The essay offers a philosophically engaged and theoretically rich examination of how power operates and perpetuates itself, weaving together insights from Foucault, Bourdieu, Spivak, and Gramsci to dissect the subtle mechanics of caste, class, and gendered domination. Set against the microcosm of a village, it reveals how supremacy regenerates not only through overt violence but also through cultural codes, normalized practices, and silent complicity. By blending narrative storytelling with critical theory, the essay challenges static conceptions of power, urging a deeper awareness of its fluid and resilient nature.
Reductionism, as a philosophical methodology, operates on the premise that complex systems or abstract ideas can be dissected into simpler, more tractable components to facilitate comprehension. This epistemic strategy, while often critiqued for its potential to oversimplify ontological richness (as warned by emergentist theories in the philosophy of science), nevertheless serves a hermeneutic function—allowing us to trace the capillary workings of grand constructs like religion, caste, or hegemony back to their micro-social instantiations.
In my small teaching career, I have observed students who seek mere conceptual clarity rather than a praxis-oriented understanding of these ideas. This exemplifies what Heidegger might critique as a prioritisation of “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) theoretical knowledge over the “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit) embeddedness of these structures in lived experience. Indeed, phenomena like structural repression, ideological displacement (Freud’s Verschiebung meets Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses), or the Lacanian unconscious do not merely exist as abstract schemata; they perform iteratively through quotidian social rituals, often in ways that escape agential awareness.
There is a small village that I know intimately—a microcosm that perfectly illustrates how societal concepts operate on a grander scale. By examining this village closely, we can uncover how much of our socio-cultural behaviour unfolds unconsciously, revealing deeper patterns that shape human interaction. My invocation of the village as a microcosm echoes Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” (Lebensformen), where the grammar of social norms becomes intelligible only within localised practices. By examining how caste hierarchies or religious dogmas are unconsciously reproduced in the village’s daily interactions (Bourdieu’s habitus at work), I attempt to expose the dialectic between macro-structures and micro-practices. This approach not only demystifies the “bigger ideas” but also reveals, via a Foucauldian lens, how power operates diffusely through seemingly innocuous cultural repetitions. The village, then, becomes a site of thick description (Geertz), where the unconscious socio-cultural performance is laid bare in its most unmediated form.
The origins of a family’s ascent in this village to dominance remain obscured by time, as though their authority had always already existed—a self-justifying myth that naturalised their power as celestial ordination or inherent superiority. Their material hegemony was undeniable: the oldest orchards, the most fertile rice fields, and the labour of villagers harvested along with the crops. But more than wealth, it was their monopolisation of institutional roles—bureaucrats, physicians, professors, teachers—that cemented their dominance, transforming their lineage into a self-replicating elite, a mohalla that was both a physical enclave and a synecdoche for the village’s power structure.
What is crucial, however, is not their luxury but the unconscious machinery of their supremacy. Despite their education, they remained blind to the artifice of their own hierarchy, trapped in what Marx would call false consciousness, though here it is less a proletarian misrecognition than a bourgeois amor sui—a narcissistic attachment to their own legitimacy. Any challenge to their authority was met not just with resistance but with visceral indignation, as though the act of questioning was itself a sacrilege. The family’s reactions were not calculated manoeuvres but unreflective reflexes, revealing how deeply their dominance had been internalised as natural law.
This belief in their innate superiority was not theirs alone; it was collectively reproduced by the village laity, a Gramscian cultural hegemony in miniature. Their influence permeated every collective endeavour—developmental projects, dispute resolutions, land disputes, committee selections, panchayat decisions, elections, religious rites, funding allocations, even matrimonial alliances. Their counsel was not merely consulted; it was constitutive of the village’s social ontology. Decisions made without their sanction were inherently unstable, as though legitimacy itself flowed through their approval. When bypassed, they retaliated not as scheming oppressors but as righteous arbiters of order, their contrivances framed—even to themselves—as just retribution for transgressors.
And so it continued, decade after decade, until their dominance ceased to be perceived as dominance at all. It became doxa (Bourdieu)—the unquestioned order of things, so deeply sedimented into habitus that it was indistinguishable from nature itself. The family did not rule; they simply were, and the village, in turn, could not imagine itself otherwise.
Yet philosophy—from Heraclitus’ panta rhei to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence—reminds us that no structure, no matter how ossified, can eternally resist the forces of change. Every hegemony carries within it the seeds of its own subversion, for power is inherently discursive (Foucault), contingent (Derrida), and vulnerable to the event (Badiou) that ruptures its illusory permanence. Tradition masquerades as natural law until a crisis exposes its constructedness, revealing that even the most entrenched hierarchies are but temporary fictions awaiting disruption.
This rupture arrived during Ramadan, a month of heightened spiritual reflection that, paradoxically, often becomes a site of hermeneutic conflict. As observed across Kashmir, the act of scriptural interpretation—far from yielding singular truths—unleashes a plurality of contested meanings (Gadamer’s fusion of horizons clashing with the fundamentalist desire for closure). The village mosque, too, became an arena where the family’s authority was challenged—not through direct revolt, but through the very mechanism they had weaponised: religious orthodoxy.
The Imam, a humble figure anointed by the family’s patronage, embodied the Gramscian organic intellectual—subaltern yet legitimised by tradition. His forced resignation over an impossible demand (memorising the entire Quran for Taraweeh prayers) was a performative assertion of the family’s power, a spectacle meant to reinforce their role as arbiters of sacred order. But their overreach backfired. The replacement—a young Hafiz whose faltering recitation disrupted the liturgy—became the event that shattered the villagers’ docility. Here, Žižek’s parallax gap emerges: the family’s insistence on textual perfection revealed not divine order but their own fallibility.
The collective hiss that followed was more than dissent; it was the return of the repressed (Freud), the unconscious recognition of systemic hypocrisy erupting into public consciousness. When one villager dared to speak— “What was wrong with our Imam?”—it marked the crystallisation of what Rancière calls dissensus: the intolerable gap between the imposed order and lived experience. Religion, often the opium of the masses (Marx), here became the toxin that poisoned the family’s authority. The mosque, once a site of their control, transformed into the stage for their symbolic undoing.
The family’s most vocal member—a figure whose arrogance had long been tolerated as an extension of their perceived supremacy—silenced the murmurs of dissent with a performative assertion of authority: “How dare you talk like that? The Imam was removed by the mosque committee. Nobody can bring him back.” This moment crystallised what Althusser termed interpellation—a hailing of subjects into ideological submission, where the very act of speaking back is rendered unthinkable. Yet, as Foucault reminds us, power provokes resistance precisely where it seeks to impose silence.
The backlash was inevitable. The village, previously fragmented in its docility, now converged in collective curiosity—even those who had never entered the mosque were drawn into its orbit, not by piety, but by the intoxicating possibility of rupture. Suddenly, religious texts were scrutinised, traditions debated, and authority questioned. This shift exemplifies Sartre’s radical conversion, where individuals, once passive, awaken to their own agency through confrontation with oppressive structures. The newcomers’ notice, pasted defiantly on the mosque entrance, weaponised scripture against its arbiters, exposing the hypocrisy of a committee that had operated in shadows. The Quranic verses cited were not just theological arguments but counter-hegemonic tools (Gramsci), dismantling the family’s monopoly on religious legitimacy.
The conflict escalated into raw agonism (Mouffe)—a clash not just of egos but of competing regimes of truth (Foucault). The family’s dominance, once naturalised, now appeared fragile, its supremacy exposed as a contingent performance. The refusal of young newcomers to pray behind the inept Hafiz was not mere disobedience; it was a performative contradiction (Habermas), revealing the absurdity of the family’s claims to religious authority. The irony was inescapable: only one family member attended the mosque, yet they dictated its order. The rest, insulated by privilege, had long abandoned the very institution they sought to control—a stark illustration of Marx’s critique of religion as the illusory happiness of the oppressed, maintained by those who do not even believe in it.
The scuffle inside the mosque marked the first materialisation of revolt—a bodily defiance against symbolic violence (Bourdieu). But the family’s response was even more revealing: they locked the mosque and renamed it after their caste, transforming sacred space into private property. This act laid bare the latent function of religious institutions under hegemony: not as houses of worship, but as instruments of social control. The newcomers’ counter-action—unlocking the mosque—was a reclamation of commons (Hardt & Negri), a defiance of propertisation.
Then came the final, devastating twist: the family produced documents, claiming ownership of the mosque’s land. Prayer ceased. The sacred was suspended by the juridical. In this moment, the mosque, once a site of collective faith, became a battleground of material and epistemic dispossession (Spivak). The family’s move was not just about land; it was an assertion that even the divine could be subject to their authority.
This crisis laid bare the instability of meaning itself. The mosque, once a stable symbol of communal unity, now became a site of semiotic slippage (Derrida). Was it a house of God, a caste’s property, or a battleground for liberation? The villagers, caught in this hermeneutic chaos, fractured along new lines: some retreated into private prayer, others ventured to the marginalised wicker-workers’ mosque, only to recoil at its perceived “impurity,” exposing the latent casteism that even dissent could not fully erase. The family, meanwhile, began tallying enemies based on something as mundane as greetings withheld, a performative unravelling of social codes. The absence of a customary salaam became a silent insurrection, a Lacanian acte manqué where the failure to speak carried more meaning than words ever could.
When the resistance leader demanded accountability for the “mosque committee,” he uncovered a farcical truth: no such democratic body existed. The villagers, long complicit in their silence, now feigned ignorance, dissociating from a fiction they had passively sustained. This was the ultimate Althusserian misrecognition—the illusion of decentralised authority sustaining centralised oppression. The village, once unified under the family’s hegemony, now splintered into factions: the loyalists, the covert resisters, and the openly defiant.
The resistance leader stood at a liminal threshold—between history and its redefinition—a living embodiment of Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (“now-time”), where the past is not a fixed narrative but a contested terrain. He knew the family’s dominance was not merely political but epistemic, woven into the very fabric of social cognition. To dismantle it would require more than protests; it would demand a revolution of the symbolic order (Žižek). Yet he also recognised the paradox of his position: to fight caste supremacy, he had to instrumentalise religion, replicating the very structures of ideological warfare he sought to overthrow.
This was not a battle of brute force but of hegemonic rearticulation (Laclau & Mouffe). The family’s power, though wounded, persisted through what Foucault called the microphysics of power—the daily, invisible reinforcements of hierarchy. The resistance leader, for all his rhetoric, was trapped in the same discursive prison: to oppose the family, he had to play by the rules of their game, where even rebellion risked becoming another form of subjection.
The newcomers’ resistance took on a theological dimension—a strategic masterstroke. By declaring that a mosque cannot be named after a caste, they weaponised religious orthodoxy against the family’s hubris, invoking fatwas from esteemed ulemas to dismantle the legitimacy of the family’s claim. Yet, the leader of this group, though ostensibly fighting for religious purity, harboured a deeper, more personal vendetta: a seething hatred for the caste supremacy that had structured village life for generations. In seizing this moment of crisis, he revealed the Nietzschean truth that all moral crusades are born from ressentiment—a sublimated will to power masquerading as righteousness.
The late-evening scuffle that left the resistance leader nearly dead was not just an act of violence—it was a spectacle of power (Debord), a brutal reassertion of dominance meant to terrify the village back into submission. The family’s calculated ambiguity, “It will be verified”, while never explicitly claiming responsibility, exposed the banality of evil (Arendt) in their rule: power thrives not just through overt oppression, but through the plausible deniability of its mechanisms.
Then came the masterstroke: the family “discovered” land records (real or forged) proving their ownership of the mosque’s grounds, only to magnanimously declare they would not reclaim it, for it “belonged to God.” This was pure ideological alchemy (Žižek)—a move that transformed their violent hegemony into an illusion of benevolence, reinforcing their authority while appearing to relinquish it. The locks were broken, the mosque “restored,” the old Imam reinstated, and the committees “reformed”—yet nothing had truly changed. The structure of power remained intact, merely repackaged as concession.
The resistance leader, now silent, confronted the bitter truth: the family’s dominance was not just political but metaphysical, woven into the village’s collective unconscious (Jung). His struggle had revealed the meaninglessness at the core of all social order (Camus), where every attempt to “balance” injustice only reinscribes it in new forms. Like the Phoenix, hegemony rises from its own ashes—not despite resistance, but because of it, metabolising dissent into renewal (Foucault’s productive power).
The lesson was clear: power does not simply repress—it adapts. The family’s triumph lay in their ability to stage surrender while tightening their grip, proving Adorno’s dictum that “the whole is the false.” The leader’s defeat was not a failure of courage but of imagination: he had fought the family’s form without seeing that its essence was hydra-headed, always already reconstituting itself.
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Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. His short stories have appeared in national and international magazines like Out of Print, Kitaab, Indian Literature, Muse India, Indian Review, Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink and more. His short story collection The Cankered Rose is his forthcoming work. Presently, he teaches as an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir.
You can find more of Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.