FEUDAL MODERNITY AND THE GOVERNANCE OF DEPENDENCY: GOVERNMENTALITY, POLITICAL SOCIETY, AND PATRONAL RULE IN DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN'S THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES

Abstract

This article argues that Daniyal Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives should be read not simply as a novel about class disparity or as a retrospective account of a residual feudal order, but as a literary anatomy of postcolonial governance in Pakistan. Rather than staging a familiar opposition between a traditional landed elite and an incomplete modern state, the novel depicts a hybrid political formation in which bureaucracy, landed authority, kinship, caste hierarchy, domestic service, police power, and entrepreneurial aspiration are deeply entangled. To illuminate this structure, the article brings Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality into dialogue with Partha Chatterjee's theorization of political society. This combined framework clarifies how the novel imagines rule not primarily through abstract legality or equal citizenship, but through the management of conduct by means of access, mediation, recognition, dependency, and selective coercion. The argument proceeds through the novel's major narrative arcs: Bayazid's incorporation into patronal service, Rustom Abdalah's encounter with infrastructural privilege and privatized violence, Hisham Atar's embodiment of feudal modernity, and Saqib's failed ascent through managerial competence and agrarian enterprise. Across these trajectories, Mueenuddin shows that roads, schools, telephones, ledgers, police stations, marriage negotiations, and household loyalties are not neutral instruments of modernization. They are socially differentiated technologies of rule. The article therefore contends that the novel's central achievement lies in exposing a postcolonial order in which elite power is neither premodern nor extra-state. It is modern, administratively mediated, and repeatedly secured through personal authority and sovereign force. By reading the novel through governmentality and political society, this study offers a more precise account of Pakistani social power than the broad and often static vocabulary of "feudalism" alone permits.