Sankaran Krishna
Institution: Department of Political Science, the University of Hawai`i at Manoa
Sankaran Krishna teaches Political Science at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. He works in the areas of International Relations, Comparative Politics, and South Asian studies. Besides two books (Postcolonial Insecurities, Minnesota, 1999; Globalization and Postcolonialism, Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), he has published essays on the centrality of racial amnesia in cohering the discipline of International Relations; on meritocracy as justificatory ideology for international inequality; and the salience of caste in the evolution of Indian diplomacy.
Reflections Upon “New Civilizationisms”
Until recently the concept of “civilization,” let alone “civilizationalism,” was not on my intellectual or political radar. The rise of Hindutva over the last three decades in India, and the increasing ubiquity of these terms in contemporary political discourse across a variety of national and extra-national contexts – India, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Europe, the “West,” to mention some of the more prominent ones- have made them inescapable for anyone interested in contemporary international politics. In particular, the centrality of claims to a civilizational distinctiveness or specialness to the rise of the BJP, and the evident currency such claims have on sizable sections of the Indian middle class and beyond, have been of great interest to me.
As someone who has worked on Indian foreign policy from the standpoint of history rather than from the more conventional (and presentist) frameworks that emphasize geopolitics and security, I have always been struck by the paradox of one of the world’s poorest countries taking it for granted that it was – or was destined to be- one of the world’s great powers, and that it deserved a seat at the table of the high and mighty. Such delusions of grandeur owed, in my thinking, to (a) the idea that India was the site of an ancient and gloried civilization, (b) that the postcolonial Indian state was the legatee of one of the world’s largest empires and its lynchpin in the Indian Ocean region, (c) its middle class’s facility with the English language, and (d) the subconscious, perhaps unspoken but always discernible, idea that its upper-caste elites were white in every sense barring color.
As a child of Nehru’s India, and as someone who had thought the Indian variety of secularism as an enduringly permanent fixture of our politics (just as I had thought that we would always be an electoral democracy with the occasional hiccup), the speed with which some of these assumptions have crumbled to has been unnerving. Looking back, and often looking for the first time, at critiques of Indian secularism that emanated from the likes of the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar I am struck forcefully by the continuities between Nehruvian or mainstream nationalist narratives of India’s past civilizational greatness and her deserved status as a great power, and those of the ur- texts of Hindutva. In other words, it strikes me now that the demise of our secularism was foretold in the very limitations of that doctrine when it came to matters of caste and race. The inability to transcend a national/communal dyad in understanding secularism, the inability to see the limitations of a secularism that evaded the question of caste inequality, was the original sin, as it were. The contemporary rise of Hindutva and the BJP was presciently forecast by Ambedkar (and possibly many others we have yet to read and comprehend).
Through this project I hope to accomplish at least three things: (a) trace the genealogies and continuities – and not just the breaks- between contemporary Hindutva and the limitations of secular nationalism of the Nehruvian moment; (b) read and re-read earlier and contemporary critiques of the idea of Indic/ Hindu civilizationism from the perspective of caste and racial inequality; and (c) understand the full-blown emergence of fascism or authoritarian populism or majoritarianism in India at this point in time in an international and comparative framework.