The inner world of India's economy

If British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had to write about contemporary rural India, he would definitely find his words "poor, solitary, nasty and brutish" inadequate.

Yet India functions, although there is still this phantom of fear about what V S Naipaul once famously described as "million mutinies".

This book by Barbara Harris-White provides facts that will indicate why Naipaul's frightening prediction is not exaggerated.

The India that is analysed here is the non-corporate India, where the Ambanis, Bajajs, Wadias, Tatas, Birlas, Mafatlals and the like do not live but they make their wealth from.

They grow and expand because this India labours and provides them with a much-needed market. This India belongs to 88 per cent of its population.

This India is sometimes called "local" as opposed to "provincial" or "national". Its markets are mud-floored. Its economy is "unorganised" but regulated. It is known as a "bazaar economy". It could well be called as "moffussil".

According to the author, "It certainly includes 'Malgudi' the Tamil town in which novels of R K Narayan are set, but although Narayan's 'painters of signs' or 'vendors of sweets' are to be found in it (not to mention one or two 'financial experts',) it involves large-scale activities and petty production."

This book tells a story of political economy that is barely covered in the pages of official documents like the Economic Survey or other documents of Indian planning that shape our perception on how India is doing.

This book also deploys an innovative approach that should be used to study the political economy of all types of societies. Harris-White describes herself as a field economist.

Her approach has synthesised the results of studies undertaken on a small scale, at a micro-level, with prolonged field research.

The result is a riveting narrative about the inner world of India's economy, and the invention of many new concepts such as "the shadow state", and "proto-fascist politics".

Her approach brings up lots of new facts and insights missing in the works of the other scholars. In that sense, this book makes contribution to the ongoing methodological debates about the most effective way we need to study Indian society.

Economic liberalisation in India has not contributed to its escape from control, but has only changed its character.

Harris-White writes, "If the detailed study of India's economy reveals one thing more clearly than another, it is liberalization means the change in the character of this control, not a release from it. This change owes much, paradoxically, to historical continuities of India's social structure of accumulation. It is a change that is not as self-evidently beneficial as those who have unleashed liberalization have us believe."

Her findings challenge the ways India's key policy makers, who justify India's globalisation, understand the processes of economic accumulation and distribution.

Moreover, one distinctive way in which this book approaches the study of India's political economy is its attempt to examine the means by which it is shaped by Indian religions. Hindutva, according to Harris-White, can sit harmoniously with the globalisation project.

So she writes, "Hindutva, then, might be read as an attempt not only to create and defend as large a space as possible for Hindu accumulation, but also to impose a more uniform ethical space on a tessellated economy."

Some scholars who have studied ethnic conflicts in India have shown convincingly that real estate concerns play a big part in the orchestration of riots.

If the primary goal of the corporate India is to expand markets, why should it support a politics that unsettles it? Furthermore, ethnic violence disturbs law and order, and shakes up the normal life of corporate India invariably causing major financial setbacks.

Why doesn't corporate India consider it rational to resist a politics that causes violence and disrupts its own life? Additionally, does it indicate that religious plurality hinders growth? There are no definite answers to these questions.

The author does suggest strongly, and correctly, that the evolving relationships among the intermediate economy, its informal institutions of corporatist economic regulations, the national and the (global) corporate sectors, the black economy and its politics, the state and its other social institutions of accumulation will determine the fate of secular India.

The most formidable thing about this wonderful book is that it raises the level of excellence, and rigour required for the study of political economy by any student of any society.

INDIA WORKING: ESSAYS ON SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

Barbara Harris-White
Cambridge University Press
Pages: 316
Price: $24