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Monastic ‘Governmentality’: Revisiting ‘Community’ and ‘Communalism’ in South Asia
Author(s) -
Chatterjee Indrani
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
history compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1478-0542
DOI - 10.1111/hic3.12265
Subject(s) - communalism , governmentality , sociality , politics , diplomacy , order (exchange) , frame (networking) , sociology , endowment , political science , law , engineering , ecology , telecommunications , finance , economics , biology
Abstract This essay extends and revises the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’ in order to root theories about the ‘political community’ in the historical evidence available from the Indian subcontinent. It uses this revised understanding as a frame for rethinking issues of violence between identical communities relevant to understanding the violence of 1947‐1971. Such violence, the essay argues, was not tied to the inherent nature of any one community. Nor was it related in any direct way to violence of the 17th and 18th century. Instead, it suggests that historians need to reconceive the distinct strands that made up a political community in terms of lay and monastic households and investigate the shifting relationships between these strands in order to understand the moment at which both diplomacy and sociality failed.