Guest Post by R Srivatsan

This essay pursues the question of how people shaped by multiple, overlapping civilizational strands, different histories, and different conceptions of the true and the good might learn to inhabit a common political world through the formation of civic dispositions. It is thus about a process of the formation of subjectivity animated by the need to inhabit a common political world.  In doing so, it explores the crossroads in a modern Indian city as an allegory of some of the problems and possibilities.

At the beginning, there was no chaos. People went about their quiet ways, across each other, sometimes meeting, sometimes not. Vehicles were few and paths were naturally chosen. Increasing traffic brought paved roads and intersections where people went about their different goals crossing paths. There were a few minor snarl-ups, and much crisscrossing could be solved by traffic islands. Traffic increased, as did cross-purposes and directions. There were avoidable traffic jams. Then came a policeman who directed the traffic with regimented, nearly mechanistic, hand signals. But that too, was inadequate, since after a point, he could not control the traffic too well. Then came traffic signals, first manual then automated. Finally, major crossroads now have sophisticated automatic signals and one or two policemen/women.

Typically, Sangeet crossroads in Secunderabad handles several thousand vehicles per hour during peak times. It seems as if, except for a few rule breakers, most people normally obey the signal. Signal jumping is serious only when one of the roads doesn’t have enough traffic to justify the long green signal period, or too much traffic hurries through and overflows into the red signal – the next in line tend to rush out, either in impatience or to guard their right of way. Very little of the traffic actually breaks the rule and is by and large reasonably well regulated. The queer thing is that if even a small fraction of the traffic decides to jump the signal, the police can do nothing and signals would be useless. On the other hand, the absence of a police presence results in a marked increase in signal jumping, and the failure of the electric signals quickly results in a descent to chaos, most likely driven by a panic that if one does not take initiative and force one’s way through quickly, one may get stuck in a jam. There is thus a fragile everyday crossing sustained by the reminder of the rule’s presence.

The personnel who police the junction intervene infrequently, to correct mistakes, discourage the stray signal jumpers and remind the rest that the rules are in force. This is a marked difference from the signal policeman in the 1960s who stood at the crossroads, following a rigid semaphore code to control the traffic. Today, brisk checking of license, registration papers, pollution control certificates and valid insurance occurs on one of the off roads: vehicles are randomly stopped to see if any online challans need to be paid, helmets are worn. While these positive actions (doubtless with revenue streams!) – checking, penalty, etc., occur on schedule, there is also “negative action”, i.e., non-action or simple presence. The system works as well as is possible under nearly impossible circumstances.

At Sangeet, vendors and beggars besiege commuters waiting for the green light with novelties, needs, and pleas for charity, attempting to break through the commuters’ steely indifference and elicit response (a few ultimately prove generous).

By all anecdotal accounts, traffic policing is the least glamorous job, almost a punishment posting if Western police serials on TV are anything to go by. It is the thesis of this essay that in Indian cities, this lowly traffic police function is perhaps quietly the most important of them all. This is not to say that these personnel are saintly, incorruptible or perfect. They are fallible mortals belonging to different castes, communities or tribes, practicing whatever religion they have in their lives, all of which have normally little bearing on their effectiveness.

How does this policing actually work? What makes this feeble presence function as well as it does; not according to any absolute standard, but given the trying conditions and circumstances it works in, what makes the situation with the police at the crossroads marginally better than its absence?

My proposal runs thus: The automatic signal represents the simplest law (as a traffic rule) in a mechanistic way. Red is Stop, Green is Go: it is a symbolic reminder to each commuter that the law exists above him or her and is there to be followed. It is almost as if the signal addresses each commuter individually – pinning him in its view. The policewoman, on the other hand, is the locus of a far more complex interaction. Unlike the traffic signal, she embodies the law in a recognizably ordinary individual. The commuters do not simply confront an agent of state coercion; they encounter another citizen who has assumed, albeit for a salary, responsibility for the law. They recognize that the police presence (despite all its fallibility) improves the chance of their going about their business and interests – a small price to be paid for a degree of order and success in their daily lives—and so they usually conduct themselves rationally on a day-to-day basis. The uniformed presence of an otherwise unremarkable individual is effective precisely because of his or her non-threatening symbolic function – to help traffic find its way; and this symbol works more often than not in spite of the different communities, genders, religions the policemen belong to – once the uniform is worn, particular identities tend to fade out. In recognizing her, they recognize not merely authority but an image reflecting themselves standing in relation to the law in the same way. It is through this recognition of the similar-to-self in uniform that the law begins to pass from external command to internal disposition.

What is to be noted in this account of the traffic signal is that the traffic on each path is constituted molecular fashion. It is not monolithic; it does not break traffic rules and explode all at once. Rather the rule-breaking is sporadic, but a threshold change can result in complete chaos. The whole point of a simple and passive police presence at the signal seems not to be so much to ensure that everybody obeys rules – stragglers are punished independently. Rather it is to ensure that there is enough (if temporary and momentary) internalization of the rule to prevent mass disobedience and the chaos that follows.

My proposal further, is that this dynamic of recognition assists in a habituation of traffic rules: not as coercion from a distant ruler above, or the enforcement of a rule by a powerful bureaucracy, or a principled and neutral observance of goals, or as a simple sense of toleration of other commuters, but as an implicit comprehension of the need for negotiation, give and take, for daily life to succeed. It is my (somewhat amazed) belief that despite the traffic increasing steadily, and through all the stresses of modern urban life, this rational internalization of rules on the road increases with the years in a molecular, slow fashion.

For the moment, let us simply note again the salesmen and beggars at the signal who symbolize the “detritus” of modernity (we will address this question later) – those who inhabit the dreary crossroads without going anywhere.

The allegory and what it is about

This allegory of policing a traffic signal explores the realities and possibilities for ordinary Indian people as they go about their individual and communal lives. It is simultaneously an exploration of the current conditions of political life in India and a probing of ways to improve it – i.e., how India holds together, in both the descriptive and prescriptive senses, where the word “hold” does not mean maintaining an unchanging stasis, but a holding together through change. The point is not that all interaction can be modelled by crossroads and that all purposes of commuters are simply intersecting at them.  The other major points of interaction would be the market, the workplace, and the home and neighborhood.   The crossroads, however, models those situations in social life where independently formed purposes intersect, and a breakdown of intersecting purposes rapidly descends into cross-purposes and even antagonistic ones.  There are tendencies towards both political negotiation and violent chaos which are inherent in the situation at the crossroads.   The argument of this essay is not so much that there are cross purposes (which is both a trivial and not necessarily accurate model of politics), but that political attitudes and conduct are never monolithic, moving en bloc like a binary switch. Within every community and political formation, these attitudes and propensities are distributed across a spectrum of commitments, intensities, and dispositions. Molecular shifts in that distribution may, on crossing a threshold, produce qualitative changes in public attitudes and conduct.  The problem for a politics is how to keep the difference and conflict at the level of politics and not permit it to descend into catastrophic violence.

In particular, the larger programme in which this essay is situated would be to study specific loci of engagement of purposes that illustrate how they hold together within the process of continual change. In upcoming essays, this approach tries to explore the ways in which a law or rule that is enacted as a regulatory necessity is engaged with, negotiated and transformed on the ground in specific cases, while at the same time, that law subtly transforms the thinking of those who confront it. In others, it tries to examine how specific initiatives with consequences for the political imagination are dealt with, their possibilities and portents. In yet another, it will examine how principles of political philosophy become arenas of ideological conflict in the situation on the ground.  It also will look at the digital crossroads where the framework of conduct seems utterly different. The objective of each essay will be to propose a new way of looking at old debates, finding paths and processes that have the potential to hold out hope for the future of the Indian polity.

In this essay, I use the term “civic” to denote not a neutral public sphere cleansed of religious, cultural or ethical commitments, but the domain of shared public practices through which people whose lives remain shaped by these commitments nevertheless learn to negotiate and contest a common political world.

The restrained policing of the crossroads I have described is thus, for me, an allegory for the fragile engagement that holds off the ever-present possibility that intersecting purposes may harden into cross-purposes between different religions and communities in the public space. This is not a model where difference in belief is left at home (faith as domestic); nor is it a model of a violent horde driven by animal hatred to annihilate the other; rather it is a model where ethical life comes routinely on the streets, and yet is able to internalize a rule that marks an identity of being a participant in a shared world, rather than as an abstract individual who would either be a perfect citizen or would do what he wanted if not stopped by coercive policing. The model of thinking is also not of a monolithic and uniform stereotype “Hindu,” “Muslim,” which is to be labeled “Friend” or “Foe”. Rather, there are differentiated positions within these groups with different degrees of attachment to different ends. As at the actual crossroads, shifts in the distribution of attitudes and conduct may gradually cross a threshold, transforming ordinary disagreement into organized violence or reversing that trend.

Can these crossroads be “policed” in the mild (or “negative”) manner I have described?  To define it once, negative policing is a mode of public intervention whose principal goal and effect lie in preventing the breakdown of threshold of civic conduct and gradually forming habits of public coexistence. Can a mere presence of a “policeman” at the junction that has the potential for chaos act as a restraint on the latter’s incipient outbreak? Given my model of commuters/participants/presences who have different ideas and convictions, and with the ever-present potential for mutually reinforcing conduct, it is my belief that it can (and in some quiet, yet remarkable examples, it does).  To repeat, there is no horde of mindless individuals: the distribution of opinion and conduct between those apparently uncommitted determine whether the more extreme members remain isolated, or if they can precipitate a descent into mass violence.  The encouragement for violent action is strengthened by non-vocal and seemingly neutral members. A negative (i.e., passive and symbolic) police presence can prevent the situation from tipping over by encouraging the less extreme members to restrain themselves from crossing the threshold and precipitating a qualitative change.  This may occur in institutional settings, i.e., actual police presence, a Supreme Court pronouncement; in digital contexts where vicious trolling is challenged; in political contexts where a minister calms an agitated constituency; and in more moral/civil/societal situations where a Mahatma Gandhi, a flag march, or a civil guard play a role. This essay is offered as one more unobtrusive presence at the crossroads.

While these presences work in specific situations, over time and through the course of repeated engagement, a gentle cultivation of civic conduct occurs in the pell-mell of everyday life: a long-term acculturation, a change of a way of thinking and conducting oneself.  My claim is therefore a modest one. The allegory does not promise the disappearance of conflict or attempt to solve all political problems. It asks instead how, over time, innumerable small acts of public restraint, recognition and intervention may influence the direction in which conflict develops within an extraordinarily diverse society.

At first sight, the crossroads is a good picture to describe some aspects of the everyday inhabitation of a common public world. It tells us how a rule of law, the possibility of coexistence, must function to ensure that people go about their lives: how its job is to facilitate this going about and not interfere with it. And yet, in the way in which I have explored it, this negative policing is doing something more – it is a quiet molecular cultivation of a more respectful way of thinking and acting in relation to others. It tells us how the policewoman at the crossroads reflects who we are/ought to be as law-abiding citizens, or in my terms, how we engage daily with our divergent interactions and acquire the practices through which we learn to live together. So, a properly conducted crossroads is not merely a liberal conduciveness to lives and purposes, but also a teaching of how to approach purpose as conducive of a life in common without being pedantic or self-righteous:  the policed crossroads in India today is an unassuming modern educational institution. Doubtless, it succeeds more in some locations, some cities, some regions than others; that is the practicality of difference in how people think of themselves and others.

The allegory in the third dimension

There certainly are limits to this allegory and its implications (or perhaps complications):

On the one hand, some actors also either passively permit or actively encourage chaos. They influence conduct in the public sphere. In particular, resentful gossip, social media contributors, economic players, political actors, administrators, and (sad to say) judges, also at times deliberately cultivate hatred, resentment, or civic breakdown for partisan advantage and undercut the effect of a quiet education into civic reason. Now while in a narrow sense, these are doubtless anti-national actors, they are also not “free” agents – they emerge from the same social substance in which the other tendencies exist. Thus, we also have autochthonous tendencies that erode the everyday civic practices through which the nation continually reproduces itself as an evolving common political world. Tendencies towards a developing civic participation and political disintegration co-exist.

On the other hand, the crossroads is also the lived space for beggars and the migrant salesmen who hawk their unnecessary toys and wares and who inhabit the crossroads going about their small business in what is for them, a marketplace.  This is the normally ignored microenvironment at the crossroads, with its friendships, rivalries, joys and disappointments. This is the far end of the spectrum of purpose – survival itself, and the infinite wait for a life of success and modern purpose that smiles seductively (and cruelly) through the window of every airconditioned vehicle going by. But look into the vehicles more closely too – you have car owners, motorcyclists and scooterists sometimes with 3-4 pillion riders, taxi drivers two, three and four wheeled, vans carrying rubble and often cheerful and desperate people on their way to a grueling workday seeking a wage. You have those who drive to the walking ground at leisure every day for their morning walks, and you have those who pump their overloaded flat-fare share-autorickshaws, racing to take that next trip on the route to earn that much more each day, frantically struggling to meet ends. You also have those who have rented or financed vehicles, with their illusion of ownership and control of their lives while they in fact are enslaved to an inhuman and competitive digital platform that drives them to the limit. Doubtless, the composition of these vary widely depending on geographic location.  So, beneath the visible reality of “going about their purposes” and internalizing the rules of the road in a molecular fashion, is also the underlying truth of exploitation and desperation. Imagining the crossroads as a merely a metaphor of civic responsibility makes it possible overlook the political and economic conditions that shape the traffic of life, its purposes, and its possibilities.

So how should India hold together?  Is it by functioning as per the allegory of permitting and facilitating individual purposes?  Or is it also by examining the crossroad itself, both in its functionality and its hidden oppressions?  Does it choose to facilitate small market places at the crossroads and pavements, or does it choose flyovers to ease the path of cars by leaping over the problem of congestion and poverty (or both)?  The allegory of the need to police the crossroads echoes in several domains: everyday life, social media interactions, civilizational confrontations, and election strategies. And yet, not all pressures are destructive; some genuinely demand a critical reimagination of economic and social life.  How can one constitutional state sustain a common political world among citizens who inhabit multiple, historically constituted, civilizationally endorsed and often conflicting, ethical worlds, while also confronting the inequalities and exclusions that shape those worlds?

Here, simple Western models of democracy, or secularism or the nation-state unity cannot be imported and applied in India. The argument must be made that the state cannot merely facilitate movement, and yet, nor can it legitimately prescribe a single destination towards which it plans to develop (the challenge is to comprehend that modern India is precisely not a single, undifferentiated entity). Yet neither can it ignore those who remain excluded from meaningful participation in the common world. The task of the state is therefore neither neutrality nor tutelage, but the continual expansion of the conditions under which an increasing number of people can, without immediately relinquishing their enduring civilizational or ethical commitments, inhabit, contest, and transform that common world. The critiques of the 1990s which have demonstrated that the abstract and ideal model of the citizen and his rights do not represent the actuality of what populations face in a postcolonial nation state are indispensable (in our allegory, these are represented by the beggars and desperate salesmen at the crossroads).  However, they have had the unintended consequence of leaving underdeveloped the theoretical possibilities and strategies of developing a life in common in a singularly plural context.  It is this essay’s aim to begin such an exploration and development.  If the state is not merely the formal structure, but a living, organic unity, it should also educate itself to function with courage in pursuit of a form of modernity that does not simply apply Western norms, nor contest them knee-jerk fashion in the name of ancient civilizational greatness.  The task is to comprehend in a conscious manner that the state has constantly, if somewhat unreflectively, always been reimagining how it should function (and this is what the allegory represents); it is to have the insight and inventiveness to pursue these lines consciously, with confidence and generosity.

Appendix: theoretical underpinnings and echoes

In many ways, the allegory of the traffic signal is a distant and improbable echo of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which was an argument for sovereignty in an age of civil conflict. It belongs to a line of thinking concerned neither with sovereignty nor with governmental techniques of directing populations.[1] This is a different kind of thought experiment, undertaken in pursuit of a different political end, i.e., the cultivation of civic coexistence. And while the allegory is about restrained policing of the crossroads, its imagination extends equally to markets, workplaces, homes and neighbourhoods, wherever everyday interactions gradually cultivate civic dispositions.

In another register, it is not about a universally understood conception of the good that must be moved towards in one great leap forward. Like Popper, this perspective is suspicious of comprehensive projects that seek to reshape society according to a single blueprint (whether of the market, or of state control).[2] Unlike Popper, however, its concern is not primarily the epistemological limits of social planning but the cultivation of a shared civic world among citizens who inhabit multiple ethical traditions. Its emphasis on gradual change arises less from caution about the limits of planning knowledge than from the conviction that ethical life cannot be manufactured by decree. The practical orientation of this argument owes much to Simon’s notion of satisficing and Lindblom’s idea of muddling through.[3] Long before I encountered Hegel, the work of these thinkers had already suggested to me that universality need not descend upon society fully formed but could emerge through concrete, incremental transformations of an existing social world.  Hegel later enabled me to understand why such a movement could itself be philosophical rather than merely pragmatic.  Thus, this allegory is not merely about administration, which is Simon’s and Lindblom’s principal theoretical concern, but rather about a citizen-subject in formation who is capable of inhabiting a common political world without relinquishing the multiple ethical traditions by which that subject has been formed.

While it is about the learning of a way of thinking, it is not about the development of hegemony in the Gramscian sense of a pervasive mode of thought, ethical valuation, and action expressive of an existing or emergent ruling bloc.[4] Rather, it is molecular in the sense of being a slowly acquired ethical disposition in public life that does not seek to erase prior commitments to ideas of the good and the true but cultivates a common civic sense through which those commitments may be negotiated in practical political conduct. It therefore does not presuppose a common identity among those who share it—it suggests a way of arriving at an identity in difference.

The allegory of the crossroads is about a shared civic orientation that emerges from quite different conceptions of the good and the true, as pursued within the many religions, communities, and civilizational strands that coexist in India. To an extent, my position would align with Rawls’ concept of an overlapping consensus in which citizens holding different comprehensive doctrines affirm a common constitutional order.[5] My concern, however, is with a prior question: Rawls’ central question is how such citizens can sustain a just constitutional regime despite their differences. Mine is how the civic dispositions that make such a constitutional order possible are themselves historically cultivated. In India, the Constitution serves as an indispensable historical anchor—one that articulates, however imperfectly, the common principles of public life. Yet those principles must continually be learned, interpreted, and lived within a civilizational context in which the very idea of civic life has developed along trajectories that are not simply those of the modern West.

Neither police personnel nor the people on the road are neutral, secular citizens.  They do not ordinarily function axiomatically with a principled distance from their beliefs in the manner in which Bhargava expected the state in relation to different religions.[6] Their actions towards each other are not based on a presupposed simple rational economic self-interest as in Adam Smith, nor the possibility of enlightened “other” interest or altruism for whatever reason, a possibility proposed by Amartya Sen.[7] Their religiously grounded moral resources (Madan) and the negotiated coexistence of communities in everyday political life (Chatterjee) function within the framework provided by and with the encouragement of the apparatus of the state.[8] For all their differences, these mentioned paradigms and approaches share a common feature: they address events and contingent negotiations. My allegory is about what happens in the formation of civic dispositions with the repeated participation in these events; i.e., what the process of transformation of subjectivity behind the events and contingencies is. My actors are ordinary mortals who find ways to negotiate their goals without having to harm either their own or others’ ideas of the good and the true according to their own religious persuasions. In doing so, they are subject to the historical reality of the state and its laws. While they do so, however, something larger happens – they learn and transform themselves, and through them, so do the laws.

The traffic signal is a bit like a symbolic interpellation (Althusser) which addresses each individual through its gaze of power.[9] The policewoman on the other hand, is the locus of a far more complex interaction. This living symbol of the law reflects the commuter’s own imperfect ethical self – a node of recognition of oneself in the form of a being who represents the law. This recognition is something mundane, every day, and characteristic of Indian modernity:  a recognition of individual imperfection which the policeman mirrors. The need to conduct oneself better, to work with the community into which one is thrown willy-nilly, and to make the best of an imperfect situation while remaining under the discipline of existing laws—this is the ordinary ethical work performed at the crossroads. This is the engagement that allows the social traffic in India today to make its way to its destination, against all odds, and in my view and hope, slowly improving the situation. As this process unfolds, citizens gradually transform the practical meaning of the law through their everyday participation, even as the law continues to shape them in return.

The difficulty of such a model is its obvious liberal reading. Its emphasis upon allowing people to go about their own lives with minimal interference naturally invites a liberal reading. Yet the freedom at issue here is not primarily market freedom but the possibility that people shaped by profoundly different ethical traditions may inhabit a common public world.  As more and more of those struggling to survive approach the crossroads under the aegis of a constitutional democracy, the only way to prevent chaos seems to be to take the egalitarian norm seriously: not merely in a shallow formal sense, but rather in the sense that recognizes that the stress and desperation of needing to eke out a livelihood also power the contradictions at the crossroads. What happens when those excluded from the promises of modernity, those aboard the “ship of fools” cease merely to wait and instead begin to contest the terms of the common public world itself?  What will address their liminal sense of a right to live and prosper with dignity?[10]  The historical responses offered by Marxism, welfare liberalism, developmentalism, and other traditions of political economy therefore remain unavoidable interlocutors for this theory of civic life; but they must be rethought to comprehend the plurality and difference that mark the actuality of our context.

Acknowledgments

I would express my deepest gratitude to two collectives of which I am a member:  The Hegel Reading Group (since 2016); and Reading Religion in India Group (since 2021).  This essay has been made possible only through the conversations I have had with them, yet ironically, they may never have heard of me mention this essay at all.

I have used ChatGPT (OpenAI) extensively in the preparation of this essay, principally as an interlocutor rather than as an author. It assisted me in locating references to texts I had read previously, commenting on drafts for readability and continuity, identifying formulations that were unclear or ineffective, and suggesting alternative ways of expressing ideas. All such suggestions were critically evaluated, edited, and incorporated only where they served the argument. Responsibility for the arguments, interpretations, structure, and final wording of the essay remains entirely my own. Used with rational scepticism, ChatGPT proved to be a remarkably useful conversational partner in developing an essay whose logistical and conceptual scope was, at times, beyond my own ability to reach and to hold together in all its detail.

References

Althusser, Louis (1971): Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Bhargava, Rajeev (ed.) (1998): Secularism and Its Critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha (1993): The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha (2004): The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha (2010): Empire and Nation: Selected Essays, New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, Michel (2003): Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, translated by David Macey, New York: Picador.

Foucault, Michel (2007):  Security Territory Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, translated by Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gramsci, Antonio (1971): Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers.

Lindblom, Charles E (1959): “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Public Administration Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 79–88.

Madan, T N (1998): “Secularism in Its Place,” in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Popper, Karl R (2013): The Open Society and Its Enemies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rawls, John (2005): Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition, New York: Columbia University Press.

Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, New Delhi: Routledge India.

Sen, Amartya (2002): Rationality and Freedom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Simon, Herbert A (1997): Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization, Fourth Edition, New York: Free Press.

Notes

[1] For an insightful interpretation of Thomas Hobbes’ concerns in writing Leviathan, see “Lecture 5, 4 Feb 1976 in Michel Foucault (1997: 97-114).  Foucault’s germinal essay on “Governmentality”, is a mirror concept to sovereignty which this essay also tries to move beyond (Lecture 5 in Foucault, 2007)

[2] To get a preview of Karl Popper’s philosophical championing of “piecemeal social engineering” as opposed to “utopian social engineering” see “Introduction” in Popper (1994)

[3] For Herbert Simon’s account of satisficing see “Introduction to Second Edition” in Simon (1957).  For Charles Lindblom’s theory of muddling through see Lindblom (1959)

[4] For an account of the molecular process of hegemony in the passive revolution of captial see Antonio Gramsci, “State and Civil Society” in (Gramsci 1971)

[5] See Rawls’ discussion of “Religion and Public Reason in Democracy” (Rawls, 1993)

[6] For a clear statement of Bhargava’s notion of secularism as principled distance, see his “What is Secularism for?” in (Bhargava 1998).

[7] Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is well known. For Sen’s countering of the principle of rational self-interest, see e.g., his “Markets and Freedoms” in Sen (2002).

[8] For T.N. Madan’s account of the moral resources embedded in religious traditions for interreligious understanding and civic coexistence, see “Secularism in Its Place” in Bhargava (1998). For Chatterjee’s discussion of toleration in the East, see “Secularism and Toleration” in Chatterjee (2010). Madan does not develop a theory of the state as the historical medium through which civic subjectivity is formed. By contrast, Chatterjee presents the national state as an ethical-political formation in “The National State” (Chatterjee 1993). In his later work, however, his analytical emphasis shifts toward governmental practices and contingent negotiations between the state and political society (Chatterjee 2004). The present essay’s concern with the historical formation of civic dispositions has a greater affinity with the earlier conception.

[9] For Louis Althusser’s account of interpellation, see his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in (Althusser, 2001).

[10] In putting it this way, I suggest that while Kalyan Sanyal’s rigorous study of those excluded from the bounds of modernity’s promise – those aboard a “ship of fools” traversing the seas with no destination is accurate, there will always be among these vast populations, a spark of self-recognition to the right to a reasonable life reflected in the image of modernity beyond their own pale.  See Sanyal (2007) for his elaboration of his analysis.

R Srivatsan is a political theorist, formerly a senior fellow at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies. He is currently working on religion, health and development.  He has been part of a Hegel reading group since 2016.