Volume XL No. 10 – OCTOBER 2016

Three essential elements of social experience, namely, governance, development and conflict, are intimately intertwined.Sometimes confusion arises because we are confronted with situations when apparently developed situations too lead to conflicts as was seen in the Khalistan movement in India’s Punjab province in the late seventies and early eighties, or what, has been happening in Kashmir. Punjab was one of the traditionally prosperous States of India, and so far as Kashmir is concerned, it is one the biggest recipients of central assistance. It is, therefore, not always simply that economic hardship alone leads to societal conflicts. The relationship is much more complex, and that is what the present book under review underscores.

A multiplicity of sources—whether it be lived experience, popular discourse or scholarly work—seem to suggest a rather dim view about the state of urban planning in India’s burgeoning cities. Lisa Björkman’s book is a thoroughly researched and carefully crafted work that provides further evidence and perspective on this sorry state of affairs. The innovation of the book is the smart way through which it sets up and pursues the subject. Rather than provide an overall commentary on the state of urban planning and infrastructure, Bjorkman approaches the topic by focusing on just one aspect of the urban civic infrastructure—the complex infrastructural and informational network required to provide daily water to residents of a large and expanding city.

Taylor Sherman’s book marks an important intervention in con-temporary debates over citizenship, belonging, democracy and nationalism. Today, it would be difficult to deny the differential access/exercise of citizenship rights, based on the social, cultural, communitarian, economic or political capital groups or individuals are able to leverage. It is also acknowledged that the formal regime of universal citizenship deftly masks systemic inequalities. Sherman teases out these nuances of citizenship-in-practice in Hyderabad, immediately after the invasion of 1948, to examine the different interpretations of belonging that shaped contemporary understandings of being Muslim and being Indian.

In urban areas like Delhi, the poor face an acute problem of space for their survival.  Most of them are compelled to live with the tag of ‘encroacher’ and face a perpetual threat of eviction from their ‘residence’. The book under review presents a meticulous ethnographic study of the lives of those citizens of Delhi who were living ‘illegally’ and faced eviction due to the emergence of ‘judicial urbanism’. The book explores the complex aspects related to urabn planning, changing nature of Public Interest Litigations (PILs) and definitions of public interest, evictions and relocation/resettlement of different ‘illegal’ bastis, social movements in bastis and their strategies to counter the evictions etc., in Delhi. In other words, it focuses on the dilemma of the marginalized sections of citizens and their social movements regarding the judicialization of urban governance because they cannot deal with judiciary with the same strategies as they have been dealing with their elected representatives and the government officials.

‘Dynastic politics is a termite that eats away the foundation of democracy,’ asserted the Prime Minister of India,Narendra Modi, addressing an election rally in Sangai Mandli area of Billawar constituency, in December 2014, in the run-up to the State assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir.1 This was not the first time that the issue of dynastic politics found mention during the electoral battle in India. In fact, the BJP leadership had made it one of the core issues during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections to target its principal opponent, the Congress. While the Congress led by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is one of the most prominent political dynasties in India, there are several others at the national and regional level, spread across parties with an increasing number in the Indian legislature.

Professor Manor’s scholarship on India extends to nearly half a century now and his distinctive commentaries on various as-pects of development of politics and society have benefitted generations of students of Indian politics so far. The set of writings under review revisits some of the key themes in Indian politics that Professor Manor has addressed from time to time and helps reconstruct an important part of contemporary political history in India. This work, therefore, becomes one of the most important additions to the literature on contemporary Indian politics as politics enters a new phase after the elections in 2014.

This is an important book that tackles a question where more heat than light tends to be generated; namely why has the Left faced such catastrophic failure in Bengal, a State where it once ruled unchallenged? Of course some may consider this a moot question. After all the Left across the world, except in Latin America, has been in steady decline, unable to withstand the collapse of the Soviet model and the consequent rise of neoliberalism. But the story of decline is not the same everywhere, and conventional wisdom may be no more than lazy, unexamined consensus. Bhattacharyya takes as his starting point the concept of ‘government as practice’, which he defines as a process by which governments attempt to work through the messy terrain of social contradictions, grasping ideological polarities and transforming them into meaningful practice.

Why are some parts of India more prone to Hindu-Muslim violence than others?  That is the question that Amrita Basu takes up in her engaging, insightful yet not fully convincing book Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India. Why have States like Gujarat or UP seen so much violence, while Kerala or Andhra Pradesh experienced much less Hindu-Muslim strife—despite having almost similarly sized Muslim populations? This puzzle is quickly becoming a ‘classic’ in the study of Indian politics, as scholars such as Ashutosh Varshney, Steven Wilkinson and Paul Brass have also sunk their teeth in it. Their answers have been varied: Varshney attributes relative peacefulness to the existence of a strong civil society connecting religious communities, Wilkinson focuses on electoral incentives and argues that violence is unlikely where the ruling party depends on Muslim votes, while Brass attributes violence to the existence of local networks—he calls them ‘institutionalised riot systems’—that derive benefit from the violence.

The trauma of India’s Partition in 1947 played out differently in diverse regions of the subcontinent. The division of Punjab in the West happened at one go and was sudden, cataclysmic, and violent. On the other hand, the Partition of Bengal was a slower process as the displacement took place in waves though the trauma was no less violent than in Punjab. Similarly in Sindh, Benaras, Kashmir and in Hyderabad the impact of 1947 was keenly felt but had different registers of remembrance and enunciations.

All modern, alien, imperial governments have faced a serious dilemma during their life: how to hold on to their rule and at the same time expand the rule to involve the local people into administration and governance. The British imperialism in addition faced another dilemma: how to maintain imperial rule and the liberal democratic reputation at the same time? The book under review argues that the Government of India Act of 1919 (popularly known as the Mantagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was one attempt to handle this dilemma. It starts with the premise that the Act of 1919 was extremely crucial for the formulation of the British policy for the subsequent period. The Act altered the profile of the imperial support system and cast its spell on the policy initiatives taken subsequently. In particular the Act did two things. One, it released and diffused some power to various segments of the Indian population (rural interests, landlords, constitutionalists). In so doing, it created a legislative body consisting largely of Indians, that would be pitched against the Executive, largely British.

Angela Barreto Xavier Angela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Zupanov

I have always viewed Kashmir as a palimpsest on which there are several overlapping discourses, most of which have valid historical and theoretical contexts. Several academics and scholars are contemplating the study of the ancient and modern history of the Kashmir region as a discrete political and cultural entity, as well as its unique and crucial role in global and South Asian politics and culture. Chitralekha Zutshi’s book, Kashmir’s Contested Past, is one such commendable attempt to provide a layered understanding of Kashmir, undercutting, in the process, a unitary ideological and political position. I read this book as a postcolonialist trained to question the infallibility of an ‘objective’ opinion. Chitralekha Zutshi’s book defies the linearity and teleology of the grand historical narrative of Kashmir. Somewhere along the way the rich historical trajectory and multilingual narrative tradition of Kashmir have been relegated to the realm of oblivion by colonial, orientalist, and nationalist, some ultra Right-Wing, productions of history.

The latter half of the eighteenth century was the golden era of private armies in India. A large number of these armies, each comprising a few thousand men, were officered by Europeans who are frequently referred to as ‘mercenaries’ or ‘adventurers’. These were professional soldiers who could change sides quite often, even though there were many who had a strong sense of loyalty and commitment. With the decline of the Mughal empire most States of the eighteenth century lacked the resources to maintain large standing armies.

Originally published in 2011, and now available in an excellent Indian edition, this set of essays in honour of and in dialogue with the ideas and writings of one of the most challenging and demanding scholars of our times is exciting, at times difficult and even arcane, and almost invariably thought provoking. Organized around five themes that have been central to Sheldon Pollock’s prolific and profound scholarship, the essays range from the densely and often dauntingly specific to more broad and general explorations, offering something for almost any scholar interested in the relationship between the past and the present, between literary cultures and the worlds in which they circulate as well as the worlds they construct, between linguistic, scholarly and literary traditions and realms of power.

An enormous amount of scholarly writing exists on the Harappan civilization. Shereen Ratnagar herself has produced a number of important books on the subject. So why another one? For one thing, the information on South Asia’s oldest civilization continues to grow steadily, and new evidence requires rethinking. Further, as Ratnagar tells us in the Preface, it is time ‘to put the pieces together and to conceive of the entirety of Harappan archaeological remains in terms of a mode of cultural organization, a kind of society, and a set of economic patterns, thereby putting some flesh on the bones.’ Ratnagar’s is not a routine overview. Apart from rich empirical detail, a lively critical perspective runs through the book, one which reflects on archaeological method and interpretation in order to question several hypotheses and stereotypes, not only about the Harappan civilization, but also about the larger Indian past.