Politics in the middle: mediating relationships between the citizens and the state in rural North India

Abstract

Caste and patron–client links have been regarded most often as the building blocks of political organization in India, especially in its rural parts (Migdal 1988; Weiner 1989), and caste associations have been thought to be the pre-eminent mode of interest formation and interest articulation for ordinary villagers (Bailey 1957; Morris-Jones 1967; Panini 1997). Caste has changed over the last twenty-five years, however, and the links between caste and occupation and caste and wealth are no longer as close as they used to be (Mayer 1997; Sheth 1999). Many observers continue to stress caste and patron–client linkages as important factors explaining political mobilization in rural India (Karanth 1997; Kothari 1997; Manor 1997). The relation of caste to political organization is mediated, however, by the nature of state policies. Changes produced by state policies over the last twenty-five years have had the result of diminishing the utility for villagers of older caste- and patronage-based conduits. In sixty-nine villages where I studied these features, located in the northern Indian states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, different forms of political association have arisen and gained ground, and the salience of older patronage-based associations has waned considerably in comparison. Varying stimuli produced by the state at different times have resulted in reconfiguring caste and political association, the historical account shows (Bayly 1988; Dirks 2001). As the nature and the rules of the political game have changed once again over the past twenty-five years, caste and other forms of social aggregation have changed further in response.

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