Ever since Pranab Bardhan characterised the Indian state as ‘patronage-dispensing’ in his S. Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecture at Oxford in the early 1980s, the concept has become a talking point. However, there has been little enthusiasm to explore further about its nature and content. This book nominated for the Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, is perhaps the most comprehensive investigation of the concept in the South Asian context. It lends enormous comparative insight to the intricate process of patronage and its implication. A majority of its contributors draw from the empirical work they have conducted in different parts of India and elsewhere. Out of its three sections, one reflects on patronage as democracy; another looks at patronage as politics and the concluding section examines the predicaments associated with this line of analysis.
The editor’s introduction presents a wealth of analytical resources by a very sophisticated literature survey. She educates us about how the dull nature of scholarship around the employment of this concept for decades is the key reason for its failure to compete with other core concepts such as sovereignty, governance and democracy. However, scholars like Ennest Gellner, Samuel Eisenstadt, and James Scott gave a solid push in their research. Furthermore, she shares her unease and rightly so, about looking at patronage purely as “ something to do with asymmetry of status, power, that it involved reciprocity and that it relied on particular, intimate, face to face relations”.
There is more to patronage than this formulation that dominated the social science understanding during the 1960s and later. It also provokes readers to reflect on questions such as whether it is fair to look at patronage as a bad thing, how regressive it could be for democracy; and furthermore, whether the patron-client relationship could be of mutual esteem and even intimate, as the work of Julian Pitt-Rivers on Southern Spain suggests. We also learn how political science and anthropology have approached the subject differently and with varied consequences. In this volume, she not only seeks to revive interest in the subject, but creates a solid platform to bring together scholarly insights of various disciplines by exploring the multi-dimensionality associated with the concept of patronage under different socio-political conditions.
She then draws our attention to the South Asianist scholarship on the concept; and how it has lost its centrality in the mainstream debate over polity, status, power, and personhood, thus denying inter-disciplinary originality to subsequent writings. The fact is South Asian scholarship — not just on this concept but also on other concepts — such as democracy, governance, human rights — is so much under the influence of Western patronage both of its institutions and state; it is yet to find feet of its own. The so-called indigenous scholarship is seemingly a more prominent victim of it than any of its rival forms of knowledge though its doyens will fiercely resist such observations, and understandably would like to stay locked up in the comfort zone, finding solace in self-denial mode. All in all, the introduction is very rich, deeply intense, representing intellectual clarity of a very high order both, from the point of view of its attempt to synthesise diverse disciplinary traditions, and also to show the fault lines of scholarship on the subject.
The book has 16 chapters. The book’s 16 chapters include case studies on Tibet, Bangladesh, Pakistani Punjab, Britain, and the Gulf in addition to the studies of India, especially of cities like Mumbai and Chennai. Some of the chapters are deeply theoretical.
Network of patronageDavid Gilmartin seeks to explain various networks of patronage, particularly with regard to elections and how electoral laws impact these processes. In the context of people’s sovereignty, he offers an interesting analysis of Nehru’s role in the context of his family member Manmohini Sahgal and Sucheta Kripalani, when they were locked in competing for a party ticket in New Delhi constituency. Lisa Bjorkman’s chapter on the politics in Mumbai is a very insightful one. Her ethnographic study shows how vote bank politics is inclined to assist non-elite voters in making sharply political claims, and in that sense it challenges liberals and their critics’ formulations on patronage. In some ways, she tries to show that populism does not exist entirely on an empty domain; and even for populism to succeed, it requires credibility even though the latter may not meet the standard of a progressive understanding of politics.
In another crucial chapter, Steve Wilkinson addresses the issue of patronage politics in post-Independent India. Given the poor record of laws and institutions in addressing the issue of corruption and patronage, he is sceptical, and rightly so about the efficacy of institutions such as Lok Pal for which Anna Hazare led such an impressive movement that brought Parliament to its knees. The overall analysis of his essay mainly revolves around the question that asks for the reasons of the persistence of patronage and the possible sources of its change in Indian politics. In the end, Wilkinson throws his weight at the wisdom of voters, who could change the system only if they send an unmistakable signal through their voting behaviour in which corruption and patronage undermine the candidates as well as the party’s electoral prospects.
The chapter by Nicholas Martiy on the Pakistani Punjab and Arild Engelson Ruud’s contribution on Bangladesh in some ways show how South Asian politics is bound by the commonality of patronage. Ward Berenschot’s chapter is another useful contribution in this volume, though he is very optimistic about the future of patronage politics. According to him, as long as state bureaucracies remain susceptible to political interference, the political fixers would remain an indispensable player for poorer citizens as the most effective way to access the state. No doubt, the book has the potential to open up new frontiers of research on patronage politics, and will be seen as a work of enduring importance for scholars of most major disciplines on South Asia.
