Table Of ContentSouth Asian Governmentalities
Michel Foucault’s work has been used extensively in South Asian studies, reshaping
the ways in which power, knowledge, subjectivity and ethics are understood. Over
four decades, this body of work has had a global impact, shaping the ways in which
Foucault’s more Euro-centric interests are shaped and tailored to help us understand
the construction and contestation of race, colonialism, the postcolony and the subaltern.
More recently, use has been made of Foucault’s later work on governmentalities, those
comings together of knowledge (veridiction), power (government) and self-formation
(ethics).
South Asian Governmentalities surveys the past, present and future lives of the mutually
constitutive fields of governmentality and South Asian studies. Drawing upon
Foucault’s work, particularly his lecture series at the Collège de France that offer
tantalising new insights into governmentality and how it operates, the book charts
the intersection of post-structuralism and postcolonialism to ask new questions about
South Asia and teases out and tests the utility of European philosophy beyond Europe.
This book brings together contributions by some of the foremost scholars of South
Asian governmentalities on subjects such as governmentality and South Asian history
(Partha Chatterjee), pastoral care (Indrani Chatterjee), the social/political binary
(Prathama Banerjee), truth regimes (Stephen Legg), law as economy (Ritu Birla),
animal subjectivities (Jonathan Saha), plastics (Sarah Hodges), the self-technologies
of feminism (Srila Roy) and the tortured body (Deana Heath), and offers new
understandings of power and how it operated in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial
South Asia.
Stephen Legg teaches at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is a specialist on
interwar colonial India with interest in the politics of urban space within imperial
and international frames. His works analyse these spaces and frames by drawing
upon theoretical approaches from memory scholarship, postcolonialism, political
theory and governmentality studies. He has authored Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s
Urban Governmentalities (2007) and Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale,
Governmentalities, and Interwar India (2014), and edited Spatiality, Sovereignty and
Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011).
Deana Heath teaches at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research focuses
on various forms of embodied violence in colonial India, including torture, sexual
violence against men and interpersonal violence. She has co-edited Communalism and
Globalization in South Asia and its Diaspora (2010) and authored Purifying Empire:
Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (2010).
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South Asia in the Social Sciences
South Asia has become a laboratory for devising new institutions and practices of
modern social life. Forms of capitalist enterprise, providing welfare and social services,
the public role of religion, the management of ethnic conflict, popular culture and
mass democracy in the countries of the region have shown a marked divergence from
known patterns in other parts of the world. South Asia is now being studied for its
relevance to the general theoretical understanding of modernity itself.
South Asia in the Social Sciences will feature books that offer innovative research on
contemporary South Asia. It will focus on the place of the region in the various global
disciplines of the social sciences and highlight research that uses unconventional
sources of information and novel research methods. While recognising that most
current research is focused on the larger countries, the series will attempt to showcase
research on the smaller countries of the region.
General Editor
Partha Chatterjee
Columbia University
Editorial Board
Pranab Bardhan
University of California at Berkeley
Stuart Corbridge
Durham University
Satish Deshpande
University of Delhi
Christophe Jaffrelot
Centre d’etudes et de recherches internationales, Paris
Nivedita Menon
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Other books in the series:
Government as Practice: Democratic Left in a Transforming India Dwaipayan
Bhattacharyya
Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India Anuj Bhuwania
Development after Statism: Industrial Firms and the Political Economy of South Asia
Adnan Naseemullah
Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India Indrajit Roy
Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka Rajesh Venugopal
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South Asian Governmentalities
Michel Foucault and the Question of
Postcolonial Orderings
Edited by
Stephen Legg
Deana Heath
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introductions
1. Introducing South Asian Governmentalities 1
Deana Heath and Stephen Legg
2. Governmentality in the East 37
Partha Chatterjee
Histories and Presents
3. Pastoral Care, the Reconstitution of Pastoral Power and the Creation
of Disobedient Subjects under Colonialism 58
Indrani Chatterjee
4. The Abiding Binary: The Social and the Political in Modern India 81
Prathama Banerjee
5. Colonial and Nationalist Truth Regimes: Empire, Europe and the
Latter Foucault 106
Stephen Legg
6. Law as Economy/Economy as Governmentality: Convention,
Corporation, Currency 134
Ritu Birla
Subjects and Matters
7. Do Elephants Have Souls? Animal Subjectivities and Colonial
Encounters 160
Jonathan Saha
8. Plastic History, Caste and the Government of Things in Modern India 178
Sarah Hodges
9. Changing the Subject: From Feminist Governmentality to
Technologies of the (Feminist) Self 200
Srila Roy
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vi Contents
10. The Tortured Body: The Irrevocable Tension between Sovereign
and Biopower in Colonial Indian Technologies of Rule 224
Deana Heath
Reflection
11. The Subject in Question 247
Gerry Kearns
Contributors 259
Index 263
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Introductions
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1
Introducing South Asian Governmentalities
Deana Heath and Stephen Legg
I write things which seem usable. In a word, usable in a different way, by
different people, in different countries in certain cases. Thus, if I analyse
something such as madness or power and that serves some purpose, then
that’s enough, that’s why I write. If someone uses what I write differently
then that’s not disagreeable to me, and even if he [sic] uses it in another
context for something else, then I am quite happy.
(Foucault, 1978 [2013], 111)
In his now classic lecture at the Collège de France on 1 February 1978, Foucault
examined governmentality as a type of power, discussed the preeminence of
governmental power over time, and analysed the governmentalisation of the
state. He also outlined what he saw as three main types of government, which
were related to different registers: that of self-government, which was bound up
with morality; that of governing a family, which was a matter of economy; and
that of ruling the state, which was a political concern (Foucault, 2007, 94). All
of these encompassed what Foucault termed ‘governmentality’. A form of power
ascendant in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century – though with much
older antecedents – governmentality emerged in apparatuses that combined
sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power, each of which in isolation had
their own ends: for sovereignty, submission to the law; for discipline, to normalise
the behaviour of individuals; and for government to employ tactics that alter
individual behaviour in order to manage populations (Foucault, 2007, 98–99).
While there has been a tendency among Foucauldian scholars to examine
each of these forms of power in isolation, as Foucault made clear in his Security,
Territory, Population lecture series (2007), it was instead possible to ‘speak
of a sovereign governmentality, a disciplinary governmentality or equally a
governmentality that was dominated by the new dispositif of power with which
that year’s lectures were concerned, security’ (Brown, 2014, 7–8). Enacted
through institutions (such as the family or school), discourses (such as medicine
or criminal justice) and procedures and analyses (such as surveys and statistics),
the aim of governmentality is to maintain a healthy and productive population.
Although Foucault analysed many facets of what he termed ‘modern’ power
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2 Deana Heath and Stephen Legg
over the course of his writings and lecture series – not all of which, notably, he
tied effectively together (Dean, 2013; Elden, 2016; also Heath, this volume)
– governmentality remained the central focus of his later work, and came to
include a focus on conduct, liberalism, truth telling and the subject of critique
(Foucault, 2008).
Scholars of South Asia have, for over 30 years, been at the forefront of global
efforts to test and apply Foucault’s research to new places and periods. This
volume aims to further broaden the debate on governmentality in South Asia
through a critical engagement with the lecture series that Foucault gave at the
Collège de France from 1971 until his death in 1984. Over the last decade,
almost all of these have been published in English translation and they shed
important new light on the intellectual genealogy of governmentality as a
concept and of the operation of governmentalities in practice. The lectures also
reveal Foucault’s thinking on issues that he has been widely critiqued for failing
to consider, not least the ethics of self-formation, traditions of critique as new
ways to approach the hackneyed question of ‘resistance’ and trans-historical
practices of colonialism.
Existing research has positioned Foucault within postcolonial studies in
various ways, while not denying his general neglect of colonial and postcolonial
concerns. Some works explore the significance of colonial and postcolonial
worlds in Foucault’s biography (Young, 2001, 395–411). Others analyse the
constitution of Foucault’s historical subjects by colonial and imperial forces, and
detect traces of these historical realities in Foucault’s theories (Stoler, 1995),
while another approach (including most of the chapters in this volume) is to
apply and adapt Foucault’s mostly ‘European’ work to ‘non-European’ contexts
and, in doing so, show how ‘European’ governmentalities were always a product
of colonial and imperial entanglements.
Stuart Elden (2017, 8) has reminded us that Foucault moved to Tunisia in
1966 on a three year secondment; it was here that he was politicised by student
activism in March 1968 not, like many French academics, on the streets of
Paris in May. Indeed, Foucault’s ‘colonial’ world was a French world, focused on
North Africa and South-East Asia, rather than the geographical foci of much
Anglophone postcolonial scholarship. Incidents in these arenas continued to
charge his political writings, such as a piece on Vietnamese refugees from 1979.
Here, Foucault (1979 [2015]) equated the refugee situation to the continual
‘occupation’ of Vietnam for over a century by French, Japanese and American
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