Insurgent India(s): unruly bodies, fugitive experience and democratic possibility

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of unruly practice as a medium of radical democratic politics in postcolonial India. The postcolonial transition in India, I argue, institutes a distinct order of the postcolonial subject: seemingly extricated from colonialism’s civilising mission, yet embedded simultaneously into a postcolonial developmentalism. Against the operations of postcolonial order – and the boundaries it establishes of the subject proper to it – this thesis draws attention to moments of disorder occurring in its surround, where insurgent and unruly practice puts into question its organising of life. This thesis aims to mark the multiplicity of ways in which such unruly practices occupy the building, caring for, sharing, and sustaining of plural imaginaries of subjectivity around, outside and underneath an image of the proper subject of postcolonial order.
Bringing Indian radical democratic thought (principally through Gandhi and Ambedkar) into dialogue with (European) post-foundational political theory (principally through the work of Rancière and Tully), the thesis works its way through a series of three critical scenographies – sites where the unruly surrounds of postcolonial order become active as interventions. An indigenous resistance movement against dams and ‘development’ projects in central India’s Narmada Valley, the literary politics of an art of Dalit writing emerging in Bombay in response to the persistence of caste, and the performances of care and sociality in working-class housing estates in Bombay as they resist a neoliberal reconfiguration of the city; each scene stages a three-way encounter between a practice of unruliness, a system of thinking democratic politics, and a subjective schema proper to postcolonial order which it interrupts. Crucially, rather than presupposing the ‘applicability’ of a given theoretical apparatus to a particular practice, I argue that the interruptions unruly practice makes in postcolonial order go hand-in-hand with an intervention in the ways in which such practices are read and understood – they introduce their own augment.
This thesis does not claim to articulate, in this sense, a genre of unruly practice in terms of presupposing some proper form, or mode of appearance. Instead, building on Cavell’s work, it argues for thinking such a genre as a medium in and through which each performance emphasises and foregrounds its differing aspects. Unruly practices, and the scenographies through which they are encountered, each point up features that supplement and augment that which has already come before, transforming given modes of perception and interpretation, action and response. Ultimately, this thesis aims to draw attention to the transformations such performances make. It demands we look differently at those sites where the surround interjects, and those practices of listening and interpretation by which such interventions are heard and understood. It thus aims toto underscore the salience and import of unruly practices for the possibilities of unruly visions of democratic subjectivity, not only in contemporary India, but across the terrain of contemporary radical democratic theory more broadly.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Tanay Gandhi: orcid.org/0000-0002-1159-054X

ORCID for David Owen: orcid.org/0000-0002-8865-6332

ORCID for Jonathan Havercroft: orcid.org/0000-0003-0995-8912

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