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Author: Sudhir Chella Rajan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674250400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.
Author: Sudhir Chella Rajan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674250400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Get Book
Book Description
A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.
Author: Manan Ahmed Asif
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067498790X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A field-changing history explains how the subcontinent lost its political identity as the home of all religions and emerged as India, the land of the Hindus. Did South Asia have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? This is a subject of heated debate in scholarly circles and contemporary political discourse. Manan Ahmed Asif argues that Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Republic of India share a common political ancestry: they are all part of a region whose people understand themselves as Hindustani. Asif describes the idea of Hindustan, as reflected in the work of native historians from roughly 1000 CE to 1900 CE, and how that idea went missing. This makes for a radical interpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity. Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, Asif uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. Asif closely examines the most complete idea of Hindustan, elaborated by the early seventeenth century Deccan historian Firishta. His monumental work, Tarikh-i Firishta, became a major source for European philosophers and historians, such as Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, and Gibbon during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet Firishta’s notions of Hindustan were lost and replaced by a different idea of India that we inhabit today. The Loss of Hindustan reveals the intellectual pathways that dispensed with multicultural Hindustan and created a religiously partitioned world of today.
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1849042764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Originally published: London: C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2013.
Author: Rachel Dwyer
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479848697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Modern Indian studies have recently become a site for new, creative, and thought-provoking debates extending over a broad canvas of crucial issues. As a result of socio-political transformations, certain concepts—such as ahimsa, caste, darshan, and race—have taken on different meanings. Bringing together ideas, issues, and debates salient to modern Indian studies, this volume charts the social, cultural, political, and economic processes at work in the Indian subcontinent. Authored by internationally recognized experts, this volume comprises over one hundred individual entries on concepts central to their respective fields of specialization, highlighting crucial issues and debates in a lucid and concise manner. Each concept is accompanied by a critical analysis of its trajectory and a succinct discussion of its significance in the academic arena as well as in the public sphere. Enhancing the shared framework of understanding about the Indian subcontinent, Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies will provide the reader with insights into vital debates about the region, underscoring the compelling issues emanating from colonialism and postcolonialism.
Author: Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674034260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.
Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134132689
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
Focusing on politics and society in India, this book explores new areas enmeshed in the complex social, economic and political processes in the country. Linking the structural characteristics with the broader sociological context, the book emphasizes the strong influence of sociological issues on politics, such as social milieu shaping and the articulation of the political in day-to-day events. Political events are connected with the ever-changing social, economic and political processes in order to provide an analytical framework to explain ‘peculiarities’ of Indian politics. Bidyut Chakrabarty argues that three major ideological influences of colonialism, nationalism and democracy have provided the foundational values of Indian politics. Structured thematically and chronologically, this work is a useful resource for students of political science, sociology and South Asian studies.
Author: Gurpreet Mahajan
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1780325169
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Gurpreet Mahajan tackles the predisposition of political theory to be limited by the Western canon. Bringing into focus how concepts central to the modern democratic political imaginary are interpreted in India, this book elaborates the ways that ideas of freedom, equality and difference are layered with new meanings and how questions of religion and state, critical reason and embedded self are understood in the Indian context. Part of Zed’s World Political Theories series, this remarkable work offers a glimpse of the social and political life of contemporary India, and how it differs from the dominant liberal paradigm.
Author: Sudhir Chella Rajan
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822974886
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Rajan investigates air pollution policy as one based on how to make cars less polluting. Putting the onus on auto manufacturers and owners has generated an elaborate scheme of emissions testing and pollution-control devices, and does not look at the technology itself as the heart of the problem. Rajan focuses his study on data collected in Los Angeles, to show how emissions testing burdens the poor, who tend to own older cars that pollute more. Rajan argues for democratic control over technology, steering it away from special interest groups and toward a long-term ethical resolution.
Author: Joseph Tainter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521386739
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.
Author: Anand Pandian
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253355281
Category : Religion and ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Outgrowth of an international workshop on the subject of South Asian ethical practices held in Vancouver, Canada in September 2007.
