The Politics of Culture

Aijaz Ahmad

Social Scientist, Vol. 27, No. 9/10. (Sep. - Oct., 1999), pp. 65-69.

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AIJAZ AHMAD*

The Politics of Culture

Most discussions of culture in India, as they take place in academic

circles and the dominant media, tend to confuse 'culture' with
'civilization' and civilization with 'religion'. These discussions then
prepare the ground for identifying the essence of Indian culture with
Brahminical classicism. Hinduism remains the centre of gravity in
these confusions of culture, civilization and religion. Christianity,
which has an older presence in India than most smriti literature, is
rarely regarded as an intrinsic part of this all-Indic culture and is
jettisoned, in the discourse of revivalist conservatism, to the domain
of missionaries. Islam, which has an older presence here than most of
medieval bhakti, is itself regarded as marginal and additional. The
very terms of this debate, with their extraordinary orientation toward
the past, pave the way, objectively speaking, for a revivalist and even
fascist kinds of cultural nationalism, since the culturalist claims of an
organised religion in the context of modern politics, where religion
gets intermeshed in cultural nationalism, almost always conceal very
high degree of violence against those who stand outside the charmed
circle of this religiously defined cultural nationalism.
Against this revivalist definition of culture, we need a materialist
conception which looks at culture not as spiritual or religious heritage
but as a set of material practices through which people live and
produce the meanings of their lives. The starting-point for such an
analysis is not the heritage of the past but the actual realities of the
present, and one of the things that most crucially matter, then, is the
degree of access to cultural goods - such as education or training in
the arts - that different classes and social groups have in real life.
When we look at culture in this way, we immediately recognise that
social conflicts of various kinds, along lines of class, caste, gender,
ethnicity, etc. actually leave very little room for all the people, or

* Senior Fellow, NMML, Teen Murti, New Delhi

Social Scientist, Vol. 27, Nos. 9 - 10, Sept. - Oct. 1999
66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

even majority of the people, to have roughly equal access to cultural

goods, that may be shared by 'a people' or a whole nation to any
significant extent. Culture, in other words, is not an arena for
harmonious unfolding of the National Spirit, as is often supposed by
those w h o borrow their nationalist vocabulary from German
Romanticism. Nor is 'Culture' simply a zone of the aesthetic. It is a
field, rather, of contention and conflict, among classes and among
other social forces that struggle for dominance. Every nation has at
any given time not one culture but several, and these contentions
take not only the benign form of 'unity in diversity', as our nationalism
presupposes, but also as unity of opposites. In today's context, then,
we have to reject certain kinds of cultural nationalism and fashion
for ourselves a different kind. The essential task in the politics of
culture is to combat the elitist, revivalist, communalist culture with
its orientation toward the past and toward Brahminical classicism.
Instead of that kind of culture, we have to build a democratic, secular
culture of modern civic values and radical equalities.
In this alternative conception, then, the very idea of culture as a
cultivation of spirit is seen as a privilege that is available to some and
denied to most. The distinctions between high culture and popular
culture, between the great tradition and the little tradition, are then
seen as so many modes of the hierarchical organisation of the sphere
of culture as a whole, which is by its very nature repressive. Classicism
is therefore seen not just as accumulated wisdom of the ages but also
an anachronism that weighs upon the souls of the oppressed.
From the materialist conception of culture - the conception of
culture as sets of material practices by different strata in society -
comes the conception of what Gramsci called "the national-popular,"
in which the nation itself is identified with the popular classes as
such, so that a 'national culture' can only arise out of the practices as
well as aspirations of those classes. This conception of national culture
as 'national-popular' has an orientation not toward the past, as in
revivalist conception, but toward the future; culture itself is conceived
then not as a finished common possession, beyond the various social
hierarchies, but as a struggle for cultural entitlements as part of a
much broader democratic struggle for social and economic
entitlements of various kinds. This conception of the 'national-
popular' distinguishes itself from mere populism in two ways. One is
that it does not regard the oppressed as cultureless, it recognises that
there are numerous traditions of the oppressed which are intrinsically
libertarian and egalitarian, that those traditions are among our central
The Politics of Culture 67

resources of hope for the future; but, unlike facile kinds of populism,
it also regards the totality of the cultural life of the oppressed critically
and even with suspicion, because there is much in the cultural life of
the oppressed which reflects the internalised forms of the dominant
ideology and even the distortions which are produced in the
consciousness of the oppressed by the mechanisms of oppression itself.
O n the other hand, the conception of the 'national-popular' refuses
to concede the culture of the upper classes to those upper classes
because it recognises that dominant culture itself is not a product of
leisure but of labour, so that it is indeed the working classes and
other oppressed social strata which have in fact produced, through
blood and sweat, the culture that the upper classes call their own.
The work of creating the 'national-popular' thus involves a critical
task twice over, in other words a critical appropriation of all that is
best in the cultures of the oppressed as well as the oppressors, in the
service of a general liberation.
Politics of culture has always had paramount importance in
Marxist.theory. In Marxysown writings we find two great projects.
A very large part of his work was devoted to a scientific understanding
of the political economy of capitalism and to a demonstration how
the laws of the transition to socialism arise out of the laws of capitalism
itself. An equally large part was devoted, however, to developing a
materialist conception of consciousness, ideology and culture. Thus,
in his 'Preface' to A Critique of Political Economy of 1859, Marx
makes a very important distinction between the realm of human
consciousness, as follows:
"... a distinction should always be made between the material
transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can
be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal,
political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic - in short, ideological
forms in which men become conscious of their conflict and fight it
out."
What is striking about this distinction is that only "the
transformation of the economic conditions of production" are said
to be available for being "determined with precision," in a scientific
manner. The "consciousness" of that fundamental conflict is said to
belong elsewhere - in "the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or
philosophic" forms - which evidently cannot be "determined" with
equal "precision" even though - or, more likely, because - that is
where people actually "fight it out." Those forms are, in other words,
less the outcome of objective structural laws and much more
68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

"determined" by the very way human subjects "fight it out" in

collective struggles. According to this principle, then, "political
struggle" encompasses a greater variety of "forms" ("religious,
aesthetic", etc.) in addition to the struggles that take place at the
point of production as such. For, one bitter lesson we have learned in
the course of the revolutionary struggles of the past is that the fact of
exploitation alone does not produce a revolutionary consciousness.
For that, the domain of consciousness has to be addressed in the very
forms in which it experiences the world, and those forms are social
and ideological in nature.
Colonialism itself was not only an economic and political system
but also a powerful cultural force. Struggles against cultural
imperialism were an integral part of the national movement. All forces
within that movement tried to capture the ground of our cultural
nationalism, the rightwing, upper class and upper caste tried to give
this cultural nationalism a revivalist colouring, which was a very
important element in the rise of communalism. The left and liberal
forces, by contrast, tried to create a modern, secular, democratic
culture in order to combat those revivalist and communal forces.
That struggle continues to this day. The past two decades have
witnessed great expansion in those revivalist and communal
tendencies, which are now parading as "Hindu nationalism" and,
alternately, Indian cultural nationalism. The struggle over culture is
now a central element in political struggle as a whole, much more so
than ever before.
The whole issue of cultural and ideological work has an altogether
different salience in our time than it had at the time when basic
principles of classical Marxism were formulated. There was no
electronic media of radio, TV and film in Marx's time, so that the
purveyors of ruling class ideologies could not so easily enter everyone's
homes, as they can now reach even very deep into the countryside.
Most of the working people in Marx's time were illiterate, and even
in countries like Britain and the USA any truly significant programmes
for mass literacy were yet to come. Nor was there a single country in
the world based on universal suffrage; most of Europe itself did not
have representative government. All these changes - electoral
democracy, increasing levels of mass literacy, increasing generalisation
of the electronic media - have profound consequenkes for working
class consciousness; the ruling classes have far greater access to that
consciousness than ever before. Even if we leave aside the question of
parliamentary democracy and the way it transforms the consciousness
The Politics o f Culture 69

of the working classes, we can readily see that the various kinds of
media - print media and even more centrally electronic media - are
not just entertainments outside the spheres of culture but are the very
central element in cultural control, as a well-oiled cultural industry
that dispenses ideology not as an abstract set of beliefs but as image
and narrative that seeks t o inhabit the soul and colonize the
unconscious on behalf of those who control the heights of this culture
industry. The working class movements have to devise new ways of
dealing with this problem.
The past decade has witnessed three fundamental shifts in the
cultural field. First, the Hindutva forces, which used to be marginal
to national culture in the days of the National Movement and in the
opening decades of the Republic, are now the main contenders for
political dominance and cultural hegemony, especially in North India.
Second, economic liberalisation has vastly accelerated the creation
of a pan-Indian culture of commodity fetishism which the electronics
media is carrying far beyond the urban habitats of the bourgeoisie,
fairly deep into the countryside. Together, these far-reaching attacks
on the founding principles of the Republic have led to an immense
brutalisation of day-to-day cultural life, certainly of the affluent but
with far-reaching consequences for society at large, as competing
spectres of greed satisfied and of greed unsatisfied stalk the land.
Third, the lack of a national project for social justice and the
acceptance of the supremacy of the market as the final arbiter of the
social good, combined with full commodification of competing
religiosities, has led to a new eruption of the savage identities of caste
and denomination, which gets intellectual respectability from the
indigenist scholars for whom secularism is the sin of modernity while
savage identities of religion and community are the very essence of
what they call 'tradition'. Of these indigenism is arising as a particular
pathology of 'high culture', and Hindutva poses the most immediate
danger to the culture of secular civility, but the greatest long-term
danger comes from that worship of the market that goes currently
under the name of 'liberalisation'. For, unleashing of an uncontrolled
market in a multi-cultural society that rests on such concentrations
of wealth and magnitudes of deprivation promises to create a culture
so brutish, so much at odds with itself, so devoid of any sense of
culture as a 'common way of life' that neither political democracy
nor the compact of a united nation may survive this brutalisation.