Interstitial Crisis in India: Towards a Theory of Crisis from the Global South

• In Event: 50664 - Theorizing Crisis (Co-sponsored by Theory Section)

Abstract

How do oppressed groups experience “crisis”? This paper investigates this question by focusing on a particular object of crisis – the postcolonial state building project – within a particular locale of the global south – India. Examining the historical patterning of protests against the postcolonial state-building project in India from the Global Social Protest (GSP) database, the paper investigates what variation, if any, exists in the intensity of protest by subaltern groups across “crisis” and “non-crisis” periods. The data reveals that in the decade following Indian independence (1950s to mid-1960s), a period widely agreed to be the highpoint of the post-colonial state, there are persistent peaks in protests. I theorize the smaller, but more persistent peaks in protest seen in the purported honeymoon period of the nation-state, as a form of interstitial crisis. Interstitial crises emerge in periods of stability, when the fault lines in hegemonic projects are merely a hair’s breadth. They are indicated by protests that filter through the fractures of hegemony, when the central tendencies of political rule still appear to be based on consent. By understanding crises as emerging interstitially, we center the reliable and persistent patterns of instability, exclusion, and coercion that are experienced as part of the “normal” functioning of hegemonic projects for subaltern groups in India and elsewhere in the global South. I suggest that interstitial crisis are also analytically clairvoyant because of the structural position of the sites in which they emerge. Because the material and ideological-political resources needed to secure consent for hegemonic projects are in shorter supply in the global South, both the tensions in hegemonic projects and the interstitial crises that develop as a result of them reveal themselves earlier and at lower levels of protests than in more privileged locales of the capitalist world system.

Author

• Smriti Upadhyay, Dartmouth College