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Akmal Hussain and Muchkund Dubey (Eds), Democracy, Sustainable Development and Peace: New Perspectives on South Asia, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, 652 pp., `1850, ISBN 9780198002346.

SAARC has been the flavour of the season ever since Prime Minister Modi invited and cordially received all SAARC heads of state/government for his swearing-in ceremony in Delhi last May. It is also true that everyone seems to have his or her own perception of SAARC, which need not necessarily fit the picture as far as the formal regional association goes. There is a fledgling notion of South Asian regionalism but the ways to strive towards it may vary.

South Asia evokes mixed feelings in the people living away from it as well as those living within this geographical sub-region of Asia consisting of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Some extremely sceptical people may not wish to touch it with a barge pole, frightened and disgusted with the region’s monstrous problems of poverty and development, peace and stability, and endemic conflicts. South Asian countries figure very low in global charts of development indices as a rule with exceptions in case of Bhutan and Sri Lanka. India and Pakistan share ranks at the bottom with sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh is several notches above them in the latest World Bank estimates. Nonetheless, both India and, its tenacious rival, Pakistan are considered formidable nations, each in its own right and wrongs.

For them, however, who are committed to this region for profound reasons, it is a burning question as to what the future has in store for peace, stability, democracy and sustainable development in South Asia. This made the theme of a ‘World Conference on Recreating South Asia: Social Justice and Sustainable Development’ held in New Delhi from 24 to 26 February 2011. The proceed-ings of this Conference, comprising both the papers and presentations made, are now available in an immensely valuable volume titled, ‘Democracy, Sustainable Development and Peace: New Perspectives on South Asia’. The book is edited by two very eminent South Asians, India’s Muchkund Dubey and Akmal Hussain from Pakistan. It comprises an extensive collection of papers and essays by a veri-table galaxy of leading South Asian scholars, statesmen, economists, diplomats and social scientists, including two Nobel laureates, Bangladesh’s Mohammad Yunus and the Indian head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Social Change 45(1) 158–183

© CSD 2015SAGE Publications

sagepub.in/home.navDOI: 10.1177/0049085714561852

http://sch.sagepub.com

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(IPCC) Dr R.K. Pachauri. The highly respected Ms Ela Bhatt, well known for her work on women’s empowerment, has also made an exquisite contribution as a ‘grihini’.

It is hard to convince the sceptics about a common future for South Asia, benefiting from all-embracing regional cooperation befitting its vast potential. At the same time, for the optimists, a full set of ingredients should form the pre-requisites for regional coming together, not only via top-down formal processes, like SAARC, but also through a deeper transformation, commencing with the bottom or base. The essays in this book explore and elucidate both the facets. Another observation that could come into focus in a dispassionate analysis is the following: since many people are optimistic about India’s inevitable rise, sooner or later, what about the rest of South Asia? The bigger neighbours of India can also stake claim to be emerging economies under optimal conditions and the smaller, more manageable societies like those of Sri Lanka can envision much faster growth under favourable conditions. This book has essays that explore in-depth interrelated dimensions, as its cover points out, of greater social inclusion in democratic governance, addressing challenges posed by violent extremism, overcoming mass poverty and coming to terms with the crisis of environment. These are the concerns that lie at the core of what can make or break the back of South Asian ambitions.

The book thus becomes a treatise on South Asia for those who wish to make the region click, to make it equitable and prosperous, and sustainable in its peo-ple’s well-being, their freedom and democratic rights. The Introduction provides a concise and substantive glimpse of what the book has to offer, defines the problem and unfurls its complete span comprised of (i) democracy, (ii) inclusive growth, (iii) the environmental crisis, (iv) peace, (v) financial structure and develop-ment and (vi) recovering a shared sensibility for a sustainable future. On each of these areas of study there are essays by people whose experience enables them to comment with a fair measure of authority and credibility. Their contributions make the main body of the book.

The last section of the book provides the perspective on South Asia by a diverse group of commentators such as former Maldivian president Mohammad Nasheed; the micro-credit messiah, Mohammad Yunus; the climate change laureate R.K. Pachauri; the acclaimed agriculture scientist, M.S. Swaminathan; and the social activist for women’s empowerment.

The editors, Dubey and Hussain, give expression to their hope in South Asia by setting out in the Introduction that

The South Asian region has not entirely ruptured the connection with its tradition of core values of sharing and caring within the community, of harmony with nature and of seeking a transcendent unity in the diversity of religions and cultures.

They underline that these traditions can be brought to bear to shaping the pro-cesses to ensure democracy, economic growth and environmental protection in the region depending upon how that is done. But that ‘how’ is intimately linked with domestic situation in each country in South Asia. Imtiaz Ahmed and Binayak

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Sen focus on Bangladesh; Hassan Askari Rizvi, Ali Tauqeer Sheikh and Imran Ali on Pakistan; and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Saman Kalegama and Sumanasiri Liyanage take up Sri Lanka. These are the three countries whose experiences are critical for various dimensions of this book’s principal thrust. Then there are cross-cutting South Asia wide themes under each major section in the book where the authors cover democracy building, inclusive growth, environmental challenges, regional financial structure, pluralism and diversity, cultural tradi-tions, peace and sustainability. These essays provide encyclopaedic details, apart from analysis and critiques of the related aspects in each case.

There are elaborate analyses of the Indian situation by Subhash Kashyap on the state of democracy, Muchkund Dubey and Biswajit Dhar on inclusive growth and Shyam Saran in regard to the climate change perspective and global challenge. Subhash Kashyap brings out, in his detailed account, that succession of grave crises and challenges notwithstanding, Indian democracy has been hailed as the most stable in South Asia. He cites in this context the independence of judiciary, freedom of press and effecting, in recent years, of revolutionary measures like right to information and right to education, and according of constitutional status to institutions of panchayats and nagarpalikas as aspects that make India unique. Dubey and Dhar emphasise in their analyses that acceptance of social services as basic rights implies that ‘their fulfilment cannot be subordinated to the needs of growth nor made conditional to growth’. They also underline the importance of implementation of the constitutional measures through actual provision of needed resources, mechanisms and creation of capacities.

Shyam Saran examines in-depth the climate change issues and explains reasons behind the positions taken by India in the global forums, on the one hand, and adoption of national plan of action, on the other. His conclusions entail three-fold imperatives, namely, achieving enforceable emission reduction obligations on the part of developed countries; situating Indian efforts in global context and enhancement, not diminishing, of India’s development prospects; and supporting India’s own actions to meet challenges of energy security and climate change. Saran also describes how despite limitations SAARC has been able to adopt eco-sustainability as its summit theme recently and paved way for coordination of strategies for addressing climate change. He underlines for SAARC, the need to focus on more ambitious and comprehensive initiatives on the climate and environment front, given a host of critical issues that intertwine the destiny of South Asians.

Coming to destiny, it is equally critical not to miss the legacy of spirit and culture that is imbued in the warp and woof of the societies in South Asia whom geography places in a similar predicament but political borders try to divide. The section in the book on shared sensibility describes this unity and diversity in the South Asian cultural traditions. As Kapila Vatsyayan puts it in her essay, ‘This region can be seen in terms of cultural zones, as distinct from nation state boundaries. So we can examine the geophysical realities, the biodiversity and the cultural diversity, the staggering plurality of human species, the multiplicity of distinctive socio-cultural groupings, and, of course, the proverbial linguistic diver-sity: multiple languages and multiple religions and multidimensional discourses

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within and across regions’. This universe, as it were, is the inheritance of South Asians and no matter how trite the rhetoric about it, its inherent worth remains incalculable for reshaping a socio-economic togetherness across boundaries.

It is no easy task to give in a nutshell what the essays in the large compendium contain. No shortcut to reading and dipping into them for reference. Their range stretches from the very down to earth and pragmatic approach of Rounaq Jahan and Rehman Subhan in reconstructing democracy in the region to Nagesh Kumar and Ramgopal Agarwala’s enquiry in the financial domain; from Khaled Ahmed’s realism in discussing State Pathologies, Peace and Water to the vision for a South Asian Commonwealth in the final essay under the Perspectives by AbulMaal A. Muhith. The book has adequate statistical heft and many useful tables and graphics to make it a ready reckoner—albeit subject to the inevitable fate of data before the force of ‘times that are changing’.

The notes and references are thoroughly compiled with care and dedication which must be lauded. It is likely to endure as a book of great value for scholars and serious researchers.

Sheel Kant Sharma Former Ambassador and Ex-Secretary General, SAARC

sheelkant@yahoo.com

Ashok K. Pankaj and Ajit K. Pandey (Eds), Subalternity, Exclusion and Social Change in India, New Delhi, Cambridge University Press India, 2014, 387 pp., `895, ISBN 978-93-82993-24-7.

DOI: 10.1177/0049085714561846

The debate on the subaltern approach to understanding the history and society of colonial India (and South Asia, in general) and the seminal studies that this debate produced constitute a significant epoch in the historiography and the social sciences in India.

Beginning with the early 1980s, this debate, initiated by Ranjit Guha and his collaborators, and the studies it occasioned established a new genre of writing history from ‘below’. The 12 volumes of Subaltern Studies published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi since 1982 have become a critical reference point for social scientists engaged in researching India both in her historical and contemporary perspectives.

Intrinsically linked to the concept of subalternity is the idea of ‘social exclu-sion’. As first used by the French public servant Rene Lenoir in 1974, ‘social exclusion’ is an umbrella term covering various categories of the marginalised population—mentally and physically handicapped persons, aged invalids, abused children, etc. However, in the context of India, this term is used more narrowly to refer to those sections of the population that have been chronically excluded from the mainstream society—like the depressed jatis, tribal communities, religious minorities and gender groups. The shift in the focus of social sciences towards these excluded categories is more than mere extending their research coverage.

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More importantly, subalternity has warranted a change in the standpoint from which these excluded categories are studied: a clear shift from being treated as existential objects of social research to being viewed as essential subjective participants.

Neither subalternity nor exclusion, however, suggests that social reality is frozen. Even without invoking these concepts, it is easy to recognise the broad sweep of forces of change, planned as well as unplanned, to which our society has been subjected to right from the time of colonialism and since independence. What is important to appreciate, the excluded have been subjected to and are active agents of the process of social change. Is subalternity, notwithstanding its heuristic significance, conceptually adequate to explain the complex social changes in contemporary India? Given its own value load, is the methodology of the subaltern approach missing out important insights? More importantly, there remain key questions about ‘subaltern reproduction’: ‘Why and how does a society produce and reproduce subalterns? How do subalterns negotiate their social and political emancipation? How do they absorb social and political changes?’ (Ashok K. Pankaj and Ajit K. Pandey, ‘Preface’, p. vii).

As stated succinctly by editors Pankaj and Pandey, the volume under review attempts to capture ‘the processes of the use of ideology, knowledge and power to reproduce subalterns and subalternity …; to map the dominant trajectories of emancipation and assertion adopted by the subalterns; and to analyse the forces of social and cultural changes including resistance to those changes’ (ibid.). It argues that ‘the reproduction of subalterns and subalternity, subalterns negotiat-ing emancipation and assertion amidst oppression, subjugation and even atroci-ties, and simultaneous working of social and cultural changes and reactions to those changes are important social facts of contemporary Indian society …’ (ibid.).

The volume contains 15 erudite essays neatly organised into five sections. It is embellished by a crisp ‘Foreword’ by Yogendra Singh. In their editorial intro-duction, the sole essay in section one, Pankaj and Pandey observe, subalternity in India is determined by the ‘distance of social and degree of economic exclusion’ which ‘exist in a mutually reinforcing relation’ (p. 3). Social change in such a society has many determinants and is devoid of ‘an independent character and a linear trajectory’ (ibid.). It is from this problematic of the relationship between subalternity and exclusion, on the one hand, and social change, on the other, that Pankaj and Pandey derive the axial theme of the volume.

The three essays in the second section engage with the approach and methodol-ogy of subaltern studies in India. K.L. Sharma recounts the origin and develop-ment of subaltern scholarship, its critique of the elitism of the historiography of ‘colonialists’ and ‘bourgeois nationalists’, and its effort in formulating a perspec-tive of society from ‘below’. Dipankar Gupta provides a lucid analysis of the attempt of the anthropology-inspired historiography of subalternists as a project ‘to alter the ego in history by bringing the people back in’ (p. 56). V.S. Sreedhara examines the discourse on subaltern studies with reference to human rights question in India so as to understand the subaltern condition of Dalits.

The three essays in the third section discuss ‘subaltern reproduction’ through idea, knowledge and power. Ashok K. Pankaj argues that ‘the discourse

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on the new political economy of India is loaded against the interests of Dalit and Backward Class movement’ (p. 106). Based on an empirical study of two service castes, namely, washerman and barber, Madhav Govind analyses ‘the process of marginalization, appropriation and subjugation of indigenous practices and techniques in the discourse of knowledge production’ (p. 119). Exploring the failure of ‘mass education’, Nita Kumar discerns the produc-tion and reproduction of ‘a vast class of citizens who do not have access to the democratic rights that could be theirs through an educational system that was equally good for the masses and the elites’ (p. 149).

The three essays in the fourth section elucidate the modes of assertion and the routes of emancipation adopted by the subalterns. Yagati Chinna Rao traces the history of Dalit movement in south India, in general, and in Telugu-speaking regions, in particular. He seeks to provide a corrective to the ‘mainstream history’, which has been apathetic to Dalit consciousness and neglected the non-elite and non-Brahmin contribution to the nationalist movement. By analysing Karukku, an autobiography of Bama, a Tamil Parayar woman who converted to Roman Catholicism and became a nun, Rajan Joseph Barrett examines the mirage and contradictions of social inclusion through conversion. Barrett argues, ‘… it is the subaltern as an agent in his/her inclusion, who plays an important role in finding creative and novel ways to redefine and remake a hegemonic society from below’ (p. 229). S. Galab and E. Revathi analyse the interface between women’s access to land and their increased participation in agriculture and land, on the one hand, and their empowerment, on the other.

The five essays in the fifth section are devoted to discussing various aspects of social and cultural changes in the country. T.N. Madan focuses on religion and secularisation, and Hetukar Jha and Mahendra Prasad Singh provide a criti-cal appraisal of the ‘exclusivist view of Hinduism’. K.L. Sharma emphasises the significance of caste–class nexus in the study of social stratification. Based on over three decades of work in rural Bihar, Gerry Rodgers analyses the changing relationship between caste and class. Finally, Madhu Nagla examines the tradi-tional multi-village patriarchal institution of khap panchayat and its extra-judicial functioning in contemporary north India.

Pankaj and Pandey deserve to be complimented for thinking of putting together this volume of essays elucidating the relationship between subalternity and exclu-sion, on the one hand, and social change, on the other. However, the volume falls far short of achieving their objective. Excepting the first four essays, the remain-ing 11 essays steer clear of engaging themselves with the theoretical and meth-odological premises of subaltern approach. None of the essays in sections three through five make reference to the tomes generated by the subalternists. This is striking, considering Dipankar Gupta’s observation that ‘No longer is it possible to discuss modern or even contemporary Indian history without referring either to the works of [Ranjit] Guha or to the literature sponsored by him’ (p. 56).

Furthermore, the five essays in the fifth section dealing with social and cultural changes hang loose in the volume. Their relevance to an understanding of the relationship between subalternity and exclusion, if any, is tenuous. There is no essay on the religious minorities and tribes, both of which appear explicitly in the

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categories that have experienced and are experiencing exclusion and subalternity. Though the editors clarify that this ‘obvious omission’ is ‘not deliberate’, it has undoubtedly weakened the substantive thrust of the volume. All the same, the essays in the volume do justice to the respective theme that they deal with and they are all well written.

N. Jayaram Centre for Research Methodology

Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai nj@tiss.edu

Rupa Vishwanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern India, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014, 400 pp., `2,850, ISBN 978-0231163061.

DOI: 10.1177/0049085714561845

Rupa Vishwanath sets the template in the preface with a brief but powerful discussion on the terminology used in the book’s title—Pariah, a much reviled word but nonetheless the nomenclature for one of the most stigmatised social orders the world has ever known. The name was not of their choosing but given by their social superiors who controlled the material, cultural and spiritual resources. At the end, the author states that the only term she endorses is Dalit a name chosen by the members of the community.

The book begins by tracing the origins of the Pariah problem (first colonial report emerged in 1891) into the public domain, the wretched situation of this social group and the responsibility of the wider society in improving their exist-ence. What is interesting is why the problem emerged at the particular historical juncture and how does one explain the silence around the similar issues which prevailed earlier? The author argues that the answer lies in the colonial state’s complicated relationship with agrarian slavery and the agrarian slave owners. While perusing the chapter, one can recognise the familiar tropes which resonate even in the contemporary debates. (a) The idea that caste itself and caste discrimi-nation are religious phenomena, (b) the prioritisation of the ‘social’ as the realm in which change is to be sought via a gradual reform rather than through the state’s enforcement of fundamental rights of equality and access and (c) the narrow focus on reservations/affirmative action in education and government employment as a substitute for structural change (pp. 2–3). Vishwanath quotes Manmohan Singh at length who holds the view that the only parallel to the discrimination against Dalits is apartheid (p. 2).

In the Madras Presidency, the itinerant Protestant missionaries were the first to interact with the Dalits. They traced the roots of the miserable plight of the Dalits to their spiritual degradation. Their chief opposition was to the irrelevant rituals and notions of purity and pollution but in principle accepted the natural hierarchy of society between the landed and the landless castes. Hence, caste was divorced from political economy and labour only existed as a part of religion.

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The author minutely analyses the sources in the official archives, the deliberations on state policies that denied Dalit subordination and understood caste as a matter of religion alone. In the long run, this policy construct helped to consolidate the control of labour by the landed castes. She argues that the spiritualisation of caste had far-reaching implications, leading to Gandhi’s famous Harijan uplift programmes of the 1930s and even the post-colonial state’s caste policies. Gradually, a discourse emerged that only a voluntary transformation of society can ameliorate the conditions of the Dalits, as the society existed beyond the domain of the state that governed it.

The administrative language and the missionary discourse worked cohesively with far reaching consequences in the late nineteenth century. The vocabulary of the landed castes also echoed similar ideas and the Pariah condition was relegated to the realm of religion. The 1857 rebellion enabled the local elites to pressur-ise the colonial state to uphold Queen Victoria’s promise of religious neutrality, thereby preventing the missionary interference in rural affairs. Gradually, public resources and public spaces in the village came to be the exclusive preserve of the landed castes.

The emergence of the liberal, welfare consciousness in the metropolis also influenced the colonial state’s reading of the Pariah problem. A concerted effort was inaugurated to better the lot of the Pariahs (now being known as Panchamas). The colonial state utilised the expertise of the missionaries to settle Panchamas as tenants on mission managed farms. This led to an uproar by the local elites about the possibility of the Panchamas being ‘converted’ to Christianity, echoes of which still resonate. The author comments ironically that till then no one had bothered about the religious beliefs or the lack of it amongst the Panchamas. The state devised a policy to grant Panchamas ownership over their house sites. Needless to say, this led to threats and intimidation of the Panchamas as the sites were controlled by their masters. The officials argued that the relationship between the Panchamas and their masters was very contented and benign, thus denying the conflict and ignoring the former’s slavery. The landed castes warned the colonial state not to intrude, else social upheaval would result. Dalits themselves, while analysing the conflicts surrounding the house sites, refused the idea that caste was a matter of ritual alone and denied that their own poverty was anything but the direct result of the concerted actions of caste folk. In principle, the officials agreed on ‘public good’ but were unwilling to press too hard against local obduracy. The author argues that despite the portrayal of Dalit contentment by both official and native elite sources, the Dalits sought every opportunity to escape the control of hereditary bondage.

The devolution of power enabled the Dalit representatives to enter the Madras Legislative Council in 1918. Any demand by them to implement the welfare measures by the state was evaded by invoking the social. The conclusion of the book coalesces its major strands with an insightful debate on what constitutes the social, which existed as an independent realm outside politics and legitimate government interference. This came in handy for the British officialdom to rel-egate social reform as a ‘domestic’ rather than ‘imperial’ matter. However, as the author proves, after the perusal of the official archives, that this social was

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not an organic whole but was wrought with contradictions. The numerous peti-tions in Tamil by ordinary Dalits who sought their representatives from across the Presidency acknowledged neither by the state officials nor by the non-Dalit public sphere. Contrary to the earlier state efforts in social welfare, by the early twentieth century the responsibility of the social was devolved onto natives by the colonial state, considered to be a matter for natives to work out among themselves. The acceptance gained ground that the social would reform itself very gradually and rushing the process would prove catastrophic.

The public discourse in contemporary India is also ruled by the idea that the autonomous social domain cannot be forced to change rapidly, thus justifying the non-implementation of many laws enshrined in the constitution to protect civil liberties of the Dalits and other marginalised groups by its principal author, B. R. Ambedkar. One can discern the trajectory of the tyranny of the social when the post-independent Indian State rejected the Hindu Code Bill (again a revo-lutionary measure by Ambedkar) to the shenanigans of the khap panchayats in contemporary times.

There have been academic writings on caste and its origins being scriptural, orientalist or driven by census enumerations. However, this work delves into the political economy of the caste system, which enslaved the Pariahs for generations as agrestic bonded labour. Rupa Vishwanath deserves all the credit for a deeply perceptive work that is devoid of academic jargons, thus enabling a non-expert also to enjoy the book. Cutting across disciplines, the book would be of interest to students of history, sociology, political science and economics. The detailed study of the sources make the work methodically and empirically profound without sounding too pedantic.

Shailaja Menon Assistant Professor in History

School of Liberal Studies Ambedkar University, Delhi

shailaja@aud.ac.in

Ranjit Singh Ghuman and Indervir Singh (Eds), Nehruvian Economic Philosophy and Its Contemporary Relevance, Chandigarh, Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development, 2014, 295 pp., ISBN: 978-81-85835-70-5.

DOI: 10.1177/0049085714561843

This book is a compilation of papers submitted at a seminar in September 2012, presented as separate ‘chapters’. These are grouped under headings dealing with the historical background, theory (Nehru’s thinking on economic questions) and practice (the development path/approach actually taken). The emphasis is more on practice, as it should be regardless of the wording of the title, with four sections covering the record, both in the Nehruvian era (which is rightly taken to extend up to the end of the 1980s) and after (post-1991 ‘reform’ of the economy), through

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case studies on education, health, agrarian, electricity and steel sectors, and the macro-economic scenario and economic diplomacy and security. It ends abruptly, without a concluding chapter or postscript to bring everything together.

Nehru’s ideas on economic questions (to term them ‘philosophy’ is perhaps an excess, intricately intertwined with his political thinking as a ‘social demo-crat’ though they were) centred around planned economic development, with industrialisation at its core, undertaken in the framework of a mixed, albeit dirigiste, economy (‘commanding heights’ in the hands of the state) and a demo-cratically organised liberal welfare state committed to establishing a ‘socialistic’, not socialist, society respectful of individual liberty and freedom. Democratic planning for democratic socialism, in short. As commonplace as they might seem today, they were pioneering in their heyday. Planning, even indicative planning (that Nehru had opted for, not the ‘centralised’/complete planning of a command economy), was then a bad word with totalitarian associations. It was, therefore, a conceptual breakthrough of sorts, ideologically—of a ‘third path’ (in between the capitalist and communist roads) for a freshly decolonised country embarking on its ‘tryst with destiny’—of a piece with the even bolder (and more original) non-aligned outlook on foreign affairs, integral to Nehru’s overall weltanschauung.

That approach manifested itself tangibly in the particular industrialisation strategy adopted in the Second Five Year Plan (succeeding the first, which had focused on agriculture, irrigation, multi-purpose flood control and power projects to ensure food security, to use a contemporary term). That strategy was based on Mahalanobis’ modification of the Feldman model followed in the former Soviet Union. The chief contribution of that model was to validate, analytically (under certain simplifying assumptions), the intuitive insight that greater invest-ment in ‘machines to make machines’ (heavy industry sectors, whose output cannot be consumed directly but only be utilised for further investment) in the initial years, instead of ‘machines to make consumption goods’ (light industry sectors, whose output could, in contrast, raise consumption levels immediately), would result in slower growth of the economy at first but accelerated growth after a certain period: a ‘today versus tomorrow’ trade-off, in other words, privileging ‘delayed gratification’.

Implementation of this strategy had, of necessity, to be a state-sponsored process, given the huge capital requirements, complex mega-linkages with other sectors and long gestation periods that investments in heavy industry required. Pre-independence thinking in the Indian National Congress, going back to its 1931 Resolution at the Karachi session (and Nehru individually earlier), had already veered around to a consensus on state control over mining, railways and other key industries. The 1944 the ‘Bombay Plan’ of leading industrialists had also envisaged a state lead, so this (dirigiste economy requirement of the strategy) was not an issue at the time of its launch. Giving shape to the dirigisme feature was to become problematic subsequently, though, because of the lack of convic-tion on the part of large sections of the Congress and the polity as a whole–with the roots of that problem going right back to the socialists–conservatives divide in the Congress during the 1939 presidentship of Subhash Chandra Bose, including

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between Nehru and Gandhi, as is well known and also pointed out in the book in passing.

Implied in that strategy, logically (but never spelt out explicitly naturally because it would have been premature to do so at the very outset), was the supposition that both the investment priorities and role of the state could be reconsidered, and refixed, as appropriate, once the ‘take-off’ stage had been attained—in all likelihood, in the direction of a switch to light industry for raising consumption steadily thereafter over the long term. (For raising consumption levels was, after all, the very purpose of choosing an optimal investment strat-egy, the particular choice made in that respect could not be turned into a fetish.) A process that all might have agreed then, as now, was best done through the private sector of the mixed economy, and reliance on market-based mechanisms, to ensure allocative and other efficiencies and consumer satisfaction.

That kind of a ‘makeover’ of the dirigisme vision of the economy, whenever it was ready for the anticipated ‘take-off’, might, perhaps, not have been considered to be a reversal of the Nehruvian approach by most reasonable observers had it come to be in the normal course of things in an organic manner, with welfare of the ‘bottom billion’, and not the upper crust of society, as the driving force.

The manner in which such a makeover was done in China, which too had followed the Feldman model strategy of initial stress on heavy industry, is instructive—in a home-grown fashion, with an exquisite sense of timing and sequencing focusing on internal reform (of the domestic economy) before opening it to a Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The December 1978 reforms initiated by the Deng Xiaoping–Chen Yun duo commenced with the agrarian sector totally within Chinese (sovereign) control—liberalising the collective economy of the communes to incentivise increase in the marketed surplus of agricultural (and meat/poultry) products. So also in case of the switch in state investment, away from heavy industry, to light industry (textiles, household goods, processed foods, etc.) to boost the output of consumption goods in parallel and a careful adjustment of the ‘scissors price’ mechanism alongside to ensure a rise in the living standards of both the peasantry and urban citizenry more or less in tandem, through exchange of the respective surpluses of the rural and urban sectors of the economy.

Invitation to FDI came later, in the later 1980s and early 1990s, after basic welfare benefits as above had accrued to the populace (and to volatile Foreign Institutional Investment (FII) flows not at all, not until very recently), in a con-trolled manner on a clear-cut ‘value-added’ basis. Such that the cumulative foreign exchange inflows triggered by the FDI, net outflows on account of repatriation of profits, royalty, etc. have resulted in the staggering US$4 trillion reserves the country has built up—highest in the world, and more than 10 times those of India (and, what is more, fully owned by China, unlike the borrowed and volatile, reversible in a jiffy, FII inflow propped up reserves of India).

Such a copy book planning exercise denouement in India was, however, not to be, as is known to all. What actually happened, as is not uncommon in real life in general, was a (huge) crisis on the foreign exchange front overtaking events in 1991—not the first really, but earlier ‘mini-crises’ having been weathered somehow.

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Though the growth rate had gone up to a clear 5 per cent plus in the decade of the 1980s (as compared to 3.5 per cent in the pre-1980), and there were also some feeble attempts at reform of the policy infrastructure (within the planning para-digm), they did not add up to a reappraisal or anything conceptually significant at that conjuncture. (Lack of clarity on the question of take-off of the economy might well have been the reason for the failure of the polity to make good use of that turning point, besides the extraordinary political circumstances and instabil-ity of that decade.) A debt default danger and balance of payments crunch alarm just after the 1991 elections led to a disruptive change in the form of the paradigm piercing policy package of the Narasimha Rao–Manmohan Singh Government. And the rest, as is well known, is history.

The question of interest with reference to the theme of the book—in an aca-demic, not policy-making, perspective—is whether the spurt in the growth rate the economy demonstrated in the 1980s could reasonably be identified to be a manifestation of the take-off anticipated in the Nehru–Mahalanobis strategy. At least in hindsight, a quarter of a century plus down the line, even though that may not have been clear at that time in the welter of conflicting signals and game of obfuscation on the ideological front, that is par for the course, so to say, in a democratic polity subject to contrary pulls and pressures.

If so, the Nehruvian industrialisation strategy clearly delivered (whatever its other shortcomings)—by easing the ‘capital goods’ constraint (a fundamental ‘supply side’ structural constraint) afflicting an underdeveloped economy, and thereby having effected a historic transformation.

If not, then, of course, it leads to further questions for enquiry (including basic ones regarding the validity of the Nehru–Mahalanobis model). But it would not, of itself, be enough to establish the converse proposition—of untenability of the heavy industry-oriented development strategy, much less cast doubts about the overall Nehruvian approach of planned development within the framework of a mixed economy. It would still be a fair question to ask whether the pre-1991 progress of the economy, such as it was, could not be considered to be a critical determinant, and enabler, of the subsequent high growth performance, post-1991.

It would have been very welcome if this book had taken up the challenge of pronouncing upon those questions with some rigour, by framing suitable empirical questions to test these hypotheses. (All things considered naturally, including in particular the known points of criticism of the Nehruvian strategy stemming from the assumptions underlying it, such as undue pessimism on possibilities of international trade, or inadequate attention to agriculture—the ‘wage goods constraint’ of economists, which had formed the basis for an alternative, ‘wage goods’-driven, development strategy proposed by Vakil and Brahmananda.)

Or, going a little further, to test the obverse viewpoint, which current ortho-doxy in policy-making and political circles avers to be self-evident simply because of chronology—namely, that the post-1993/94 economy (after comple-tion of the ‘reforms’ initiated in 1991) marked a complete break from the past, and (most importantly) was a kind of ‘stand-alone’ success not really dependent on

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the inheritance of the preceding decades; rather, something that emerged in spite of that legacy.

Regrettably, that cannot be said to be the case. The contributors to this volume—all seasoned social scientists—make no secret of their Nehruvian persuasion (except for one, tangentially). The blurb highlights the intuitively appealing propo-sition that ‘the fundamentals and foundations laid down during the Nehruvian era provided the much needed substrate for the…post-1991 higher growth trajectory’ (besides the ‘turning points’ of the 1950s and 1980s). Yet, in taking up cudgels on behalf of ‘Nehruvian philosophy’, or countering its negation, they are peculiarly defensive and stop short of doing so frontally. One would have liked to see a more categorical cogitation capable of establishing the proposition definitively.

Or demolishing it, if that be warranted—in view of the impossibility of success of the mixed economy approach in practice, for socio-political or other reasons, or whatever. The one chapter that expresses doubts about the viability of the heavy industry reliant strategy (inter alia because of failure of the strategy, it feels, to provide for realisation of employment and equity) is, unfortunately, least lucid while leaning toward the alternative of a ‘wage goods’-driven development strategy and is, therefore, far from convincing. Its wishing away of the ‘capital goods constraint’, in particular.

The other ‘what if’ question that a book by this title might have taken up for examination meaningfully for illuminating the relevance of Nehru’s thinking is what might be the contours of a course-correcting policy approach appropriate for the economy, post-take off, within the Nehruvian framework of ‘growth with social justice’? To get rid of rigidities and other dysfunctionalities of the command economy features that were known to have cropped up in the mixed economy framework as a result of undue shunning of market rationality (allocative and other efficiencies through price signalling and other automatic mechanisms) over the years but, at the same time, to consolidate gains made and use them to mount a direct and effective attack on poverty.

Say one capable of incentivising if not ‘directing resources to the sectors in which the poor work (such as agriculture and informal activities), areas in which they live (relatively backward regions), factors of production which they possess (unskilled labour) and output which they consume (such as food)’ to foster ‘bottom up’ growth? Instead of the ‘top down, trickle down’ approach of the post-1991 kind, relying on select industries catering to the urban affluent (‘luxury without limit’ dream-land real estate and private transport, mainly), alongside free imports of luxury goods and simi-larly oriented FDI (rationalised as being helpful for fostering competitiveness), with unsurprising regressive consequences for income inequality. One seeking to pursue genuinely inclusive growth, rather than lip-service to the concept (as in recent Plan documents etc., which use the term, misleadingly, to describe mere ameliorative meas-ures window dressing, ex-post facto, an unabashedly exclusionary, ‘growth first’, policy paradigm).’ (UNDP Astt. Administrator in a seminar in 2009)

After all, the 1991 Budget speech of the Finance Minister had advanced boost of domestic manufacturing as the rationale for his reform package (but, paradoxically, stopped short of announcing policy measures commensurate with

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that end), so this kind of an approach cannot be dismissed as a ‘pie-in-the-sky’ fancy of the tribe of ‘permanent nay-sayers’.

But the book does not attempt that either—not surprising in view of the more basic hesitancy noted above, for it is undoubtedly a far more ambitious (and arduous) task.

The strengths of the book lie in the several insights proffered in almost all its ‘chapters’, in the process of providing an overview of the record of performance of the Indian economy. But those nuggets lie scattered in a sea of words, so to say, that speak, often confusedly, to the converted (treating means, in the Nehruvian approach, as ends in themselves and shibboleths); not with clarity and the force of argument and evidence, to dialogue and persuade. Moreover, these are no more than leads that need to be worked upon further—akin to homilies in media articles—rather than definitive pronouncements. That all important task has been left, unfortunately, for undefined others forgetting (it would appear) that, in academic debates, the buck stops with the scholar. For that is what distinguishes the intellectual from the expert!

The weakness of the book arises from its design—as a mechanical compila-tion of the proceedings of a conference, that fails to make it an organic whole greater than the sum of its parts. Repetition is rife, with considerable overlap but no great logical connection between the thematic content of its individual papers. The absence of an overall assessment synthesising the insights of its con-tributors in conclusion is sharply felt, more so because of a lacklustre introduction that does not go beyond providing paragraph length précis’ of the ‘chapters’.

In this it may not be alone—there is a growing tendency in the country to bring out conference proceedings as ‘books’ without proper integration, possibly under pressures from funding agencies wanting to see (and show) some tangible ‘output’ emanating from the conclave funded by them. Such ‘minimalist’ accountability, like much else in the country, is pro forma and gross. It is unable to incentivise the pursuit of quality in advancing the frontier between the known and the unknown, in respect of the question(s) that, it can reasonably be surmised, must have formed the ‘raison d’etre’ of the seminar funding proposal submitted to the funding agency.

That criticism of the book does not take away from its utility as a primer on Nehruvian thinking on economic issues and questions pertaining to the national development for younger generations of Indians unfamiliar with the trail-blazing course charted by the nation under his leadership in its infant and growing up years. But a bolder follow-up volume on the lines suggested would be required to establish the contemporary relevance of the Nehruvian approach, if the reader is not to be left dissatisfied with over promise and under delivery.

Saurabh Kumar IFS (retd.)Formerly the Ambassador of India to the UN and

other international organisations in Vienna, Austria, Ireland and Vietnam; and Adjunct Faculty,

National Institute of Advanced Studies Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru

saurabhkumar1610@gmail.com

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Manish Thakur, Indian Village: A Conceptual History, Jaipur, Rawat Publications, 2014, 224 pp., $42.44, ISBN 978-8131606384.

DOI: 10.1177/0049085714561849

Indian sociology and social anthropology have a very long tradition of studying village. In fact, immediately after independence, sociology and social anthropo- logy primarily meant empirical fieldwork-based study of village. The American and British social scientists (mainly anthropologists) would themselves study villages as well as encourage the Indian scholars to do the same. The empirical tradition of studying village in various parts of India was an attempt to examine it as a specific type of social reality. We had Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis trying to examine the reflections of part society and part cultures in Indian village. Oscar Lewis meticulously compared North Indian Rampur with Mexican Tepoztlán. While different social scientists were studying village in different parts of the country, the aim was mainly to understand the social and cultural dynamics of the village life. This was further extended when Social Studies Division of the Census of India undertook a massive exercise to study villages in different parts of India. Thus, between 1963 and 1968, about 500 villages all over India were studied for socio-economic survey. Some of these villages (more than 50) were subsequently re-studied for ascertaining the changes occurring due to economic development in the coming decades. Besides countless individual village-based monographs, many collected works titled ‘India’s Village’, ‘Village India’, etc., appeared and Indian sociology, at least for sometimes, was synonymous with study of village.

In a plethora of written literature on Indian villages, the book by Manish Thakur stands apart as it looks at the village not merely as a community of people with portrayal of social, political, economic and administrative functioning of village institutions but at the very concept of village in all its politico-economic manifestations as a discourse. One is reminded of Dipankar Gupta’s comparison between the image of Indian villages depicted in films such as Upkar and Mother India, both presenting almost contrasting picture of Indian villages. What Thakur is able to demonstrate is the point that village has been used variably by differ-ent actors in furtherance of their motives. While looking at the colonial interest, he (twice) states, ‘The British attempt to understand the nature of Indian society was inseparable from their effort to design an ideology that would sustain their rule over it’ (pp. 10, 16). Thakur painstakingly bring out the inherent interests of the actors when he carefully describes the colonial construction of village; rep-resentation of village in context of Western social theory; image and invocation of village in the Indian nationalistic discourse; study of village in social anthro-pology and sociology and finally the use of village as a concept in the discourse on rural development.

The author starts with the image of village for the utilitarian, the British colonial administrators, for whom the main aim of undertaking settlement was to bring in the Indian masses under the purview of revenue collection or under the ambit of administrative control. The representation of village as a self- sufficient little republic very well suited them to exercise the required control over the masses, as aptly stated by the author, ‘the colonial construction of the village in India was a response to the historically specific need to use easily

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definable spatial area for administrative control’ (p. 169). In the process, they were also able to manipulate the existing traditional political apparatus. For example, in the Paragana of Jaunsar-Bawar in the United Province, the British utilised the system of Sayanchari for collection of revenue from the village subjects. Otherwise, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Kachchh to Kohima, the Indian village was never a homogenic republic. Take for instance, the exter-nally imposed tradition of ‘gaon budha’ (village elder) in the entire north-eastern India. The diversities of the Nagas, Mizos, Khasi, Garo, Kuki and various other tribal communities have been quietly suppressed for an uniform and centralised administrative control of the colonial officer or collector.

For Western intellectuals, Indian village was also a good example to further Western social theory and historiography. The case study of Indian village was appropriately used to explain and justify Western society. To Western scholars such as Sir Henry Sumner Maine and Karl Marx, Indian village presented a curious case, a precursor to the contemporary evolved Western society. Indian village fitted very well in the evolutionary scheme representing ‘arrested Aryan institutions’ (Maine) or ‘Asian stagnation’ (Marx). Through both the chapters, pri-marily representing pre-independence intellectual history, Thakur has been able to bring forth the thesis supporting village writing as discourse. The nationalistic perspective, representing struggle of Indian freedom movement and searching for a golden past for establishment of historical superiority, can be termed as romantic tradition of visualising Indian village. Finally, the author has been able to describe the empirical tradition of sociology and social anthropology along with the development discourse associated with Indian villages.

The book, on the whole, is an interesting reading, providing refreshing view-point to otherwise ethnographically loaded representation of Indian village. He has successfully established the conceptualisation of Indian village as a discourse. It is a useful reference for the students of Indian village study. The book is not only valuable for the sociologist and social anthropologists but also for historians, geographers and public administrators.

P.C. Joshi Department of Anthropology

Delhi University pcjoshi@anthro.du.ac.in

Prasenjit Biswas and C. Joshua Thomas (Eds), Construction of Evil in North East India: Myth, Narrative and Discourse, New Delhi, SAGE Publications, 2012, 296 pp., £40.00, ISBN: 978-81-321-0945-7 (HB).

DOI: 10.1177/0049085714561851

This collection attempts to bring together a broad array of essays on the theme of ‘evil’ in the specific context of the Northeast of India. It brings together the work of scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology and anthropology. The collection also, it appears to me, makes a sincere attempt to be ‘representa-tive’: out of the 19 essays in the book (excluding the Introduction), 6 are about

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Nagaland and Naga tribes, 2 deal explicitly with Mizoram, 1 about Arunachal Pradesh, 1 each about the Bodos and Karbis of Assam, 1 about Borok people in Tripura, 2 about the Khasi-Jaintia people of Meghalaya and 1 about the Tiwa tribe of Assam and Meghalaya. The book is divided into four sections: the first is called ‘Evil, Conflict and Politics’, the second is titled ‘Good and Evil in Society’, the third—‘Representation of Evil in Myths, Folktales and Narratives’ and the last ‘The Idea of Evil among Various Communities and Tribes of India’s North East’.

While I am not entirely certain whether the essays in each section manage to maintain their thematic separation based on these headings, Prasenjit Biswas’s introduction to the volume attempts to give coherence to the multiple thematic strands of the book by first situating the idea of evil philosophically in both the Indian and the Western context. However, Biswas moves with almost a dizzying speed in the first two paragraphs from Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist philosophy, to Gandhi, Tagore and Aurobindo’s conception of evil. When he moves towards a discussion of the conception of ‘evil’ in certain Northeastern tribes, the connec-tion between his theoretical discussion of evil as a philosophical concept and the particular material he is discussing does not seem to be entirely clear. This does appear to be a recurrent problem with the structure of the book before us: several writers appear unsure of how to achieve a productive fit between the theoretical frames they choose for their essays and the ethnographic material that they have chosen to discuss. However, what does emerge from Biswas’ introduction is that the question of the ‘construction of evil’ in the Northeast of India and the con-flicts around it cannot be discussed without confronting the question of modernity as it emerged through the subcontinent’s history of colonial occupation and its legacies in the socio-legal forms of the modern Indian nation-state. The violence inherent in this notion of modernity (built into the project of nation-building) becomes apparent when Biswas speaks of ‘a nascent Indian Self (sic.) expel-ling its anxieties, contradictions and irrationalities onto the subalterns in the periphery...’ (p. XVII). Biswas then goes on towards a brief critique of the limi-tations of the discipline of anthropology in understanding some of the notions of evil and the ‘spirit’ world that exist in India’s Northeast. While he does not entirely spell out the historical connections of these limitations with the colo-nial roots of the discipline of cultural anthropology, he speaks incisively of the ‘reductionist’ understanding of the notion of ‘spirit’ that is found in the work of most anthropologists writing on the Northeast. He ends the introduction with a brief discussion of the reconfigurations of the idea of ‘evil’ in contemporary global politics—especially within ideas of a ‘war on terror’.

Biswas’ own essay ‘The Idea of Evil in the Context of India’s North East: A Philosophical Analysis’ (also the first essay of the book) goes on to argue for the concept of evil as a kind of ‘bricolage’, a conceptual tool that has a certain amount of flexibility and can be used for purposes other than that for which it was originally intended. In the case of the Apatani tribe, whose rituals and beliefs Biswas analyses at length, he speaks of an ‘ontological mixing up of the worlds of the souls, spirits and gods with rituals that ensure the transference of one into the other’ (p. 11). He goes on to say that these transferences can only be under-stood through a conception of the internal continuity that holds them together

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not as measured against an external anthropological paradigm. The most impor-tant point that he makes is, however, in the conclusion of the essay where he critiques the academic processes whereby anthropology assumes ‘the stability of the subject in language’ as well as the ‘iterability of the subject of language’ (p. 16). He writes: ‘The ethnographic-anthropological bias lies in a juridical autonomy to construct their discursive subjects, as if such subjects are constituted by and in rules guiding their practices’ (pp. 16–17).

The next essay is ‘God, Good and Evil: A Philosophical Perspective’ by V. Prabhu and is largely a generalised overview of the various philosophical and especially theological opinions (mostly Western) regarding the existence of evil in the world, in spite of the presence of God. One misses the engagement here with any primary ethnographic material and is especially surprised by the fact that there is hardly a mention of ‘the Northeast’ anywhere in the essay, even in a passing or generalised fashion. What then justifies the inclusion of this essay in the edited volume at hand? The following essay is ‘The Good and the Evil: The Self and the Other’ by N. Vijaylakshmi Brara. This piece of writing is refreshing in the clarity and cogency of its argumentation. Brara stands out amongst the rest of the essays in the volume in her ability to engage with primary material, while simultaneously keeping a larger political argument in mind. She manages to produce a piece of writing that is lucid, yet makes its rather nuanced analyti-cal point with effective force. She begins by speaking of Meitei cosmology and the necessity of the presence of void/darkness for the process of creation. She speaks of how while concepts of auspicious and inauspicious existed in Meitei society, the concept of ‘paap’ or sin entered Meitei culture through the invasion of Hindu religion. Brara then goes on to state how good and evil are social con-structs, notions of evil are always manifestations of power relations and each individual’s concept of evil is based on what is good for the ‘self’, rather than any sense of ‘objective good’. She then relates these notions to contemporary situa-tions of political conflict, like the one in Manipur, where a distinct dichotomy that exists between ‘us and them’ manifests itself.

The next essay is ‘The Discourse of Evil and the Mizo Folk Imagination’ by Kailash C. Baral. Baral argues that the concept of good has to do with the norms and conduct of a regular life, while the concept of evil may manifest itself both at the personal and community levels, resulting often in binaries of purity and impurity, which in turn lead to intercommunity violence. Baral then engages in a fairly long discussion of the nature of evil in Western philosophy from Greek philosophy and St. Augustine till Schopenhauer and Sartre. Perhaps precisely because of the wide range he attempts, the discussion here becomes exceedingly generalised. The essay only picks up speed when Baral comes to the subject of evil in the folk imagination. Baral states that evil in the Mizo theology is not traditionally the creation of God, but created by spirits who bring misery to human beings. While the anthropological material on the Mizo folk imagina-tion is rather interesting, it seems difficult to connect the first part of the essay to the rest of the description of the Mizo spirit world. It seems that the essay could have done well enough without the exposition on Western philosophy in the first part.

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A.J. Sebastian’s essay is called ‘A Window to Social Evils/Concerns Portrayed in the Contemporary English Poetry of Nagaland’. He begins by categorising evil into three categories: physical, moral and metaphysical—these being those which can cause harm to the body, to human deviations from ‘moral order’ and the limitations caused by the various elements of the natural world. He then marks his intention to the study the representation of social evils in contemporary Naga poetry as well as the expressions of dread and anguish caused by these social evils found in the same. He then divides the essay into sections based on the categories of social evils as he sees them for example, ‘rape’, ‘gender discrimination’, ‘con-flict/fratricide’, ‘substance abuse’ and ‘ecological concerns’. In each section, he provides examples of poems that speak of these particular concerns, containing both brief quotations from the poems themselves and an analysis of the quotes. The highly schematic nature of the structure of the essay often leads to essentiali-sations and a loss of complexity in the analysis of the poems as well the ‘social evils’ themselves. While the essay is a rather broad survey of the field of English poetry in Nagaland today, one cannot help but feel that the narrower focus in terms of thematic concerns might have increased the depth of analysis.

The next essay, called ‘The Idea of Evil among the Adis of Arunachal Pradesh: A Study of Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam’, is by Nigamananda Das. Das uses Mamang Dai’s 2006 novel in order to give us a broad general appraisal of the animism of the Adi tribe, the various evil spirits that they believe in and the newer forms of evil that have assailed Adi society in the modern world. He speaks of the traditional ways of dealing with evil practised by the Adis, their dependence on the priests or ‘miris’ who also function as mediators between the people and the spirits. Das then speaks of the various kinds of ‘supernatu-ral’ and ‘spiritual’ evils, instantiating each of these through incident and char-acters from the text of The Legends of Pensam. Some examples of these are the ‘python spirit’, the ‘tiger/fire spirit’ and the Si-Ye. He also mentions other aspects of the Adi culture, which he designates as ‘symbolic evils’: these are objects or things of nature which connote good and evil luck. What appeared troubling to me in this essay is that it is often hard to tell which parts of it are summarised from the novel and which are the authors own comments; it often seems as if the transmission between the literary and the social is a seamless exchange and that Dai’s novel fully (and without spillovers) instantiates the truths of Adi society as a whole.

Section II starts with an essay by Ajanta Sircar titled ‘Psychoanalysis and the Evil Within’ on Santosh Sivan’s 1998 film Malli and connecting it to another film by him called The Terrorist (1997). Sircar’s is one of the more accomplished and complex essays in the volume, where she offers us what she calls a ‘Kleinian reading’ of the film Malli, which is about the friendship of two girls and a blue bead. It would be hard to justly summarise Sircar’s rather complex arguments within this space, but she makes an incisive attempt to connect this personal and rather intricately lyrical film with the politics of Sivan’s The Terrorist. However, much as one enjoys reading this essay, one is left entirely perplexed by its inclu-sion in the volume at hand, since it has absolutely nothing to do with India’s Northeast and the specificities of its political/linguistic/cultural predicament.

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One could imagine that there are analogies to be drawn between Malli’s situ-ation and those of the insurgents/revolutionaries in Manipur or Nagaland, but would it not be rather irresponsible to imagine uncritically that these analogies actually work given the particular complexity of the political situation in each of the Northeastern states in their immense diversity?

The next essay, written by Anjali Daimari, is called ‘The Idea of Evil among the Bodos: Text and Context’ speaks about the gender hierarchies that determine the traditional relationship in Bodo societies between the ojha and the dayna whereby the first is seen as the propitiator of evil and the second as its perpetrator. The majority of the Bodos believe that it takes an ojha to identify and punish a dayna, but Daimari’s contention is that there is often not much distinction in the knowledge possessed and practised by these two categories of people. Witches are seen as the source of evil and black magic, causing disease, harm and mis-fortune that can only be cured by the counter-magic of the ojha. Daimari gives a rather disturbing and well-researched sociological account, along with detailed case studies, of the victimisation of certain women perceived as threatening (they are killed as well as punished) or on whom the male ojha wishes to exer-cise his power/vengefulness. She includes an interesting critical analysis of two novels by Manoranjan Lahary as well where witchcraft appears as an important thematic, and ends by commenting on the possible historical connection between the growth of the Bodo agitation post 1985 and the rise in dayna killings in Bodo society. This is a competent, cogent and well-argued essay that examines the relationship between Bodo ritual practices and Bodo identity politics rather productively.

The next two essays are both about evil in Naga society. The first, by Visakhonu Hibu, undertakes something of an autoethnographic project by conducting a survey among 183 respondents, especially the youth, from 13 different tribes in the Kohima district of Nagaland. The questions were orientated towards finding out what the respondents considered to be the greatest evil in contemporary Naga society. He includes the Naga practice of head-hunting among the list of traditional evils like spirit mediums (tem-mi), poison (tero) and intestine-eater spirits (ratumi). In the survey about contemporary evils, factionalism, drug abuse, rape, extortion and other such phenomenon are mentioned along with their per-centages and bar/pie graphs. While one is sceptical about this methodology in order to effectively calibrate human responses on disturbing social phenomenon, one wonders with much more shock about the editor’s position on phrases where the author lists ‘immorality, live-in-trends and homosexuals’ (p. 125) amongst the prevalent ‘evils’ in Naga society. The following essay by Jano L. Sekhose discusses the animism, the fear of the supernatural and the rituals to ward off evil common amongst the members of the Angami Naga tribe, as well as their cosmology without much critical comment. The essay ends with the brief con-clusion that this fear of the other world had a ‘positive impact’ on Angami Naga society. The subsequent essay by Chubarenla Lima discusses how a concept of evil was imported into tribal societies along with the Bible, and thereby internal-ised with reference to the Ao Naga tribe. She is particularly concerned with the use of the Bible to discriminate against and humiliate women, even though this is

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against the principle of Christian love. There are eight more essays in the volume. While it would be difficult to comment on each of them in detail and most are purely descriptive in nature, the one that stand out among them are those by Margaret Ch. Zama about the ‘taboos and superstitions’ in Mizo society.

Looking back on the collection as a whole, the sheer range of essays and the varied cultures they deal with somewhat boggle the mind. While one under-stands the need to aim for a broad representative range in a collection such as this, one wonders whether a smaller number of essays that aimed at more than a description, categorisation and listing of social evils would not have been more effective analytically. While this is not true of all the essays in the book—for example, Ajanta Sircar’s, Vijaylakshmi Brara’s or Anjali Daimari’s (which are highly analytical in their scope)—the collection remains divided between those essays that have presiding philosophical and sociological concerns, and those which do not go far beyond a primary description and categorisation. What the collection seemed to lack, in my view, was a more discerning and rigor-ous selection of material and a broader scope of analytical engagement allowed to contributors, even in terms of the length of the essays. But finally and most importantly the volume seems to be deficient in an overriding political/social/philosophical concern that would hold it together in order to bring the clash/interfaces/complicity between traditional notions of evil and the developmental modernity in the Northeast to the fore.

Trina Nileena BanerjeeAssistant Professor

Centre for Studies of Social Sciences, Kolkatatrina.banerjee@gmail.com

Anirban Das, Towards Politics of the (IM)Possible: The Body in Third World Feminism, London, Anthem Press, 2012, 232 pp., $99, ISBN 9781843318552.

DOI: 10.1177/0049085714561847

This philosophically nuanced work examines discourse on ‘women’s question’ with profound theoretical rigour. The book highlights contemporary debate among feminists in the context of post-coloniality. It deconstructs body, gender and iden-tity projected by the feminist standpoint theory and provides critical reflection on inter-sectionality of social construction of ‘body’ and ‘others’ in the context of power relations and scientific rationality. The book enriches our understanding on ‘Third World feminism’ by questioning ‘embodied knowledges’. The author makes an honest effort to delineate ethical priorities in foundational structuring of heterogeneous feminist efforts to question universal forms of knowing and enhances reader’s understanding on power dynamics.

In Chapter 1, the author analyses ‘power’ as ‘the hierarchical construction of subjects’. He starts with Foucault, Althusser and Spivak, and deconstructs Deleuze’s engagement with Foucault’s principal themes of knowledge, power

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and the nature of subjectivity. The author is inspired by this discourse on state, ‘the power relations are shifting, contingent, unstable and multiple’ (p. 7). He argues that power indicates a process, ‘that constantly flows and shifts its location, its configurations, its points of applications and resistances’ (p. 10). He raises perti-nent questions: How to distinguish ideology from truth? Does ideology provide ground for hegemony? The author states, ‘Hegemony is said to occur when space B is made to obey rules of space A without use of coercion or state institution’ (p. 18). Primacy of gender in Anglo-American tradition, popularised by Julian Kristeva, has gained global acceptance over the last 50 years. Thus in women’s studies, there is acceptance of the sex–gender distinction as one of the main-stays of critical analytical tool in feminism (p. 44). Like nature/culture binary, sex refers to biological difference and gender refers to ‘socially constructed’ difference between boys and girls as well as between men and women.

Chapter 2 makes an attempt to address unsolved queries concerning binary—the mind and the body discussed at great length by philosophers like Descartes, Foucault and Derrida. The author aptly remarks, ‘gender roles presuppose a sexed body that acts out roles assigned to it’ (p. 68).

The author, in Chapter 3, delves on the notions of immanence and transcendence—not opposing in separation nor conflating in union. The author asks a mind-boggling question, “How to write (about) death?” And critically examines the role of medicine in conceptualising the phenomenal body. Then he moves from ontology to ethics. He comments on Fox Keller’s notion that ‘relations to the secret are at the heart of scientific revolution and the purported progress, the developments in science’ (p. 94). Fox Keller speaks of the relation-ship between God/Nature and man/woman and finds roots of male supremacy as an ideological tool to keep women in subordinate position.

Chapter 4 begins with a question, if in the post-modern parlance the body is not one, then how is the body rendered many? While discussing sexual differ-ences as multiple singularities, the author believes that deconstructing discourse on masculinity opens an avenue for feminisation of philosophy. He quotes Irigaray as Spivak reads her in terms of two universals (arising out of sexual dif-ference) and two different ethical worlds. While showing relationship of sexual difference with the struggle for equality of men and women, the author says, ‘the fight for equal rights is not for the same sets of rights’ (p. 123). Feminist liter-ary criticism of Kamal Kumar Majumdar’s Bangla novel Antarjali Jatra in this chapter not only makes a moving tale but also brings to the fore the political economy of sati (p. 127). Yashomati, a Brahmin girl to be married to an old man on the verge of death, exposes patriarchal vested interests in widow burning— the father is relieved of the burden of an unmarried daughter, the Brahmin who conducts the rituals of marriage and sati gets gold and money, and the grown-up sons of Yashomati’s husband get prestige and portion of widow’s property. While dialogic narrative of scheming of the patriarchs is heart-breaking, Baiju, Chandal, whose job is to burn corpse, brings out the humane side. Baiju real-ises that Yashomati, a widow, is an object of male manoeuvres and rebels against the patriarchs. The author asks, ‘How mind-body binary acts itself out in the reason-emotion dichotomy?’ (p. 130).

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Feeling of shame, guilt, helplessness, disgust, consistent with the construction of gendered body are discussed in detail in this chapter with respect to menstrua-tion, child sexual abuse, forced marriage, class, caste, coloniality, religion and other identities. The author discusses these complex issues by giving examples from works of Taslima Nasreen and Jaya Mitra. While discussing valorisation of motherhood, he quotes Spivak and states that ‘family is a machine for the socialisation of female body through affective coding’ (p. 131).

Chapter 5 begins with scrutiny of structuralism, phenomenology and herme-neutics and evaluates politics of location and experience in Third World femi-nism. He reflects on positions of Julie Stephens (1989) and Chandra Mohanty (1088) and shows the genesis of the construction of ‘Third World woman as a monolith’ (p. 137) that challenged universal sisterhood-many voices one chant. With this came the unfolding of heterogeneous history of struggles based on class, caste, elite-non-elite and race. Cross-cultural studies became trendy in women’s studies. In this backdrop, the author asks, Does category ‘woman’ in its bid to homogenise in the model of white, western, middle class identity do violence to black women, Third World women or women workers? (p. 142). He talks of location specificity of women in Third World in the twin sense of the cartographic and the historical. He mentions contribution of Janaki Nair, ‘On the Question of Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography’ that advocates feminist viewpoint that sees woman neither as a victim nor as a rebellious heroine but performs ‘negative critical task of unmasking gender-neutral methodologies and the development of a complex and dynamic conception of female agency’ (p. 145). This viewpoint does not treat victimhood and agency in a contradictory mode. The author treats experiences as mediated by discourses and histories. Shefali Moitra’s attempt to classify and categorise general forms of hegemony through patterns of communi-cation ‘speaking to…’ and ‘speaking with …’ the former being Anglo-American tradition and latter being rooted in ‘cognitive anxiety’.

The concluding chapter, titled ‘Towards a Politics of The (Im)possible’, begins with Leninique question, ‘What is to be done?’ This exploration of the dynamics of the production of the ‘body’ with a focus on the ‘others’ (death, sexual differ-ence and colonial experience) provides nuanced understanding on Third World feminism.

Detailed notes and an extensive bibliography enhance the value of this scholarly effort multifold. Scholars interested in gender studies, philosophy, polit-ical science, logic, ethics and philosophy will find this theoretically dense book extremely educative in terms of ideological, conceptual and ethical concerns.

Vibhuti Patel Director, Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy and

Professor and Head, Post Graduate Department of Economics SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai

vibhuti.np@gmail.com

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Book Reviews 181

Swapna Banerjee-Guha (Ed.), Accumulation by Dispossession: Trans-formative Cities in the New Global Order, New Delhi, SAGE Publications, 2010, 268 pp., `596, ISBN 978-81-321-0313-4.

DOI: 10.1177/0049085714561848

The book under review is an edited volume on the processes of capital accu- mulation driving the processes of dispossession, displacement and exploitation of the poorest in cities. All the chapters in the volume are passionate pieces, advo-cating the rights of the marginalised poor. They describe and attempt to grasp the contemporary changes in various facets of the urban landscapes. These changes are also seen in the contexts of several Indian and foreign cities. While the other Indian cities have also found a place in the volume, Mumbai is the most favoured subject of study by the contributors.

The book draws its title from the phrase ‘accumulation by dispossession’ coined by David Harvey in his book The New Imperialism (2003). Harvey argued that accumulation of capital is essentially accompanied by processes of dispossession and exploitation. In explaining his use of this phrase, Harvey sought to dispel the notion that primitive accumulation was only ‘a stage’ in the past. He contends that the word ‘primitive’ in the term was misleading and that the present day global processes of accumulation continue to be about dispossession. He proposed that contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation are associated with neolib-eralism (or new imperialism) in the same way that primitive accumulation was associated with colonialism. It is this argument that forms the axle of this volume.

Harvey is the ‘big name’ contributor to the volume, but almost all he has said in his chapter is only a repetition of his arguments elsewhere. Even though the title of his chapter, ‘The Right to the City: From Capital Surplus to Accumulation by Dispossession’ suggests that he is approaching the problem of accumulation from the angle of another celebrated concept ‘The Right to the City’, he never quite deals with it here. Nevertheless, for those interested in a Marxist analysis of urbanisation, this chapter remains a useful distillation of Harvey’s ideas. The chapter is ambitious in the temporal and geographical expanse of its subject matter. It includes Harvey’s earlier thesis about the scale of urbanisation and about urbanisation as a process to harness unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour. He records ‘Haussmannisation’ of Paris between 1853 and 1868 in some detail, and the emulation of Baron Haussmann in New York in 1940s by Robert Moses. He discerns similar trends of neoliberal processes driving urban transfor-mation in various cities across the globe. Notably, in this chapter he does pause to comment briefly on urbanisation in India and the dispossession and displace-ment of India’s poorest. Its presence in this volume also establishes that although the case for placing any enquiry of the urbanisation process in the local context is strong, a sound theory can travel well and may even help scholars avoid the pitfalls of parochialism in the name of localisation.

The chapter by Saskia Sassen ‘The Global City: Strategic Site, New Frontier’ seems to address the concerns contained within the subtitle of the volume.

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In the new global order, it seems to suggest, the frontiers are not defined by the boundaries of the nation-states and the balance of power between them but rather by the frontier of the Global Urban. The Global City, as explained by Sassen, is no longer just a localised place but a strategic site enmeshed and integrated in a transnational geography, from which capital flows are being controlled. Like Harvey, Sassen is interested in questions of scale of transactions in the cities that she identifies as Global Cities; she also pays attention to the intensity and direction of these economic transactions mainly in finance, trade and investment. She comments very broadly and abstractly, discerning global trends in margin-alisation and new class formation. Her project is essentially one of creating a cognitive tool for analysing contemporary forms of urban processes occurring in and centred around the Global Cities. As (transnational) firms of Chinese and Indian origin forage and compete with each other for control over African labour power, natural resources and markets, it would have been useful if Sassen had clearly set out the criteria she used for inclusion or non-inclusion of cities into the list of Global Cities. Her discussion is, however, indicative of how her conception of ‘Global City’ might be employed to frame a useful problématique to imagining a ‘Just City’ (Fainstein, 2010).

The chapter ‘Global Capital, Neoliberal Politics and Terrains of Resistance in Vienna’ sticks out like a sore thumb. The only thing common here, and author Heinz Nissel takes pains to point it out, is that neoliberalism has adversely impacted the fortunes of the relative poor in the developed countries too—widening the income and class disparities there like in the developing countries. However, his analysis of disparities in Vienna is too stretched by the standards of the developing world. In fact, as Nissel shows, Vienna as a Global City has more of a role in controlling the new member states of the European Union. This and other historical reasons due to which the abjectness of poverty has been avoided by the Viennese should have received more attention from the author for it to be of interest to urban scholars interested in the developing world in general and India in particular.

Dhaka, another non-Indian city that has a chapter dedicated to it in the volume, is closer home in more ways than one. ‘Globalisation and Transformation of Dhaka City’ by Nazrul Islam and Salma Shafi describes well the challenges posed by globalisation to Bangladesh, a country born in 1971 as one of the poorest coun-tries in the world. The problems are compounded by geographical limitations and challenges posed by an evidently weak civil society. The narrative of the chapter is simple and straightforward, but it fits the pattern well.

‘Hi-tech Hyderabad and the Urban Poor: Reformed Out of the City’ focuses its inquiry on the land question. The dispossession of the poor in Hyderabad through eviction in the name of reforms is chronicled in great detail in this chapter by Umesh Paklapati. Like the Dhaka chapter, this too, is an interesting narration that could have been much more valuable with some attempt at analysing the processes that have been described so well.

Solomon Benjamin, in his contribution ‘Manufacturing Neoliberalism: Life- styling Indian Urbanity’, raises important questions regarding recent trend of elite formations (so-called citizen’s groups) staking a claim to shape the cities with a vision that decidedly excludes the poor residents. The chapter focuses on Bangalore in its discussion of the neoliberal Urban Reforms Agenda joined by

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various international monetary organisations and implemented in India through the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. In arguably the best piece of the volume, Benjamin paints a picture of the situation that is both empirically and theoretically rich. Benjamin indicates that this is not a city-specific phenom-enon but widely prevalent fallout of the neoliberal policy of urban renewal in many cities in India. The concern regarding middle class and elite groups’ activ-ism playing a role in dispossession of the poor has been echoed in almost all other India-centric chapters. Although the chapter makes no mention of Delhi, it provides valuable insight into the activities of the elite resident welfare bodies in Delhi where they have wielded immense clout.

On an aside, Benjamin and Marie-Helene Zerah both use the metaphor of Trojan horse for different claims of the elite, which hide their real intent of disci-plining and dispossessing the masses. Zerah’s chapter inquires into the political economy of governance and access to civic amenities in Mumbai. But it is Sharit Bhowmik’s chapter, ‘Urban Public Space and Urban Poor’ that brings to life the narrative of contestations for space in Mumbai. He describes the struggles of the urban poor in the city and how they fail to retain any claims over public spaces in the city. He also engages with the differences in perception of nature and uses of public space by different classes. In one section in the article on slum redevelop-ment, he erroneously deploys the term ‘public spaces’ when he probably meant public land. The chapter by Darryl D’Monte focuses on Urban Transport projects in Mumbai and aligns his questions to the larger questions of the book on many counts for a city grown in size. His research is meticulous and points to his jour-nalistic antecedents, but the geographical peculiarities of Mumbai may limit the insights for scholars studying other cities in India. The chapter could have done with a good conclusion.

The last chapter of the book is also on Mumbai. Here, Banerjee-Guha convinc-ingly establishes the fact of the swift transformation of Indian cities and displays skilfully the routes of progression of the same. The data that she uses to bolster her claim show the aggression and magnitude of these processes to be breathtaking. Although the title of the chapter claims that she is ‘Revisiting Accumulation by Dispossession’, she ends up more or less recapitulating the discussions thus far.

In the final analysis, the volume adds nuances to the theoretical conceptualisa-tion of urbanisation as a result of accumulation and its intricate relationship with the dispossession of the masses. It is extremely valuable in adding finer strokes of contemporary developments to the big Marxist narrative that holds very well.

References

Fainstein, S.S. (2010). The just city. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harvey, D. (2003). The new imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ghazala Jamil Associate Fellow

Council for Social Development, New Delhi ghazalajamil@gmail.com

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