The moral republic : corruption in colonial and postcolonial India, c. 1830-1974
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is a political history of modern India. Using the lens of corruption, it examines the critical transformations that occurred in the subcontinent across the nineteenth and twentieth century India. I investigate the use of corruption in the institutional and popular context to chronicle the changing notions of public and private, trust, and solidarity. British colonialism presented corruption as provisional and anomalous. Postcolonial India reformulated corruption as a problem inherent to the logic of necessary modernization. Exploring the imperial and the independent state of India through episodes of dysfunction and misconduct, my chapters are organized chronologically. My first chapter explores the administrative reforms introduced in 1833 to explore how the East India Company's production of the vocabulary and rhetoric of corruption as serendipitous pathology was a deliberate tactic of legitimizing imperialism. I then move to examine the imperial attitudes towards Indians through a particularly flagrant example of colonial corruption in 1888. While the norms of professionalization advocated distance, ironically, they also resulted in heavy dependence on lower Indian functionaries. For these 'native' officers, corruption was often a path to gain masculine authority and assert indigenous control. My third chapter explores the discourse on corruption in early independent India (1947-1960) through institutional and popular cultures. Studying the Constituent Assembly debates between the various members of the Constituent Assembly, this chapter reflects on some of the original and formative tensions that undergirded Indian democracy. It also examines the popular distrust that was formative to the Indian democracy. My fourth chapter follows the complex trajectories of the anticorruption movement in 1974-1975 to examine the regional, national, and international resistance to corruption as it occurred at the time. Corruption, in this study, becomes a site where different kinds of radical as well as disciplinary political energies are crystallized. Drawing from hitherto unexamined literature in English as well as other Indian languages, my dissertation acknowledges the need to study the narratives around and about corruption to understand the complex careers of nationalism, morality, and sovereignty in the subcontinent.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Anushree, Anubha |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Bellenoit, H. J. A. (Hayden John-Andrew), 1978- |
| Thesis advisor | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Shil, Parthapratim |
| Thesis advisor | Sinha, Mrinalini, 1960- |
| Degree committee member | Bellenoit, H. J. A. (Hayden John-Andrew), 1978- |
| Degree committee member | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Shil, Parthapratim |
| Degree committee member | Sinha, Mrinalini, 1960- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anubha Anushree. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/sd470bz5290 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Anubha Anushree
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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