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Haemopolitics: Blood and the Question of Community

October 10, 2025 9 min read

For the inaugural edition of this column, Kanika Gauba deliberates on ‘haemopolitics’, a concept she introduces in her article for NLSJ, ‘Sieving Silence: The Communal Question and the Archive of Indian Constitutional History’. The journal article attempts an alternative reading of the issue of political safeguards for religious minorities at the time of constitutional founding. In trying to read the silent triangle of disagreements between the Sikhs, Anglo-Indians, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Gauba wonders about the role played by blood in defining ‘community’. In this blog post, she probes the idea further.

If silence is what one invariably encounters in the archive, the constitutional historian should work with this silence—they must go where the archive refuses to speak rather than where it is most vociferous. I suggest this in my article in the NLSJ, at the end of which I hint that blood is crucial to the story of constitutional founding in India. I suggest that a ‘haemopolitical sensibility’ was at work in the way at least one community, the Sikhs, perceived the founding moment. ‘Haemopolitical’ here indicates the idea of a community premised on shared bonds of blood. Although this blog piece does not develop the concept of the ‘haemopolitical’, I invite the reader to consider the connection between law, blood, and community.

This may seem an odd juxtaposition: what does blood have to do with law? Haven’t we come a long way from talk of racial nations? In fact, does not the grammar of modern constitutionalism help in surpassing precisely this kind of a community of blood, particularly in India? Although talk of blood may appear old-fashioned to modern sensibilities, if not outright dangerous, the fact is that the substance survives in law. Think of jus sanguinis provisions that impose descent as a precondition to citizenship or commitments to fraternity that conjure a brotherhood (albeit of citizens). Not only does blood persist in law but also shapes the politico-legal definition of community. Law regulates blood to determine the very notion of a citizen, who is then placed in a fraternity-of-law that constitutes the People.

Whatever the cause of our modern reticence to think about blood, the non-moderns were keenly aware of communities founded and destroyed on its basis. I am talking of civil war—real or mythical—that was often acknowledged as the origin of political order. Consider the restoration of democracy after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants in ancient Greece in 403 BCE. Ancient Rome rested on the myth of a fratricide. In Sophocles’ play Antigone, Creon assumed the throne after a civil war between Eteocles and Polynices left the brothers dead. For a while, the Ottoman Empire legally prescribed fratricide to prevent political instability caused by wars of succession. Closer home, in the Mahabharata, a terrible civil war led to the founding of a righteous state.

In pointing out these instances, I do not valorise violence but only indicate non-modern attempts to understand civil war. The Athenians invented the concept of amnesty to reconstitute democracy after what they called stasis. On the other hand, the Mahabharata wrestles with ‘kul-kshay’ (the destruction of family) to offer a phenomenology of righteous action. In fact, modern thinking on the state and constitutionalism was itself inaugurated by the English civil war (1642–51), perhaps the ‘last’ civil war to have had a tangible impact on thought. This is not to suggest that civil wars have disappeared in our times. Rather, what is lacking is theoretical engagement with it as a specific type of violence that precedes politico-legal founding. For example, although spectators consistently described the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in terms of civil war and fratricide, the conceptual significance of this framing has been only recently developed as ‘fraternal enmity’ by Shruti Kapila. Why is this the case? In the Indian instance, one might suggest with Achille Mbembe that:

insofar as postcolonial theory has considered the struggle between Father and Son – that is to say, the relationship between coloniser and colonised or native and settler [sic] – to be the most significant political and cultural paradigm in formerly colonised societies, it has tended to overshadow the intensity of the violence of ‘brother’ towards ‘brother’ and the status of the ‘sister’ and the ‘mother’ in the midst of fratricide.

Mbembe suggests this is a postcolonial problem. But I think it runs much deeper and is not limited to India. Consider that, even in its conception during the French Revolution, ‘fraternity’ was the last element of the famous triad—‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’—to be constitutionalised. It still remains the least theorised. Moreover, in modernity, scholarly preoccupation with revolution has displaced the non-modern engagement with civil war. Revolution is now seen as the legitimate horizon of politico-legal change. The standard concepts of constitutional theory, thus, describe legal change as revolution in terms of the event (‘transformative constitutionalism’), agency (‘constituent power’), and consequence (the ‘constituted’ state and its institutions). So, although scholars recognise—to varying extents—that the origins of law lie in an act of foundational violence, there have been few attempts to understand legal founding in the aftermath of civil war. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, our times are marked by the return of the notion of a ‘global civil war’, a violence that incessantly ‘divides the peoples and the cities of the earth’.

What explains, on the one hand, the modern reticence to engage with civil war, and on the other, our readiness to depict all conflict in its image?

I think this is because of an underlying anxiety over how blood continues to structure polities. Blood is inextricable from the idea of community, ancient or modern. It has an infinite capacity to foster new kinds of connections, and so, communities. Throughout human history, there have been attempts to wall up blood to found a ‘closed’ community, whether of religion, caste, or the nation-state. But such attempts only restrict its liquid flows, because blood is an unruly material that constantly transcends and undoes such limits imposed on its circulation. Its infinite capacity to remake community renders it a pre-political substance. When BR Ambedkar deems inter-caste marriages the ‘solvent’ of caste, he acknowledges this capacity of blood. Where ‘(f)usion of blood can alone create the feeling of being kith and kin’, blood’s unhindered flow makes democratic politics possible. For this reason, even the nation-state as ‘the most universally legitimate (political) value’ that structures contemporary politics, struggles to domesticate the fluidity of blood.
It should be clear that I am not suggesting we think of national communities, of either ‘pure’ or ‘impure’ blood. Nor am I signalling the ‘universal brotherhood’ of humankind under some form of the Absolute. Rather, I am interested in the question of community that blood raises, which it does most potently in the context of civil war. Let me explain. Sudipta Kaviraj offers a genealogy of constitutional thought that rejects blood-based community (which he collapses into the ‘Western’ tradition of the nation-state) and instead chooses the idea of neighbourliness. Although Kaviraj adopts the usual sense of a ‘closed’ community of blood, I have suggested above that blood remains a source of anxiety in such contexts, because its material flows resist every attempt at closure. Further, as Ambedkar’s critique of caste clarifies, the notion of blood-based community cannot be reduced to the tradition of the nation-state. We cannot simply consign blood to nation, ignoring other ways in which the former makes and unmakes community. I suggest that something about blood remains to be thought in modernity and that this is the question of community.
Community is about relationality: how should we relate (or belong) to each other? How does one relate to a stranger, neighbour, or friend? Far from what the courts call an ‘academic’ question, this is often a matter of policy on which law is called upon to pronounce, for example, in the context of the refugee-foreigner or the enemy-neighbour. Similarly, civil war raises the question of community with a familiar, familial figure. How does one think of community after civil war, where violence does not sever the genetic sharedness of blood? To push even further, consider the challenge posed to existing conceptions of human-centric community by the ‘nonhuman’, whether in the form of artificial intelligence or of living beings endangered by the climate catastrophe. What would community with the nonhuman look like?

Law tends to address the question of relationality from within the paradigm of the nation-state, that is, as matter of how citizens should relate to each other. Where the question of community centres on the definition of ‘citizen’, relation becomes a matter of inclusion and exclusion from national community. But as suggested above, the question of community, and the problem of relationality, is much broader than the relationship between citizens within a nation. Thus, through ‘haemopolitics’, I want to examine the connection between blood, community, and law. How does modern law imagine blood-based community? To what extent, and in what forms, are modern law and politics constituted on haematological ground? What communities are imaginable in an age of nation-states? Conversely, what communities can no longer be alluded to, whether in theory or in practice? To address these questions is to return to blood as the idea and substance of human existence, in order to ask the question of community anew.

Kanika Gauba is a PhD Candidate at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.