A host of approaches to the study of politics in early twentieth-century India appear within multiple disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. The Swadeshi movement from 1905 to 1911, as well as the larger intellectual history of the term swadeshi, has long served as a centerpiece in modern South Asian history. The history and theory of politics in late colonial India also bring to light classic works in legal history and Indian constitutionalism, as well as interdisciplinary analysis of the meaning of “the political,” evidenced by recent work in political theory from Indian vantage points. Taken together, these two books offer a great deal to consider for a range of scholars; theorists of theater and performance and political theorists will likely find the most resonance here. Whereas recent histories of the early twentieth century and late imperial moments of South Asia have focused on topics such as war, famine, or the movement to establish Pakistan, these books offer perspectives from theater and performance studies as well as the issue of electoral representation.
In five chapters, Mimasha Pandit in Performing Nationhood offers a study of performance history—of songs, theatrical plays via text and performance, jatra, and memories of such performances in Swadeshi-era Bengal during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Chapters 2 and 3, on “community of emotion” and “community of felt emotions,” establish how particular themes emerged in literal performances, such as the jatra form, a performance tradition with precolonial roots in agrarian eastern India that was retooled for the politics of Swadeshi nationalism, as well as themes such as the symbolization of land as mother, which was central to many of the performances of the time. These chapters offer performance studies analysis of music, lyrics, and performance spaces and textual criticism of a corpus of Swadeshi-era plays, such as Girish Chandra Ghosh's Siraj-ud-Daulah, and other plays on historical topics, such as Ghosh's Mir Kasim and D. L. Roy's Durgadas. Chapter 5 explores the complex lines between public performance, private resistances to colonial rule, and mediated political interactions, excavating “hidden transcripts” of resistance through the site of Swadeshi plays and performances. Chapter 6 furthers this line of inquiry through a range of cases in which the public and private realms of politics and performances fold into one another.
Pandit offers extraordinarily rich documentation of the field of Swadeshi theater and performance, far exceeding most published work on the topic. Her discussion of themes in history plays (pp. 23–36) includes the well-known Ghosh and his history play Siraj-ud-Daulah. She also manages to integrate the work of Haranath Basu and Manamohan Goswami, among many others, expanding the analytical range of the topic. Juxtaposed against the remembrances of individuals well known to Bengali readers, such as Tarashankar and Hemchandra Qanungo, the book has something for nearly everyone who would be interested in the topic.
At times, long footnotes providing essential analysis would have been better integrated into the text. For example, a long and fascinating footnote (pp. 105–6) about Miss Sorabji, legal advisor to Kalitara Sen Gupta of Noakhali, and letters regarding sedition among women in the zenana, deserves a full and detailed examination. Similarly, an extremely long footnote (pp. 129–30) about Manamohan Goswami's proscribed play Samaj and its significance to issues of caste and class demands full inclusion in the text.
Questions remain about the significance of this rich archive for the field of South Asian history. The region of Bengal remains underconceptualized, as the book contains numerous references to “Bengalis” without specifying the class, caste, and religiously diverse nature of Bengali audiences, performers, or local critics. Pandit mentions Santhals, Biharis, and Ahoms (p. xvii), but in the context of a theoretical intervention into the nature of performance and community formation. Regarding Muslims, the population that made up the majority of residents of colonial Bengal, Pandit rightfully addresses the diversity of positions that Muslims held with respect to Swadeshi-era performances. Some Muslims composed and performed Swadeshi songs, whereas some Muslims were bitterly opposed to the depictions of Muslims in some of the plays. Future research will hopefully explore how Muslim Bengalis related to an emergent “felt community,” as well as the exclusions that were built into some sectors of Swadeshi politics of that time.
Pandit argues that Swadeshi-era theater and performance “invented” indigeneity by creating a storehouse of newly constructed collective memory. This occurred in a variety of plays, but particularly the one well known to Bengal specialists, Ghosh's Siraj-ud-Daulah. For Pandit, “the Bengali theatre thus assumed a pedagogic function, teaching the masses to identify various kings and events as their historical past and educating them to believe this past to be the root of their indigeneity” (p. 24). Though Pandit raises pertinent issues regarding audiences in the scattered appearances of commentaries in various political files and particular memoirs, the lack of comprehensive evidence that disaggregates the “masses” compels attention to more precise analysis of the ideological form and function of particular imagery long deployed by scholars of popular entertainment. Indigeneity is productive as a framework, though the ways and potential implications of how particular social formations were typed as “non-indigenous” could have been explored in more detail. Nonetheless, Pandit's detailed engagement with history as a political resource for playwrights compels readers to consider her work alongside scholars such as Aparna Dharwadker, Rustom Bharucha, Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Sudipto Chatterjee, and Partha Chatterjee on the topic of history as imagined by playwrights in colonial India.
Whereas Pandit's focus is on performances and their impacts on Swadeshi Bengal, Abhay V. Datar's line of vision in remains within political theory and public debate about the question of representation in late colonial India. In Political Representation in India, Datar offers a framework to think about the details of electoral politics through two major schools of thought, mentioned in the introduction and conclusion. One school is the Institutionalists, associated mostly, but not only, with the Muslim League, as they seek to carve out safeguards for minorities, who have advocated for institutional interventions such as communal electorates for specific groups. Processualists are the other school, associated with the Indian National Congress, who disputed any challenge to electoral politics as inherently exclusionary or problematic. The Processualist view, in Datar's account, supported a system on the same basis for the entire electorate of India.
After a review of the literature on political representation in chapter 2, especially the work of Hanna Pitkin, Datar begins a historical discussion of the origin of representative institutions in India from the 1861 Indian Councils Act in chapter 3. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the introduction of separate electorates and notable moments in this history, such as the 1932 Communal Award and the Poona Pact. By this time, the assumptions undergirding the original discussions in 1861, that Hindus were a majority and other groups were to be seen as minorities, were retained in public discourse.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the detailed debates about various groups, positioned as minorities in colonial India, regarding electoral representation. Whereas many treatments of this subject focus only on Muslims or Dalits, Datar includes detailed analysis of Muslims, Sikhs, non-Brahmins, Depressed Classes, Tribals, and Anglo-Indians, as all hold particular histories and claims associated with the emergent political category of the minority. Chapter 4 explores how minorities were defined by religion, and at times caste; however, these definitions never flowed from a consensus, but rather were continually contested. Chapter 5 brings the narrative portion to a close, as it offers readers a tour through the electoral representation in the Constituent Assembly of India (1946–1949). Article 292, passed on August 23, 1949, capped off decades of debate about the issue, eliminating any separate or communal electorate, and guaranteeing adult franchise for every Indian. It ended a long journey from “nominations to nearly completely elected legislatures, from communal electorates to seats reserved only for the deprived sections of the Indian society, and from indirect to direct elections” (p. 167). Datar's analysis lends itself to a reading against recent scholarship on political thought in the late colonial period, including the work of Shruti Kapila, Prathama Banerjee, Faisal Devji, and Aishwary Kumar.
Pandit and Datar provide two thoughtfully executed arguments about the nature of politics in late colonial India. Read together against the backdrop of contemporary India, the books provide important insights for scholars, critics, and activists concerned about minorities in the context of nationalism. The contemporary endangering of minorities, at times aided and abetted by the symbolic and affective layers of performative nationalism in India, resonates strongly with these two books. At the least, readers of these books will be reminded that the possibilities inherent in the imagination of a nation and the inclusion of minorities into an electoral system reveal no singular history, but a number of contestations and struggles within affective and formal political registers.
