Introduction

At the beginning of the new millennium democratic states are facing some pressing problems. Among these are a more just representation of the different groups in society, be it ethnic minorities or women, and the decentralisation of the political decision-making process, which becomes increasingly important in a globalising world. The exclusion of women from positions of political power is especially widely lamented, and has emerged as a contentious political issue. Interestingly enough, India, otherwise classified as a ‘developing’ or ‘backward’ nation, is – at least from a constitutional point of view – at the forefront as concerns inclusion of marginalised groups in the political process and the devolution of political power.

The passing of the 73rd Amendment of the Constitution in December 1992 is considered by many as a milestone in the history of women's political participation in India. Besides providing the basis for the mandatory introduction of a system of rural local self-government in all Indian states, it laid down a reservation of seats and offices for women of not less than 33 per cent. Additionally, there is provision for a proportional representation of women in the existing Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) quotas. This system of local self-government, called Panchayati Raj (‘rule of the five’), was introduced in the 1950s, but lay dormant in most of the states. Since the ratification of the Act by the state Legislatures on 24 April 1994, all Indian states except Bihar have held elections, and in March 1997 there were 716,234 women representatives in office.

If the theses advanced in the preceding chapters are correct, then the evidence should be found in Dostoevsky's last novel. We should look there not only for what Epstein calls minimal religion, but also for signs that such phenomena tend to proliferate in a situation where the extremes of religious faith and atheistic conviction appear to have reached stalemate. We should also look for evidence that these extremes have a common origin in the nothingness where cosmic despair or an experience of a transcendent reality may equally be found.

When Epstein talks of minimal religion, of course, he has the Russian context specifically in mind, and he seems to use the expression to denote any manifestation of religion that falls short of a complete expression of Russian Orthodoxy. It could be argued that all manifestations of religion in The Brothers Karamazov, including Zosima's faith, and the conception of God against which Ivan rebels, fall into that category. The concept is an extremely broad one and, as we shall see, it encompasses many varied expressions of religious sensibility. Moreover, the expressions ‘minimal religion’ and ‘minimal religious experience’ are often used outside the Russian context simply to mean an experience of a transcendent reality unencumbered by all but the most rudimentary of interpretative traditions. In the pages that follow, we may have to distinguish Epstein's sense from the more usual sense.

A Perilous Threshold

In his contribution to Pattison and Thompson's recent book, Henry Russell cautions the reader:

In drawing attention to this vital distinction Russell, perhaps unintentionally, highlights the ease with which one may be confused with and slip into the other, not only conceptually but also, depending on the mood of the experiencing subject, experientially. In other words, the silence at the core of apophatic religion may be interpreted or experienced either as a fullness or as an absence, as glorious plenitude or as desolate abyss, as a Godcentred locus of meaning or as total chaos and meaninglessness. As we have seen, Dostoevsky experienced this himself and understood the slippage very well. Similar experiences may be observed in the experience of his individual characters, and also among them. As Thompson points out,164 characters as unlike each other as Myshkin and Ippolit quote the same phrase from the Book of Revelation, ‘there will be time no more’ (Rev 10: 6), the one in his epileptic ecstasy, the other in suicidal despair. This dual experience is not a modern discovery.

In 1990, CUP published my book Dostoevsky after Bakhtin. When the reviews began to appear, I was not surprised to find that what most troubled some otherwise sympathetic Western readers was that I had tried in my final chapter to relate Dostoevsky's religious insights to a narrative structure that in many ways anticipated a post-modernist sensibility. In particular, it was my reintroduction of the notion of an originary truth (‘The Whisper of God’) into critical discourse that gave offence. Clearly, I was thought to have failed to grasp something essential (if that is not a contradiction in terms) about the post-modernist enterprise. The fault may well have been mine, but I suspect that some readers still secretly prefer a Dostoevsky whose religious insights, as in Soviet days though for quite different reasons, have been suppressed, or translated into the sort of discourse that is politically acceptable to them.

I am afraid that I remained incorrigible, and in my introduction to the Russian edition (1998), I went further, stating that if I were to rewrite the book now I should expand rather than delete that section. I was also aware by that time that some of my Russian readers, themselves adherents of a resurgent Orthodoxy that regards Dostoevsky as a great Christian prophet with a unique word for the twenty-first century, might take the opposite view, and consider me culpably neglectful of the religious dimension of his work.

The previous two essays should have made a number of things clear. The first is that religious experiences and images of very diverse kinds play a very important role in Dostoevsky's life and work. The second is that, to do full justice to Dostoevsky's vision, we must extend the meaning of ‘religious experience’ to cover the whole spectrum from the fullness of belief to the desolation of unbelief, which itself has a mystical quality, and we must accept that these two extremes, though at first sight they may seem to be located at opposite poles of a continuum, often exist on each other's doorstep. This at least was Dostoevsky's own experience and, in different degrees, it is frequently replicated in the experience of his fictional characters. A third conclusion is that whatever certainty Dostoevsky might have longed for, and at times thought he had found, in the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church, to read his text exclusively through the lens of the Orthodox faith creates as many problems for the reader as it solves. Moreover, Dostoevsky actually banishes many central features of the Orthodox tradition to the very margins of his text. It is as if, at the level of ideal author, his text is telling us that a situation has arisen out of the conflict between belief and unbelief in the modern age in which the richness of that Tradition has to be put aside in order that personal faith may be allowed to blossom again.

If Christianity often went by default in educated Russian families in Dostoevsky's day (as it did, for example, in the Herzen, Tolstoi and Turgenev families), this was certainly not the case with the Dostoevskys. In 1873, now aged 52, Dostoevsky recalled that he had been brought up in a pious Russian family and had been familiar with the Gospels from an early age (XXI, 134). Both factors — the early memories and the pious family environment — were vitally important to his development. As a child, he would sometimes be called on to recite prayers in the presence of guests. His brother Andrei remembered that they would attend mass every Sunday, preceded by vespers the previous night, in the Church attached to the Moscow hospital where their father worked as a doctor. They would do the same thing on Saints' days as well. Their parents were evidently not just conventional observers of religious practice. Both, especially their mother, said Andrei, were deeply religious: every significant event in the life of the family would be marked by the appropriate religious observance. Dostoevsky himself received religious instruction from the deacon at the hospital. Before he even learned to read, his imagination had been fired by events from the ancient lives of saints (XXV, 215), who provided models of asceticism, compassion, suffering, humility and self-sacrifice, based on the example of Christ.

Until the 1990s, dissemination of news through print and the commercial cinema represented the most significant media presences in the Indian context. The factors that shaped the historical and political context of discussion in the public domain include: the limited nature of participation and access to print media for large segments of the population; the predominance of upper-caste agents, especially in the print media; the internal divisions, on the one hand, between English and regional language audiences, and between the regional language reading publics on the other. Within this larger scenario, the links between big business houses and Indian news media, especially the press, in the post-Independence period, have been fairly well documented. As Robin Jeffrey's work has well shown, the expansion in the market for political news and the consumer base from the 1980s onwards has resulted in a phenomenal rise in the circulation of regional-language newspapers. Significant as these trends have been, it is debatable if they have brought about any fundamental shifts in reversing the relations of power underlying the structure of the public sphere, especially those pertaining to the nature of ownership, participation and access.

Parallel to these connections, but less analysed in terms of their implications for the nature of the Indian public sphere, have been the relations between the entertainment media and speculative capital and the informal sectors of the money markets. Students of popular Indian cinema have long known that, with its nationwide markets and growing international audiences, the commercial film industry is an attractive area for the investment of unaccounted profits.

Introduction

In the past 15 years, several political scientists have tried to understand and explore ‘liberalisation’ reforms in India: first, the efforts in the 1980s and why they failed, and later, the apparent success of the reforms in the 1990s. This chapter reviews the literature that focuses on the latter – and still ongoing – reform process. It does not discuss the impact of economic reform as such, instead concentrating on political explanations for the reforms: the success or failure of both stages of reforms and the relative absence of opposition to them. The terms ‘reform’ or ‘reforms’ are used here rather loosely. I do not refer to specific monetary or financial measures, but rather to the whole process of change from a more state-regulated economy to a more market-oriented economy.

The real beginning of the economic reform process in India is widely viewed as having been in 1991. There had been earlier episodes of economic liberalisation: first, during the post-Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi (1980–4) and later during Rajiv Gandhi's regime (1984–9), but the pursuit of liberalisation policies during the 1990s was much more significant. In 1991, a new government, headed by PV Narasimha Rao and with Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister, announced its first reform measures almost immediately after taking office in June 1991, and continued to introduce new reform measures in various key economic sectors during its term. The first measures aimed at stabilisation and included a substantial currency devaluation and deflationary measures.

Introduction

In the years after Indian independence, the concept of Panchayati Raj seemed to have disappeared permanently into the mists of India's romantic past. In the late twentieth century, however, the notion has returned once more to the political agenda, for a variety of reasons: strategic, practical, economic and ideological. This essay briefly traces the origins of the concept of Panchayati, offers some historical examples of the panchayat in use, and attempts an explanation as to why it should once again have assumed importance in the minds of politicians, NGOs and administrators.

To begin with, we need to ask about the etymology of ‘panchayat’. On doing so, one discovers that despite its apparent place in Indian tradition, the meanings of the term have their origin in orientalist thinking. Using inscriptions and other sources, historians have identified patterns of association and resistance among peasant communities in both north and south India. The terms used to describe such communities include the bhaiband or ‘brotherhoods’ in the villages of the Bombay Deccan, and the nurwa and patidar in Gujarat. Further back in time, the gana, sabha, samiti and parisad in the north, and the nadu, brahmadeya and periyanadu in southern India, refer to equivalent political or social communities, while anthropologists have observed the functioning of caste panchayats in the present day.

Some readers will regard the statement that Dostoevsky was a Christian novelist, as a simple statement of an obvious truth, while others may regard it as a denial of all that is modern and of enduring importance in his work. It is easy to see why. However, both camps will agree on one thing. Dostoevsky and his novels take the claims of religion seriously on its own terms. Religion does not occupy the peripheral place that it does in most notable English novels of the period: it is not just depicted from the outside as a social phenomenon nor, with some minor exceptions, is it the subject of caricature. In both Dostoevsky's life and work, Christianity was engaged in pitched battle with the most desolate atheism, and neither is of that untroubled, optimistic variety often held to be characteristic of the Victorian age. When, awaiting his own execution on the Semenovskii Square in 1849, he had murmured the words ‘Nous serons avec le Christ’, his companion, the atheist Speshnev, had rejoined dryly, ‘un peu de poussière.’58 Whatever thoughts on life and death had passed through Dostoevsky's mind before this moment, the burden of Speshnev's words, in one form or another, refused thereafter to go away. In a letter to A N Maikov of 25 March/6 April 1870 about his plan for The Life of a Great Sinner he wrote, ‘The main question, which runs through all the parts, is the one that has tormented me consciously and unconsciously all my life, the existence of God’ (XXIX, I, 117).

On 26 January 2000, India marked the fiftieth anniversary of its Constitution. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition of 22 political parties that formed the Union (federal) government in September 1999, chose to mark the milestone in an unusual way. On February 22nd, it established a National Commission of recognised experts of various political persuasions whose explicit purpose was to review the workings of the Constitution. The body was set up to consider ways in which the Constitution might be reformed in order to serve the interests of the country in light of its present imperatives. One particular issue was vigorously debated in public discourse: the instability of the Centre. The reason for this was quite simple. Since 1989, India had conducted five general elections, none of which produced a singleparty majority Union government. None of the eight multiparty coalition governments which emerged – with the exception of the minority Congress administration under Narasimha Rao (1991–6) which engaged in horsetrading and vote-buying to gain a parliamentary majority in 1993 – survived for the mandated five-year term in office. Simply put, they either broke into rival factions during their tenure in power or succumbed to political blackmail exerted by parties providing external parliamentary support. Given this, the issue of governmental instability and its presumed negative effect upon the formulation, execution and implementation of public policy (which is contested by certain studies of economic liberalisation), assumed great importance in the minds of many observers and citizens.

This essay examines the dynamics of development and growth in post-Independence Bombay. It examines the manner and extent to which the Indian planning enterprise has been implicated in the wider domain of societal ‘structures’ within which the state apparatus operates, and outlines the analytical grid within which Indian development planning ought to be located. It situates the dynamics at work within an active geographical arena, pertinent to a particular set of people in a particular place – in this case, the country's largest urban enclave.

Urban Development Planning : The Indian Context

Planning, here, is contextualised as the Indian state's attempt to lay the groundwork for capitalist growth and enhancement. The Bombay Plan of 1944, promulgated by eight prominent captains of industry, unequivocally viewed the strategic control of the key sectors of the economy by the public sector as an essential means to the primary accumulation of capital. Cooperating with the state in this project has been the ‘modern’ sector, comprising the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, the landholding classes, and the whole panoply of professional, service and small-scale sectors within the domain of industrial production and the reach of its markets.

Functionalist readings of the Indian state regard it, variously, as a neutral entity providing a socialist, ‘developmentalist’ impetus in its role as central allocator, or (in Miliband's sense of the term) as a willing ‘instrument’ of class rule. The Rudolphs' Weberian notion posits the view of a technocratic ‘self-determining’ state, as does the neoliberal ‘dogmatic dirigisme’ model.