Organizer: Thomas R. Trautmann, University of Michigan
Chair: David N. Lorenzen, El Colegio De Mexico
Clarence T. Maloney, Euroconsult, Kerala, India
Technically trained officials and administrators in governments and in development projects tend to behave as members of a brotherhood to maximize their opportunities for profit. These brotherhoods are particularly effective in engineering and construction sectors such as irrigation, road, and electrification projects, as also in forestry, agriculture, animal husbandry, and medicine.
Traditional categories in South Asian societies have been partly displaced by these professional brotherhoods, few of which have women members. Young men and their parents nearly always think first of engineering and medicine as ideal careers, because in official positions they can earn far more than just their salaries. Engineers especially gain a self image of their desired life style during training, and they carry this through their careers. Their professional training mostly includes no social sciences or history, and certainly no humanities or arts.
Such technocrats aim to earn enough on the side to build a nice urban house. This is a reasonable individual goal, but given the salary scales in South Asia and the inflation of urban land prices caused by black money, the social cost is great. It means that the whole objective of the department or the project one is working for is partly diluted and submerged under personal interests, and some 30% or so of funds in construction projects are skimmed off the top. So the whole development process is affected, and poverty widely persists. Projects tend to be designed and approved for their construction components more than for their effect on human and environmental needs. Such distorted monodisciplinary management is mainly responsible for fiascoes such as the Narmada Dam project. Corruption is often found in politics and other areas of life in South Asia too, but the technical brotherhoods present a phalanx which is hard to circumvent.
This paper presents three examples: irrigation management in India and Pakistan, and rural roads management in Bangladesh.
While South Asian societies generally accept such self interest groupings, and they can even be viewed as part of the modernization process, we still have to ask what policies are appropriate for donor agencies so that international aid resources are better utilized.
K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University
During the last decade, groups of villagers in southwest Bengal mobilized to protect certain second growth forests, securing the natural regeneration of degraded sal shorea robusta and its associates in several thousand hectares of forest land in the region. This process of local cooperation within villages and between villagers and the state, called Joint Forest Management (JFM), I contend has to be studied at the intersection of many historical processes. In my larger project, I ask the question-is JFM indexical of a radical political transformation of peasant state relations in the forests of Bengal? This leads into an examination of how JFM is interpenetrated by wider formations and interdigitated with its past. I propose that as a development regime pertaining to forest management, JFM is an historical product of colonial state making (1). Therefore, like Anna Tsing,1993 (2), and others, my goal is to explore the historical relationship between local political dynamics and regional and/or national politics. But unlike Tsing who mostly dwells on the shifting identities of local and marginalized communities, my focus is on the schisms and uncertainties within the formal state apparatus, to trace their vicissitudes over time.
In this paper I will explore the emergence of systems of sal silviculture, especially the political history of naturally regenerating sal in Bengal, roughly between 1890 and 1930. Laying down systems of forest management, the colonial state was caught up in questions of conservation, control, and the rights of local communities that reverberate into the present. The solutions that they found, the patterns of state making that we can detect, provide the materials from which the rubric of JFM has been fashioned. By discussing the negotiated, contested and experimental ways in which sal silviculture was crystallized in working plans, my paper will demonstrate that the scientifically desirable was always entangled in debates about the locus of effective governance. The turn of the last century was critical to the development of knowledge that is foundational to sal forest management today. Through representations of the forest, definition of expertise and manipulation of local structures of authority, the creation of this body of knowledge about natural regeneration of sal forests in Eastern India converged with political expansion and the process of establishing the colonial state on its frontiers, which was also the fringes of settled cultivation in certain parts of Bengal.
(1)"Development regime" is used in the manner defined by David Ludden in the article "India's Development Regime," in Nicholas Dirks (ed.) "Colonialism and Culture," Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
(2)I refer to her recent book, "In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place," Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Vinay Lal, University of California, Los Angeles
The political trial in colonial India enjoyed a remarkable place in the arena of state activities from 1775 to 1947-48. Most pivotal moments in the history of British India were marked by a trial, and my paper will focus on two trials that possess a unique significance, although I shall constantly entertain some broader considerations about the conduct of 'political' trials in general and their place in the history of British India in particular. The history of political trials in British India begins with the impeachment and trial, between 1788-1795, of Warren Hastings, to whom fell the task of consolidating British rule in India, and takes us to the period after the attainment of independence, when Nathuram Godse stood on trial for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the 'Father' of a barely emergent nation. At mid-point stands the trial of the Emperor Muhammad Bahadur Shah on charges of murder and treason; if that trial encapsulated central issues in the contestation of authority, so did the trial in 1922 of Mahatma Gandhi, who had initiated the first nationwide movement of resistance against British rule since the days of the Rebellion of 1857-58.
Political trials in colonial India, I will suggest, can also be constituted as commentaries on questions of the nation-state. Hastings had brought a new colonial state into being; the trial of Bahadur Shah was thus a commentary on the success of the new state that Hastings and his successors had forged, as much as on the possibilities of a state where, in the British perception, Muslim power would once again have been triumphant. The trial of Mahatma Gandhi, a political anarchist devoted to the idea of the complete decentralization of power, was meant to provide an illustration of the indispensability of the colonial state.
My paper will view the trial not only as ritualistic enactment of authority, but also as a rhetorical and substantive testimony to the 'rule of law,' a form of communicative action, and as a guide to the colonial sociology of knowledge. My concern is less with certain 'events,' such as the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58 or the non-cooperation movement of 1920-22 under the inspiration of Gandhi, than with exploring the political trial as a form of governance and knowledge.
Vijay Prashad, Direct Action for Rights and Equality
From the 1930s, Hindu reformers sought to purify certain north Indian untouchable communities with the intention to expand the 'Hindu' community both for itself and in the eyes of the colonial State. Caught in the vortex of a political negotiation between elite Hindus, elite Muslims and the colonial bureaucracy, the Chuhras of Punjab struggled to retain their faith in Bala Shah Nuri, the pure preceptor to whom they owed their fealty. The Hindu reformers urged them to remove their affections for Bala Shah, whom they accused of being a devious Muslim. In place of Bala Shah, Hindu reformers put forward the author of the Ramayana, Maharishi Valmiki, as the teacher of the Chuhras. By the late 1930s, Bala Shah Nuri disappeared and the Chuhras began to call themselves Balmikis. The valiant fighters in the struggle, the radical untouchables, argued that the Hindus only wanted them for political purposes and not for purposes of freedom and humanity. In recent years, the struggle has resurfaced in the fracas over the Mandal commission and over Ayodhya.
In this essay, apart from telling the story of this transformation, I deal with the issue of untouchability and Hinduism-the trials of oppression and the untouchables' oppressive present. I especially delve into the putative a priori belief that untouchables are Hindus, a view made more natural by the troubles of the 1930s. I raise issues such as the disjuncture between 'faith,' 'religion,' and the 'religious community' in light of the pragmatics of modern politics.
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