Post-Modernist Approaches to Identity Politics in Indian States

Why do some social movements and ethnic conflicts refuse to fit neatly into the explanations we are taught in classrooms? When we study state politics, we usually reach for systemic models or class-based Marxian analysis. But these grand theories often miss the messy, local, and deeply contextual realities on the ground. This is where post-modernist frameworks step in, offering a powerful way to study identity politics in Indian states by questioning the very assumptions on which traditional political analysis rests.

What post-modernism means for political analysis 🔗

Post-modernism emerged in the mid-20th century as a broad intellectual movement that challenged the certainties of modernism. Modernism placed its faith in progress, science, reason, and the idea that universal theories could explain how societies work. Post-modernism rejects this confidence. Instead of searching for one big truth, it argues that knowledge is fragmented, local, and shaped by power.

The most influential statement of this position comes from the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition, he famously defined the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. A metanarrative is a totalising story that claims to explain all of history and the goals of humanity, such as the Marxist narrative of class struggle or the liberal narrative of steady progress. Lyotard argued that we should be sceptical of these grand stories and instead pay attention to petits récits, or small, localised narratives that reflect the diversity of human experience.

The three thinkers most associated with this tradition are Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Together, their ideas pushed political scientists to ask a different set of questions: not just “what happened?” but “whose story is being told, and who benefits from telling it that way?”

Foucault and the link between power and knowledge 🔗

If Lyotard supplied the critique of grand theories, Michel Foucault gave political analysis its sharpest tool: the connection between power and knowledge. Foucault argued that power is not simply held by rulers and imposed from the top down. Instead, power is productive. It generates knowledge, shapes how people behave, and operates through networks of institutions like schools, hospitals, families, and the police.

For Foucault, what a society accepts as “truth” is never neutral. Theories, categories, and official explanations are discourses that work to establish the dominance of one group over another. Edward Said’s concept of orientalism is a well-known example of this idea, showing how bodies of knowledge were constructed to assert power over colonised peoples. When applied to politics, this means we should treat official narratives about communities, conflicts, and identities with suspicion, asking what relations of power they conceal.

Why this matters for the study of state politics 🔗

Traditional approaches to studying state politics tend to lean on two big frameworks. The systemic framework, associated with scholars like Rajni Kothari and Morris-Jones, focuses on how political institutions and processes function and how a “dominant political centre” manages plural identities. The Marxian framework explains politics through class structures and economic relations. Both are valuable, but both share a weakness from the post-modernist point of view: they are grand narratives that risk flattening the unique experiences of smaller groups.

Post-modernist frameworks correct this by emphasising the autonomy of smaller identities and the value of indigenous knowledge systems. Caste groups, linguistic communities, tribal populations, and regional movements are not treated as side effects of class or as units to be absorbed into national integration. They are studied on their own terms, in their own contexts.

Interestingly, post-modernism also questions the privileged status of the nation-state itself. Where classical political theory placed great emphasis on the state as the central unit of analysis, post-modernist thinkers argue that nation-states are losing some of their explanatory importance, especially as globalisation makes societies more interdependent and as sub-national identities assert themselves. For a federal country like ours, where state-level politics is shaped powerfully by language, region, and community, this shift in focus is especially useful.

Deconstructing narratives and reading power 🔗

The core method of a post-modernist approach is deconstruction: taking apart a dominant narrative to reveal the assumptions and power interests hidden inside it. Rather than accepting a conflict as a spontaneous eruption of ancient hatreds, the analyst asks who constructed that explanation, what it obscures, and whose interests it serves.

This is why contextual analysis sits at the heart of the framework. Instead of applying a universal model to every situation, post-modernist scholars insist on examining each case in its specific historical, social, and political setting. The goal is to understand events from the ground up, paying close attention to local actors, rumours, provocations, and the way meaning is manufactured.

Paul Brass and the production of communal violence 🔗

The clearest illustration of how this framework works in practice is the research of political scientist Paul R. Brass on ethnic and communal riots. Brass spent decades studying north Indian politics, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, and his work directly challenges the comfortable assumption that riots are unplanned explosions of communal feeling.

In his 2004 book The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, Brass argues that riots are deliberately provoked and sustained. Based on detailed fieldwork in the city of Aligarh, he implicates the police, criminal elements, sections of the business community, and leading political actors in the continuous effort to “produce” violence. The word “produce” is deliberate, because Brass treats riots almost like a theatrical production with assigned roles and rehearsed performances.

The institutionalised riot system 🔗

Brass’s central concept is the institutionalised riot system. In places where riots have become endemic, he argues, known persons and groups occupy specific roles in the rehearsal for and production of communal riots. He divides this dramatic production into three phases: preparation, activation, and explanation.

In the preparation phase, which is a continuous activity, individuals he calls “fire tenders” keep communal tensions alive through provocations and inflammatory acts. In the activation phase, the actual violence is triggered, often timed to coincide with intense political mobilisation or electoral competition. Finally, in the explanation phase, the event is interpreted and labelled, frequently as spontaneous communal hatred, which conveniently hides the deliberate manipulation behind it.

This approach reflects post-modernist sensibilities at every step. It deconstructs the official narrative of spontaneous violence, exposes the power dynamics and political incentives driving events, and insists on close contextual analysis of a single locality rather than sweeping generalisations. Crucially, Brass points out that the principal beneficiaries of this process are often the government and political leaders, who consolidate the support of religious or ethnic groups through the violence.

The debate over agency and structure 🔗

Brass’s work has not gone unchallenged, and the debate around it is itself instructive. Some critics argue that focusing so heavily on the deliberate agency of a small political elite underplays the larger forces at work. Reviewers have suggested that while institutionalised riot systems may explain where and when riots occur, the sheer number and persistence of riots may be better explained by broader discourses, such as the power of a pervasive communal ideology that shapes the preferences of many actors at once.

This tension between human agency and structural forces is a genuine puzzle in political analysis. Yet it also shows the strength of the post-modernist contribution: by refusing the easy answer of “spontaneous hatred,” it opens up a richer and more honest debate about how violence is actually manufactured and sustained.

Strengths and limits of the post-modernist lens 🔗

The greatest strength of this framework is its sensitivity to difference. It gives voice to marginalised groups whose experiences are erased by grand theories, and it equips us to see through official explanations that serve the powerful. For studying identity politics, social movements, and ethnic conflicts in diverse Indian states, this is invaluable.

However, the approach has real limitations. By rejecting all grand narratives, post-modernism can struggle to offer a stable foundation for political action or reform. Critics, especially from the Marxist tradition, argue that it fails to recognise the material base of social conditions and can fragment the solidarity needed for collective political struggle. There is a risk that endless deconstruction leaves us able to criticise everything but build nothing. The challenge for the thoughtful student is to use the post-modernist lens to sharpen analysis without losing sight of the structural and economic realities that also shape political life.

What do you think? If every official explanation of a conflict can be deconstructed to reveal hidden power interests, how should citizens and scholars decide which account of events to trust? And can a framework that rejects all grand narratives still guide us toward meaningful political reform?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lyotard/
2. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-33961-0_3
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/57858/1/Unit7.pdf
4. https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295985060/the-production-of-hindu-muslim-violence-in-contemporary-india/
5. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/reviews/22125/hegde-brass-production-hindu-muslim-violence-contemporary-india
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutionalized_riot_systems
7. https://www.paulbrass.com/attachments/Ethnicities-pbr.pdf
8. https://doingsociology.org/2022/04/18/in-defence-of-identity-politics-maitreyee/