Book review: Aditya Mukherjee, Political Economy of Colonial and Post-colonial India

PurposeThe paper aims to relocate discussions on police stops and police interactions from the Anglophone world to the particularistic context of the post-colonial state of India. The paper further frames the everyday policing practices in a theoretical dialog between questions of legitimacy, accountability and tolerated illegalities. For that purpose, the author contextualizes the discussion in the post-colonial state of India, in the jurisdictions of two police stations (PSs), in the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the State of Kerala.Design/methodology/approachThe author conducted ethnographic studies in one station each in Kerala and Delhi, India, from February to July 2019 and July 2019 to January 2020, respectively. The study mapped everyday power relations as the relations manifested within the site and jurisdiction of the PSs.FindingsThrough the research, the author found that to fully understand everyday practices of policing, especially police interactions and police stops, one must contextualize the police force within the administrative power-sharing relations, police force's accountability structures, legal procedures and class dynamics, which mark the terrain in which personnel function. In that terrain, the author found that the dialog between particularistic legitimacy, accountability and tolerated illegalities offered an important framework to interpret the everyday policing practices.Originality/valueThrough the paper, the author seeks to expand the analysis of ethnographic descriptions of policing by contextualizing them in the political economy of the state. In doing so, the author aims to provide a framework through which police interactions in post-colonial India could be understood

Reviewed by: Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India Antoinette Burton (bio) Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, by Parama Roy; pp. vii + 236. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, $45.00, $16.95 paper, £35.00, £12.50 paper. Scholars seeking work which explores theories of the performative in the context of postcolonial criticism and, more particularly, in its “South Asian incarnation” (4), will find in [End Page 576] Parama Roy’s book a far-ranging discussion of the various procedures of identity production and its high-political corollary, nation-formation. Taking as her point of departure the specter of originality that haunts both colonial and postcolonial discourse, Roy offers a reading of impersonation which emphasizes the heuristic value of its often spectacular cultural effects, and which, above all, rejects the celebratory character typically assigned to it, in favor of a more pragmatic view of its relationship to colonial authority and imperial power. Here the concept of traffic—which conjures a political economy of movements with specific historical and cultural trajectories—serves her well, in part because it enables her to track figures as diverse as Richard Burton, Swami Vivekananda, and the film star Nargis across the landscapes of both Victorian and post-independence India. Foregrounding this metaphor also permits Roy to pursue her claim that we need a more sophisticated model of identity- and nation-formation than Anglicization, insofar as traffic presumes no determinate point of origin and therefore allows for the possibility that nation and empire are mutually constitutive rather than serially related. The fact that Roy pursues her arguments about the unfinished business of identity through a series of case studies based on biographies is a sign of how seriously, and how persistently, postcolonial theory has taken up the challenge to individualism at the heart of post-Enlightenment modernity. Such a challenge is evident in her discussion of Burton’s attempt to masquerade as a native, and the successes and failures of that venture. For Englishness emerges in this interpretation as the capacity to represent non-Englishness, itself a parodic form which, like colonial mastery itself, is never finally or fully accomplished. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who has arguably become the recurrent familiar of postcolonial theory in its literary critical mode, comes off as similarly incomplete and narcissistic—not only in the context of the novel itself, but also as against a variety of Anglo-Indian men (like Policeman Strickland) in Kipling’s short stories. The chapter on thuggery, in contrast, assembles an archive of fiction around the practice and privileges no single author. It documents the historical coincidence of criminal surveillance with ethnographic data-collection in ways that are intriguing, but would seem to engage the question of performativity only secondarily. And despite Roy’s determination to produce counter-readings of these well-known characters in ways that are attentive to the pressures of historical placement, it is puzzling to see John Masters’s 1952 novel The Deceivers (made into a Merchant/Ivory film in the 1980s) tacked onto the discussion of Victorian thuggery. This is especially so since an analysis of how tropes of “Indian” deception and criminality would have resonated for all manner of movie-going audiences in those two eras and might have proven extremely fruitful. Roy’s provocative arguments about the “performative model of the nation” (91) and its historicities are more persuasive when applied to Indian nationalism in its later colonial embodiments: Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita and Sarojini Naidu. If asceticism—and in this cultural context, discipleship as well—functions as a kind of “transvestic discipline” (97), then Vivekananda represents one of the most intriguing examples of both spiritual and “aggressive” Hindu masculinity-in-crisis. The genealogy of his gender performance that Roy excavates here might profitably be read together with Indira Chowdhury’s account of him in her recent book, The Frail Hero and Virile History (1998)—especially in relation to the publicity given to his American tour on the occasion of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Roy in turn traces the impact of what she calls the Swami’s “exorbitant masculinity” (115) on Sister Nivedita, a Western female follower whose struggle to reconcile...

Aditya Mukherjee, Political Economy of Colonial and Post-colonial India (Delhi: Primus, 2022), hb., 559 pp. ₹1,950.

History and Context 1. Independence to the Mid-1970s John Adams 2. Mid-1970s to the Present Christopher Candland Economic Policy 3. The Political Economy of India's Economic Performance since 1947 Baldev Raj Nayar 4. Planned Development and the Search for Self-Reliance George Rosen 5. The Western Aid Community and Postcolonial India: On Development's Continuities with Colonialism Daniel Klingensmith 6. Growth with Justice: Understanding Poverty Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay 7. Federalism, Local Government, and Economic Policy George Mathew 8. Changing Indian Agriculture: Agrarian Society, Economic Planning, and Development since 1947 Allen Kornmesser 9. India's Increasing Integration in the World Economy: The Tensions of Nationalism and Globalism since 1990 Alan Heston Social and Cultural Aspects of Economic Growth 10. Population, Heath, and Development: Policy Debates, Directions, and Dilemmas Barbara D. Miller 11. Living Multiculturally in a Federal India Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay 12. National Politics, Regional Politics, and Party Systems Arun R. Swamy 13. Human Development in Crisis: Investment Failures in Health and Education A. K. Shiva Kumar 14. Indian Economic Reforms: Popular Perception and Public Debate Girijesh Pant International Political Economy 15. Changing Regimes in Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property in India Sunil K. Sahu 16. Regional Organizations for Trade and Security: SAARC, ASEAN, APEC M. J. Vinod 17. Competing Asian Giants: Development and State Formation in India and China Lei Guang and Himadeep Muppidi 18. International Monetary Fund and World Bank Involvement in India's Economic Reforms Farida C. Kahn and Roby Rajan Future 19. India's Development at 50 years: The Center, the States, and the National and World Economy Subbiah Kannappan Appendices Chronology Glossary Personalities Bibliography Index

Contemporary India is among the top seven countries in the world witnessing the rise of mega urban regions, infrastructural expansion by government and private entities, and acceleration of special economic zones; the fallout of these trends has been the loss of cropland, and massive resistance coupled with political destabilization. Since the 1990s India’s political economy has increasingly been defined by land dispossession. Indeed, some politicians and big industrialists argue that the developmental agenda of India remains an unfulfilled dream because of land scarcity. On the other hand, strong grass-roots protest movements against land grab have toppled reigning governments and, in some cases, managed to thwart the outward march of land capitalization, dispossession, and ecological degradation. Land ownership remains a protean issue for Indian politics and its social matrix. Yet, it is not a recent phenomenon. Land acquisition and dispossession have a long genealogy in India and have gone through successive stages, engendering new political modalities within different economic regimes. Although not a settler colony, the East India Company grabbed land from the 18th century onward, dispossessing and uprooting people in the process, while alienating and disembedding land from its social matrix. Beginning with the Permanent Settlement of agricultural lands in eastern India in 1793, the Company sought legal authority to justify taking land, thus initiating a regime of quasi-eminent domain claims upon land for a wide range of practices, among them salt manufacturing, urbanization, infrastructure, and railways. The political authority and dubious legitimacy of the joint-stock company acting as a trustee of land was written into the various laws on land acquisition, ultimately culminating in the colonial Land Acquisition Act (LAA) of 1894. While independent India envisioned distributive justice through land redistribution, land acquisition and dispossession continued unabated, and postcolonial India’s land acquisition law merely offered procedural legitimacy to the act of taking land from people against their will for the greater “public,” and thereafter for public–private partnership. From 1947 state-led development resulted in the expropriation of land for industrialization, dams, and mega-infrastructural projects resulting in massive development-induced displacement across the country. India’s economic liberalization from the 1990s began a transnational movement of capital on an unprecedented scale, which manifested itself as an emerging configuration of real-estate-as-development. The government of India created new legal entitlements for private companies by enacting the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Act in 2005 for export industries, IT companies, mining companies, and supporting real-estate development, resulting in dispossession, resistance, land speculation, and the emergence of land mafias.

The ascendance of the multiplex film theatre in India has great significance in the creation of new public space, and is part and parcel of the long-running contestation of modernity and citizenship in postcolonial India. However, while the histories of urbanism, cinema and modern politics are usefully indicative of each other, their relationship in this instance also needs to be further related to the history of leisure capital in India and, in particular, to the contemporary dynamics of the media economy. The rise of the multiplex is closely related to the re-organisation of working practices and of capital investment within the film exhibition sector. The aggregation of interests within what has traditionally been a highly fragmented industry with largely informal organisation is a result of both the entry of outside concerns into the theatrical market and of operational change within the industry itself as leading players pursue an agenda of ‘corporatisation’. It is these new corporate entities, funded by institutional investors and public flotation, that dominate the multiplex business, which has arisen in marked contrast to the loose agglomeration of family-owned theatres that have previously characterised theatrical exhibition in India. As the leading multiplex brands embark upon a massive programme of expansion into India's second-tier cities, this paper provides a critical account of the emerging political economy of the multiplex paradigm.

Recent theorizations of affect have focused largely on Western historical, political and aesthetic contexts to distinguish between affect and emotion. Notably, these interventions offer new imaginaries to reinvigorate analysis of politics in the face of shrinking possibilities. However, much of this literature views affect as autonomous from emotion, while overlooking the political history of development and the differentiated relation to affect under colonial capitalism in other historical contexts. This paper studies subaltern engagement in activist performance in India to address these issues. It thinks through Lauren Berlant's account of the aesthetic genre and affective structure of cruel optimism, and her focus on historical contexts where people have recently lost the vision of a good life. By contrast, focusing on the historical present of those born into a pervasive and intractable sense of marginality and insecurity, I ask: what is the subject's relation to affect and activism in contexts where the loss of vision of a good life is not new under neoliberalism, but rather, reworks long-standing violence and inclusion/exclusion of colonial capitalism and nation-state histories. I argue that it is useful to understand Berlant's ‘materialist context for affect theory’ in light of uneven global histories of colonialism, development and neoliberalism. The affective experience of time is different across different spaces. As such, this paper contributes a global materialist context for affect theory, by focusing on activist theatre by a tribe called Chhara, designated ‘born criminals’ by British colonial law – a status legally denotified in 1952, but that is practically still effective in postcolonial India. Competing affective structures – sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, betrayal and ordinary regard – shape and are shaped by Chhara negotiations with branded criminality. Ultimately, for the postcolonial subject, surviving in the neoliberal present involves vacillating among competing affective structures, only some of which generate sustained political critique.

I. Entanglements of Desire and Economy 1. Marx's Concept of Radical Needs in the Guise of Queer Desire 2. Can the Subaltern Desire? The Erotic As a Power and the Disempowerment of the Erotic 3. The Associations of Black Queer Life: Reading and Seeing the Nineteen Eighties 4. Queer Economic Justice: Desire, Critique, and the Practice of Knowledge II. Intersections of Sexual and Economic Justice 5. The Instrumentalization of Sexual Diversity in a Civilizational Frame of Cosmopolitanism and Tolerance 6. Unruly Desires, Gay Governance, and the Makeover of Sexuality in Postcolonial India 7. Integrating Sexual and Economic Justice: Challenges for queer feminist activism against sexual violence in South Africa 8. Classing Desire: Erotics, Politics, Value III. The Political Economy of Queer Embodiments 9. Queer Needs Commons! Transgressing the Fiction of Self-ownership, Challenging Westocentric Proprietism 10. The Ruse of Sexual Freedom: Neoliberalism, Self-Ownership and Commercial Sex 11. Queer Economies: Possibilities of Queer Desires and Economic Bodies (Because 'The Economy' Is Not Enough)

The democratic Left in India is in crisis. During the first decade of this century it slid from its highest parliamentary presence to virtual irrelevance. A key to its retrieval, this book argues, lies in its ability to imagine a new popular politics for reinventing its democratic credentials beyond electoral posturing. In this respect, much can be learnt from the Left's governmental practices as they have evolved since the late 1960s, crafting a unique blend of politics, policy, idealism, practicality, vision and delivery. By looking at the problematics of government from the days of deft land reforms to messy land acquisition, this book situates 'government as practice' as a prism for critical thinking on democratic politics in postcolonial India. Grounded in empirical and archival research, the book will be useful for those who are passionate as well as sceptical about the revival potentials of a new Left in India's fast-changing political economy.

This paper traces the transformation of India’s telecommunications and media industries in the context of neo-liberal policies pursued by the state since 1991 to establish the supremacy of the market. The growth of the capitalist enterprises, their expansion abroad, their entanglement with foreign capital and the closer ties to the multinationals are some of the features of this historic process. While the evidence indicates impressive short-term gains for the middle and upper classes, the larger structural questions linger. Nearly 400 million Indians out of the billion-plus population are languishing in crushing poverty as they attempt to climb up the economic ladder and grab the ephemeral promises made by the new, fast globalizing economy. The social costs of this economy, in which post-colonial India’s vision of a fair and just society are abandoned, have resulted in various upheavals and an unstable political economy.

Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by focussing on Naoroji's pre-occupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. It shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism's incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority's economic decline. He responded by innovating his own liberalism, characterized by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence maintained by freely contracting workers. Significantly, the author draws attention to how Naoroji seeded 'Western' thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book offers a compelling argument which reframes Indian 'nationalists' as global thinkers.

To the modern world, the notions that freedom is an innate condition of human beings and that money possesses the power to bind people appear as natural facts. Bonded Histories traces the historical processes by which these notions became established as dominant discourses in India during colonial rule and continued into post-colonial India. Gyan Prakash locates the formulation of these discourses in the history of bonded labour in southern Bihar. He focuses on the emergence and subsequent transformation of the relationship of reciprocal power and dependence between landlords and labourers. The author explores the way in which these transformations were connected with broader shifts in the political economy of this part of the subcontinent; with the changing structures of agricultural production, land tenure and revenue demand; with local social hierarchies and the ideology of castes; and with Hindu cosmologies, spirit cults and their articulation in ritual practices.

The Political Economy of Communications in Post-colonial India: 1948–1985

Reviews of Books

Matthew Hull, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, was interviewed as an author of his recognized book titled “Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan” (2012) by Elena Gudova, PhD student and teacher at the Higher School of Economics.Matthew Hull discusses the material practices concerning document production and circulation among government employees at the Capital Development Authority (CDA) of Islamabad. According to Prof. Hull, intense documentation is not necessarily a feature of state bureaucracy alone; rather, it is also relevant to the managerial and accountability activities of private corporations. Still, paperwork at government organizations provides a good empirical example of “governmentality practices”.Apart from their ability to organize things by the power of a word, documents serve as mediators in the relationships among people, objects, and institutions. Storytelling practices may shed some light on the performance of specific files and regulations, which can form physical social order and provide access to different areas of responsibility and sources of power. In that sense, the “virtualization” of documents and their break from materiality does not necessarily reduce the level of bureaucracy; instead, it can create new dimensions of symbolic inequality among bureaucrats and their clients.According to Hull, the power of bureaucracy (both official and nonofficial) varies cross-culturally and even across companies in the same country. Despite their common British postcolonial legacy, India and Pakistan may serve as good examples of this. The idea of accountability lies at the core of bureaucracy and sets the ground for the emergence of a political economy of paper. Above all, this interpenetration of documents and goods and services production may characterize both capitalistic and noncapitalistic societies.