Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy

336 Pages·2000·28.93 MB·English

by  Stuart Corbridge

Reinventing India
For the memory of our friend and mentor B. H. (Ben) Farmer, Reader in the
Geography of South Asia, Fellow of St John’s College, and long-time
Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies in the University of Cam
bridge.
Reinventing India
Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and
Popular Democracy
Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss
Polity
Copyright © Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss 2000
The right of Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss to be identified as authors of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd
Reprinted 2006
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ISBN 0–7456–2076–0
ISBN 0–7456–2077–9 (pbk)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corbridge, Stuart.
Reinventing India: liberalization, Hindu nationalism and popular democracy / Stuart
Corbridge and John Harriss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–7456–2076–0—ISBN 0–7456–2077–9 (pbk.)
1. India—Politics and government—1947–I. Harriss, John. II. Title.
DS480.84.C783 2000
954.04—dc21
00-039986
Typeset in 10 on 11.5 pt Times
by Kolam Information Services Pvt Ltd, Pondicherry, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations ix
Glossary xi
Map 1 Territorial growth of the East India Company, to 1843 xiv
Map 2 Contemporary India xv
Preface xvi
Part I The Invention of Modern India
1 The Light of Asia? India in 1947 3
2 ‘Sovereign, Democratic, Federal, Socialist, Secular’:
The Invention of Modern India 20
Part II Contested Modernities
3 The ‘Tall Men’ and the ‘Third Way’: Nehru, Patel
and the Building of Modern India 43
4 Jealous Populism, Crises and Instability: Indira’s India 67
5 Drifting Towards Catastrophe: The Powerlessness
of the Congress-(I) 93
6 ‘Elite Revolts’: Reforming and Reinventing India in the 1990s 119
Part III The Reinvention of India
7 The Dialectics of Reform: The State and Economic
Liberalization 143
vi Contents
8 The Guilty Men? Militant Hinduism and the Politics
of Anti-secularism 173
9 Transfers of Power? Subaltern Politics, Sites of
Empowerment and the Reshaping of India’s Democracy 200
Conclusion 231
Notes 241
References 272
Index 297
Acknowledgements
Both of us have researched in and on India throughout our professional
lives, and this book is in part our attempt to make sense of that experience,
stepping far beyond the particular engagements of our ‘field’ researches in
Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal. In its conception, design and
writing, the book has involved each of us in equal measure; we hope that
readers will find no awkward seams in our text.
We are grateful to a number of friends and colleagues for sharing with us
some of their own experiences as citizens or students of India, and for
encouraging us in this venture: thank you, then, to Jim Bentall, Arvind
Das, Haris Gazdar, Anil K. Gupta, Ronald Herring, Craig Jeffrey, Sarah
Jewitt, Sudipta Kaviraj, Sanjay Kumar, Satish Kumar, James Manor,
Emma Mawdsley, Saraswati Raju, V. K. Ramachandran, Sunil Sengupta,
Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron. We are also grateful to Alpa Shah and
Glyn Williams for commenting on the drafts of some chapters, and, most
especially, to Barbara Harriss-White in Oxford and Meghnad Desai and
Chris Fuller at the LSE for their many detailed comments. In several places
we have indicated where one or other of them cannot be entirely exonerated
from responsibility for the interpretations that we offer, although for the rest
we alone are responsible. We would also like to thank two anonymous
referees for their helpful comments on a first draft of the book; P. Jacob,
Deputy Editor of ‘Frontline’ (Chennai) for his courteous assistance; and
Sandra Byatt, Sarah Dancy, Lynn Dunlop, David Held and Anna Oxbury
for their editorial advice and support.
We are also grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to
reproduce as Map 1 a version of a map prepared by Matthew Edney for his
book Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India
1765-1843 (1997); and to Oxford University Press (India) for permission to
viij Acknowledgements
quote from P. Chatterjee, A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism
(1997).
And for so many gifts that have nothing (much) to do with writing books
a specially big ‘thank you’ to Joan and Joanne, and to Gundi, Mark, Kaveri
and Elinor.
S. C and J. H.
Miami and London