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Paper
presented in the International Seminar jointly organized by Indira Gandhi
National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi and National Folklore Support
Centre, Chennai in Delhi on “Folklore, Public Space and Civil Society”
on October 7-11, 2002.
Chaupal is a
public place, fixed or changing, in the Indian villages where the
villagers sit and discuss their problems, celebrate their pleasures, share
the pains of an individual, family or a particular group, sort out their
disputes with the consultation of the village elders and traditional panches
(judges) and retain the communal harmony by maintaining tradition, norms,
rituals etc., of village life. An
attempt has been made in this paper to highlight the significance of chaupal
as a public place for civil society in India. In order to trace the
relationship between chaupal and
the public space, the concepts of civil society, public space and public
sphere are discussed in the first part of the paper; and in second part,
deals with the role of chaupal
as a platform of public space. As a sacred place with secular nature, chaupal,
guarantees freedom of speech and expression to everybody in the Indian
villages without any discrimination of his/her association with sex,
religious affiliation, caste, rank, status, majority, minority etc.
During the freedom movement and even after Indian became
independent, this space and the concept of this space have been used by
the freedom fighters, social animators, writers, filmmakers, politicians,
planners of development, policy makers, change agents, local and central
governments as platform or via for the dissemination of message for the
benefit of the civil society.
Part
- I: Concept
of civil society and public space
Part
II: Chaupal as Multidimensional Public Space
Part
- I
Concept
of civil society and public space
(I)
Civil society
What
is civil society? Civil society has been universally seen as a necessary
condition for modern liberal democracy (in Ernest Gellner’s phrase,
“no civil society, no democracy”). If a democracy is in fact
liberal, it maintains a protected sphere of individual liberty where the
state is constrained from interfering. If such a political system is not
to degenerate into anarchy, the society that subsists in that protected
sphere must be capable or organizing itself. Civil society serves to
blame the power of the state and to protect individuals from the
state’s power.
In
the absence of civil society, the state often needs to step into
organize individuals who are incapable of organizing themselves. The
result of excessive individualism is therefore not freedom, but rather
the tyranny of what Tacqueville saw as large and benevolent state that
hovered over society and, like a father, saw to all of its needs. In a
nutshell, civil society can be described as interest groups trying to
divert public resources to their favored causes, whether tribal
development, women’s and children’s healthcare, or the protection of
biodiversity.
Civil
society, as declared by the Universal Declaration of the Rights of
People, confirms a) right to existence for everybody; b) guarantees
rights to the respect of its national and cultural identity for every
individual; c) gives right to everybody to retain peaceful possession of
its territory and to return to if it is expelled; d) none shall be
subjected because of his national or cultural identity, to massacre,
torture, persecution, deportation, expulsion or living conditions such
as may compromise the identity or integrity of the people to which he
belongs; e) guarantees an
imprescriptible and inalienable right to self-determination for
everybody and it also confirms that an individual shall determine its
political status freely and without any foreign interference; f) right
is ensured for every individual to break free from any colonial or
foreign domination, whether direct or indirect, and form any racist
regime; g) every people is given right to have a democratic government
representing all the citizens without distinction as to race, sex,
belief or colour, and capable of ensuring effective respects for the
human rights and fundamental freedoms for all; h) every individual is
free to have exclusive right over its natural wealth and resources it
has the right to recover them if they have been despoiled, as well as
any unjustly paid indemnities; i) scientific and technical progress
being part of the common heritage of mankind, every people has right to
participate in it; and j) every individual has the right to a fair
evaluation of its labour and to equal and just terms in international
trade. Freedom and liberty to every individual without any
discrimination, therefore, are the essential tools for a civil society.
What do we mean when we talk of freedom? First, there is a
national freedom; that is, the ability of the citizens of a country to
determine their own future, and to govern themselves without
interference from outside power. Second, there is freedom from hunger,
disease, and poverty. And third, there is personal freedom for the
individual; that is, his right to live in dignity and equality with all
others, his right to freedom of speech, freedom to participate in the
making of all decisions which affect his life, and freedom from
arbitrary arrest because he happens to annoy someone in authority
- and so on.
(II)
Indian society as civil society
Is
there a civil society in India? My answer to this question is yes. When
we talk of civil society, an impression comes that it is a gift of the
west to the east. This impression is a created impression.
In the west, mainly in European countries, it is considered as a
newborn baby of modernization and industrial revolution. The Magna carta (1215 AD), the Westphalia
Declaration, French Revolution and Freedom
Movement in America are considered to be the pillars of freedom of
speech and expression and all individual freedoms that ensure an ideal
civil society. Once
developed, it diffused everywhere in the world from there including
India. India is a wonderful country where the people of thousands of
castes, all major religions and more than 427 odd Tribal communities
have been living maintaing an exemplary communal harmony. It is rooted
in its traditions. The thousands of years of Indian history confirms
that we had civil society right from the Vedic period. Vedic
hymns describe about egalitarian and democratic norms of their society.
In this context some people’s assemblies like vidath,
sabha and samiti have been
mentioned. Vidath was a
general meeting of the jana
(whole community), which had redistributive functions. Vedic seers
also described about kilvis
samprat that means general consensus. In all the Vedic assemblies’
decisions were taken on the basis of consensus only.
Sabha
was a body of village elders and it assisted the janasya gopah. The etymological meaning of janasya gopah is the protector of the people or fellowmen as well as
their cattle wealth. But in practice it was used for the rajanya
i.e., ruler. Samiti was a
general assembly in which all the members of the community participated.
Its main function was to elect the ruler. The most remarkable fact about
all these assemblies was that women also participated in it. Sabha
and samiti had been depicted
as the two daughters of Prajapati and especially samiti
has been termed as narista
that means a place where intellectual discourses or discussions can be
made. Sardh, vrat and gana are the
three other assemblies about them also we have a number of references.
Mention can be made of gosthi
that was like a modern days Chaupal
in which discussions regarding day today socio-economic problems of
village life were discussed. The Vedic seers used a fascinating term, madhyamsiriv i.e., in case of indecision or altercation in the
assembly the elders should opt the middle path to maintain the harmony
and solve the problems. So Vedic period assures a balanced and ordered
civil society. Later also all rulers, political thinkers and seers tried
hard to honor the individual as well as the group liberty.
According
to Tocqueville, a modern democracy tends to wipe away most forms of
social class or inherited status that bind people together in
aristocratic societies. Men are equally free, but weak in their
quality. Men are equally free, but weak in their equality since they are
born with no conventional attachments. The vice of modern democracy is
to promote excessive individualism, that is, a preoccupation with
one’s private life and family, and an unwillingness to engage in
public affairs. Americans combated this tendency towards excessive
individualism by their propensity of voluntary association, which led
them to form groups both trivial and important for all aspects of their
lives. This stood in sharp contrast to his native France, which was
beset by a much more thoroughgoing individualism than the United States.
As Tocqueville explained in The
Old Regime and the French Revolution, on the eve of the Revolution
“there were not ten Frenchmen who could come together for a common
cause.” It was only by coming together in civil associations that weak
individuals became strong; the associations they formed could either
participate directly in political life (as in case of a political party
or interest group) or could serve as “schools of citizenship” where
individuals learned eventually carry over into public life.
The
above description of civil society confirms the status of all Indians as
the dignified members of a civil society.
III.
Habermas’ contribution in public space and
public sphere
Habermas,
one of the principal exponents of the “second generation” Frankfurt
School of critical theorists, predicates a great deal of his thinking on
the nature of human rights with robust conception of the nature of
rationality in the modern post-Enlightenment World. Jurgen Habermas’
classic thesis The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962; trans.
1989) was that such a sphere emerged briefly among the bourgeoisie of 18th
century Europe – in the coffee houses, salons, pizza huts etc., of
London and Paris and informed by the emerging print media, the journals
and periodicals of the day. Although it was in practice restricted to
those qualified by property, education and leisure to engage in critical
discourse, Habermas maintains that bourgeois public sphere embodied a
more general principle of ‘publicness’: that rational debate in an
open, critical and uncoerced context could produce public opinion as a
democratic force, out of the personal views and opinions of private
individuals.
Habermas
maintains that it is not possible to return to classical rationality,
but he is interested in extracting “emancipatory” element from
modernity by means of the notion of “public space”.
Habermas’ “theory of communicative action” is associated
with a special segment of human rights jurisprudence pertaining to
freedom from political domination with respect to normative
argumentation. He wants to advance beyond the pessimistic views of
rationality taken by the “first generation” critical theorists such
as Adorno and Horkheimer. In their book, Dialectic
of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer contend that reason, which
was supposed to be an agent of human emancipation, became transformed in
the philosophy of the Enlightenment into the antithesis of this. Reason
became an agent of domination (e.g., the Nazi Holocaust). How did reason
come to be associated with human emancipation at all? In ancient Greek
thought, logos referred to human capacity for this “good life”. This
might consist of Aristotelian virtue leading to eudaimonal, Platonic
contemplation of the Form of Good, or Living in Stoic conformity to the
Cosmos. Reason in the classical sense represented a way of reality human
means to human ends. Yet during the Enlightenment, this association of
reason with logos was abandoned. Rationality became characterized by
instrumentalism… technical knowledge of how to attain ends but without
the emancipatory knowledge of what the ingredients of a good life are.
Reason was reduced to calculating about means, not philosophizing about
ends. The intellectual project of the Enlightenment period, which held
promise for bringing knowledge and enlightenment to humankind, yielded
only the former. Habermas discusses how Max Weber, who recognized this
“disenchantment” of the modern world, failed to solve the problem of
what consequences would in fact result from the loss of reason qua
enlightenment. For Weber, modernization represents not only loss of
meaning, but also a loss of freedom. In this rationalized modern world,
a “new polytheism” arises in which “different value orders of the
world in insoluble conflict with each other”. The contemporary world
faces a challenge. A unity not seen in the prevailing orders of the
social world must be constructed. But how? In the ancient world,
mythical polytheism solved the problem. Society’s competitive strife
was personified as a divine struggle. Later on, religion hold out
another answer by representing reality as it rationally organized
hierarchy (“God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world”.).
Weber relinquishes ‘such manifestations of naiveté, of course, seeing
the legal system as rationalization of means end relations. Weber’s
analysis leads him to conceive of disagreement about the proper ends for
society as being a by-product of disillusionment. A plurality of
irreconcilable value judgments about social goals leads law to become
systematized by specialists who manipulate rules according to desired
ends, whatever those ends happen to be. Habermas expresses his
conception of law in the following words:
“Weber
assimilates to the law an organized means applied in a
purposive-rational manner, detaches the rationalization of law from the
moral-practical complex of rationality, and reduces it to a
rationalization of means-end relations.”
So,
Weber’s theory of law provides no independent justification for the
legal order as a whole. For Weber, bourgeois legal systems are
characterized by positivity, legalism, and formality. Positivity is the
expression of the sovereign’s will through law; legalism is
sanctioning any behaviour which deviates from norms; and formality is
the protection of private, free choice through law, plus the principle
that what is not prohibited is permitted. Although these concepts
express law’s function in facilitating bourgeois commerce, they fail
to account for the normative dimension of law. Legal norms need
justification independently of the particular conventional order out of
which they arise. Habermas finds this post-conventional rational
justification missing in Weber’s sheer “positivism”.
Habermas
also observes that the separation of morality and legality effected in
modern law brings with it the problem that the domain of legality as a
whole stands in need of practical justification.
Habermas’
ideal “speech situation” supplies a device of legitimation for
institutions that engender unrepressed political discourse – through
respect for the human rights of free speech, assembly, and expression
– within a milieu of emancipatory rationality. Epistemologically,
Habermas’ analysis has a tripartite structure. Drawing from the notion
that there are “anthropologically deep-seated interests”. Habermas
distinguishes between human interests in prediction and technological
control, practical political discourse (which produces individual and
group under standing, and emancipation from the “illusion of
necessity”. According to Thomas McCarthy, these cognitive interests
have a “quasi-transcendental status”. Habermas’ “theory of
Communicative action “ is deeply democratic. It with this general
political context that Habermas tries to account for the emancipatory
faces of nationality in the modern world. This is done with the help of
his concepts of public sphere and universal pragmatics, which form an
integral part of his theory.
The
“public Sphere” (offentlichkeit) refers to a social space where consensus emerges on
matters of political morality. Habermas notes that from the Renaissances
period there evolved a public space, embodying the idea that normative
statements must be argued and justified publicly, before an audience.
According to one commentator, the public sphere is an area of society
that arose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western
Europe between the absolutist state and bourgeois society, in which
discoursing private citizens could freely and
critically discuss practical issues and note of the state.
Institutionally the public sphere took the form of participatory
democracy…
The
public sphere presupposes an “ideal speech situation” (ideale
sprechsituation) in which each individual is recognized as a
potential participant in public discourse. Thomas McCarthy, an expert of
Habermas has summarized this notion brilliantly. According to Thomas
McCarthy, structure is free from constraint only when for all
participants there is a symmetrical distribution of chances to select
and employ speech arts, when there is an effective equality of chances
to assume dialogue roles. In particular, all participants must have the
same chance to initiate and perpetuate discourse, to put forward, call
into question, and give reasons for or against statements, explanations,
interpretations and justifications… The condition of the ideal speech
situation must insure not only unlimited discussion but also discussion
which is free from all constraints of domination, whether their source
be conscious strategic behaviour or communication barriers secured in
ideology and neurosis.
Thus,
Habermas argues that there is presupposed in every speech act an
idealized communication liberated from domination. Although he concedes
that the public space was the product of modern industrialized Western
societies, he denies that it was the progeny of anyone particular
culture. In this way, Habermas is able to sidestep the skeptical
challenge of culture relativists that the public space lacks any claims
to universalize
A
further claim made by Habermas is that individual speakers in the ideal
speech situation are held to a number of underline validity claims (Geltungsansprueche)
that flow from what he terms universal pragmatics.
Habermas
is of the opinion that the speaker must choose a comprehensible
expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another. So
speaker must have the intention of communicating a true proposition….
so that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker. The speaker
must want to express his intensions truthfully so that the hearer can
believe the utterance of the speaker (can trust him). Finally, the
speaker must choose an utterance that is right so that the hearer can
accept the utterance and speaker and hearer can agree with one another
in the utterance with respect to a recognized normative background.
For
Habermas the public sphere was mediator between the private concerns of
individuals in their familial, economic and social life and the demands
and concerns of social and public life. Habermas argues that the
classical bourgeois public sphere as postulated by Kant understood
itself as the structure that would wrench intellectuals and political
exchange out from the limiting private confines of the academy and allow
it to actively impact on public life. Habermas writes:
[A]lthough
the center was the academy; the public sphere within which philosophers
pursued their critical craft was not merely academic. Just as the
discussion of the philosophers took place in full view of the
government, to instruct it and give it things to consider, so too did it
occur before the public of the “ People”, to encourage it in the use
of its own reason.
Access
to the bourgeois public sphere was supposedly open to anyone who
understood how to use his reason in public. The public sphere was thus
intended as public forum within which, to use Habermas’ Kantian
language, informed and reasoning subjects could discuss matters of
mutual concern and reach democratic concerns on issues that pertain to
their community.
Even Habermas realizes that this was not how it worked. The
public sphere through which public policy could be shaped was only
theoretically open to ‘anyone who understood how to use his reason in
public’, in practice, “only property-owning people were admitted to
a public engaged in critical political debate’, the justification for
this restriction, as Kant explains it through a logic that would be the
envy of any contemporary conservative politician, is grounded in the
assumption that the reasoning capacities property-owning people are
somehow less likely to burdened with special interests and agendas
because they are “their own masters” in a way that property-less
wage-earners are not. Habermas minutely explains:
“Only
property-owning private people were admitted to a public engaged in
critical political debate, for their autonomy was rooted in the sphere
of commodity exchange…[for] while the wage-laborers were forced to
exchange their labour power as their role commodity, the property-owning
private people related to each other as owners of commodities through an
exchange of goods. Only the latter were their own masters; only they
should be enfranchised to vote—admitted to public use of reason….”
Public
propriety was thus linked to the possession of private property was thus
linked to the possession of private property. The assumption is that
property-less people could not (and must not) be trusted to have part in
democratic process of forming rational consensus because they were in
completion with one another for buyers of “their role commodity”,
their labour power, while property-owners could “relate” to each
other as owners of commodities unencumbered by any “special”, i.e.,
“private”, interests. Habermas continues:
“Consequently
the property-less were excluded from the public or private people
engaged in critical political debate…. In this sense, they were no
citizens at all, but persons who with talent, industry and luck
might someday be able to attain that states; until then they
merely had the same claim to protection under the law as others, without
being allowed to participate in legislation themselves.”
In
this way, Kant excludes from politics and the public spheres all those
sections of the population that do not participate in bourgeois politics
because they cannot afford to. The bourgeois public sphere is thus from
the onset a “mechanism of exclusion” that understands itself as
precisely the opposite, a mechanism for democratic inclusion.
Part
II: Chaupal as Multidimensional Public Space
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Newspaper
Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, December 29, 2002 “Constructing Delhi Brick By Brick: Milestones set up during the last four years. (An advertisement of Urban Development & Public Works Department, Govt. of NCT of Delhi; p. 15)
In case of any enquiry or further dialogue, kindly consult Dr. Kailash Kumar Mishra in the following
E-mails:
kailashkmishea@indiatimes.com
kailashkmishra@hotmail.com
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