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Class, Ethnic Group, and Party in Indian Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Paul R. Brass
Paul R. Brass
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

Several recent books on India have focused on issues of nationalism and ethnic conflict, policy and ideological differences, parties and elections, and the stability of Indian democracy. The most useful contributions to the understanding of Indian politics and to social science theory have come from works that use analytical categories that have proven themselves cross-culturally (namely, those of class, status group, and power), and that lay bare through case studies the sources of the conflicts and cleavages in Indian society that both threaten and sustain democracy. Less useful are works that impose on Indian political behavior explanatory frameworks, political ideals, and methodologies derived from Western political history and culture-bound social science, such as political divisions between Left and non-Left, the two-party system, citizenship, and survey research.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , April 1981 , pp. 449 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1981

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References

1 Irschick, Eugene F., Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)Google Scholar, and Hardgrave, Robert L. Jr, The Dravidian Movement (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1965).Google Scholar

2 The term “instrumentalist” is used here to refer to the perspective among scholars of ethnicity that views ethnic groups less as “primordial groups” emerging into consciousness than as cultural categories transformed into self-conscious communities by leaders, elite groups, or the state, and seeking to provide social, economic and political advantages for the group in question.

3 This critique of Geertz's dichotomy was first made effectively by Melson, Robert and Wolpe, Howard, “Modernization and the Politics of Communalism: A Theoretical Perspective,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 64 (December 1970), 1112–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The issue has since been taken up by many other writers on contemporary ethnic and nationalist movements in various parts of the world.

4 This argument is one that also has been made in reference to India, particularly by Gupta, Jyotirinda Das, Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), esp. 259 ff.Google Scholar, and Brass, Paul R., Language, Religion, and Politics in North India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), esp. 431 ff.Google Scholar

5 See Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).Google Scholar Hechter has since recognized some, but not all, of the deficiencies of his original formulation. See especially Hechter, Michael and Levi, Margaret, “The Comparative Analysis of Ethno-regional Movements,” in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 11 (July 1979), 262 ff.Google Scholar

6 See Nayar, Baldev Raj, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Das Gupta (fn. 4); and Brass (fn. 4).

7 Bombay: Vora & Co., 1966.

8 Charan Singh first offered his critique of Nehru's strategy of economic development in an undeservedly neglected book, Joint Farming X-Rayed: The Problem and Its Solution (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1959).Google Scholar A revised and expanded version is available under the title The Poverty of India and Its Solution, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1964).

9 There is some overlap between the points made here and in my review of Eldersveld, and Ahmed, in the Journal of Asian Studies, XXXIX (May 1980), 648–50.Google Scholar

10 Weiner, Myron, Party Politics in India: The Development of a Multi-Party System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Party Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

11 See Brass, Paul R., “Party Systems and Government Stability in the Indian States,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 71 (December 1977), 1404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 See Weiner, (fn. 10, 1969), 18 ff.Google Scholar, for an explanation of his own reasons for not selecting “statistically typical” units.

13 Frankel, has also made use of the case study method in India's Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, and of aggregate data analysis in “Problems of Correlating Electoral and Economic Variables: An Analysis of Voting Behavior and Agrarian Modernization in Uttar Pradesh,” in Weiner, Myron and Field, John O., eds., Studies in Electoral Politics in the Indian States, IIIGoogle Scholar: The Impact of Modernization (Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1977), 149–93.