Conclusion

In this concluding chapter, I aver that subaltern politics engenders a locally constituted space through which people negotiate with their larger demands on the nation-State. It brought to the fore how and why an “internal sectarianism” emerged within subaltern groups which makes it difficult for progressive politics to trump majoritarian populist forces. I show, in this book, how strategic engagements of subaltern community leaders with the State creatively used territorial and non-state spaces to jettison off the clientelist predilections they share with their political patrons. For Chatterjee, political society expands popular freedom in the domain of governmentality, which is inhabited by those populations that are rendered legible by the State. But the emergence of “fluid brokers” in such a situation not only helps the subaltern community to work with multiple patrons at varying levels of engagement, but it also reinforces the goodwill, faith and trust that the subalterns’ harbour. However, in so doing, the concept of “fluid brokerage”, I want to suggest, also helps us widen our understanding of subaltern as it encourages both old and new community leaders to historicise subalternity as a relationally mobilised and politically constituted moving target.