Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xxii, 192 pp. (Map, illustrations.) US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-10697-0.
On a scorching afternoon in the summer of 2009, I found myself straggling behind a group of ten women as they carried sacks of cement up a steep incline in the mountains of Uttarakhand. After reaching a plateau, the women placed their heavy loads next to a watering trough that was being constructed under the auspices of the Indian government’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). The women shrugged their shoulders and laughed at my presumptions of their participation in decision-making when I asked if, and why, the trough was needed. Later, I found that these women were paid less than half of the government mandated wage for their arduous labor; the rest of the money was swallowed by village and administrative heads. As Nayanika Mathur might comment, the slippage evident in this one small project—wherein underpaid villagers built a potentially unnecessary structure—is all too common under programs such as NREGS, which was designed to provide no less than 100 days a year of government employment to India’s most impoverished while producing projects needed by rural communities. In her book, Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India, Mathur ethnographically explores how the law linked to NREGS came into force along with the many difficulties associated with a scheme that her interlocutors described as “unimplementable.” The text draws upon the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state to demonstrate the everyday struggles through which law is translated into practice in ways that are “capable of producing absurdity” (2) as well as “contingency, uncertainty, coercion, and affect” (5). Overall, the book offers a timely—and otherwise difficult to obtain—insight into the inner workings of state bureaucracies, and of the professional lives of administrators in Uttarakhand State.
Whereas other observers of state programs like NREGS might be quick to dismiss its quagmires as the inevitable outcome of entrenched corruption, Mathur urges us to eschew this “lazy person’s answer” in our analyses of “why the Indian state fails with such startling regularity” (17). As she explains, “In lieu of joining the large chorus that spends its time bemoaning what is popularly described as the ‘cancer of corruption’ in India… Paper Tiger, instead, concentrates its attention on the much harder task of articulating the bureaucratic everyday” (20). This, to her mind, helps us get past some of the “primitivism” of the international development apparatus, which for too long has described governments such as India’s as lacking and aberrant in ways that closely align with colonial discourse and practice. Since much of the blame placed upon corruption is insufficiently backed by empirical data, Mathur’s study serves as a revelatory correction; her book employs painstakingly acquired data to concentrate on how the Indian state actually functions as its officials navigate bureaucratic procedure and policy inertia (20).
The presentation of this data is spread across three main sections (and six narratively accessible chapters) in which the author discusses the sensibilities of remoteness as they influence life in her chosen field site; the everyday practices of administration in a sleepy town; the materialities and ambiguities of transparency; the letter-writing practices that convey nuance and hidden meaning; the high-stakes body language and intense boredom of official meetings; the challenging process of administering NREGS in the field; and the ways in which the state’s ineffectualness is most clearly exposed when it is unable to authorize the killing of a leopard that preys on women and children. But above all else, Mathur explains how and why the state—from the lowest administrative level to the highest branches of government—produces lots and lots of paper. So much paper, in fact, that it appears to Mathur and others that the production of documents is the main way that the state is able to show “progress” and “the accomplishment of development” (169).
The impressive means through which Mathur acquired the data to support her arguments helps us “study up” the chains of power that influence the lives of India’s rural poor. After an auspicious introduction via an official letter from the Chief Information Commissioner of Uttarakhand, Mathur was able to gain access to the everyday administrative workings of a “remote” office in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli District. With empathy and compassion, Mathur portrays the logics and practices of her colleagues in an administering NRGES office in the town of Gopeshwar, as well as across the district. Once established in the office, she undertook a project that knowingly committed her to the drudgery of governmental procedure and officialese that lasted from 10am to 5pm six days a week. This regime she continued over the course of a year in a town that public servants consider a punishment posting. It was a risky proposition, especially since those with whom she worked were uncertain if there was anything for her to discover in their offices that would be worthy of note.
Beyond her engagement with anthropologies of the state (including the work of Max Weber, Veena Das, David Graeber, and James Scott), Mathur draws upon insights from Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau. The author’s attention to the Foucauldian “regime of practices” that constitute the “paper state” is useful in this regard. The employment of Bourdieuian insights is mostly limited to his comments on power, which is the part of his work that is often overlooked elsewhere. More narrative direction for how readers might absorb and deploy the conceptual synthesis that the author builds would, however, have been useful. That said, the conceptual eclecticism is perhaps where the book provides the most use to readers hoping to understand how they can apply Mathur’s analyses to the exploration of bureaucratic and governing practices outside of India. Through her careful work, readers will catch glimpses of how they too can examine elements of affect and emotion amidst the banality of everyday governance, or the agency and materiality of official documents that were written to safeguard the professions of their authors rather than to improve the lives of those in need. Mathur additionally provides an example of how others might approach these topics in ways that keep an emphasis on the plight of the most marginalized, even as we discuss the dispassionate violence of the bureaucratic everyday with measured sympathy for those engaged in the mind-numbing production of the paper state.
Georgina Drew
The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
pp. 615-617