India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (review)

This book engages with a wide range of scholarship grounded in different disciplines to expand our understanding of how the contemporary Indian economy works. While development studies as an interdisciplinary field is uniquely poised to undertake this sort of engagement, due credit must also be given to the author Barbara Harris-White for her self-conscious effort to converse with theories and empirical works outside the formal confines of economic studies.

Liberalization of the Indian economy from the early 1990s has opened up many sectors of farm and non-farm production to private capital, including foreign private capital. This constitutes a distinct break for an economic system that had until then followed the centralized Soviet model by awarding a prominent role to the state in managing the commanding heights of the economy. Economists frequently have commented on the implications of that momentous political decision for the Indian economy at large. With the liberalization and its effects as the reference point, Barbara Harriss-White, going against the grain, examines and analyzes the impact of social "structures" that continue to shape the process of capital accumulation in India today. She focuses primarily on the Indian caste system, religion, gender relations, and the class configurations to explain how they mediate the processes of accumulation. The author concludes that the process of economic rationalization has not progressed very far despite liberalization, and that some of the structures whose existence have been well documented for India historically continue to be deterministic in the new context. These conclusions are targeted to reach institutions like the World Bank that are engaged in formulating current development policies as well as those with an interest in understanding the nature of economic liberalization and its relationship with the growth of right wing politics in India.

The monograph starts with a qualification that it will focus on what Harriss-White calls the "India of 88 per cent." This vast section of the population lives in villages and small towns. Away from the metropolitan cities, these rural and semi-urban spaces form a vanguard where the resilience of the dominant social groups comes into relief most clearly. A good portion of the book shows how the superior and potent classes in India have altered their strategy of engagement with the formal state and the informal economy in India at the turn of the twenty-first century to retain their erstwhile dominance. On the basis of field studies Harriss-White provides a comprehensive picture of these on-the-ground realities. That is the most valuable contribution of the book.

Harriss-White deals with a contemporary context that is fast evolving. The postscript in the book tries to address some of the economic and political patterns that arose even as the book was being completed. If anything, the trends in economic changes have only accelerated. The "metropolitan" Indian economy has seen further capitalization, and recent macro statistics confirm unprecedented growth rates in Gross National Product (GNP) for the country as a whole.

One would have wished the author addressed how local particularism responds to the economic impulses generated in corporate India. There are grounds for believing that the local in India has not remained totally impervious to influences from outside. This is certainly truer of some regions in India as compared with others. Perhaps there is a need to address regional and even state-wide variations in this response.

National patterns in consumption and the use of producer goods are only one example reflecting macro level rationalization, even if the breadth of this rationalization does not include the lower-most levels of the society in every region. Labor mobility between states, guided by the difference in wage levels, further compromises local insularity. In the same context, the role of state in implementing its own regime has been underemphasized in the narrative at least in one respectóthat of reserving jobs in the public sector through...