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Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age

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A groundbreaking history of the political ideas that made modern India

Violent Fraternity is a major history of the political thought that laid the foundations of modern India. Taking readers from the dawn of the twentieth century to the independence of India and formation of Pakistan in 1947, the book is a testament to the power of ideas to drive historical transformation.

Shruti Kapila sheds new light on leading figures such as M. K. Gandhi, Muhammad Iqbal, B. R. Ambedkar, and Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of Hindutva, showing how they were innovative political thinkers as well as influential political actors. She also examines lesser-known figures who contributed to the making of a new canon of political thought, such as B. G. Tilak, considered by Lenin to be the "fountainhead of revolution in Asia," and Sardar Patel, India's first deputy prime minister. Kapila argues that it was in India that modern political languages were remade through a revolution that defied fidelity to any exclusive ideology. The book shows how the foundational questions of politics were addressed in the shadow of imperialism to create both a sovereign India and the world's first avowedly Muslim nation, Pakistan. Fraternity was lost only to be found again in violence as the Indian age signaled the emergence of intimate enmity.

A compelling work of scholarship, Violent Fraternity demonstrates why India, with its breathtaking scale and diversity, redefined the nature of political violence for the modern global era.

328 pages, Hardcover

Published November 2, 2021

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Profile Image for Pramod Biligiri.
37 reviews7 followers
September 13, 2025
This book is very thought provoking but I wish it were written in a breezier style and not in academic sounding language. It invites you to look at some famous leaders of India’s freedom struggle as fairly intellectual politicians whose actions were premised on well thought out ideas, some of them novel to the whole world and most of them breaking with the dominant "liberal" worldview. The book claims this matters, because their intellectual contributions haven't been appreciated within academia. It comes from a historian who has been researching the intersection of history and politics for a long time, as the numerous footnotes show. As for the lay Indian, it’s too easy to work backwards from 1947 and retrofit their whole life as somehow drumming the singular beat that the British should leave India ASAP! But their political ideas were much more complex...

I can reframe some of these ideas as questions: How were Savarkar's and Gandhi's approaches to history different? Why is Ambedkar's vision for Indian society best described as “agonism”? Why was his approach to Hindu-Muslim tensions so different from his approach to caste discrimination? Should Partition violence be seen as civil war? What did Sardar Patel's actions imply about his ideology when this violence was happening? Why should Tilak’s political outlook be seen as theology rather than as conventional politics or communalism? What was the attitude of the Ghadar movement towards the state of India and of sacrifice?

Tilak
The book's analysis of Tilak's commentary on the Gita is a good illustration of its contents. The author points out that Tilak does not try to apply the Gita to our daily lives and keeps his focus firmly on the unusual situation in which the sermon was delivered, The imminent war need not be seen as a culmination of a sequence of historical events where oppression is finally overthrown, like with the French Revolution. Instead the sermon comes at a moment unmoored from historical time, pregnant with possibility. It is not quite your everyday situation, but whether it acquires a historical character is contingent on what Arjuna will do, and equally, what justification he will provide for his actions. The author cites other such cusp-like moments which initiated a new "historical sequence". It is for Arjuna to judge and decide for himself whether he is in a situation where "Dharma" is in jeopardy, where the antagonists could well be his own kith and kin. The ethical turn in the Gita comes from a pressure to recognize an intimate enemy. If it were a distant entity (like the British monarch), there wouldn't be fraternal ethics involved. If he does go along this path and vanquish intimate enemies through violence, he would have converted himself from a competent "warrior" into a political actor, specifically, one asserting sovereignty - similar to how an Indian revolutionary might take out local British officials and their native accomplices. Since regular moral codes are considered suspended once an unusual situation is recognized, your actions acquire a "detached" character in the karmic scheme of things - whatever you do (killing, dying) gets coded as "sacrifice" and hence the law of consequences does not apply (?).

In this way, even without any explicit references to the British, Tilak used the Gita to argue that an individual's acts of violence against "intimate enemies" can constitute the making of political selfhood, and might sometimes be necessary. Operating in a "cosmological register", he motivated political action using concepts like Dharma (which he expounded as the ties that bind us together), violence, duty and sacrifice. This had little overlap with the rights and representation based discourse of constitutional methods! What was clothed in religion was technically opaque to the law, although its significance was obvious to people in the know! Back in the legal-corporeal world, the violence arising from these motivations would invariably get intepreted by the British government as sedition. So much so that his activism compelled the British to redefine "sedition" as recognizable through harmful activities against local government officials (not just through disloyalty to a distant monarch)!

Violence, Fraternity, Sovereignty
The above analysis shows why concepts like Violence, Fraternity and Sovereignty are foregrounded in the book. To dislodge imperial rule you need to make your own claim for sovereignty (autonomy to inflict violence and to choose laws/moral codes). And you need to present the colonial government as not only unjust, but also contingent and defeatable. This is where a range of tactics (both violent and non-violent) come into play. In fact, throughout history, violence has preceded the formation of new regimes (the French Revolution, American Revolution, their Civil War, the World Wars etc). It is only the non-violence of the later parts of India's freedom struggle that blinds us to this, so it makes eminent sense to study the role of violence. Parallely there was a need to create a new community of “Indians” who are willing to mobilize together and co-exist in future, overlooking old animosities. If you compare the Indian project with an episode like the French Revolution, the people there were more close knit than in India and lopping off the king made them sovereign. But here there were also oppressive local power structures and animosities (caste being a big one) so just booting out the Viceroy and his subordinates wouldn’t suffice!

According to this book, ideas like Tilak's above constitute India’s novel - or at least, independently developed - contributions to global political thought. It buttresses its points using Sigmund Freud, Carl Schmitt, Ashis Nandy, Hannah Arendt, Partha Chatterjee and many others. But I think you can safely glide over these references and the global comparative aspects; just its core insights about Indian political thought are pay off enough. I appreciated that the book did not dumb down the nuances of its positions and remained an opinionated deep dive throughout. But sadly the prose can get fairly dense and abstract so it will require good effort from a lay person to parse them. Below are more high level takeaways, because I think more people ought to be able to ponder these without having to work through the book. Each of these is argued extensively in it and the book is worthwhile for the shape of these arguments irrespective of the conclusions.

A key move to challenge the sovereignty of the British empire was to start believing that individuals are sovereign, and violence can be a property of individuals as well, not just of the State. From this you get what the book calls an "anti-statist" subject. I didn't find this claim particular enlightening because once you've arrived at the position that a regime needs to be overthrown, anti-statism is but a short step from there?

Savarkar
There was intense rivalry between Gandhi and Savarkar on some aspects. The author uses a psychological concept called "identification" to deduce this: it is the perception of an existential threat from an intimate (enemy?), a threat so overwhelming that one doesn't dare acknowledge it openly. But their rivalry has been noticeable to political observers through their actions. It was based on competing claims about Hinduism. Specifically, whether Hinduism can be a vehicle for fraternity among all the residents of this new political unit that was taking shape. Gandhi believed so. Savarkar didn't (or perhaps believed his approach was better?), and the author argues that "Hindutva" was a project to prove his case.

Roughly, the following was the nature of Savarkar's arguments and the project. He deployed history to argue that India is prone to repeated conquests, and more optimistically, capable of resistance. The present oppressors were the British and Muslims. He believed that war and violence - the shedding of blood, to be precise - have been vital in forging bonds of unity among people. Hence his general thrust was towards the solidarity that results from being (imaginary?) victims and then confronting a common oppressor in a violent milieu. Not just that, through effective rebellion the oppressed raises himself up to the level of the oppressor and sets the stage for co-equal friendship! To him "Hinduism" as religion is only of tangential interest and its tenets even an obstacle, because he is more of a political thinker. Similar obstacles are India's history of inter-mingling, pluralism and collaboration, for his quest to create an identity based on race/ethnicity; unlike Nazism/fascism there's no "pure" race to be preserved here. His articulation may be historical, but his ideological bent (or failings?) means he summons mainly territoriality and race. Ultimately, both (dispassionate) history and Hinduism remain thorns in his flesh! Therefore the author concludes that Hindutva is "a theory of violence in search of its own history". It emerged patently as a reaction to Gandhian - then mainstream - politics and was a violent way to unite people. It appropriated and instrumentalised disparate elements of India's past to weave together a history of conflict and potentially perpetuate it.

Gandhi
The main concept in politics for Gandhi was "truth", not non-violence or even freedom. His famous term "Satyagraha" brings to mind non-violent protests, dharnas etc. But above all, it urged one to reach for the truth, not oppose or negate per se. His goal was to reveal the truth behind existing (unjust) power relations. These power relations undergirded everyday life but were internalised or seen as insurmountable. To expose and defeat them was what he was after, and it took the form of a series of spectacles. He had to go beyond the historical and scholarly approaches of a Naoroji or Gokhale, as they had run their course. For the benefit of the masses he kept connecting the abstract to the concrete. His techniques and organisation were meant to serve that goal of "Satyagraha". But unlike the revolutionaries who would drop bombs on prominent targets only to invite repression, the manner in which his spectacles played out were meant to elicit reflection and a change of heart on the oppressor's part (tall order I know!), and of course the political empowerment of the masses.

But his originality (and audacity, if you go along with him) also lay in his diagnosis of the underyling cause for this state of affairs. He called modern “civilization” an "evil" that keeps all of us addicted to a cycle of desires, and colonization was also another outcome of it. He called it evil because the way "civilization" operated, it kept us in thrall on a routine basis, while in the long run breaking ties that were intimate and immediate; it stopped us from living up to our full potential as humans. Even the mainstream leaders looking to overthrow British rule believed in the oppressors' logic of markets and exchange. For the group comprising of Marxists and Communists, the "commodity" and possession of it still held pride of place. They only wished to alter its conditions of production.

He evolved practices under the umbrella of "Swaraj", for a transformation of oneself. Practices like spinning, fasting, walking and celibacy offered each individual a non-mediated arena of experience away from the political world with its hidden truths and civilization with its evils. These practices were deliberately de-historicised and embedded in a temporal framework of the everyday, though they did demand sacrifice and violence (upon oneself). In effect, they would lead to the creation of a self-reliant (Swaraj) self.

Conclusion
The book has more to say about Gandhi's attitude towards religion and Hindu-Muslim relations. And of course chapters on Ambedkar, the Partition violence and others. Do give it a try, but in small doses rather than gulping it down whole! You can supplement your reading by checking out the author's conversations about the book, like this one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzfau.... This otherwise academic work might acquire relevance if you are at all wondering if liberal-constitutional methods of politics are again losing their effectiveness these days. In one speech after the establishment of India’s constitutional republic, Ambedkar had hoped that there would no longer be any need for politics of revolution or for civil disobedience! They were the “grammar of anarchy”, in his words!

If I were to criticize it, I would point to the following things apart from its uncompromising prose: i) I worry about its overly texts-based approach. For example, trying to pin Gandhi down to one or two things he wrote at some point in time seems risky ii) It relies mostly on the political actors' own statements. There is no mention of how they were received (the justification here seems to be that these people were very effective). iii) It might put you off as overly cynical or over-interpreting, in constantly trying to read between the lines. It's hard to keep track of whether you're assimilating the original texts or the author's gloss (just like with this review of mine!). On a related note, I wonder whether fine distinctions travel well in the world of active politics? Nuances matter more in explaining why a particular idea/approach happened to succeed at a given point in time, rather than propelling a political project itself forward. iv) Lastly, I wish the book included a timeline and biographical sketches. I felt like I was dropped in the middle of a long chat among historians and found it hard to get my bearings.
48 reviews2 followers
September 15, 2022
The book is a fascinating commentary on the significance of violence in the writings and utterances of some of the most influential ideologues of the subcontinent in the early and mid-twentieth century like Tilak, Savarkar, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Iqbal, and Patel. The author provokes us to think about intimacy as a condition of enmity, violence as a condition of popular sovereignty, and extimacy as a condition of peace in the context of South Asia. Whether talking about how Tilak posited violence as an individual capacity or how Gandhi posited death as the ultimate habitation of truth, the author exposes the centrality of the subject of violence to sovereignty, including popular sovereignty.

She has done a remarkable job at explaining some of the most complicated ideological underpinnings of a very complex time in the history of the subcontinent. For instance, how Gandhi brought abstract concepts to life or how he reconciled his religious devotion toward Hinduism with his appreciation of Islam as a religious reality of India and Muslims as a religious community.

I particularly found her commentary on the centrality of violence in the ideology of Savarkar the most interesting and insightful, though. Let me share a telling excerpt from p.115 of the book:

“If territory and soil were inadequate referents, if Hinduism did not equal Hindutva, and if blood lineage could not identify the Hindus as a race, then the inadequate and incomplete form of attachment to which India had consigned its inhabitants could only be rendered complete by the spilling of blood.”

The book explains why Ambedkar viewed the hostility between the Brahmin and the untouchable as very different from the one between Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent, why Iqbal expanded the identity of the Muslims of India from religion, culture, or language to discover its political roots, and why Patel considered the partition of the subcontinent a necessary evil.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.
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