Heteroglossia and Polyphony: Can We Teach a National History in Tongues?
By Dr. Farish A. Noor
A Note To Readers:
This paper was first given as the keynote address for the International Conference SPICES August 2008, Organised by CENPRIS, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang.
I. Writing the Nation: How many scripts became one.
"The desire to expunge contestability from the terms of political enquiry expresses a wish to escape politics."1 -William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse.
It has come to pass that practically every single postcolonial nation on the face of the earth is currently beset by the problem of identity politics in one form or another.
A cursory glance at the troubled landscape of Asia, from South to Southeast and East Asia, would bring to our attention the common plight of differentiated communities that are plural and complex, all of which demand that a national narrative that is inclusive and open is written whereby all the voices of the national body can be seen and heard. In response to these demands for the recognition of heteroglossia and polyphony, political elites all over Asia have been quick to dismiss them as so much 'noise' from the angry masses protesting outside the fenced compounds of Parliaments or the ivory towers of official mainstream academia. It is ironic and somewhat comical to note that the lament of the postcolonial elites of today echo that of the colonial elites of the past: that the restless natives are surrounding the near-sacred precinct of state power and banging away on their drums in the dead of night, somewhere out there in the heated swamps of the native vernacular imagination.
The postcolonial state, therefore, is as besieged today as the colonial state was in the past, and occasionally an arrow or two manages to penetrate the palisades of power and state authority. The vernacular cry for recognition and representation takes on forms not entirely unlike that of the cry of the colonial subject in the not too distant past: at times it may come in the form of the religious chant for a supra-state religio-political entity as in the case of the demands of the Pan-Islamists and their dreams of a transnational Caliphate; on other occasions primordial ethno-racial loyalties that transcend the frontiers of the state are plied by disparate diaspora communities in search of a political voice.2
The postcolonial state tries its best to accommodate some of these demands, and often obliges the subaltern by making the odd concession or two in the direction of heteroglossia and polyphony. But invariably, they retreat back to the safety and comfort of conventional modern governmentality where frontiers are fixed, the cacophony of politics is reduced to the monologue of governance, and where power resides firmly in the bosom of the state. All the while, however, the pretence and respect that is due to the democratic claims of these states are dutifully given, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This democratic claim for inclusivity and universal representation was, incidentally, the forgotten promise of the first generation of postcolonial elites themselves: In India, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Singapore we saw how the first generation of postcolonial leaders embraced the ethos and spirit of a secular democratic form of politics that was meant to include rather than exclude the subaltern cries of the minority groups and liminal constituents. Why, even Pakistan which took almost a decade to formulate its first constitution and which was created ostensibly for the sake of creating an asylum and a homeland for the Muslim minorities of South Asia was, at the outset, envisioned to be an inclusive land where - to quote its founder-leader Jinnah - all that mattered was that each citizen recognise himself or herself as a Pakistani first, regardless of the fact that they may have been of the Hindu or Christian faith.
In time however, the vagaries and variables of postcolonial representative politics that took to the mechanisms of democracy better than its spirit led us to the situation that we see today; where democratic majoritarianism runs riot and representative politics has given way to a decidedly more communitarian mode of political representation at best. Malaysia's long and somewhat haphazard entry into the democratic space is a case in point, where more than a century of divisive sectarian race-based politics (that was meant to serve the needs of the colonial economy, its divisive racial hierarchy and the needs of racialised capitalism) has been perpetuated by the lingering traces of racial and ethnic communitarianism, now institutionalised in its mode of race-based politics and race-based political parties.
But looking further afield we see how the same logic of sectarian compartmentalisation has also been the bane of many other neighbouring countries: Burma (or, as some might call it, Myanmar) was and remains a plural nation-state with significant ethnic minorities ranging from the Shans, Chins, Kachins, Karens and Rohingyas. Yet the dominant cultural stamp that has been impressed upon the nation as a whole and which has been presented as the panacea for all its ills is a distinctively Burmese one, one that reflects the concerns and interests of its most dominant ethnic community, the Burmese of the Irriwady delta region. Likewise Thailand which is a plural nation made up of significant minorities including the Chans, Cham, Khmer, Shan, Karens as well as a host of migrant communities such as the Hakka from China and Indians from Bengal, remains a nation where the dominant cultural template is distinctively Thai-Buddhist in character. This of course leaves little room for the other minorities in its midst, and offers cold comfort for the Malay-Muslims of the Southern provinces of Satun, Jala, Narathiwat and Patani who maintain that they belong to Malay-Muslim kingdoms that predated the creation of Bangkok (Ratanakosin) and the Chakri dynasty - a fact that is borne by history and difficult to refute.
In Indonesia the grand project of nation-building as envisaged by its architects Sukarno and Hatta was intended to bring together an archipelago of fourteen thousand islands that spans the width of Europe into a common nation-state bound together by a common language, Bahasa Indonesia. The genius of Sukarno and Hatta lay in their choice of Bahasa Melayu - a lingua franca spoken by one of the smallest ethic groups of the Southern Sumatra - as the national language that had to be learned and spoken by all, thereby equalising the nation and foreclosing the possibility of the hegemonic dominance of any particular group, notably the Javanese, over the rest. Yet despite these efforts in Indonesia too we see the development of what can only be described as the hegemonic-majoritarian politics of Javanese culture over the rest; and lately the reaction to this has come in the form of sectarian ethnic and cultural-based groupings that have called for autonomy.
In South Asia, the tested fibres of India's secular-democratic culture were strained somewhat during the 1980s and at the height of the country's Emergency period when political tensions ran high and a beleaguered Congress party clutched at the straws to retain its grip on power. One of the straws chosen happened to be that of a somewhat conservative and exclusive interpretation of political Hinduism, and when Indira Gandhi was re-cast by her party spin-doctors in the form of a semi-sacred 'Mother India' - her form equated and conflated with an array of Hindu Goddesses no less, including Lakhsmi and the awe-inspiring Durga - this marked the Congress party's slow descend from the pedestal of austere secularism to a watered-down rendering of Hindu politics; which in turn created the precedent necessary for the rise of other Hindutva parties such as the BJP and the RSS in years to come. Three decades on, the secular-democratic and inclusive structures of Indian politics remain, though the contending demands of both Hindu and Muslim communitarian groups are louder than ever.
In Pakistan and Bangladesh, similar developments took place as one by one the secular leaders of the postcolonial generation gave way to younger elites less inclined to accept and adapt to the secular developmental model as a source of inspiration. As Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's grand design to create his Islamic-socialist republic failed and was dashed on the rocks of a costly nuclear programme, the secular-nationalist leader who ruled more like a Zamindar feudal lord of Sindh opted to wear the turban of the Mullah instead, courting conservative Islamists and conceding to their demands for a stricter implementation of the Shariah that would have deleterious effects on the religious minorities of the country. Bhutto's acquiescence to the Shariah and Hudood ordinances of 1974 - which he made after he toasted the creation of the Islamic state over a glass of whisky with his cabinet colleagues - sealed the fate for Pakistan's fledgling democratic experiment and led eventually to the harassment, silencing and virtual elimination of minority cultures and creeds such as that of the Ahmadis; while also laying the foundations for what would become the laboratory of the Taliban and their monochromatic moral order.
That practically every single postcolonial nation in Asia today is more inclined towards a mode of nation-building that is exclusive rather than inclusive is a given that serves as one of our first premises. The question is not how, but rather why we have taken this particular path to nation-building and what were the other paths not taken.
Now of course the historian (myself included) will inform you that one of the biggest problems faced by the first generation of postcolonial elites was having to create and maintain nation-states that were, from the outset and recognised by most if not all, to be artificial constructs to begin with. The seed of the current predicament faced by the powers-that-be in Bangkok over the claims of the Malay-Muslim dissidents of the southern provinces was first planted with the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909 which introduced a wholly artificial frontier between the northern Malay Kingdoms of British Malaya and the southern Malay kingdoms in present-day Thailand, thereby occasioning a rupture so deep in the collective consciousness of the Malays there that its bleeds (literally) until today. Likewise the Durand line that cuts across South Asia and other such foibles by the colonial cartographer's hand remain as very real obstacles that stand in the way of nation-building.
Across Asia today we see that the lands of the Shans, Chins, Kachins, Hmongs, Malays, Indonesians, Kashimiris, Punjabis, Pathans and other ethnic groups have been rent asunder, cut at times into neat little chunks according to the limitation of colonial budgets rather than the realities on the ground. During my stay in Pakistan-administered Kashmir following the earthquake there, I could only sympathise with local Kashmiris who were forced to make the long and expensive journey all the way to Muzafarabad if not Islamabad to get supplies and building materials whereas the closest supply depot happened to be right in front of them, though sadly inaccessible thanks to the presence of an artificial border between India and Pakistan.
I would argue that it is this lingering awareness of the sheer artificiality of Asia's political landscape that accounts for part of the anxiety faced by the postcolonial elites of Asia today. While military and geo-strategic concerns persist and ensure that governments do not readily give away chunks of their country to anyone who comes along and demands a part of it, even deeper still is the unstated fear that some of these demands may actually have a factual and logical basis to it. Hence the constant erasure of history, in particular marginal, liminal, subaltern history, all over Asia today. As Khurseed Aziz (1998)3 has noted, the history of countries like Pakistan reads more like a catalogue of historical assassinations of facts and figures than a true record of events past: What is even more important in the writing of a homogenous, monological history of the nation is the denial, erasure and obliteration of alternative accounts and counter-factual truths that point to a plurality of pasts and presents that can also serve as alternative routes to be taken in the near future. There is little evidence of the complexity of Pakistan's artificially-assembled society in its official history, as Aziz notes: All traces of heteroglossia and polyphony were drowned out by the din of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's assault helicopters as they bombed the Baluchistan people's movement out of the hills and mountains of the northern tribal zones, and the few remnants of Baluch poetry and literature were blasted as well.
That modern postcolonial nation-states have this tendency to selectively appropriate elements of the past in the writing of their own self-referential (and often self-reverential) national narratives should not come as a surprise to any one of us: After all, the postcolonial state in Asia hardly marks a radical departure from the modes of colonial governance and governmentality of the past, and as scholars like Shamsul A. B (1986)4 have noted, much of what passes as post-colonial governance in countries like Malaysia was and is really merely a case of old wine in new bottles, with postcolonial elites merely taking over the task of the earlier generation of colonial census-makers, town-planners and technocrats.
The root of the problem has less to do with who helms the modern nation-state, but rather with the parochialism (ironic, I know) of the modern technocratic mindset itself, for despite its universalist claims the modern nation-state is a rather provincial thing. So when we talk about multiculturalism today, or when the issue of multiculturalism is pathologised (as it often is in the press) in terms of a 'problem' or a 'crisis', we need to qualify the query with yet another: If heteroglossia and polyphony, diversity and alterity are problems to be addressed and solved, who, or what, is it a problem for?
Pierre Clastres (1989)5 has argued that pre-modern societies in general have demonstrated the ability to survive and thrive without the apparatus of the all-encompassing omnipotent and omniscient state looming above them. Against the grain of thought that 'the state is the destiny of every society', Clastres has argued that it is the state that needs a society to govern more than the other way round. Moreover Clastres' work aims to demonstrate that non-state or anti-state societies have long been able to deal with the realities of complexity, diversity and alterity in its midst; more so that the fumbling, grasping modern state that constantly clutches at every means to contain and control the alterity within the society it governs over. If, as Clastres suggests, the modern state is cursed by this Midas touch that arrests all that comes within its grasp, then perhaps we need to ask the question of whether modern nation-states - and in particular their postcolonial variants - are able to deal with the realities of complex differentiated societies that were artificial from the outset and fraught with internal divisions within. Can the postcolonial nation-state deliver its citizens from the overbearing order of knowledge and power that were the hallmarks of the colonial era, or has it become - in the words of Basil Davisdon6 - the burden of the postcolonial subject today?
II. That provincial thing called the Modern Nation-State.
Davidson (1992) has argued that the modern nation-state was always a double-edged instrument whose troubled provenance was rendered all the more problematic with its introduction (and forced imposition) on the colonies of Africa and Asia. That the modern nation-state came along in the train of colonial and imperial ideas and values is something we are all familiar with by now. The point that I am trying to make here has less to do with a belated critique of Orientalism or colonial eurocentrism, but more with the problematic of Modernity itself and its discontents.
For better or worse, the modern state has been accepted as inevitable across Asia. Its enduring presence after the eclipse of Empire was confirmed when the nascent anti-colonial movements across Asia took as one of their foundational premises the idea that the anti-colonial struggle was aimed not at dismantling the modern state apparatus itself, but rather to replace one set of modern colonial administrators with another set of modern postcolonial administrators and elites; the contradictions of which were wryly observed by the Indonesian intellectual and writer Goenawan Mohamad when he wrote thus in his essay 'Cocktail parties':
'This confusion is like the symbol of our times: The leaders of the Third World appear to be confronting the oligarchy of the wealthy nations, but at the same time they are desperately envious of that position. Formerly, as colonial subjects, they were not even allowed in with their colonial masters- and they rebelled. But did they rebel against injustice, or just so that they could get in? The 'revolution' is over, before we really knew who it was for'.
Granted that the seats of power are now being warmed by a new generation of postcolonial elites schooled in the mores and norms of modern governance, the question remains: Can the modern postcolonial state ever give up its claims for hegemony and its longing for an panoptic vision of society in its totality?
The modern nation-state, with its attendant modern propensities that include the drive towards the centralisation of power, the need to create and maintain fixed geographical and epistemic boundaries and frontiers, its proclivity towards maximalisation and arrest, and its love for fixed categories and distinctions - is not an entity that is entirely well disposed towards minority voices that speak the language of difference and alterity. Modern technocrats who are members of the same broad church of nation-building bear all these characteristics as well, and are often rather dour and sceptical in their estimation of the worth of alternative voices.
It is for these reasons that everywhere across Asia today we witness the on-going struggle to write the national narrative in a manner that excludes the suppressed voices of the subaltern Other, and in practically all the civil society domains that make up the political landscape of Asia, the struggle for hegemony and counter-hegemony is being waged between the state and a plethora of dissident groups, ranging from gender minorities to radical Islamists who wish to contest that very same domain and to plant their own respective flags on the discursive landscape of their complex nations.
The state's response, in many of these cases, ranges from outright violent suppression of difference and Otherness to more subtle means of diluting the disruptive potential and transformative impact of these subaltern strategies. In an Asia whose development has been propelled and fuelled by the free market and the inflation of commodity choices and modes of commodification, it has become all too easy to blunt the radical thrust of the subaltern's message by allocating it a safe space and outlet for the expression of its identity. The colonial tourists ads that proclaimed the manifold wonders of an 'exotic Asia' are once again being used to promote the notion that Asia is indeed diverse, but this diversity has been neutered by virtue of it being cast in the frame of the exotic and unique: The former category robbing alterity of its real import (by rendering it extraordinary while reserving for the status quo the coveted status of normality), the latter making particular (and thus limited) the appeal of something that may have far more universalistic claims.
That the modern postcolonial nation-state in Asia is wont to seek these modes of domestication and subjugation should not come as a surprise to any of us. We tend to forget that the modern nation-state that we see around us today and in which we wantonly inhabit happens to be the product of centuries of toil and violence. As Bartlett (1993)7 has shown, the emergence of modern-day Europe was not without its own history of internal conquest and colonisation, where smaller nations and peoples were brought within the ambit of stronger kingdoms through the mode of colonisation that was later further refined and developed before it was applied in the non-European colonies from the 17th century onwards. Bartlett's account of the creation of France and the United Kingdom are instructive for our concerns here: He shows that the creation of a united France that spoke the same language - the administrative language of Ile-de-France - was achieved only after the violent suppression of all other dialects and local variants across the kingdom; and that the same violent imposition of the English language was at work in the unification of the United Kingdom that led to the attempts to eradicate the use of Gaelic and other local languages too. Furthermore, the making of Europe also called for the creation of a constitutive Other, the Other without which Europe's own sense of identity could not have been maintained outside an oppositional dialectic that policed its cultural, historical, racial-ethnic and linguistic boundaries with the outside world. At times this constitutive Other was framed as the modern Orient, at times as the exotic East, and most of the time Islam and the Muslim world as Lewis (2008)8 has shown.
The postcolonial state in Asia today bears all the family resemblances to the colonial state of the past in these vital respects, and as such its reluctance and inability to accept and address the democratic demands of a differentiated political public is not a startling revelation to any of us. What has to be emphasised here, however, is that the modern postcolonial state – like modern states in general - has a very different genealogy to that other modern phenomenon, democracy.
We tend to overlook the fact that the democratic revolution that took place in Europe in the mid-19th century was both a symptom of the Modern age and also an expression of discontent against the stifling grip of Modernity as well. In tandem with other movements that sought to problematise the claims of modernity - such as the Romantic movement in Germany, L'art Nouveau with its conscious and sustained critique of militarism and martial culture, etc. - the democratic uprisings of the 19th century chafed at the yoke of state power that was growing ever more concentrated and centralised. The modern state has had to deal with the implications of these revolutions, and to some extent has adapted itself to them, but it would be erroneous to think that the modern state is necessarily democratic per se.
On the contrary, as Connolly (1974) has argued, the tension that resides deep in the heart of the modern state project is how to deal with multiplicity, alterity, heteroglossia and polyphony while making the fewest concessions to such demands in the long run. His conclusion is that the modern state's arsenal of discursive strategies for closure (ranging from the calls for national unity, claims of racial supremacy, historical uniqueness and so on) is there to help the modern state administrator govern, by minimising any disruptive impact of the subaltern on the mainstream. The goal, as Connolly puts it, 'to expunge contestability from the terms of political enquiry'. In his words:
'The desire to expunge contestability from the terms of political enquiry expresses a wish to escape politics. It emerges either as a desire to rationalise public life, placing a set of ambiguities and contestable orientations under the control of a settled system of understandings and priorities; or as a quest to moralise public life thoroughly, bringing all citizens under the control of a consensus which makes politics marginal or unimportant.'9
This is as true today in the case of the modern postcolonial state as it was for the colonial states of the past, and is perhaps the salient feature of modern states in general. The overriding fear of the modern technocrat is the lingering doubt that the demand of the liminal, marginal and subaltern will not be silenced in the long run, and that the restless natives who continue to make their 'noise' with their incessant demands for recognition will not be satisfied unless and until a national narrative that is inclusive of their voices is finally written. This would, however, render impotent the claims of the modern state that has declared its ability to govern with a singular voice, a singular vision and which follows its own singular itinerary.
The monologous discourse of the postcolonial state today, however has been challenged by the other advances we see all around us and the strides that have been made by constituencies and communities that were once rendered secondary. Perhaps the most important change of all has been the empowerment of women in Asia, a factor that cannot be denied and whose transformative potential in the near future can be gauged by the fact that in most Asian universities and institutions of higher learning the number of female students exceed those of males. Ethnic minority concerns have also been brought to the fore thanks to the easy availability and portability of communications technology that has also helped in the creation of both formal and informal communicative infrastructures and social mobilisation across the region, occasioning several popular revolts such as the ones in Philippines (1986), Indonesia (1998) and at least two election upsets in Malaysia (1999 and 2008).
Faced with the prospect of an increasingly diverse, differentiated political public that is both politically aware and capable of mobilisation, the postcolonial state evinces signs of panic: It correctly surveys the lay of the land and detects the first signs of an impending crisis, if by 'crisis' we mean what is meant by Bobby Sayyid when he defines it as the expansion of the terrain of undecidability thus:
'Crisis' describes the situation in which sedimented relations and practices become unsettled, when the unity of a certain discursive field becomes disarticulated. This leads to the disruption of routinisation. As the space for sedimented social relations shrinks, the terrain of undecidability expands. ... The expansion of undecidability precludes the possibility of deriving outcomes from that crisis. By definition, one cannot predict the undecidable.' 10
Can the postcolonial state in Asia cope with such radical contingency arriving unannounced at its doorstep? As we have noted in the introduction above, the signs would indicate that all across present-day Asia the tendency of the state and the state-supporting elites of the region is to fall back on the safety zone of comfortable assumptions and state-perpetuated political myths and fictions; be they myths of racial unity and superiority or the ever-present threat of the malignant Other within or without.
There are, however, enough indicators to suggest that such discursive strategies for closure and arrest no longer work, and that the mythology of the state no longer beguiles. The election results of March 2008 in Malaysia is a case in point, where every popular fiction of the state and the ruling elite was brought into play in the prelude to that fateful day when it was demonstrated in no uncertain terms that the monological and monologous discourse of the state has lost its currency. After five decades of race-based communitarian politics that was upheld and sedimented by the state and its compradore agents, Malaysians voted against the grain and showed that the myth of racial difference was precisely that: a political myth that had been instrumentalised for too long.
This does not, however, mean that we are out of the proverbial woods yet, for it remains a fact that the state has set its roots in Asia and that there exist no counter-hegemonic and counter-factual alternatives that have - or even can be - put to the test for now. Half a century after the demise of Empire and in the wake of a train of nation-building projects that have gone off the tangent, we are still trying to imagine that which for now remains radically exterior to our frontier of possibility: to write a national narrative that is inclusive and representative of most, if not all, of the dissonant voices in our midst. Heteroglossia, polyphony and alterity remain distant markers that signal the furthermost extent of our political imaginary today, and we have yet to write a national narrative in tongues.
Footnotes
1William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, p. 213.
2For an example of such a case where long-held diasporic loyalties were put to work in the mobilization of the Malaysian Hindu Rights Action force, see: Farish A. Noor, The Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) of Malaysia: Communitarianism Across Borders? Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Working papers series no. 163, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore, July 2008.
3See: Khursheed Aziz, The Murder of History, Renaissance Publishing House, Delhi, India, 1998.
4See: Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, From British to Bumiputera Rule: Local Politics and Rural Development in Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), 1986.
5Clastres' anthropological work on non-state and even anti-state social networks in South America sought to debunk the notion that 'primitive societies are missing something - the State - that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance.' He argues that the modern technocratic bias presents such social arrangements as 'societies (that) are incomplete; they are not quite true societies--they are not civilized--their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack--the lack of a State--which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers' chronicles and the work of researchers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society.' Yet as Clastres own research shows, in many instances there are examples of social networks that have survived for centuries without the need for a central state authority that polices the workings of society itself. (See: Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Social Anthropology, (La Société contre l'État', 1974 French), Zone Books, London, 1989).
6Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, Times Books, New York and London, 1992.
7Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change 950-1350, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.
8David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570-1215, Norton and Co. London, 2008.
9William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, p. 213.
10Bobby Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London: Zed Books, 1997, p. 24.
Dr. Farish A. Noor is presently a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies; where he is also director of research for the research cluster 'Transnational Religion in Contemporary Southeast Asia'. He is also Affiliated Professor at Universitas Muhamadiyah Surakarta, Indonesia. He is the author of The Madrasa in Asia: Political Activism and Transnational Linkages. (With Martin van Bruinessen and Yoginder Sikand (Eds.), University of Amsterdam Press, Amsterdam, 2008; Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party PAS: 1951-2003, Malaysian Sociological Research Institute (MSRI), Kuala Lumpur, 2004; Writings on the War on Terror (Globalmedia Press, India, 2006); Islam Progresif: Peluang, Tentangan dan Masa Depannya di Asia Tenggara (SAMHA, Jogjakarta, 2005), and New Voices of Islam, (ISIM, Leiden, Netherlands, 2002). He is also an Advisor to Project Malaysia.