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.The same argument in favour of political power as the ground of anew national purposefulness also addressed a familiar and longstandingcolonial objection to independence.That argument had been a claim thatcountries such as India had not articulated themselves into that specificform of society that could represent itself politically.Whatever forms ofcollective action they were capable of they were not capable of politicalself-representation.They were caught between anarchy, despotism, or, asJ.S.Mill emphasised regarding India and the East, a surfeit of socialnorms and customary mores.They lacked and were as yet incapable of apolitical will of which a state was the only evidence.They had no state,which in effect could claim to be authorised by We the People.There were only two ways to disable this argument.There was theGandhian alternative in which political agency, to the extent that itrequired a monopoly on the means of violence and clear territorialdemarcations, was not in any case to be celebrated, and where, for pre-cisely those reasons, agency did not turn on the authorisation of a centraland unified state.Rather, agency rested on an adherence to universalethical principles that were free from the instrumental logic of modern12See Report of the Indian Franchise Committee (Calcutta, 1932). 02 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:42 Page 43THE SOCIAL QUESTION AND HISTORY AFTER EMPIRE 43politics and were largely nested in extant social relationships.For Gandhi,the strands from which freedom, both individual and collective, was to becrafted existed in the integuments of extant social life.They did not there-fore require a specifically political cast.Gandhi was challenging the veryconception of politics and agency that underwrote the colonial claim,including the argument that required transcending of the social and thediversity that was implied by it.The issue of the requisite unity of politicsand representation was thus challenged by affirming the universality ofethics and the inherent diversity of the social.Gandhi, in effect, disabledthe colonial argument by disputing its underlying premise, which madepolitical unity and the state the condition for collective agency.The second alternative was the constitutional and democratic alterna-tive in which the answer to the colonial question Is there a political orderand whom does it represent? could only be, First that we have an orderwhich is vouched for by a corresponding unity and it is one in whicheveryone is represented. 13 The answer of course was itself largely wishful,especially under conditions where social identities were deeply entrenchedand where in particular the very issue of the representation of minoritieshardly felicitous.Yet it was an answer which if nothing else indicated aclear constitutional orientation in which politics was to be the ground ofa prospective unity.14This is not the appropriate context in which to discuss why constitu-tion making has not been recognised as a truly revolutionary politicalmoment.I hope it suffices to say that in the modern western tradition ofpolitical theory revolutions have been associated with that dramatic andtumultuous moment when individuals, in for example John Locke sunderstanding, contracted with each other to leave the state of nature andform a new body politic.In contrast, constitutions have been associatedwith that orderly act where the body politic entrusted its power in a par-ticular form of government.As Thomas Paine put it when writing of theAmerican experience, A constitution is not the act of a government, butof a people constituting a government. 1513 We cannot say that the republican tradition is foreign to the genius of this country.We havehad it from the beginning of our history.Panini, Megasthenes and Kautilya refer to theRepublics of Ancient India.The Great Buddha belonged to the Republic of Kapilavastu :Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, speech to the Constituent Assembly on 20 January 1947, CAD, vol.1,p.272.Also see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp.9 11.14I am indebted to Pratap Banu Mehta for some of the formulations in this and the previousparagraph.15Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, ed.I.Kramnick (London, 1990), part 2. 02 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:42 Page 4444 Uday MehtaThe Question of HistoryIn the Indian case, I am suggesting, it is quite the reverse of what one hascome to understand through this generic Lockean narrative, and of whichthe American example is taken as paradigmatic.In India instead it is theconstitutional moment that is revolutionary and rupturing.But this claimobviously provokes questions: revolutionary with respect to what andrupturing of what? What does the Indian constitution rupture? Or, moregenerally, what did it mean to be post-imperial? I think the answer is thatthe constitution ruptures a particular relationship with time and with his-torically sanctioned social practices as an expression of that relationship.It is from this rupture or distancing of history that sovereignty, and thepolitical, as an expression of a capacious public will, comes to be formed.To put the point somewhat polemically, the Indian constitution, alongwith the conception of the political that it puts in place, does not so muchemerge from history as it emerges in opposition to history and with a firmview of the future.If political absolutism in Europe had defined itself fol-lowing Bodin and Hobbes as potestas legibus soluta, i.e.power absolvedfrom laws, one might say that in India, following the constitution, thepolitical became power absolved from history.The relationship of power to history is fraught with imperial associa-tions.In the nineteenth century every major expression of European pol-itical thought had made history the evidentiary ground of political andeven moral development.In Hegel, Marx, and J.S.Mill, notwithstandingtheir differing accounts of historical development, history was the regis-ter through which alone a society s political condition and political futurecould be assessed.Hegel s articulation of the state as the embodiment ofa concrete ethical rationality represented the realisation of a journey ofReason that originated in the distant recesses of the East
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