Culture,Power,Agency and Structure in Kashmir:Drabu’s omission obscures the obvious

Haseeb Drabu, the finance  and culture minister of Jammu and Kashmir, has linked ‘culture’ with the political settlement of the conflict in and over Kashmir. Describing preservation of culture as cornerstone for a strong future, Minister of Finance and Culture Haseeb Drabu today said that cultural autonomy will ‘strengthen our case in any kind of political settlement.’Connecting preservation of culture with final settlement of Kashmir, Drabu said, “We have huge discussions about autonomy, self-rule and other ideas, but going a bit deeper have we worked a bit towards safeguarding, preserving and promoting our culture. Have we created a strong cultural autonomy that will provide us a strong standing in any kind of political settlement, he asked?”

While it is not clear what Drabu is really saying and I will not probe for ‘deeper meanings and deconstructionism thereof and will take him on face value, it would appear that Drabu is guilty of ‘compressionism’ here. He compresses culture, politics and political economy and distribution of power in society and reduces all this to culture. In other words, he is taking recourse to a culturalist perspective and therefore cultural determinism and cultural essentialism.

It needs to be stated here that there’s no such thing as a static culture; all cultures evolve and change with the passage of time. This does not mean the negation of culture. Culture as well as cultures exist but both do not exist in a vacuum; there’s context to both and there are interdependencies. According to Clifford Geertz, the great theorist of culture:

“Culture  is  (…)  the structure  of  meaning  through  which  men  give shape  to  their experience: and politics is not coups and constitutions, but one of the principle arenas in which such structures publicly unfold”.(Geertz C,1973) 

Cultures mutate and evolve but key is retention of a cultural core. Culture gets reified by the quotidian practices of peoples and the institutionalization of these. But culture is not a neutral concept; it is loaded and is intimately related to power- a domain or discipline of study called Political  anthropology. Political Anthropology explores the political thinking and behaviour of human beings in their communities. The anthropological study of politics is devoted to understanding how and why power and authority operate in human societies. Or, in other words, how power relations  influence  society and culture. 

It is here that the work of the American anthropologist Eric Wolf  characterized by his   interest  in the  issue of power, becomes relevant and salient.  In his book , “Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World”  , Wolf holds the study of culture to be inadequate without understanding its relationship with power. Wolf, however questioned the approach of studying culture in isolation.

His point of departure is the question about the structure of systems of symbols and meanings, cultural schemas, or mental constructs. He, unpacks the equation and tries to understand how structures(socialand lultural) came into being and what role these cultural structures played in founding and sustaining the differential powers and the consequent inequalities resulting from it.(Wolf, 2001). In sum, Wolf teases out the relationship between power and culture and embeds power in the relationship between power and culture.

Culture and power are then implicated in each other. These cannot be unpacked or understood in isolation. Now in terms of Kashmir, what are the implications?

Power or relational power in  Kashmir has historically accrued from the various rulers that governed Kashmir and their governance paradigm and how they related to the people. This was institutionalized by the creation of an intermediary class and a priestly class. Power then was hierarchical and it can be stated that this laid the basis for a hierarchical society in Kashmir. The diffusion of culture in society flowed from this. There then was a symbiotic relationship between the two. No organic or bounded culture emerged from this. What came to be known as Kashmiri culture was an amalgam of the nature of these relationships.  This corresponds to Wolf’s thesis who held that

“ Cultural forms are always intrinsically connected to the domain of public power and how it is expressed both through the state and its ensuring bureaucracies and as a sense of togetherness, which is the basis for any social structure”.(Wolf,2001)

Does this mean that there’s no such thing as Kashmiri culture? And what is its relationship to power?What is missing in the equation?

No. There is but this culture is not static. It exists and is reified by the practices of people but its relationship with power is skewed. Kashmiri culture is not Kashmiriyat- a construct promoted by the state for self serving reasons(delineated brilliantly by Nandita Haksar). Kashmiri culture is derived from accretions and accoutrements over the centuries but it is difficult to define it given its skewed relationship with power which has rendered it rather sterile.

Culture, by definition, is a dynamic concept with agency central to it. A culture cannot be culture unless the element of agency is woven into it. But agency in Kashmir has been smothered over centuries. This has rendered Kashmiri culture inert. So the need of the hour is to embed agency into Kashmiri culture- an exercise that would call for disaggregating and dis-embedding it from power and power relations. It is then that a vigorous , dynamic culture that is both self confident and unbounded but which can hold its own can emerge. Restoring agency to Kashmiri culture, divorcing it from power and then embedding it into the political paradigm of the state and not harping about its boundedness will be the ‘recipe’ for both the longevity of our culture and perhaps lead to some kind of settlement too. The question is what form and shape should this take? Drabu is curiously silent on it. If he adumbrates and delineates this form and shape, it is then we stand more enlightened and thus wiser.

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