The Abiding Binary

The concept of governmentality has been crucial to the study of modern Indian history. Scholars have shown how colonial governmental techniques – reform, education, medicine, enumeration, classification, codification, survey and representation – came to produce in India critical social categories such as caste, religion, gender and ethnicity (Dirks, 2001; Hodges, 2004; Kalpagam, 2014; Stoler, 1995). Scholars have also discussed the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial governmentality in order to specify the precise nature of the modern Indian state (Legg, 2006). Partha Chatterjee has gone further and described the postcolonial social as society of the ‘governed’ (as opposed to ‘citizens’) – the governed here being not just a policy category but also a political subjectivity, demanding ethico–poitical (though not juridico–civic) recognition (Chatterjee, 2004; Nigam, 2008). This chapter, pleads for a rethinking of the concept of governmentality, from a perspective, not merely of colonial difference but of historical difference in a wider sense. It proposes that the concept of governmentality, produced out of Foucault's re-reading of European history, is not applicable in the same way to all histories of the world. This is not to say that governmentality must be abandoned as a concept but only that the concept needs to be supplemented by other narratives and other concepts if it has to work transhistorically.

Colonialism · Epistemology · Governmentality · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy