CSCS) in Bangalore, India and the Graduate School of the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Ansari makes new meaningful connections between international contemporary academic debates on pluralism and democratic social transformation on the one hand and discourses circulating within Indian subaltern spaces on the other. Through a particular case study of ‘the pasmanda counterpublic’, Ansari aims to enrich the debates within civil society as well as open new possibilities for engagement with social change. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, the work of Laclau and Mouffe in particular, offers a meaningful point of departure in the conceptual context in which Ansari launches his discussion on the pasmanda counterpublic and its significance for rethinking contemporary challenges of social change. According to Ansari, Laclau and Mouffe have developed “an anti-essentialist and relational view of identification and stressed the constitutive role of power in identity formation”. Their approach exposes a number of the “immanent limits of any discussion of pluralism outside ‘the political’ envisaged as a field necessarily marked with social antagonism and discursive contestations”. When he connects this line of thinking with his own empirical research on discourses in the pasmanda movement, Ansari suggests that pluralism is indeed “an empty signifier whose content cannot be fixed beforehand but which will be contingently produced by the hegemonic struggle itself”. In addition to the above, the notions of governmentality and relationality of the state (Foucault), the relation between public sphere and subaltern counterpublics (Fraser), and the distinction between ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’ (Chatterjee) also play a meaningful role in Ansari’s sharp analysis.

The second part of the paper locates the pasmanda counterpublic in the ongoing and historical debate with a account of the emergence of new subaltern counterpublics in India and a concise genealogy of the modernity of traditional identities applied by both the colonial and post-colonial Indian state, with a special focus on caste. The third part of the paper is primarily based on resources produced by the pasmanda movement itself and discusses the ways in which the movement deals with religious pluralism, social reform within the Muslim community and social justice in India and finally sketches how the process of globalization is currently received by the pasmanda community.

As the Patna Collective is both research – as well as activist oriented, Ansari offers not only a thoughtful and well-researched academic account, but also explicitly pleas for civil society to be more “critically self-reflexive and engage with these new sites of social transformation in order to make their frames and strategies more sustainable, effective and inclusive”. I am convinced that Ansari’s paper offers new challenging insights into pluralism, which are most certainly valuable not only in India, but also in the broader international realm. Apart from thanking Khalid Anis Ansari for his paper, I’d like to thank two additional people. Firstly, there is Sitharamam Kakarala who coordinates the India Pluralism knowledge program and also serves as one of Ansari’s doctoral supervisors. Secondly, there is Hilde van ‘t Klooster from the Kosmopolis Institute who did some fine editorial work on the paper. I hope and trust that this paper will inspire new dialogue in the international Pluralism network and beyond.

 

Caroline Suransky

Chief editor of the Pluralism Paper series for the Pluralism Knowledge Program.