Seva, Saviour and State: Caste Politics, Tribal Welfare and Capitalist Development [1° ed.] 1138796093, 9781138796096

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Seva, Saviour and State

R. Srivatsan makes an important intervention in the debate on the

historical emergence of modern caste power in India ... His well-argued essays demonstrate how the concept, practice and ideology of seva enabled the upper castes to establish their hegemony while casting dalits and tribals as marginalised populations in need of amelioration. Functioning as a disciplinary power, seva strategically served to soften the processes of capitalism and state penetration. The book's uniqueness lies in its method-of tracing the genealogy of seva. It will be extremely useful for students of political theory and social sciences in general as well as dalit studies, cultural studies and women's studies. More importantly, it is a book that needs to be read by anyone involved or interested in social and political activism in India.

A. Suneetha Coordinator Anveshi Research Centre for Women Studies, Hyderabad 'Development' was a hegemonic idea before it became the dominant framework for state policy. But our collective common sense puts the cart before the horse by attributing the influence of the idea to its adoption by the state. This original and provocative book offers an important corrective to common sense . . . It reminds us that India pioneered not only the economic theory and the administrative practice of developmentas-policy but also the political pragmatics and the ethical principles of development -as-idea. Srivatsan's project is to explore the pre-history of the development idea through the thoroughly Indian notion of 'seva' ... As an overarching model for both collective action and personal conduct, 'seva' was produced through a process of political experimentation that yoked together the culturally resonant ideals of ascetic-altruism and self.sacrifice. This in turn enabled the emergence of the idea of welfare based on public service. Thus, the initial form taken by the development idea in the 1930s and 1940s was the welfare of the suffering masses brought about by 'seva'. Development as growth-with the focus on science, technology and industry rather than morally-motivated upliftment-was a later formulation that overtook and eventually over-wrote the welfare model, thus marking the transition from the Gandhian to the Nehruvian era. Anyone interested in the history of ideas, of politics and of the technologies of government in modern India will learn a lot from this unusual and absorbing book.

Satish Deshpande Professor and Head, Department of Sociology Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi

Seva, Saviour and State Caste Politics, Tribal Welfare and Capitalist Development

R.

~l Routledge

!~

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

SRIVATSAN

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

First issued in paperback 2019 Copyright © 2015 R. Srivatsan This book was written in the context of the development initiative at Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies, Hyderabad.

Typeset by Eleven Arts Keshav Puram Delhi 110 035

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-138-79609-6 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-367-17703-4 (pbk)

Contents Foreword by Gopal Guru Acknowledgements Introduction

vii xi 1

ONE

Seva and the Sevak in the Freedom Movement

Two

Swami Balananda's Poverty Relief Service and the Malayappan Report

37

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THREE

Colonial and Nationalist Perceptions of Hill Tribes in the Madras Presidency: A Comparison

FOUR

115

Changes in Tribal Anthropology between Colonial Rule and the Development State

135

Epilogue: From Ambedkar to Thakkar and Beyond: Towards a Genealogy of our Activisms

163

Bibliography About the Author Index

182 190 191

Foreword The struggle for India's political independence involved a cacophony of languages that were seeking liberation from both the colonial and local configurations of power. First, the colonial configuration of power was constitutive of the language of both British colonialists and their Indian collaborators-either direct or indirect. The constitutive role of colonial thought in this discourse was so powerful that some scholars have argued that this thought retains an essential, if not residual, 'derivative' voice where the categories of the struggle are largely determined by colonial forms of knowledge. Second, there was a distinct language of confrontation, which I have called 'desi', deriving its strength from its access to Sanskrit language and hegemonic Hindu culture. This thought exerted a powerful force on the anti-colonial struggle, drawing strongly on its ancient traditions and native history. Voices that were pitched against the colonial configuration were largely of these two kinds of language, and were represented by the Congress and other parties that used various amalgams of the two languages to articulate their concerns for freedom from the colonial state. Thus, the Congressman Nehru was speaking one kind of language while Savarkar from the Hindu Mahasabha was speaking another kind to mobilise against the colonialist. It is my opinion that there is a third language, 'beyond' the derivative and desi, that articulated a set of problems beyond the margins of political freedom, i.e., expressing the desire for social and cultural freedom from both colonial and local oppression. These voices emerged from and often remained confined to the outer boundary-untouchable, marginalised and discriminated against. Sometimes, as with Babasaheb Ambedkar, the experience of exclusion coupled with fortunate circumstances and Western education allowed this voice to cross the margin and speak out in mainstream society, providing a rare and disturbing glimpse of the pain and distress of the oppressed. There is another important distinction to be made with respect to language in relation to this configuration of colonial rule and

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nationalist struggle. One, there was a cognitively effective kind of language demarcating clear categories, setting up oppositions and marking differences. This kind 0f language was used in several contradictory registers. Most importantly, colonialism used a form of clear categorical language to establish its forms of knowledge. In opposition to this colonial discourse, sharply categorical language that was cognitively effective was also used by the nationalists to demarcate a clear political boundary with respect to the British. Within the local configuration of power, constituted by capitalism (shetji) and brahmanism (bhatji), the elite deployed the deep cognitive language of caste, primarily in order to demobilise the dalit and shudra masses who were already reeling under the ideological spell of these twin systems of domination (colonial and local). It is undoubtedly true that this polarising language was an aspect of the traditional language of confrontation with the British. Finally, sharp categorical language was also used by the discourse of the 'beyond', i.e., in the writings of Jyotirao Phule, B. R. Ambedkar and E. V. R. Periyar among others who try to constitute a political community among the oppressed. This fourth use of categorical language was invariably marked by anger against the hostility and exclusion faced by the oppressed castes in the social spaces dominated by the elite. It is interesting that the language of nationalism, in some of its important strands, had in it a non-cognitive character-rather than draw exclusive boundaries, it sought to minimise difference, emphasise community and sought to inculcate novel inclusive practices. I would argue that, within the colonial configuration of power, rather than the cognitive (categorically unequivocal) language as used by the socialist, communist, dalit, and right wing parties, it was the non-cognitive (soft, non-controversial, equivocal) language used by Gandhi and his followers that was most effective for anti-British mobilisation on the subcontinent. Seva as a noncognitive category was handled by Gandhi so effectively that this language continued to remain relevant even in the post-independent period. In Gandhian thought, the moralising language of 'seva', care, harijan welfare, and trusteeship seeks to dissolve the contradiction between castes and eliminate the possibility of polarisation and oppositional imagination. It is driven by an element of appeal rather than assertion. Moral appeal finds its basis in the language of duty, whereas assertion is driven by the language of rights.

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Seva as a non-cogmt1ve moral category also possesses a discursive character. That is to say, it is available to various social forces with different connotations and is used for intersecting purposes. For example, it makes a 'guest appearance' in Hindu political thought. It acquires a thick presence in Gandhian thought and is available to the native capitalist as well. It is taken seriously by the Christian missionaries who have been active in India for a long time now. In fact, as Srivatsan argues, the concept of seva genealogically belongs to Christian religious discourse and has been subsequently borrowed by the new Hindu discourse. It was Gandhi, foremost among all Hindus, who offered a rather substantive treatment to the category of seva. The dalit was constructed as 'harijan' to invoke a sense of seva among the orthodox Hindus. Seva thus connotes a kind of passive revolution, which becomes feasible because it facilitates the reconstruction of Hindu ethics while preserving caste Hindu dominance. Some other Hindus (especially those of the sanatanist persuasion) had only a rhetorical association with the category of seva. The native capitalist also supported seva as a hegemonic device to pacify the dalit masses. It was for this reason that the capitalists donated generously to Gandhi's Harijan Sevak Sangh. The book demonstrates that this pacificatory dimension in the history of seva is also evident in the way in which both voluntary activists and government servants have approached and provided service to the tribals who become passive recipients of seva. At the level of political theory, Srivatsan's contribution warrants special acknowledgement. The book harks to a political vocabulary that was present in Gandhi's writing and was pervasive in the literature of political science in the 1970s and 1980s, but that was later given up by social science discourse. This older 'ethical' language was replaced by a more instrumental vocabulary consisting of terms such as 'stakeholder', 'partner', 'good governance', etc., after the 1990s. The book revisits the older normative vocabulary with a critical voice; by doing so it problematises that vocabulary, and gives it a new normative charge. For example, the term 'seva' takes on a new and rich analytical significance, as does the term 'development', both these going beyond the original prescriptive sense in which they were used. The book provides a theoretical, philosophical and historically alert basis for understanding the entity called the State in India.

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As it talks of the State, the vocabulary in the book has the power

to appeal to the human strengths of civil society rather than to the State itself. Through its intervention, I believe that the book sends us a very important reminder that the State, in the course of its career from the national State at Independence to the current neoliberal State it has become, has steadily appropriated the normative vocabulary of the freedom struggle, emptying it of essence. Srivatsan's essays in this volume provide fresh insights in many domains of colonial rule and the freedom struggle. It examines Gandhi's harijan politics, tribal welfare, national development, and the conditions for the growth of capitalism as they are displayed through the prism of seva.

Gopal Guru New Delhi August 2013

Acknowledgements The conversion of a doctoral thesis (2006) to a book (2014) is a difficult task, since the effort to ground formulations theoretically is demanding. It has been a hard, yet exhilarating path from the one to the other, and as such has drawn insights, support, sustenance, contributions, and plain acceptance. These inputs are important since I wrote the thesis late, and converted it into a book even later, and therefore needed to ensure that what I produced in a sizeable chunk of my remaining working life would be valuable. Perfunctory acknowledgements would lack the necessary grace. I start with thanking Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies for the opportunity, space and time it gave me to work on the thesis/book from the period 2004-2013. The many different kinds of detailed and broad feedback I received were invaluable. I would like to express my gratitude to the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS) part-time PhD programme, affiliated to the B. R. Ambedkar Open University, that welcomed me when the regular universities were reluctant. Specifically, I am grateful to K. Venkataiah for advice on how to proceed with the official aspects. I am also grateful to Vijay Kumar and Sudhakar for the help in the CESS library. I thank two mentors/stage guides: N. Subba Reddy, for his insistence on the importance of fieldwork as the basis for theory. The research is richer for his inputs. I am extremely grateful to my final, 'official' guide, Rama Melkote for the near-complete academic freedom she gave me in my choice of approach, style and topic, while at the same time, making valuable comments based on a fine, but prompt, reading of the chapters. I cherish her friendship and guidance in this endeavour. My unofficial guides were K. Sivaramakrishna and Tata Rao. I entered Koya and Kondareddi politics through Sivaramakrishna and his organisation Sakti in Rampachodavaram. Tata Rao, my guide and mediator in Bhadrachalam and Suravaram, was an important teacher on the problems faced by the tribals in the region. He took me to several places on his motorcycle, 50-60 kilometres away at times, sharing

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an unfulfilled dream of imbibing under a toddy tree, a meal and an interview. I am grateful to V. N. V. K. Sastry for putting me in touch with Tata Rao. In addition, Sastry's report on the Muthadari system has been an invaluable input to the chapter on 'Swami Balananda'. I thank Gita Ramaswamy for helping me meet needed officials in order to work in what was unofficially a disturbed area due to Marxist-Leninist activity; also for her introduction to Sivaramakrishna. I am grateful to my interviewees, who were actually teachersBadisa Muthaiah, Chinna Rao, Govindu Reddy; Kamam Ram Babu, Kondareddi Ram Babu, all of who taught me how to think the political every day. I would like to thank Kodandram Reddy and Kancha Ilaiah for a vigorous discussion over lunch hosted by Rama Melkote at the Blue Fox restaurant in Himayatnagar. My uncle, K. Seshadri, one-time professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University; urged me on as I wrote, while grumbling about my lack of sense regarding a change of profession so late in life. The words that often ring in my ears after he passed away on 19 January 2006 are: 'When are you going to write your conclusion?' I remember him with gratitude and affection, dedicating this memorial moment to his presence in this work. Veena Shatrugna listened to my arguments, provided me with an understanding of nutritional anthropometry (and much else), read one of my thesis chapters 'Native Noses ... ', and vetted my arguments from her perspective. My thinking has been enriched by her collaboration and friendship. Discussions with K. Satyanarayana strengthened my argument and provided me valuable insight into the question of caste oppression. Working with K. Lalita and Rama Melkote as part of the development initiative in Anveshi and listening to the discussions and lectures organised about ground-level governmental practices has buttressed my understanding of development. I am grateful to Lalita for the added dimension her presence and interaction has provided to my work. As I reworked the thesis, I had to write a new introduction that provided organisation and held the chapters together. I am grateful to Dipesh Chakrabarty with whom an extended e-mail conversation was extremely useful. I thank Susie Tham, Madhava

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Prasad and Janaki Nair for having read the introduction carefully and providing many critical inputs which, to the extent that I have been able to incorporate them, have led to an academically sound yet politically useful chapter. I also had to completely overhaul the first chapter I wrote in the thesis 'Native Noses and Nationalist Zoos', now more sedately titled 'Changes in Tribal Anthropology between Colonial Rule and the Development State', to tame its wild profusion of ideas. Comments and critical discussion of the chapter's shape and structure with Chris Chekuri have been a highly valued interaction. The parallel effort to edit a Development Reader at Anveshi, where I work as a fellow, has been foundational. Research Committee feedback, criticisms, warmth, and love have been important. I owe gratitude to A. Suneetha and N. Vasudha for reading my chapters unfailingly and stressing their usefulness. I would like to thank Deeptha Achar for providing me with an opportunity to do a preliminary presentation of material connected to the Epilogue in the Art and Activism Seminar, Baroda, 2004. The essays have since appeared in other journals and books acknowledged in the body of these chapters. Simultaneous work with a group of doctors and social scientists to produce an edited volume of new essays by Anand Zachariah, R. Srivatsan and Susie Tham, Towards a Critical Medical Practice: Reflections on the Dilemmas of Medical Culture Today, during the period 2005-2011 was an extremely useful enterprise of massive intellectual scope, which provided added insights to my thinking through the questions in this book. My gratitude to my collaborators: Anand Zachariah, Sara Bhattacharji, Susie Tham, 'Chinu' Srinivasan, K. S. Jacob, Veena Shatrugna, Lakshmi Kutty, Jacob Tham, Jayasree Kalathil, Sheela Prasad, Vasanta Duggirala. I would like to thank Gopal Guru, who first read this thesis and found something of value in it. I therefore requested him to write a Foreword to this volume, which places my work in a broader context of language, culture and ideology. I am -grateful to the team at Routledge India for their enthusiasm as well as their assistance and patience in bringing out this volume. I thank Routledge's commissioned peer reviewer who through her detailed and meticulous comments gave me the necessary inputs to strengthen and sharpen my formulations. I am convinced due to her challenges that the perspective I have

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adopted is an effective and useful one in taking the debate on seva forward. Finally, these years with Vasanta have been eventful and productive. Some of what has happened cannot be written about, but has shaped the project by shaping me. I would like to thank Vasanta for her companionship, for being an academic role model, and for her unobtrusive support over these 11 years from thesis concept to book publication.

Introduction The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over and so we have to labour and to work and work hard to give reality to our dreams. - Jawaharlal Nehru's Speech to the Constituent Assembly, 15 August 1947 (Publications Division 1958: 25-26).

I During the 1990 riots in Hyderabad, my friends and I were going around in a truck in the old city area distributing rice to the poor who had been hit by an unremitting curfew for over three weeks. That was the time when the Confederation of Voluntary Associations (COVA) was constituted as a response to the communal crisis with the aim of working comprehensively on the problems of life in the old city. 1 I remember speaking to my neighbour in the better-off part of town where I lived, a really warm and wonderful Marwari woman, telling her about what we were doing. Aap service kar rahe hain kya? ('Are you performing service?'), she responded. I hesitated, 'Ye-es', and she immediately said, Hum aap ko ek basta chawal denge, yadi aap Hindu aur Musalmaan dona ko baantenge ('I will give you a bag of rice if you promise to distribute it to both Hindus and Muslims'). I was a little puzzled but no doubt happy about the term and the conversation-little did I know then that service had a venerable history of repairing the social, indeed national fabric! In immediate terms, the significance of her question was, 'are you voluntarily serving the poor?' The meaning of

2 Cr Seva, Saviour and State

the term service emerges as ministering to, taking care of, looking to the wellbeing of, ameliorating the misery of someone who needs it. In my neighbour's question there was an explicit warmth, respect and endorsement directed towards my quest to serve the unfortunate. It was indeed easy to bask in the glow of that admiration that seemed to emerge only too readily in response to my description of what I was doing. Hidden from our common view was, perhaps, the awkward and gratuitous question: why did I actually choose to do what I did? Was it because of an innate sympathy for a fellow being's misery? Or was there more to it? The term 'service', historically speaking, has an alias, seva which recurred in different contexts in the period 1900-1950 during the freedom movement; more precisely, however, seva is conceptually equivalent to charitable service. While seva is used in regional language discourses, and in names of organisations started for the purpose, in English the term often used is 'service' (without the adjective 'charitable'). This abbreviation of 'charitable service' to 'service' permits many conflations of the meaning of the term, as may be observed throughout this book: to serve charitably is to minister; to serve is also to become a public servant, or officer, or even a minister for that matter; rather than sort out these meanings, my strategy has been to preserve the fuzziness of the relationship under the concept of seva to retain a sense of its mobility and polymorphism. To facilitate retaining this 'fuzziness' without losing clarity, I will be using the term seva at two levelsone, as a precise usage in the discourse of the period, and two, as a meta-concept in my analysis that holds together clusters of terms describing identical or related activity-for example I have already indicated that I will use 'seva' and 'service' interchangeably. I will try and signal which of the two usages I intend if it is not clear in the context. For complex reasons related to perspective and focus, the practice covered by the term seva (and its cognate 'service') has a minor significance in the writings of the freedom movement, as an aspect of the practice of social reform. This book is an attempt to review and re-evaluate the significance of the term, and thus portray some aspects of the freedom struggle in a new way. My agenda in this book is a political analysis of the concept and practice of seva examined at different intersections at two formal levels: first, at the disciplinary level between political theory,

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history and anthropology; and second, at the level of method between archival work and field interviews. It is also situated at the meeting point of three domains of content (a) Harijan seva and depressed classes politics; (b) colonial and nationalist tribal anthropology and welfare; and (c) civil society and state. In mapping these crossroads through a study of seva, I would like to approach something like a genealogy of our national ethic.

II

Seva as a Political Instrument One who receives seva from another is implicitly bound by a code of conduct best described by the English adage: 'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth'. This implies that since seva is an act of charity where a benefactor does the good deed for a beneficiary, it may not be questioned. There is a moral-economic content to the act that is complete: 'What you need, I have chosen to give'. However, my argument is that there is not only a moral-economic dimension to the act-there is a political one as well, which needs to be examined. This is not an entirely original argument, but it is possible to draw important consequences from it, as the following pages will show. A study of the usage and context of the term 'seva' in the discourse of the first half of the twentieth century makes it clear that seva was a political instrument that evolved to develop many different dimensions, uses and legacies. I will list these here, leaving the elaboration and argument for such a characterisation to the rest of the introduction and the book as a whole: (a) Seva was a principle of nationalist commitment to social reform. It was reform in relation to both the status of women (an area this book will not address), and the depressed classes and tribes (which will be the central theme of the chapters). In important ways this latter aspect of seva was a response to the colonial criticism that Indian society was riven by caste, and therefore Indians could not think beyond their corporate caste group. For this reason, the criticism concluded that they had no ability to think of themselves as a nation, which was in turn the justification

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for British rule. From its early stages in its modern avatar, seva was about caring for the other, one who did not form part of one's caste group, as an expression of commitment to and competence in becoming a nation. (b) Soon, this led to seva becoming an implicit principle of criticism of colonial rule. In an inversion of the original charge, the nationalists argued that the colonial rulers could not actually attend to the welfare of the natives because they were an alien race, unable to feel for the native as one of their own. The organic culture of the nationalist enabled him to perform seva and thus take care of his own native brothers and sisters. Indeed, the nationalists conceded that the practice of seva existed more in its lapse, but reviving and reformillg Hinduism was eminently possible through the practice of seva. Gandhi argued that if service and constructive action took root as a social-indeed religious-reparatory duty, colonial government-more so, government as such-would become unnecessary. (c) Seva was also the source of an aesthetic principle-of a stance towards society where the sevak's (the person doing seva) performance was a demonstration of commitment, a deep piety in action, life and attitude. There was always a current of asceticism that ran through seva in any variant: whether it was Gokhale's Servants of India Society (founded in 1905), Gandhi's Harijan Sevak Sangh (founded in 1932) or Ambedkar's criticism of the latter. There is no doubt that Satyagraha too had an aes!:hetic dimension to its performance that signalled non-violent, yet impenetrable resistance that was utterly under control. This aesthetic characterised action as non-spontaneous and committed in the long run. The aesthetics of activism we see in the twenty-first century have important elements that come from these genealogies. (d) Finally, I will argue in this book that seva was one of the implicit governmental principles of the policy orientation of the national state in India. That the service of the nation and its poor was never far from the considerations of the members of the Constituent Assembly is clear from Nehru's address to it on 15 August 1947 (see epigraph at the beginning of the chapter). Seva differentiated the

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self-characterisation of the national state from the colonial state it replaced. Given its history of a mass struggle for freedom from colonial rule, the state in free India needed a demonstrable orientation to the people that was clearly marked apart from the colonial one. How would it do so, given its colonial inheritance of the 'steel frame' bureaucracy with its structural orientation to revenue collection? The commitment that the state machinery would undertake to develop the people gave the bureaucracy its 'national development' character. In that historical moment, the term 'development' had a specific connotation in international relations after World War II (Srivatsan 2012: 23-30). The world powers, i.e., the USA and the USSR primarily, evolved different promises to help decolonised third-world nations develop and become technologically, economically and socially like their advanced counterparts. Development in this context had a dual focus: one on the agenda of economic growth, and the second on that of the welfare of the people. India was one of the first decolonised nations to have such a 'development state' with a specific governmental rationality. It is my argument that the principle of seva gives the national commitment to develop its orientation and rationality biased towards growth by placing all welfare measures in the chapter 'Directive Principles of State Policy' that does not permit legal redress. 2 The meaning of this is that while the state 'endeavours' to do 'its duty' to the extent possible, it is ultimately not open to challenge in the court of law in the name of a right. That is, welfare remains an act of charity that is not accountable to the beneficiary, or in other words, welfare in India is an expression of seva in my metalanguage, even though the term does not appear in the Indian Constitution. As seva developed to form the political instrument I have briefly described earlier, it intervened in several different debates and practices of the historical period under consideration. First, from its early days, it shaped the character of voluntary activism (alongside other principles such as Satyagraha). Seva was peaceful, non-confrontationist, opinion-moulding, and an institution-building activity. It advertised itself as such, and performed its actions in an appropriate manner. Seva was seen as

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constructive action in the deepest sense of building civil society and its values to a standard of ethics and care. This action was intended to be exemplary, and because of this character it was always a performance from the earliest stages of its emergence. This dimension of exemplary concern for the fellow human being (of the nation) is a legacy of seva we witness today in the various forms of activism. Voluntary activism indeed had a spectrum of characteristics across the board, including in many cases an opposition to the State with regard to the latter's encroachment into the public domain. However, the focus of this study is on the collaboration and correlation between State and voluntary activism in the Indian context. Second, the political valency of seva matured in the context of the rise of the Indian National Congress. Alongside its explicit criticism of colonial rule, it became an instrument against untouchable politics led by B. R. Ambedkar, displacing the latter to the limited expression of sectoral, rather than national interest. The Harijan Sevak Sangh (HSS) was the premier institution that gave it a specific character in relation to the untouchable. The HSS assumed a caste-Hindu form and performed ameliorative service to the untouchable with the aim to reconstruct the ethical norm of a caste-Hindu society. It envisaged the untouchable as a passive recipient of an action that represented concern for social wellbeing. It thus located the untouchable outside the process of the constructive work of nation-building, marking him as marginal. The best critical analysis of this action remains B. R. Ambedkar's book, What Congress and Gandhi did to the Untouchables (Moon 1990, vol. 9). In two of the chapters in this volume (the following one and the Epilogue), I approach the historic event where this displacement and marginalisation expresses itself symptomatically. The reader may ask the question, is the HSS affair not peripheral to the freedom movement, and am I not making too much of a minor episode? Well, my reading is more in the nature of a probe, trying to explore the dimensions of hegemony and marginalisation in Indian politics. In addition, I am convinced that it is through 'minor' skirmishes like this that the major theme establishes itself as such, and examining these processes of marginalisation is central to the understanding of hegemonic politics. Third, seva always had an eye turned towards the administrative category of (aboriginal, primitive) tribes. 3 From the early 1920s

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onward, there have been seva organisations specifically focused on this category (Gond Seva Mandal, Bhil Seva Mandal, Bharatiya Adimjaati Sevak Sangh, Poverty Relief Service, etc.). These organisations often moved into hitherto 'dangerous', 'violent' and 'politically unstable' agency territories with an agenda of tribal uplift. Shadowing these agendas that assimilate the aboriginal tribes to the mainstream, and doubling them from a developmental perspective were those administrative programmes of settlement of tribes. These government programmes were designed to release large tracts of land for industrial development. The third chapter in this volume describes one particular historical enactment of a twopronged agenda in the 10-year plan for the aboriginal tribes of the Godavari uplands. While tribal administration and its commitment to welfare followed a specific pattern of generosity that was not accountable to the tribes, it was also an expression and model for the administration of welfare of general populations. That is, as stated earlier, governmental welfare was an expression of national intention and goodwill that was untrammelled by any conception of right. In order that the reader understands the perspective from which I am making these assertions and their significance, it is necessary for me to provide a map of the discourse on seva in contemporary political theory and historiography, and show how I am positioning my argument. The next two sections are devoted to this task.

III Seva in Contemporary Historiography and Political Theory4 In this section I will try to provide the background of the debates in historiography and political theory, both in the direct usages of the term seva, and at the same time in the theoretical implications of these usages in the broader explanatory frameworks. The strands of debate I have chosen to map my position are those between the Cambridge India specialists (henceforth Cambridge) and the Subaltern Studies historians (henceforth SS). 5 I will try to show how my argument takes a specific position outside the explanatory

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field laid out in this engagement. Broadly speaking, the SS charge the explanatory paradigm of Cambridge with the following flaws: (a) The Cambridge account played down the force of colonial penetration and its destructive effects on the Indian political economy, so that in this account modernity on the whole was a worldwide process, and when the British came the propertied and elite Indian classes simply allied with them for greater gain (Chatterjee 1993: 27-34). Such a theory masked the ravaging impact of colonialism on India and on the non-Western world in general. (b) The Cambridge account overvalued the role of Englishlearned theories, attitudes and practices in the constitution of the nationalist spirit, so that any revolutionary action by the native was simply a lesson learned eagerly by the nationalist elite from the British masters, i.e., the nationalist consciousness was a 'derivative one' (Chakrabarty 2000b: 12). As it levels these charges against Cambridge, the SS perspective distinguishes itself by asserting the following: (a) A focus on those aspects of the freedom movement that demonstrate the more or less extensive autonomy of the subaltern struggle, and showing at the same time that this struggle was far more complex and polyvocal than represented by elite nationalist historians (Guha 1982: 1-7). (b) A focus on the destructive dimension of the colonial encounter, keeping in view this dimension in the historiographic project (Chatterjee 1993). In addition, SS also very importantly distinguishes itself from the orthodox Marxist grand narrative of progress in which colonialism, and the twists and turns of the history of national struggle, in some way reflect stages of progress towards a final goal of some form of democracy, equality and happiness (Chakrabarty 2000b: 1524). The SS argue that the outcome of each struggle is open, and cannot be reduced to an instance of a stage in the development of an organic consciousness-for-itself. What happens in each case needs to be recorded accurately without the anodyne of a narrative that says 'all's going to be well, so this episode too ends well in the broad scheme of things'.

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I start with an examination of the themes of seva in the works of Cambridge historians Christopher Bayly and Carey Watt, and then examine Gwilym Beckerlegge's study on Vivekananda and the history of service in the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. I will look at Asok Sen's brief description of 'constructive work' in an early text and go on to examine Partha Chatterjee's position on freedom struggle, constructive work and the gramsevak. Finally I will examine Ajay Skaria's attempt to firm up the Gandhian notion of seva with philosophical rigour. Needless to say, none of these readings are about current positions held by these authors, unless otherwise specified. They are about positions in the debate that have some significance in locating my own argument. Christopher Bayly mentions the term 'sewa' once in his chapter on merchants and their businesses in the eighteenth century (1992: 388). Vallabhacharya, the twelfth-centuryVaishnava saint, prescribed 'sewa' as an act of devotion and surrender to the Lord, as opposed to the traditional practices of fasting and asceticism. This notion of 'sewa' slowly transformed itself into acts of charitable service to Brahmans, and to one's guru as an element of morality and economy in Vaishya life. 'Sewa' was part of an ambiguous set of eighteenth-century cultural practices, which had to be judiciously managed to ensure that it was not seen as a mark of excessive ostentation. This fine balance in moral-economic conduct was required to ensure that the merchant found success along the dimensions of both caste purity and mercantile gain. Thus 'sewa' was an aspect of a culturally conservative economy of the merchant community-it was something that worked within the boundaries of the Vaishya caste. Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, as the name suggests is a rigorous history of the development of urban society, economy and culture. It is doubtless a magisterial classic that describes the intricate detail and weave of urban social processes in pre-British India, and of how the arrival of colonialism forced complex changes of both positive (politically useful, and sometimes implicitly progressive) and negative (oppressive) valences in its wake. In this narrative of the complex transactions between colonial rulers and regional elite, 'sewa' is a marginal, native and implicitly pre-modern category of practice that has a caste-conservative character in the eighteenth century. Some notes on Bayly's perspective and method follow the account of Carey Watt's work.

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Watt's is a book-length study (2005) of the evolution of service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the precursors Bayly touches upon. Watt's meticulous scholarship traces the different strands of seva that arise in Indian history. It weaves together the various roots of seva in Indian traditional practice and its significance, on the one hand, and in the ideas brought by colonialism on the other (the idea of public service, the boy scouts organisation, etc.; ibid.: 28-52). It also skilfully and perceptively incorporates a description of the norm for masculinity that is embroidered in the idea of service. Watt argues that he emphatically is not using any notions of diffusion of Western influences in order to explain 'progress'-indeed he argues that progress is not the issue at all. However, his usage of terms such as voluntary work, citizenship, the public sphere, and associational culture is marked by an inadequate reflection on their provenance in the normative frameworks of Western theories of civil society, and the consequences of this normativity for any descriptive enterprise. In other words, terms such as 'associational culture' are cryptic codes (perhaps unintended, but certainly present) for the evaluation of the culture of public association, seen as characteristic of European (and quasi-European) societies, at any historical juncture in the non-Western society under study. That is, while the associational culture is not necessarily theorised as being of Western origin, it certainly is a marker of a universal form of progress that may occur multi-nodally. My problem with this is not that there is a diffusion of the Western model-I would perhaps use the idiom of selective and eclectic borrowing, cannibalisation instead-it is rather, as I will elaborate, the implicit belief in the stage of unambiguous historical progress that is represented by this diffusion, borrowing, influence, or even originary beginning. In many ways, however, Watt's argument follows Bayly's historiographic method of faithfully describing the multi-nodal growth of modernity and capitalism, ensuring that it is not the story of the 'West and the rest'. 6 And yet Bayly, in his recent contribution to the debate on the new emphasis on writing World History, endorses with great subtlety the formal progressiveness and ultimate beneficence of the modern epoch. This he does through a critique of Eurocentric universalism in the name of global history, peppered with terms such as 'superior technology' and 'great divergence (of European history)'. As he does so, he asserts that the

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all too necessary focus on the polycentric nature of changes relating to modernisation does not imply that 'the early and dynamic growth of a particular style of European political economy can be downplayed' (Bayly 2012: 8). What is important here, as I have already said, is not that the West was ahead of the rest but that there is a common notion shared between the historians of the West and those of the rest: that it is possible to decide on what being 'ahead' means in unequivocal, 'universal' terms. In another register, context for both these historians, rather than being a problem to be solved by historiography, is what the documents attest to as the truth about everyday practice.7 Archival sources are treated as texts that were almost solely generated for the purpose of the historian, and in principle there is no attempt to examine the archival document as an artefact that was once part of a power play in the period it is from (even though such exemplary historians as Bayly are classically trained and highly skilled in examining the veracity and authenticity of archival sources). In other words, there is no scope for examination of the valency and active role of the fragment of discourse that remains as the only significant record of the passed event, its forces, forms and motivations. In contrast to this perspective, my understanding of seva as an index of modernity in India is ambiguous, as is, I would argue, any element of modernity anywhere. While there are good things that happen, there is always the serious possibility of evils, oppressions, hecatombs, and genocides, the risks of which need to be assessed in the power structures that emerge. This multidimensional risk is perhaps woven into the texture of modern politics and economy. There is, on the one hand, the near-universal adoption of a utilitarian economics of what may be called 'the greatest good of the future of the people-nation' by the postcolonial nation-states of the world. On the other hand, there is a liberalism that is geared to this economics in the world today. In such a situation, there cannot but be large populations and political minorities (and the two are not mutually exclusive) that are at serious risk of pain and suffering in any social formation. Add to this, the scramble for political power that accompanies decolonisation and the clashing interests between the groups who want to form governments to run the nation-state and those destined to be ruled. It seems inevitable that any mapping of the growth of institutions and practices such

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as seva that belong to a history of 'the day before yesterday' would have to be critically evaluative. It is also inevitable that documents that provide the historian's archival access to these processes and formative discourses around new institutions are primarily expressions of interest, political force and strategy in that moment under study, and must be read as such. Gwilym Beckerlegge's book-length study (2006) of Vivekananda's concept of seva and the practice of the Ramakrishna Ashram attempts to probe the roots of the ashram's contemporary practice in the writings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. 8 Its major preoccupation is to sympathetically examine (with a view to the sensibility of current insiders to the ashram and their practices) the debate on whether Ramakrishna or Vivekananda was the originator of seva in this organisation (ibid.: 12-14). There are two viewsone, seva originated in Ramakrishna's thought, and the other, it was Vivekananda who actually brought in the concept of seva and its practice into the ashram's thinking and work. Beckerlegge proposes that the criticism of Ramakrishna's lack of interest in seva needs to be nuanced considerably, given his saintly status among believers. Ramakrishna's life provides examples where such a nuanced reading is inescapable, with his warning against the earthly delights (maya) of seva on one hand, and promoting love directed outwards (daya) and ultimately towards god on the other (ibid.: 121-26). The author argues that undoubtedly there is a founding role for Ramakrishna in the direction of seva. At the same time, Beckerlegge states that, with Vivekananda, the focus on seva is clear and explicit, especially in his speeches and writings in America. He suggests that this was perhaps inevitable given his exposure to life and possibilities in the country. As Beckerlegge's focus is on the contemporary function of the organisation, he is careful to warn the reader that the term 'service' and the word 'seva' are neither used frequently in Ramakrishna's own writing nor in an unqualified manner in Vivekananda (who used the term 'jiva seva' to differentiate his work from that of his followers), and seems to have become popular in the Ashram writings after 1940 (ibid.: 53-58). On the other hand, the term sevashrama is used to describe some of the math's early centres (ibid.). Thus Beckerlegge's work is committed to, i.e., sensitive to, the effects of Vivekananda's writing on the living inheritors of his tradition and hence his writing has currency in the contemporary Indian debate. The point here is

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of course that the inheritors of the debate are actually engaged in several other debates and are thus pulled into the powerful force field of revivalist agendas in Indian political contexts. Beckerlegge's weak reference to these contexts aligns his work in a way that causes no disturbance to the established religious institutions in India, and shows an unwillingness to examine the implications of their positions. Asok Sen's perspectival review 'Subaltern Studies: Capital, Class and Community' (Guha 1987: 203-35) clearly marks the theoretical location of SS's work in relation to the orthodox left and nationalist historiographies. Sen's argument in this essay explains the tum towards Gramsci that has marked a line of SS scholarship typified in Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1986, more on this text later). Sen proposes that the SS perspective is characterised by its explanation of the 'failed transition' to bourgeois capitalism in the national movement. 9 The failure occurs because the nationalist elite cannot succeed in mobilising the masses into a battle that expels colonialism, and also does not succeed in providing the ethico-political leadership to make the transition to a full capitalist economy. In this historical context, elite politics is marked by partial agitations against and returns to collaboration with the British, while subaltern insurgency expressed the unacceptability of both colonial and traditional forms of oppression. Within this broad process, Sen proposes that Gandhi was a powerful and ambiguous figure who had the potential to mobilise the masses into destroying the structure of alien domination in toto. His appeal could not be limited to being the mascot of Indian bourgeoisie. Gandhi appealed to the fundamental category of community as a consciousness-for-itself. Indeed, Sen continues, for a country technically disarmed and militarily inferior nonviolence had significance as a form of protest. The ethical dimension, the training of a new kind of person through constructive work, along with its educative and cultural influence, could have become the experience of a people's war ... But this process required a full assimilation of the forces of protest throughout the nation. This is where Gandhi's ethic failed to be ethico-political in the fulfillment of mass non-cooperation or civil disobedience (quoted in Guha 1987: 219, italics mine).

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In chapter 1, in this volume, I have argued in some detail that the phrase 'constructive work' is another name for seva, i.e., though they are used in different discursive locations, they come under the meta-concept of seva. Sen's argument is that constructive work (or seva) had the educative force to train the elite into a communitarian ethos that transcended an acquisitive pre-capitalist society, and thus make them capable of leading the revolution to a progressive, full-blown capitalism. It, however, failed to do so because of Gandhi's constant elision of people's expectations of a mass struggle. That is, Sen's model is one of transition to a normative form of capitalism, in spite of the fact that his concept of social progress does not follow chronological stages. The proposition that Gandhi failed to unite people under his ethico-political leadership facilitating a people's war, presumes a historical ideal type of leader who would succeed in doing so. It also suggests a belief that the transition to capitalism in the fully normative inclusive form was a possible model against which the actual transition failed. In hindsight, a judgement of Gandhi's failure to be an ideal leader forecloses an analytical discussion of the debates that occur between the proponents of Gandhian seva and their opponents. It also cannot explain how a 'failed transition' results in full-blown (yet specific) form of capitalism in 50 years. In his discussion of Gandhism as a moral method to bring about a new political order, Partha Chatterjee (1986) describes Gandhi's proposal of how a samagra gramsevak, or the ideal constructive worker, was expected to emerge within the village economy (ibid.: 122). As an example, Gandhi says, and Chatterjee quotes, the ghanchi or the person whose traditional caste occupation was to press oilseeds to get oil, would be no ordinary ghanchi, but a Mahatma ghanchi, one who would be versed in the Gita and Koran, and thus be one who can teach the children, and the community in general, how to live. The success of constructive work in providing ethical leadership in this autochthonous sense would result in nothing less than the withering away of government as an external (i.e., state) process. The constructive programme in Gandhi's perspective was an ideal pursuit, even though it would never actually be feasible because of entrenched opposition from the industrial classes. Unlike Sen, who sees a failure in Gandhi's leadership of the people, Chatterjee locates Gandhism in a stage he calls the 'moment of manoeuvre'-when nationalist thought finds

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diverse, incoherent, irrational, resources to draw the subordinate classes into the struggle unity while keeping them away from political power (Chatterjee 1986: 85-130). As such, with the moment of arrival that is signalled by Nehru's coming to power, the irrational, incoherent, contradictory means of assimilating peasant consciousness through Gandhism is swept away (ibid.: 154-57). The confidence of governmental reason as it accedes to the throne replaces the ideological confusion of nationalist manoeuvre as it struggles to achieve political power. In The Nation and its Fragments, published seven years later than Nationalist Thought, Chatterjee (1993) has a similar formulation with respect to modern industrialisation without explicitly invoking the conceptual apparatus of the moments of departure, manoeuvre or arrival. In 'The National State', which remains a pre-eminently influential essay on a theory of the Indian state today, Chatterjee describes how the National Planning Committee that met in 1938 jettisoned the 'archaic ideological baggage' of Swadeshi, and Khadi, as a result of which J. C. Kumarappa, the Gandhian member of the committee, resigned (ibid.: 200-202). Chatterjee subsequently argues that as the British leave India, one of the principles of legitimation of the national state would reside not in the early nineteenth-century liberal concept of 'freedom', but in the idea of 'welfare', which was the historical end product of the struggles around capitalism and democracy over the past one-anda-half centuries. This principle of welfare, in Chatterjee's implicit view, was directly and transparently accessible to the Nehruvian imagination at the moment of arrival, and is thence incorporated in the rationality of post-Independence government. This cluster of formulations leads to some difficulties from my perspective. First, given it may be true that Gandhism as the moment of manoeuvre was eclectic, irrational and incoherent in the instruments it evolved to achieve political power, were these instruments all seen by Nehruvian reason as irrational in the same way, for example, were satyagraha, seva, swadeshi, and the idea of swaraj all identically irrational? Why then does Nehru pick up the idea of swaraj as part of language of governmental reason that anticipates the moment of arrival (Chatterjee 1986: 151)? Also, as evident in the epigraph to this introduction, Nehru uses the term 'service' in his famous 'tryst with destiny' address to the Constituent Assembly, a term which was an integral part of Gandhi's discourse

16 l) Seva, Saviour and State

on 'manoeuvre' in the freedom movement. 10 Second, is it correct to argue that the fully formed, Western concept of welfare found a home on strange soil without any indigenous cultural practice that provided it ideological hospitality? Isn't it perhaps necessary that there was something in the Indian political culture that provided a hospitable ground (not necessarily 'progressive') to the concept of welfare when it arrived in Independent Indian political and administrative thought? Third, does the conscious act of jettisoning ideological baggage mean that there is no other link, except this intentional one between Nehru's new dynamism and Gandhi's traditionalism (it is clear from Chatterjee's chapters as a whole that he does not think so, but such a deduction is inevitable in this particular formulation of how welfare comes into Indian governmental rationality)? In other words, was Nehru simply an opportunistic user of Gandhi's leadership, or did being part of a cultural movement in which Gandhi was an important actor fundamentally shape his thought; if the latter, what was the range of Gandhi's effect on Nehru? Fourth, the idea of jettisoning ideological baggage, without accounting for the political culture within which Nehru finds his governmental reason, hides from view the process through which both Gandhi and Nehru achieve their status as representatives of the dominant culture in the Indian landscape, thus foreclosing important questions on what that dominant culture was like. Finally; colonialism's steel-frame bureaucracy was originally predominantly oriented as a revenue, law and order bureaucracy. This bureaucracy was adopted as is by the national state in 'the moment of arrival', as it was formed after Independence. How is the bureaucracy reoriented in principle towards a commitment to the welfare of the people? What is the genealogy of welfare in the Indian administrative thinking? In my perspective in this book, seva provided one important theoretical underpinning for the nationalist movement as a principle of ethical worth and political self-sufficiency. While Gandhi made seva an indirect instrument (because it was not a Congress venture) to throw in relief the universal representativeness of Congress nationalist politics, it preceded him in a strong current of social reform thinking. Seva in its later phase was also the principle by which a bureaucratic service would, in Nehru's language, become 'racy to our soil' (Nehru 1936: 432) .11 Thus, rather than being simply abandoned by governmental reason, seva is the precursor

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of governmental welfare in the preparatory environment of a political movement without governmental power. The principle of seva is subsumed by the governmental reason of developmental state, as a principle of its unaccountable charity. I will provide evidence for my hypothesis of subsumption of seva in Indian development thought and practice by a symptomatic reading of a quotation from Nehru in the next chapter, and through a more extensive case study of the relationship between a voluntary organisation Poverty Relief Service and a 10-year plan for tribal development in chapter 2, this volume. Ajay Skaria's 'Gandhi's Politics' (2002) is an attempt to conceptualise the latter's political philosophy. Skaria annotates Gandhi's criticism of the liberal concept of a secular civil society as a platform for political action that is constructed through the exclusion of religion. Because religion makes a person prone to irrational conduct and uncontrollable violence, and since it is the source of particular and exclusive convictions of a specific community, it is illegitimate in the public domain conceived as a universal space (ibid.: 971-72). Gandhi has argued against liberal thought: first, civil society as an aspect of Western modernity was the most violent form of life, and second, politics has to be fundamentally religious otherwise it would have no meaning. He proposes that religion is an individual's search for and access to 'absolute truth', which is nothing but God. For Gandhi, this absolute truth is not universal or objectively shared. Each person (or community) has his own personal absolute truth, which may differ from the other. What then is the principle of interaction between persons when their absolute truths differ in this way? Gandhi argues that the only principle of interaction in such a situation is ahimsa, normally translated as non-violence. Skaria proposes that a better way of translating ahimsa would be neighbourliness (ibid.: 974). Thus neighbourliness, as ahimsa, expresses itself as satyagraha, a non-violent political engagement with the other who rules you. It translates itself as mitrata or friendship with an equal, and as seva, the non-aggressive engagement with one who is not your equal-Le., the subaltern. In Skaria's view, Gandhi's proposal of ahimsa as a principle of interaction is an alternate to the secular politics of civil society. Skaria cites Gandhi as saying that even though such a politics is never going to be accepted by all, it has to be conducted on an ideal plane.

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My observations about this account are as follows. If ahimsa as mitrata is to be the conduct of all those who differ in their visions of absolute truth, including Hindus and Muslims, it is a principle that transcends specific religions, or arises as a common human principle beyond specific religions that people with their own absolute truths are advised to follow, in order to coexist. Thus, Gandhi, in a discussion of the support for the 'Mussalman' (Muslim) in the Khilafat movement, argues (and Skaria cites him) that he will not make his support conditional on saving the cow, which is sacred to Hinduism. And yet, the very act of extreme neighbourly commitment on Gandhi's part will make the Mussalman realise the farmer's sensitivity to the issue and therefore desist from killing the cow (Skaria 2002: 978-79). The principle of communitarian interaction in ahimsa is thus explicitly Hindu in its idiom. While this proposal is a gesture of friendship that recognises the immanence of its foundation in Hinduism and keeps the expectation of response open, it perhaps opens the road to a genuine alternative to secularism in its perspective. However, the expressed conviction that cooperation in Khilafat would result in the certain stoppage of cow slaughter, thus raising the Mussalman to the level of Hindu ahimsa, sullies the purity of Gandhi's gesture. Gandhi wants to reform his Muslim friend (according to Skaria's interpretation). Here, Skaria's Gandhian model of interaction, which has no shared objective absolute truth, leaves us with an intersubjective agreement of neighbourly love and toleration as a transcendental construct beyond the specific, personal, absolute religious truth-a perspective that in fine would privilege and make hegemonic a caste-Hindu participant. However, let this be a weak spot in Gandhi's thought in this specific example, and perhaps all attempts at friendship for better or for worse do indeed seek to reform the friend at some level-is the general principle viable as the basis of a political practice? The difficulty with the general principle is that there is no scope in the model of ahimsa for the possibility that one individual or community with one vision could be engaged in the oppression or exploitation of an individual or community that has another vision. Thus, on the one hand, when one propagates seva as a form of ahimsa with those beneath one's station, what is left out of view is the fact that inequality may be coupled with active oppression and exploitation that is sustained by history, culture and intention. This

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inequality may thus also be tied with a deeply ingrained bias that colours the perception of partisans of other 'absolute truths' (e.g., the distrust of Muslims among Hindus; the inability of upper-caste Hindus-as of Gandhi himself-to tolerate differences in relation to public food culture, such as restaurants that serve beet). Finally, and most importantly, the moral high road of extending a saving hand on the part of the superior disables in advance the possibility of a political negotiation from the position of the inferior; as argued throughout this Introduction, such an act of generosity is undergirded by an act of power. In Skaria's analytical elaboration of the Gandhian model of politics both the possibility of malevolent bias and the hazardous dimension of the political are bypassed with the precept that love provides the principle of orientation for all religions, and that ahimsa ought to be the principle guiding the engagement between partisans of different religions. This is much in the same way the civil societal model attempts, somewhat futilely, to generate a space for a politics that transcends violence. The problem here is not so much that Gandhi is a 'romantic idealist' as whether his ethical precept of ahimsa can form the theoretical basis of a practical political system in our specific historical context. My assertion here is that the historical context is the only ground for establishing the validity of philosophical principles and practising them in concrete political systems. In the national movement, Gandhi's pedagogic model is used to fulfil purposes not sanctioned by the principle itself; i.e., the ethical principle of sympathy that underlies seva is pulled into political circuits that provide the caste-Hindu stratum one of its bases for hegemony. A historical effect of this is that actually existing civil society in post-Independence India has shown a specific trend to function through the caste-Hindu idiom of satyagraha and seva (not so much mitrata, unfortunately). This unusual mode of functioning marks a path that is historically distinct 12 from secular groups explicitly expressing self-interest or common purpose along the lines of the 'classical' civil societal model. Arguing this point is the burden of the following section. This does not mean that I find the secular principle of Western civil societal politics acceptable and without any problems (indeed the problems of civil societal model and the public sphere are extremely well discussed in the literature, and Skaria's essay under discussion is only one example of this). In my assessment, Gandhi's experiments with truth and ahimsa, even

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as they have radical philosophical potential, can in their pristine form only remain in the ethical domain as precepts of personal conduct that may be ideals to teach people. When they form the theoretical basis of a political arrangement, they inevitably become aspects of a strategy of ethical and cultural hegemony. And yet, there is no doubt that practical, risk-laden inter-communitarian dialogue that is hinted at in Skaria's efforts is perhaps more likely to succeed than a theoretically sanctioned secular transcendence in generating consensus and moving beyond violence. My perspective on seva is not one that is predicated on Gandhi's philosophy. I examine seva as an interpenetration of discourse and practice, which starts before Gandhi and continues after him. Gandhi is a critical player in this discourse and practice, but not on an ideal ethical ground, nor on his own terms. He comes to life in my account in his interpellated, compromised location in the political struggles around the concept of seva. This is an effect of my method of reading a text in the configuration of other texts that surround it and give it meaning. Insofar as this dimension of seva goes, I have no use for an exceptionalist argument about Gandhi. I will argue in the following section that I also do not have use for a universalistic argument about seva. My account is one that examines the specific historical function of seva in the context of colonial rule, without presenting the concept of seva as a stage in progress towards modernity and the universal good.

IV

Perspectival and Methodological Principles of this Study of Seva Questions of progress, universality and civilisational maturity drive powerful undercurrents in Indian historiography; anthropology and political theory. They have dogged my attempts to establish my discussion of seva at a broader theoretical level over the last five years through an answer to the following questions: Does seva represent a stage of development that is marked by a voluntary activist-based, altruistic, and therefore advanced form of 'civil society' in India (advanced because civil society is usually theorised

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as a body that expresses limited corporate interests in the public domain)? Is it a product of colonial education, a particular local elaboration of the universal principles of charity and welfare? Is it a sign of civilisational maturity of the native? The movement, from the thesis that is the basis of this book, to the shape it is in now, is a provisional resolution of these fundamental theoretical questions. The first perspectival principle of my study of seva is a Foucauldian one: seva is not the expression of some universal objective principle of progress, which though flawed, is a step in the route to universal wellbeing in the long run. 13 In adopting this perspective, I am eschewing the Marxist dialectic of development through an ever-refined synthesis that leads to the ultimate state of global human wellbeing. There is simply no guarantee that a specific action, direction, sacrifice, or programme at any point in the present will result, with certainty and without cost, in the universal future good however attractive and likely it may seem today. This is because a history of the long term is the history of those who survive to tell the tale-those who do not are forgotten or are represented by the survivors. The future may well be good for those who survive and thrive in the process, but the concern of this book is the immediate and short-term consequences of seva rather than its ultimate beneficence. Thus, these essays are written with a commitment to specific political positions based on evaluations of contemporary relations of dominance, and have no guarantee of universal validity. As such, in relation to the question of modernity both from Marxist and liberal perspectives, these essays accept the obvious fact that capitalism is here to stay in the long haul; they also accept the importance of accounting for the economic dimension of the analysis of capitalism in its rigorous relation to the political dimension; nonetheless they reject the Marxist proposition that the economic base, in however complicated a manner, determines the political, cultural and social superstructure. The argument, following Michel Foucault, is that there is always a historically specific relationship between these 'superstructural' domains of politics, culture, society, and the economic 'base', and it is our task to map this relationship and its transformation. 14 The second perspectival principle that follows elaborates this argument. The second principle: the term 'civil society' as used (or implied) in different places in this book is not used here as an

22 I) Seva, Saviour and State

ideal that serves to measure how a Third World nation compares in its political development against the standard Western model. 15 It therefore does not celebrate the 'anti-state' activity of civil society as an unambiguous mark of progress. The term 'civil society' is used to describe a specific formation that arises when the historical forms of pre-capitalist community enter a process of transformation into the kind of market-driven configuration needed for capitalism to work. In other words, 'civil society' describes an active and living correlate of both capitalism and modern government. It defines the emerging urban configuration of people, practices and institutions-as a specific political culture-that ensures a way of life compatible with capitalism and the market. The native urban configuration of 'civil society' studied in this book is a historically evolving outcome of (a) the constraints and facilitations of colonial rule; (b) the form of capitalism that British mercantilism and industrialisation carried to various parts of the globe where they settled for extended periods and (c) the organic response of the community under transformation. I propose that seva is one of the elements that elaborates such an urban configuration and culture in colonial India. It is one political practice among several others that helps construct the concrete form of 'native civil society' in colonial India. How was civil society related to capitalism in India? The national movement complicates the answer to this question: we are speaking of the relationship between native civil society under colonialism and national capitalism in the independent nation-state. The 'underdevelopment' of national capitalism (i.e., the deficit in capital investment and the numerical weakness of Indian capitalists) at the turn of Independence, has been a matter of furious debate and agony for all strands of historiography and development economics. Now the national movement was conducted primarily in the native civil societal space (or public domain) of colonial India-it was in fact a vehicle for historical elaboration of civil society as we see it in postcolonial India. The strength of the national movement, and of the elite who successfully steered and concluded that movement, cannot be explained away as the superstructure of a weak national capitalist base, seen either in terms of economic strength or statistical number of capitalists. After all, G. D. Birla, one of the greatest capitalists of that era, and the first president of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, wrote only of

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walking in the shadow of the Mahatma, and not of the Mahatma as mascot. If, on the other hand, the nationalist elite did represent the superstructure on the economic base of colonial capital, it remains to be satisfactorily explained why the superstructural national movement had to work towards the demolition of the political form of colonialism that consolidated that economic base. The problem of understanding the national movement in relation to the post-Independence political economy is one of understanding the historical formation of the national capitalist class through the national movement. The major difficulty I encountered here was that there is a blurring of the borderlines between the analytical concept of capital, the ideal type of capitalist class and the historical form of bourgeoisie in Marxist literature. 16 Clearly delineating these different categories helps in understanding the emerging relationship between caste and class in the crucible of national transformation that helped forge the Indian political economy after Independence. My hypothesis is as follows: In India between 1900 and 1960, 'civil society', the way I use the term, describes the colonial formation of a native urban culture that precedes the full growth and extension of national capitalism as an economic driver. 17 It would be useful to think of this with the term bourgeois as Hegel used it to describe the evolution of the 'person' in civil society in Europe. 18 My argument is that the Indian bourgeoisie in this quasi-Hegelian sense of an urban civil society (under colonial rule) precedes and facilitates the peopling of national capitalist class. It is through the successful enculturation and nurture of individuals who would populate the capitalist class through a range of complex social processes and the intensification of these processes after Independence, that capital as we know it today becomes the dominant category in the economic framework of twenty-first-century India. This is also the genealogy of capitalist culture in India. However, or rather as a concomitant of this genealogy (whatever other the global processes may be), this construction of civil society is not a guarantee of full transition of Indian society to 'modernity', seen as a stage in the long march of progress. This book reads the discourse and practice of seva as a specific element in the elaboration of civil society according to this broad hypothesis. It is my argument that the historical path taken by seva contributes to the marginalisation of initiatives and groups that

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either threaten or contest the hegemonic rise of caste-Hindu elite during colonial rule. It is well known that these elite comprise the bulk of the nationalists in the domain of social reform and in the pre-Independence Congress party. The rise of caste-Hindu elite gives Indian post-Independence civil society its characteristic strategies; on the one hand, vigorous opposition to the colonial state that ruled them, and on the other: (a) wrestling with the socially inferior castes to ensure they did not access civil society in the same way as the elite did; (b) finding ways to imagine and institutionalise the new national state to come. I thus argue, on a more speculative terrain, that this principle of seva is one genealogical strand in the historical character of governmental rationality and the logic of the development state in India. In some ways thus, seva provides the conceptual primitive both for the self-definition of civil society, and for the logic of independent government as it emerges in colonial India. The terms 'rationality' and 'logic' as I am using them here do not describe abstract laws or universally valid steps that gu2rantee truth (they are not the infallible processes of 'Reason'). They are rather the taken-forgranted, invisible, inexorable, yet alterable, rules of thought and practice that facilitate and limit governmental and development policy, objectives and strategies. In other words, seva functions as both a boundary and a guide rail of the discursive formation of government and development in India. Does this mean that seva is a cynical practice? Not essentially, though it is so in some instances, as the chapters in this volume will demonstrate. Seva is what I will call, following Foucault and Paul Veyne, a historical universal. 19 That is, though I do 11ot subscribe to the notion of history as the time chart of universal progress of mankinc:'., this notion of an actually existing true universal progress is a theme that is widely and deeply believed by many thinkers and political practitioners of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I try to demonstrate in many of the chapters that follow that the caste-Hindu elite and their interlocutors believed that seva was a local model of a universally valid progressive step in an ethical sense. Seva was seen as the keystone of ethics in modern India. As I will argue in chapter 1, it was a necessary ethical principle that objectively helped the caste-Hindu elite find an internally valid and self-respecting way to move out into society beyond what they perceived as crippling restrictions of caste pollution

Introduction

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and purity. Such an internal validation of 'moving out of caste boundaries' is, in my opinion, one of the key changes in Indian culture that were necessary for that elite to take command of the national postcolonial economy. In other words, seva helped establish the imaginary geography of capital within the space of caste-Hindu thought. From my perspective it is not adequate to trace seva as a benign expression of an 'associational culture', as Carey Watt has in his book (2005). It is necessary to analyse what formations take centre stage, and what formations are marginalised in the evolution of this centre. Again, my perspective does not permit me to look at seva or the Gandhian practice of it as a failed step in the transition to modernity; as Asok Sen has argued. Seva is a step that contributes to the formation of civil society and modernity in our historical context-it neither succeeds nor fails. I also propose that seva is not an irrational part of a moment of manoeuvre that is ejected by the logic of development state that 'arrives' in India, in the way Partha Chatterjee has argued more generally. Seva as a historical universal mobilises and gives shape to the theme of a unified brotherhood (however unequal) among the oppressed in colonial India. This provides the ethical ground and, more importantly, the discursive constraints for the logic of development in the Indian context. In other words, seva is a historical coming together of colonial (i.e., 'universal') and indigenous practices of sympathy and charity that provides one of the important elements to the ethical configuration of the Indian ideal of welfare in the late twentieth-century development state. It arises out of a colonial culture and pedagogy of urbanisation, but no less, also out of the ressentiment of the national elite as it searched for means to recoup the cultural authority; history, a sense of dignity; and self-respect, all lost to the hegemonic anthropology of colonial rule. 20 The questions of method I will now retrace are in the nature of hindsight and clarification. They were more or less intuitively developed at the time when I worked on the field and in the archives. This implies that the methods adopted in the following chapters preceded the descriptive guidelines expressed here, and might not meet them fully. The first point of retrospective description of method in my work is that each document in the archive or respondent in the field, i.e., each 'text' investigated was seen as a participant in

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the struggle that constituted seva. There was no such thing as a 'neutral' report-every text had a political position. So the research problem was to find ways to understand the stakes of the text, and how it functioned in that power struggle. This does not mean that the text was cynical, but the method does insist that it was a power player, nonetheless. This way of reading the text went beyond the normal historiographic or ethnographic principles of establishing its authenticity and reliability; beyond being sensitive to the context. It was faced with the task of actively reading it as a sign of involvement in political engagements conducted along several directions at once. It may have been addressing the colonial ruler, the hegemonic caste-Hindu classes, the depressed classes, the minorities, and the administrator of agency tribes, at the same time as it perhaps sought authenticity and respect from an international audience. The research problem was to understand its multi-dimensional resolution. The second methodological principle was that my reading of the document or interview scrupulously bracketed out the ethical charge of a claim or a statement. In other words, I could not succumb to the desire to evaluate any statement in terms of good or evil, reaction or progress, or in any gradation on these scales. The problem was to understand what happened. By avoiding evaluati0n, it was possible to refrain from judging whether seva resulted in a progressive (i.e., leading to a fully formed version of modernity according to a Western norm) movement or led to a 'passive revolution' formation in Gramscian terms. 21 There was also no place for a desire to see what a participant 'actually' meant in an exchange, but which was misinterpreted in the heat of political intercourse. The participant, for example Gandhi, simply functioned in the imperfect mode in which his writings, speeches and actions were received. Looking at seva in this way, rather than foreclosing its significance by judging its ethical value, facilitated exploring its work in detail. The third methodological principle was that the text was not judged for the reliability of its account of the event or process being described. The question of reliability reflects a concern for an underlying truth, which the reliable document transparently represents. If the text is a participant in the political process, it reflects an investment and interest in the process and has to be taken for its face value rather than for its reliability in

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representing what happened. This implied that, in my way of reading, some reality was being constructed at the level of the text and its implications rather than anterior to it. For this reason, an interviewee's response in the context of a legal battle about a seva organisation (in 'Swami Balananda's Poverty Relief Service and the Malayappan Report', this volume) was not read with the aim to verify in a deep or rich ethnographic sense, what the true meaning of the interviewee's position was in relation to his or her life. It was simply read at the level of a political assertion made by a participant in one of several groups trying to gain an advantage. 22 The final principle was to ensure that the research was focused on reading as comprehensively as possible the configuration of texts through which debates around events or historical discussions emerge. This meant trying to understand what the explicit point of agreement or dissention was about; what the implicit agendas were, as glimpsed in the other texts regarding the same event in the archive or in the memory of respondents; and what the common constraints of the discourse were which shaped the contestants or partners. This was done to ensure that the texts were read in their role as expressions of interest, bias and force rather than as simple signals of the existence of a tendency to perform seva. Thus, for example, if the agent of the Godavari tribal region, in a letter to the Madras government in 1950 (Government of India 1951), said that a certain swami in Bhadrachalam was a 'messiah come' who was interested in 'service to the tribals' that matched the kind of ameliorative efforts of such services performed for the 'untouchables in the plains', the letter was not read simply as a semaphore signalling delight that seva has entered the Godavari uplands from the plains. It was an impetus to see why the agent had said so in relation to other documents in the archive; what the ameliorative efforts in the plains were in parallel debates during the period; what the antecedents of this tone of reverence with which the agent spoke of the swami were; what this swami was going on about in his enterprise as described by written discourse and in the institution of an ashram that continues to run in his name. Therefore, it was also to explore if possible, what the document tried to achieve, and what it resulted in. Further, it was also to serve as a stimulus to understand through personal interviews of the survivors and inheritors of the tradition, the contemporary formation that arose in its wake over the 50 years of its historical

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effects. Some more examples of these considerations may be seen in the different chapters of the volume. There is no claim to originality in the methodological principles listed here, largely since I lack the competence to make such a claim. They are so listed only for convenience and for their application in the research context. The following section deals with the specific historical and theoretical events and processes my research has pursued in the archives and in the field; first with how the concept of seva and the debates around it functioned in response to untouchable politics during the freedom movement, and second about how it functioned with respect to tribal administration in late colonial and post-Independence India. They show how the two branches of my research are connected to the root of the concept of seva in Indian political practice.

v In this section I briefly touch on the Gandhian concept of 'Harijan seva' in order to point to the argument in subsequent chapters that the structure of caste and the politics of nationalism that housed his writing give seva a specific practical character in the struggle for hegemony. I also sketch out how seva and tribal administration interweave in twentieth-century colonial rule as a prelude to chapters that follow. HARIJAN SEVA

Chapter 1 in this volume explores how the discourse of social reform and nationalism articulates, over a period of about 50 years, the meaning and significance of the term seva. Thus, when the term seva is used in correspondence and speeches of the period 19081915 approximately, it has a connotation of social reform that is not directly linked to the national struggle. It is more a project of the Social Conference and less a project of the Indian National Congress. When the term is used after this point, and especially in the context of Gandhi's writings which begin to dominate this terrain, it still refers to social reform. Seva is explicitly not a part of satyagraha and the direct struggle against colonial rule, but it is

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a foundational aspect of the national struggle as a process of selfpurification, social reconstruction and Hindu revival. 23 Both chapter 1 and the Epilogue, in this volume, explore the discourse on seva as one expression of conflict of purpose and interest. On the one hand, the nationalists strive to control Ambedkar's politics of the depressed classes through the engagements at the Second Round Table Conference, the Poona Pact and the establishment of the Harijan Sevak Sangh. On the other, Ambedkar's response is an expression of his rejection of the Congress perspective on the 'Untouchable question'. The two chapters bring out the complexity of Gandhian seva position. They highlight how its mobilisation actually strengthened Congress' hold in the battle for ethical leadership. 24 My purpose in this book is not so much to criticise the Congress about its side-lining the untouchables. It is rather to show, first, how the usually taken-for-granted centrality of the Indian National Congress and the nationalist elite was actually achieved through active political work of establishing hegemony through terms such as seva. It is to argue, second, that the idea of seva and that of welfare, through this establishment of hegemony, became irrecusable concepts of the freedom struggle. TRIBAL WELFARE

The concept of seva enters tribal administration at a tangent, rather than arise centrally as in the case of Harijan seva. In terms of a practical politics of colonial civil society, seva in relation to the tribal is a minor current; however, the concept of seva serves to destabilise the foundation of a colonial epistemology of government that is based on the nineteenth-century anthropology of castes and tribes of India. What results is a new logic of administration of scheduled tribes that is the basis of the nationalist perspective on this subject. In the process, seva demonstrates the umbilical link between the 'official' (i.e., administrative) and the 'non-official' (civil societal in a historically specific sense) in the emerging discourse of governmental rationality as India gains freedom from colonial rule. The 'tribe' was an anthropological category denoting those communities that did not easily fall in the formal caste system as articulated by the governmental needs and forms of knowledge

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in colonial rule. Many of the 'tribes' also inconveniently did not subscribe to the plains concept ofland as property and its ownership. That was in fact the root difference between those whose lives were hierarchically organised around agriculture and ancillary labour and those whose were not. The caste system was, as Ambedkar convincingly argued, an inflexible allocation of labour power and division of labourers. It ensured the inheritance of access to decentralised power as a systematic feature of society. 'Tribes' in contrast were either nomadic, or they cultivated shifting patches of land, which did not allow them to be pinned down to a specific area of bounded land registered under their name. This meant that, for a colonial administration that was focused on revenue, the tribes were an unknowable, illegible, unsettled and therefore unsettling element among the ruled. Thus the anthropological category of the 'tribe' was always already an administrative one in the colonial Indian context. There were two practices of handling the tribes ('agency' and 'scheduled area' are two terms that earmark the location of hill tribes in a colonial political geography). First, the direct administrative practice, I argue in chapter 3 in this volume, was one that looked upon the tribes (at least some of them) as potential insurgents who had to be treated with respect and circumspection. Second, the colonial anthropological discourse, as I argue in chapter 4, was a tenacious attempt to fix the tribe as the lowest outer boundary of the hierarchical caste system. This attempt at location fixation anchored a SO-year debate on race and caste conducted through experiments in caste anthropometry coupled with theories of civilisation and progress. This is the scenario in which the concept of tribe functioned in the colonial administrative and anthropological discourse between 1870 and 1940. When seva enters the debate, it does so through the national movement, where attempts at 'uplifting' the tribe lead the nationalists and their allies into the hitherto forbidden tribal territory. Anthropometric questions to determine racial origin of castes and tribes lose their value and the caste system becomes an irritating yoke that needs to be thrown aside. Underlying this is another significant change in territorial imagination: while the colonial rulers saw the agency areas as archipelagos of potential unrest that had to be kept apart from the mechanism of governance in the plains, the nationalists saw the tribal areas as a backward

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hinterland that urgently needed to be integrated into the national territory. What remains in continuity between the colonial and nationalist agendas, however, is the need to settle the tribes according to established notions of property ownership. Chapter 2, in this volume, discusses the transition between seva activism in the voluntary organisation called Poverty Relief Service and the government's 10-year plan for the development of agency areas, formulated by the Special Agency Development Officer of Madras Presidency R. S. Malayappan in 1950, before the national Five-Year Plans come into force.

VI Concluding Remarks I would like to conclude this Introduction by making a few remarks about the purpose of the project, i.e., what its current significance is. (a) In a theoretical dimension, my project has been to evolve a framework of understanding seva in a model of history that is open to chance. That is, in history there is not necessarily a vector of progress that will hold unconditionally for all members of a given society. Thus, the emergence of seva is not necessarily a step towards a utopian society of care-it is an opportunity for engagement. Not only is it such an opportunity, but in its very emergence seva was a political engagement even as it was an expression of human kindness. (b) Using this framework of history I have tried to establish seva as a discourse and practice that provide one of the bases for the development of civil society in the form in which we know it today. Hopefully such a model of seva would be of help in understanding civil societal activism, its strengths and discontents. (c) I have argued on a more speculative terrain that at the same time this discourse and practice of seva also give a model for governmental rationality in the post-Independence state, thus providing that rationality its contrapuntal value

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in relation to that of colonial government. In a critical way, the ethics of care provides the legitimacy for the logic of administrative reorganisation of social space-in this study, the exemplary reorganisation is of tribal administration. (d) Principles of welfare today do not refer to caste principles of seva, yet the structural form of charitable service retains the unaccountability of those caste principles. In general, this lack of accountability and the structural mode of charity become hegemonic principles in the way the state thinks of its commitment to the people, and we need to investigate how this mode of thinking affects policy decisions and their effects on the people as beneficiaries of charity. This unaccountability leads to unilateral administrative conduct in relation to welfare policy and the corresponding allocations of budgets. (e) The essays that follow are a critique of the principle of charity that underwrites the ethical supremacy of the elite. From the point of view of these elite, who have a commanding hold on civil society and its instruments, any policy, programme or expenditure that does not go in their favour, any attempt to redistribute access and wealth away from a pattern that permits the elite to access it at will, is remapped as an act of charity. This dominant mode of representing the state's function of redistribution as charity means that the beneficiary is marginalised in any attempt to challenge or criticise the allocation. Such a representation masks the political negotiations and resistances that have pushed the state to make these allocations in the interests of long-term security. These essays are an attempt to work out a mode of understanding charity that helps the politics of the marginalised (dalit, minority, tribal) in attempts to critically engage with policy in the domains of employment reservations, education, healthcare, and other forms of security and wellbeing. (f) This study of seva as the one of the main strands of voluntary activism in India is also an attempt to provide development and welfare activism in India with some equipment to reflect on its actions from an analytically desirable distance. It has been my argument in this introduction that civil society in India has emerged through a history of voluntary activism

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in the forms of seva and satyagraha. If agitationist activism has learnt its lessons from satyagraha, development and welfare activism have without doubt learnt its lessons from seva. There is political value in providing a theoretical orientation for the activism of groups who are willing to accept it, towards a mode of conduct that is responsible to the beneficiary. It is also of value to help activist groups understand the way in which their work is understood by the mainstream as 'service', i.e., charity. Looking at this boundary of voluntary work will help activists learn to think of their work in a more politically informed way. Charity and service seem to be the two fundamental aspects of our national self-image. There is thus a hint of reluctance to think about them critically. Yet, I believe we often have to look carefully and honestly at things that we love to do the most-especially when we do it to other people. My point here is not that sympathy in general is evil (there is on the contrary every reason to believe that it is one of the few positive impulses that lead to exemplary political conduct); nor is it that the ethics of seva is bad on the whole; it is rather that the political projects that give substance to and at the same time subsume the affect of sympathy in twentiethcentury Indian culture of charity and seva have aspects that need to be critically examined. It is also that development as welfare has to be studied for what it actually achieves in terms of the structure of power that is compatible with the variant of capitalism that takes root in India. What is needed is an examination not only of the concrete economic effects of the developmental effort towards the wellbeing of the people, but also of its political and structural tendencies in spite of its good intentions. There is perhaps a timeless essence of sympathy and compassion in the human response to the misery of others, which expressed itself through our actions and speech as we distributed rice in the old city during the communal riots of 1990. However, there is no doubt that sympathy and compassion have been pulled into different circuits of power, economy and culture. Sympathy and compassion have been given specific direction and shape at various moments in history: what human condition deserves sympathy (ostracism, banishment, a curse, the ordeal of travel, disease, imminent death), how to respond to one who suffers from such a condition (deep sympathy without any alleviating action,

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alleviation without acknowledgement that there was a problem, providing accommodation, food or water to drink, prayer) and what merit the action will bring (social esteem, punya or heavenly reward, self-satisfaction), are all determined according to these circuits of power, economy and culture. This book's theoretical task is to investigate how compassion and sympathy are configured in the practice of service or seva in modern Indian history, and it is this task that marks its singularity in the academic literature.

Notes 1. I have never been a functionary of that organisation, but have been a bystander watching it from its informal beginnings. 2. Article 37 of Part IV regarding the Directive Principles of State Policy as set forth in the Indian Constitution states: 'The provisions contained in this Part shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws'. 3. This book does not address the way government operated the concept of nomadic or denotified tribes. 4. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude an extended e-mail discussion with Dipesh Chakrabarty, which has helped me formulate this section and state my perspective and method with accuracy. The risks and errors are entirely mine. 5. While this is apparently a binary formulation of exclusive categories, let me hasten to add that I am pursuing this extreme formulation as an analytical strategy. I am aware of the divergences and convergences between perspectives, practitioners and political positions of members of these 'opposed groups'. Perhaps these two positions (Cambridge India specialists and Subaltern Studies) should be seen as a bipolar field of theoretical/academic force around which different adherents were scattered more or less distant from each pole. 6. See, for instance, Bayly's criticism (2012: 16--17) of the diffusionist paradigms of the 'Cambridge school' of historians led by Quentin Skinner, John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock. 7. This is with reference to Quentin Skinner's argument that intellectual history texts should be studied within their intellectual contexts in an attempt to think in a manner that is compatible with that point in history (Tully 1988). 8. See Watt (2006) for a more extensive and sympathetic review of Beckerlegge's book.

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9. Sen's precise term in this context is a 'non-capitalist transition' (Guha 1987: 234) 10. Nehru delivered his famous 'tryst with destiny' speech after the presidential address at midnight of 14-15 August 1947 (Publications Division 1958: 25-26). 11. See chapter 1, in this volume, for a more extended discussion of this passage from Nehru. 12. An example would be the Anna Hazare satyagraha in 2011-12 against corruption in the name of the Indian people. 13. See Veyne (2010: 41) and the general discussion in the chapter 'Foucault's Scepticism' in that volume. 14. See Foucault (1980: 89) for a brief statement of the relationship between power and economy. Two series of lectures in the College de France by Foucault (2007 and 2008) are almost entirely dedicated to addressing the structure of this relationship in the West. 15. In proposing this entire argument, I am following the directions suggested in 'Lecture 12, 4th April 1979', in Foucault (2008). 16. It would take me too far afield to demonstrate, through citation and argument, what I am saying here. Let it suffice to say that in my understanding capital is that factor that appropriates surplus value in a way that stimulates economic growth in the capitalist systemit is the factor that owns the means of production and sets up the dynamic of money-commodity-money. The capitalist is the ideal type of individual who is the key functionary of capital as defined earlier. The bourgeoisie, as Marx used the term, referred to the historical social formation that acceded to the function of the capitalist as defined earlier. 17. The centrality of an urban culture to capitalism has been asserted by many theorists of the society since the nineteenth century: Marx's 'Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte', Gramsci's 'Notes on Italian History', and Foucault's two lecture series Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics being some of the most wellknown. 18. In the Nisbet translation The Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991) the Remark to§ 190 says '[i]n right, the object [Gegenstand] is the person; at the level of morality, it is the subject, in the family, the family-member, and in civil society in general, the citizen (in the sense of bourgeois)' (ibid.: 228), while the Knox translation on the site http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegeV (accessed on 23 Oct 2012) in the remark to§ 190 renders it as '[i]n [abstract] right, what we had before us was the person; in the sphere of morality, the subject; in the family, the family-member; in civil society as a whole, the burgher or bourgeois'. The bourgeoisie takes the connotation of the capitalist in Marxist thought in general, accentuating the conflation

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20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

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between the usage of terms capitalist and bourgeois. See preceding note 16 for a brief definition of my differentiation of the terms. Foucault (2008: 317) in his 'Course Summary' refers to Veyne as the original thinker on the concept of the historical universal, while Veyne (2010) attributes it to Foucault. Whichever is the truth, I am thinking of the historical universal, elaborated as a crucial element of Foucault's thought by Veyne (ibid.: 5-20). This telegraphic signal of the spiritual and cultural sources of the twentieth-century practices of seva owes much to the remarkable study by Ranajit Guha titled An Indian Historiography of India (1988). It is impossible to understand the colonial ground of seva and its historical articulation except by seeing it as a product of English education (and urbanisation) as described as an aspect of colonial power and native humiliation (ibid.: 15-21). On the other hand, its anti-colonial edge driven by the resentment needs to be understood through Guha's argument about expropriation that is the subject of both the beginning of 'Lecture One' (ibid.: 3-15) and the whole of 'Lecture Three' (ibid.: 48-69). And yet, at the same time, my argument here is that though this discourse and practice of nationalist resentment are an expression of elite disempowerment in the economic and political context of colonial rule, their simultaneous address towards those destined to be marginalised in the configuration of postcolonial national capitalism should be kept in view (see argument by M. S.S. Pandian 2002, in this respect). For an introduction to Gramsci's seminal theory of the passive revolution of capital, see his 'Notes on Italian History' (Gramsci 1971), especially pp. 106-20. In this the interviews were somewhat more like those in 'fact-finding committees' that write reports on specific incidents of injustice rather than like deep ethnographic engagements. This difference between seva and satyagraha is expressed in Gandhi's letters and communication to his followers. This is different from Skaria's rendering of Gandhi's conceptual unification of seva and satyagraha (and mitrata) under the umbrella of ahimsa. Seva and satyagraha, in their operation on the ground, required different cadres. For a recent nuanced elaboration of how seva is appropriated within the Bahujan Samaj Party by women activists, see Ciotti (2012).

ONE

Seva and the Sevak in the Freedom Movement* This chapter develops the concept of seva to describe a node of political discourse and practice in the freedom struggle. In what follows I try to explore the historical elaboration of this concept roughly during the period 1900-1950, arguing that seva served to consolidate Congress, caste-Hindu hegemony during the growth phase of the freedom movement. I suggest that it was structural to the reform of Hindu practice through which the subjective disposition of the enterprising capitalist becomes a possibility without the prerequisite of a revolutionary transformation.

The Commonsense Notion of Seva Today Seva is usually represented as pressing another's feet or legs to relieve suffering. Following this leitmotif in upper-caste narratives of seva will lead us to what this term connotes today, and form a point of departure for the historical investigation. Slapstick humour in North Indian life accompanies the request for an exceptional favour with a pantomime of pressing legs, saying Mai teri seva karunga ('I will perform seva for you'). When the grandparents come to perform seva for the newborn, the normally polluting task of cleaning the child becomes sacred because he is an incarnation of Ram Lalla or even Krishna. In another usage, Karseva refers to the manual work of (re-)building a religious shrine to which the devout contribute, suffering no loss of caste status despite 'helping-build' being a low caste profession. In Sikhism, the act of contrition, or seva performed by one who has offended the faith, refers to cleaning the shoes of the devout at the entrance

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to the gurudwara for a specified period. 1 A free-flowing discussion about seva evoked mythical South Indian narratives involving touching the feet of another. 2 In a Maharashtrian legend, a lowercaste boy, Pundalik, massaging the legs of his ageing parents, is called by his companion Krishna to play. Pundalik asks him to wait while he performs his primary task, and tosses him a brick to stand on. This avatar of Krishna waiting on a brick, Purandhara Vittal, is a symbol of the cultural recognition that seva as the duty to one's parents and the infirm comes before response to God. In the Alwar tradition of Tamil Nadu, an untouchable devotee prays outside the temple until God tells the priests to bring him in. One of the priests hoists the devotee on his back, holds his legs with his hands, and brings him into the sanctum sanctorum. This devotee becomes Thirupanalwar. Thus, in Brahmanical and upper-caste legend today, the term seva denotes what is called service in English, but comes to mind in connection with a normally menial, demeaning or polluting act of service which carries no taint in special contexts: in the family, in reparation for wrongs, for community repair, as ethical obligation, establishing the priority of duty, as recognition by God, and as the sanctification of an untouchable. This contemporary, twenty-first century connotation provides a fuzzy, but adequate, horizon against which to develop concept of seva in my historical study. What follows is divided into two sections: I. An analytical description of the usage of the term in different historical phases; and II. Reflections and Conclusion.

I The Idea of Service in the Social Reform Agenda A substantial part of Charles Heimsath's study (1964) of social reform focuses on the debate between the Indian National Congress and the Social Conference in Maharashtra during the 1890s. 3 In these debates, Tilak and his Congress colleagues argued that the reform agenda was a colonial ruse diffusing the focus of political

Seva and the Sevak in the Freedom Movement

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struggle. Their opponents, led by Mahadev Govind Ranade, argued the primacy of social reform. By the turn of the twentieth century, R. G. Bhandarkar, Narendra Nath Sen and Viresalingam Pantulu, were calling for widespread social reform in debates across the different Presidencies. Controversies forced the social reform movement to settle for local initiatives, while the political agenda took the national stage. In local initiatives, Christian work among untouchable and tribal communities provided the model for the formation of missions to uplift the 'backward classes'. 4 In this context, around 1900, the notion of service takes on a shade of meaning beyond the then current meaning of steady employment, and begins to connote uplift of the depressed classes, through educational, cultural, and sometimes religious, work. In national politics (as different from local reform), the new meaning taken on by the term 'servant' informs Gokhale's Servants of India Society (SIS) formed in 1905. The SIS was conceived as an elite band of political volunteers committed to full time, unpaid political work. Aspiring Servants were to be university 'graduates of distinction and high calibre' (Sastri 1937: 51), who then spent the next five years 'studying and traveling, and working under trusted leaders, but never making themselves responsible for either a speech or a newspaper article or for any public action' (ibid.: 50-51). On entering probation the volunteers had to take seven vows: to the service of the country; to seek no personal advantage; to regard all Indians as brothers regardless of caste and creed and work for their advancement; to remain content with the Society's economic provision and never engage in paid work; to lead a pure personal life; to engage in no personal quarrel with anyone; to remain faithful to the objectives of the SIS (ibid.: 50-53). The constitution of the SIS, calling for a missionary attitude and the spiritualisation of public work, asserted the influence of liberal ideas among all, and thus remarked on its goal: The Servants of India Society has been established to meet in some measure these requirements of the situation. Its members frankly accept the British connection as ordained, in the inscrutable dispensation of Providence, for India's good. Self-government on the lines ofEnglish colonies is their goal (Gokhale 1916: 1230).

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What was a Servant of India like? Arnritlal V. Thakkar was born second of six sons in an educated family of the Lohana community in Kathiawar (see Jagadisan and Shyamlal 1949). 5 His father, Vithaldas, a businessman, was known to have organised famine relief kitchens in Kathiawar for about 400-500 of his own caste members, and regularly fed 50-60 beggars at his doorstep. Amritlal served briefly in the railways, and then went to Uganda. He came back and, after some other small jobs, joined the Bombay Municipal Corporation. Here he met 'Bhangis' and Mahars and seemed to have worked for their uplift. He joined the Depressed Classes Mission around 1906, fell under the influence of SIS members and later joined them. We get a sense of Thakkar's character from a letter he wrote in 1914 to his brothers explaining his decision. Dear Brothers,

Bombay, 25 January 1914

"It pains me to write this letter and I believe it will pain you all very deeply to read its contents. I wish someone else would have communicated this to you. But after all, it falls to my lot to perform this sad duty. "I have resigned my service from the Bombay Municipality and shall be relieved from my duties on the 2nd February and shall immediately join the Servants of India Society. I have consulted no one in this matter, and have acted entirely according to the dictates of my own conscience ... In the course of my service I have formed strong ties of affection with my subordinates, and not only that, but I have also learned to love the very roads in my charge, inanimate as they are. It pains me more to part from my servants and roads than it does to part from my kith and kin, and as a brother-officer told me yesterday, I feel as if I have sinned against my hundreds of subordinates and thousands of coolies. I feel as if I am deserting these people who have ever showered affection on me and have blessed me from the bottom of their hearts ... "Moreover I am fully convinced that India wants whole-time and devoted workers, and not part time or spare-time workers, and unless these are secured, no real progress can be made. There is plenty of money for real workers. Mr. Gokhale can command thousands and lakhs of rupees, but he cannot secure devoted workers ...

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"My struggle is now over. All parting in life is sad, but I leave you for a noble cause, and hope to go with your blessings (Jagadisan and Shyamlal 1949).

Amritlal uses the words 'service', 'servant', 'work', and 'worker' in many different and overlapping senses in the letter, but the new idea is taking shape, and in the next few decades, the SIS work he refers to here when he uses the term 'worker' is recognised as 'service'. 6 His moral sense of duty drives him to seek out and work for the depressed classes. On the other hand, Amritlal harbours an egocentrism that sees the roads, servants, subordinates, and coolies as focused, and totally dependent, on him for their wellbeing. This sensibility and subjectivity are the symptoms of a new model of an 'elite' in emergence, and points to the consolidation of a specific social structure, which I will try to sketch in the concluding remarks of this chapter. Thakkar excelled at relief in distress. In 1926, under the aegis of the SIS, he started the Bhil Seva Manda} and also became the president of the Antyaja Seva Mandal. (Clearly by this time the term seva was beginning to be used.) His work with the Harijan Sevak Sangh (HSS) and the Bhil Seva Mandal will be touched on later. I conclude this section with a review of the 'servant': One, the Servant of India towered above the people served, as their ascetic leader and exemplar. Two, the Servant of SIS was not a simple embodiment of elite leadership, but a conceptualisation of an elite vanguard as a structural solution to what had begun to be perceived as the problem of India's backwardness. Three, since most of those who qualified, or thought in these terms, were upper caste this vanguard elite was implicitly upper caste in structure. Four, insofar as its liberal and secular imagination eschewed reference to religion except in terms of reproof, it did not touch the feelings of the society it worked in (Heimsath 1964: 242). 7 This does not imply that the only way to appeal to popular feeling was to endorse religion; serious engagement with every-day religion was necessary for a political venture like the SIS to succeed on a large scale.

Karma Yoga and the Ascetic Activist Roots of seva appear in the work of Swami Vivekananda. 8 Charles Heimsath has described Vivekananda's castigation after his return

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from the United States of America in 1897, of the arrogance of social reformers-their posturing for Western eyes, their failure to change society, and their petty politics-which innervated reform. 9 Both the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, which were started by him, eschewed social reform since proper nourishment with education and food would weed out evil. On the other hand, Vivekananda poured scorn on Hinduism's philosophy of 'don't touchism' and exhorted the Hindus to change their ways if they had to survive the transformations sweeping the society. The solution of caste question was not degrading those who are already high up, is not running amuck, through food and drink, is not jumping out of our own limits in order to have more enjoyment, but it comes from every one of us fulfilling the dictates of our Vedantic religion, by our attaining spirituality, and by becoming the ideal Brahmana. The Brahmans must work hard to raise the Indian people and teach them what they know. They should open the treasury of virtue and distribute its values in the world (Vivekananda 1962: III, 19697; cited in Pavitrananda 1947: 22).

Heimsath reads Vivekananda's revivalism as a critical moment in the progress to universal nationhood, which would occur through reform of social structure, and amelioration of the depressed classes. Thus, in Heimsath's narrative, between the desire to break the stifling barriers of tradition on part of the revivalists and the resentment felt by the social reformers against the perpetual humiliation by the West, a common language emerged, providing the national movement with a sweep and perspective that would emancipate and modernise India. The suppressed narrative is that the fire of revival would be extinguished by the overall progress of the modernised nation. Such a partial, though sympathetic, reading of Vivekananda's project would not do justice to the complexity of the change wrought by his discourses on the structure of Brahmanical Hindu thought. This reductive reading of the advent of modernity, without an understanding of the change in the conceptual structure of Hinduism and its interplay with that modernity, pits one against another in a seemingly timeless opposition: secular modernity and an outdated tradition.10 A more detailed look at Vivekananda's perspective on the crisis of Hindu

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society would be useful and also serve as a background for the following discussion of Gandhi's work on seva. Vivekananda's Karma Yoga is the primary text that yields this understanding (see 'The Ideal of Karma Yoga' in Vivekananda 1962: 108-18). Karma Yoga's lesson is that, for most people, i.e., grihastis or householders, duty to the community is the only practical route to salvation. While withdrawal from the world (sanyas) is certainly a greater good, it is far easier preached than practised. The performance of duty in utter selflessness brings freedom in its wake; not 'political' freedom, but mukti or moksha, i.e., freedom from the eternal cycle of rebirth. For Vivekananda, karma yoga does not imply belief in a specific religion; it only insists that unselfishness is the supreme good. The karma yogi finds his own path to selflessness. However, the karma yogi's work has no absolute value, because the world in its eternal flux remains the same. Inequalities remain, and are the driving forces of progress. The sum total of happiness, like energy, is unchanging-it is only redistributed by human action. True and total change occurs only when the millennium (yuga) comes to an end. Thus, acts of duty, rather than have an effect on the world, actually only elevate the grihasti and bring him closer to freedom from rebirth. Vivekananda's exhortations regarding the need for a new ethical conduct were, it seems certain, based on a creative reinterpretation of tradition. Karma Yoga (unlike the Gita or the Vedas 11 ) prescribes an open-ended moral injunction which was to be installed in the hearts of caste-Hindu grihastis, who in Vivekananda's time formed the bulk of the middle-class society. In Karma Yoga, varnashrama dharma weakens its link with varna, i.e., what may be called the 'synchronic' caste order of society, and strengthens its link with ashrama, or the orthogonal 'diachronic' order of the stages of life, by its reference to the grihasta (one who lives in a griha: home, family) in the series brahmacharya (bachelorhood), grihasta (stage of life as a family man), vanaprastha (forest ascetic stage of one's life), and bhiksha (the final stage where one who sought alms for a living). 12 The grihasta has to think about his ethical response to Hinduism's crisis and look outwards, seeking the meaning of his life in his duty to society. Dharma is then reconfigured as an internal, autonomous, creative response of the modern householder-duty is left to his ethical imagination with only broad limits placed on its innovativeness. Vivekananda's karma yoga shifts the emphasis of

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dharma and appropriates the Western concept of moral autonomy (see Schneewind 1998, especially the chapters on Kant). It cuts the householder free from subjection to the external Vedic dharma (and that of the Gita as well) and subjectivates him to an internal decision on conduct. This involves a clear rejection of a constant in the debates of the Vedanta through its millennial history: i.e., obedience of the injunction to work within the specifications and boundaries of one's own varna. It is quite beyond my academic ability to establish through primary references the genealogy of this kind of move from subjection to subjectivation; however, given the historical imagination of India and Hinduism within which Vivekananda thought his solution, it is almost certain that this specific historical structure of subjectivation was quite unique, if not unprecedented. 13 One marker I can offer in this connection is the systematic difference in emphasis between Vivekananda's turning outwards to the world, and his preceptor-the bhakta par excellence-Ramakrishna's withdrawal from it (for a reading of his philosophy, see 'The Nationalist Elite' in Chatterjee 1993: 35-75). 14 On the other hand, the Bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism, who followed the lived principles of the Buddha, were expected to gift everything, including their very lives to the bahujana, or the multitudes of people in misery, without reference to caste. 15 Kancha Ilaiah in his study of Buddhism as political philosophy has drawn attention to the fact that Buddha's asceticism was structurally different from the tapasya (penance) of the Brahmanical sages, and that the former did not appeal to God (Ilaiah 2001: 57ff). In the 'modern' world, the transition between Vithaldas Thakkar and his son Amritlal shows a change in the practical structure of duty, similar to the one taught by Vivekananda. While Vithaldas performed the externally mandated caste duty of feeding beggars and his own caste brethren during a famine, Amritlal sought to look outwards and found his duty and meaning in life in an autonomous response to the general condition of the Hindu outcaste. While it is difficult to say whether Amritlal followed Vivekananda or not, the ethical action reflects a parallel change in his conduct. As we shall see, Amritlal preserved a deeply Hindu sensibility in social service, which contrasts with the Social Reform sensibility of the 1890s. At the same time, it must be noted that Thakkar's act exceeds Vivekananda's exhortations in one respect. While Karma Yoga

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stressed the grihasta or family life as the site of duty; Thakkar cut off family and resigned from government service to do service to the depressed classes and to the nation. This step beyond karma yoga pushes the transformation of the ethical personality into one which may be described as the ascetic activist. Such an activist plunges into the world and breaks with the Brahmanical orthodoxy regarding purity and pollution. This ascetic activism has a distant precedent in the model of Bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which is however unacknowledged in the subjective understanding of the activist. At this point I would like to draw attention to Lloyd and Susan Rudolph's argument in The Modernity of Tradition about Gandhi's 'This-Worldly Asceticism and Political Modernisation' (1967: 21640), directly applying Max Weber's thesis of the Protestant ethic to the understanding of asceticism in terms of petty accountancy and frugality. I feel this does not explain some crucial hegemonic aspects of the function of ascetic activism, which I explore in the last section of this chapter.

The Concept of Seva, Swaraj and Constructive Activity in the Early Phase of the Freedom .Movement The secular use of the term seva gained currency starting around 1908 when, for example, 'Seva Sadan' was established for women in Bombay (Gandhi 2000: 10: 114n2). G. K. Devadhar and Ramabai Ranade started the Seva Sadan for widows in Poona in 1909 and its branches were formed throughout Bombay Province and in Madras city (Heimsath 1964: 238). Another reference is the draft constitution of the SabarmatiAshram (dated before 20May1915), which had three names suggested for the ashram: 'Satyagrahashram?; Deshsevashram?; Sevamandir?' (Gandhi 2000: 14, 453). There was a Marathi monthly called the Bharat Sevak in which Gandhi contributed an article titled 'The Hindu Caste System' in 1915 (ibid.: 15, 258nl). By this time the Servants of India Society wa~ also being called Hind Sevak Samaj (ibid.: 15, 454). There are references during this period to a Gujarati book Striyo ane Samaj Seva with Gandhi's Foreword (ibid.: 15, 302). These few references

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to the use of the term show that its origin in twentieth-century usage is not Gandhian. The Gandhi correspondence of the 1920s has the word seva usually in reference to organisations, like Seva Sadan, Bhil Seva Mandal, Gandhi Seva Sangh, and so on. Gandhi preferred to use the word 'service' to describe activity, and another significant term was 'constructive' used as an adjective describing work, activity or programme. Mark Thomson (1993), in his study of Gandhi's ashrams (chapter 4, 'The Village of Service: India in a Village'), notes the importance of constructive work in his ashrams at Sabarmati and Segaon. 16 We get a sense of the relationship between 'constructive' work and seva by mapping the use of the adjective 'constructive' in Gandhi's correspondence around the halted Bardoli civil disobedience movement in 1922: constructive work connotes 17 (a) A preparation for civil disobedience (b) Something that purifies the heart of a political worker (c) Non-violence-the constructive programme is a form of organised nonviolent war to oppose the colonial state's organised violent peace (d) The religious side of the political-the two could not be divorced in the mind of the average Indian, many Muslims and Hindus joined the political struggle because they saw it in religious terms (e) It was anti-communal, and promoted harmony between Hindus and Muslims (j) It was anti-untouchability and worked for the upliftment of the depressed classes (g) The economic side of the political-khadi and the spinning wheel were symbols of an ethical commitment to economic freedom, from imported cloth and the growth of indigenous village industry. For Gandhi, constructive work founded the active 'non-violent blows' of civil disobedience, strengthening the community and weakening the state. It was an essential element of satyagraha seen as a complex of ethical political action. Thus the constructive work of community repair had to prepare the ground for Swaraj, and help Congress deepen its reach, moving beyond superficial parliamentary reform to a genuine representation sought by all the people of the nation. The several ways in which the term

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'constructive work' was used suggest that it also carried the connotation of the term seva used in the commonsense context described at the beginning of this chapter: 'community repair, ethical obligation, the priority of duty, recognition by God and the sanctification of an untouchable'. Mark Thomson (1993, chapter 4) has argued that the village service experiments both at Sabarmati and at Sevagram were failures because of several reasons, including participant opportunism, Gandhi's cripplingly massive charismatic appeal, lack of interest among the villagers themselves, entrenched caste culture in the village, and lack of organised effort on the part of the ashram. If we avoid the trap of judging the success of seva experiments by their own standards of achievement and instead look at what occurred in and around the seva activity we will begin to understand how the concept of seva functioned in the politics of hegemony in the freedom struggle.

Christianity and Gandhian Seva Not all Christians supported Gandhi, not even all missionaries, 18 but there were many Christian admirers who drew energy from his thought and helped the nationalist cause. Before briefly examining the work of three Gandhian Christians-C. E Andrews, Jack Winslow and Verrier Elwin-I will look at Gandhi's debt to Christian thought. Gandhi had often acknowledged the deeply emotional effect of the Sermon on the Mount in which the believer is asked to offer the other cheek when struck. 19 At the same time, he was antagonistic to the Christian missionaries who sought to convert the Hindu, especially when they criticised Hinduism. In general he felt that Christianity had no right to convert even one who sought conversion. 20 Gandhi found love at the source of all religions including Hinduism, expressing itself in service to the oppressed. Love was the root of ahimsa which in turn was the kernel of the concept of satyagraha. Though he drew on the Christian ethic of loving one's neighbour, he did not see it as a commandment in the sense of the Old Testament. This neighbourly love was not also a channel for God's unconditional love (Agape) in the inexplicable incarnation of

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Christ among the sinners. Nor was there the Augustinian synthesis of love (Caritas) as the human bid to ascend to God's level (see Nygren 1939). The crucifixion was the way of all human effort to form the community of man. Gandhi spun together belief in varnashrama dharma, ascetic activism and committing one's life to society and the wellbeing of all, neighbourly love in the Christian sense, guilt, self-sacrifice and mental self-flagellation, and last but not least, Bhakti expressed in bhajans sung with his followers. However illogical this synthesis may seem, it answered an emotional need in caste-Hindus feverishly defending a lived culture against colonial reason's assault on selfrespect. The difference between seva and the philosophy of the Servants of India Society discussed earlier is evident in the way in which the concept of seva engaged vitally with religion. In all these dimensions, the agential aspect of seva was from the beginning, as I will argue further on, a community repair exercise and not an individualist ethical response to colonialism in the Romantic sense. However, as Ambedkar's astute critique that follows shows, in its concept and execution seva was at least in part focused on the individual amelioration of its beneficiary. Thus, there was a clear element of pastoral care of each individual in the Gandhian concept of seva, through which the welfare of all could be ensured. How did Christianity look at Gandhi? We have some evidence from the written views of three different missionaries. C. E Andrews belonged to an Anglo-Catholic family (Tinker 1979: 24). Cambridge led to Andrews becoming a missionary priest with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and to his first job at St Stephen's College, Delhi, a decade before he met Gandhi. He started out supporting the idea that Christian missions and colonialism were India's blessings, but slowly saw that the cohabitation of race and Christianity was the most sinful and retrograde association that could befall the latter. Early on, he was involved in an initiative to found an Indian organisation to spread Christianity, called the National Missionary Society, or the Bharatiya Christya Sevak Samaj. Through meetings with Tagore and with Mahatma Munshi Ram, and confronted by a series of crises in his theological understanding, he came to believe that Semitic and Hindu religions had common roots (ibid.: 88). In Gandhi, Andrews found a brother-teacher who

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met his emotional and intellectual demands. Recognised by the colonial rulers as belonging to an English voice that was loved and trusted by Indians, and which could not be ignored due to its sheer honesty, Andrews' writings and interventions provided a powerful hegemonic link between the Indian freedom movement and Christian thought across the world. Jack Winslow, another missionary from the Church of England coming to India in 1914, later described mission work and his gradual understanding of the problems that ailed the Christian mission in India (Winslow 19 54). While it was true that the number of Christians in India was growing exponentially; there was a dearth of contact and fellowship with the Indian at the practical level. Everything in the mission was European, strange and bewildering to the Indian, from the knife and fork used to eat, to the psalms sung to Anglican chants. Drawing inspiration from Shantiniketan, and the Sabarmati Ashram, Winslow decided to start a Christa Seva Sangh, in Ahmednagar. 21 The inmates lived simply; wore khaddar cassock-like garments, sported a saffron girdle, ate, sat and slept on the floor. As the Sangh's understanding of the caste hierarchy deepened, it focused on the untouchables; Winslow records one success in generating a 'mass movement' towards Christ in which the untouchables of the village of Karanji, near Ahmednagar, destroyed their Hindu idols at dawn and en masse converted to Christianity (ibid.: 83Jf). The local casteHindu population, far from resenting the conversion, actually lauded the missionaries' good work, in contrast to Gandhi's antimissionary position. Verrier Elwin was an ordained priest who joined the Christa Seva Sangh in reparation for the evils of colonialism, fell under Gandhi's influence, left the Sangh to become a lay 'philanthropologist' among the Gonds, and later started the Gond Seva Mandal at Karanjia in the Central Provinces. 22 These attempts to return Christianity to its 'true vocation' were an outcome of a significant British consciousness of the moral untenability of colonial rule. From the reception of Andrews' work, as of Elwin's and Winslow's to lessening degrees, it is clear that this critical anti-colonial thought, far from representing the views of a minority of private individuals, was a schism that agonised the colonial rulers themselves. The official discussions that always emerged around the pronouncements of these seditious defenders

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of the faith were cracks in the colonial fac;ade, exposed by the hegemonic force developed between seva and some expressions of missionary Christianity. The critique of the cohabitation between the Christian mission and colonial racism, as exemplified in the radicalism of C. F. Andrews and Verrier Elwin, was an important and influential reinforcement of an elite nationalism's claims to the care of its own flock. This critical pastorate was the Western precursor of the Gandhian sevak, even though the former and its essential religious concerns would be disavowed in the process of national appropriation.

Sevak and Tribal Gandhi's disapproval of the m1ss10nary, his appropnat1on of pastoral effort for Hinduism, the nature of sevak's work, and the character of the cultural assault on the life of Bhils of Western India, all come through in one of his notes on the subject. Shri Amritlal proposes once again to hold a fair for the Bhils on the forthcoming Rama-navami day. On that occasion a temple to Ramachandra is to be declared open, that is, there will be pranapratishta23 into the idol of Rama. Why may we not call it pranapratishta into the Bhils? Shri Amritlal has shown us our duty towards them. We hardly ever accept them as human beings. The Government has also classified them as a scheduled tribe. Thus neither society nor the Government takes interest in them. These so-called uncivilised communities are bound to attract the attention of the missionaries, for it is the latter's duty to get recruits for the Christian army. I do not regard such proselytisation as a real service to dharma. But how can we blame the missionaries, if the Hindus take no interest in the Bhils? For to them any one who is brought into the Christian fold, no matter how, has become a Christian, has entered a new life and become civilised. If as a result of such conversion, the converts rise spiritually and morally, I personally would have nothing to say against their conversion. But I do not think that this is what happens. I, therefore, say that the pranapratishta into the idol in this temple will in fact be prana-pratishta into the Bhils themselves, for I suppose that they will from that time

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onwards understand the holy power of the name Rama, will feel God's presence and resolve to give up eating meat and drinking and be filled with new life. The building of the temple, however, is but the beginning of our service to them, not its end. There are many things we can do to serve them; but workers are few, and that is our misfortune (Gandhi 2000: 30, 311.ft).

Gandhi's stream-of-consciousness Sanskritisation proposed for the Bhils and his rock-like faith in his own interpretation of the relative values of Bhil and Hindu cultures, lays bare the force relations between the caste-Hindu centre and the tribal periphery. This is in stark opposition to Verrier Elwin's valorisation of tribal life in The Baiga, which, I have argued elsewhere, opens a genuine possibility of critically thinking about modernity and its discontents (see chapter 5, Elwin 1939). It is also quite in contradiction to the colonial administration's trepidation in handling insurgent tribals. Gandhi's cultural confidence presumes that the tribal is incapable of resisting the actions taken on his behalf, and marks the sevak's position of superiority in the seva encounter with the tribal. This superior position in the configuration of the sevak is a defining feature of the way in which the concept of seva appears when examined at the political level. The rest of this chapter looks at the political significance of the concept of seva in the period under study.

The Harijan Sevak Sangh Seva finds its fullest expression in the formation of All India AntiUntouchability League, founded on 26 October 1932 by casteHindus under the chairmanship of Madan Mohan Malaviya; G. D. Birla became the President and A. V. Thakkar the Secretary (Gandhi 2000: 58, 42 7n2). The name was later converted to 'Servants of the Untouchables Society'. C. Rajagopalachari objected to the phrase 'servants of untouchables', arguing that service to untouchables would freeze them as a category, and that service was not really the issue-doing away with the evil of untouchability was. 24 Rajaji's objection led to its Hindi name 'Harijan Sevak Sangh' being adopted. The penumbra of the term 'seva' beyond the English term 'service', in the sense of social reconstruction, shows itself in the

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way in which Rajaji's intervention led to the use of the term 'sevak' in the name of the organisation. The HSS was started with the objective of eliminating untouchability by mobilising opinion, organising social movements that throw open temples to untouchable devotees and addressing other social disabilities, such as drawing water from wells. This religious organisation was designed to begin the constructive work of bringing Harijans into the Hindu fold. Gandhi wanted to ensure that the untouchable vote was not separated from the mainstream Hindu one. The logic of Harijan Seva was based on Gandhi's thesis that Hindu chaturvarna died a corrupt death. The systematisation of untouchability, with no religious sanction, had led to a dominant hierarchy among the originally equitable varnas. Duty had succumbed to privilege, kingship and priesthood had become coveted objectives, and the trust reposed in these positions by the community squandered. With the loss of sense of duty, the essence of varna was lost and all had become Sudras, hence their caste duty had become service to repair the community (prescribed for the Sudras by antiquity) by re-establishing the social equitability of varna. Thus, Harijan seva became the key instrument of reparation and repentance for the sins of Hindu history. Given the fragmentation of modern society, missionary zeal was called for. This is where the sevak came on stage. The sevak was expected to be a pure socio-religious activist who did not participate in civil disobedience. His tapasya consisted of immersion in the social life against the current of Hindu practice, rather than a withdrawal into the woods, or a fervent appeal to god. His asceticism consisted of steadfastness, frugality, fearlessness, loving opposition to the caste-Hindu forces, and forbearance for the impatience of the untouchables. The Harijan sevak at the same time was to be an exemplar and a pastoral figure. He not only fashioned religious reform at the local level by leading the unfortunate flock, he also led society by example, and Gandhi himself was, without doubt, the First Sevak. The journals Harijan and Harijan Sevak, more importantly the former, were the instruments used to project the image of these exemplars in the national imagination, firing the modest middle classes with a missionary zeal. The act of service-expiation was the duty, and in reality ultimately the privilege, of the upper caste. The untouchable had no right to

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do what he thought was right for himself; he had to submit to the painfully masochistic ministrations of the sevak. That the project failed on ground is fairly obvious from even a superficial reading of the situation, but seva's success lay in the way it was mobilised and functioned alongside the Congress discourse of nationalism, the mutations it underwent and the links it established with other, often opposed, modem ways of thinking about the nation. The difficulties it faced with both Sanatanist versions of Hinduism (expressed most clearly by Madan Mohan Malaviya) and the depressed classes (expressed by Ambedkar who, alongside two other representatives of the depressed classes, was drafted into the original committee of the HSS) points to the work that this concept of seva had to perform in order to mature, as a product of strife and disagreement, into a hegemonic term. This operational concept of seva was an integral elaboration of the thought of an upper caste as it learnt to become an elite, overcoming the challenges to its hegemony from different directions.

Ambedkar's Critique and Another Model of the Sevak It is quite evident that Ambedkar was unhappy with being co-opted into the HSS in the first flush of enthusiasm generated by the Poona Pact (Gandhi 2000: 57, 444). He made suggestions in a letter to A. V. Thakkar, simultaneously released for publication (Moon 1991: 134). Given his political sensitivity, 25 and the connotations of such a move in the politics of freedom movement, 26 the simultaneous publication of the letter was clearly intended to create conditions in which he could resign from the membership of the HSS in a manner which was accountable to the public. Ambedkar's critique differentiated two approaches to seva: One, the implicit Gandhian one, which assumes that the untouchable and member of the depressed classes in general suffers because he has been vicious or sinful. Proceeding from this framework, seva attempted to foster personal virtue with education, gymnasium, cooperation, libraries, etc., to make the fallen individual a better moral being. Two, Ambedkar's own approach which, starting from the assumption that it is an unfavourable social environment which

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results in a person's suffering, led to programmes of action that would uplift the class as a whole. Starting off from this difference, Ambedkar proposed three steps: (a) A rural campaign to secure civic rights; (b) An urban movement for economic equality in industry; (c) A programme of social intercourse that would lessen the 'nausea' felt by the one in the company of the other. These steps, he felt sure, would entail nothing less than a civil war driven by the resentment of the upper castes, in which the sevak should be prepared to fight alongside the untouchable. Gentle reasoning about the folly of false tradition was doomed to fail. Shocking the upper castes into thinking about their practices was the only way to bring about change. Finally, he insisted that the sevak's single point agenda be service, first and last, in the manner in which he envisaged it. He concluded that the best sevaks could be easily found among the untouchables themselves, who had suffered under the oppressive system. There was no written response from the HSS, or from Thakkar. The HSS programme followed methods exactly opposite to those Ambedkar recommended: the soft approach of convincing people; moral uplift of the untouchables through cleanliness and vegetarianism; employment of only caste-Hindu sevaks. The Gandhian agenda brooked no interference or reinterpretation! Ambedkar resigned. In order to understand the need for such a complex response to the HSS we need to look at the political context in which it was formed as a specific instrument. Ambedkar had contested Congress representation at the Second Round Table Conference on the grounds that that caste-Hindu body had no thought for the wellbeing of the untouchables. Since the HSS was started precisely to institute caste-Hindu care for the untouchables, the challenge of seva could not be turned down lightly. Ambedkar was bound by the implicit terms of his representation of the depressed classes to play by the rules of seva. While his dilemma demonstrates the hegemonic force exerted by the concept of seva in the politics of the freedom movement, 27 his imagination of Harijan seva opens out for us the possibility of another, counterhegemonic relationship between sevak and beneficiary-one in which comradery and mutual respect in battle replace the pity and condescension of the Gandhian model of pacifist service. However, the limits of the contest within the domain of seva

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indicate to us that it was not possible to conceive of a politics outside that domain in any useful manner. If the Gandhian concept of constructive action and seva were a form of non-violent war against the violent peace instituted by colonial rule, its Janus face was precisely a violent peace on the side that confronted the Untouchable. 28 Hinduism had to change itself in order to establish sovereignty in the postcolonial era and no challenge could be tolerated. This sovereignty had to find legitimacy in a manner that simultaneously delegitimised colonial rule. It was to be an internal sovereignty that met the structural requirements of a modern democratic nation, and not the alien supremacy of the hitherto omnipotent colonial ruler. The basis for that legitimacy was the universal claim to be equal to the task of taking care of people regardless of caste or creed-seva served as that nascent working logic of welfare as the freedom struggle approached its zenith. In this logic, the sovereign governing body was to be caste-Hindu. No wonder then that in this context, against the peace of an ascendant and metamorphic Hinduism, Ambedkar's 'liberal' discourse unmasks the visage of nothing short of civil war. The section that follows examines the bitter battle that erupts in a challenge on the margins of the Gandhian idea of seva.

Tribal versus Untouchable: Who is More Marginal? In May 1945, Ambedkar delivered a talk at the Annual Session of the All India Scheduled Castes Federation in Bombay, titled 'Communal Deadlock and the Way to Solve It' (Moon 1989: 1). In the preamble, Ambedkar stated that he was responding to the pressure of public opinion that the Untouchables were only capable of selfish actions, implying that they could not develop a universal perspective that looked beyond their immediate corporate interests. The talk was intended as a demonstration that they were capable of thinking on a broader scale. It analysed and proposed a structure of parliamentary representation that would be acceptable to all parties. The primary problem Ambedkar was trying to tackle was the Muslim League's fear of majoritarian Hinduism, which led to the farmer's espousal of a separate Pakistan. He understood that

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the Hindu majority in India was, due to its caste-Hindu essence, a despotic majority that would never flow freely across different sections in society according to the demands of the issue at hand. This understanding was based on his experience and analysis of the depressed classes' plight in the Hindu grip. He framed his solution between two extremes. On the one hand, there was the danger of a breakdown of the Constitution and the failure of law and order, if the Constitution did not truly represent the communities who were party to it. On the other, majority rule had to be preserved and limited so that the Hindus would not be able to enforce their will against the interests of any one of the other minority parties through an overwhelming coalition. In this framework, Ambedkar felt that the Aboriginal Tribes 'have not yet developed any political sense to make the best use of their political opportunities and they may easily become mere instruments in the hands of either a majority or a minority and thereby disturb the balance without doing any good to themselves' (ibid.: 375). He recommended that a statutory commission administer the agency areas in which the

Aboriginal Tribes lived, compelling the governments of the parent

provinces to contribute to their upkeep. This was quite close to Elwin's proposal of a zoo for the Baiga (see chapter 4). In a news;:.aper article following Ambedkar's speech, Amritlal Thakkar responded characteristically with feigned surprise that 'this doughty champion of the oppressed, depressed and exploited should have so completely ignored the aboriginal tribes who are worse off than the Harijans'. 29 Tha.kkar argued that if Ambedkar's principles of weightage based on social and educational status were applied, the aboriginal tribes might even qualify for an absolute majority. In the bitter exchange that followed, Thakkar argued that Ambedkar's proposal was nothing short of a refusal of the right to vote to the aboriginal tribes, and that his excessive favouritism for the Harijan resulted in a complete denial of justice to the Aborigines. Ambedkar's response had two remarkable aspects to it. First, he had, he said, never tried to champion the oppressed of the Earth, and addressing the problems of the untouchables was more than enough for him. The echo of his recommendation for Harijan sevaks with a single-point agenda is sharp and clear in this description of his own practice. Second, he reiterated that the untouchable was socially worse off than the tribal, erroneously finding support

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for his own perspective in Thakkar's argument that the Aboriginal would require absolute majority because of his status of extreme deprivation in the caste-Hindu hierarchy! This ambiguity which arises between Thakkar and Ambedkar is a symptom of a rapidly changing historical process within which the tribal was being reconfigured as a hapless being at the margins of the caste hierarchy. As I have argued, in the following chapters, this reconfiguration is accompanied by a transformation of the idea of tribal, from an unpredictable insurgent to a poor, miserable wretch in need of charity and aid. In Ambedkar's partisan perspective, the tribal was politically uneducated and educationally backward, but his social status was better than that of the untouchable. Thakkar on the other hand championed the aboriginal's marginal status and had little time for the subtleties of poll politics. Thus, in this minor confrontation in the broad battle for political hegemony, positioning the aboriginal at the extreme of caste hierarchy helped the caste-Hindu check the threat of untouchable politics to the farmer's claim to universal representation, and hence, to its legitimate sovereign status. This threat was precisely the counter-hegemonic move made by Ambedkar to rope in the Muslim League's support for a representative structure designed to check Hindu legislative dominance. The caste-Hindu defence was activated by (a) using the aboriginal to establish that the untouchable was not the one subjected to the greatest exploitation or oppression; and (b) pointing to untouchable politics' inability to think of the welfare of a national community in a larger interest, i.e., a universal perspectiveespecially in the context of an attempt by Ambedkar to show precisely that universal perspective. At another level, Ambedkar's talk and the ensuing debate with Thakkar present us a view of the fuzzy and undecidable historical link between the statistics of representative democracy and that of governmental welfare in the specific context of Indian freedom movement. The statistics of the census and of the castes and tribes series were originally used by the British to decide on a strategy to engineer civil societal legislative representation in proportion to caste groups in the Morley-Minto Reforms. In Ambedkar's thought, these statistics become an instrument embattled in the theorising of the postcolonial nation state, the structures of its constituent assembly and its legislature. 30 The 'sub-normality' of the aboriginals'

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political understanding, in Ambedkar's perspective, disqualifies them from an active role in democratic legislation. This same statistical disqualification of the tribals as a group makes them a population fit for a welfare initiative. In a similar fashion, the statistical understanding of the tribals and the depressed classes as a significant minority underlies the Gandhian mobilisation of seva as an ethico-political instrument in the caste-Hindu quest for political centrality. The similarity between the positions of Ambedkar and the Gandhian initiative insofar as the tribal is concerned shows that both their thought processes are bound by the emerging governmental modes of modern Indian politics. This archaeological similarity due to the colonial enterprise underlies the profound differences in their political projects. The concluding section explores the specific role of colonial government, education and culture in the history of nationalism. What remains then is, to understand the historical process by which the link between seva and welfare is established.

The Constructive Programme, the State and Welfare Luxury is indeed possible in the future-innocent and exquisite; luxury for all and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruellest man living could not sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold. Raise the veil boldly; face the light; and if as yet, the light of the eye can only be through tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ's gift of bread and bequest of peace shall be Unto this last as unto thee; and when, for earth's severed multitudes of the wicked and the weary; there shall be holier reconciliation than that of the narrow home, and calm economy, where the Wicked cease-not from trouble, but from troubling-and the Weary are at rest Ruskin (1968:193).

Gandhi translated John Ruskin's Unto This Last (1968) into Gujarati around 1908 and titled it Sarvodaya. He claimed that he was so transformed by the book that he started the Phoenix settlement on the outskirts of Durban (see 'The Story of My

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Experiments with Truth' in Gandhi 2000: 44, 313-34). The concept of sarvodaya matured as a foundational component of his political utopias and communes starting with Hind Swaraj and practised at Sabarmati and Sevagram. A theory of ethical value annulling the opposition between the employer and employee revived an 'ancient' trusteeship that was violated by the historical degeneration of Hinduism. This was to be achieved through seva without a revolutionary uprising. Christian Socialism was transformed into Ramarajya where each respected the other's station and practised his own responsibility to society. What must be noted is that Ruskin's Romantic and ultimately individualistic critique of capitalism was immediately transformed into a reconstructive community practice by Gandhi. Thus, seva and sarvodaya need to be understood from the point of their emergence as practical forms of community reconstruction and a concomitant discourse, rather than as individual modes of thought and writing. In what follows, I will argue that the communitarian and ultimately statist dimension of seva was something that developed in Gandhi's thought from the establishment of communes to a programme for ethical self-government. 31 Ruskin criticised James Mill's concept of an amoral market 'value' of a commodity at the heart of the discipline of political economy. Instead he proposed an ethical valorisation of the producer and consumer. 32 Thus, if Utilitarian philosophy led to a colonial sovereignty maintained by the Western elite and reinforced by the notion of racial superiority, Ruskin's alternative was based on constructive contribution to social wellbeing. For this to make sense in the Indian context, the alien superior animating colonial rule had to be replaced by a trustee nurturing society from within. Trusteeship went beyond the paternalism of home and domestic economy to practically engaging with 'earth's severed multitudes of wicked and weary', i.e., to a population of the wretched. Such a transformation, ultimately proving impossible for the colonial ruler, was a feast on the 'pure milk of the Ruskinian word' for Gandhi. 33 Constructive work in the early phases was non-systematic and practical in its emphasis on individual amelioration. Gandhi's reformulation in 1941, called the Constructive Programme, gave a firm shape to the constructive social system by describing the margins to be repaired (18 of them): Communal amity; elimination

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of untouchability; prohibition of liquor; promotion of khadi; village industries; village sanitation; new or basic education; adult education; emancipation of women; general education in health and hygiene; the promotion of regional languages; the adoption of Hindustani as the national language; the struggle for economic equality across society; the welfare of the kisans; urban labour; the amelioration of living conditions of the adivasis; the care of lepers; and the nurture of students. This apparent caricature of a classificatory listing has in fact a quiet logic to its structure. The centre around which the defined groups, habits, failings, and afflictions fall short, and are therefore in need of amelioration, is the caste-Hindu, sober, adult, healthy man, who takes stage as the norm of Indian society. This evaluative core of a norm of what constituted a full-bodied Indian citizen provides the implicit structure of a democratic sovereign body to govern postcolonial India. Gandhi had often asserted that emancipated national life would make the state unnecessary; when national life was ideally self-regulated, representative institutions were not required for government (Gandhi 1931). Gandhi's fantasy of the ideal society, in which the state withers unheeded, screens, perhaps from his own eyes, historical processes in which the 'oppressive' colonial state would in fact be transformed into a postcolonial one that is in the grasp of an equally ambiguous and ambitious nationalist elite. In the Indian context, the practical struggle for a free nation is accompanied by precisely a discourse of contestation: what is the shape, purview and competence of the state that would govern twentieth-century India? The transformation energised by the 'freedom struggle' occurs in opposition to the colonial state, in the resistance of a 'native' society whose cultural activism combats the crippling mental grip of British rule in order to fashion public debate, conviction, objectives, and initiatives against the state. Thus, Nehru, usually committed to the priority of political action over social service in the running debate within the Congress, deploys the notion of service in a discourse of a new nationalism: It is curious how one cannot resist the tendency to give an

anthromorphic form to a country ... India becomes Bharat Mata, Mother India, a beautiful lady, very old but ever youthful in appearance, sad eyed and forlorn, cruelly treated by aliens and

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outsiders, and calling upon her children to protect her ... Does the beautiful lady of our imaginations represent the bare bodied and bent workers in the fields and factories? Or the small group who have from ages past crushed the masses and exploited them, imposed cruel customs on them and made many of them even untouchable? "And yet despite ... different classes and their mutual conflicts there was a common bond which united them in India, and one is amazed at its persistence and tenacity and enduring vitality ... There was an active sustaining principle, for it resisted successfully powerful outside influences and absorbed internal forces that rose to combat it ... Right through history the old Indian ideal did not glorify political and military triumph, and it looked down upon money and the professional money making class. Honour and wealth did not go together, and honour was meant to go, at least in theory, to the men who served the community with little in the shape of financial reward. "The old culture managed to live through many a fierce storm and tempest, but though it kept its outer form, it lost its real content. To-day it is fighting silently and desperately against a new and allpowerful opponent-the bania civilisation of the capitalist West. It will succumb to this newcomer, for the West brings science, and science brings food for the hungry millions. But the West also brings an antidote to the evils of this cut-throat civilisation-the principles of socialism, of co-operation and service to the community for the common good. This is not so unlike the old Brahman ideal of service, but it means the brahmanisation (not in the religious sense, of course) of all classes and groups and the abolition of class distinctions. It may be that when India puts on her new garment, as she must, for the old is torn and tattered, she will have to cut it in this fashion, so as to make it conform both to present conditions and her old thought. The idea she adopts must become racy to her soil (Nehru 1998: 431-32).

This uncharacteristic passage appears in Nehru's autobiography as the concluding paragraphs in a chapter that thinks about 'India old and new'. The passage leads into a critique of the Indian Civil Services and further reflections on the tasks of the new national government's administrative services in the following chapter 'The record of British rule' (ibid.: 443-49). In this textual arrangement,

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Nehru's spin on the ancient history of the service classes in India outlines the shape of a battle for sovereignty among the elite inheritors of postcolonial India. Would the business classes with their practices of individual charity and social service (and limited reach in the eighteenth century) become sovereign rulers? Or would it be the urban bureaucratic classes who emerge as the 'service' cadres from the Brahmin castes, dominating the middle level administrative networks of colonial rule? The answer historically resolves itself in favour of the latter, feeding into the stream of state capitalism, planned development and the interventionist state. Paralleling this process, the spirit of individual amelioration inherent in seva is subsumed into an administrative effort to develop marginal and backward populations, through a welfare programme that mitigated the pains of modernisation, and at the same time ensured the priority of economic growth in the ultimate analysis. The effects of this resolution continue six decades after Independence.

The Normative Intervention in Statistics In chapter 4 I discuss the shape and evolution of the practical use of statistics in the colonial state. I argue that the nature of statistical effort begins to change during late colonial rule with the progress of national struggle. In the work of Herbert Hope Risley (1981), statistics is an instrument designed to ensure an allocation of political representation among communities in order to structure native political society under colonial rule according to racial parameters. This emphasis on the structure of native society undergoes a complex set of changes, through which the statistical question begins to address, not so much to a race or race-fraction which demands representation but the welfare needs of the marginalised communities who are now unambiguously characterised as 'poor, miserable, hungry millions', i.e., as a population. The statistical project thus begins to have a normative content, asking questions of deprivation of social status and economic wellbeing according to the norms of citizenship. One of the expressions of this change is visible in Gandhi's note to Harijan sevaks citing and annotating a well-wisher's advice, which goes as follows (the first paragraph is the citation, and the second is Gandhi's own writing):

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"The statement of things done, of progress, from week to week, seems to be very valuable. I wish it could be expanded, and not give only the skeleton . . . I have wondered if the new Society will undertake any local surveys and publish the results. I should like to read paragraphs like this: 'In ... taluka according to a survey made by a member of the Society during the last fortnight, 25 village wells were being used by all castes without discrimination. Twelve of these have been opened to the untouchables since last September. But there are still 18 village wells from which the untouchables are excluded. The figures for temples are ... ' and so on. "... Everyone wants deeds. Words may follow to explain deeds sometimes. The more reports one can have on the work done ... the more useful the Harijan will become. There should be no difficulty in producing the surveys such as has been suggested by the correspondent. We have nothing to conceal. 34

This trend to use statistics to describe the degree of progress towards an idealised norm becomes more pronounced in the nationalist phase of colonial rule when the representative mechanisms come in place after the Government of India Act of 1935. It is not long, however, before this idealistic use of statistics to mark progress towards a desired goal of social improvement towards equal citizenship is overlaid entirely by the realist administrative handling, conceptual deployment and ultimately physical displacement of populations in what is configured as the national interest in the full-blown development state. But perhaps what is as significant at this point, as the ambivalent future of a nascent statistics in the writing of Gandhi, is its presence and provenance. The presence of statistics is a clear indication of the derivative framework of nationalist thought in even its most intuitive and impulsive thinkers-the very idea of statistics in this form arises within the colonial episteme; it is an integral part of colonial forms of knowledge. Moreover, the provenance of this specific invocation of statistics clearly indicates the mode in which Western thinking supported and promoted the anti-colonial struggle, not simply as a native reaction to colonialism, but as what MarxistHegelian language would describe as a progressive, developmental synthesis. On the other hand, both Gandhi and his purported interlocutor Horace Alexander in the citation mentioned earlier

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hedge around the modern scientific term statistics-preferring 'paragraphs' that list numbers and descriptions of 'deeds'. Perhaps these preferences could be understood by remembering Hind Swaraj's anti-Modernist polemic and the Christian Romanticism (Alexander was a Quaker) that characterised some strands of British support to the nationalist movement.

II Reflections It is time to bring together the concept of seva shaped in this chapter. I have looked at the idea of service in the social reform movement, the Servants of India Society and the early life of A. V. Thakkar, Vivekananda's teachings, a somewhat contemporary understanding of early Hindu thought on grihasta, karma and seva, the early twentieth-century use of the term, Gandhi's early ideas of constructive work, the Christian interaction, the sevak's view of the tribal, the HSS, the contestation with Ambedkar and the 'Constructive Programme', and finally the Nehruvian take on service. I have also looked at one instance in which the concept of seva made links with the governmental programme of welfare. The political context of each instance described ensures that the individual positions that I have discussed were not trivial or idiosyncratic. The need to represent an interest group or community's position would express itself in carefully strategised statements, extensions of argument, assertion of positions, and creative flights of imagination, all geared in different ways to the political demands placed on the individual actors. Thus, these voices represent not individuals but singular structures of group and community engagements in the politics of the freedom struggle. It is the importance of these voices in the given community or group situation that raises them as worthy of our historiographic attention. While each of the mobilisations bears some sort of family resemblance to the others, there is no clearly defined essence in any one name or the act it describes. Rather, all these initiatives may be seen to historically construct a quite discrete discursive formation about normative politics, opening out on to other

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supporting networks of discourse around satyagraha and swaraj. I have appropriated the word 'seva' from the writings of the freedom movement, to name a concept describing this integral modular element in the discourse of the freedom struggle. In what follows, I will elaborate the implications of seva as a theoretical construct in its relation to the political processes during this phase of the freedom struggle. 35 This will be as answers to a series of questions. WHAT ARE THE ROOTS OF THE DISCOURSE OF SEVA?

It is clear that the discourse of seva draws on a nationalist 'spirit' that expresses itself as the autonomous driving force of the freedom movement. The discourse of this spirit expresses the historical ressentiment of the hitherto dominant forms of social power, exploitation and traditions of legitimacy that were systematically displaced by colonial rule, which replaced them with its own forms of exploitation, political power and knowledge. The history of this ressentiment has been explored in several cardinal studies. 36 It is also evident that there is an idea of seva that has a fairly long Indian tradition. This tradition, while not acknowledged, provides the nationalist mobilisation its authenticity and autochthony. 37 C. A. Watt (2005), in his study of service and association maps the complex patterns of Western influences and indigenous practices of philanthropy-dana and seva. Thus, the idea of seva has several diverse roots from which it comes together as a coherent practice. While the discourse of seva exorcises some of these roots and ignores others, in this study I have emphasised specific lineages to highlight its structural importance in my reading of this culture of activism in the freedom movement.

How

DID SEVA FUNCTION IN THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT?

The, answer to this question can only be made in a series of imperfect approximations, the first step of which is through Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, understood as intellectual and ethical leadership through which capitalism constructs civil society as it simultaneously asserts control over the coercive apparatus of the state. Gramsci has suggested that several levels of practical-political analyses and reflections need to be isolated within the hegemonic process through which capitalism expresses

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itself in the form of a (nation) state. 38 Speaking of the level of political activity/analysis in which a 'fundamental social group' develops its own consciousness as a universal expansion, Gramsci describes it as bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a "universal" plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups (quoted in Forgacs 1988: 205).

In this context, Gramsci takes into account the fact that international relations intertwine with these internal relations of nation-states, creating new, original and historically concrete combinations. (Religion, for example, has always been a source of such national and international ideologicalpolitical combination, and so too have other international organisations ... ) (ibid.: 206).

Here is an immediate model for seva, which is so deeply intertwined with Christian missionary discourse and practice. Seva is the process by which one group finds a universal meaning to its ethical endeavour, thus marginalising all the other groups in the solution to its fundamental problem. The universal called seva cuts so deeply into the Indian political consciousness that even an opponent of the group (Ambedkar) is forced to acknowledge its significance. In short, it would be possible to provisionally argue that seva serves as the practical form of hegemony in one strand of the freedom struggle. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SEVA AND CAPITALISM?

A doubt that is likely to occur in response to seva's hegemonic characterisation described in the previous section is as follows: When the native capitalist class was in general so weak and underdeveloped, 39 how did such a powerful superstructural group engaged in political struggle come into being? Marxist arguments from the early texts onwards have little difficulty with respect to this question. Colonial capitalism simply creates the

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contradictions that result in the dialectic of nationalist movement, which somehow then serves the needs of a national industrial bourgeoisie in advance of latter's maturation (see, for example, Dutt 1940: 299-309). Later arguments tend to be more nuanced, but the question is deferred in the process. 40 In my view, critical to understanding is the fact that these processes occur across a fairly wide spectrum of urban society; well exceeding the boundaries established by the fledgling capitalist or even the mature native mercantile class, and was described, for example, by Gandhi as caste-Hindu, middle class. Perhaps we need to go back to the original meaning of the term 'bourgeoisie', which meant town (or city; as opposed to village) dweller. If nationalism is an urban, i.e., 'bourgeois', phenomenon, that arose within the context of colonial society; then the urban administrative, educational and cultural anchor of metropolitan colonialism provides this class with its frameworks, perspectives and objectives. 41 Thus, while the resentment against the colonial ruler's humiliating domination provides nationalism with its drive, it is the training, standardisation, 'liberal' education, and urban discipline of colonialism that gives shape to nationalism's 'progressive' goals, perspectives and methods. 42 There is no other way to explain why the nationalist ressentiment gave rise to a 'progressive', i.e., Westfacing resolution and not simply a counter-colonial reaction. In a similar way, more than a language and newspaper, the uniform urban-metropolitan systems of colonial revenue extraction, trade, currency, promissory notes, and instruments of finance, not to mention the railways, bind together the imagination of a nation through everyday practice. 43 Seva's logic emerges in this urban ecology of nationalist discourse and colonial practice. At this point I would like to explicitly jettison any references to a dialectical logic that results in a synthesis towards an ideal, recognising its own form and stage of perfection. Instead, I will call into use the idea of a strategic logic, offered by Foucault, which retains the hazardous and risky enterprise of history in each of its stages or epochs. 44 It would be useful, however, if the reader kept in mind that the existence of a strategy in Foucault's conceptualisation does not imply a grand strategist or conspirator who is driving the whole process-there are several interlocking strategies that fall into place, fulfilling different agendas and dynamics, becoming a stable formation. 45 Implicit

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in my line of argument is the complete abandonment of the basesuperstructure model. From this perspective, the early native bourgeoisie (urban populace) are largely autonomous of the national capitalist class. Their objective of industrial modernity arises from within the epistemic configurations of colonialism, in reaction to its empirical reality, and in its universal language. Capitalism strengthens in India as a result of a state that embodies this objective within a strategic p::.-ogramme of planned development. Seva is a historical universal that provides one strategic anchor for the development state. WHAT WAS SEVA'S RELATIONSHIP WITH HINDUISM?

Western discourse on ancient India becomes a source of material, and models, for the new national consciousness. If the colonial rulers sought to follow a Utilitarian historiography of the irretrievable corruption of Hindu rule, the nationalists followed the cues of the Indologists to revise Indian history and anthropology, so that it was possible to see continuity with a past that was a golden age. 46 This was the basis of a reformation of Hindu society and of shaping the nationalist consciousness in a manner that resonated with the new theory. In the process, modern Hindu thought jettisoned all reference to the Western sources from where it borrowed its genealogy. Hindu thought was redefined from within. The discourse of seva, while acting alongside other discourses and practices to expropriate the colonial ruler, performed another crucial function. It achieved the reform of Hinduism by transforming the caste structure so that purity and pollution were no longer the determinants of the hierarchy in the new national culture. Untouchability would be a sin, a crime, an atrocity that had to be condemned in the name of the new Hindu ethic. Clearly, Sanatanists and their legatees would contest this transformation for decades. However, seva opened out the communicative link between caste-Hindu and the lower castes by fashioning anew the ethics of Hinduism, orienting it to service, reconstruction and reparation. This communicative link was the first instrument through which activities that were otherwise prohibited for a given caste became permissible and were ethically valued by the community. The anchor was the model of the sevak, whose universalising perspective and ethic facilitated more or less complete political control of the social transaction made possible with the

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lower castes. Again, this upper hand would in actual history be subject to the vagaries of changing political strengths and equations vis-a-vis the depressed classes and the Sanatanists. 47 Even so, the change in subjectivity brought about by the model of sevak cannot be overestimated. In order that a saving becomes an investment; 48 in order that the state bureaucrat (statistically most likely to have been caste-Hindu if not a Brahmin) becomes a state capitalist, 49 or even an investment banker assessing the promise presented by loan-seekers; in order that a Marwadi merchant may become a capitalist who may even set up a slaughter-factory to export beef, 50 or an engineer from a Brahmin family becomes a venture capitalist in leather technology seeking to employ leather-working communities as labour; the closed, self-crippling experience of upper-caste laws of pollution and purity had to be broken. 51 The challenge to the community structure had, for sure, begun to occur from the beginnings of British rule. However, seva theoretically attacked what were increasingly experienced as autistic caste-Hindu laws from within the community in an ontological satisfactory manner for emergent nationalist thought and experience. In addition, seva's ascetic activism broke a culturally-safe path into the 'polluted spaces' of society, which could then be followed by an expansive capitalist consciousness in a manner which did not need to radically break with the caste-Hindu community structure. To put it in Marx's language, the universal commodity, i.e., money, whose mobility in a free economic space inverts the economic relation from commodity-money-commodity to money-commodity-money in capital's expansive mode, is predicated on a universal capitalist subject who is equally mobile in a free social space. It is this progressive expansion of capitalism that, as Gramsci recognises, promises to absorb all subaltern classes into modern life. As more and more recent investigations and reflections acknowledge (for example, Chatterjee 2004; Sanyal 2007), there is no guarantee that capitalism today will meet its promise to provide this universalising drive for the emancipation of people. Therefore, it seems as if it would not be accurate to say that the growth of capitalism in the abstract is a prerequisite for progress. In other words, there is no call to lament one's national backwardness in the progress of a universal history. Even more simply put, the development of the economy is not the base on which political and social life will be transformed.

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The singularity of Indian capitalism is that while the ruling classes seek for themselves the universal mobility required by the capitalist, they simultaneously try to restrict a similar mobility of the working classes by reinforcing in subtle and blatant ways the old caste structure within them, and between them and the ruling classes. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SEVA AND GOVERNMENTALITY?

The argument I am making in this series of essays is that seva is a pastoral form of government that develops over a period of 50 years in mainstream caste society under colonial rule in India. In the early part of its history it draws in a whole range of inputs for its sustenance, and in the long run finds stability in the ecological niche provided by the particular configuration of colonial rule and nationalist politics in India. In late colonialism, and at the height of the national movement, seva first shows signs of taking on a more statistical, State-oriented form, and later serves as a model that provides at least one dimension of the ideological orientation for the development state. On the other hand, seva provides the cultural impetus for a whole range of voluntary activisms in India in the second half of the twentieth century. These activisms had many different and ambiguous positions with respect to the Indian state, as has been recorded in many other studies. 52 In this work, I am retaining a focus on the relationship between seva and the State.

All these details have a bearing on some fundamental questions which characterise academic research in our specific historical context: How does the nationalist consciousness take root in the colonially educated mind? What was the intellectual and social base for the development of nationalist thought? How did its programmes become self-evident universal truths, if not dominant, at least as points of hegemonic articulation with different subordinate groups? What are the cultural changes that permit, facilitate and encourage the formation of a consciousness that is willing to take a risk in the capitalist style? The question here is not

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whether the 'capitalist bourgeoisie' effected a passive revolution of a progressive or retrogressive nature in the negotiations of the freedom movement, but rather this: if it is true that a bourgeois (city-dwelling) social group were to struggle against colonialism; if this bourgeoisie were to strategise what we may call a 'passive revolution' through and after the success of that struggle, and thence engender something akin to 'a capitalist class' over the next half century; what were the historical processes that grounded and provided the social, cultural and intellectual bases for such a development? How did an autochthonous ideology and ethic of capitalism evolve as organic elements in the new national consciousness? The discursive representation of the sevak as the acting subject (in journals such as the Harijan) who will bring into being the new India throws light on the reconfiguration of social relationships to facilitate transition to a capitalist structure. The 'passive-pacific revolution', it seems, becomes feasible because seva facilitates the reconstruction of Hindu ethics while preserving caste-Hindu dominance. My problem is not one of ideology in the orthodox Marxist (or even Althusserian) sense, but precisely of the culture, i.e., the organised mutation and growth of the different dimensions of affect, intellect, ethics, and ontology that energise the performance of the capitalist subject.

Notes * A version of this chapter was first published as an independent paper, 'Concept of "Seva" and the "Sevak" in the Freedom Movement' (Srivatsan 2005).

1. I am indebted for these examples to a personal discussion with

Patricia Uberoi. 2. I am indebted in a different way to my mother Choodamani Raghavan for these examples. Her responses were about memories that evoked the term seva for her, rather than instances where the word itself was used in the given narrative. 3. While I draw on Heimsath's social history in this and the next section, our history of the concept of seva has an aim that differs from the former in seeking to isolate some generalisable perspectives for our time. However, I do not develop seva into a practical-political concept for use as Joan Bondurant (1964) develops the concept

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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of satyagraha. This history of the concept of seva is an attempt to understand its function in its time and its ambiguous legacy for us today. Shinde's Depressed Classes Mission ran over 30 institutions-the Arya Samaj, the Dev Samaj, the Theosophical Society, Sikh Associations and some enlightened maharajas followed. Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj was formed in 1873. The page numbers in citations to this work are not mentioned here because of their idiosyncratic structure: each essay begins afresh on page one and makes the pagination meaningless. See Jagadisan's biography of Thakkar in Jagadisan and Shyamlal (1949). However, Thakkar is a notable exception to this disregard for religion. For a related but differently articulated evaluation of the roots to seva, see Carey A. Watt (2005). Also see Gwilym Beckerlegge (2006) for a discussion of Vivekananda and Ramakrishna in relation to seva. Swami Vivekananda, From Colombo to Almora (Seventeen Lectures), p. 133, cited in Heimsath (1964: 332). See Rudolph and Rudolph (1967) for a broad argument about the modernity of tradition from a political development perspective. See Surendranath Dasgupta (1975: I, 29) for a description of karma as minutely specified sacrificial duty in the Vedas. Dasgupta (ibid.: II, 437-552) describes karma yoga in Gita as the performance of casteduty. It would be useful to intuitively map the difference between dharma and karma for the untutored reader. Dharma is duty-caste duty, ritual duty; sacred duty, and in latter day interpretations, just duty. Karma is work or action-one's engagement with the world and the propriety of that engagement. Because karma refers to the work or action done in the world, in a previous birth or this one, one's destiny is also determined by one's karma. It would be too far afield to demonstrate the manner in which I intuitively draw here on Paul Veyne's notion of the constitutive imagination of an epoch (1988). The suggestion here is that the imagination necessary for Vivekananda's way of thinking about reform (and the practices that accompanied it either due to that thought's inspiration or independently) did not exist in any earlier period. Hence the mode of subjectivation was unique if not unprecedented. See Dasgupta's discussion of the concept of Bhakti (1975: rv, 34658). Bhaj = service + kti = love. It is also clear that since Vallabha (1481-1533), what may be called the Bhakti tradition, replaces dharma and jnana with the supremacy of love of god and seva to him as the path of jivan mukti. However, the notion of seva, either

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15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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in service to god, or in service to the preceptor (guru-seva) and the desire to do good to others (daya), which gained currency after ninth century CE, differed from the twentieth-century one. See Dasgupta (1975: I, 136), and in general his section on Buddhist Philosophy. Also see Dasgupta (ibid.: II, 493-514) for a discussion of the difference between Buddhist ethics and that of the Gita. Segaon was later named Sevagram. While this current study focuses on Gandhi's use of the term 'constructive work', it is also clear that such a trend was already present in history, as was so with the term 'seva'. See, for an important example, Uma Das Gupta (2008) for a detailed discussion of Tagore's thought and action in relation to village reconstruction in the Sriniketan experiment. See also the economic face of constructive action in the village movement with the Gandhian J. C. Kumarappa's leading role in Benjamin Zachariah (2005), especially the chapter 'The Debate on Gandhian Ideas'. Interestingly; the possibility of conceptualising seva and constructive work in a theoretically rigorous manner escapes Zachariah in this volume where he merely uses constructive work as a term that points to a simple social reality. See several references across Gandhi (2000: 26). See Gandhi (2000: 26, 77-78), for an example of a missionary's disapproval for Gandhi's methods and objectives. He found a parallel in the poet Shamal Bhatt's didactic stanzas on the moral life. See discussion on conversion with C. F. Andrews in Gandhi (2000: 26, 31). In 1922; it shifted to Poona in 1927. Elwin's work and the questions that arise out of it have been discussed in chapter 4, this volume. Winslow (1954) does not mention the CSS' most famous priest-Elwin! See chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of Elwin. Invocation of life (italics in the original), Gandhi is referring to Arnritlal Thakkar. See Gandhi (2000: 58, 155, 473) for the discussion regarding the name. Gandhi's letter to Birla suggests a slightly modified name, in that 'Sevak' replaces 'Seva' in the final version (ibid.: 58). On another occasion, Ambedkar expressed extreme caution about writing something that would offend the Muslim political sentiment. See his conversation with Gandhi in Gandhi (2000: 57, 443). Gandhi too published differences of opinion even when friends (such as V. S. S. Sastri) expressed them in private communication. It is certainly true that seva was not a Congress agenda, and it was historically in a contestatory relationship with political activism.

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28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

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Even within Gandhi's thought and practice, seva was a discourse and practice which was critical and 'counter-political' with respect to the Congress norm. However, it is the crucial interplay between Congress political activism and the social reform agenda of seva that is the focus of examination here. That they are intimately linked is proven by the inauguration of the HSS on the terrain of the Poona Pact, as a move that complemented the Congress-Gandhi strategy. Here I would like to acknowledge M. S. S. Pandian. He argues, 'the very domain of sovereignty that nationalism carves out in the face of colonial domination is simultaneously a domain of enforcing domination over the subaltern social groups such as lower castes, women and marginal linguistic regions, by the national elite' (2002: 1737). Letter to The Times of India dated 12 May 1945, issue dated 17 May 1945; reprinted in Thakkar (1945: 2). See chapter 4 for a more explicit description of the relationship between the census and the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909. This does not mean that Gandhi intended to develop the statist dimension of seva. Indeed it is true that Gandhi was the true voluntarist in that he was anti-statist in his way of thinking. Yet it is important to see the statist dimension in the kind of governmental thought that permeated his work like a political language. This is true of voluntary organisations in general. Though they may be antistate in their intention, they do participate fully in the governmental function of the state 'through other means'. See Ruskin (1968) in chapter '.Ad Valorem'. Eric Stokes describes Bentinck's dinner with Bentham as a feast on 'the pure milk of the Benthamite word' (1989: 51). See chapter 4, this volume, for a description of British rule's difficulty in evolving a governmental rationality in its relationship with its colony. Harijan, dated 1April1933, reproduced in Gandhi (2000: 60, 222). The indented part of the citation is 'presumably' attributed to Horace Alexander in a footnote. This section is partially a response to G. P. Deshpande's critique of my presentation of the debate between Thakkar and Ambedkar over the HSS, in a workshop on Art and Activism organised at the Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda in January 2004. Two examples would suffice: Ranajit Guha's An Indian Historiography of India (1988) maps the emergence of this autonomous nationalist discourse in the elite who precede and are subjugated by colonial rule. Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) explores the roots of this discourse in the writing of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. See, for example, reference in preceding note 14 for a discussion of guru-seva in the preachings of Vallabha. Also see Bayly for a

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38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

discussion of 'sewa' as an important ethical orientation of the north Indian merchant during the nineteenth century (1983: 388). Interested readers may look at the broader range of his models in Forgacs (1988), particularly the section titled 'Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc'. However, the basic text for the study of hegemony as enunciated by Gramsci (1971), is of course the compilation of his 'Notes on Italian History', which begins: 'The historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the State, and their history is essentially the history of States and of groups of States. But it would be wrong to think that this unity is simply juridical and political (though such forms of unity do have their importance too, and not in a purely formal sense); the fundamental historical unity, concretely, results from the organic relations between State or political society and 'civil society'. This assessment about a weak capitalism-on-the-ground can be made without taking sides on what Irfan Habib has called the 'old great controversy' about the 'deindustrialisation thesis' of colonial India, i.e., the debate whether colonial rule led to a substantial deindustrialisation of the Indian economy. See Habib (1995: 366). For a much more complex reading of the relationship between the nationalist movement and capital, see Habib (1995: 290-95). I should alert the reader that by referring to the freedom movement or seva as an 'urban' phenomenon, I am in over-determined theoretical territory. On the one hand, Gramsci's characterisation of the urban in relation to the leadership of the rural (in an underdeveloped Italy) is to be kept in mind. In his reading, the possibility of capitalism's proper transition involves the correct leadership of the rural by the urban. On the other hand, Foucault's characterisation of discipline as characteristically belonging to the mercantile urban centre as opposed to the rural territory, points to the importance of urban technologies and organisational practices in the development of early modern industry. Both these powerful theoretical formations need to be kept in mind. In using the terms 'training, standardisation, "liberal" education and urban discipline of colonialism', I am aware that I am setting up a project that would have to undertake a history of discipline in colonialism, that would follow in the footsteps of M. Foucault's Discipline and Punish (l 977). Acknowledging the importance of mercantile discipline as a key aspect of early Western modernity also throws a new spin on the arguments about the potential for capitalism in India. The reference to language and newspapers is of course to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983). The standardisation and systematisation of colonial government referred to draws on the more recent work of Manu Goswami (2004: 73-153).

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44. Foucault argues 'What is a dialectical logic? Dialectical logic puts to work contradictory terms within the homogenous. I suggest replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call a strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenisation of the contradictory' (2008: 42). 45. The relation between heterogeneous elements of power, their mutual support and strategic relationships without there being one single strategist is best explained in the essay 'Power and Strategies', especially pp. 142-45 in Foucault (1980). 46. Again, Guha's brilliant work (1988) in relation to the agenda of nationalist historiography provides invaluable pointers. 47. It is important to note here that this essay describing the hegemony of the caste-Hindu middle classes is incomplete in a serious way. For a more comprehensive account it would be necessary to work out a description of how the hegemonic link was forged and operated with the 'peasant' or 'kisan', i.e., the agricultural castes, but that is out of the scope of this body of work. 48. See Bagchi (1972: 199-216) for an argument about the availability of savings for the purposes of investment with the bania castes at the cusp of the freedom movement. 49. See Lewis (1954) for an allusion to state capitalists in India; Charles Bettelheim's seminal work on state capitalism in India is difficult to get hold of in English. For a more recent position, critically evaluating Bettelheim's work, see Chattopadhyay (1994); see also Bardhan (1984), especially the chapter titled 'The State as an Autonomous Actor'. 50. The '.Al Kabeer' slaughterhouse near Hyderabad is a case in point. 51. See Bayly (1983: 369-93) for a discussion of the barriers of kinship and pollution in the business castes in the period 1770-1870. 52. I have discussed some of these contributions in section III of the Introduction and acknowledged others in the notes, where appropriate. In section IV of the Introduction, I have argued th:lt we need to understand the historical specificity of the relationship between civil society and the state in India. This book has been designed as a corrective to many studies that foreground the rich empirical history of seva as the voluntarist expression of the political development of civil society, at the cost of a structural understanding of its complicity and role in the formation of the Indian state.

Two Swami Balananda's Poverty Relief Service and the Malayappan Report The hill tribe populations in many parts of India posed two related problems for colonial rule. One, they did not have a social structure that related to the concept of property ownership in the plains-land sense; and two, they did not fit into the caste system. The second problem was closely related to the first since caste was fundamentally a structure of administrative power and political coercion that drove a division of labour/labourers based on (a) the relation to land ownership and authority; (b) agriculture, ancillary and complementary occupations; surplus generation and consumption; and (c) cultural hegemony and hierarchy. Colonialism, envisaging the subcontinent as a single geopolitical entity encompassing the tribal areas, needed an anthropological theory of tribes as part of the overall social structure. And yet, in administrative practice, the tribes were treated as exceptions where colonial policy followed a strategic goal of establishing a concept of land ownership among the hill tribe populations. This led the British to find a way to settle the tribes, making them 'property owners' in at least a limited sense. These two problems (of property and caste in relation to the tribal) are transformed in the period of the freedom movement, such that they constitute an entirely new configuration resulting in the promises of land ownership and tribal welfare envisaged in Schedule V of the Indian Constitution. The concept of seva I discussed at length in the previous chapter has a role to play in this transition. In this chapter I will look at the practical operation of the concept of seva or service in one local instance in the 1950s, in order to understand how the politics of seva, the effort to establish

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hierarchical status of the Koya tribes, tribal land ownership, welfare and development worked on the ground. This chapter is built of two parts. The first part begins by reconstructing a political biography of Swami Balananda, an exemplary sevak who founded a Ramakrishna Ashram and a cooperative society called the Poverty Relief Service (henceforth PRS). While I will describe how the PRS was started and did significant charitable work for the Kondareddi tribe at Perantapalle, I will focus more on the PRS initiative to establish an agricultural cooperative for the Koya tribe in the village of Suravaram undertaken a decade later. 1 This part of the chapter details the way in which the Swami's moral authority and leadership, i.e., hegemony; functioned in that historical period. I examine this authority of the sevak Balananda drawing on historical records in the archives and in the memory of the people who had encountered him or his colleagues. The play of contradictions between the documentary record and living memory provides some understanding about the ethical aura of the sevak in the written documents. It also throws light on the kind of land transactions that occurred in the 1950s (and in many ways continue to do so today) in the tribal agency areas. The second part of the chapter explores the linkages between his voluntary organisation and the beginnings of State-led development planning and administration. The focus in this part is on the relations between the mature voluntarist initiative represented by the PRS and the nascent developmental state in the fluid moment at the dawn of Independence. The objective of this second section is to establish how the development agenda in the hill region is driven by the objective of freeing land for industrial growth. It is also to show how the ethical and administrative framework of development thinking rests on the foundation of seva. I try here to suggest a framework to understand the profile of the government administrator and his concerns as exemplified in the case of R. S. Malayappan, Special Agency Development Officer for the Godavari Agency. In an interlude between these two parts I will look briefly at the changing fortunes of two quasi-governmental offices-those of the Muthadar and the Karnam-in the borderline agency territories, to understand better the changing pattern of land ownership, revenue and the structure of the state in transition from colonial rule to national government.

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I Swami Balananda and Poverty Relief Service SWAMI IN HISTORICAL RECORDS: HAIMENDORF'S ENDORSEMENT

Among the earliest references to Swami Balananda are those in the work of the anthropologist Christophe van-Furer Haimendorf (1945). 2 Haimendorf devotes a few pages in the later part of his book (after detailed accounts of Kondareddi cultural practices) to Balananda. He describes the Swami as a benign saviour of the Kondareddis, freeing them from indebted bondage to the moneylending contractors who exploited their labour to fell the timber sold to the Presidency Government. Balananda, with help from the government officials, had taught the Kondareddis to form a cooperative and bid for the government major forest produce contract, thus bringing money into their hands for the first time. He had also started a Ramakrishna Ashram at Perantapalle, and The Reddis of Bison Hills describes the free life at the Ashram where the devotees were given lectures on the thought of Vivekananda by one of the Swami's protegees (ibid.: 274). Haimendorf also lauds the work of Balananda's cooperative PRS as the marker of a new and free Indian spirit (ibid.: 272). I will make a few observations about the trust Balananda evoked in the anthropologist who was a fairly keen observer of life among the tribes he studied. Haimendorf's concern for the tribal struggle for survival and his understanding of their nearhopeless condition led him to endorse the Swami's efforts with whole-hearted appreciation. This appreciation of Balananda implicitly drew on a model of modernisation and 'development' of tribal culture that depended on two anthropological concepts that were different from those of colonial anthropology3-the first new concept was the diffusion of political, economic and cultural practices from the metropolis to the periphery through administrative means. The diffusion of political practice consisted in the introduction of cooperatives to stop predatory extraction of the moneylenders. The cooperatives would also ensure the

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diffusion of settled agriculture, which was considered an economic advance over shifting cultivation. The cultural practice was improved through the diffusion of mainstream Hinduism in the Ashram's teaching. These resulted in the second new concept of change, i.e., the acculturation of tribal peoples through contact with agents of change like Balananda. In the colonial discipline, this kind of cultural change occurred in what may be called 'aeonic' time, and the theoretically frozen stage of culture in the evolution of the race left the present practically free for British intervention. 4 In the new way of thinking Haimendorf brought to his work, this change was occurring in secular time and its ill-effects needed to be minimised. 5 The emphasis on ethnographic description in the Reddis and the shift to a new kind of extended fieldwork through sustained observation are other signs of changing anthropological frameworks corroding the dominance of the colonial discipline, with its armchair practice, evolutionist/anthropometric bias and dominant status. 6 It is this shift and the underlying anti-evolutionist paradigms that open new pathways of understanding native culture in terms that are not only more generous, but also marked by a relative degree of humility. 7 While such a model of modernisation and development no doubt provided a realistic assessment of what was possible for the Kondareddis in the given situation, the moral endorsement that it commanded is a sign of its normative force. Haimendorf's acquiescence to the moral authority represented by Balananda, i.e., the sevak who brought modernity through settled agriculture to the 'primitive' shifting cultivators, blinded him to the nascent political relations that the formation of the PRS signalled. This blindness to emerging political forms was to be expected given the residue of evolutionism in Haimendorf's culturalist perspective, even though his work shows a clear political understanding of the contemporary tribal in the predatory grip of the money-lending contractors who formed part of the modern colonial economy. In other words, even though he knew that the predicament of the tribal was a modern one, he continued to evaluate their 'backwardness' in evolutionary terms. Such a residue of evolutionism was part of the general current of cultural anthropology which accepted the historical ranking of civilisations according to the modern notion of progress, while disavowing the physical basis of race in that

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ranking. 8 In the anthropological framework Haimendorf worked within-the fact that the Swami, who represented an advanced civilisation, chose to live among the primitive tribes and perform 'service' to aid their acculturation in relatively modern economic and cultural registers-outweighs any consideration of the politics such a service entails. 9 An almost identical valuation of service in general persists to this day. My aim in this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of the political relations that emerge around the Swami's cooperative society with the hindsight of half a century. This will inevitably mean that the perspective adopted here will be non-committal about the morality of the Swami's enterprise. Raghavaiah Committee Report 10 The second mention of Swami Balananda in the archives occurs in the Raghavaiah Committee Report (Aiyappan 1948: 20) on the socio-economic conditions of the scheduled tribes in the Madras Presidency; which mentions in passing the good work of the Swami in integrating the tribals into the national mainstream. The Chairman of the Committee V. Raghavaiah, a well-known Gandhian sevak from Nellore, was secretary of the Bharatiya Adimjati Sevak Sangh after A. V. Thakkar. 11 The report emphasised that the tribals, 'our weakest brethren', were in danger of being left behind in the great change that seemed imminent on the Indian political landscape at the turn of Independence. It lamented the poor implementation of tribal improvement programmes during colonial rule and stressed the need to assimilate the tribals through a process of integration into the mainstream. It rued the British administrative focus on short-term solution of immediate problems. It stressed the need to develop the economic potential of the agency areas. The Committee recommended the establishment of a special office to undertake these urgent tasks. From the perspective of a SO-year gap, it is only too easy to read these complaints as an epistemologically unproblematic nationalist assessment of British rule and its discontents. However, the infancy of such a discourse (alongside the freshness of the Swami's incursion into the agency areas) complicates the matter. This infancy may be inferred from the report, which stresses that its work in the national scene was delayed by a decade. The

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Government of Bombay had appointed a special officer in 1937 for the same purpose, the Thakkar committee report on the partiallyexcluded areas of Orissa was commissioned in 1940, and the Central Provinces appointed a special officer in 1942 (Aiyappan 1948: 3). These initiatives occur with the empowerment of the governors of the provinces in tribal matters with the Government of India Act of 1935. When seen in the context of the Godavari agency area, with which I am primarily concerned in this chapter, the general tone of pity and the description of the tribal in the report as 'our weakest minority', 'flesh of our own flesh', and 'tribes not harijans, but weaker' (ibid.: 3-5) drastically differ from the Forest Policy of 1936, which I will have occasion to examine shortly. How did the nationalist non-officials gain the courage and perspective to voice these powerful criticisms in what seems like a natural language in retrospect? Taking the question a step further, at what precise juncture and with what transformation in perspective did the inward-directed self-criticism of the social reformists become an accusing finger pointing at the ruler? It is easy to attribute these shifts to a dominant personality, say that of Gandhi, but that does not answer why he was so widely endorsed among the nationalists as speaking the truth. I cannot satisfactorily attribute these changes to a simple understanding of nationalist hegemony either, because the question is one of understanding the emergence of new truths and passionate beliefs. It is a question of understanding the conditions that enable nationalist speech to shelve an earlier colonial truth in the dusty archives of ideology past its prime. If we were to picture the change, it would seem as if at a moment in travel through a political landscape, a new imaginary horizon signalling an entire new way oflife appears-transforming some q11estions beyond recognition (such as proportionate represen•ation of castes and tribes in national politics), throwing others away as insignificant (such as understanding caste and tribes in terms of race), generating new ones that make sense in the new scenario (such as the urgent questions of welfare). The old landscape seems grim and mountainous in hindsight and everything done in that phase of history seems wrong, waiting to be corrected by the pristine certainties of the new moment. Thomas Kuhn's concept of the 'paradigm shift' (1962) does not capture the range of ethical, political, epistemological, and

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aesthetic dilemmas that the shift engenders. It also does not help us to understand the complex restructuring of relationships between institutions, forms of knowledge and historical types of personality that occur in the process. The Malayappan Report references to the Poverty Relief Service

The Malayappan Report (Malayappan 1951), of the Special Agency Development Officer of the agency areas, had no direct mention of Swami Balananda. However, it did refer explicitly to the government order sanctioning a grant and loan to the Swami's cooperative society at Suravaram as a precedent to the funding mechanism proposed in the Plan on a large scale. 12 The Suravaram cooperative society was started by the PRS, ostensibly for the benefit of a small group of Koyas who lived there. While the Malayappan Plan is the theme of the second part of the current chapter, it is sufficient to point out here that this Plan recommended that the tribals who practised shifting cultivation in the agency areas be settled in cooperative agricultural societies with plots of land for permanent cultivation. This was essentially what Balananda's cooperative society at Suravaram was supposed to do. That this process of settlement of the tribal was fraught with difficulty is evident in the Malayappan Report suggestion that the plots were to be cooperatively owned so that clandestine sale of land by the tribal was impossible (Malayappan 1951: 8). An explanation of the reasoning for this somewhat forcible settlement of the tribal for his good, and against his will, may be had from the Forest Policy (Government of India 1938) that deals with reservation of forests, hitherto freely available to the tribals, for government use (Malayappan [1951] also refers to this policy). In the Forest Policy file, which details a 20-year debate on revising the laws of forest reservation under threat of Koya revolt, the changing circumstances are noted by the Commissioner of the Board of Revenue in 1935, who makes an astute observation on the tribal preference to eschew land ownership (Government of India 1938). Since the tribal is always indebted to the moneylender and the former cannot read what the latter writes as his due, the tribal would prefer not to have property in his name. When he is free of land, the tribal is also freed of debt burden since the moneylender

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or trader can only take what remains after the tribal has taken care of his own food and livelihood. However (the Commissioner continues), it is necessary to 'improve' the condition of the Koyas by settling land 'on them' without giving them the right to alienate the land through sale, so that at least a limited sense of property may be inculcated. In this connection, he suggests that it is necessary to examine the forest officials' idea to import plainsmen to the settlements so that they employ the Koyas on the one hand and also act as exemplars for a disciplined land cultivation practice on the other. Thus, by the mid-1930s the colonial government was beginning to examine something that may be called the 'improvement' of the Koyas, through settlement and inculcation of a civilised sense of property. 13 This urge to settle the tribal as a legible subject was an evolving disciplinary trend in mature colonial rule. 14 The colonial solution to the problem of tribal land loss to the predatory nontribal was to enact special laws to prohibit sale of agency land to non-tribals from 1917 onwards (Government of India 1917). 15 I will comment on the vicissitudes of the colonial effort at settlement in the section on Muthadars and Karnams. This trend of settling the tribal was carried forward to the threshold of implementation in the Malayappan Plan, which also inaugurates several new welfare moves that transform the character of governmental intervention into something very different from the simple settlement model envisaged by colonialism. Anchoring these changes is the precedent of the PRS cooperative society started by Balananda in Suravaram in 1950. The Agent's View of Swami Balananda and the Poverty Relief Service in Suravaram

The most direct reference to the Swami and the PRS may be found in the government file (Government of India 19511 that contains the recommendation for sanction of loans and grants to the members of the cooperative society called Balanandanagar at Suravaram. The recommendation made by the Agent of the Godavari praises the Swami as a messiah-come ... an ascetic ... essentially in (the world) with a singleness of purpose to do everything in his means to compass

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the well being of the tribe and to enable them to participate in the blessings of a civilised existence (ibid).

I have outlined this same citation in chapter 3, this volume, linking it to the problematic of seva. It is now possible to bring out the difference between the settlement plan outlined in the Forest Policy (Government of India 1938) where the exemplar was merely that for disciplined agricultural practice, and the exemplarmessiah, i.e., the sevak, who will shepherd the tribal towards the blessings of a modern existence with a missionary zeal (see chapter 1 in this volume). SWAMI BALANANDA AS A SEVAK

In chapter 1, this volume, I have described the Gandhian sevak as a historically advanced type among a cluster of service-oriented types that worked during late colonial rule. Vivekananda was an intellectual precursor to the concept of seva without being necessarily a sevak in the strict sense. Swami Balananda was on the one hand a self-proclaimed disciple of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda's guru. Unlike Vivekananda who was a more or less secular figure, Balananda claimed to have seen god in moments of possession. According to hagiography he was driven by a vision of Durga to build a temple in the place of a local shrine to Yellamma and construct a Ramakrishna Ashram in Perantapalle (see Bhakta Brundam Balananda 1998). He continued to see god during the later period of his life, sometimes during festive celebrations, and sometimes without any impetus. On the other hand, Balananda was a politically active ascetic-he fought against the Razakars before and during the Hyderabad Police Action, and worked for the freedom movement (see ibid.) .16 In all these, Balananda was supposed to have the guidance of Ramakrishna. The difficulty of accounting for political guidance from Ramakrishna-he is well known to have shunned political affairs throughout his life-was solved by the Swami Balananda Jeevita Viseshalu (ibid.) in the following manner: Ramakrishna continued to observe the world and change his perspective after he attained Samadhi, and the growing oppression of British rule made him appear before Balananda and advise him to enter politics to ameliorate the peoples' suffering. This made the Swami ponder

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over the matter and enter the secular domain with reluctant obedience. Swami Balananda wrote a volume on the nation and its development, which was due to be presented at the Moral Rearmament Conference at Sevagram in 1949, but could only be presented at the next conference at Shanti Niketan, a few years later (Balananda 1956). These Liographical episodes are clear indicators that Balananda does indeed qualify to be described as a sevak in the precise historical sense I have developed in chapter 1. Balananda in turn had a faithful devotee in a Karnam of the Suravaram village called Purushottam Das, who was known to have brought Gandhi's disciple Vinoba Bhave to Bhadrachalam in the Bhoodan movement. 17 Das, according to some strands of local memory, was a distinguished and respectable Karnam who had donated nearly 900 acres of land to the Sree Ramachandra temple at Bhadrachalam. 18 According to his widowed sister, he had died several years earlier, and a flood in the Godavari during the 1980s had destroyed all his documents and records irretriev,.bly. 19 On the other hand, Purushottam Das also had a dubious reputation as a real estate wheeler-dealer among some other officials. 20 I will have occasion to return to Das often in the course of this chapter. Thus Balananda formed linkages with the village elite as part of his seva enterprise. The process by which the Swami establishes support linkages is also evident from the Special Agency Development Officer Malayappan's letter endorsing the Agent's proposal for loans to the PRS, in which the Swami emerges as a man with secular goodwill and national welfare at his heart (Government of India 1951). 21 Thus, if we see the sevak as a political figure that is larger than the intentional product of Gandhi's thought and practice, Balananda's work as an ascetic activist becomes explicable. 22 The 'natural' linkage between Balananda, Karnam Purushottam Das and Vinoba Bhave in one dir~ction; Balananda, Malayappan and Raghavaiah in a second direction; and Balananda, the Agent of Godavari and the Presidency Government Officials in the third direction; and last but not least, Balananda, Haimendorf and the Hyderabad officials, gives us one glimpse of a network of political relationships among diverse social groups, representatives and actors, made possible by what I have broadly characterised as seva. The normative drive that makes this possible is Balananda's discourse and practice that mobilises Hindu culture to uplift

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the 'wretched' tribal. It is this normative force and the ethical conviction of a renewed Hindu culture that convinces the Agent of the Godavari to recommend the Swami in glowing terms. 23 In the resulting hegemonic linkage, the exact work of the sevak is less important than the fact that there is a broad web of activity in a geographic, political and cultural area that was just a short period ago barred to the plainsman. The sevak enters the tribal space with government and religion in tow. In other words, he is the prime instrument of urban entry into and control of the hinterland. 24 In the text of Malayappan's recommendation for the cooperative society, the exemplary activity of the Swami and Karnam will consist in providing an environment that teaches the Koyas the right way to till the soil, i.e., they (the former) will be ideals on the colonial administrative model I have just discussed. This simple description of the Swami is deceptive in two ways: first, because Malayappan adds that this small cooperative exercise will become a model for large-scale settlement in the agency area, and the Malayappan Plan is the result. The Swamf is thus a precursor for the Plan itself in the important sense of providing a pilot model for the ethical stance and political strategy of the developmental nation-state. Second, the importance of the sevak really arises in his exemplary quality, not so much for the Koyas targeted by the PRS but rather for the officials (like Malayappan, the Agent of Godavari, etc.), activists (like Purushottam Das) and other people who play a part in converting the formal freedom of 194 7 into a 'true' freedom that is brought about by an internalised commitment to seva. 25 His presence is a stamp of approval for the project of nation-building that moves the phlegmatic officials beyond their carping at petty detail. Seen from this perspective, his is a luminous national presence guiding lesser mortals in the ethics of conduct towards unfortunate tribal souls. This then is the profile of the sevak that emerges in the academic/ administrative discourse between the 1930s and the 1950s. The sevak and the non-official in general are exemplary beings who in their singular status are in some ways the seed around which civil, societal and governmental consciousness crystallise. As I have argued in the Introduction, it is important to realise that the relationship between civil society and State in India is not simply oppositional as theorised in the West, in spite of different confrontations between the two. Structurally, Indian civil society

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in the pre- and peri-Independence period is the crucible in which a nationalist governmental thought develops. It would be worth juxtaposing this image of the Swami in records against the memories of the Swami narrated in interviews by people who knew him. SWAMI IN SMALL MEMORIES

Interview with Ramaiah of Rekapalle 26

Rekapalle is a small town at the junction of the Sabari and the Godavan, about four hours upstream of Perantapalle. Also called Vararamachandrapuram, it is a quiet one-street town with memories that run back to the 1950s. One Karnam Ramaiah, now possibly 75 years of age, lives in this village and remembers the affairs of Swami Balananda clearly. 27 The freshness of living memory astonishes! Unlike the gentle Swami of the documents, Ramaiah's Swami is steeped in politics and violence. Ramaiah does not brand him as evil in any unequivocal sense, but his narrative, largely based on the memory of his dead senior friend Satyam, is complex and multi-layered in its ethical tone. Satyam was another Karnam the Swami liked (the first being Purushottam Das at Suravaram), and some stress on this brings home the kind of disciples the sevak attracted. I will continue the narrative, simply remarking here that the main thread of our discussion of seva in this chapter follows the historic destiny of the Karnam as a disciple of the exemplary sevak. Satyam was assigned the task of handling money. He would collect the money earned from the sale of forest coupes to the government and pay the tribals in kind (rice) or cash. 28 The Swami himself did not handle the money. According to Ramaiah, this was the story of the Swami told by Satyam before he died: 29 The Swami implicitly trusted Satyam as his right hand man. Satyam never refused to do the tasks assigned to him. One day, Swami asked Satyam to bring a register from the room he used to meditate and rest in. The only furnishing in that small room was a tigerskin. When Satyam couldn't find the register, he searched under the tiger-skin and uncovered a pistol. Satyam was shocked-what was a pistol doing in the Swami's room?

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''Another thing happened after this. One rowdy from our village-he was a wicked fellow, with bad qualities, was Swami's disciple too. During the Razakar time, the Swami sent him to Ashwarraopet to get some money (for the Ashram) through rowdyism. 30 He returned with a kidnapped Muslim and had tied him to a tree at Koida, a village neighbouring Perantapalle on the Godavari. Satyam, when he was walking from the launch at the jetty to the village along with the Swami and the rowdy, heard a feeble shout. The Swami continued on the path to the village, but Satyam took the other path and found the man tied, weeping. "Release me, or else I will die" he pleaded. The prisoner, who was fair and wore a white lalchi said the rowdy had brought him here to kill him. Swami had not told Satyam anything. Satyam behaved in accordance with humanity. He felt very bad and untied the man and told him to run away in another direction. "When Satyam saw all these things happening-the pistol, and the bound Muslim-he began doubting the Swami: "he is not a man of peace". He wanted to escape from the organisation after settling accounts. He went to Rajamundry, settled accounts with the Swami and was about to leave. Swami realised that if Satyam survived, some facts would be leaked to the public about the Ashram. He asked Satyam to get into his car-the Swami had a car by which he travelled to Devipatnam from Rajamundry, after which he would take the launch to Perantapalle. Satyam pleaded for mercy "Swami, I have never done you any wrong-I have done everything you have asked for, I have obeyed your every word. Please let me go", because he knew that the Swami had the pistol with him and he was going to kill him. But he was forced to go with the Swami. When they got off at Devipatnam, he asked for permission to urinate, went into the bushes and ran away. He never went back to Swami and returned to Rekapalle. The Swami too never came near him. "One other time, the Swami asked Satyam whether he knew the Bendapudi Sadhu from East Godavari district. Satyam had heard of this Sadhu, an extremely violent man, who had set up an ashram. He was known to have killed several people. "He is my colleague", said the Swami to Satyam. It thus dawned on Satyam that the Swami and his colleague were violent men who didn't belong to this region. He thought they were probably from North India. 31 ... There are rumours that he was actually Alluri Sitarama Raju, who

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had escaped from the British and came to Perantapalle. 32 There is some possibility of this too, because Raju too was known to be violent-he would kill easily with his sword and throw the body into tbc Godavari. The ages would match, because the Swami too would have been in his early twenties during the Alluri Sitarama Raju rebellion. The quality of Ramaiah's account is unique in its logical storyline, its ethical drive and sureness of perspectival bias. What is even more interesting is the way in which a speculative interjection by my guide, whether Balananda was actually Alluri Sitarama Raju in hiding, was dealt with. Ramaiah simply responded, 'is that what you want, now let me tell you', and wove in a plausible acccant of how it was entirely possible that Balananda was indeed Raju. Karnam Ramaiah lived in extremely modest surroundings, but was unhesitant, self-assured and authoritative in his conduct right through the interview, even though it was most likely the first (and perhaps last) in his life. While it is likely that this narrative authority is a personal trait, it is also important to think about its caste-cultural legacy from what is possibly an early historiographic tradition of the Karnams of South India, discussed at length in a recent study by Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam (2001; especially the chapter 'Of Karnams and Kings'). In other words, it would be necessary to explore the authority, self-assuredness and faith in the veracity of his speech, not simply as individual traits, but as cultural characteristics of a caste whose profession was to keep the truth of historical records of land ownership, social power and political authority alive and effective. Interview with Badisa Muthiah of Suravaram

Badisa Muthiah is a 93-year old Koya man from Suravaram in Khammam district. Suravaram is 29 kilometres north of Bhadrachalam town on the road to Venkatapuram. 33 When I first met him, I did not know ifl had come to the right village, i.e., the one in which Swami Balananda had started the cooperative society for the 12 Koyas described in the Government Order (1951). By then I had already wrongly identified two other villages called Suravaram in the region. When I asked the village postmaster (also a Koya) to tell us about Swami Balananda and the cooperative society,

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he did not know anything but offered to call the oldest person in the village. Soft of speech, gait slow but firm, gaze dignified and friendly, Badisa Muthiah was introduced to us as this man. Muthiah did not remember anything at first, and the words 'Swami' or 'Balananda' did not bring forth any memories. However, I had a copy of Haimendorf's Reddis of Bison Hills (1945) from which I showed him a photograph of the young Swami at the Perantapalle Ashram along with a group of Kondareddis. He first recognised the others in the picture as 'the Reddis who live on the hills'. 34 He then squinted at the bearded long-haired figure and remembered him immediately as the 'Sadhu'. He then remembered an incident concerning the water tank nearby. The bund had been collapsing every monsoon for many years, and the people didn't know what to do. When the Sadhu came, he decided to help in the matter and took three fistfuls of earth, said some magic words each time and threw them in the gap. All of us then hefted earth and rock and packed the bund tight. Since then it has never failed. 35

This incident finds mention in the government order recommending the funding of the cooperative society in these terms. A tank [of] about 18 acres ... is in a state of disrepair ... The next urgent question to be tackled is the improvement of the tank. This has been undertaken at the time of starting. Swamiji has set an example to the colonists in the work by himself removing the first shod [sic] of earth from the tank bed to the bund. The rest followed and are now doing the repairs. In order to complete the repairs before the outbreak of the monsoon, outside labour has to be recruited and paid. Its cost estimated at Rs. 500/- will be defrayed by the society from out of the share capital which the Swamiji is subscribing in addition to a free grant to the colonists, for this purpose (Government of India 1951: 2).

The colonists mentioned in this quotation are 12 Koyas invited by 'careful selection', a Karnam who has 'come under the spell of the Swami and has since developed a spiritual bent of mind' and five non-Koyas. Elaborating on the non-Koyas, the note adds, 'though quite contrary to the purpose of the scheme, it has

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become necessary to allow these adventurous persons to settle down so as to serve as an inducement to the Koyas to settle along with them'. 36 Muthiah's oral testimony has it somewhat differently. Right from the beginning, his people had nothing to do with the Sadhu's cooperative settlement. 37 He remembers very clearly that none of the Koyas had settled on the land because they believed that there was a 'Shaitaan' (devil) on that land. They had cleared the jungle for the Sadhu, but had completely stayed off the land themselves. According to Muthiah, two years after the five 'kammas' settled there, all of them died the same year of some unknown disease after a good crop. This convinced the Koyas that a Shaitaan was indeed at play and they left the land well alone. The Karnam then contacted the Sadhu and gave the land to other non-Koyas after the latter had driven away the Shaitaan. Muthiah was the first of our respondents to name the Karnam as Purushottam Das, which was corroborated by several people later including Ramaiah interviewed in the previous section. It is difficult to describe the ambivalence of Muthiah's words and tone more than 15 years after Das's death. When I probed him about whether Das was a 'good man or a bad man', he first said that he was both good and bad. 38 Muthiah said that Das rarely spoke with each of them. He only talked to the Koya Patel, i.e., their 'police' representative, completely dealing through him. He knew that the Das would occasionally give the Patel a rupee for toddy and take away the money (grant and loan, wages, etc.) that was supposed to be in their name. At this point, Muthiah spat into the yard and said, 'what is this about his being good and bad, he was all bad!' The wording of the government order is unclear about whether the Swami actually lived in Suravaram. It describes his 'arrival', his meeting the Koyas, his starting the cooperative society along with Das and his zeal to begin the work immediately, leaving an unsuspecting reader with the impression that the Swami was actually a present-moving force who lived at least temporarily among the residents. Muthiah, however, is quite clear in his memory of the Sadhu. He came to Suravaram twice on horseback. Each time he arrived in the morning and left by the evening. Muthiah had no direct impressions of the Sadhu's character. 'We never met him ... he was always among the "big men" 39 and we were in another group. Once Das took us in his presence and told

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us that the Sadhu was a big man, and we said "yes, he is a big man" and saluted him. What did we know then?' Other memories of Balananda

Clearly, then the cooperative society at Suravaram was not what

it was made out to be, i.e., an institution that was intended to

bring the good life to the Koyas. The answer to the question 'what the cooperative was for' first came from one of the non-tribal farmers of the Balanandanagar cooperative. 40 This farmer had seen the Swami, had been blessed by him and advised to farm well. According to him, the land is now in dispute (2002) between the current non-tribal occupants and the Balananda Bhakta Brundam of Perantapalle-the Koyas of Suravaram have no stake in the matter directly. The aim of the cooperative society was to provide income for the PRS at Perantapalle, which had run out of income when the bamboo coupes were abolished sometime in the 1950s. It thus becomes clear that the cooperative society was established to use the Koyas to draw in government money and rent from the tenant farmers to run the Ashram. In the event, this exploitation of a governmental inclination to provide for tribal welfare becomes a precedent to a large-scale model to propose government finance for the development of the Koyas through the Malayappan Plan. The Mandal Revenue Office of Dummagudem has fair Adangal records of a diagonal and offset survey (Andhra) system. 41 The survey and settlement has been done. 42 The Mandal Revenue Officer said that according to his memory, Purushottam Das was placed under suspension for writing documents in an unauthorised manner. His brother too was accused of selling Bhadrachalam tribal land. As of 2003, there was a case filed by a Kondareddi teacher from Perantapalle, on behalf of the Balananda Bhakta Brundam, about the non-payment of rent by the non-tribal occupiers of the land at Suravaram. I travelled nearly 60 kilometres down the road from Bhadrachalam to Chintur, through several square kilometres of maturing government teak plantations, to speak with the aforementioned Kondareddi teacher who worked at an Ashram government school for tribal children in a small village called Bodlugudem. 43 The teacher said that earlier, before 1973, the farmers renting the Suravaram land used to send produce to Perantapalle. Later they

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began to send money to reduce transportation costs. Slowly, as the Swami aged and died in 1975, rents stopped coming and the Ashram was in dire straits. The old faithful thought of two options: (a) handing over the ashram to the Endowments Department; or (b) keeping it in their control and fighting the matter in court. The second idea won out. The Balananda Bhakta Brundam, a prayer organisation, was founded by members who wanted to keep the legacy of the Ashram alive, and who contributed a bag of rice each year (the teacher continues to send a bag of rice to the Ashram to this day). The Bhakta Brundam took the matter of the Suravaram cooperative to court. The teacher is one of the representatives of the Bhakta Brundam at the litigation, now being adjudicated by the Commissioner of Settlements at Hyderabad. The teacher said that when the Swami came to Perantapalle, he found a Yellamma Talli shrine there. He had the shrine demolished to make place for a bigger temple. They found bricks and a Siva linga in the debris. Balananda thus dedicated the new temple to Siva. Interview with Kondareddi Balaraju at Perantapalle: 44 Balaraju, a Kondareddi at Perantapalle, spoke haltingly about the PRS, the Ashram and the Bhakta Brundam. In his narrative, the Swami, who he referred to as aiyyagaru, 45 was the blameless centre of all the corruption that emerged in the history of the Ashram at Perantapalle. The PRS was the original organisation started by the Aiyyagaru. 46 Sahukars (money-lending businessmen) who exploited the Kondareddis originally cornered the bamboo auction. Aiyyagaru helped the Kondareddis and they began bidding through the PRS. However, as time went by, clerks (gumasthalu) like Satyam who worked for Aiyyagaru began siphoning some of the money earned in the auction and that led to the slow collapse of the revenue. Things got worse when the tenants of the Suravaram land stopped paying rent because they thought the rent collectors of the PRS were siphoning off the money. To add to all this, Purushottam Das, who was to take care of the land at Suravaram, applied for a title on the 10 acres of Balanandanagar cultivated by him. The government refused in the early 1980s. While Aiyyagaru started the PRS, those who wanted to protect the Ashram for the future started the Bhakta Brundam. Aiyyagaru's PRS was an organisation where many people did seva,

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and one of them, a doctor was also present to take care of the health of the people working at Perantapalle.47 This doctor had run the organisation for several years as president. 48 Today the Integrated Tribal Development Agency was doing a great deal of work for the Ashram, but Aiyyagaru had always advised us that anything we got in the world should have been earned through at least a little labour on our part. MEMORY AND HISTORY

The surpnsmg play between memory and document in the accounts of Swami Balananda reflects, first of all, a difference in their respective historical moments and political agendas. The documents of the 1950s deploy the Swami as an ethical token that gives a specific programme or project legitimacy. This strategic use of his profile creates the aura of goodness that envelops all accounts of his life and work. In contrast, several features distinguish the memories of the Swami today from his representation in the historical record. Since they are current, dynamic traces of living memory; buffeted by the pressures of politics, and since they are enmeshed in several ongoing struggles, the tales of the Swami develop a realist flavour that is completely different from the written record. 49 On the one hand, the Balananda Bhakta Brundam and the Kondareddis of Perantapalle think he is a noble soul who has provided them an opportunity to live well. This belief is integral to their sense of moral rectitude in trying to recover the rent for the Suravaram land being tilled by the non-tribals, and their complete nonchalance with respect to the recorded purpose of the cooperative society. On the other hand, the Karnam Ramaiah had a jaundiced view of Balananda from a perspective, which was decidedly in favour of Satyam as a misunderstood member of the rural elite. Ramaiah's defence of Purushottam Das, characteristic in its positive evaluation, received casual corroboration from another reluctant Karnam I briefly spoke with in Bhadrachalam. The Kaya elder Muthiah spoke of Das and the Swami in terms that reflected his experience of their dealings. The Swami was evidently a distant and poorly understood figure of power and authority, and Das had entrenched himself in Muthiah's memory deeply enough for the latter to retain a strong antipathy years after the death of the

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former. Each lived history of practical engagement with the Swami and the structures he came to represent resulted in a specific, completely unromantic memory. These registers of history and memory indicate that the implementation of an ethical idea like welfare is enmeshed in politics from the moment of its emergence. At my level of observation, however, whatever the ethical charge of the several discourses about him, there is little doubt that the Swami was acknowledged as a leader of singular local stature, who could and did organise a configuration of village clerks, mofussil doctors and metropolitan officers in a sustained and energetic manner to perform seva for the beneficiaries. The morality of his relationship with governmental policy agendas is of secondary importance to all who speak of him. The relation between the living account of what happened and what was stated in the formal record is not one of correspondence, but of a system of relays that encourage us to interpret what happened as best as we can. Methodologically; this exercise recalls and rehearses for us the historiographic adage to be sceptical about any simple correspondence between the written account and what happened on the ground. It is of course equally important to understand that the oral record is not an exact account of what happened on the ground either. Rather, both the oral record and the written one are in fact what 'happen'-they embody part of the truth that emerges in discourse and practice. The full significance of the sevak and the telos of seva become evident in the Malayappan Plan document, which uses the Swami's presence and practice as a relay to propose a new development agenda for the territory. However, before I proceed to the Malayappan Plan, it would be useful to look at the historical relationship between the Karnam and another tribal political authority called the Muthadar by drawing out a comparison of our Koya respondent Badisa Muthiah's evaluation (implicit and explicit) of each of the two kinds of local authority. INTERLUDE: KovA, KARNAM AND MmHADAR

The Muthadar was an officially designated, decentralised agent of revenue collection for the colonial government in the agency areas of the Madras Presidency. 50 He was invariably a member of the community he represented. However, he may or may not have been

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a chieftain since it was British practice to nominate individuals who could collect the revenues for them. The post was hereditary but liable to be transferred at the colonial rulers' pleasure. The Mutha was a collection of villages under the command of a Muthadar and could number in hundreds in the largest cases (Sastry and Subba Reddy 1991). V. N. V. K. Sastry and K. V. Subba Reddy have described in detail the travails of the Muthadar, who was often a sympathetic leader of the community he spoke for, sometimes not collecting revenue under difficult conditions and on occasion paying the shortfall from his own purse (see Sastry and Subba Reddy 1991: S4-SS). 51 The authors have also suggested that the 'double face' of the Muthadar as the political leader of the people and as a revenue collection agent of the government led to this authority being considered less than reliable. This was exacerbated by the fact that Muthadars led major rebellions, such as the Rampa Rebellion of 1869. Because of these problems, attempts were made to ensure better collection of revenue through the unequivocal presence of a village officer (i.e., a munsif or karnam) in 26 Muthas of the Visakhapatnam district in the Godavari agency (ibid.: SS). In the Golugunda and Rampa territory, this officer was also called the pettandar. The munsif or karnam, being a locallyrooted revenue authority of the plains territory, was an agent of coercion who would determine who in the tribal village would be conscripted to work for the government and for the regional authorities. He was structurally an 'advanced' alternative to the ambiguous Muthadar for the purpose of strict revenue collection, even though in the hierarchy of power, the karnam of one village reported the Muthadar (who commanded several villages) and gave the latter the revenue collected on his behalf (ibid.). In a tell-tale bypassing of intermediate authority characteristic of the establishment of ryotwari administration, it was also expected that the village officer would obey the orders of the British agent or his officers who controlled the Mutha. The evaluation of Muthadars is equivocal in administrative/ academic analyses, Sastry and Subba Reddy (1991) being more sympathetic, as was the Raghavaiah Committee (Aiyappan 1948). The Malayappan (19Sl) Report found the Muthadari system oppressive even though individual Muthadars were less exploitative. However, it is also clear that in lay conversation in the agency areas, the Muthadars are seen as throwbacks of a

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feudal era, and the Muthadari system was abolished by the State in 1969. The Tribal Land Regulation Act II of 1970, that facilitated the survey and settlement of tribals, accompanied this abolition so that their land ownership would be known and, more importantly, their location would be fixed. This Act was, in spite of the benign intention of distributing land to the tribal that drove it, the last step in the long legal-administrative march to establish the legibility and pacification of the tribals. It is against this background that I try to assess the overwhelming presence of the Karnam in the scene of the story I have traced in the preceding part of this chapter. By 1951, in these specific borderline agency areas, the plainsmen had already begun to make inroads into the tribal lands. Badisa Muthiah's account of how his people cleared the Balananda acreage of forests so that settled cultivation could be practised in the cooperative society is a direct indication of the fragile and labile boundary between the retreating forest and the advancing plain. The ambiguity of and antipathy towards the Karnam in Muthiah's imagination are an indication of the former's increasing local dominance in this region (see page 92). What was interesting, however, was the complete difference in affect with respect to the Muthadar, the earlier and greater figure of local authority. I had asked him whether he had every performed 'chakiripani', crudely bonded labour. Muthiah responded: Yes! What is there to be ashamed about it? When any of us were in dire need we would do chakiripani for the Muthadar. I have done 14 years with my Muthadar and I am saying it with my head up. There is nothing wrong with working in need. I was given a bowl of gruel each day as my food, and I was paid a rupee each year as my wages. The Muthadar gave me work to do, different kinds of work. 52

Thus it becomes apparent that the intrusion of the plainsman authority of the Karnam through the cooperative society brought into Muthiah's life an element of destabilisation, as did the end of the Mutha system and the loss of a de facto community leadership that the administrative post of the Muthadar had crystallised. It is a matter of historical interest that the decentralised authority of the Karnam was found viable until the late-twentieth century in Andhra Pradesh under the independent Indian state administrative system. The Telugu Desam Party's first Chief Minister, the

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cinema actor, N. T. Rama Rao espoused the administrative innovation of dividing the district into mandals, thus making the government more accessible to the villagers. This measure was accompanied by the abolition of the Karnam's quasi-governmental post and hereditary tenure, and its replacement by the village assistant, who was a fully paid state official. Thus, ostensibly the state increased its centralised control and surveillance of society through the administrative machinery, eliminating what N. Mukherjee and R. E. Frykenberg have called in the context of colonial rule, the 'principle of the white ant', i.e., the specifically (south) Indian corruption/corrosion of the framework of central authority by silent, determined local energy of the Karnam (Mukherjee and Frykenberg 1969). However, the regularising objective of this centralisation seems deceptive at least from one account. The abolition of the Karnam erased the hereditary, rooted structure of knowledge of land tenure that went with him. The village assistant, being a transferable figure, could not match the record-keeping power of the Karnam and was easily misled. Thus, at least according to one account, several thousand acres of land were appropriated by well-positioned people of the Kamma caste supporting the Telugu Desam Party, due to the loss of localised legibility and control of land caused by the abolition of the hereditary Brahmin post of the Karnam. 53 If this were the case, it seems as if a move of administrative centralisation was out-manoeuvred by a political agenda that precisely sought a loss of local administrative control and political power. And yet, there is a historical change in the structure of power. The removal of the Karnam is also in some ways the annihilation of the caste structure that formed the foundation of local rule and regulation, on the basis of which India famously lived as a collection of village republics. This change alongside the change in landholding (if it was true) suggests that centralisation is the process by which capitalism alters the structure of the periphery. This alteration of the periphery is paralleled by a modernisation of caste domination that is not its elimination, but its transformation into new configurations of power and economy. In the broad national perspective, it is possible to speculate that the fate of the Karnam's record-keeping and administrative function takes another historical trajectory. To do this, it is necessary to differentiate between the Vaidika Brahmin who performed priestly functions, thus being conscious of pollution,

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purity and tending to Sanatanist conduct, and the Niyogi Brahmin (of which the Karnam is a specific type) who took to administrative, ministerial and secular historiographic functions. When I make this separation, it seems as if the Karnam function wins on the national stage what it loses at the local level. The battle for freedom also, in parallel, energises the Brahmin elite's struggle to secularise itself without loss of social dominance. This drive to secularise the Brahmin elite follows the path out of the agrahara into the world, opened out by the Karnam in the administrative field, and extends this path strategically through seva to arrive at the modern development-administrative profile. s4 The appetite for historiography that, according to Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam (2001), characterised the Karnam of the grand pre-British tradition whets itself. History is told anew from the modern Karnam's pen as it writes in the name of the sovereign national state. It is in this register that Nehru's writings on the The Discovery of India, his Autobiography, and the specific remark I have cited from the latter on the need to think of a secularisation of the Brahmin's task of service to society through the 'Brahminisation of all classes and groups (not in the religious sense)', becomes understandable.ss I now turn to the Malayappan Plan, keeping this speculative history of the secularisation of the Karnam's function in peripheral vision.

II

The Malayappan Plan for the Agency Areas As stated earlier, the Malayappan Report (1951) is a document

written by the Special Agency Development Officer that outlines a plan to develop the Godavari Agency area over a 10-year period. I will refer to this as the 'Malayappan Plan or Malayappan Report' interchangeably. The report/plan of the Special Agency Development Officer starts with an acknowledgement of debt to the conference of officials and non-officials held in December 1949, and its recommendation that established the Special Agency Development

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Office and made the report possible. It is not very clear whether the conference discussed the Raghavaiah Committee's findings, which had also recommended the institution of similar measures. 56 What matters is not so much whether they were in fact identical, but that the moves to institute such measures demonstrate a coherent governmental (though not yet necessarily nation-statist) intent. Given the closeness of the agendas between the Malayappan recommendations and the Raghaviah Committee's findings, there is no doubt that they were part of the same process of governmentalisation that transformed the colonial administration into a nationalist one where the tribal was the problem to be addressed. The uniqueness of the report lies in the fact that it inaugurates a new mode of state functioning at the dawn of Independence. This mode of functioning is marked by a novel confidence in the stability and peace of the region. The Forest Policy of 1938 following the adage festina lente ('make haste slowly') slowed down the reservation of forests for government use in the Rampa country; because of a chronic anxiety about tribal rebellion. 57 In contrast, the Malayappan Plan in free India confidently recommends additional reservation of forests as government lands, in full knowledge that the tribals will not rebel against such a move. This confidence finds another expression in the prefatory remarks of the same report, which said that the touring was arduous, the team that wrote the report travelled several miles each day on foot, and the only thing required was to protect themselves from malaria by spraying the halting places with DDT and using mosquito nets. In the span of about 15 years between the Forest Policy of 1938 and the Malayappan Plan of 1951, the tribal had been completely supplanted by the mosquito as the main enemy. The forests on the hills no longer constituted an alien archipelago of redoubtable trouble-making communities. 58 They were now the backward hinterland of the national territory; peopled by tribals who were very poor and their standard of living is deplorably low. They are poorly clad and ill-fed. What they produce is not sufficient even for few months. Afterwards they eat all sorts of unwholesome foods like mango kernels, bamboo shoots, bitter roots, tamarind seeds, etc. . . . The hillmen in general are very much exploited by the plains traders to whom they are eternally indebted (Malayappan 1951: 5).

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It is quite impossible to judge whether the political stability had improved 'objectively' (and therefore the tribes effectively disempowered) from the administrative perspective, because this perspective was itself undergoing severe stress and change during this period-what is clear is that the perceived landscape and perceptual framework had been transformed. In addition to this novelty of the Malayappan Plan's perspective, when seen against the recent history of colonial administration, there is yet another register in which this aspect of the document should be read. Given the broadly caste-Hindu composition of the administration at the tum of Independence, we have to try and imagine how the notion of seva facilitates a freedom from the experienced cultural force of purity and pollution. 59 Seeing the Koyas and other tribals as ill-fed, poorly-dad and exploited, and therefore in dire need of intervention of the type I have conceptualised as seva, puts the administrator (as a historicallydeveloped expression of the Kamam function) in a strong position with respect to traditional caste-Hindu society, which latter espoused a revival to Sanatana principles of Hinduism as the way in the future. In return, the administrative discourse and practice of seva strengthened the reformist activism in Hindu culture in its battle against Sanatanist Hinduism. More importantly, when the concept of seva is put into operation in the framework of tribal administration, it is subsumed within the developmental logic of the national state, providing it with the spirit of amelioration that meets the needs of both internal and external legitimacy. The developmental logic, thus armed, steals a march over the private forms of charity that characterised the business community, sidelining the latter's claim to the universal locus from which the welfare of the nation could be imagined and planned. It is in this multi-pronged advance, i.e., (a) as the culmination of an ideological thrust against a fatal colonial hesitancy; (b) in an aggressive move against a hard Sanatanist Hinduism; (c) in forging ahead of the local and idiosyncratic acts of charity through piecemeal ameliorative efforts like those of Balananda and his disciples in the trading community; and (d) in its strategic repositioning of the Koyas (among other tribals) as beneficiaries of governmental amelioration (rather than as a redoubtable political neighbour) that the penumbra of force around the Malayappan Report becomes visible.

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THE WORK OF DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

The spirit of the Malayappan Plan is to integrate the tribals to the plains culture and economy using exemplars like the Swami to teach modern cultivation, and using administrative precedents judiciously set in place through the support for the Suravaram cooperative society. The call of the hour is to eliminate all woes of the tribesmen so that they become free and equal to the more fortunate men of the plains. The interest of the Report lies in the way in which its two parts are structured: (a) the development schemes and (b) the ameliorative schemes. The development schemes call for economic development of agency resources such as land, water, forests, and minerals. The Report's truthfulness is admirable in that the settlement of the tribals is listed as one of the goals of economic development, through release of large areas of agency land for investment, and not as an ameliorative measure for the tribes. The ameliorative schemes call for the rational maximisation of health, wellbeing, education, and freedom. The analytical insight of the colonial Commissioner of Revenue, cited earlier in this chapter, to provide exemplars from the plain have now become confident plans to annihilate the woes of the tribal in one fell swoop. 60 Elimination of bonded labour, indebtedness, crippling illness, lack of communications, and poverty all form part of the plan's seemingly utopian scope. Malayappan's document often descends to the caricature of a home assignment on 'What would you do to the tribals if you were the prime minister of the country?' The innocence of the proposals seems to underline the monumental challenge of the ethical project and the economic change envisaged in the framework of development. Is it really possible to eliminate the indebtedness to moneylenders so simply? Can clearing forests for fresh agriculture on the scale envisaged significantly further the 'grow more food' campaign for the nation? Will the problem of health actually be manageable in the manner proposed? But perhaps these questions are traps that divert our attention from what the process I have described actually does: that is, it thoroughly restructures social relationships in a manner that facilitates a powerful transition to the new political order. The Plan may be seen as signalling a set of transformations that are not visible in the frameworks of analysis employed hitherto.

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As a relay from sevak to administrator

The first important transition that is being signalled in this (Malayappan Plan) document is the conceptual transfer of authority from an exemplar of a nationalist society in battle against the colonial state, i.e., the sevak (Swami and Raghavaiah) to an administrative agent of the State (Malayappan). In accepting the baton, Malayappan is transformed into an exemplar of the changing state functionary. He thus marks the transition from a colonial orientation towards revenue and law and order, to a nationalist orientation towards development of national resources and welfare/amelioration of the people. It is almost as if the sevak, in true Gandhian style, knows that once the goal is reached the task ahead is beyond his reach. However, the administrator still cannot be completely free of the sevak's authority-he needs the crutch of the example and precedent (here Balananda's cooperative society) to begin his work of re-mapping the nation and its tasks. My analysis differs from Partha Chatterjee's reading of Gandhi and J.C. Kumarappa (Chatterjee 1986: 146-57; 1993: 200-202), where the irrationality of the moment of manoeuvre is cast off by the rationality of development planning. While the sevak defers to the power of the planner, the planning spirit draws legitimacy from the ethical sensibility of the sevak. The sevak's activism rooted in charity provides the indigenous authenticating bridge between welfare in the West and planning the development of India's people. Such a reading also provides a transition whereby the historical character of welfare in India's development planning has an explanation. 61 As sketching the profile of the development administrator

The institution of a Special Agency Development Officer is new in its primary emphasis on development, which includes welfare as a specific arm of its activity. An illuminating contrast can be made with the role of the 'development department' of the Forest Policy files (Government of India 1938). When the debate on the forest policy begins, its initiators belong to the development, forest and other departments. The development department is merely an infrastructure agency. As soon as it becomes clear in the debate that the issue is a matter of policy; the revenue department takes

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command of the situation and decides the matter fairly rapidly. Thus the superior department in the colonial power structure is the revenue department. The institution of the Special Agency Development Officer marks a change in the status of development, whereby the question of revenue is relegated to secondary importance, with the nurturing of resources taking the primary place. The revenue, extractive or deductive function of colonial sovereignty loses its centrality and status to the facilitating, constructive and human/natural resource-maximising function of national government. Building an infrastructure assumes the overarching primary role in the new national development agenda. As an example of statistics in its nationalist normative incarnation

When development takes precedence over revenue, the kind of statistical knowledge required undergoes several changes. When Risley mapped the statistical evolutionary anthropology of castes and tribes (see chapter 4), 62 he had two goals: one, to add to the positive base of anthropological knowledge; two, to survey the cultural formation and classify it in a manner that would make colonial rule of law more effective in reaching into the social structure-he used the metaphor of the cadastral survey in a direct parallel to the similar move of knowledge-production in colonial land reform and settlement. The administrative aim of anthropology and statistics was primarily to help build a knowledge structure that would enable a more exact extraction of revenue and provide the political basis for a more long-lived and stable ruling structure. When Malayappan looks at the castes and tribes in the agency areas and the areas themselves, his statistical needs change. The problem is no longer to extract revenue-it is to maximise the yield of resources, both human and natural. Hence, the statistics become normative rather than explanatory: in what way do these territories fall short of the national average? In what ways and to what extent do the people of the tribal regions fall short of the national norm? Thus, questions of education, health, communications, and wealth all provide instruments to measure the extent to which the tribal population falls short of the minimum necessary level.

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As the tutelary voice of a new agent of the development of the nation As the Malayappan team surveys the agency territory, they begin to outline the possible potential of the resources of the region. The venture seeks to root itself in the market economy and tries to establish what, if nurtured well, could become a cluster of profitable enterprises. This confident gaze of what may be called the proto-capitalist spirit in India is supported by the other gaze that assesses the lives and wellbeing of people in the agency. The aim to develop capital, resources and economy finds legitimacy in the unquestionable objective of taking care of the wellbeing of the people who live there. This care for the people, regardless of social station, or rather to make up for the lack of social station, is the proof of the administrator's ultimate ethical commitment to those people. However, the scale of commitment to the people is dwarfed by the scope of the economic projects that are envisaged, and by the way in which the nationalist geography transforms a colonial territory from a hitherto troubled and unstable blot in the administrative terrain to a beautiful, difficult land waiting to be effectively utilised. The development of the agency areas seen in terms of capital investment, growth and redistribution remains outside the physical and imaginative scope of the entrepreneurial class, which forms a miniscule statistical fraction of the social structure concentrated in very specific urban centres. This is most evident in the lack of a clearly definable entrepreneurial interest in the region I am studying. That is indeed the reason why the Malayappan Plan is there in the first place-to develop enterprise, which is doubled by the task of development of an entrepreneurial class. At the same time, the Karnam Purushottam Das does represent a local interest in growth of personal wealth and power using the opportunities provided by the law and administrative apparatus. However, the rather equivocal ethical reception of his efforts-donating land to temples, trying to find ways to occupy cooperative society land, not paying the Koyas, etc.-show that he is seen as a residue of a 'colonial semi-feudal' extractive apparatus rather than as a modern entrepreneurial spirit with an ethical commitment to national development. 63 His kind of 'primitive' extractive, rent-driven ability to create wealth and power must be extinguished, as it finally is in

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the 1990s under N. T. Rama Rao. The administrative framework of this early development initiative takes on the function of a midwife of 'good' capitalist growth in India, and Malayappan's plan bears all the marks of that tutelary role characteristic of the Five-Year Plans that came to force a few years later. In the process, it erases the genealogy of its own garrulous centralised power that may be traced back to the ambivalent local, silent force of the Karnam.

Concluding Remarks There are many aspects to the restructuring of relationships described in this chapter, which need to be emphasised in a concluding summary. First, the physical presence and near-universal endorsement of the sevak as a legitimate and bonafide benefactor of the Koyas is to be noted. The Koyas were through that move, constitutedrather than just described-as 'backward'. We must remember the freshness of the move by setting it against the history of colonial forest laws that underlined administrative reticence to enter the agency areas under threat of a known and well-rehearsed history of tribal revolt. 64 Second, Balananda's practice drew on new cultural formations. His interventions were reflected in the Raghavaiah Report's criticism of colonial reticence in welfare. The Report fed into a pattern of much more powerful criticism of British rule. I remark in parentheses that the political horizon of that critical discourse is such that even today I would be hard put to find an effective and broad-based argument against this nationalist criticism of colonial rule. Third, sevak Raghavaiah's recommendation as a 'non-official'-a term whose historical density is yet to be mapped-to institute a government department to focus on agency development and tribal welfare is a marker of the new relationships between the logic of State-functioning and the nationalist thought in this fluid moment. It is therefore also necessary to understand the structure of a positive, caring, constitutive discourse that moulds the new form of the development state, as it emerges from its chrysalis in the colonial regime. For, is not the recommendation to set up an

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office to focus on tribal welfare and agency development at the end of the colonial era a constitutive act that reorients the State according to a new ethical direction, by a new political will and towards new governmental priorities? Fourth, establishing a relay with Raghavaiah's move, the lonely sevak Balananda's incursion in the tribal world was a step that signified a transformation of Hindu thought and practice-from an autistic preoccupation with Sanatanist purity to a shrewd and powerful concern for what was constituted anew as the miserable margins of caste society. It was thus also a wedge and fulcrum for a state-administered developmental and welfare intervention that was immensely more ambitious than a mere cooperative society, and this is expressed in the Malayappan Plan for the tribal areas. This kind of developmental imagination is leveraged severalfold into the national state's Five-Year Plans for development, implying morphological change in the role of administration and state apparatus. Fifth, in its effect on the ground, and with a predictable inevitability; the cooperative society is planned with what appears like a casual and unremarkable dishonesty using the specific configuration of the tribal in the governmental imagination to meet other ends. Finally, this programme was also accompanied by a set of historical changes in the institutions that settled, pacified and made the tribal legible, in the process slowly and surely transforming the cultural underpinnings of tribal life. Two important changes that occurred in the local official structure were the abolition of the post of Muthadar in the late 1960s, and that of the Karnam, much later. However, I speculate that at the national level, the Karnam function undergoes a morphological change through seva and takes centre stage in the new development administration.

Notes 1. Perantapalle is a village set on the gorge cut by the Godavari as it flows across the Papi Konda range of the Eastern Ghats between Kunavaram and Polavaram. Suravaram is about 100 kilometres upstream of Perantapalle, beyond Bhadrachalam. The Kondareddis, literally translated as 'the hill Reddis', is a scheduled tribe in the region. The Koyas are another community that falls under the governmental category of the Scheduled Tribe.

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2. The area is now in the Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh. Haimendorf visited Perantapalle, a village in the Papi Kanda range during his field visit to the uplands of the Godavari district in the Madras Presidency. The title of his monograph, Reddis of Bison Hills (1945), refers to the Kondareddi tribe. 3. See chapter 4, in this volume, for a discussion of colonial anthropology. 4. See chapter 4, in this volume, for a detailed description of colonial anthropology's timescale for cultural change in India. 5. Haimendorf describes his training in the Kulturkreis School of Vienna, followed by a post-doctoral course at the London School of Economics and Political Science, under Bronislaw Malinowski. However, Haimendorf stresses that he was never converted to the British theoretical stream of functionalism and its anti-historicist extremism. His Reddis of Bison Hills (1945) shows a theoretical inclination to American interwar anthropology, which is laced with a deep sense of historicity. See Kroeber (1948) for a contemporary critical assessment and refinement of the concept of acculturation. 6. See chapter 4, in this volume, for a discussion of evolutionism and armchair practice that formed the framework of colonial anthropology. Colonial anthropology was a dominant form of the discipline through the nineteenth century. 7. I am referring here to the new trends in social anthropology in England and cultural anthropology in the United States of America that began to challenge evolutionism from the late nineteenth century onwards. 8. For a discussion of the ranking of cultures and the disavowal or race in cultural anthropology, see Harris (1968). Chapter 14 on Diffusionism discusses the Kulturkreis debt to evolutionism. See chapters 12 and 13 on Kroeber and Lowie for an assessment of their complex and ambiguous relationship to evolutionism. Harris himself favoured a refined theory of evolutionism as consistent with Marxist theory of social change. 9. In addition, when we look at the photograph of the Swami in the Reddis of Bison Hills (1945), we sense how the paradoxical effectiveness of the near-naked Sadhu would have had a profound impact on Haimendorf. 10. In this volume I call it the Raghavaiah Report (rather than using the more common appellation 'Aiyappan Report' referring to the report writer) to avoid confusion with the Malayappan Report that is discussed in the same chapters. Vennelakanti Raghavaiah was the Parliamentary Secretary heading the committee that inquired into 'Socioeconomic Conditions of the Aboriginal Tribals of the Province of Madras' (Aiyappan 1948).

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11. See chapter 1, in this volume, for a biography of A. V. Thakkar and an extended discussion of his work. 12. Malayappan (1951: 11) refers to a Government Order (Government of India 1951) as an explicit model for funding cooperative settlements for tribals with money for share capital, seed and bullock purchase, advances for agricultural implel!'ents, etc. I will discuss this Order in detail shortly. 13. See Sastry and Subba Reddy (1991: 54) for similar proposals and early initiatives made in the Golugunda Agency in 1918. 14. I use the term 'legible' in this chapter several times in the sense in which Scott (1998) uses it to describe the increasing disciplinarisation and making visible the subject population in the context of high modernist initiatives in the twentieth century. This is clearly part of the panoptic strategy that was part of the revenue system and law put in place by colonialism. See Stokes (1989) for an extended and diffuse discussion of this strategy. To understand Panopticism as a disciplinary strategy, see Foucault (1976). 15. See Sastry and Subba Reddy (1991: 52) for a discussion of the purpose, success and failure of this act. 16. I also heard this in an interview with Karnam Ramaiah in Vararamachandrapuram (2001). See excerpt from the interview that follows. 17. The Kamam (Munsif, Patwari), or accountant, was one of the two quasi-government village officials on whom the colonial revenue administration depended for revenue collection. He kept the village records and helped conduct the Jamabandi, or the annual estimation of the revenue due according to actual conditions of ownership, usufruct and cultivation. The Karnam was paid an honorarium from a land cess of 1 anna per rupee from 1864 onwards. It was also possible that the Karnam owned inam (revenue-free) lands. He could also be paid by i.e., fees from revenue in shares of grain (Baden-Powell 1892: III, 87-88). 18. An interview with Karnam Ramaiah in Vararamachandrapuram, Khammam, Andhra Pradesh. 19. Visit to Purushottam Das's residence in Dummagudem, Khammam, Andhra Pradesh. 20. An informal conversation with Swarna Venkateshwara Rao, MRO, Dummagudem. 21. This is the same R. S. Malayappan who wrote the plan for the agency areas. 22. See chaptPr 1, in this volume, for an argument developing the term 'ascetic activist'. 23. I argue in chapter 1 that seva reconstructed Hindu thought by making service to the Harijan the important new focus of redemptive

mera,

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24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

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act1v1ty, This is explicit in Gandhi's thought, and finds different resonances in other strands of nationalist thought in the period. See the last section of chapter 1 for the link between seva and capitalism. The fact that he was not an exemplar for the Koyas will become clear shortly. Gandhi pointed out on several occasions that freedom was not a simple external political matter-what was needed was the internalisation of the capacity to ensure the wellbeing of the people of the nation; when that happened, political freedom was a mere formality since the fetters of alien rule would fall away of their own accord. See the discussion of Gandhi's concept of seva in chapter 1 in this volume. This Karnam was called Rambabu, as was another Kondareddi interviewee. I have changed his name to Ramaiah and the second interviewee's name to Balaraju to avoid confusion. These interviews were conducted in 2001. I am indebted to Mr Dayakar of the Integrated Tribal Development Agency, Bhadrachalam who took me to meet this man on the spur of the moment. Ramaiah was doing his intermediate when the PRS at Suravaram was startedso that would place his age at about 75 today. The word 'coupe' pronounced to rhyme with the English word 'soup' by Ramaiah is of French origin, meaning 'cut'-it probably refers to a measure of cut bamboo. The Swami Balananda Jeevita Viseshalu (Bhakta Brundam Balananda 1998) clearly refers to one Satyam as the Swami's disciple. This was recorded in an interview with Karnam Ramaiah in Vararamachandrapuram, Khammam, Andhra Pradesh. The framework of this story finds broad corroboration in the section on Balananda's resistance to the Razakars in the Jeevita Viseshalu (Bhakta Brundam Balananda 1998). This sentiment, that the Swami was a man from North India, is echoed in Malayappan's recommendation letter that the government support the cooperative society at Suravaram (Government of India 1951). Dayakar who knew the lore of the region initiated this turn of conversation. Alluri Sitarama Raju was a famous rebel in the early 1920s who led a Koya rebellion against the British in this area. See chapter 3 in this volume for a description of Raju's rebellion. I am deeply indebted to my local guide Tata Rao, Agricultural Officer in Bhadrachalam, without whose internal understanding and savvy I would perhaps neither have arrived at Suravaram, nor been able to actually discuss the Balananda story with the residents. Gutta paina unde Reddlu, he said immediately.

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35. Interview with Badisa Muthiah (2001, unrecorded since the place was too noisy for his soft voice, noted down more or less verbatim. Another interview conducted two years later was similarly written down). 36. All citations in this paragraph are from Government oflndia (1951: 2). 37. He named 10 Koyas who seemed to have worked alongside him on the land at that time: Karam Subbaiah, Koya Yerappa, Tellam Pedda Gangaiah, Tellam Gangaiah, Kunja Gangaiah, Karam Chinnu, Karam Maraiah, Koija Lakshminarayanana, his own uncle Muthiah, and Badisa Ramaiah. 38. Conducting a conversation that was not patronising was one of the main difficulties that limited my interviews with this respondent and others. 'Good or bad' is an unconscious use of a way of speaking one rarely used except among children! And yet it served a purpose. 39. 'Big man' is an inadequate translation of the Telugu phrase pedda manishi. 40. Interview with Bulipili Jogaiah in Suravaram in February 2003. 41. An Adangal is a village-level record of ownership, usufruct, occupancy, survey numbers, etc., maintained by the Mandal Revenue Office, and is a legacy of the colonial revenue system (See Baden-Powell 1892). Entries nos 50-53 of the Record of 1997-98 (1407 F) have the occupier column entered with the name 'Balananda Swami'. 42. See preceding section to understand the historical sense of 'survey and settlement' of tribals. 43. I have used occupational descriptions such as 'farmer', 'postmaster', 'teacher' and eliminated proper names of minor actors in the main text to improve comprehensibility and avoid confusion due to too many proper names. 44. Balaraju's account of Satyam's embezzlement throws some light on the story of his fate as related by Ramaiah (see excerpt provided earlier). 45. The term 'aiyyagaru' roughly translates into 'his lordship', with the connotation of a landlord. 46. See Haimendorf (1945: 272) for an allusion to the PRS's work. 47. The term 'seva' was used by Balaraju. 48. See Haimendorf (1945: 274) for a brief account of a doctor who lectured on the Vedanta in his spcire time at Perantapalle. 49. I use the term 'realist' in the manner of its use in political theory. It is difficult to use the term 'oral history' for these accounts, because they are not part of a narrative carried across generations but are precisely memories dredged by questions about incidents and people who are not part of daily life.

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50. See Sastry and Subba Reddy (1991) for a full-length discussion of the Muthadar's duties and sometimes incredible burdens. See also Mukherjee and Frykenberg (1969: 219). 51. This point was elaborated in a personal conversation with Dr Sastry. 52. In the cited interview, even in the Rampa region, a conversation with a retired Koya forest official resulted in a mention of the Muthadar with unalloyed respect. 53. I am grateful to Dr V. N. V. K. Sastry for the information and assessment he shared about the ill-effects of the abolition of the Karnam's post in a personal conversation. This is also an opportunity to thank him for the help he has rendered this thesis by providing an introduction to my Koya guide, Tata Rao. 54. The agrahara is the Brahmin quarter near the centre of the village where ritual purity of caste is observed. 55. See chapter 1 in this volume. 56. See Aiyappan (1948: 15) for administration of agency areas under one commissioner. Also see ibid.: 40 for the establishment of a Department of Tribal Welfare, with a Tribal Welfare Commissioner at its head. 57. One of the participants in the administrative debate in the framing of the Forest Policy, G. T. H. Bracken, who became Secretary of Revenue after having served in the forest department, recommended festina lente as the policy of caution to be followed in the Godavari Agency (See Government of India 1938). Also see Malayappan (1951: 16). See chapter 3 in this volume for a discussion of the colonial caution in dealing with tribal territory. 58. See chapter 3 in this volume for the colonial ruler's perception of the hill tribes of the Rampa and Bhadrachalam regions. 59. See chapter 1 in this volume for a detailed argument of this point in general terms. 60. See chapter 3 for a description of the recommendations of the Commissioner of Revenue. 61. See Niraja Jayal (1999) for a discussion of how welfare is not driven by a justiciable concept of right, but by the unaccountable concept of charity. See also Srivatsan (2010) for an exploration of this characteristic trait in the field of health care. 62. See chapter 4 in this volume. 63. This term 'colonial semi-feudal' is used more for its descriptive felicity rather than as an analytical term with the force given to it by the mode of production debate in the 1970s. 64. See chapter 3 in this volume for a discussion of this history. The history note on rebellions in the agency areas, written as a background to the correspondence between the British centre at Delhi and the Madras

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Presidency on the Alluri Sitarama Raju rebellion of the early 1920s, is an interesting record of the colonial experience and perspective of the agency areas. See Government of India (1924). For a reading of the struggle in terms of that against colonial rule, in the context of the change and development of the region, see Dosagiri Rao (2003). Also see the report of the judicial inquiry of H. E. Sullivan (Government of India 1880) after the Rampa Rebellion of 1869, where it is clear that the rebel Muthadars and commoners were treated with dignity as respectable members of a community driven astray by misrule rather than as criminals or as poor miserable wretches.

THREE

Colonial and Nationalist Perceptions of Hill Tribes in the Madras Presidency A Comparison The following chapter provides a comparative picture of the perspectives and framework of understanding of the hill tribes in the Godavari uplands between Bhadrachalam and Rampachodavaram. 1 The comparison is between that of the Madras Presidency government before the 1940s and the 'proto' nationalist government after this period. Key to understanding this difference is a grasp of the central goals of two forms of state-the existent colonial state and the national state to come-and how they differed.

Feral Insurgent or Weak Sibling? AN UNNAMED DOCUMENT AND A FORGOTTEN HISTORY

When a scholar pursuing research on the tribal areas of Andhra Pradesh goes to the State Archives at Hyderabad for historical background, he or she is first given a set of documents consisting of district progress reports, policy statements, narratives, and so forth. I found in this assorted collection a stapled bundle of ageing sheets with a pale purple typescript characteristic of a now obsolete cyclostyle reproduction process. It bears no primary marks of identification or reference. The unnamed document was curious and warranted a closer look. 2 As I read through the document, I realised that this was a copy or draft of a report from the Home Department of the Madras

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Presidency, to the Home (Political) Department at Delhi, about the uprising led by Alluri Sitarama Razu in the Rampa region. 3 It was possible to establish by means of internal date references in the narrative that the report was prepared circa 1924. The description, in the fourth part of the report containing five parts in all, of the Razu ·being shot dead as he tried to escape when allowed to ease himself, strikes an uncanny resonance with the newspaper reports of 'encounter deaths' that frequently puncture my morning sense of wellbeing. 4 The purpose and thrust of the correspondence was to request permanent emergency shoot-asight powers for the police in the Rampa region. This request was rejected. The unnamed document in the Andhra Pradesh State Archives includes some verbatim sections of recorded correspondence available at the National Archives at Delhi, and also cites reference numbers of letters traceable to files in Delhi. 5 This proves beyond doubt that the document does indeed belong to the chain of correspondence available at the National Archives. It is indeed a draft of a historical report requested by the Centre in its correspondence and prepared by the Presidency. From my point of view, the most interesting section of the unnamed document is the first one, which is a narrative history of the rebellions in the Godavari uplands. Starting with the Parlakimedi campaign in 1832-1834, a chronological record is constructed containing no less than 17 uprisings preceding the rebellion under Razu in the 1920s. All the disturbances involve one tribe or another. Razu, who was a non-tribal, led a band of mainly Kaya rebels in the last campaign that succumbed to colonial forces in 1924. The British perception of tribal ferocity is evident in the narrative of some of these uprisings, describing the massacre of men, women and children, and the sacrifice of policemen to the goddess. The most trouble was faced in the Great Rampa rebellion of 1879 that spread over an area of 5,000 square miles, all the way upriver to Rakapilli 6 in the Bhadrachalam taluka where some of the affected muthas7 lay. This forgotten history introduces and underscores the longstanding colonial perception of the agency tribal as a feral insurgent who had to be handled with great care.

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Menacing mosquitoes in the Godavari uplands

In 1950, 26 years after the Alluri Sitarama Razu correspondence, R. S. Malayappan, the Special Agency Development Officer (SADO) for the Godavari uplands, and a team of government officials took a two-month trip through the territory covered in the historical narrative of the unnamed documentjustdiscussed, i.e., Srikakulam, Vishakapatnam and Godavari districts, in order to assess the development potential of the region and the amelioration of the people. The following citation from the report paraphrases the nationalist government's perspective of the terrors of the region: ITINERARY OF THE TEAM:-The last member joined the team on 17'h August 1950. The team started its first tour of the Agency on 25rh September 1950 and the last tour ended on 20'h April 1951 ... Very remote places such as Lingapuram, Ramavaram, Sujanakota, Pullangi and Gangaraj Madgole etc., were visited. It was, indeed a very arduous touring necessitating walking several miles each day. We really felt the lack of good and adequate camping places for all of us at the same time and of good communications. The most remarkable thing is none of us suffered from malaria. The only preventives we used very systematically were mosquito nets, poludrine [sic], anti-mosquito cream, and the spraying of halting places with D.D.T. This clearly proves that if one takes adequate precautions he can escape from malaria in any part of the Agency. I would therefore suggest this fact may be circularised to all Government Officers having jurisdiction over the Agency areas so that they may, without hesitation or fear, camp in these areas more frequently (Malayappan 1951: 2; hereafter called the Malayappan Report).

At this point, the most important inference to be drawn from this citation is the complete harmlessness of the tribal territory in the perspective of the new national administration interested in developing the region. A bare 26 years separates the time when the region was perceived as chronically insurgent for a century from a time when the only opponent to be feared, but that too conquered by the use of DDT, was the mosquito!

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Differences in Perspective between National and Colonial Governments It is evident that there is a clear and major difference in the way in which the two governments write about the same territory and people. The first question is the reason for this difference: (a) Is it because a different department is talking about the tribal in each instance? (b) Or is it because a sense of calm in better times leads to more balanced views regarding tribal threats? (c) Or is it indeed because the tribal himself has become a weakened, impoverished character who no longer poses a threat? In answer to the first question, the perspective of the colonial government was primarily that of a law and order administration designed and fine-tuned to extract revenue and promote colonial exploitation of the forests. The colonial objective in the tribal areas was analogous to that of the plain. While revenue and law and order mechanisms in the plains were systematised and improved to ensure the extraction of predictable revenue and political control, they were not directly focused on maximising productive efficiency through any form of disciplinary industrialisation of agricultural labour. Education and economic upliftment of the colonised population as a whole through disciplinary training was part of a process that had an extremely large, evolutionary, time cycle in the colonial perspective. 8 As opposed to the plains territory, the hill country was only indirectly governed to appropriate forest produce, exact nominal revenue and assert colonial authority. For these structural reasons, the department that produced the unnamed document mentioned earlier was the Home (Political) Department. After 1950, the existence of a SADO in the new government who speaks of the tribal in the Malayappan Report is not an accident. A similar post is recommended in the broad guidelines provided by another earlier report, the Raghavaiah Report (Aiyappan 1948), by a committee constituted in 1946 to inquire into the socio-economic conditions of the aboriginal tribes. The institution of the post of the SADO is the outcome of a desire to understand the socio-economic conditions and points to the emergence of a new perspective in

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the national government. This initiative claims to ameliorate the lives of tribals, and ensure that they meet the norms of mainstream life in the plains. It also takes further the colonial process of freeing the hill regions from the de facto sovereignty of the tribes. In answer to the second question, I will assert that it is impossible for the national government to arrive at a sense of calm so drastically different from the just prior colonial anxiety; unless there is a perspectival change. In chapter 2 in this volume, I have shown evidence in documents dated as late as 1938 that the British continued to remain nervous about the tribals long after the Razu rebellion had settled down. The policy of non-interference with the tribes dates back to 1894 when the forest policy excluded the Rampa territory from any precipitate measures by which the colonial rulers could exploit major forest produce. The very fact that the national government is able to contemplate a 10-year plan with major administrative intervention from the plains is indicative of a difference in perspective which cannot be resolved simply by reference to times of peace as opposed to times of war. In answer to the third question, while a weakening in the threat posed by the tribal is not to be ruled out, it is not possible to say from the documents of the period whether this is actually so. For example, in the 1930s, Verrier Elwin wrote a treatise on the Baigas, a tribe living in the Central Provinces, where he described their miserable plight, reeling under the onslaught of civilisation in the guise of non-tribal settlers advancing on their land. 9 He then suggested that something of the nature of a zoo must be created where they may pursue their life and culture changes at their own pace. G. S. Ghurye responded to Elwin's book in the 1940s and attacked him for being a political reactionary on this point, arguing that the tribals, having many woes in common with other landless labourers under colonial rule, were not as badly off as the latter suggested, and that the non-tribal interest must be given as much importance in any policy decision about agency territories. Thus, the documentary record of weakening or impoverishment of the tribal (in comparison with the plainsman), because it is subject to political inclinations, is not an accurate indicator of the actual status of the tribes. In fact there is no accurate indicator of change in tribal status independent of the implicit change in perspectival position between colonialism and nationalism, which expresses itself in either a primary account of an anthropologist or in a historical source.

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This then leads me to the formulation of the problem of this chapter: What is the change in perspective regarding the tribal populations between the colonial and national governments? A study of related documents in the period under study leads us to three differences which are crucial to understanding the change: (a) The tribal himself is seen in opposed perspectives: ferocious in the colonial view, miserable and poor in the nationalist view. (b) Territory is seen in a different way: as insurgent archipelago in the colonial view, as a benign marginal hinterland in the nationalist view. (c) There is a new practice of including an anthropological note about the tribes in the major administrative documents in the late colonial and nationalist period.

f EROCITY VERSUS

POVERTY

Corroborative evidence on colonial respect for the tribal

I have described the colonial anxiety regarding the tribes in the unnamed document at the beginning of this chapter. There is further corroboration in local sources, exemplarily in the judicial inquiry on the Rampa rebellion in 1879, which helps me sustain the argument regarding the colonial perception of the tribes' ability to take care of their interests and of their belligerence when disturbed. The report of Member of the Board of Revenue, H. E. Sullivan, on the Rampa rebellion is well known to the specialists in the history of the Rampa region (Government of India 1880). Sullivan's report records a judicial inquiry into the causes of the Rampa rebellion and the settlement of Muthadars' grievances, which were diagnosed as the causes of the uprising. The way in which the inquiry was held, and description of the people who were summoned, illuminate the point being made about colonial respect for tribal competence. Each of the Muthadars who came forward gave a statement which was recorded, and was awarded a judgement with or without penalty for the act of rebellion. The raja or mansabdar had a pleader, J.E. Anderson from Kakinada, to represent him. Settlement was made for 19 Muthas in the inquiry. The Muthadars were all Koyas and Kondareddis. What is remarkable is the respect

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and propriety with which the inquiry was conducted. There was no sign of the vaunted tribal timidity on the part of the chiefs who came before Sullivan. There was not a single line of condescension or pity on the part of Sullivan's procedure as described in the report either. There was no mention of poverty or misery. A broader view of colonial respect

It must be understood that, while quite clearly the Rampa country is specially marked as rebellious it is by no means unique. Corroborative evidence regarding the colonial perception of specific tribal communities as rebellious is available in the work of several students of tribal history. Two examples, one from the work of J. H. Hutton and another from the work of G. S. Ghurye will suffice to prove the point. An extract from Hutton's account (1941) of the Santal Rebellion of 1855 at Daman-i-Koh in the Bengal Presidency, in his essay on primitive tribes, will illustrate a parallel colonial perception of the ferocious, primitive Santal. 10 The march was orderly while the food the [Santal] villagers had with them lasted and while the movement was unopposed. But lack of food soon led to plundering ... and what had begun as a non-violent, orderly, and legitimate movement ended in an oldtime foray accompanied by arson, plunder, and bloodshed ... The [colonial] operations that followed were rather in the nature of unavoidable butchery than of fighting. 'It was not war', said Major Jervis to Sir W.W. Hunter, 'it was execution'. The bows and arrows of the Santals were ineffective against the well-armed British troop ... The Santal did not understand surrender and fought to the last; the total Santal losses are put at 10,000 men ... Indeed the European staffs of many indigo factories could easily have been massacred had the rebels wished, but generally the latter refrained from attacking English residents except in self-defense. Nevertheless, the Calcutta newspapers were clamorous for severe measures. The wrongs of the Santal were ignored, his honesty and his industry were forgotten; he was merely a bloodthirsty savage to be shot like a leopard in the jungle. One irresponsible writer in the Friend of India even urged that the whole of the tribe should be deported en masse to Pegu (Hutton 1941: 425-26).

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G. S. Ghurye in his l\boriginal Tribes' So Called and their Future (1959), first written in 1943, also provides a broader picture of the colonial view of the tribal, though with far less sympathy. He thus summarises the colonial policy towards some of the tribal communities such as, the Hos, the Malers or Paharias, the Santals, the Oraons, the Mundas, the Khonds and the Bhils all of whom rebelled at one time or another, and some of them more often than once. Their grievances regarding the tendency for their lands to pass on to nontribesmen, and the gradual substitution of their own landlords by the landlords or money-lenders of the plains, generally manifested in some violent form. In view of the fact that the tribals were sullen and on occasions violent the main purpose of the British policy was to secure peace and not necessarily to help the people to advance on the road to progress either by integration with the plains Hindus or otherwise (ibid.: 79). The Hos, the Malers and the Santals belonged to what were known

as the Rajmahal tracts and the Daman-i-Koh in West Bengal, the Mundas and Oraons belonged to the broader Chota Nagpur region, now coming under the State of Jharkhand, the Bhil territory is in the uplands of the Bombay Presidency, now b the boundary region between Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, and the Khonds belonged to the Ganjam district in what is now southern Orissa (now Odisha). These texts lead us to the conclusion that the British perception of tribal ferocity was a phenomenon not limited to the people of the Godavari uplands alone, but was in line with the view about the populations of several (though clearly not all) tribal pockets across the colonial empire. These examples suggest that while it is impossible to say whether the tribals have been by nature and perennially rebellious, it is indubitable that colonialism's disarticulation of the extant relations of power and surplus extraction was a factor that provoked rebellion. When colonialism took over a social formation, it maintained that formation in a shell of its earlier structure, and inserted itself into the circuits of exploitation and relations of oppression. I am following here an adaptation of Samir Amin's description of colonial social formation, which is described in the 'mode of

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production' debate in Hamza Alavi (1975: 1255.IJ). However, I am not committing myself to the finer point whether it is a 'mode of production' or the 'social formation' which is colonial. I am using the latter term as a way of signalling a distance from the tight economistic schematism of the early writings of Andre GunderFrank/Samir Amin/Hamza Alavi on colonialism and underdevelopment. In addition, and in line with current thinking on the subject, I am also not endorsing the view that the extant social formation in the agency areas before British rule was 'feudal'. In fact what must be understood is the specificity of the social formation in the agency areas, which gave rise to an exceptional resistance to colonial rule. The specificity of these social formations was that they were not as amenable to the changes introduced by the British as the social formations in the Presidency plains were. It is the violent expression of this lack of accommodation to the predatory structure of colonialism that was seen from the British perspective as 'primitive', 'rebellious', etc. Concern for the poor tribal in the nationalist perspective

The most striking difference in the perception of the new government is with respect to the tribal himself-the Malayappan Report sees the tribal as impoverished (Malayappan 1951). Thus, [t]he agency people are very poor and their standard of living is deplorably low. They are poorly clad and ill-fed. What they produce is not sufficient even for few months. Afterwards they eat all sorts of unwholesome foods like mango kernels, bamboo shoots, bitter roots, tamarind seeds, etc., and the somewhat well-to-do people go to the plains merchants for advances of grains ... The plight of the Koyas in Polavaram and Bhadrachalam taluks where the plains people have settled in large numbers is miserable. All their best lands have passed into the hands of the plainsmen ... In Nugur taluk, however, the Koyas are a bit benefited by their association with the right type of plainsmen who have settled there (ibid.: 5).

The contrast between this passage and the perception of the tribals in the ordinance documents described in the first section of this chapter is remarkable. Supporting evidence for this view comes from a recommendation

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regarding a voluntary organisation from the Agent of Godavari to the Secretary of the Rural Welfare Department at Madras. 11 In the year 1950, one Swami Balananda buys a piece of land and starts an organisation called the Poverty Relief Service (PRS) to ameliorate the lives of 12 Koyas by settling them in the village of Suravaram on the bank of the Godavari about 19 miles upstream of Bhadrachalam town. The Agent's recommendation is to treat the organisation as a cooperative society so that the government can provide a grant and loan to help the Koya members begin agricultural work. The language used by the Agent in making the recommendation speaks for itself as a sample of the nationalist discourse on the tribal condition: Among the many items included in the Ten-year plan for the development of the Agency tracts of the Godavary District, a report on which was submitted ... agricultural colonisation for the Koyas must occupy a place of pride. It is the first to be implemented in a practical way and contains within it the germs of vast development of the economic condition of the tribe. Vast stretches of fertile tract lie along the banks of the Godavary. Their reclamation and cultivation have now been carried out by the emigrants from the plains and by the prosperous non-aboriginal inhabitants of the locality. But the primitive people, the Koya tribe continue to remain nomads, slaves of their rigid and hampering customs and victims to the machinations of the clever, and sometimes cruel, exploiters. Their condition has been rendered pathetic in that there has not been any philanthrophic [sic] agency or proselytising mission or any planned Governmental programme for the amelioration of their social and economic condition, such as the Harijans of the Plains have had. But a silver lining in this perennial gloom has been drawn within the past decade through the undaunted endeavours of one Swamiji, Sri Balananda Swamiji by name. He is a messiah-come ... He is an ascetic, but far from having cast off the world and [sic] is essentially in it with a singleness of purpose to do everything in his means to compass the well-being of the tribe and to enable them to participate in the blessings of a civilised existence (Government oflndia 1951: 1).

Thus, the tone of this letter adds colour to the sober concern in the Malayappan Report, in what seems like a rather verbose

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description of the misery of the Koyas. However, a few points should be noted for later elaboration. 12 First, as in the case of the Malayappan Report, the amelioration of the aboriginal tribes finds a place of pride in the plans for national development. In fact the usage of the two terms 'development' and 'amelioration' in this document merits a study for their closeness and distinctness: in the passage cited, the two related usages 'economic development of the condition of the tribe' and 'amelioration of their social and economic condition', point to the State as an actual or possible agent of these actions. Second, there is a reference to a philanthropic agency/proselytising mission/ governmental programme, whose absence in the case of the unfortunate Koyas is contrasted against the Harijans of the plains, who have been blessed with some such external intervention. Third, the government agent literally prostrates himself welcoming the Swami as the messiah who will deliver the Koyas to a civilised existence-a 'wellbeing'-through his exemplary act and voluntary commitment. Fourth, the Agent describes the Swami's asceticism as the opposite of a withdrawal from the world, i.e., as a being 'within it with a singleness of purpose'. Both chapters 1 and 2 in this volume have explored in detail the ethical, political and administrative significance of these actions under the rubric of the concept of seva. A broader view of the nationalist perspective

The character of nationalist writing on the tribal communities in the Godavari agency area is a part of a nationwide discourse on tribal amelioration. The Raghavaiah Report (Aiyappan 1948) laments the fact that the investigation in the Madras Presidency has started so much later than in the other parts of the nation, but finds solace from the maxim, 'better late than never'. The Government of Bombay had appointed a Special Officer in 1937 to inquire into the condition of the hill tribes; the Thakkar Committee had begun its survey of Orissa in 1940; the Government of the Central Provinces had begun the same task in 1940 and completed it in 1942. The appointment of the Thakkar sub-committee to draft the provisions of the Schedule V of the Constitution had already begun its work by the time the Raghavaiah Report was circulated. 13 Thus there is indubitable corroboration that the nationalist perspective regarding the people of the Godavari Agency area was

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in no way anomalous with respect to the rest of the nationalist discourse on the tribals. This nationalist perspective began to take root soon after the new and more powerful representative system in legislature according to the Government of India Act of 1935 was installed, and became stronger as the independent government took charge in 1947. The tribal, I have demonstrated in several cases, was seen by the British rulers as a potential source of instability and danger who did not conform to the rules and laws of the colonial administration that seemed to work in the plains among the mainstream population. This same tribal is seen by the nationalist administration as unhealthy, weak, in need of amelioration and uplift, and it is in such a state of dire poverty that the immediate work of development is necessary to save him. Thus, against the ferocity of the tribal in the view of the colonial administration is opposed the poverty of the same tribal in the view of the nationalist. INSURGENT ARCHIPELAGO VERSUS BENIGN HINTERLAND

Insurgent archipelago in the colonial perspective The second of the three perspectival differences we have listed earlier is about difference between the perspective of the colonial administration and the nationalists regarding the agency territory itself. Clearly, in the case of the colonial rulers, the tribal regions which gave them so much trouble were viewed as a cluster of islands, an archipelago, of insurgency which should be isolated from the plains or the mainstream in order to prevent an eruption of rebellion. This perspective is a fundamental epistemological platform of the logic of colonial administrative policy, which has been so often described as 'divide and rule'. This does not mean that because the administrators wanted to divide and rule, they propagated a false ideology, but that the very logic of colonial rule resulted in the need to isolate tribal territory. Isolation took the form of an 'agency territory' to be ruled through exceptional statutes. Zamindari regulations were enforced in the Bengal Presidency in order to establish the rule of private property and pinpoint an unambiguous target for the extraction of land revenue. 14 The extension of the rule of private property led to problems in the Godavari Agency area, which are described with clarity in the

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unnamed document I have referred to, in an excerpt attributed to a 'characteristic minute' by Thomas Munro, written in 1822, examining the causes for the frequent disturbance of peace; thus [a]s the regulations now stand, we must, whenever a sowcar (nontribal moneylender) obtains a decree against a zamindar (tribal) for a part or whole of the zamindari, support him by force both in getting and maintaining it, and hence we are everyday liable to be dragged into a petty warfare among unhealthy hills, where an enemy is hardly ever seen, where numbers of valuable lives are lost from the climate and where we often lose but never gain in reputation (unnamed document).

This historical backdrop of the framing of agency regulations, set in a wider context against the citation from Ghurye (see preceding section), suggests that the establishment of the colonial regulation itself caused the initial problem of insurgency faced by the British. The designation of such areas as 'Agency tracts' in which land transfer was regulated was clearly a move to alleviate the colonial aggravation of the land relations between the hill tribes and the settlers from the plains. However, and this leads me to the second example, as the causes for the Rampa rebellion of 1879 show, even the regulation of land transfers between hill tribes and plainsmen does not actually help alleviate the problem. The justification of colonial dominance based on the rule of law, enforces its own logic of interference in local relations of power whether the community is tribal or non-tribal. In my third example, near half a century later in the 1930s, the logic of colonial rule expresses itself in the Agent's 'illegal' 15 act of demarcating areas of the Rampa forest as prohibited for podu (shifting) cultivation. This leads the administration to ponder over yet another change in the forest regulations, which would permit cautious progress in enforcing laws that will increase the inflows to the colonial treasury from major forest produce. The decision to go ahead is seen to be fraught with the danger of rebellion (Government of India 1938). Key to understanding the colonial perspective of tribal territory is the conceptual impasse caused by two factors: (a) the British had to see colonial India as a single entity under colonial rule; (b) at the same time they had to see the native and territory as

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incommensurably differentiated into segments that had to be kept separate. Nationalist politics systematically exploits this impasse in a strategic manner. Benign hinterland in the nationalist perspective

Since the nationalist view of the tribal territory has been discussed at length in chapter 2, here I will simply point out that, the fact that the main opponent to be feared in the Malayappan tour was the mosquito is proof that the perception of the territory had changed. There is not a single line in the Malayappan Report exhibiting the kind of tension so often encountered in colonial statements of the risk of forward policy in the agency areas. On the other hand, what were stray voices or marginal observations about the possibility of developing the agency areas' income and growth potential in colonial discourse, have consolidated themselves into the firm recommendations of the Malayappan Report (1951), the directions established by the Raghavaiah Report (1948) and the programme hailed by the recommendations about the PRS (Government of India 1951). Development of the agency territory and the amelioration of the poor, miserable tribal is now the main point on the agenda. The change of nationalist perception of territory from the colonial one may be described in a single line: the agency is an undeveloped backwater of a territory which is geographically and politically contiguous with the plains. There is no hint of any need to separate these lands from less explosive regions. The logic of agency isolation in the colonial period is clearly weakening. However, maintaining a clear continuity with the colonial policy and practice, the Malayappan Report (1951) too wants to settle the tribal down and release the forests for exploitation by the national government. In this connection, Malayappan's suggestion too is to provide an exemplar who will lead the tribals to the benefits of a settled existence. The Malayappan Report explicitly refers to both the Forest Policy file and the PRS file, citing them as examples and precedents to be followed. ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTES IN NATIONALIST DISCOURSE

A third difference that may be noticed between the perspective of the colonial and nationalist records of tribal discourse in the

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period is the practice of writing anthropological notes about the tribal. Both the Malayappan (1951) and the Raghavaiah (1948) reports have substantial sections devoted to tribal culture and socio-economic life, their problems and possible solutions to them. The ameliorative logic of nationalist 'developmental' intervention implies the need to write an accompanying note about tribal life. This is because the particular backwardness of a tribe has to be measured and mapped against the norm of advancement before improvement can take place. In the case of this 'new' characteristic, however, the break between colonial practice and the nationalist one is not so sharp. There is a different activity of colonial government, not directly linked to the active rule of law, order and revenue, which begins in the late nineteenth-century census and continues till date in the national one. Extant scholarship has focused on the meaning of the census as a new turn in colonial administration and its forms of knowledge (see, for example, Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001). The census enumeration practice has been read more or less along Foucauldian lines as a totalising, governmental knowledge which helps the colonial ruler evolve new political practices of managing ruled communities as modern populations. Alongside the census enumeration process, the Castes and Tribes series of anthropological notes begin to form a staple of census elaboration with the work of Herbert Hope Risley in 1881. It is worth thinking about why these notes did not form part of the colonial revenue administration's daily discourse, but remained in the strategic, epistemological domain of the census. I would hazard a guess here that the forms of knowledge of the census exercise were incompatible with the humdrum yet risky task of revenue extraction. It is almost as if colonialism's new forms of knowledge represented an advance beyond the capabilities and imagination of the colonial state in its bread-and-butter function. The practice of writing anthropological notes on castes and tribes finds application in the nationalist government's documents that are geared to the practical functions of development administration. This must again be regarded as a tell-tale sign of the changing forms of the state and its hospitality to emergent forms of knowledge developed precociously in colonialism. The practice of writing anthropological notes, spanning both the colonial and nationalist epoch, is a complex one that I have explored in detail in chapter 1.

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The Question I would summarise the three differences in perspective, constituting the transformation of the 'problematic tribal', between colonial rule and national government thus: First, there is a change in the way in which the rebellious tribal is perceived. From the exceptional status of a feral insurgent in the colonial imagination, the image of rebellious tribal has been reduced to a status of categorical uniformity with the rest of the tribals, all of them being lumped together in the nationalist imagination as the most marginal, impoverished, unhealthy siblings of the Hindu mainstream. Second, there is a change in the way in which the agency area is imagined. From being flagged as an island in a dangerous archipelago of insurgency in the colonial territory, the imagined geography of the agency area has been transformed into a benign, undeveloped backwater of a politically contiguous national territory. Third, and underlying the first two changes, there is a new epistemological form of the Castes and Tribes series of census elaboration which was developed through the late colonial period into the nationalist one, thus changing the way in which the tribal is known. This change may be described in a preliminary way as a shift from a tactical revenue perspective of early colonial rule to a strategic developmental perspective of late colonial/nationalist government. These perspectival changes may be seen to be related to three general axes: first, the approach to security has changed from defending a difficult sovereignty, in this particular context, to governing people through attention to their wellbeing. Doubtless, this defence of sovereignty cannot be the sole description of the complexities ofBritish rule in India. Second, the concept of territory has undergone a fundamental shift from being an archipelago of insurgency to a decrepit margin that has to be nurtured so that it becomes a bountiful and productive domain of exploitation. Again, rather than succumb to a stereotypical description of colonial 'divide and rule' policy as a whole, it is necessary to take into account the ambiguous integrative role envisaged, for example, for the railways that were constructed in colonial rule. Third, the way in which the tribal is seen has changed from being an inalienable element in a subjugated kingdom who remains a potential political

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adversary, to an individual member of an administered population which is subject to the perspective of anthropological knowledge. Again, it is to be remembered that this too expresses itself not in a clear break, but in a fuzzy changeover as exemplified by the beginnings and emergent uses of anthropology in colonialism and proto-nation state thinking. These three axes of change may be called those of security, territory and population-in short, in the space of governmentality, i.e., what this note traces (and the volume elaborates) is the political transformation through which the governmental rationality of colonial rule gives way to that of the rationality of national development. 16 Two additional details will complete the picture. In spite of the sharp differences in perspective with respect to the tribal people and territories, there are two continuities in the way in which the late colonial and nationalist governments approached the 'tribal problem'. One, the broad desire for an improvement in the tribal condition was already making its appearance in the late colonial period. Two, the theme of developing the agency area too appeared late over the colonial horizon and gained strength as it continued into the nationalist one. The emergence of both the desire for the improvement of the tribal condition and the development of the agency area do not gain momentum in practice until the nationalist administration begins to takes over. This is because the logic of colonialism exerts a force on the ruler to think of the territory and people as divided and insular, and this hampers both the logistics and the cooperation between the administration and voluntary social action required for implementing the plans for amelioration and development. There is however, in addition (to the three changes with respect to security-territory-population described earlier), one sharp difference between the colonial discourse and the nationalist one that occurs in what may provisionally be described as the moral tone of the nationalist discourse. When the colonial rulers planned and executed their improvement programmes, they did so with the serene unconcern of gods on Mount Olympus. They were comple tely unmoved by even the most massive failures of what they perceived as their sterling efforts at improvement. In contrast, when the nationalists began their projects of uplift, amelioration and development, they did so by providing clear discursive evidence of their anxiety about the success of these projects-both in view

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of the global spectators witnessing the birth of a new nation, and in an intrinsic sense. There was a new passion in the speech of the nationalists, a new ethical commitment to do good and do well. The self-ascribed reason for this difference in moral tone is that the nationalists had the good of the tribals at heart, sincerely wanted to develop the nation and thus fought the colonial rulers whose only desire was to exploit India. Indeed, the Raghavaiah Report states the reason why the British did not look at welfare: because they were only interested in controlling law and order (unlike 'us' who are accountable before the rest of the world for how we treat our minorities). This leads me to the central problem of this project and volume-what is this new ethic that makes us do the good deed, and what holds us accountable to the world? I am interested in the epistemological and ethical platform which makes the assertions of national goodwill towards the tribal possible. In some ways, this volume maps the transformation of my provisional characterisation of the nationalist discourse as a 'moral tone' into a rigorous description that throws light on the structure of nationalist subjectivity.

Notes 1. The region between Bhadrachalam and Rampachodavaram, extending eastward beyond the latter into Vishakapatnam, consists of the Eastern Ghats, which are the uplands of the Godavari, on the border between Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. This region is called the Rampa region, or forest, or mountains. The arguments in this and the other chapters in this volume pertain to this region. 2. This document will be henceforth referred to as the unnamed document. 3. There are many variants of the spelling of each term. While I have used the spelling Raju, according to modern conventions in other places in this volume, here I am keeping with the spelling in the unnamed document. 4. The term 'encounter death' in the post-1970s Andhra Pradesh context of Maoist (Naxalite) war against the state has a sinister meaningbeing gunned down by the police in cold blood. It was indeed a frequent description by police officials of their retaliation against the People's War (the most powerful Naxalite group in Andhra Pradesh, now called Maoists) during the 1980-1990s. It is possible to argue

Colonial and Nationalist Perceptions of Hill Tribes

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

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that the connotation of 'encounter death' was changed to signify police murder, largely due to the committed activism of the civil liberties groups who took up the cause of defending the rights of these Naxalites. See the Delhi correspondence record in Government of India (1924) and (1922). Now Rekapalle-also called Vararamachandrapuram! Territorial units in political control of the Muthadar and exploited by him. Muthadars were themselves tribal zarnindars. See section titled 'Koya, Karnarn, Muthadar' in chapter 2 in this volume. The colonial rule focused on education largely for the urban native population in order to generate personnel for their state apparatus. See Part II, chapter 4, in this volume for a discussion of the ElwinGhurye exchange. Here I do not refer to Ranajit Guha's classic Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) because my purpose is to describe colonial perceptions-not make inferences about the tribals from these perceptions. Similar reasons hold for our not referring to David Arnold's study of rebellious hill men in the Godavari agency area. I would insist on strong filiations with the Subaltern Studies project, but assert that my approach to the problem in this volume is a different one. The exchange of correspondence is recorded in Government of India (1951). These points have been elaborated in chapter 2 in this volume. The work of Gopinath Bardoloi sub-committee to draft the provisions of Schedule VI for the Indian Constitution was also underway. The treatment of the tribals of the North East under Schedule VI was a problem of a different order, even though the principal effects were the same as in the Schedule V areas. In the Schedule VI regions, the issue at stake was the very assumption that these were part of Indian territory. On the one hand, the McMahon Line demarcated unilaterally by the British as the border with China erupts regularly, if in a subdued manner, to this day in Arunachal Pradesh. The Naga quest for sovereignty has been a fierce half-century battle, which remained within control in the 1950s only because of the differences among the Naga people themselves regarding the proposed State of Nagaland, e.g., the difference between the Serna and the Angarni perspectives on the future of Nagaland. The battles between the plains people and the hill men in Meghalaya and Assam have been an explosive political issue. Ranajit Guha (1980) provides an invaluable reference for this moment. Also see Eric Stokes (1989) for an extended discussion of land revenue, law and administration.

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15. According to descriptions of colonial discourse itself (Government of India 1938). 16. See 'l February 1978', in Foucault (2007) for a discussion of governrnentality, especially page 108, where he explains the relationship between security, territory, population, and governrnentality. The chapter has been reproduced under the title 'Governrnentality' in various collections.

FOUR

Changes in Tribal Anthropology between Colonial Rule and the Development State* In dealing with the programme of industrial production one most important question would be an adequate supply of trained personnel at all levels. This may indeed be a serious bottleneck. Attention would, therefore, have to be given to estimate the requirements of trained personnel ... In addition, suitable provision will have to be made to ensure an adequate supply of services personnel (including health, education, research, etc.). P. C. Mahalanobis (1954: 12) The time has not come to assess the value of Karl Pearson's work. But two things may be stated with confidence. He will come to be recognised in the future as the great pioneer who first placed the science of statistics on a secure basis not only by his own researches, but also by his life-long labours as a teacher, as an editor, and as the founder of a new school of research. Also when Eugenics is fully established, Karl Pearson will be associated with Francis Galton as the joint founders of the new science. If Galton's was the original idea, Pearson gave it concrete form. P. C. Mahalanobis (1936: 378)

Between these two epigraphs and the 18-year gap that separates them in time, is a world of difference, yet a subtle continuity: the difference is between a commitment to development planning in the modern nation-state on the one hand, and an interest in Eugenics in the context of colonial rule on the other. The continuity between the epigraphs is in the foundation of statistics as a science of populations: geared on the one hand to the task of government

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that underlies the discipline of development planning; on the other hand, to the possibilities of a science of Eugenics. How Eugenics disappears after World War II, and whether it is subsumed within the discipline of demography is a tortured debate I will not enter here. But I will note that when Mahalanobis, who was profoundly and explicitly interested in evolutionary anthropometry and implicitly so in Eugenics for a period of over 30 years, became the first development planner of free India, he lost all traces of his earlier commitment to anthropometry. What is the trajectory of this career-so exceptional, yet puzzling? In this chapter, I will approach this question by tracing the changing discourse on castes and tribes-looking first at a 70year long debate in colonial anthropometry in which Mahalanobis was a participant, and then at a late colonial debate in tribal administration policy between G. S. Ghurye and Verrier Elwin, which occurred a little before Mahalanobis was drafted to the national plan exercise. What was the difference and similarity in the way the colonial state and the national development state conceptualised the tribes in the process of governing them? I began chapter 2, in this volume . by proposing that the hill tribes posed two problems for both the colonial and the nationalist state: They were not subsumed under the caste pattern of land ownership and power that existed in the plains, and they did not easily fall within the caste system. This was not an issue as long as tribes lived in territories contiguous with or on the boundaries of kingdoms established before colonial rule. When the British did arrive, with the concept of territorial sovereignty that ultimately led them to see the subcontinent as a territory to be governed as a unit by a unique and single sovereign, it became important for them to find a way to conceptualise these communities as constituents of that larger unity. 1 The characteristic symptom of the colonial aporia was that in its perception and rationality, this unity was marked by its divisiveness, and its inability to bring itself together. In such a situation it became necessary to think of the tribe as contiguous with the caste system as the latter's outer boundary. 2 This chapter reviews two debates in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, in order to map a change in focus that occurs in anthropology and the discourse on tribes with the rise of nationalism. The first part of the chapter discusses Herbert Hope Risley's scientific hypothesis about the racial basis of Indian

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caste and tribal culture, proposed in the 1890s, which could be verified through the scientific measurement of nasal index (ratio of width to height of the nose) of the natives. It also describes the contestation and refinement of Risley's theory in the late colonial census administration work of B. S. Guha (1931), and Mahalanobis et al. (1949). The second part describes a completely different debate in the 1940s on the need to protect tribals, in which G. S. Ghurye attacks Verrier Elwin's proposals for an area earmarked as a 'zoo' in which the Baiga could pursue changes in their ways of living at their own pace. While the first debate is squarely located within the epistemological domain of Risley's science of colonial rule, the second is located on the margins of the epistemological domain of nationalism and its perspective on tribal communities. This change in the terrain of debate is a sign of the transformation that the administrative category of the tribe undergoes towards the end of colonial rule and the establishment of the nation-state.

I Reading Native Noses: Colonial Anthropometry of Castes and Tribes The colonial impulse to systematise knowledge of society according to castes and tribes in the late nineteenth century has several different historical roots. These follow different trajectories: two were quests that began before the revolt of 1857 and one a direct consequence of it. First, Evangelism was one such frame of thought that had always needed and generated a critical discourse about native society to justify the Christian alternative. 3 Reverend M.A. Sherring's anthropological work, which I will examine shortly, is an example of such an initiative that remained active after 1857. Second, the conviction of many Utilitarian officials was that while a unified system of laws was a necessity in the sphere of 'civil society', cultural specificity might be the only viable option in the regime of personal law. My discussion of Risley will analyse in detail the character of Utilitarianism in the late nineteenth-century anthropology of the castes and tribes of India. Third, at the practical level, the colonial

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administration, shaken by the magnitude and ferocity of the revolt of 1857, was hard-pressed to understand what it was in the Indian character that made it to rebel in such an unpredictable way. As Nicholas Dirks puts it, 'concerns about revenue gave way to a preoccupation with social order' (2001: 44) and the British needed to understand Indian society as opposed to economy alone. Early attempts at an ethnographic description followed different schemes of organisation with a common preoccupation in the search for an origin of caste. The gaze towards the past as shown in the written record automatically centred Brahmanism. 5 This was the inevitable mirror of seeing contemporary Brahmanism as a source of the evils of Indian society. What went out of view, when the gaze was focused on the written record, was the possibility of seeing that each community has its method of eulogising its own culture at the cost of others, and that this had varying historical effects according to the political force of the community. Lost was also the possibility of seeing that several culturally vibrant communities did not necessarily privilege writing and thus implicitly, if partially, devalued the primacy of Brahmanism. Therefore, privileging Brahmanism because it had a recorded culture irretrievably biased the dynamic cultural balance in i::s favour. 5 Such a positioning of Brahmanism, as the decadent, traditional centre of a colonised culture was a necessary ground against which the progressive, modernising, metropolitan culture of the coloniser could rise in relief. At the same time, this positioning set the stage for a political re-formation of Hinduism in terms that retained Brahmanical and caste-Hindu centrality while inverting the vector of evil in order to make it point towards colonial rule. The question of all the other castes and tribes revolved around this centre of Brahmanism. The discussion of the colonial debate that follows elicits this inversion of values in relation to the Brahmanical centre, and the same time, lays out the mapping of the tribes at the periphery of the caste system.

Risley, Race and Anthropology H. H. Risley has been described as a 'Mephistophelian', brilliant thinker, influenced by John Stuart Mill and by th,e conservatism of

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the German historical school. 6 He exemplified the fusion between administrator and anthropologist in what Nicholas Dirks has called the Ethnographic State (for a discussion on this, see Dirks 2001). When Risley wrote about castes and tribes, the subject was already crisscrossed with different readings. What follows is a brief background to Risley's work. BACKGROUND: MANU, POLITICS AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION

Among the many different strains of the nineteenth-century discourse on castes and tribes, I will use three themes: One, the reference to Manu's text; two, the theory of a politics of caste hierarchy on the ground; and three, the concept of racial amalgamation and the beginnings of a nationally unified race. This will enable the reader to see how Risley's theory works out its rule of racial difference in relation to these three background frameworks. The reference to Manu's text occurs in Sherring's descriptive analysis (1974) of the representative castes and tribes in Benares, which follows a twin impulse. It first describes the origin of each caste category as a degraded product of the miscegenation of the purebred castes, based on existing translations and annotations of the texts of Manu, without reference to caste groups that existed in the nineteenth century. The text runs typically, thus, [w] hile Brahmanical families in early times preserved, with great and remitting care, the purity of their race, nevertheless it is plain from the statements of Manu, that many new tribes were continuously being created by the intercourse of Brahmans with women of other castes (ibid.: xv).

However, in dealing with contemporary caste in the nineteenth century, it uses an empirical method based on observation to determine how the caste groups appear and inhabit society, and concludes with a logic that integrates the Manu text with contemporary observation, thus: 'existing Hindu castes are of two kinds; first, those of comparatively pure blood, Brahmans, Kshatriyas and perhaps some of the Vaisyas; secondly, those of impure blood, embracing all the castes not included in the first division' (ibid.: xxii).

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This reading thus (unconsciously) straddles the gap between, on the one hand, a categorisation according to Manu's laws, which may be called an ancient jurisprudence of questionable authoritativeness, and on the other a sociological narrative of existing groups in Benares. 7 There is no suspicion in this anthropological thought that, on the one hand, what was translated as an ancient categorisation, and on the other, the contemporary sociological grouping that category was made to cover, may not have belonged to a common epistemological or administrative framework. 8 In its implicit intention to provide the Manu Dharma Shastra's caste laws as an ancient signpost for forms of sociological knowledge adequate to colonial rule, this typical definition and activation of caste tradition breached new epistemological and political frontiers. In another register of the discourse on castes and tribes, Panjab Castes (Ibbetson 1916), an iconoclastic essay on the erroneous ways in which the contemporary debate conceptualised caste, argues that the thread of common descent, or blood characterised early tribal communities all round the world. 9 As life became more complex and occupational differentiation occurred, most communities preferred to inherit i:he legacy of occupation rather than that of blood. Peculiar conditions prevailed in India, whereby Brahmans consolidated their power and privilege by insisting on levitical descent rather than priestly occupation. Other less powerful caste groups followed, resulting in the caste system and the arrest of Indian civilisational progress. Thus, the tribe's ancient practice of maintaining purity of lineage as the strength of the community is in some ways reproduced in the caste system in its later history; which then begins to prohibit intermarriage and miscegenation between castes. In this view, the stress placed by contemporary accounts of castes and tribes on the ancient Varna system was excessive, and the essay moves towards an empirically derived description based on petrified occupational groupings, describing their actions as political rather than in terms of any deeply rooted racial tendencies. The essay recognises the difficulty of establishing the hierarcHical order between castes and uses several examples to show the wealth of exception defeating the rules of caste hierarchy in India. The relative sophistication of this understanding of the fluidity of caste hierarchy, its sensitivity to the internal political dynamics of a society supposedly stratified

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by caste, and insight into the everyday use of specific caste terms in conversation with no reference to reality, are all exemplary in colonial discourse, prefiguring developments in perspective which occur near three quarters of a century later with M. N. Srinivas and Bernard Cohn. The third influential theory of castes and tribes framed in terms of an amalgamated race conducive to nationalism, and of a caste system that is independent of race provides us with the third signpost with which to triangulate Risley's epistemological terrain (Nesfield circa 1885). The argument is as follows: the main bond that fused a caste group into a new social unit was the community of function, or occupation, rather than the community of kinship (blood, race) or creed. 'Function and function only, as I think, was the foundation upon which the whole caste system in India was built up' (Nesfield, cited in Risley 1981: xx). Such an assertion broke with the current conceptualisation of caste as a product of the clash of the Aryan and Dravidian races, insisting that the differences in race had vanished before caste arrived. In this argument, the Brahmans instituted the first closure of caste, quickly leading to a similar sealing of other caste groups. The precipitation of society into caste groups was ultimately counter to progress, which occurred when the embrace of scientific reason caused caste boundaries to melt, first with the Brahman, 'the Jons et origo mali [the source and origin of evil]', after which the rest would soon follow (ibid.: xxi). The proposition that the sympathy of occupation drove caste groups into coherent and interlocking units led to the proposition that amalgamation of racial types into a single Indian race provided the basis of a possible national unity, 'raising the choice spirits of the various tribes into the rank of Brahman or Chattri, leaving the rest to rise or fall in the social scale according to their capacities and opportunities' (ibid.: xxii). Such an assertion flew in the face of the ascending racial orthodoxy and this thesis withered under the anthropometric onslaught on the science of Indian castes and tribes. Doubtless, behind the attack on the racial amalgamation theory was also the colonial need to prove that a single Indian race potentially capable of self-rule was nowhere near coming into existence. Both the theory of a politics of caste on the ground (Ibbetson 1916) and that of an amalgamation of race in India (N es field circa 1885) project interesting phantom projects of a possible colonial

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anthropology and its effects on the administration it served. 10 Both these perspectives serve as implicit rallying points against Risley's dominant model in late colonial and early nationalist anthropology. 11 RACE, CASTE AND MARRIAGE IN RISLEY'S ANTHROPOLOGY

Risley's 'Introductory Essay: Caste in Relation to Marriage' in the Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1981) argues the centrality of race in the constitution of caste society. 12 It starts by assuming Alfred Lyall's thesis that a gradual Brahmanising of the aboriginal, nonAryan or casteless tribes continued to occur in modern times, based on the author's own observations of specific cases (Lyall n.d., cited in ibid.). This historical process happened, according to Risley's citation of Lyall, through four distinct routes. In the Lyall/ Risley theory of Brahmanisation, the tribes face a barrier to their social progress in the form of resistance to intermarriage from the existing 'purebred' castes, at the apex of which is the Brahman. It is for this reason that tribes who wanted to enter the caste-Hindu structure usually chose what we today might call a 'neo-Kshatriya' caste, often descended from a mythically banished or fleeing Rajput king. The aspirant groups or individuals then have to seek out other newly successful, peripheral groups in the Hindu fold for spouses and for their children. Thus, in this theory, an aboriginal tribe is seen as an explicitly theorised marginal category aspiring for the st1tus of a Hindu/Brahmanical Aryan centre. The study's hypothesis, based on expert anthropological advice, 13 was that the Brahmanical resistance to forming kinship relations through marriage, against the pressure of tribes to enter the higher reaches of the caste structure, would generate a measurable difference between the Aryan centre and the aboriginal periphery in anthropometric characters, such as the shape of the nose, mouth and cheeks. Thus, [i]f we take a series of castes in Bengal, Bihar or the North-Western Provinces, and arrange them in the order of the average nasal index, so that the caste with the finest nose shall be at the top, and that with the coarsest at the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social precedence (Risley 1981: xxxiv).

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This assertion was a call to arms of anthropometry in the service of an epoch of evolutionism at its zenith in the West. ANTHROPOMETRY IN THE LOGIC OF COLONIALISM

Risley had one main reason for undertaking afresh the project of describing the tribes and castes of Bengal. This was the need to provide administration with the knowledge of native society, which is made up of a network of subdivisions governed by rules which affect every department of life, and ... in Bengal at any rate, next to nothing is known about the system upon which the whole native population regulates its domestic and social relations. If legislation, or even executive action, is ever to touch these relations in a satisfactory manner, an ethnographic survey of Bengal, and a record of the customs of the people, is as necessary an incident of good administration as a cadastral survey of the land and a record of rights of its tenants (Risley 1981: vii).

The metaphor of the cadastral survey and record of tenant rights hark back to the colonial rationalisation of land revenue over the nineteenth century. This intent to construct a system of infallible knowledge that would serve as the foundation for a powerful supervisory law locates the roots of this project in Panopticism, 14 which was the engine of colonialism's Utilitarian philosophy of law. The history of nineteenth-century colonial rule in India is seen in Eric Stokes' magisterial study (1989), as an experiment in Utilitarian government and law-making. While a separate forthcoming section in this chapter is devoted to the difference between Utilitarianism in England and in colonial India, I will make one observation at this point. It was historically inevitable that the Utilitarian philosophy of law when put into practice in India, had to come to terms with and accommodate the theory and practice of race that drove colonial logic in the nineteenth century. Risley's theory of race is a case in point. Most of his theory of Indian society (Brahmanisation as a cultural phenomenon, exclusion of intermarriage, hypergamy, etc.) in the Tribes and Castes of Bengal would hold with internal consistency, whatever its truth-value, without the support of the race basis the study invoked. However, anthropometry in the configuration of

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nineteenth-century thought, provided a connective link between race theory and Utilitarian technology of colonial rule 15 in the path it opened through numerical statistics. 16 Thus anthropometry would ensure that the aboriginal would scientifically be rated more primitive than the Brahman, and hence the stages of culture as marked by marriage, inheritance, relationship, and property could be unequivocally determined. Such a gradation would doubtlessly offer a theoretical basis for a secure administration to be planned for the colonised population: a didactic proportionate system of representation overseen by the benign administrative eye for the barbarous Aryan; and a simple, paternalistic system of rule for the savage tribal. It would also provide a scientific basis for the logic of colonial supremacy and sovereign authority. THE PROFILE OF STATISTICS IN COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Risley conducted measurements of the head, nose, cheekbones, orbits, forehead, and zygomatic arches, weight, stature, and Cuvier's facial angle, on approximately 100 individuals of each tribe so that the average may represent a type. The use of averages of samples from each caste was a natural corollary given the umbilical link between the nascent discipline of statistics and that of anthropometry. 17 However, his main instrument was the average nasal index of each caste group. For Risley, the average nasal index measured the average physical characteristics that represented a caste/tribe as a type, in the stage in the evolution towards Brahmanism. It thus gauged, on an infinitely larger scale, the degree to which that type fell short of Western civilisation. What then were the specific effects of this deployment of anthropometry?

In this anthropometric exercise, measurements of physical features were averaged and grouped according to castes. It thus established the ranges of average anthropometric measurements as a sequence of caste norms. This sequence distributed the statistical average of the colonised population as a whole across caste groups, seen as a graded sequence of statistical populations. 18 The effect was that each individual was evaluated according to his caste norm. This concept of caste as a characteristic that is

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physically measurable by the nasal index segregates society into compartments of closed communities with the objective of ultimately handling them independently in separate systems of personal law. Such a definitive concept of caste is marked by the absence of the normalising force that is characteristic of governmental/statistical exercises in the West. 19 This absence expresses itself in the conspicuous lack of any intentional attempt at unification of interests in Risley's objective-more on this theme in the following section. The broader picture emerges in the essay's understanding of how the boundaries of caste groupings are forged and held through sexual regulation, i.e., rules of endogamy and exogamy. Control of sexual intercourse and its formalisation through marriage serve as explanatory concepts of how caste boundaries come into being. This explanation too has no regulative potential-i.e., there is no normative element in the description that exerts a force to amalgamate these boundaries into one social composite. 20 The idea of a racial amalgam that constitutes modern civilised populations (e.g., Nordic, Mediterranean) is an important theoretical assumption about the racial structure of civilised societies. Risley's logic of the Indian anthropometric gradation thus facilitates a 'scientific' timeline of the racial progress of different castes through the ages, as they ever so slowly moved towards the normative amalgam that constituted modern European society. Risley's style of reasoning thus led to distanced administrative mechanisms and legislative enactments according to the logic of caste. It is important to read Risley's scientific/administrative decisions as singular expressions of the evolving structure of colonial logic rather than as a simple personal choice, given his status and function as a senior administrator. Read thus, Risley's discourse suggests that the imperatives of colonial anthropology restricted anthropological research to finding the reason for existence of the colonial state in its racial supremacy, and thus ensuring its perpetual sovereignty. 21 UTILITARIANISM AND COLONIAL RULE IN INDIA

It is useful to place this specific detail of colonial anthropometry against the background of Utilitarian logic in India, as it is shaped by colonialism in a way that opposes it to Utilitarian logic in the nineteenth-century West.

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In a still much referred to study conducted at the end of the nineteenth century, the French thinker Elie Halevy (1928) has shown that Utilitarian governmental thought in Europe was driven by the fundamental theme of the identification of interests. In the economic domain, Adam Smith's invisible hand forged disparate individual interests into a natural identity of social interest in a free market economy. On the other hand, in the legal domain, Jeremy Bentham was convinced that laws must be carefully designed so that individual behaviour changed. The objective was to create an artificial identification of interests in society in a manner that functioned positively alongside the market. In politics, despotism was to be avoided through the accountability of the ruler to the ruled, by establishing the identity of interests between them. This identity was to be achieved by a system of electoral representation so that the ruler is always under threat of a periodic removal by the ruled. To repeat in summary, according to Halevy, identification of interests was the theme that drove Utilitarian thought in industrial England. Throughout its reign in nineteenth-century England, Utilitarianism was largely a form of critical questioning of the effectiveness of the existing forms of government. The difference was that in India, Utilitarian thought rather than being a principle of critical questioning, was used as a guiding framework to frame law and design government. In this constructive (as opposed to critical) role, it had to maintain an uneasy truce with the logic of colonial dominance. 22 Thus, in colonial India in the nineteenth century, land revenue regulations, efforts to establish uniform civil laws, railways, financial systems, etc., led to complex and frustrating administrative struggles to establish a market economy in the Western model where a natural identity of interests would begin to play freely. However, it is arguable that the artificial identification of social interests through a system oflaws governing social life was marked by its weakness, if not absence. From the beginning, personal law was handled with some trepidation about interfering in the daily affairs of natives (see the quote from Risley provided earlier). This intuitive reticence becomes almost a positive goal in the logic of caste anthropometry, which was geared to the creation of specific systems of personal law for different caste and tribal groups in the future. Characteristic is the manner in which castes and tribes were

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theoretically segregated from one another in racially differentiated groups with disparate interests. This segregation was driven by the colonial need to demonstrate that there was no possibility of a nation in emergence. The chapter on the concept of seva in this volume (chapter 1) discusses the battle around identification of national interests and their representation by the Congress. It concludes with some observations about the crisis for emergent national capitalism caused by the weakness or absence of an identification of interests in the kind of native society fostered and held in place by colonialism. The problem of political representation for Utilitarianism in India was linked to this too: it is clear that in colonial India, the political identification of interests between the ruler and the ruled through electoral politics was a structurally impossible task and it is easily argued that this ultimately led to the collapse of colonial rule. From such a perspective, the history of this failed exercise is but the underbelly of the freedom movement. IMPROVEMENT AND INFLECTION OF RISLEY'S FRAMEWORK: COEFFICIENT OF RACIAL LIKENESS

The census study titled 'Racial Affinities of the People of India' (Guha 1931) is technically several degrees more sophisticated than the work of Risley. After a critical review of Risley, the chapter sets out to study the racial affinities, noting the importance of keeping 'clear the respective fields of Race and Culture in scientific investigation' (ibid.: i). 23 The study uses a modified version of Pearson's Coefficient of Racial Likeness (CRL), which permits comparison of more than two groups with each other. The author B. S. Guha calculates the CRLs for caste groups in the following different regions: North Western Himalayan; Indo-Gangetic Plains; Central India and Gujarat; Peninsular India; North Eastern India; and finally for the tribal groups. The study plots the CRLs between castes and tribes within and across regions. Based on these measurements it is able to demonstrate some racial affinities across the Indian subcontinent, thus (implicitly) proving the amalgamated racial unity of India. This study reverts to a somewhat 'Nesfieldian' position, eschewing commentary on culture in an analysis of race, and at the same time, demonstrating 'the unity of the Indian race'. 24

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The interesting aspect of the study, in my seeking to explore habits and systems of thinking during this period, is its focus on the Brahmans and upper castes in general. Muslims are examined in the Northwestern regions, Punjab and Sindh, but are not mentioned in either of the studies of the United Provinces, Bengal or the Deccan, which cc.nsisted of a significant population of Muslims. 25 On the other hand, while the paper does discuss in detail the Kayashta, Bania and Kshatriya castes, it rarely descends below these groups in its hierarchy of discussion. Only in its incorporation of Edgar Thurston's studies in South India does the paper address the depressed classes, such as the Mala and Madiga in Andhra. The study of the Maratha country mentions Chitpavans, Karads, Deshasta, Saraswats, (Brahman castes), Prabhus (Kayasthas), and Marathas but has no mention of the Mahars, the caste to which Ambedkar belonged, and who during the time of the paper's writing was engaged in a bitter and public political battle with the Congress. 26 Finally, in its map linking the Indian subcontinent through the CRLs of different castes, the main groupings are the regional Brahman variations, with the odd Kayashta or Kshatriya thrown in. Another aspect of the study is its conclusion that there is a complete lack of any racial linkage between the various aboriginal groups. The structural biases of this rigorous work of research point to the dominant social thought emerging under late colonial rule. The character of this thought is demonstrated in another essay by Guha (1951) on the 'Indian Aborigines and their Administration', which concludes as follows: The essential thing is to realise that the tribal and general population are inhabitants of the same country and their interests are closely interwoven for good or bad. The fostering of the growth of a common outlook and common interest should be the ideal for which both should strive. The administration of the primitive tribes should be so planned that this purpose is served by developing them on their own models and thought, but also gradually bringing them up as full and integral members of the country and participating like the rest in her joys and sorrows (ibid.: 44).

In the 20 years that separate the publication of the above-cited paper on the racial affinities of the people of India and the one on

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the CRL of castes and tribes under study here, there has emerged a theme of integration, amelioration and understanding, all from the perspective of an implicitly Brahmanical centre, which links and consolidates the nation through its high racial coherence. It is the administrative duty of this centre to integrate the aboriginals of the periphery (who have the misfortune of not constituting a coherent racial group) by 'developing them on their own models of thought' so that they gradually learn to participate 'like the rest' in the new born nation's joys and sorrows. As I have argued in chapter 2 in this volume, the economic principle that undergirds assimilation or integration of the tribes is the release of territory, natural resources and wealth for the use of the greater national good. THE MAHALANOBIS DISTANCE AND THE RANK ORDERING OF CASTE

The final historical document in this analytical study of the Risleyan debate on the factor of race in the structure of castes and tribes is the study of the United Provinces authored by Mahalanobis, Majumdar and Rao (1949). The paper criticises Guha's work and raises a theoretical objection to Pearson's CRL, which had recently been criticised by both R. A. Fisher and P. C. Mahalanobis independently. Mahalanobis had by then refined his measure of 'group' distance, the D2 statistic and the original name he proposed for this measure was 'Caste Distance'. Fisher renamed the measure as the Mahalanobis Generalised Distance, in a clear recognition of, and salute to, its extended horizon of application. 27 Mahalanobis et al°. succeeded in doubling Guha's average sample size (to 128) and computed the D2 statistic based on 12 anthropometric characters measured on 22 different caste and tribe groups in the United Provinces. They corroborated the statistical results of the D2 values using the method of computing canonical variates by means of 'Mallock's Machine' housed in the Mathematical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. 28 After a long and complex analysis, the results were found to be broadly corroborative of a version of Risley's thesis that 'in India, in a general way, the change from more primitive to more civilised conditions appears to have been accompanied by a shift from smaller to larger physical size (with narrow nose) among the different castes

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and tribes' (Mahalanobis, Majumdar and Rao 1949: 199). The gradual nature of this change was seen to be indicative of a racial amalgamation which was not yet complete. What follows is an exploration of the framework of thinking about caste and tribe in relation to race that structures the study. The concept of 'distance' between castes or races, like the comparison of the nasal index (which compares the numerical difference between two given nasal indices), does not provide any intrinsic rank ordering in terms of superiority and inferiority. It is only a measure of a theoretical distance between one caste and another computed according to anthropometric characteristics. The concept of generalised distance complicates the concept of distance by measurement in a multidimensional space (in this case a 12-dimensional space defined by the 12 anthropometric characters measured). In line with this concept of generalised distance, the early statement of purpose in the paper is as follows: The first obvious question is, whether, as judged by the present physical measurements, all these castes and tribes can be considered, in some significant sense, to belong to the same homogeneous group of population. If not, do these 22 castes and tribes show any evidence of internal patterning or any kind of systematic classification in the sense that certain castes and tribes may be considered to be nearer to one another than others? (ibid.: 114).

By the end of the statistical analysis section of the paper, however, the argument moves to the notion of rank, drawing on anthropological knowledge to posit the presence of a 'main sequence' of castes in the study (that is, by subtly changing the goal from 'grouping' castes to 'sequencing' them) and then describing this sequence thus, [t]he D2 -values thus supply a general picture of the following kind. There are three well-demarcated clusters, the Brahmins CB-cluster), at the top of the Hindu social hierarchy; the artisans (A-cluster), in the middle, and the tribal groups CT-cluster) at the bottom (ibid.: 180).

Another indicator of the agenda of rank in the statistical section is the statement expressing puzzlement that the 'criminal'

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tribes, i.e., the Bhatus and Habrus, are racially similar to the Brahmins thus '[t]hese two so-called criminal tribes are clearly differentiated ... but in certain ways form a sub-cluster which is, strangely enough, nearest to the Brahmins, and quite close to the artisans' (Mahalanobis, Majumdar and Rao 1949: 179). Or yet again, in a frame of reference reminiscent of Risley's injunction to exclude wide-nosed Brahmins, the paper observes that the tribal group called 'the Rajwars have a most remarkable feature, namely, the narrowest nasal breadth among all the groups, which is most surprising and requires further study' (ibid.). The paper then continues with anthropological observations written by Mahalanobis on the basis of manuscript material provided by Majumdar (see ibid.: 181). The author uses axiomatic hypotheses of evolutionist anthropology to refine and strengthen the rank-ordering logic of the exercise. Thus, the Brahmins were traditionally the priestly class occupying the highest social status in the Vedic age, and have retained their position at the apex of Hindu society up to the present time. They are clearly and unmistakably differentiated from other groups; and may reasonably be considered to be the modern representatives of the highest layer of the Vedic people speaking Indo-European or Indo-Aryan languages (ibid.: 184).

In contrast, the tribal groups live in the hills, speaking languages of the Austric family with no written script. From a point of view that would perhaps be critically questioned today, the paper states that the tribal way of life is usually primitive, and they have social customs and religious practices which differ widely from those prevalent among the Brahmins and other high castes in Hindu society. As already noted, they are usually identified with the primitive aboriginals of India, and occupy a position at the bottom or even outside the pale of Hindu society (ibid.: 185).

In this account, as in Guha's, a crucial reversal with respect to nineteenth-century discourse has taken place: the Brahman of today is the successor of the Vedic Brahman, but he is no longer

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stigmatised by what in the colonial anthropological/ administrative perspective is selfish parochialism. He is the inheritor of an elite status, without any negative characteristics given to him in the colonial discourse. The social model of a centre and periphery does not take into account the weight of the relative populations, or of the ones constituting castes in the intervening social space. The metaphor of the 'apex' of Hindu society suggests that the zones of high social status are sparsely populated. The logic is perhaps Galtonian here, where the Brahmans represent the rarefied abnormal pole of excellence towards which the general population's anthropometric averages must gravitate. If we ask the obvious hypothetical question, 'How do such anthropometric averages gravitate?' The simple answer was bound to be 'through Eugenics'. 29 As in the case of Risley, however sophisticated the statistical reasoning, the perspective of Mahalanobis et al. remains mired in the problematic of establishing an implicit hierarchy of racial precedence. The discourse at this stage does not have even a faint hint of welfare and development discourse that will thunder out of the Nehruvian paradigm barely five years later.

II

Proposing Nationalist Zoos-The Tribal in Nationalist Perspective About six years before Mahalanobis et al. published their paper on the racial basis of the caste and tribes of the United Provinces, another debate took place on the question of tribes and 'what to do with them'. This debate signals a change in the imagined ground on which the tribes posed a problem. Looking at this debate will help the reader begin to understand the continuities and ruptures that nationalism brings about in the discourse on castes and tribes, and in tum understand the tensions and contradictions of nationalist thought. I have written this section with a focus on the colourful personalities of the scholars in this debate, rather than as a straightforward academic description of their argument.

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Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, 'armchair' anthropologist, extraordinary, brilliant scholar and polemical interventionist wrote like the steam locomotive: on a single track, with a relentless logic and a remorseless argument, inexorably lumbering to a pitiless destination. Verrier Elwin, a 'philanthropologist' who spent an awe-inspiring number of years in the field living among the people he studied, yet almost persona non grata in the world of academic anthropology, while being extraordinarily influential in the Congress and in the first decade of nationalist government, wrote with an airy brilliance. Ghurye, in his The Aboriginal Tribes, So-called, and their Future, was a spokesman for modernisation. 30 In this detailed and complex essay on the various debates in colonial tribal anthropology which continues to serve as an invaluable review of the discourse of nearly a century, Ghurye launches a veiled attack: his target, Elwin of The Baiga vintage (1939), was a Romantic-unclear and ambiguous about what he wanted-who in the end in effect acted to modernise tribal societies. Ghurye's argument was composed of a series of steps. Establishing nationalism as the te.rrain of the debate, Ghurye asserted a la Nesfield that the formation of a single composite 'Indian race' was maturing and anything harming the process should be avoided. He had already demolished Risley's hypothesis by showing that status and fineness of the nose did not go together. 31 Setting sights on the 'so-called' aboriginal tribes, he argued that the aboriginal (primary, first inhabitant) status of the tribes in India was unproven, and that a large section of the anthropologists hitherto had concluded that the tribes were rejects and the fringe communities at the periphery of Hindu society. Pampering them was unnecessary. Next he argued that' [t] he main problem of the tribals, therefore, is very similar to the problems of the non-aboriginal agriculturists [ ... ] The effective solution of the problem lies in strengthening the ties of the tribals with other backward classes through their integration' (Ghurye 1959: 207). The governmental policy of giving them special treatment in view of their unique crisis was wrong because it ran against the integration of a national race and culture. Third, he asserted that the tribes, being backward Hindus, were troublesome, and were generally bribed into peace by the British.

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The term 'backward', for Ghurye, denoted 'uncivilised', 'rough' and in need of taming. Many, like the Santal and the Bhil, were no less than rowdy marauders who would lose the battle against the civilised, ruthless and predatory Hindu. That was the unswerving route to modern national unity and the detritus scattered in its tracks must be ignored. Ghurye argued that the anthropological fashion of describing the 'loss of nerve' of the tribal was due to the trend set by W. H. R. Rivers. 32 With justification it may be said that the eyes of anthropologists were turned to the discovery of evils attendant on the contact of aborigines with people of alien and higher culture by the writing of Rivers on the depopulation of Melanesia (Ghurye 1959: 137). He asserted that the process of contact and exchange with Indian plainsmen was not as destructive of tribal custom as was seen by the followers of Rivers. In the case of the Baiga, he contradicted Elwin's praise of their culture and asserted that their sexual practices bordering on debauchery measured their distance from the civilised norm. The overindulgence in sex, which is admitted in the case of the Baigas also by Dr. Elwin, may be expected to increase rather than diminish in the particular circum~tances [of being accommodated in a 'zoo', more on this follows]. The Baigas believe that generally sex desire must be gratified whenever it arises, and that they were a far more virile race when they were practising shifting cultivation without let or hindrance than at present. They will have their shifting cultivation, and they will try to live up to their belief of a return of great virility. Add to this the impetus given by the more ample feeding likely to result from larger plots available for cultivation. Thus for the physical and moral betterment of the people, this plan holds no promise (Ghurye 1959: 182).

This moral criticism of the Baiga tribe's sexual excess is a clear litmus test that marks Ghurye's nationalist agenda of cultural unification through the systematic regulation of personal conduct. It is perhaps only a coincidental convenience that this moral regulation of sexuality would also work broadly against the dangers of sexual miscegenation of castes in this proposed model of national unity. This normative evaluation and judgement of

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the Baiga, and of mores in general, are very different from the tendency to 'let sleeping dogs lie'. Finally, Ghurye attacked Elwin's view that the Baiga suffered the most in the Central Provinces, and derided his proposal for a 'zoo' in which the Baiga may change his law and culture at his own pace. Even [the] suggestions regarding civil law and customs of the so-called aborigines, therefore, stamp Dr Elwin as a no-changer and a revivalist (Ghurye 1959: 172). He charges Elwin with continuing the policy of British isolationism and being unwilling to admit the forces of progress. 33 In addition, Ghurye makes the Utilitarian argument that in the interests of the greatest good of the greatest number of tribals and non-tribals, the area should be left open for public exploitation. He then suggests a structure of action to take care of the assimilational stresses and strains of the tribal without the retrogressive step of providing a zoo.

What then was the target of Ghurye's attack? The Baiga is an unusual text (Elwin 1939). Most of its 500-odd pages are devoted to a masterful description of culture, epistemology, economy, and world-view from a perspective that is more Baiga than Elwin. The Baiga does not try to be a sensitive English anthropology of that tribe from the inside-it strives to become an auto-ethnography and the contemporary history of the Baiga through Elwin's work. It is as if the erudition and the literary gifts of the Oxford don gone awry are joined to the divine knowledge and celestial poise of the Baiga to pose a philanthropological question to modernity. Thirty years after his writing The Baiga, Elwin re-describes their spellbinding origin story in the Nanga Baiga, who was God's right hand in creating the world, adding a touch of his own magic thus, [n] o wonder that the Baiga, tracking his descent from such a distinguished ancestry has an air about him. A king (or perhaps I should say an archbishop) is always peeping through his loop'd and window'd raggedness. And still today he is the magician and medicine-man, the classic type, who acts as intermediary between

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the other tribes and their gods. He is sent for by the Gonds to charm fertility into their reluctant seed; he is consulted even by the Brahmins in time of sickness; it is believed that he can divert hail from a treasured field; he can detect with a divining rod a stray bullock or a stolen goat far more efficiently than the police. This tradition and pride of the Baigas brought them into conflict with the government in two ways (Elwin 1964: 146-47).

In Leaves from the Jungle: Life in a Gond Village (Elwin 1936, cited 1989), he describes the Gond Seva Mandal, an organisation he started to help the Gonds, bringing together in confused juxtaposition a religious attachment to the Gandhian principles of service, respect for the Gond, coupled with compassion for his predicament, and a flavour of the lonely life of one who finds adventure at the junction between life in a Gond village and the forest. The publication ends with a portrayal of life at the Gond Seva Mandal at Karanjia in the Mandla District of the Central Provinces, as 'wild, lonely and very odd', suitable for an invocation of Blake. Every Moment has a Couch of gold for soft repose, And every Minute has an azure Tent with silken Veils; Etc. (ibid).

Elwin was not alone in his spiritual mysticism, having come to India with a group of four others to join the Christa Seva Sangh, which was already in existence. 34 Jack Winslow started the Sangh in 1922, with an aim of restoring an increasingly corrupt and jaded Christianity its fundamental orientation of love. Winslow's and C. R Andrews' attraction for Gandhi foreshadowed Elwin's own. 35 Why did a would-be don spend decades of his life wedded to a Gond, studying her people and the Baigas of Central India? We are on the terrain of Romanticism here. 36 This shift in perspective, from that of an armchair anthropologist (Risley, Ghurye) to that of a 'participant observer' in the deepest and most challenging sense of the term, locates for us the singularity of Elwin's project. Romanticism in Utilitarian thought (Stokes 1989: 9) sought to do stern justice to the oppressed, seeing them from the point of view of privilege. The conscience of colonial authority found a despotic justification and not disturbance in the

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process. Elwin, a century later, sought to offer reparation for the damage caused by his countrymen's subjugation and exploitation of India (Elwin 1964: 62). Elwin's writing is a singular critical expression of the West's knowledge of itself, not in the imagination, but on a formidable empirical ground. His project provides space for a critique of modernity whose implications for the Western conscience are severe, since the shift in perspective eventually brings into question everything modern including the impulse of adventure behind Elwin's own project. It is this abyss which makes Elwin suggest the confused idea of a zoo in terms that reduce the Baiga to the rank of an animal-a place where he can find a suitable pace of change in response to the demands of modernity. And yet, the proposal for a zoo would be eminently acceptable to the forces of industrialisation exerting pressure on the wild countryside. Thus Ghurye's assessment of Elwin's project as 'no-changeist' is perhaps wrong, since the establishment of a zoo to house the tribals would in effect modernise the released territory. Of the many contradictory strands that constitute Elwin's exercise, the one that is given political meaning both by Ghurye's attack and by the Congress' support is the former's wobbly adherence to the Gandhian concept of seva. The Gond Seva Mandal is one of the myriad service organisations that sprouted in the Indian socio-political landscape from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards. Matching and exceeding in epistemological scope Ghurye's relentless demolition of the theory of nasal index, Elwin's discourse reflects the collapse of the Risleyan racial hierarchy in the nationalist imagination.

Conclusion The change in the structure of the tribal problematic that emerges across these two debates-one between Risley and his interlocutors, and the other between Ghurye and Elwinbrings into focus the differing epistemological bases of a tribal anthropology in colonialism and nationalism. Going back to the first of the epigraphs to this chapter from Mahalanobis' writings, the idea of economic growth and of channelling of a population that is suited to working in a decolonised nation, in its structure

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implicitly demands that the tribal be assimilated to the logic of national unity. On the other hand, colonial capitalism, predicated on restricted colonial enterprise and on alien government, needed segregation and therefore a science of race. Given the Western academic focus on Eugenics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is perhaps to be expected that the best scientific minds in colonial India were interested in the subject. Both these (a nationalist theory of economic development, and a colonial science of race) focused on the tribal populations, based on careful ongoing estimates of populations, their characterisation and an assessment of the political threat they pose to a stable economy. However, as chapter 3 in this volume argues, this characterisation and assessment as a form of anthropological knowledge is accompanied by a practice of administration that, rather than simply apply this knowledge, sets up a play where practice and knowledge interweave and shape each other.

Notes * This chapter is a revised version of my earlier publication (Srivatsan

2005). The version was also reprinted as a contribution in M. T. Ansari and Deeptha Achar's edited volume (2010). I am deeply grateful to Chris Chekuri who read an earlier unwieldy draft of this essay and helped greatly in giving it its current shape and drive. Any lack of coherence of course remains my own responsibility.

1. I am indebted to Partha Chatterjee, who stressed the importance of territoriality and integrality of control over territory in postWestphalian sovereignty, in his keynote address to the Research Students Forum, Alam Khundmiri Foundation and the ICSSR (SRC)sponsored seminar on 'Contemporary Ways and Voices of Resistance/ Resilience' (Hyderabad, June 2012). 2. It should be noted that the Muslim in India, seen as the displaced ruling class, was the focus of a battle for legitimacy; and therefore the subject of a much more complex political epistemology than was the tribal. This problem is beyond the scope of this book. 3. See Eric Stokes (1989) for a discussion of Evangelism in the colonial intervention. Nicholas Dirks (2001) reads Sherring, whose work I will summarise in this chapter, in a related way. 4. Bernard Cohn has shown that the history of the concept of the Brahmanical centre itself was much older than the period

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

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I am examining, being present in its early avatars in the work of N. B. Halhed, who published a compilation and translation of the Dharmashastras in 1776 (See Cohn 1987: 142). See 'Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture', in Cohn (1987) for a slightly different argument. See also 'The Enumeration of Caste: Anthropology as Colonial Rule' in Dirks (2001), for a description ofRisley's privileging ofBrahmanical sources. G. S. Ghurye (1990) was the first to observe that contemporary caste practice was a response to British categorisations of status. See Dietmar Rothermund (1968) for that author's comments on Risley and for contemporary evaluations of Risley's character by G. K. Gokhale and Morley. The term 'ancient jurisprudence' is taken from Bentham (1948: 328). The authoritativeness (ibid.: 326) of the texts of Manu is clearly the central question of historical research in the domain of caste. See next point for the conclusion of the argument. The point behind the preceding citation of Bentham is to suggest that the spirit of historical scepticism was alive and functioning in Western thought relating to colonial rule long before Sherring's exercise in historiographic innocence. Denzil Ibbetson (1916) was a separate publication of his work on the subject as commissioner for the Panjab census of 1881. The naivete of the historical speculations of these thinkers (as of Risley's narrative to follow) gives us some idea of why the British social anthropologists, especially Radcliffe Brown, and following him Evans Pritchard, rejected wholesale the idea of speculative evolutionism in anthropological explanation, focusing on current social relations and building their explanation on the basis of a thorough structural functionalism. J. H. Hutton (1941) is one example of this reversal. Ghurye's argument against Risley is another (1990). Risley's interlocutors may be found in Jacob, Lee and Pearson (19021903: 348), cited in Mahalanobis and Bose (1945); Guha (1935); Ghurye (1990); Mahalanobis and Bose (1945); Mahalanobis, Majumdar and Rao (1949); Rothermund (1968); Cohn (1987). Risley cites his correspondence with the Englishman Flower and the work of the Frenchman Topinard in the text. Panopticism in the Utilitarian philosophy of law refers to Jeremy Bentham's model of administering institutions through a system of omniscient supervision. See Michel Foucault (1976) for the basic analysis of Bentham's Panopticon as the concrete design for specific institutions like prisons, schools, hospitals, etc., in the West. However, Foucault argues that Bentham proposed the Panopticon as the general formula for liberal government (2008: 67). See Stokes'

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15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

many references (though somewhat inarticulate) throughout the book to Bentham's Panopticon (1989). My own reading is that Stokes sees Panopticism as the spirit animating the mechanism of the legal systems in colonial India. The term 'Utilitarian technology of colonial rule' draws on Foucault's characterisation of Utilitarianism as a technology of government, rather than a philosophy (2008). Throughout this chapter, the term statistics would refer to its use in measuring people and their attributes, not things such as land, minerals, forests, etc. A present history of 'statistics of things' would begin by re-examining the experiments on land tenure. See second epigraph to this chapter from the obituary essay in honour of Karl Pearson for a biographical sense of this link between statistics, Eugenics and anthropometry. I am using the term population in two senses in this sentence. In the first instance, it means the population of a state as a whole, while in the second case, it means a statistical population of individuals who meet specific characteristics, here belonging to a specific caste. For an understanding of the European use of statistics in sociology, consider Durkheim's sociological method: it expressed a social phenomenon (of suicide for instance) in numerical statistics. The statistical averages measured a normal state of society, whose stability was the objective of investigation. Thus, an increasing annual suicide rate indicated a change in social stability. Durkheim, a conservative, saw the normal as a measure of goodness. For him, the normal was opposed to the pathological, and was a measure of the current state of degeneration from a perfect past. On the other hand, for Francis Galton the normal was actually the central mean of the empirical normal curve-there was no perfect past. The normal was the mediocre (as inhabited by most 'ordinary' people), opposed by two abnormal extremes of excellence and sub-normality. Society would have to strive towards the pole of excellence to achieve a future perfection-hence Galtonian Eugenics. In both Galton and Durkheim, in spite of their different trajectories, there is a more or less subtle normative drive at improvement of the current state of affairs th2t exerts its force behind the empirical measurement of the normal. My argument about Risley's model is that such a normative drive is notably absent. See Ian Hacking (1990) for this analysis of the relationship between Durkheim and Galton. In contrast, Foucault's classic study of the History of Sexuality (vol. 1, 1976) in the West maps the emergence of a norm of adult heterosexual conduct, against which deviances like homosexuality, child masturbation and female hysteria are decided, characterised, measured, controlled in their explicit manifestation and regulated

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in their potential appearance. Such constructs as abnormality and deviance, however problematic, shaped Western society through a regulatory mechanism. However, I am not in the least suggesting that these measures were good for the society. 21. It must be recognised that such a reading cannot depend on the simplistic attribution of evil to colonial intentions. The civilisational arrogance of the West and its rapacity have their roots in a powerful consensus about the truth of Western superiority that is nowhere near weakening today. 22. This was because of the ambivalence of Utilitarian thought towards colonialism. Bentham had written a tract regarding the economic fallacy of seeing investment in the colonies as profitable, while James Mill had written probably the single-most influential text justifying colonial rule and providing it its strategies, i.e., The History of British India.

23. This emphasis on differentiating Race and Culture suggests allegiance to the Boasian school. See Franz Boas (1940) for papers on his concepts on race and culture. 24. Guha, however, clearly did not buy Nesfield's functionalism. 25. Mahalanobis, Majumdar and Rao (1949) point out this limitation without reference to specific territories. 26. To get a sense of the Second Round Table Conference, the Poona Pact and Ambedkar's battle with Congress, see chapter 1 and the Epilogue in this volume. 27. See Mahalanobis and Bose (1945) for Mahalanobis' description of Fisher's baptism of the concept in the Annals of Eugenics. 28. The Mallock Machine was an analogue computer that solved linear differential equations. 29. See the second epigraph to this chapter-Mahalanobis was vitally interested in the problems of Eugenics. It is important to remember that there is a deep connection between statistics and Eugenics in both the international and national spheres during this period. However, it must be noted that Mahalanobis seems to have never explicitly espoused a Eugenics programme or perspective. 30. This book was first published in 1943, and second revised edition in 1959. I refer here to the latter since the earlier version could not be found. 31. See the essay 'Race and Caste' in Ghurye (1990). 32. Loss of Nerve was the title of a book written by Elwin shortly after The Baiga.

33. The derisory term 'no-changer' condemned those who supported the continuation of gradualist change through British institutions in the Swarajist council entry programme of 1920s, against the more nationalist minded 'pro-changers' who followed the Gandhian programme

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of non-cooperation. See, for instance, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's introductory chapter 'Prospectus of the First Volume' to Azad (1959). 34. His friend Bernard Aluwihare from Ceylon introduced him to the writings of Tagore and the opinions of Gandhi. Interactions with Jaipal Singh (Munda), Sadhu Sunder Singh, Prof. Heiler, and Jack Winslow showed him the path (Elwin 1964: 36). 35. See chapter 1 for a discussion of Andrews and Winslow. 36. For a brief introduction to the literary concept of Romanticism see Abrams (1953), Butler (1981), Chase (1993), and Wiltshire (1985).

EPILOGUE

From Ambedkar to Thakkar and Beyond Towards a Genealogy of our Activisms* I attempt here to draw out the implications of an important critical

'essay' from the writings of the freedom movement in a manner that is alive to context and intervention, and at the same time useful to our thinking today. This seemingly innocuous text is a letter proposing a programme of action for the Anti-Untouchability League (AUL), written by Dr B. R. Ambedkar in 1932, and addressed to A. V. Thakkar, Secretary of the organisation. 1 Babasaheb Ambedkar's argument in this letter is not a polemic, though often he did indulge in polemic with dramatic effect. It is rather a fiercely focused discussion of ideas about how to work for the welfare of the depressed classes and social reform. 2 Through this discussion, Ambedkar draws a sharp outline of Mahatma Gandhi's activist programme and structure. The document provides us with some of Ambedkar's profound and enduring insights regarding the structure of caste oppression, the politics of the oppressed and the scope of social activism. I had originally titled this chapter 'Towards a Preliminary Genealogy of our Activism' to suggest that this 'preliminary genealogy' of activism was proposed as a future programme to be undertaken by me, and that Ambedkar's letter is a vehicle for my proposal. 3 Through the process of reading, I now think that it is Ambedkar who sketches the genealogy of nationalist voluntary activism in this letter, critically tracing its descent in caste-Hindu thought through his proposal for a different programme. The activism he criticises is Gandhian, and I will primarily focus on this aspect. Alongside, I will also use Ambedkar's complex understanding of the struggle against caste oppression as a viewing platform to examine Marxist

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thought and practice in the Indian context. To this end, I will read this letter as if he is addressing Marxism too, even though his writings on Marxism only appear after the 1950s, and his earliest written reference to socialism and communism perhaps comes four years after this letter in 'Annihilation of Caste' (Moon 198 7, vol. 1: 27-96). 4 My reading of Ambedkar's letter will stress the structural aspects of his thought-in-praxis that complicates Marxism as we know it, rather than dwell on his explicit criticisms of Marxism. These have been dealt with at length by the writers cited among many others. My reading of this letter is not unprecedented. Gail Omvedt has dealt in detail with the same letter in her biography of Ambedkar (2004: 49-51). Given the focus of her work in that book, she has read the letter as expressing a more progressive view than Gandhi's and has narrated the history of how it was smothered to Ambedkar's dismay and defeat (in that particular battle). While Omvedt's reading is almost entirely valid and acceptable from my perspective, what I want to do here is to read this letter with less of a straightforward biographical intent. Rather, I want to attempt understanding for our present juncture the structure of Ambedkar's political thought as it emerges in the logic of Depressed Classes activism, in implicit criticism of the Gandhian position and its structural strain against the Marxist one. It is with in this view that I will read his letter in a way that will be significantly 'ahistorical'. Ahistoricism asserted, I will provide some 'straightforward history' which will situate the letter and its contents for the reader who is unaware of the background. The AUL was started in 1932 by Gandhi after the Poona Pact resolved the crisis of his fast unto death. Gandhi undertook this fast in protest against Ramsay Macdonald's Communal Award, which had provided a separate electorate to the Depressed Classes, thus removing them from the Hindu fold. The idea behind the AUL was to extend in a logical manner Gandhi's constructive strategy of demonstrating that the Congress and its penumbra organisations provided an increasingly deep political representation for the people of India as a whole. 5 It was felt that the untouchables, alienated from the Congress by Ambedkar's crisis-provoking interventions, had to be won back to the fold of the nationalists. Gandhi's bitter battles with Ambedkar in connection with the Yeravada fast found some

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reconciliation in Ambedkar and his Depressed Classes colleagues Rao Bahadur Rettamalai Srinivasan and Rao Bahadur M. C. Rajah being included among the eight members of the AUL board. G. D. Birla was President and A. V. Thakkar of the Servants of India Society (and Gandhi's lifelong companion) was elected Secretary. Ambedkar's letter dated 14 November 1932 (Moon 1990: 13440) was written to place his views before the AUL board for their consideration, en route to London since the trip was being made at a very short notice and rendered a personal meeting impossible.

Two .Methods of 'Uplift' Ambedkar starts his argument by outlining two ways of thinking about the causes of social suffering and the methods of uplift that flow logically out of each of these ways of thinking. The first way thinks that a person who belongs to the Depressed Classes suffers because of some failing in his 'personal conduct'. Ambedkar's critical use of the term personal conduct is noteworthy: If he is suffering from want and misery it is because he is vicious and sinful. Starting from this hypothesis this school of social workers concentrates all its efforts and its resources on fostering personal virtue by adopting a programme which includes items such as temperance, gymnasium, co-operation, libraries, schools, etc., which are calculated to make the individual a better and virtuous individual (Moon 1990: 134). 6

The second way suggests that if a person suffers from want and misery, it is because his environment is adverse. Ambedkar professes this second way and asserts that it is the task of social work to lift the Depressed Classes as a whole and not just a few individuals, as the first way would. This task would be to change the environment in which the Depressed Classes lived in society. Since the AUL came into being to lift the Depressed Classes as a whole, it would be a wasteful dissipation of energy to focus on individual uplift. This opening argument, though it does not name Gandhi, comprehensively targets his approach to service. In Gandhi, viciousness or sinfulness is a matter of past incarnations of the

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individual-his present suffering is due to his past sins. However, the kinds of intervention described with their focus on individual conduct, i.e., 'temperance, gymnasium, co-operation, libraries, schools, etc.', point to the new avatars of the Gandhian mode of intervention that dominate many of our activist efforts. In fact, we need to pay special attention to those holy cows of our own developmental activism, i.e., libraries and schools here. The library and school, when used as an instrument to improve the individual conduct of the 'sinful wretch' 7 from the Depressed Classes, is as much an object of criticism as is the attempt at promoting temperance, vegetarianism, praying to Ram, and other Gandhian methods of uplift. Thus Ambedkar criticises a social reform or welfare initiative that moulds the conduct of an individual from the Depressed Classes as if it was that conduct which was flawed and needed improvement, without fighting the social oppression that is the root cause of the problem. What then does the second method that tries to improve the social environment imply?

Civil Rights: Crisis of Belief The most important step of the AUL, in Ambedkar's pursuit of the second path, would be a campaign to secure 'civil' rights. It is interesting that while the heading of this section says civil rights, the text uses the word 'civic rights' or 'rights of a civic nature' on three occasions and never uses the word civil. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (1973) gives the primary definition of civil as belonging to citizens, while civic is defined as pertaining to citizens. What belongs to a citizen almost with the force of a possession, i.e., civility, is described in the dictionary as an orderliness of life, wellgovernedness in civil society, politeness of address, privacy, legal right, etc. In stark contrast, the attribute of a citizen that pertains to his character as the civic comes from corona civica, a crown of oak leaves and acorns bestowed upon one that saved a fellow citizen in war. It is an oath of allegiance to the new order of things, demanded from citizens in the French Revolution (ibid.: 342). The shift in the usage from 'civil' in the heading to 'civic' in the text marks the shift from a politics of civil society to a specific kind of revolutionary politics. 8

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Such a programme if carried into the villages will bring about the necessary social revolution in Hindu Society, without which it will never be possible for the Depressed Classes to get equal social status ... First of all, there will be riots between the Depressed Classes and the caste-Hindus which will result in breaking heads and in criminal prosecutions of one side or the other (Moon 1990, vol. 9: 135).

What are these rights, the defence of which may confer the

corona civica? They are precisely the rights of entry to schools,

public places, public transport, etc. Entry to school as a civic right has a desirable connotation that is different from that of an instrument to improve the conduct of the sinner. Here education is a general programme of intellectual growth, not a method of improvement premised on the individual's flaw. There would be many obstacles to such a campaign to secure civic rights, the first being the magistracy and the police who would ensure that the dignity of the caste-Hindus, even if they were guilty, was upheld against the Depressed Classes. The second deadly obstacle would be a social boycott that would harass the Depressed Classes, throw them out of jobs and starve them. But this trauma was inevitable in pursuit of the goal, and the AUL would need to have an army of activists in the rural parts to support and encourage the Depressed Classes to fight their battles. The reason why this campaign was necessary in spite of bloodshed, according to Ambedkar, was its dramatic effectiveness in forcing the caste-Hindu to think about his everyday conduct. The caste-Hindu will never think about his habitual practices of oppression unless a crisis forces him. Preaching and other easy options of converting the Hindu opinion through rational ideas will fail because 'they do not compel thought, for they do not produce a crisis' (ibid.: 136). Thus, the most important lesson Ambedkar teaches us about activism for social justice is that it must produce a crisis in order to force thought. The other aspect of Ambedkar's formulation is the way in which he imagines revolution for the Depressed Classes in the context of this letter. The caste battles are not to consume the whole of society in flames, they also do not attempt the overthrow of the oppressor-they are acute (in the medical sense of short and intense) engagements which force a dominant community to think about its practices. The assumption behind this imagination of the

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revolution is that while there are a large number of thoughtless and violent followers of the dominant tradition, there is also a significant part of the dominant group which can be forced by a critical situation to see reason and enlightenment over the issue of caste. The change in the social environment sought by Ambedkar through the AUL activism was to come about by a shift in the dominant consensus. 9

Against an Economics of Caste Oppression The next step that the AUL would have to undertake would be a struggle to bring about an equality of opportunity for the Depressed Classes. The 'bar-sinister' operates against them in rural self-employment (they are not permitted to sell vegetables, milk, eggs, or butter in order to earn a living), government employment (where they do not even get the posts of messengers) and in urban private industry (where they are employed in the most menial jobs, being thrown out at the slightest hint of business adversity). Focusing on the cotton-spinning and weaving industry, Ambedkar describes how the Depressed Classes employees never rise to the highest rung, are discriminated against in distribution of raw material for piece work even among women, where the Naikins give all the raw materials to caste-Hindu women, leaving the women of the Depressed Classes to face their hunger. The AUL, in this environment, would have to work to create public opinion against such practices and establish bureaus to deal with this kind of inequality. Thus he suggests, '[m]uch can be done by private firms and companies managed by Hindus by extending their patronage to the Depressed Classes and employing them in their offices in various grades and occupations suited to the capacities of the applicants' (Moon 1990, vol. 9: 138). The current debate among Dalit intellectuals about reservations in private industry echoes the political assertion made here. However, the optimism Ambedkar shows in his expectation from caste-Hindu industrialists, which seems misplaced in today's context, also needs to be explained against the miserable employment context of the textile mills he himself describes. Why does he think such a drastic shift in employer opinion and action is possible when the reality in that era was so stark?

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Be that, as it may for the time being, there is some conceptual gain in pursuing his strategy beyond this detail and perhaps beyond his explicit intention at the moment of writing. The contradiction Ambedkar describes here is a caste contradiction within the same working class. 10 He does not seek a Marxian metahistory of class struggle and ultimate goal of communism to ground the proposed initiative; that is, there is no proposal for a base of class inequalities that gives rise to a superstructural effect of caste struggle. 11 He focuses on the directly observable caste contradiction between the caste-Hindu and Depressed Classes. The struggle takes on an immediate, perceptible meaning, and provides a specific logic of finding allies that is based on the singular character of caste oppression. Thus, it is possible for Ambedkar to hope to find caste-Hindu allies among the managers of industry who may help in the annihilation of caste. In this hope, Ambedkar seems to depend on the inherent rationality of industry that will drive it to find the most suitable candidates for jobs, in 'various grades and occupations suited to the capacities of applicants' regardless of caste. 12 It would seem that this reasoning is a valid one even today for industries seeking good employees. On the other hand, the same caste contradiction would divide the potential Depressed Classes employees and actual caste-Hindu ones as it did then. This single-minded focus on caste oppression alone is a wellthought-out policy for Ambedkar, who in another less amiable context responded to A. V. Thakkar's sarcastic description of him as 'the doughty champion of the oppressed, depressed and exploited' (Thakkar 1945) .13 In the following vein Mr. Thakkar has sought to give point to his criticism by calling me a "doughty champion of the oppressed and depressed". Let me tell Mr. Thakkar that I have never claimed to be a universal leader of suffering humanity. The problem of the untouchables is quite enough for my slender strength, and I should be quite happy if I could successfully rescue the untouchables from his clutches and those of Mr. Gandhi. 14

Ambedkar's logic of focused support to one issue is again seen in the strategy to garner counter-hegemonic consent against the

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Hindu majority that he proposes in his 1945 speech on 'Communal Deadlock and the Way to Solve It'. There, Ambedkar formulated a system of reservations in parliamentary representation that would ensure that no minority would face the oppressive hegemony of majoritarian Hinduism. At the same time, no single minority would try to find a theoretical rationality that would cover all the specific oppressions faced by all the minorities. Thus, with an intuitive pragmatism, he rejects a single overarching battle against oppression theorised according to one 'primary contradiction'. He prefers to find conjunctural partners to struggle alongside the Depressed Classes against the single source (i.e., caste-Hinduism) of different kinds of contradiction, and different forms of oppression. Even if there is one dominant oppressor, the oppressed are divided and differentiated by the structural logic of caste-Hindu oppression in the Indian context. We may deduce here that the result of the struggle against caste-Hindu oppression, even if successful, is not a utopian community free of all struggle, but clearly another set of struggles that arise in that emergent situation in ways that cannot be theorised today.

Thus, while the first step of a campaign for 'civic' rights is theorised in a way that problematises the Congress-Gandhian concept of service to the untouchables, the second step to fight for equality of opportunity problematises for us the Marxian concept of class struggle, and forms of activism based on this concept. The important thing about this criticism that those of us with a Marxist habit (and I am one) must uaderstand is this. The logic of a contradiction and the language of a struggle against oppression have to be born of the experience of the oppressed. Ambedkar's position may be read as arguing that there is no use in trying to achieve an understanding of oppression according to a category (of class) which calls for a reasoning beyond the strong experience of caste oppression. 15 The analysis of forces in a struggle, if democratic, must arise organically from the consciousness of the oppressed. Any attempt to short-circuit this consciousness of the oppressed with readymade formulae of universal history will regress to an authoritarianism that undercuts the experiential basis of the struggle. This is why even today the struggle against caste oppression must be a Dalit struggle, and not an upper-caste agenda.

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Sharing a Meal, Shaping a Community The next paradox Ambedkar poses for us in his conceptualisation of struggle is his proposal for inter-dining between caste-Hindus and the Depressed Classes, 'to dissolve the nausea which the touchables feel towards the Untouchables, and which is the reason why the two sections have remained so apart as to constitute separate and distinct entities' (from Letter to Thakkar, Moon 1990: 138). Ambedkar argues that only a common cycle of participation in a way of life can overcome the strangeness one feels for the other. Social unity, 'which we are all striving after' will come only with understanding and a sense of bonding with an associated way of life. In one of those rare instances when Ambedkar refers to Gandhi as 'Mahatma', he says that in those 10 days when the Mahatma undertook the fast that shook the nation, many of the caste-Hindu employers broke rules of untouchability and fraternised with the untouchables. This led to caste-Hindu servants striking work. Instead of pushing ahead with their programme of fraternisations, the employers capitulated to orthodoxy and abandoned their newfound friendship. Ruing the existence of such 'fair weather friends', Ambedkar argues that the AUL should work to strengthen sympathisers so that they are ready to fight alongside the Depressed Classes against the forces of orthodoxy. Trust in the caste-Hindu will come only when he is ready to shed blood for the Depressed Classes, as the Whites of the North did against their own kin, the Whites of the South 'for the emancipation of the Negro' (Moon 1990: 138). Sympathy and trust are reciprocal. However, it is important to note that Ambedkar's example is not a simple espousal of the 'American way'. In the American Civil War, it was the Whites who fought each other over the issue of Negro slavery. In Ambedkar's programme, the Depressed Classes will assert themselves and wage the primary struggle-the casteHindu sympathisers are mere supporters and fellows-in-battle. Thus, in the same argument, Ambedkar runs together both a reference to revolutionary violence on the one hand, and a plea to the employer to put into practice a programme of change that will affect the caste-Hindu servant's behaviour on the other. The attack here is on our understanding of how a community works, how Ambedkar thinks for and about the Depressed Classes, their

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political condition and what justice consists of. It would be worth exploring each of these aspects in some detail. The first point to note is the complexity of Ambedkar's implicit concept of community (or of a group or class as such)it is necessary to set aside all imaginary communities that find peaceful coexistence or are uniformly structured classes in their loves, understandings and antagonisms. Thus, we need to recognise that communities are richly textured in their levels of oppressiveness, irrationality and sophistication. While it may be necessary at one place in a given period to break caste-Hindu heads in a pitched battle, it may be equally necessary at another place, in the same period, to dine with the caste-Hindu and get used to him while he gets used to us. It is necessary to work different aspects of the community (or class, or caste) against the other, exploit the failure of the logic of community, and force its inconsistency, in order to bring about a change in its structure. It is plain that such a process cannot provide a final resolution to the caste question-only continuing battle. This is far from both a Gandhian imagination of RamarajyC1, and from a Marxist dialectical resolution of class contradiction. 16 The Ambedkarite model of community is one that is constantly put under stress, working apart and together in a jerky, malfunctioning, slowly improving, and always provisional unity. The second point to note is that in Ambedkar's conception, the oppressed do not think themselves as victims, nor do they hunger for world transforming state power. He suggests that the Depressed Classes recognise the contours of their oppression and fight actively to overcome it to the extent they feel necessary. The structure of oppression, like that of comradeship in battle, does not follow geometric lines and rectilinear perspectives; therefore, a uniform, broadly conceived, massive approach to oppression will not serve the purpose. On the other hand, it is necessary to refrain from seeing the Depressed Classes as passive recipients of pity and alms, in the way the Gandhian programme did. The third noteworthy point is the suggestion that the demand for justice in the face of untold oppression will be a demand for blood. Anything like a 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission', which listens to the victim and compensates him in a simple way without punishing the oppressor, will not be enough in itself, even though it may be part of the whole process. At the same time,

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that bloodshed is not an apocalyptic river of revenge, there will be different levels of battle against oppression, which will be conjunctural, contradictory and multiple. Justice demands respect, not only sympathy. It requires love, which will arise both through the crisis of bloodshed and through acts of courage and generosity that go beyond the imagination of bloodshed. This follows from the complex, multileveled logic of the way in which a caste-ridden community which is trying to become a nation will have to work.

Activism Born of Love, not Pity If the activists of the AUL have to fight alongside the oppressed, they will have to be people who love the oppressed, and are not 'fighting' mainly for financial consideration. 'Hire purchase' of Depressed Classes activism by organisations who are also engaged in several other programmes is to be eschewed, because love for the Depressed Classes cannot be purchased on hire. Activists will have to be disciplined to have a single-minded devotion to the problem, 'narrow-minded and enthusiastic about their cause' (Letter to Thakkar, Moon 1990: 139). Such activists will best be found among the Depressed Classes themselves. As Ambedkar put it, I do not suggest that there are not scoundrels among the Depressed Classes who have not made social service their last refuge. But largely speaking, you can be more sure that a worker drawn from the Depressed Classes will regard the work as love's labour-a thing which is so essential to the success of the Anti-Untouchability League (ibid.).

Thus, again, through his explicit advocacy of Depressed Classes activists, Ambedkar clearly shows his assessment of the limitations and limits of caste-Hindu activism. Ambedkar reiterates in his closing lines the need for love to bring together, however doubtfully and provisionally, the national community: The touchables and the untouchables cannot be held together by law-certainly not by any electoral law substituting joint electorates for separate electorates. The only thing that can hold them together

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is love. Outside the family justice alone in my opinion can open the possibility of love, and it should be the duty of the AntiUntouchability League to see that the touchable does, or failing that, is made to do, justice tq the Untouchable (Moon 1990: 140).

What Happened, Then? Given the powerful criticism of the structure of nationalist activism in his letter, we may guess that Ambedkar did not feel too upset when there was no response from Thakkar, even though he did express rhetorical surprise in his retrospective narration (ibid.). In complete contradiction to his recommendations, the AUL had decided to adopt the method of 'peaceful persuasion'; eschew force and the creation of crises; avoid reference to inter-dining and intermarriage; adopt constructive work of uplifting the Untouchables. Meanwhile, Gandhi began to call Untouchables Harijans (Omvedt discusses this point in her account [2004: SO]). He renamed the organisation the Harijan Sevak Sangh, after a discussion of terms in 1934. 17 To add insult to injury; the organisation decided not to permit membership of untouchable representatives, even though the original central board of eight members had once had three. Thus the AUL, through its renaming as the Harijan Sevak Sangh, reverted to its genealogical descent-it began functioning as a caste-Hindu organisation seeking salvation for its members' souls by offering repentance for the sins of untouchability committed by Hinduism in history. The irony of this prayaschitta for the casteHindu soul was that it was to be achieved through the purification of the physical body and moral fibre of the 'Harijan'! The AUL/ Harijan Sevak Sangh thus sacrificed what Ambedkar felt was an invaluable concept of service to improve the environment of Untouchable life at the altar of the constructive programme that was central to the caste-Hindu nationalist strategy. Perhaps most importantly, Ambedkar's strategic move of writing this letter forced the AUL to unmask its agenda, show the casteHindu hegemony at its foundation, and thus expose its limitations. The AUL could have responded positively to Ambedkar's letter, in which case, the historical situation would be altogether different today. The fact that it did not, does not belittle Amkedkar's attempt at critical retrieval. Herein lies the last lesson Ambedkar teaches

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us in this letter. In an activist struggle, he did what he implied should be done in his writing, and that is refuse to abandon hope of support from any quarter, however unlikely. Partners in struggle may make strange bedfellows. The logic of an oppressed minority's struggle that is taking place on the ground may not be reduced to a simple political and ethical calculus of comrades and class enemies. 18 It calls for strenuous efforts at working counterhegemonic consensus with all parties who share related positions, until such time that these hopes are belied. However, that alliance should be on terms that affirm the oppressed minority's implicit perspective of the struggle. It is this call to collective self-assertion which becomes the principle that critically differentiates the term 'Dalit', which arises during the same period, from the term 'Harijan', which connotes a passive, once sinful, individual to be redeemed by upper-caste benevolence.

What Then Do We Make of All This? The question that arises is: how far can a letter outlining a social service programme be theoretical? Is it valid for my analysis to attribute this top heavy theoretical and philosophical intention to such a slender text? My answer is that insofar as Ambedkar, an exceptionally sharp theoretician of caste and at the same time one of the most powerful activists India has produced, was thrown in the middle of events that had enormous theoretical and practical significance, it is logical to assume that even his simple activist communications were driven by a broader conceptual framework. It becomes necessary to make this assumption in reading this letter, given the scope of the specific struggle within which Ambedkar framed it, and given the fact that he was mounting an increasingly systematic and radical critique of Gandhi, Congress and casteHinduism. At the same time, this conceptual framework evolved and transformed its underpinnings under the inexorable pressure of the political battles he fought. Through all this, Ambedkar fully practised what he found to be a residual fire in Marxism, 'small but still very important', and that '[t]he function of philosophy is to reconstruct the world and not to waste its time in explaining the origin of the world'. 19 For this reason, I would argue, Ambedkar's theoretical reflection is rarely oriented towards an abstract

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diagnosis and prescription for a universal problem-it is always a perpetually sharpening 'theoretico-pragmatic' instrument geared to the here and now of activist work. This reading of Ambedkar's political thinking is based on a snapshot view provided by one letter written in a specific historical context of activism. My attempt has been to draw out the implications of the letter for the different kinds of activism that we inherit. This has necessarily entailed sketching a positive outline of how Ambedkar viewed Depressed Classes activism in that moment. However, this positive outline is not a theory of Dalit activism as it emerges and evolves historically in his writings and in post-Ambedkarite practice. 20 This exercise clearly demands a depth of primary and secondary scholarship that is beyond the scope of this chapter. Given these structural limitations, some concluding cautions about categorising 'Ambedkarism' as it emerges in this letter are in order: 21 (a) Even as this stage of Ambedkarism problematises Gandhian welfare activism, it accepts the notion of welfare and provides it with a transactional content of great dignity that outstrips the Gandhian imagination. (b) Even as it problematises Marxism, it takes on board a practice of revolutionary violence where needed, and couples it with a whole spectrum of activism, ranging from this violence at one end to strategically planned expressions of love at the other. (c) While there is undeniably an element of pluralism in Ambedkar, the element in his thought which goes beyond civility to strife confounds our understanding of pluralism, which is essentially a non-violent civil societal process of collective bargaining and negotiating for political goods. (d) Ambedkar's counter-hegemonic strategy is more complex than Ernesto Laclau's somewhat abstract concept of hegemony as socialist strategy, introducing texture, detail and range of activism that is attentive to the singularities of the historical situation. (e) While Ambedkar's working philosophy is essentially pragmatism, it is not a simple application of Dewey's thinking, given Ambedkar's demonstrated habit of completely reworking the terrain on which a concept is originally proposed.

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(j) Whichever philosophical element it takes on board, changes

or rejects, it is clear that Ambedkar stresses the self-assertion of Dalit consciousness through the perspective and structure of activism he proposes. It is this that differentiates and makes specific the Ambedkarite, Dalit agenda today. The most important thing to be remembered here is that the specific content of his programme reflects an evaluation of the condition of the Depressed Classes at that point in history as much as it reflects Ambedkar's choice of political strategy in that context. In fact this context, evaluation and choice are interwoven inextricably. If we have to draw on his thinking, we will have to construct it anew for our situation, to deal with our aporia. 22 This construction will surely put our ingenuity and analytical understanding to test. What do we make of Ambedkar's legacy of Dalit activism? How then do we construct our Enlightenment? 23

Notes *

This chapter is a revised version of my earlier publication (Srivatsan 2008). Another earlier version was also published as a contribution to Deeptha and Shivaji Panikkar's edited volume (2012). This is a paper I wrote in the context of my PhD thesis, but outside its main argument. It is written to not so much a pure academic audience, as to an audience of academics who are deeply committed to activism in the different domains of politics in India today. As such, its 'tone' is not coolly academic, but rather signals a warmly committed attempt at intellectual engagement. It is for this reason, I have placed this chapter in the epilogue-an afterword or postscript to the more distanced perspective of the chapters that precede it.

1. I will henceforth refer to this letter as the 'letter regarding AUL'. See

Moon (1990, vol. 9: 134-40). The entire chapter 5 in which the letter appears, 'A Political Charity-Congress Plan to Kill by Kindness', is a resource of value to activists and theorists interested in issues of welfare and social reform. 2. In this chapter I will use the term 'untouchables' and 'Depressed Classes' more or less interchangeably. 3. The term 'genealogy', which I have used in the title, is placed within quote marks in this sentence and in italics in the next sentence, is from Michel Foucault, a thinker from another milieu, whose theoretical work establishes interesting convergences (though

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certainly not identical thought processes) with this letter. To make it absolutely clear, my point is not to say that Ambedkar is Foucauldian, or that Foucault is an Ambedkarite! I am just trying to illuminate each with the work and thought of the other. I will bridge these convergences with notes at relevant points in this chapter. Genealogy, according to Foucault is an effective history (or similarly functional description) of a dominant, morally unassailable concept or practice from a critical perspective, subjecting the underlying ethical values to a thorough revaluation. 'It will uproot traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not meant for understanding. It is meant for cutting' (Foucault 1994a: 380). The dating of his major texts is based on Anand Teltumbde's diary of important life events in his invaluable CD e-compendium of Dr B. R. Ambedkar's Writings. See also 'Introduction' in Rodriques (2002) for a useful background and rough chronology. However, Anand Teltumbde (1997) argues that it is reasonable to assume that Ambedkar was familiar with Marxism from his early days in Columbia, since his course work included a study of Marxism, and his guide Edward Seligman was conversant with the materialist conception of history. In the broad historical context of Ambedkar's letter, the Communist Party of India has two dates of origin. One was started after the Indian National Congress Kanpur session in 1926 by S. A. Dange, Singaravelu Chettiyar and others. The other was started in Tashkent in 1924 by M. N. Roy, Muzzafar Ahmed and their colleagues. Thus, there was a Marxist historical context in India when Ambedkar wrote this letter in 1932. This historical context in Depressed Classes discourse is described in detail by Gail Omvedt (2004). Omvedt argues that class radicalism and Marxism were part of the milieu of Dalit thinking even in the 1930s (see Chapter titled "'Against Capitalism and Brahmanism" Years of Class Radicalism'). It was this use of the AUL as an organ of constructive activity, rather than service as he understood it that led to Ambedkar's disillusionment with Congress and Gandhi, leading to the text that begins with those words. This term conduct is used by Foucault in a similar way. Power for Foucault is the conduct of conduct. See his 'The Subject and Power' (cited in Dreyfus and Rabinow [1982: 219-21]). 'Sinful wretch' = bechara, or even paap bechara as they would say in Hyderabadi. Similar terms in common use would be ayyo paavam in Tamil (paapam in Telugu). I have been criticised (A. Chatterjee 2008) for my superficiality in referring to the Oxford dictionary, and for not understanding the

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lineage of the terms that go back to Hegel. My response is twofold: First, a clarification-the term civic is related to a strain of thinking that is different from the Hegelian one; it refers more to French Republicanism in the context of 1789, and to American survivalist, gun-toting, libertarian Republicanism (see Kaviraj and Khilnani [2001: 293-300], also Skinner [1998] for a history of the English version of Republicanism). Second, my reference to the Oxford dictionary was precisely because I did not want to refer to the great masters in order to attribute Ambedkar's thought as a species to the genus of a known form of Western thought. My point is that there is no great use to try and point to the evident, and perhaps expected, parallels between American, British and French Republicanisms (or Hegel for that matter) on the one hand, and Ambedkar's Republicanism on the other, since they are very different in historical context and character. My concluding summary in this chapter cautions against such reductive arguments, advocating instead a very context-specific reading of Ambedkar's borrowings and political system designs. 9. In this context, it is important to note that Gandhian activism operated with a double face: against the British Communal Award, his fast provoked an immense moral crisis not least for Ambedkar himself, and in the face of Hindu opinion, it sought rational, peaceful consensus for improvement of conditions of the untouchables, who Gandhi begins to call the 'Harijans'. It is precisely at the receiving end of this 'peaceful' oppression of the Gandhi-Congress combine that Ambedkar gives up this position on changing the dominant consensus within Hinduism. Tracing the growth of Ambedkar's revolutionary agenda calls for a different project and a more detailed analysis of the relevant texts and their contexts. 10. See ;i\nnihilation of Caste', where Ambedkar argues that the caste system is not only a division of labour, but a division of labourers (Moon 1990, vol. 1: 4 7). 11. See Moon, where he argues that 'economic power is the only kind of power no student of human society can accept. That the social status of an individual by itself often becomes a source of power and authority is made clear by the sway which the Mahatmas have held over the common man. Why do millionaires in India obey penniless Sadhus and Fakirs? Why do millions of paupers in India sell their trifling trinkets which constitute their only wealth and go to Benares and Mecca? That, religion is the source of power is illustrated by the history of India where the priest holds a sway over the common man often greater than the magistrate and where everything, even such things as strikes and elections, so easily take a religious turn and can so easily be given a religious twist' (1990, vol. 1: 44).

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12. See Moon (1990, vol. 1: 47-48), where Ambedkar argues about the dynamism of industry and the need for an open channel of movement so that people can survive. 13. The context was Ambedkar's famous speech on 'Communal Deadlock and the Way to Solve it', delivered to the Scheduled Castes Federation in that month. 14. B. R. Ambedkar, Letter to Editor, The Times of India, Bombay, 17 May 1945 (issue dated 18 May 1945, reproduced in Thakkar 1945), emphasis added. See chapter 'Truth and Power' in Foucault (1980: 126-27) for a discussion of the difference between the specific intellectual and the universal intellectual (or leader, as Ambedkar says here). Though the issue in Foucault is posed from the 1960s onwards in the context of scientific knowledges, the differentiating concept of the specific intellectual is useful to gain some insight into Ambedkar's intuitive adherence to the problems of the Untouchables. This focus of Ambedkar's intervention may again be understood in Foucault's terms as a genealogy, that is, 'the union of erudite knowledge and local memory which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today' (ibid.: 83). 15. Again, '.A.nnihilation of Caste' provides us with the anchorage for the deeper theoretical point I am trying to make. In that speech/essay, Ambedkar argues that the logic of economic oppression will not hold because people find religion a source of power, and therefore a socialist of India must deal with the issue of caste either before or after the revolution. 16. It is useful to look up this point about the dialectic in Foucault's 'Power and Strategies' (1980: 143-45). 17. It was called Service to the Untouchables Society in an interim period, and C. Rajagopalachari objected to this term, saying that by doing service to the untouchables they would be perpetuating the experience of untouchability while the purpose was to eliminate it. It was then that the name 'Harijan Sevak Sangh' was proposed and found acceptable. See Gandhi (2000, vol. 58: 58, 155, 473) for the discussion regarding the name. Gandhi's letter to Birla (ibid.: 58) suggests a name which is slightly modified, in that 'Sevak' replaces 'Seva' in the final version. 18. Again, Foucault provides us with a useful perspective to understand the practical struggles and the primacy of their demand in Ambedkar's political philosophy and the importance of constructing theory not as a system of analysis according to universal parameters, but as a toolkit that explores 'i) ... the logic of the specificity power relations and the struggles around them; ii) ... This investigation can only be carried out step by step on the basis of reflection (which will necessarily be

Epilogue

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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historical in some of its aspects) on given situations' (Foucault 1980: 143-45). B. R. Ambedkar, 'Buddha or Karl Marx', in Moon (1987, vol. 3: 444). This is surely the task and privilege of the Dalit activist-intellectual before whom one must stand aside in respect. These cautions are formulated in extreme shorthand given the limitation of space. The term 'aporia' means (to me, in this context) an ethical and political roadblock represented by the configuration of Brahminical thought and practice. The reference is to Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?' (1994b). In this essay Foucault overturns the generally accepted meaning of Enlightenment as a universal good to which the world would and must progress, into a problematisation of a dangerous modernity that would have to be negotiated through the use of exceptional wisdom.

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About the Author R. Srivatsan is a political theorist and works at Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies, Hyderabad. He is currently an executive committee member and co-convener of Medico Friend Circle, and is an occasional translator to English of Telangana dalit literature. His research interests include critical development studies, health care and visual culture. He has authored History of Development Thought: A Critical Anthology (2012), being used as a textbook in some university courses, and Conditions of Visibility: Writings on Photography in Contemporary India (2000), and co-edited Towards a Critical Medical Practice: Reflections on the Dilemmas of Medical Culture Today (with Anand Zachariah and Susie Tharu, 2011).

Index aboriginal 6, 7, 56, 57, 118,122, 124, 125, 142, 144, 148, 149, 151, 153 absolute truth 17-19 acculturation 80, 81 activism 4-6, 31-33, 45, 48, 60, 65, 69, 70, 102, 104, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 173-74, 176, 177 activists 20, 33, 41-45, 52, 86, 87, 163, 166, 167, 173, 175, 176; voluntary 20 adivasis 60 aesthetic 4, 83 agency areas 30, 31, 56, 78, 81-83, 87, 96-98, 100-107, 114, 117, 123, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131 agency tribes 26 agriculture 30, 77, 80, 103 ahimsa 17-19, 47 ahistorical 164 ahistoricism 164 Aiyappan Report 109 altruistic 20 Ambedkar, B. R. 4, 6, 29, 30, 48, 5358, 64, 66, 148, 163-77 amelioration 42, 48, 59, 60, 62, 102, 104, 117, 124-26, 128, 131, 149 ancient 59, 62, 68, 140 Andrews, C. F. 47-50, 156 annihilation of caste 164, 169 anthropological category 29, 30 anthropology 3, 20, 25, 29, 30, 68, 79, 80, 105, 131, 136-53, 155 anthropometry 30, 136, 137, 143-46 anti-colonial 49, 63 anti-state 22

Anti-Untouchability League 51, 163, 173, 174 AP State Archives 115, 116 Archipelago 31, 101, 120, 126-28, 130 archival document 11 armchair anthropologist 153, 156 Arya Samaj 72 ascetic activist 41-45, 48, 69, 86 associational culture 10, 25 AUL see Anti-Untouchability League authoritarianism 170 auto-ethnography 155 autonomy 8, 44 award, communal 164 backward 30, 39, 41, 57, 62, 69, 80, 101, 107, 129, 153, 154 backward classes 39, 153 backwardness 41, 69, 80, 129 bahujana 44 Baiga 51, 56, 119, 137, 153-57 Balananda, Bhakta Brundam 85, 93-95 bania 61, 148 Bardoli civil disobedience movement 46 base 19-23, 29, 31, 43 52, 56, 59, 68-71, 77, 88, 105, 107, 127, 139, 140, 142, 147, 149, 158, 169, 170, 176 base-superstructure model 68 Bayly, C. 9-11 Beckerlegge, Gwilym 9, 12-13 beneficiary 3, 5, 32, 33, 48, 54

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Index

Bentham, J. 146 Bhadrachalam 27, 86, 90, 93, 95, 115, 116, 123, 124 bhajans 48 bhakti 48 Bhandarkar, R.G. 39 'bhangis' 40 Bharatiya Adimjati Sevak Sangh 81 bhatji viii Bhave, Vinoba 86 bhiksha 43 Bhil 50, 51, 122, 154 Bhil Seva Mandal 7, 41, 46 Birla, G. D. 22, 51, 165 Blake, W. 156 Bodhisattva 44, 45 bonded labour 98, 103 Bondurant, J 71 Bourgeois 13, 23, 67, 68, 71 Bourgeoisie 13, 23, 67, 68, 71 Brahmacharya 43 brahman 9, 38, 42, 44, 45, 61, 13844, 148, 149, 151, 152 brahmanical 38, 42, 44, 45,138,139, 142, 1"9 brahmanical Hindu thought 42 brahmanical orthodoxy 45 brahmanisation 61, 142, 143 brahmanism 138, 144 brahmin: Niyogi 100; Vaidika 99 Brown, Radcliffe 159 bureaucracy 5, 16 bureaucrat 16, 62, 69 cadastral survey 105, 143 Cambridge 7, 8, 9, 48, 149 capital 13, 22, 23, 25, 91,106 capitalism 10, 13-15, 21-23, 33, 59, 62, 65, 66, 68-71, 99,147,158 capitalist 13, 14, 22, 23, 37, 61, 6671, 106, 107 capitalist class 23, 66, 68, 71 caste 3, 4, 6, 9, 14, 18, 19, 23-26, 28-30, 32, 37-45, 47-49, 51-58, 60, 62, 63, 67-70, 77, 82, 90, 99,

102, 105, 108, 129, 130, 136-52, 163, 164, 167-75 categorical language viii census elaboration 129, 130 census enumeration 129 Central Provinces 49, 82, 119, 125, 155, 156 charitable see charity charity 3, 5, 17, 21, 25, 32, 33, 57, 62, 102, 104 Chatterjee, Partha 9, 13, 14, 25, 104 chaturvarna 52 Chitpavans 148 Christa Seva Sangh 49, 156 Christian 39, 47-50, 59, 64, 66, 137 Church of England 49 citizenship 10, 62, 63 civic rights 54, 166, 167, 170 civil disobedience 13, 46, 52 civilisational maturity 20, 21 civil rights 166-68 civil society 3, 6, 10, 17, 19-25, 29, 31-32, 65, 87, 137, 166 civil war 54, 55, 171 class 3, 8, 13-15, 23, 26, 29, 39-43, 45, 46, 52-56, 61, 62, 66-71, 100, 106, 151, 169, 170, 172, 175 Coefficient of Racial Likeness (CRL) 147-49 Cohn, B. 129, 141 colonial 3-11, 13, 16, 20-26, 28-31, 38, 46, 48-51, 55, 58-60, 62, 63, 65-68, 70, 71, 77-82, 84, 85, 87, 96, 97, 99, 101-6, 115, 116, 11832, 135-38, 140-48, 152, 153, 156; administration 30, 51, 101, 102, 126, 129; discourse 128, 131, 132, 141, 152; epistemology 29; forms of knowledge 63 colonialism 8-10, 13, 16, 22, 23, 48, 49, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 77, 84,119, 122, 123, 129, 131, 143, 145, 147 colonialist vii colonial state 4, 24, 46, 60, 62, 104, 115, 128, 129, 136, 145

Index 0 193 commodity-money-commodity 69 communal 1, 33, 46, 55, 59, 164,170 communal deadlock 55, 170; Ambedkar's speech 56 communitarian 14, 18, 20, 59 community 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 22, 38, 40, 43, 46-48, 52, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 68, 69, 96, 97, 98, 101102, 127, 138, 140, 141, 167, 170, 171-73 community repair 38, 46, 47, 48 concept of seva 2, 12, 14, 20, 28, 29, 37, 38, 45-48, 51, 53, 54, 64, 77, 85, 102, 125, 147, 157 conduct 3, 9, 17, 18, 20, 22, 26, 30, 32, 33, 43, 44, 87, 90, 100, 121, 144, 146, 154, 165-67 Congress 6, 16, 24, 28, 29, 37, 38, 46, 53, 54, 60, 147, 148, 153, 157, 164, 170, 175 consciousness-for-itself 8, 13 constituent assembly 1, 4, 15, 57 constitution 5, 8, 39, 45, 56, 77, 125, 142 constructive 4, 6, 9, 13, 14, 45-47, 52, 55, 58-62, 64, 105, 146, 164, 174 constructive programme 14, 46, 5862, 64, 174 constructive work 6, 9, 13, 14, 46, 47, 52, 59, 64, 174 conversion 47, 49, 50 convert 47, 49, 50, 51, 87, 167 cooperative society 78, 81, 83, 84, 87, 90-93, 95, 98, 103, 104, 106, 108, 124 corporate interests 21, 55 counter-hegemonic 57, 169, 176 COVA1 cultural practices 9, 16, 79, 80, 85 dalit 32, 168,170, 175-77 dalit intellectuals 168 Dasgupta, S. 72, 73 decolonisation 11

democracy 8, 15, 57 demography 136 depressed classes 3, 26, 29, 39-42, 45, 53, 54, 56, 58, 69, 148, 16373, 176, 177 Depressed Classes Mission 40 derivative 8, 13, 63 Deshasta 148 'desi' vii developmental logic 102 development economics 22 development planning 78, 103, 104, 135, 136 development state 5, 24, 25, 63, 68, 70, 107, 136 dharma 43, 44, 48, 50, 140 diffusion 10, 79, 80 Directive Principles 5 Dirks, N. 129, 138, 139 discursive 14, 24, 25, 64, 71, 131 dominance 21, 57, 71, 80, 98, 100, 127, 146 don't touchism 42 ecological niche 70 economic driver 23 elite politics 13 Elwin, Verrier 47, 49, 50, 51, 119, 136, 137, 153 emancipate 42, 60 entancipation 60, 69, 171 Emile, Durkheim 160 enculturation 23 Enlightenment 168, 177 equality of opportunity 1, 168, 170 ethical norm 6 ethico-political leadership 13,14 ethics 3, 6, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 29, 32, 33, 38, 43-48, 58, 59, 65, 66, 68, 71, 78, 82, 87, 88, 90, 95, 96, 103, 104, 106, 108, 125, 132, 175 ethnography 155 eugenics 135, 136, 152, 158 Evangelism 137

194 0

Index

evolutionism 80, 143 evolutionist anthropology 151 exemplar 6, 11, 32, 33, 41, 52, 78, 84, 85, 87, 88, 103, 104, 120, 125, 141 exploitation 18, 57, 65, 93, 118, 122, 128, 130, 155, 157 failed transition 13, 14 ferocity 116, 120-26, 138 Five-Year plans 31, 107, 108 forest policy 82, 83, 85, 101, 104, 119, 128 forms of knowledge 29, 63, 83, 129 Foucault, Michel 21, 24, 67 freedom 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 28, 29, 37, 43; 45-47, 53-55, 57, 60, 6466, 71; 77, 85, 87, 100, 102, 103, 147, 163 Galton, Francis 135, 160 Gandhi, M. K. 4, 6, 13, 14, 16-20, 26, 45^8, 51-53, 58-60, 63, 67, 82, 104, 156, 164, 165, 169, 171, 174, 175 Gandhi Seva Sangh 46 genealogically 3, 4, 16, 23, 24, 44, 68, 107, 163, 174 Ghurye, G. S. 119, 121, 122, 127, 136, 137, 153-57 Gita 14, 43, 44 Godavari 7, 27, 78, 82, 84, 86-90, 97, 100, 115-17, 122, 124-26 Gokhale, G. K. 4, 39, 40 Gond 6, 49, 156, 157 Gond Seva Mandal 7, 49, 156, 157 governmentality 70,131 governmental power 17 governmental reason 15-17 Gramsci, Antonio 13, 35, 65, 66, 69 grand narrative 8 Great Rampa Rebellion 116 grihasta 43, 45, 64 grihasti 43 Guha, B. S. 137, 147-49,151 Guha, R. 8, 13

Haimendorf, Christophe von-Furer 79-81, 86, 91 Halevy, E. 146 Harijan 3, 4, 6, 22, 28, 29, 41, 51, 52, 54, 56, 62, 63, 71, 82, 124, 125, 174, 175 Harijan Sevak Sangh 4, 6, 22, 29, 41, 51-53, 174 Hegel 23, 179 hegemonic see hegemony hegemonic linkage 87 hegemony 6, 19, 20, 28, 29, 37, 47, 53, 57, 65, 66, 77, 78, 82, 170, 174, 176 Heimsath, C. 38, 41, 42, 45 hill tribe 30, 77, 115, 125, 127, 136 Hind Swaraj 59, 64 Hindu Mahasabha vii Hindus 1, 18, 19, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 56, 60, 122, 153, 167, 168, 171 historical imagination 44 historiography 7, 11, 20, 22, 68, 100 Horace, Alexander 63 Hos 122 HSS see Harijan Sevak Sangh Ibbetson, D. 140, 141 ideological hospitality 16 Ilaiah, K. 44 improvement 63, 81, 84, 91, 129, 131, 147, 166, 167 indebtedness 103 independence 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 24, 28, 31, 62, 78, 81, 88, 101, 102; Indian 20, 23, 24 Indian Civil Services 61 industrialisation 15, 22, 118, 157 institution-building 5 insurgent 30, 51, 57, 115-17, 120, 126, 130 interlocking strategies 67 jurisprudence 140 Karads 148 karma 41, 43-45, 64

index 0 195

karma yoga 41-45

karma yogi 43 karnam 78, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97-100, 102, 106, 107 Kayastha 148 khadi 15, 46, 60 Khilafat 18 Khonds122 Kondareddi 78-80, 91, 93-95, 120 Koya 78, 83, 84, 87, 90-93, 95, 96, 102, 106, 107, 116, 120, 123-25 Kshatriya 139, 142, 148 Kumarappa, J. C. 15, 104 lepers 60 liberal 15, 17, 21, 39, 41, 55, 67 liquor 60 logic: of contradiction 170; dialectical 67; strategic 67 Madiga 148 Madras Presidency 31 81, 96,115,125 Mahalanobis Caste Distance 149 Mahalanobis Generalised Distance 149 Mahalanobis, P. C. 135-37, 149-52 Mahars 40, 148 Mahatma 14, 23, 48, 171 mainstream 7, 33, 52, 70, 80, 81, 119, 126, 130; society 70 Majumdar, D.N. 149-51 Mala 148 Malaviya, M. M. 51, 53 Malayappan Plan 83, 84, 87, 93, 96, 100-108 Malayappan Report 27, 83-84, 100, 102, 117, 118, 123-25, 128 Malers 122 Mandal, Antyaja Seva 41 Manu 139-42 Marathas 148 marginalised 6, 23, 25, 32, 62, 66, 128, 142 market economy 106, 146 Marxism 164, 175, 176 Marxist 8, 21, 23, 63, 66, 71, 163, 164, 170, 172

masculinity 10 mercantilism 22 messiah 27, 84, 85, 124, 125 methodological principles 20-28 metropolitan 67, 96, 138 minorities 11, 26, 132, 170 missionaries 39, 47-50, 52, 66, 85 modern entrepreneurial spirit 106 modernisation 11, 45, 62, 79, 80, 99, 153 modernity 8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 42, 45, 51, 68, 80, 155, 157; Western 17 modern nation-state 135 mofussil 96 moksha 43 moment of arrival 15, 16 moment of departure 15 moment of manoeuvre 14, 15, 25, 104 money-commodity-money 35, 69 Moral Rearmament Conference 86 moral tone 131, 132 mukti 43 mundas 122 Musalmaan 1 Muslim 1, 18, 19, 46, 55, 57, 89, 148 Muslim League 55, 57 Mussalman 18 Muthadar 78, 84, 96-98, 108, 120 Nanga Baiga 155 nasal index 137, 142, 144, 145, 150, 157 National Archives 116 national development 5, 105, 106, 125, 131, 136 national government 61, 78, 105, 119, 120, 128, 130 nationalism 28, 50, 53, 58, 60, 67, 119, 136, 137, 141, 152, 153 nationalist: consciousness 8, 68, 70; elite 8, 13, 23, 29, 44, 60 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World 13 national movement 13, 19, 22, 23, 30, 42, 70

196 0

Index

National Planning Committee 15 nation and its fragments 15 nation-building 6, 87 Nehru, Jawaharlal 1, 4, 15, 16, 17, 60, 61, 62, 64, 100, 152 Nesfield, J. 141, 153 non-confrontationist 5 non-official 29, 82, 87, 100, 107 non-violence 4, 13, 17, 46, normative 10, 14, 62-64, 80, 86, 87, 105, 145, 154 normativity 10 Omvedt, G. 164, 174 opinion moulding 5 oppression 11, 13, 18, 57, 85, 122, 163, 166-70, 172, 173 Oraons 122 Pakistan 55 Pantulu, Viresalingam 39 passive recipients 172 Perantapalle 78, 79, 85, 88-91, 9395 Periyar, E. V. R. viii personal conduct 20, 154, 165 philanthropic 125 philanthropological 155 philanthropologist 49, 153 Phoenix settlement 58 Phule, Jyotirao viii, 72 Plainsman 87, 98, 119 political economy 8, 11, 23, 59, 79 political minorities 11 poll politics 57 Poona Pact 29, 53, 164 population 7, 11, 49, 58, 59, 62, 63, 77, 105, 118, 120, 122, 126, 129, 131, 135, 143-45, 148, 150, 152, 154 postcolonial 11, 22, 25, 55, 57, 60, 62 poverty 1, 7, 17, 27, 31, 78, 79, 83, 84, 103, 120, 121, 124, 126 Poverty Relief Service 7, 17, 27, 31, 78, 79, 83, 84, 124 Prabhus 148

prana-pratishta 50 prayaschitta 174 pre-modern 9 principles of legitimation 15 Pritchard, Evans 159 progress 8-10, 14, 16, 20-24, 26, 30, 31, 40, 42, 43, 62; 63, 67, 69, 71, 80, 115, 122, 127, 138, 140, 141, 142, 145, 155, 164 property 30, 31, 77, 83, 84, 126, 144 proselytising 124 PRS see Poverty Relief Service public domain 6, 17, 21, 22 public servant 2 public service 10 public sphere 10, 19 purity and pollution 24, 45, 68, 102 Quaker 64 questionable authoritativeness 140 racial 30, 59, 62, 136, 139,140, 141, 145, 147-52, 157 racial origin 30 racism 33, 50 radicalism 50 Raghavaiah Committee Report see Aiyappan Report Raghavaiah, V 81-83, 86, 87, 101, 104, 107, 108, 118, 125, 128, 129, 132 Rajagopalachari, C. 51 Rajaji see Rajagopalachari, C. Raju, Alluri Sitarama 89, 90, 114 Ramakrishna 9, 12, 42, 44, 78, 79, 85 Rama Rao, N.T. 99, 107 Rampa region 116, 120 Ranade, M. G. 39, 45 Rao, C. R. 149-51 rationality 5, 15, 16, 29, 31, 104, 131, 136, 169, 170 Razu, Alluri Sitarama 116, 117, 119 rebellion 90, 97, 101, 114, 116, 11922, 126, 127 reconstruction 29, 51, 59 Reddis of Bison Hills, The 79, 91

Index 0 197 reform 2-4, 16, 18, 24, 28, 37, 3842, 44, 46, 52, 57, 64, 68, 82, 102, 105, 163, 166 regulative potential 145 Rekapalle 88, 89 representative structure 57 ressentiment 25, 65, 67 revenue 5, 16, 30, 67, 78, 83, 93, 94, 96, 97, 103-5, 118, 120, 126, 129, 130, 138, 143, 146 revivalism 42 revolutionary violence 171, 176 revolution, passive 26, 71 riots 1, 33, 167 Risley, H. H. 62, 105, 129, 136-53, 156, 157 Rivers, W. H. R. 154 romantic 19, 48, 59, 64, 153, 156 romanticism 64, 156 Rudolph, Lloyd I. 72 Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars 9 ruling classes 70 rural 54, 95, 124, 167, 168 Ruskin, John 58, 59 ryotwari 97 Sabarmati 45-47, 49, 59 Sabarmati Ashram 45, 49 Sadhu, Swami Balananda 27, 79100, 124 Sanatana 102 Sanatanists 53, 68, 69, 100, 102, 108 Sanskritisation 51 Santal 121, 122, 154 Saras wats 148 Sarvodaya 58, 59 satyagraha 4, 5, 15, 17, 19, 28, 33, 45-47, 65 Satyashodhak Samaj 72 Savarkar vii scheduled tribe 29, 50, 81 Schedule V 77, 125, 133 Schedule VI 133 schemes: ameliorative 103; development 103

Second Round Table Conference 29, 54 security territory and population 131 semi-feudal 106 Sen, Asok 9, 13, 14, 25 Sen, Narendra Nath 39 Sermon on the Mount 47 servant 2, 4, 39-41, 45, 48, 51, 64, 165, 171; government 64 Servants of India Society 4, 39, 40, 45, 48, 64, 165 service 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 15-17, 27, 31-34, 38-41, 45-47, 50-52, 54, 60-62, 64, 65, 68, 77-100, 124, 156, 157, 165, 170, 173-75 seva 3-29, 37-71, 156, 157 sevagram 47, 59, 86 sevak 4, 50-55, 68, 69, 71, 78, 80, 81, 85-88, 96, 104, 107, 108, 174 Seva Sadan 45, 46 'Sewa' 9 Sherring, M. A. 137, 139 shetji viii shifting cultivation 80, 83, 127, 154 Shinde, V R. 72 SIS See Servants of India Society Skaria, A. 9, 17-20 Smith, Adam 146 Social Conference 28, 38 social intercourse 54 socially-inferior castes 24 social reform 2, 3, 16, 24, 28, 38-42, 44, 64, 82, 163, 166 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 48 sovereign 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 100, 105, 119, 130, 133, 136, 144, 145 sovereignty 55, 59, 62, 105, 119, 130, 136, 145 Special Agency Development Officer 31, 78, 83, 86, 100, 104, 105, 117 Srinivas, M. N. 141, 165 statistical 22, 58, 62, 69, 70, 105, 106, 144, 145, 149, 150, 152 St Stephen's College 48

198 0

Index

Subaltern 7, 8, 13, 17, 69 Subaltern Studies 7, 13 subjection 44 subjectivation 44 superstructure see base swadeshi 15 swami see Swami, Balananda Swami, Balananda 124 Swaraj 15, 45-47, 59, 64, 65 sympathy 2, 19, 25, 33, 34, 122, 141, 171, 173 Telugu Desam Party 98, 99 10-year plan 7, 17, 31, 119, 124 territorial imagination 30 territory, national 31, 101, 130 Thakkar, Amritlal V 40, 51, 53, 56, 64, 81, 163, 165, 169, 171, 173, 174, 180 Tilak, B. G. 38 toleration 18 tradition 9, 10, 12,13, 14, 27, 38, 42, 43, 45, 54, 65, 90, 100, 102, 138, 140, 151, 156, 168, 178 tribals 3, 7, 17, 27-30, 32, 39, 50-51, 55-58, 64, 77-85, 87, 88, 93, 9598, 101-3, 105, 107, 108, 11532, 136, 137, 140, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150-55, 157; administration 7, 28, 29, 32, 102, 136; land ownership 78 tribal welfare 29-31, 77, 93, 107 tribes, aboriginal 7, 56, 118, 122, 125, 142, 153 trustee 59 trusteeship 59 tryst with destiny 15 underdevelopment 22, 123 unification of interests 145 universal 10, 11, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 42, 55, 57, 66, 68-70, 102, 169, 170, 176 universality 20 Unto This Last 58

untouchability 46, 51, 52, 60, 68, 163, 171, 173, 174 untouchable 6, 27-29, 38, 39, 47, 49, 51-58, 63, 164, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174 uplift 7, 30, 39, 40, 46, 54, 86, 118, 126, 131, 165-166, 174 urban 9, 13, 22, 23, 25, 54, 58, 60, 62, 67, 68, 87, 106, 116, 127, 168 urban discipline 67, 75n42 urban ecology 67 utilitarian 11, 59, 68, 137, 143-47, 155, 156; economics 11 utilitarianism 137, 143, 145-47 Vallabhacharya 9 Vanaprastha 43 vanguard 41 varna 43, 44, 52, 140 varnashrama dharma 43, 48 Vedanta 44 Vedas 43 Vedic Brahman 151 Veyne, Paul 24, 36nl9, 72nl3 vicious 53, 165 village industries 46, 60 village sanitation 60 virtuous individual 165 Vivekananda, Swami 9, 12, 41-44, 64, 79, 85 voluntary activism 5, 6, 32, 70, 163 voluntary organisation 17, 31, 78, 124 voluntary work 10, 33 volunteers 39 Watt, Carey 9, 10, 25, 65 Weber, Max 45 welfare 3-5, 7, 15, 16, 21, 25, 29, 32, 33, 48, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 77, 78, 82, 84, 86, 93, 96, 102, 104, 107, 108, 124, 132, 152, 163, 166, 176 Winslow, J. 47, 49, 156 working classes 70