This chapter aims to analyse Karnataka's political economy in the postliberalisation phase. It explores the changes in policies, particularly on the agricultural sector, and the way these have affected class formation and consolidation. It examines the relationship between proprietary classes and the state to understand how the state allocates resources, such as land, water, and credit, and infers how the political settlement operates within the state. These questions have been addressed through a thorough literature review and fieldwork conducted in the state between February and July 2012. Although Karnataka has four agricultural universities that publish vast literature, these were of little pertinence to the study. This was primarily due to the technical nature, micro-view, and quantitative approach of these publications. Nonetheless, the information has been included whenever appropriate. Karnataka is a diverse state, and patterns vary between the northern and southern districts; therefore, evidence from fieldwork is juxtaposed with existing literature to present a comprehensive and nuanced picture. The north is less irrigated, has less capitalist agriculture, and has fewer commercial crops in comparison to the south.

In line with the other field-based chapters, this chapter opens with a brief description of the state, and a discussion on the economy, particularly sector growth rates, main sources of investment, and alignment of lobbies. It presents the trajectory of certain agrarian proprietary classes and links it to dominant castes, as the literature is mostly written along the parameter of caste. To make sense of proprietary classes after 1991, the scene prior, during the 1970s and 1980s, has been briefly discussed. This is followed by a brief discussion on three key features of Karnataka – corruption, farmer suicide, and decentralisation. These are relevant for explaining the field findings. Subsequently, political settlement and agrarian class formation and consolidation are reflected upon. Accumulation through diversification by fractions of rich farmers are highlighted along with that of the political leaders and state officials who have transformed into petty bourgeoisie. Field findings suggested that regional variations within the state exist, as demonstrated. Comparative assessment of these findings with Chhattisgarh and Gujarat is attempted. Finally, it is inferred that the nature of the regional state is clientelist, playing a major role side by side the market.

One could start the story of an insurgent movement with a vignette of the frontline or a first encounter with some enigmatic rebel office. In fact, the deleted text that was once on this page did precisely that. While such an initial vantage point helpfully offers the reader a glimpse of the convoluted ground reality of an emerging state, it also risks depicting these territories as exotic and the author as an adventurous protagonist with privileged up-close knowledge of dangerous outposts. Indiana Jones turning to the camera to look his audience in the eyes one more time, before he enters a land of mystery and peril. To start on this footing would disguise that the depiction of these supposedly quaint and anomalous places derives in part from the peculiarities of international perceptions and from the compromised knowledge curve of people like me who seek to understand insurgencies. Let me therefore not start in Sampur or Omanthai or Jaffna but at the picturesque gardens on the northern outskirts of The Hague.

These parklands are home to the Clingendael Institute. As a junior researcher of the institute – perhaps best described as an academic outboard motor to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – I had been put on a team of consultants that had been commissioned by a group of aid donors to write a ‘Strategic Conflict Analysis’ about Sri Lanka. It was 2005, and these donors had enthusiastically jumped aboard the bandwagon of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which had started three years prior. However, the process appeared to be going off the rails, and donors were desperate to consider their options. Hence our assignment. Having completed several visits, interviews and consultations in previous months, I was sitting at my desk overlooking the ponds and greenery of the Clingendael estate to write up our report when the phone rang. In hindsight, my struggle with the interpretative problems around the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka that has become this book started with that phone call

This chapter establishes the theoretical underpinnings of this book and clarifies key concepts and ideas. More specifically, it reviews debates on the question of sovereignty and its murky status as the central referent of global political order, and it advances the perspective of performative politics to grapple with the contradictions and ambiguities that prevail in the context of sovereign contestation. The chapter then proceeds to apply this perspective to the Tamil nationalist movement in Sri Lanka. In doing so, it also provides the reader with essential contextual and historical background to the chapters that follow.

The notion of the sovereign state as the legitimate authority over people and territory is deeply inscribed in prevalent understandings of the world today – as the referent of law, authorised force, national citizenship, democratic rule and international order. It is embedded in a whole architecture of norms and claimed entitlements. However, this framework of legitimation is ultimately circular: sovereign states are sovereign because they are. This circularity becomes exposed when the fundamentals of a state are challenged (Pegg 1998, 2017). Such confrontations come in myriad forms – indigenous communities resisting settler states, such as in Australia (Schaap 2004), Canada and the United States (A. Simpson 2014); occupied territories with a government in exile, like Tibet (McConnell 2016) or Western Sahara (Alice Wilson 2016), or a constellation like the Syrian Interim Government (Gangwala 2015; Sosnowski, under review); governments with incomplete or faltering sovereign recognition, such as the Palestinian Authority (Feldman 2008; Kelly 2006), the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (Bryant and Hatay 2020; Navaro-Yashin 2003), Transnistria (Bobick 2017), Abkhazia (Preltz-Oltramonti 2017), Kosovo (Krasniqi 2019; Van der Borgh 2012), Taiwan (Corcuff 2012; Friedman 2021) or Hong Kong (Yep 2013); insurgent groups that demand reunification with a neighbouring state, as in Northern Ireland (Aretxaga 1997; Little 2014); or separatist movements as in Catalonia (Achniotis 2021; Bárcena 2020; Enguix Grau 2021), Kurdistan (Gunes 2012; Watts 2010), northeast India (Baruah 2007) and Myanmar (Brenner 2017) – and, as discussed in this book, in northeastern Sri Lanka.

By challenging the foundational premises of state sovereignty, these movements unsettle the self-referential cycle of analytical and normative claims that undergird the notion of legitimate state sovereignty.

At the Sherpur shrine of Laldas, I was introduced to Jogi and Mirasi bards during a religious performance. These bards were traditionally supported by the Meos under the jajmānī (patron–client) system, which gave the dominant Meos control over these socially and economically marginal Muslim communities. The landless and small landowner bards were hit most by the slow collapse of this patronage system. Additionally, the rise and popularity of the Tablighi Jamaat led most Meos to condemn their musical performances as perversion from Islam, which had once been greatly admired by them. Since the Tablighi doctrine frowns upon music, most Meos today see the bards’ performances as incompatible with Islam. Consequently, the Jogis and Mirasis felt pressured to abandon their performances, even though this was their livelihood, and they cherished their artistry.

As socially and economically marginalised communities, the Jogis and Mirasis had to negotiate the opinions and stances of their erstwhile patrons, whose hostility to their performance now threatens their everyday survival. The Jogi and Mirasi minstrels are employing the lyrics of their new poetic songs as a form of passive resistance in response to the Meo patrons’ interpretation of religious piety. More specifically, these minstrels are promoting a version of righteous behaviour that is universal and does not depend on organised religions.

Earlier, it was noted that when Muslim devotees of saints faced pressure, they resorted to tactics such as secrecy and concealment in order to deal with the Tablighi idea of religious discipline. The examples in Chapter 6 were not related to issues of livelihood but rather to the right to freely profess one's religious beliefs in saints. It was evident that the attempted imposition of the religious authority of the Tablighi Jamaat had severe consequences for many individuals beyond Sufi believers. This same theme is now being explored in relation to Muslim bards and their passive resistance against their former patrons, the Meos. The Meos frequently encouraged the bards to abandon their musical profession, join the Tablighi Jamaat and adopt its reformist principles. Considering the Indic theme of cultural interaction in the formation of all these communities, it is important to analyse the past and present forms of their interrelations and the nature of their religious subjectivity.

I wrote the initial drafts of this book over the period November 2018 to April 2020. Every time I had finished a draft chapter, Sri Lanka's appetite for power-sharing seemed to have crumbled further. The scene at the Galadari Hotel and the dim prospects of devolution in the concluding chapter are reflective of this. With Gotabaya Rajapaksa's election to president in late 2019 a new era appeared to start, and I decided to draw a line under my analysis. Academic books cannot continue to keep up with events, and it would be foolhardy to try.

Or so I told myself. Until an economic maelstrom of debt and shortages precipitated a popular uprising that ousted the Rajapaksa government, leaving Sri Lanka's entire political landscape in disarray. With the resulting whirlwind of ideas, hopes, puzzles and disillusions – as present in many readers’ minds as in mine, I presume – an epilogue is warranted to grapple with the afterthoughts to this book. As my manuscript wormed its way through the academic machinery of reviews and revisions, radio stations called me to comment on a country that appeared to have changed beyond recognition. Everything that had seemed unchangeable – the very genetic coding of Sri Lanka's political system and culture – got in flux. Through the aragalaya (struggle), as the uprising came to be known, the edifice of the state and its foundation of a sovereign people made a volte-face in the first half of 2022 – only to land roughly where they had always been, though maybe not quite, in the second half of that year. Many of the characteristics of this revolt connect to the central concerns of this book.

In late 2021 and early 2022, Sri Lanka spiralled into a foreign debt trap. The seeds for this had been sown in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, when the Rajapaksa government initiated a lending spree to bankroll a trajectory of postwar development that combined sensible infrastructural upgrades with misguided megalomanic prestige projects, as well as soaring corruption (Ruwanpura 2016). The impressive growth figures of the immediate postwar years and visions of becoming a new Malaysia or Singapore muted concerns over the debt burden from multilateral, Chinese and other loans.

In recreating women's literary spaces, the tazkiras not only mention the poets of their time but also refer, in interesting details, to the life stories and lyrical compositions of women poets from the historical and imagined pasts. In the process of commemorating them, these texts portray them as exemplars in terms of their literary skills and aesthetic qualities for the littérateurs of their generation. As commemorative texts, both BN and TN memorialize their literary precursors, but, in the process of doing so, they remind us of the historical presence of an inclusive literary space in which were ensconced memories of lyrics allegedly composed by women. The poets from the multiple pasts claimed an undying existence, an enduring and ever-inspiring presence, in the literary public sphere. It should be emphasized here that even as these tazkiras are exclusively concerned with women poets, the literary community they seek to reproduce and represent is not gender-specific; the community of women poets, writing and reciting poems in Persian and Urdu, did not constitute an exclusive social group, but were seen as a crucial component of the larger Persianate literary culture. In fact, the overwhelming interest of Ranj and Nadir in publishing their compendia was to draw the attention of the reader to the significance of women literati in shaping the norms of aesthetics and appropriate expression in art and literature.

Tazkiras as Commemorative Exercises: Memorializing Women and Their Words

In the last several decades, there have been quite a few insightful studies on the tradition of biographical commemoration in the Persianate world, and scholars have looked at the complex ways through which remembrance – repeated and constructed – served to structure a moral community, and circulating within networks of communication, reinforced ethical norms and appropriate practices. It is for this reason that some scholars have described the tazkiras as ‘memorative communications’ wherein memories were restructured by forms of communication and vice versa. The appropriate ethical norms and behaviour, and aesthetic tastes and expression constituted the Persianate adāb (singular: adab), which were reiterated and reformulated in and through the remembrance of the lives and work of exceptional persons.

During his regular Thursday visits to the Sufi tomb of the saint Shah Chokha, Ram Singh, a schoolteacher of the Baniya caste from the town of Punahana, never forgot to donate money to Tablighi Jamaat volunteers. He believed that visiting a Sufi dargāh and providing funds for Islamic education and mosque renovation were acts of service to God. Ram Singh lived close to the Laldas temple in Punahana (Figure 5.1). He or a member of his family visited the temple daily, either in the morning or evening. Ram Singh openly regarded Laldas as a Muslim, saying, hamāre bābā musalmān the par hamen unki pahcān se koi lenā denā nahī (our saint was Muslim, but we do not have any problem with his identity).

In 2015, the new temple of Laldas was built on the premises of an Arya Samaj school. The school building also served as a regional centre for the Arya Samaj. An open courtyard was located in front of the temple. Visitors arrived daily and waited in the courtyard while the Brahmin head priest, made the required arrangements for Laldas's morning and evening prayers. Most of the devotees were shopkeepers in the nearby central market in Punahana and came to the temple for quick prayers to the saint. This market was dominated by Hindus, particularly the Baniyas who owned shops for selling items of daily use. On the outer circle of this market, which separated Punahana from Nakanpur (a very old Meo village that is today part of the Punahana town municipality), there were shops for selling garments, mobiles, and vegetable and fruits, among other items. These shops were predominantly owned by Muslims.

The town was also home to considerable populations of Hindu ‘low castes’ such as Valmikis, Jatavs, Sainis (Malis), Nais and Punjabi immigrants from Pakistan. The everyday dynamics of social life in this town were significantly influenced by the presence of these communities. The demographic numbers of Hindus and Muslims were almost nearly the same, but the region had a Muslim majority. Hindus and Muslims interacted with one another, but there was a sense of insecurity among the Hindus, especially the Baniyas, due to the Muslim majority in the area. Hindu caste communities built strong networks with right-wing organisations such as the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the Arya Samaj in response to their minority status, anticipating potential conflicts in the future.

In this chapter, we look at, with a focus on two sisters, both courtesans – Zuhra and Mushtari – the meaning of and constraints on the participation of women entertainers in the literary sphere. We hear them ‘speak’ and from their speech-acts explore their construction of selfhood, articulation of subjectivities, and resistance to dominant social and literary norms. At the same time, we make an effort to unravel the anxieties that their literary talents evoked in the sociocultural spaces, and the reasons for their immense popularity in social memory. We also ask how their agency in the cultural domain was represented in the literary sphere, in particular the biographical compendia of the time.

The Courtesans as Models of Literary Emulation: The Pre-eminence of the Sisters in Cultural Spaces

Why these sisters? My reason for choosing them is because their literary acumen was widely accepted, and critics often measured the compositions of other women poets against the depth and range of their poems. The sisters had, it seems, set the standards that other poets were expected to aspire to and emulate. Nazakat, ‘an endearing public performer’ (mahbūba-i bāzārī) based in Bombay, wrote a couplet and a ghazal as an accompaniment to (and in the same meter as) one of the poems of Mushtari; comparing her effort with the literary skills of the two sisters, Nadir found her endeavour no more than ‘meaningless verbosity’ (tūl-i fazūl), and decided not to include the ghazal in his tazkira. Ranj was blunt, and saw her attempt to imitate Mushtari as ridiculous. He says:

In the case of another courtesan by the same name, Nazakat, Ranj expressed his appreciation of her poetry by comparing her with Mushtari (and Sardar). This courtesan, based in Jaipur, could, says Ranj, get the likes of Mushtari envious. Clearly then, in matters of literary expression and aesthetics, Mushtari, and her sister, Zuhra, were held out as models against whom other poets were assessed, and their compositions evaluated.

Reading the biographical compendia of women poets written in the nineteenth century, we cannot but appreciate the impressive presence of women in the literary field. However, this impression fades away when we look at the more popular literary biographies, anthologies, critical literature, and instruction manuals; in the dominant literary strands, indeed women poets are scarce, if not totally absent. The nineteenth century was the period in which the figure of a woman poet evoked moral anxieties, resulting from the reformist zeal to keep women away from eros and love, and other emotions associated with Persianate poetry. Elite women should, for sure, be educated but only in the subjects that helped them efficiently manage their domestic spaces; there were, as we see in several reformist texts, detailed discussions on what women should and should not read, and among the books that they were instructed to shun were romantic tales and works of poetry. Commendably, the women's tazkiras contest these assumptions, and make available to the interested readers an archive of women's voices, and draw our attention to the ever-present but barely recognized contribution of women poets to the shaping of the literary culture in early modern Hindustan.

It is not without basis to argue that women's lyrical compositions represented a marginalized and incongruent literary culture, but doing so would be banal and simplistic and, above all, quite ahistorical. Women poets were present in poetic assemblies (mushā‘ira) organized by aristocrats and rich patrons; and in the salons of the courtesans, young men learnt the niceties of language, and men of letters experimented with new forms of thought and expression. In our study of women littérateurs here, we have seen that their lyrics, despite their creative depths and fresh signifying practices, were firmly obedient to the literary adāb, or the norms of aesthetics and expression. Their interventions in the literary field served to enrich and deepen the field, even as they continually challenged and contested its dominant assumptions. It is for this reason that I described their compositions, in one of the earlier chapters, as situated within the realm of what Foucault terms as ‘subjugated knowledges’, reflecting a cultural practice that was ‘masked’ by the power-language ensemble of relations but still conversed with the dominant literary and aesthetic norms and values in an aporetic relationship where women's speech both reinforced and challenged them.

India has been rapidly changing since globalisation, albeit not uniformly. In 2022, India has been found to be the most unequal country in the world (Chancel et al., 2022). This makes it critical to understand where the inequality came from: is it new or structural or something else? Several characterisations have been attributed to India's transformation since globalisation; some talk about rapid urbanization, fast growth with incoming global investments, the IT boom, and an expanding middle class, while another set of scholars highlight aspects such as the agrarian crises, farmers’ suicides, food insecurity, and corruption. The point, however, is to comprehend how each version of this story has a saga of unequal distribution within it, whether in cities or villages. India being the most unequal country in a Marxian term means certain classes are accumulating and others are not even able to reproduce themselves. This makes it even more crucial to look at ‘capital’, and how it is accumulating, which spreads across the urban and rural. This book offers an in-depth analysis of diversification and various sources of accumulation accessed by the agrarian proprietary class, and a discussion on the other two proprietary classes, the petty bourgeoisie and the capitalist. By disaggregating the sources along fractions of the agrarian proprietary class, it shows how the class adopted new means within agriculture and outside agriculture, to further accumulation during the 2004–2014 policy regime. The policies under scrutiny are agricultural and those related to rural population in general, such as Panchayati Raj institutions (PRIs), land acquisition and affirmative action in employment. The latter may serve caste groups but in addition contribute to consolidating class structure. What these policies demonstrate is the key role played by the state in the globalisation era, thereby maintaining a stable political settlement with the three proprietary classes. The state and the nature of the state are important questions raised in this book, thus ‘bringing the state back in’, as Skocpol (2010) once argued. This book's third contribution is that it brings an understanding of classes that does not begin from being informed by abstract categories but rather begins with the empirical observations that guide the formulation of the conceptual classes and fractions. Skocpol finds neo-Marxism's conceptualisation of state very abstract, therefore hard to be applied, and hence starting from the empirical to the abstract following a methodology of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) is an attempt to address that limitation.

Big questions sometimes present themselves in small form. The grand themes of Sri Lanka's contemporary history – its quagmire of nationalist politics, the hampered solution of provincial devolution and the incessant friction between constitutional, administrative and political realities – became manifest in the minutiae of a marginal bureaucratic problem when I was in Colombo in October 2019. For just a moment, all the central concerns of this book were folded into a discussion between a civil servant and a constitutional lawyer about a topic that would never have occurred to me as one of my research interests: the appointment of schoolteachers.

I was attending a seminar titled ‘Thirty Years of Devolution’ at the Galadari Hotel in the historical heart of the capital. Constitutional experts were launching a book (Amarasinghe et al. 2019) to an audience of civil servants: chief secretaries and legal officers from various provinces. The debate centred on the unresolved problems of the provincial council system three decades after its creation. Any talk of fixing devolution felt like a rear-guard battle, though. We all knew that the world outside our elegant conference room had moved on. Whatever had been left of the consultative process on constitutional reform, which had started with much excitement under the Sirisena–Wickremesinghe government in 2015, had been thrown off the rails by the constitutional crisis of 2018 (Welikala 2020). The governing coalition had become defunct. The country was now holding its breath for the presidential elections, which would be in two weeks. Until the race between Sajith Premadasa (United National Party, or UNP) and Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, or SLPP1) was adjudicated, all other political matters were on hold. Quite literally so at the provincial level: by now, all councils had been dissolved. Their term had expired, but new elections had been postponed time and again due to a stalemate over electoral system reform. In effect, we had entered a new ‘interim period’ where the provinces were ruled by presidential appointees (the governors) rather than elected politicians (the provincial council and the board of ministers), not just in the north and east this time but in all nine provinces.