Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii, 200 pp. US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-19-966564-8.
The demand for comprehensive and accessible reviews of modern Indian society and political economy has intensified of late, fuelled by the growing geo-economic significance of the sub-continent. The transitional status of India from a more or less abject object of developmental studies to the more favoured status of an “emerging economy” in neo-liberal parlance has made older and new paradoxes appear both more visible and acute: the co-presence of democratic stability alongside steepening inequality, the persistence of radical social movements alongside a revitalized Hindu right, the widening of systemic corruption alongside a critical moral political economy of state/economy relations. Keywords for Modern India, co-authored by Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss, does not attempt a comprehensive review nor does it offer a critical history of the present. Instead it offers an accessible, well-researched, and often lively portal into modern and contemporary Indian politics, economy, and society via a kind of curated glossary of major concepts and categories of public debate and practice. The explicit inspiration is Raymond Williams’s profoundly innovative 1976 work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Attempting to replicate this template, Jeffrey and Harriss offer entries that range across social sectors, temporal spans, and discursive fields, showcasing the research strengths and interpretative gloss of the authors. It encompasses terms with general social-scientific import such as: capitalism, labour, civil society, colonialism, development, secularism, and poverty; others rooted in a specific political sociology or movement such as Coolie, Dalit, OBC (Other Backward Classes), Dowry, Adivasi, Reservations, Green revolution; and some narrowly institutional in origin such as BDO (block development officer), DM (district magistrate), Collector, NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). Three people make the compendium, namely, B.R. Ambedkar, M.K. Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru. Most entries begin with a potted account of the English-language term’s original usage based either on the OED or Raymond Williams’s 1976 work, followed by a thumbnail sketch of their subsequent usage and meaning in Indian studies. Absent throughout is an engagement with the growing historiography on concept formation in colonial and postcolonial India and there is no mention even of prior efforts, for example, the wondrous hybrid of social history and cultural mapping contained in the 1886 Hobson-Johnson dictionary that included vernacular, English, and Anglo-Indian terms. But the entries are broadly speaking judicious, insightful, and incisive. The volume is in this regard a useful resource for new entrants into contemporary and modern Indian studies across the non-historical social sciences as well as for commentators and journalists outside the academy.
But fundamental methodological and conceptual ambiguities remain. All the entries are English-language terms, effectively ignoring not only the “actually existing” linguistic diversity of modern India, but overt issues of class, cultural capital, and spatial politics. For Williams, in contrast, the differential meanings assigned to general terms telescoped the cleft between bourgeois and popular orders, the socially rooted divide between ordinary usage and elite deployments. The absence of such cross-linguistic vernacular keywords as “swadeshi,” “vikaas,” and “goonda” shuts off the socially resonant diverse meanings that they have accumulated across conjunctures. Likewise, the decision to exclude Indian-English terms—especially cross-over social-scientific and popular terms such as “vote-bank” or “time-pass” (bewildering given Jeffrey’s excellent ethnography of unemployed youth)—forecloses an account of the socioeconomic and discursive complexity of transformations in modern India.
Given these significant flaws, the most striking feature of the volume—its explicit modelling of Raymond Williams’s Keywords—begs more questions than it resolves. Williams’s Keywords is justly regarded as a lodestone of British cultural Marxism and more generally, of a new left critical historical sensibility. The culmination of several decades of research, it integrated political, analytical, and aesthetic commitments towards a revitalized historical materialism. The dual analytical and political status of “culture” in Williams’s work was tied to the new left project of envisioning a socialism that encompassed the totality of human relations, one beyond a narrowly construed arena of political economy. It appeared in a moment before Thatcherism held sway, when Marxist and left-historical debates flourished in the British academy and when a radical left ranged across local councils, trade unions, and within the Labour Party. The self-description of Williams’s work as an exercise in “historical semantics” was a robust riposte to the static structuralism that undergirded what later came to be called the “linguistic turn,” setting it apart from formalistic linguistic models. The commitment to historical reflexivity was evinced most overtly in its explicit mapping of the dynamic, variegated, and often contradictory meanings of such keywords as class (the longest entry), masses, equality, private, and welfare, among others. What inoculated Williams’s project from the temptations of scholarly solipsism was its effort to historicize major shifts, hitching mutations in meaning to wider social, economic, and ideological transformations. This buoyant historical materialism placed Williams’s Keywords beyond an ordinary encyclopedia, dictionary, or glossary, setting it apart as well from the kind of “objectivist” philology associated with the conservative German historian Rienhart Koselleck. Jeffrey and Harriss provide a useful glossary to assorted terms in contemporary Indian studies, but its methodological and conceptual flaws are too apparent and numerous to assuage those with a critical historical orientation.
Manu Goswami
New York University, New York, USA
pp. 685-687