A State of Resistance or Resisting the State? Subalterns and their Encounter with the ‘State’ in India
Assa Doron: RSPAS, The Australian National University
Much of the recent literature by political economists in India has focused on the powerful elites and their increasing influence on the modern Indian state. Studies of this approach perceive the autonomy of the Indian state as severely marred by the competing interests of the dominant classes, including industrial capitalists, rich peasants and professional elites. While these studies have enhanced our understanding of state-society relations and the way in which certain social forces penetrate and affect state discourse and action, how such state discourse and policy is disseminated and re-interpreted at the local level is largely unexamined. When it is considered, the encounter between state and local actors at the level of everyday life is often perceived in terms of state repression or, alternatively, as subaltern resistance. In this paper I employ the anthropological vantage point to examine the encounter between subalterns and the state, focusing on the case study of a boatmen community in the sacred city Banaras. I argue that the boatman community has an ambivalent relationship with the state, illustrated in the way boatmen experience the Indian ‘state’, not as a unified entity, but through its various institutions and officials in everyday life. This ambivalence is concretely exemplified in the various tactics and strategies developed by subaltern groups, such as boatmen (individually and collectively) to deal with state policies and functionaries. Such considerations, I also suggest, reflect the inconsistencies and ambiguities in state ideology and practice in contemporary India.
