Among the most vulnerable citizens of the new Soviet state in its first decade were its children: abandoned by their families who for various reasons were not able to care for them, displaced from their homes by the Civil War, or simply lost in the constant migrations (the rural population going into big cities in search of a better life, or people leaving the cities for the villages, hoping to find food), these ‘little comrades’ became the first targets of the Soviet project that sought to make the ‘new man’. Two fictional works of Soviet children‘s literature-both of which confirmed the success of revolutionary rebirth-became testaments to the struggle of the street children in the early days of the Revolution: SHKID Republic (Respublika SHKID, 1926), by Grigory Belykh and Leonid Panteleev; and Pedagogical Poem (Pedagogicheskaia Poema, 1933,1936), by Anton Makarenko. The first, written by two former delinquents, describes the rigorous life in the school for young criminal offenders that bore Dostoevsky‘s name (the abbreviation SHKID comes from the Russian shkola imeni Dostoevskogo-‘Dostoevsky School’). It was a highly romanticized picture of life in the ‘republic’ where self-governance and trust were integral parts of human existence, and it celebrated the freedom and creativity of its young citizens.

What Vikram Seth says of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin can be said with equal justification about his book The Golden Gate – ‘like champagne/Its effervescence stirs my brain’ (5.5). This wonderful artefact, ‘tour de force of tour de forces’ (John Hollander), ‘the Great California Novel’ (Gore Vidal on dust-jacket), ‘the perfect book of the 1980's’ (publisher's blurb)–in 594, fourteen-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter – is certainly, to use a phrase from The New York Times review, ‘a splendid achievement’ (quoted in Leslie, 4). Indeed, The Golden Gate has generally received high praise as a zesty, trendy, scintillating and warm portrayal of modern Californian life, ‘an up-to-date tale of San Francisco's “Yuppiedom'‘ (Ionnone, 54).

In this chapter I shall look at the early reception of the novel to argue that The Golden Gate, much more than these things, is a sort of enquiry into the meaning of life in the contemporary world; that it is, above all, a book about love, pacifism, tolerance and compassion. What emerges is not a celebration of Yuppiedom, but a severe critique and rejection of it. In short, I find the book anti-materialistic and, ultimately, ‘spiritual’ in the values that it propounds.

Democracy and democratic governments have been the subjects of much scholarly attention both in India and elsewhere in the world. This focus on democracy may be due to the success of democracy both as an ideal, and as a set of political institutions in a large number of countries, including underdeveloped countries of the world. Whether as an ideal or as a set of institutions that enables the realization of ends, it is the ability of the democratic political process to allow political principals to participate, directly or indirectly, in shaping their destiny, that accounts for the popularity of democratic governance. Even in countries where democratic forms of government do not exist, there is an aspiration among citizens to realize it. In fact, in the recent Freedom House Survey, about 123 countries have been categorized as partial or complete democracy. At the same time, there is disillusionment with the practice of democracy – a gap between the expectation and the outcome of democratic governance.

In actualizing the ends of democracy, political institutions play a pivotal role. In most post-colonial societies like India, the process of social change and transformation has been initiated through institutions. Political institutions are thus both agents and representatives of societal transformation. As such, institutional composition and functioning provide a good indication of the extent of democratization. In this context, three aspects of democracy – permeability of institution, representativeness and efficiency need to be understood as separate categories.

India adopted Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in 1991; since then economic growth rocketed and, according to the Planning Commission and the World Bank, poverty indicators drastically declined. This ‘official’ decline contradicts the figures on agricultural crisis, hunger, food consumption and undernutrition, which are undoubtedly worsening. This paper gives an explanation for this apparent contradiction through an analysis of poverty figures and an assessment of the related methodologies. The aim of this paper is to show why consumption-based measurements are not fully reliable to measure poverty in India.

This paper is divided into five sections. The first section focuses on the decline of official poverty figures in the world and India in particular as a consequence of liberalization. The second section illustrates India's agricultural crisis and its dramatic consequences for the country's food security. The third section explains the technical errors of poverty measurements while the fourth section analyses the theoretical shortcomings below these methodologies. Finally the fifth section, showing the results of field work in three villages of rural Tamil Nadu, demonstrates that consumption-based methodologies are inaccurate to measure the real trend of poverty.

THE DECLINE OF POVERTY

The Apparent Decline of Poverty in a Globalized Economy

Since 1990, poverty – measured as the percentage of people living in families which earn or consume less than $1 per day – has drastically declined. Between 1990 and 2004, the poverty rate in developing countries fell from 31.6 per cent to 19.2 per cent, while the total number of people living in poverty fell from 1.25 billion in 1990 to 980 million in 2004 (UN, 2007).

Introduction

As in many other contemporary developing countries, Sri Lanka's economic policy regime in the 1960s and 1970s saw a gradual shift toward inward-looking dirigiste policies, prompted by deteriorating international terms of trade for its primary export commodities (tea, rubber, and coconuts). However, the country witnessed a marked shift in economic policy thinking from the late 1970s, when it adopted an outward-oriented liberal market economic policy regime, becoming the first country in South Asia region to do so. The policy program included many of the standards reforms of a structural adjustment program, including liberalization of trade and payments, rationalization of public expenditure, dismantling of controls on prices and interest rates, promotion of private sector development, promotion of foreign investment, and financial sector reforms.

The structural transformation of the Sri Lankan economy following the reforms—moving it away from a predominantly agricultural economy to one driven by industrial and services sector growth—set the pattern for its trade and investment links with the rest of the world. The emergence of an export-oriented garment industry strengthened Sri Lanka's trade and investment links with East Asia—as a major source of imports and foreign direct investment (FDI)—while its export interests were primarily focused on the developed countries in Europe and North America. Apart from the early emergence of the garments industry, industrial transformation has remained limited in the two decades of reform because Sri Lanka's investment climate has been hurt by unfavorable political and policy developments.

Calcutta has, for the past hundred years or more, been looked upon as the city to which thousands have travelled for education and employment. The founding of the Calcutta Madrassa (later Alia Madrassa) in October 1780 and the Calcutta University on 24 January 1857 by Warren Hastings, by the incorporation of an Act of the Legislative Council, established Calcutta as the centre of education in the east. These institutes of higher education attracted students from all over Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Orissa and many other states. Education, in the changed context of the post- Mutiny period, was the route through which many discovered the tools to create a new, and more desirable, identity. It was the key of access to employment, and thence to privileges that had been till then closed to many. With its numerous schools and colleges set up by either the Christian missionaries or the native wealthy landlords and later the government, with its mercantile promise and its colonial institutions of power, ‘no other Indian city dominated its hinterland as completely as Kolkata dominated Bengal’. People from the far-flung rural regions of Bengal journeyed to this distant centre of power, braving the terror of thugs and enduring the lack of proper inns along the way, the extremes of weather, the discomforts of transport.

Born into Essex landed gentry, Cox decided on military a career, graduating from Sandhurst in 1884. He joined the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) and went to India where he quickly learned Hindustani before starting Arabic and Persian. Following a well-trodden path for imperial administrators he decided to become a ‘politico’, and was appointed temporary assistant political resident in British Somaliland Protectorate at Zeila. At this point in his life he was ‘devoted to his studies of bird life, Somali clans and conchology’ (Graves 1941: 33). In 1899 Curzon offered Cox the position of political agent and consul at Muscat. This was the making of him; he honed his diplomatic skills during a period of tension with the French in the Gulf and established an influence over the Sultan of Muscat that continued when in 1904 he was promoted to acting political resident in the Persian Gulf and consul-general for southern Persia. It was during this period that Cox, following on from earlier travellers in Oman, James Wellsted, Colonel S.B. Miles, and the Dutch missionary Samuel Zwemer, performed two journeys in the interior. On the first he started out from Abu Dhabi, reaching Muscat via the desert oasis of Buraimi and the desert side of the Jebel Akhdar. The second, from Ras al Khaimah to Buraimi, returning to Muscat by steam boat via Sohar, involved transporting a chronometer along the caravan route in order to set the latter's longitude and latitude.

Historical Background

The long reign of Nasir al-Din Shah ended with his assassination in 1896. His death at the hands of a disciple of the revolutionary agitator Jamal al-Din ‘al-Afghani’ reflected a deep popular discontent both with the monarch himself, the Qajar dynasty in general, and the overall stagnation of the country. Reform was urgently required, but the combination of arbitrary and despotic rule and Western penetration of the economy generated an unnatural opposition alliance of radicals and conservative ulama. This had manifested itself in 1891 in the popular protests against the Shah's selling of the tobacco monopoly to an Englishman and would emerge again when Muzzafar al-Din Shah was forced to grant a majlis (parliament) in December 1905. The so-called mushrutih, or Persian constitutional revolution, lasted until 1911 when Russian pressure effectively ended it. Although the British legation in Tehran had been generally sympathetic to the revolution, the British government signed a convention with Russia in 1907 partitioning the country. In allowing Russia a free hand in the north this effectively doomed Persia's experiment in modern government to failure. In the south, where Britain's influence invariably predominated, oil had been discovered and in 1901 a Briton, William Knox D'Arcy, had been granted the concession for exploration. In 1914 the British government acquired a majority of the shares in the company holding the concession.

This paper is about the nature and working of Indian rural non-farm capitalism, that part of Indian economy that consists of small towns (under 2,00,000 people) and rural areas – often referred to as ‘provincial capitalism’ (Chari, 2004) and ‘regional capitalism’ (Baru, 2000) – in which the vast majority of Indian population lives and works (Harriss-White, 2003). After the Green Revolution, this part of Indian economy has undergone a widespread industrial transition giving birth to a pattern of non-farm growth in which social structures and power relations inherited from colonial and pre-colonial past are intertwined in capitalist production relations. Rural non-farm capitalism appears to be markedly distinct from Indian corporate capitalism and is still largely unexplored.

Addressing Indian rural non-farm capitalism as a distinct section of the Indian economy, this paper contributes to the debate on contemporary capitalism within the vast literature that goes under the rubric of ‘Varieties of Capitalism’. In broad terms, this literature rejects the view that a pure capitalist system exists as a model to all countries, to explore instead ‘real’ capitalist systems, pointing out the differences among them that are seen to depend on their institutional features. Accordingly, my major aim is to show that Indian rural capitalism is based on structures and relations that are ‘institutionally embedded’, i.e. that are specific to the Indian countryside, being determined by the institutional framework that the country has inherited from her past history and culture.

Introduction

In this chapter I compare and contrast the ancient quest for longevity through the search for an elixir of life with the growth of modern medical technologies that may assist the contemporary quest for longevity. The linking theme in this comparison is the centrality of technology to human culture. By ‘technology’ I mean not only machinery and equipment, but, more importantly, the techniques by which societies discipline the body with the aim of controlling either health or moral behaviour. These techniques of behaviour we can call, following Michel Foucault, ‘the technologies of the self’. Perhaps the key issue in this chapter is that, in thinking about old age and longevity, most societies have seen health and morality as being intimately connected. Hence, the technologies of the self typically seek to prolong life through promoting good health and at the same time embracing the notion that good health and longevity are consequences of moral probity. In short, most religious traditions have regarded longevity as the beneficial mark of a moral life. Perhaps the real break, therefore, between past generations and modern society is that our guides to good health have broken, or at least weakened, the link between moral behaviour and longevity.

The catalogue of gardens that comes after the description of Paradise in Book 4 (ll.268–85) of Paradise Lost has been viewed as something of a rhetorical topos. Alastair Fowler cites a comparable passage from Spenser (The Faerie Queene, II.xii.52). The catalogue may be seen as a special form of what Ernst Curtius described as the topos of outdoing, in which ‘on the basis of a comparison with famous examples provided by tradition, the superiority, even the uniqueness, of the person or thing to be praised is established’. Curtius notes that this rhetorical device was used to suggest the beauty of landscape. Milton's point here is to emphasize the singularity of Eden, and to set it apart from history, myth and legend. As such the catalogue serves a functional end rather than purely a descriptive one. A closer look at its positioning in the narrative is instructive, and a proper view of its place requires us to look back, however briefly, at the description of the garden.

The garden may well be regarded as the most strenuous achievement of Paradise Lost. The inalienable otherness of the garden, its existence outside the known human world, is so critical and difficult to convey because, unlike Hell or Heaven, it is nonetheless a human dwelling-place. It is easier for Milton to convince us of the otherness of hell and heaven than to demonstrate the singularity of the garden, for the garden necessarily involves a human perspective. Its proportions and features are amenable to human sense.

South Asia is the largest democratic region of the world. It has been the biggest theatre of struggles for democratic development in contemporary times. Countries of the region have passed through variegated political experiences, including attempts to establish authoritarian rule, struggles to restore democracy, violent conflicts and efforts to resolve differences and divisions through negotiation. But, most countries of the region have sustained democracy for most of the time, although they are economically less developed and culturally highly diverse. While structural factors might be important to explain the dynamics of democracy in the region, the attitude of the people towards democracy is no less important in the success stories and the setbacks to democracy. Since we cannot view people as an undifferentiated mass, it may be useful to examine the attitudes of the elites and the masses separately to find similarities and dissimilarities between them. As the elites in any society play a crucial role in sustaining the political system, it is appropriate to know whether the elites of South Asia have favourable attitudes towards democracy, whether the elite and mass attitudes in this regard cohere with each other, and whether the elite–mass differentials are a cause for concern.

What does democracy mean to the elites and the masses? Why do they prefer democracy and how much do they support it? How participative or indifferent are they in the political process?

About the opening scene of Act III of Prometheus Unbound, there is general agreement that it “is an example of irony in the classical sense in which everything the speaker says is true, but in a way that he does not comprehend” (NS 256). The “fatal child” of Jupiter's eager anticipation will be fatal to him, not for him. Drunk with power and sexually aroused, Jupiter calls for Idaean Ganymede to “fill the daedal cups” and for a “wide voice” of exultation to rise up circling into a full-throated plenum of song and celebration. But in reality this tyrant of the world is on the brink of an annihilation toward which he will plunge with the “Ai! Ai!” (III.i.79) of Prometheus's pain and Apollo's written grief on his lips. What Jupiter has brought forth will not dynastically seal his sovereignty as the only potent begetter; instead, its advent will put an end to him just as he previously put an end to Saturn. All this is true enough. The enthroned tyrant of heaven does incarnate the old story of pride running before a fall.

The spatial concentration of communities, with transformations over time has been a neglected theme in academic research on Indian cities. Thus, when I was asked to present a broad overview of the organization of minority communities in the city space of Calcutta, a number of questions immediately came to my mind. First, how would one define ‘minorities’? Second, has there been any change in the concentration/dispersal of minorities over space? Can one identify the factors behind such changes? Third, can one identify the major phases in the development of minority settlements in Calcutta?

The decennial census, the only source of a consistent time-series demographic data, provides us with figures on the two broad groupings into which minorities are generally classified: religious and linguistic. The limitation of this database, however, is that the census authorities have discontinued the publication of either religious or linguistic categories at the level of the municipal wards, since 1961. Yet, one cannot make meaningful spatial analysis unless such micro-level figures are made available. The existing ward-level data prior to 1961, though not fully comparable over time, due either to changes in the method or subject of enumeration, gives a broad indication of the transformations, if any, in the organization of minorities over space.

Very few sources exist, apart from demographic data mentioned above, that could provide some clue as to the concentration of communities over space in the city of Calcutta, historically.

Historical Background

Arabia entered the twentieth century still a relatively unknown, backward and inhospitable region. However the spread of the telegraph and railway enabled the Ottoman Empire to reassert its claim of sovereignty over parts of the peninsula. Construction of the Hijaz railway from Damascus to Medina (opened 1908) meant the Ottoman government was able to exercise ‘more direct control’ over the Sherif of Mecca and ‘restore its direct presence in Yemen’ (Hourani 1991: 280). In Central Arabia though, the pro-Ottoman Ibn Rashid were eclipsed by the rising Sultan Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, while British agreements entered into with rulers of the Gulf sheykhdoms at the end of the nineteenth century prevented Turkish expansion in that area.

Turkey's late decision to join the Axis powers on the eve of the First World War meant she would be fighting against her old ally Britain in the Middle East. Serious British reverses at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia were offset by the Sherif of Mecca's decision to open up a front against Turkey in the Hijaz. The Arab Revolt (1916–1918) led eventually not only to the removal of the Turks from the Hijaz but also to the Arab tribes' conquest of Syria. However Arab nationalist aspirations were dashed when after the war, the Allies acted on the Sykes–Picot agreement and divided Greater Syria. French armies ejected Faysal's supporters from Damascus in 1920, while Faysal's father, the embittered King Husayn, who expecting to rule over a much larger swathe of Arab territory had declared himself ‘King of the Arabs’, was confined to the Hijaz.

Although not as well-known a figure within English travel literature as he should be, to the researcher into Middle East societies of the inter-war years such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen, the writings of Ameen Rihani constitute a valued and authoritative source. Born in Freike a small village in Lebanon in 1876, Rihani migrated to New York as a boy of 12. As a young man the United States gave him the freedom to develop himself as an individual, and as a person of Middle Eastern ethnicity to research into and choose his own identity. Moving beyond the narrow sectarian Maronite Lebanese background into which he had been born, Rihani found, as he later claimed, a larger Arab allegiance through reading the travel writing of Doughty and Burton in the New York public libraries. Returning to Syria in the first decade of the twentieth century, Rihani tapped into an emerging Arab nationalist discourse, while back in the United States he carved out a niche for himself as an exotic writer and reporter on Arabian culture. It was, however, when this novelty value wore off on the American public and he found it difficult to place his work that he decided to travel in Arabia. From late 1922 through 1923 he journeyed to the main cities and through the great deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, meeting rival Arab kings, emirs, sultans, and imams, and trying to enlist them in the cause of peace and Pan-Arabism.

Martineau's life represents a triumph over early adversity. Overcoming poverty and ill health in childhood, and despite advancing deafness as an adult, she supported her siblings and established a career by writing for the Daily News and the Edinburgh Review. Born into a Unitarian family her radicalism – especially her antislavery principles and concern for the conditions of women – is incorporated into her travel writing, beginning with Society in America (1837), an account of a tour of both the southern and northern states of the USA. Martineau even went so far as to produce a manual for travellers, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838). Her write up of her journeys in Egypt and Palestine of 1846–47, Eastern Life, Present and Past, appeared in 1848. As an observer of the East her Victorian social reformist principles and espousal of the ‘higher criticism’ of religion appeared to leave little room for her to connect with local people and their customs. She saw the world of the Middle East ‘as frozen in biblical history’ (Harper DLB/166: 255). Pointing out that only five of the twenty-four chapters of Eastern Life are concerned with ‘modern’ Egyptians, Billie Melman dubs Martineau as belonging to the ‘mythopically ethnocentric’ type of traveller: ‘Time and again she discloses her total lack of interest in the Muslim Orient and in contemporary Egypt’ (Melman 1992: 63, 242).

Christine Lutringer is a researcher and teaching assistant at the Centre for Asian Studies of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (Switzerland).

Claudio Cecchi (PhD in City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University) is Professor of Rural Development at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.

Elisabetta Basile is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.

Fabio Sabatini (PhD in Economics, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’) is research and teaching assistant at the University of Siena (Italy).

Ishita Mukhopadhyay is a faculty in Department of Economics, University of Calcutta. She specializes in Economic methodology, Labour economics, Gender and development economics.

Luca Molinas (PhD in South Asian Studies, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’) is a research fellow at SPES – Development Studies Research Centre at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.

Marco Cavalcante (PhD in South Asian Studies, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’) is works at the Policy, Strategy and Planning Division of the United Nations World Food Programme.

Mario Prayer (PhD in South Asian Studies, University of Cagliari) is Associate Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.

Rabindranath Mukhopadhyay is a faculty in Department of Economics in University of Calcutta. His area of specialization is Economics of education and human rights.

Raj Sekhar Basu is a faculty in Department of Modern History in University of Calcutta.

With clergymen for father and maternal grandfather, and a navy tradition to boot, Doughty's family background seemed to predetermine him to a life of patriotic service and religious earnestness. But while these influences would leave their imprint on his life, other contingencies arose to conflict with them. He was an orphan by the age of six, developed a stammer, and his faith was confronted by doubts raised by his study of geology. The speech impediment barred him from a naval career and despite graduating from Cambridge with a natural science degree in 1865 this was not good enough for him to take his scientific work further. After literary study in England and travel in Europe, during which he laid the foundations for his later preoccupation with a literary style purged of modern adulteration, Doughty spent the period 1874–78 in the East. Having prepared himself by studying Arabic, he set off from Damascus in November 1876 with the intention of being the first European scholar to describe the carved monuments of Madain Salih. He accompanied the hajj as far as its vicinity, viewed and made notes on the site, but then instead of returning determined to continue his wanderings in Central Arabia. Attaching himself initially to the Fukara Bedouin, he went on to Ha'il, where he met Muhammad ibn Rashid, and thence to Khaybar, before turning back towards the Hijaz. Not far from Mecca he came perilously close to being murdered by a fanatic, but eventually arrived in Jeddah in August 1878.