Methods and Approaches in Global Political Thought
My engagement with global anticolonial thought is driven by a primary question: what is required of a capacious imaginary of the political, i.e. one that takes traditions of thought and institutional practices beyond the North-Atlantic world seriously?
My approach to this question has been two-fold. First, I adopt a conceptual history approach toward ideas of worldmaking, secularism, public discourse, constitutionalism, and civil disobedience, examining how their meanings shift with(in) imperial and anticolonial contestations on the limits and possibilities of political liberalism. Second, I use substantive anticolonial reconstructions of these ideas to raise institutional possibilities for the decolonization of the normative and critical theory using a variety of methods developed by comparative political theory.
Anticolonial Constitutionalism:
Islam, Caste and Democratic Possibilities in India. (Dissertation Project)
My Ph.D. dissertation pivots on the two-fold approach toward anticolonial thought outlined above to demonstrate how Islamic and anti-caste justifications for constitutional democracy in South Asia unfolded across the critical juncture between imperial rule and postcolonial political possibilities. Based on extensive archival, ethnographic, and transnational research conducted across India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this dissertation, titled Anticolonial Constitutionalism: Islam, Caste, and Democratic Futures India, brings several ideas that shape minority justifications for postcolonial constitutionalism from the background to the foreground of thinking on politics.
I argue that the grammar of constitutionalism was viewed by minority anticolonial political thinkers in South Asia, like Abul Kalam Azad and Bhim Rao Ambedkar, as a necessary but insufficient political conception to replace structures through which modern empires ordered the world. Constitutionalism enabled a transformational, and perhaps, even a revolutionary reordering of a hierarchical, religious, and deeply diverse society like India through the guarantee of political and social rights to ensure greater participation of minorities in post-colonial publics. However, the grounds on which constitutionalism was justified and critiqued, and the political possibilities that these grounds opened up, were not limited to secular nationalist justifications nor to critiques of political economy alone. Rather, these grounds extended to bringing religious arguments, reformed by anticolonial worldmaking, into India’s public domain in order to reconstruct how constitutionalism could act as a repository of collective self-expression and claims to equality and progress in a deeply diverse postcolonial democracy.
My dissertation examines the implications and effects of such grounds, understood either as justifications or critiques of anticolonial constitutionalism, on the social ecology of Islam and anti-caste ideas of dwelling, recognition, and self-respect in India, particularly with the rise of the dominance of the Hindu right and Hindutva in Indian politics. It interrogates the complexity of shaping a public when justifications or critiques of political principles are grounded in religious arguments that are brought into the public domain. It asks if justifications or critiques of political principles appear and operate differently in postcolonial democracies. Finally, it answers why and how anticolonial constitutionalism enables and provides substantive content to acts, movements, and the practice of civil disobedience.
Journal Articles
This article argues that Abul Kalam Azad, one of India's most prominent anticolonial thinkers, was critical of nationalism because of its emphasis on circumscribing a political community with territorial borders. Instead, he conceived of India as a place, and he used this conception of place as the grounds for an alternative frame of the political. For Azad, place indicated a point of equilibrium between conceptions of nationalism, particularly as a form of anticolonialism, and universal ideas of humanity (insāniyyat), and the earth as its common inheritance (arẓiyyat). Connecting the idea of place to that of self-knowledge, this article examines how Azad laid the grounds for membership in a locality where particular identities gathered to form a general consciousness of common life. In doing so, it argues that he developed a potent normative idea that remains relevant to repetitive contentions of the political membership of Muslims in India and elsewhere
This paper outlines how entrenched ideas such as ‘state of nature' and ‘traditional societies’, as outlined primarily in the political thought of liberal imperialists such as John Locke and Henry Maine, cause modern colonial and post-colonial states to enforce a ‘limit of the political’. It argues that such a limit of the political excludes from the political domain imaginaries of collective life shaped by communities that came to be categorized as tribal. By marking the influence of these categories on British parliamentary debates on Schedule VI of the Government of India Act, 1935, the arguments of Gopinath Bardoloi and his Sub-Committee Report on the ‘Excluded Areas’ of Assam, and on the Constituent Assembly Debates of India on 'Excluded Areas' and 'Partially Excluded Areas' in India, this paper demonstrates that a ‘limit of the political’ came to be enforced by the legal creation and maintenance of ‘murky boundaries’. It defines murky boundaries as non-dichotomous boundaries drawn between both people and areas to demarcate the gradated manner in which those the modern state categorizes as tribes are included, partially excluded, and excluded altogether from the political. This paper argues that such murky boundaries were created so that the state could organize its standoffishness towards routine administration, standardization, and legibility of its diverse tribal subjects.