Indrajit Roy

Development and its Discontents: Civil society as the new lexicon

Indrajit Roy argues that civil society has become synonymous with the new development paradigm, although there exists little clarity on the ramifications of this newness. The lexicon needs to be demystified to prevent it from degenerating into mere jargon.

Reserve labor, unreserved politics: dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act

The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in force since 2005. I locate the program against the backdrop of neoliberal transformations in India. I then examine the ways in which the rural proletariat engage with the program, even when other opportunities in the agricultural sector are available. Based on these examinations, I argue that the practices spawned by the program are to be understood as ‘encroachments’ into the extant social customs, norms and habits of rural India. This perspective, I contend, is more fruitful than locating the rural proletariats engagement with the NREGA as a coping strategy or a tactic of resistance against rural elites. The data which this paper draws on include official sources, in-depth interviews with workers in rural Bihar and West Bengal and ethnographic observations.

Development as Dignity: Dissensus, Equality and Contentious Politics in Bihar, India

This paper makes an analytical case for the understanding of development as a process that enables people to reclaim their dignity and interrogate inegalitarian social relations. It is motivated by the ongoing debate within development studies between those who propound a teleological view of development and those who adopt the opposing view that the process must not obliterate historical and cultural difference. The former view is informed by an assumption that the human condition can and should be improved, and the trajectory of such improvement is predetermined and predictable. The latter view is ambivalent, not only about the possibility of improvement, but also about its desirability. Against this dichotomy, this paper urges scholars of development to consider that people might envisage that the social inequalities they experience could be reduced, irrespective of “improvement”. The ethnography on which the paper draws cover show the way in which a group of agricultural labourer households stigmatised as “untouchable” — and alleged to be illegally squatting on public property—stand their ground violent opposition by local elites. While servility to and quiescence with elite opinion would allow them to “improve” their lives by relocating to a less contentious space, community members assert their ethical claims on the disputed property without flinching. They do this not because they like to live in squalid conditions, but because complying with elite diktats is an affront to their dignity.

Development Discourse and Popular Articulations in Urban Gujarat

ABSTRACT This article discusses how members of marginalized groups in the Indian state of Gujarat make sense of hegemonic discourses about national development in light of their own experiences and material circumstances. For many, the idea of development resonates even when they do not experience material progress in their lives. This partial hegemony of development discourse can be explained by the concept of “political articulation.”. This captures the political process by which parties succeed, at specific historical moments and under certain circumstances, in joining different, even potentially conflictual interests by referring to a common idea and project. The article focuses on Ahmedabad city where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created a cross-caste bloc through the trope of development. The BJP has been particularly effective in linking the idea of development to mundane concerns about security, identity and spatial order. However, anxieties about the degradation of labour by increased casualization, informalization, and socio-spatial marginalization have disrupted this common sense linkage and weakened the hegemony of the BJPs model of development.

Utopia in Crisis? Subaltern Imaginations in Contemporary Bihar

Abstract The Subaltern Studies Collective inaugurated an important point of departure in Indian historiography and social sciences by demanding that attention be directed to subalterns (a term adapted from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks) as makers of their own destinies. Their scholarship raises three issues, which are discussed in this article. The first of these relates to the empirical observation about subaltern resistance to elites. The second pertains to the analytical dichotomy between elite and subaltern modes of conducting politics. The third centres on the valorisation of a putatively coherent fragment that seeks autonomy from the totality of the state. The fundamental problem with the perspective advanced by the subaltern studies scholars stems from their implicit assumption that utopian ideals centred on reclaiming dignity and asserting social equality are necessarily derivative of European Enlightenment ideals.

Equality against hierarchy Imagining modernity in subaltern India

How do subalterns imagine their membership in India’s political community? Many scholars argue that they imbibe the egalitarian ideals in India’s political–economic sphere. Others suggest that subalterns identify the modernising impulses of the political–economic sphere as a greater threat to their ways of life.  Intervening in this debate, recent research enlivens analysts to the perspective that the political–economic sphere of the state cannot be unambiguously mapped onto modernity. Nor, for that matter, can the socio-cultural sphere be regarded as singular realm of uninterrupted tradition. This article is offered as a contribution to this strand of the scholarship. By exploring endogenous egalitarian impulses among subaltern groups in India, I seek to interrogate the widely prevailing notion that ideas associated with modernity are the preserve of and emanate from elites in the political–economic sphere of the Indian state. Subalterns eschew notions of hierarchy and value ideas of equality and social justice without necessarily drawing on statist vocabularies in their assertions.