[Reader-list] sixth post

[Abhik Samanta]

The figure of the Swami can be seen as a phenomenon from the latter half of
the 19th century onwards which is contemporaneous with the rise of middle
class politics of representation. The Swami or master  can be seen as a
master of work whose sociological domain is composed of the middle class
employed in various regimes of colonial knowledge labour. Swami Dayanand
Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda are prominent examples who had widespread
following among the education based middle class in two disparate regions.
In understanding nationalism as part of the exercise of hegemony the
strategy of the presentation of work as transcending the separated regions
of the mind and the body brings out a crucial ambivalence which is
historical. The domain of work as is evident from Swami Ramtirth's
descriptions from points 18- 28 seeks to overcome the contradictions between
the mental and physical signifiers of labour. In doing do this the discourse
located itself on the edge of politics as in claiming the overflow of
engagements of work that went beyond the specified schedules of colonial
worktime. It was apolitical in the sense that the colonial regime was not
its overt direction of adressal. It was on the other hand a language of self
development as progress which was closely reflected in the agenda of radical
organization of the violent overthrow of colonial rule at the beginning of
the 20th century. Public sphere engagements were also evident in the
activities of the Arya Samaj of which the involvements and the eventual
murder of Swami Shraddhanand are an example. As a member of an association
that advocated the violent overthrow of  British power Hanumanprasad's
activism through the Gita Press which happened after his internment at
Simlipal can be seen as a change characteristic of the way the regime of
work enters mass politics particularly since the rise of Gandhi in the
1920s.

The body of a Swami draped in saffron or any other colour of symbolic
significance did not hold as much meaning in a sphere of public mobilization
outside the elite as it did within. This is implicit in the way the national
service is conceived in the example of Swami Ramtirth, to suggest the pre
requisite of the engagement with the problem of nationhood as an
institutional as well as individual crisis. The matter of choice that is a
solution to this aporia relies heavily on the body of the man who gives the
message. It is a physicality that has to be repeated every time the message
is enacted. Hence the necessity felt of periodic gatherings around discourse
or the recording and their dissemination as printed tracts.

This form was a fetish with elite terrorist societies members of which
sought  the man who would endow them with a secret prowess. This sort of
work for the nationalist cause was essentially of a demonstrative nature
seeking to reveal the intimate connection of the national with violence and
death. Just as the body of the martyr was a resounding success in terms of
the demonstration of the reality of nationalism it also showed the isolation
of the knowledge of the national and its appurtenant ethics of a universal
time. The notion that I offer here is that work associated with nationalism
was no longer conceived in the teleology of the fruits of its enactment. The
time of the nation in which the body of the Swami holds sway over a process
becomes irrelevant in the need for a more demonstrative existence where the
fruits of national work are conceived in political terms. Hegemony of the
elite in the context of connecting  discontents in colonial rule becomes
necessary as an explicit part of mobilization. The metaphors of this form of
work is discernable in the practice of weaving on the charkha widely
popularized by Gandhi. The act of weaving was an act which brought the
nation into being by its very demonstration as an act. In this sense it was
not premised on its ends as Gandhi used it to unify his public, when he
would sit on a public platform and weave, and private time, when he would
sit alone and weave. The relationship of time with work thus changed with
immense implications for the nature of the time in which the nation was
conceived. The work on the charkha had its origin in the aim to offset the
consumption of industry made cloth including in its fold the Gandhian
critique of machinery but since it was configured as a demonstration through
which it became political its significance in the teleology of nationalism
was altered. The nation now embodied a demonstrative form of action which
constituted a different body of time in which work was conceived. In order
to understand the changed nature of work or seva that emerged as the
expression of nationalism it is important to understand the relationship of
work with time. Taking the metaphors used by Marx some interesting light can
be thrown on the nature of the effort that went into the making of the
commodities produced by the Gita Press.

To do a cursory exploration of Marx's depiction of the relationship of
labour and time I use a text called Marginal notes to the programme of the
German labour party. The notion of the margin is a strategy to depict a time
of reading whereby the margin becomes the central issue of orientation of
the programme. The existence of the programme is the agency which allows
Marx's observations to have a value in replication and thus constitute a
knowledge. At the same time when knowledge is a moment when the reader
enters into the landscape of movement it is also revealed as the ersatz of
the bourgeois order of time which is the cause of the enslavement of labour.
The effect of this duality is to engender a sense of programme that is
constituted by an awareness of time itself , hence an agenda to disseminate
a sense of time.

[This is the law of all history hitherto. What, therefore, had to be done
here, instead of setting down general phases about 'labour' and 'society',
was to prove concretely how in present capitalist society the material, etc,
conditions have at last been created which enable and compel workers to lift
this social curse.]

The sense of history of class struggle is thus outside the agenda of a
workers programme which at the same time is described in terms of a
compelling sense of time. This is achieved with the use of the sense of time
signified by the word hitherto. The location in which history lies on the
outside of the real workers programme is contiguous with the revelation of a
disguise. The Lassalean programme which Marx critiques is entrapped in this
disguise of time whose manifestations subsume any form of the conception of
labour itself. This is because labour was conceived overwhelmingly as a
means of exchange which was the way it had to be in order to fit the
bourgeois time order.

Thereby the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as all the
criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboard
once and for all and it was made clear that the wage worker has permission
to work for his own subsistence, that is to live, only in so far as he works
for a certain time gratis for the capitalist ( and hence also for the
latters co consumers in surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of
production turns on the increase of this gratis labour by extending the
working day or by developing the productivity, that is increasing the
productivity of labour power etc; that consequently, the system of wage
labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more
severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop,
whether the worker receives better or worse payment.