Book title
The Indian Yearbook of Comparative Law 2020
Beyond Friend and Enemy: the Stranger as a Political Category in Colonial Modernity
Abstract
This piece is a book comment on Jon Wilson’s “The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India 1780–1835.” Center-staging early colonial Bengal as an innovative site of practice in the history of modern law and constitutionalism, the book moves beyond the political distinction between friends and enemies and introduces the category of the “stranger” as an essential ingredient of state formation in South Asia and the modern world. It convincingly shows how the British colonial enterprise in India broke away from pre-colonial relations of concrete familiarity and intimacy to govern a distant and inscrutable society through the detached rule of a mechanistic, bureaucratic, and positivist state. However, Wilson does not reckon seriously with the constitutive role of ideas and ideology and misses out on intellectually engaging with the question of whether colonial practices were determined by the strangeness of the colonized other, or whether abstract estrangement was a product of colonial rule itself. More than an empirical or sociological phenomenon, we argue that strangeness is a conceptual and psychical category crucial for a renewed subjectivity, and promises rich dividends for the discipline of Indian political thought looking past the framework of imperialist and nationalist historiography.
Recommended Citation
Choudhuri, Salmoli and Tundawala, Moiz, "Beyond Friend and Enemy: the Stranger as a Political Category in Colonial Modernity" (2023). Book Chapters. 13.
https://repository.nls.ac.in/book_chapters/13
Publisher
Springer
Year
2023