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India's Religions and the Economy Section 3
- Religious plurality and small-scale accumulation in south India (the case of Arni)
- Conclusions: Religious Plurality and the Economy
(1) Why religion has not dissolved as a force in the economy
(2) How far is the role played by India's plurality of religions in the contemporary economy conducive to efficiency?
(3) How far do the conditions of production in India accentuate or even require religion and/or the plurality of religions?
- Bibliography
- Tables (on separate page)
Religious plurality and small-scale accumulation in south India
"The tendency of capitalism has been to do away with different manners, customs, pretty local and national contrasts and to set up in their stead the dead level of the cosmopolitan town." (Sombart, 1951, p. 274)
The final case study is of Arni, a place like Siliguri but half its size, an administrative centre and police station, with a complement of developmental state activity and infrastructure, retailing, agro-industrial production and trade, transport, the workshop production of silk cloth, the crafting of gold, and the finance for all this and the rural economy. Unlike the other cases we have cited, in Arni we can see the religious minorities at work together in "the dead level of the cosmopolitan town". Together with the Scheduled Castes they constitute 35 per cent of the population; but without them, a mere 10%, of which Muslims make up more than half. While Arni's Muslims comprise a great range of ranks and status, Arni's Hindu majority are for the most part relatively low caste, but the richest business families include higher caste immigrants from other regions of India. Family businesses make up 85% of commercial and productive enterprises, under half of which have a wage labour force. The way in which the religions are niched is summarised in Table 5. Arni's is a distinctive form of pluralist development, one that may be as widespread in India as the "Punjab" model - in which agriculture, trade and industry are mapped onto religions. Though minorities are not scattered randomly through Arni's economy, each minority has a wide range of both niches and incomes. While some commodities are the preserve of distinct minorities, only sanitary work (Scheduled castes), rubbish dump scavenging (a Scheduled tribe) and recycling (Muslims) are exclusively so. Religious plurality does not lead to the suppression of competition, either between firms or in the labour market. (132) The gender division of labour in family business cannot be disentangled from the gendered practices of religious observance. Both affect business reputations. Women in the local Hindu business elite are as secluded as their Muslim counterparts. There is no evidence that in Arni the relation between private and public spheres differs according to religions. This goes for the kinds of business family there are and the type of businesses they undertake; and this way private religious merit is linked to public economic reputation.
But differences in authority derived from religion do affect the economy. They work through the tainting of new occupations which can be "genealogically" related (through the deepening of commodification) to ones which were of ritual significance in the agrarian economy. Lorry ownership, for example, requires relatively large capital, by the standards of this small town. But the status of transport, derived from bullock carting, is regarded as relatively low, so transport is mainly undertaken by Vanniar Gounders, an upwardly mobile agricultural caste. Religious authority works through the sacred qualities of things. For Hindus, rice is a purer thing than garlic and it also has no protective covering by the time it is retailed, so, although Scheduled caste labourers may turn paddy on the drying yard with their feet, no Scheduled Caste traders handle milled rice in the main market places. Scheduled Castes do retail garlic. Unlike Hinduism, Islam declares no divine sanction against the recycling of waste, so, from the recycling of scrap metal from the local rice mills Muslims have developed an increasingly complex - and now an international - trade network for recycling plastic, card and paper, glass and a range of metals, activities they freely admit are tainted for Hindus by their association with the low Hindu caste status of scavengers and waste pickers. "That's no concern to us," some say, "there is good money to be made". Religious groups sometimes also form moral units within which distribution occurs; the Jains for instance react with solidarity and money if their co-religionists meet with accidents, sickness, alcoholism, depression and death.
In Arni, there is nothing that distinguishes those members of religious minorities who are most successful at accumulation from successful local capitalists in general. Muslims and Jains are prominent as political representatives in business associations, in philanthropical organisations (in education, housing, town development, commodity associations, the running of mosques or temples and their properties) - but Hindu businessmen express their power in exactly the same ways. Differences in the way economic exchanges take place within and across religious boundaries are not marked enough for businessmen ever to have talked about them to me when I was working there. In fact, in the mid 1990s, elite businessmen - both Hindu and Muslim - denied that religion made a difference to transactions. The religious groups intermix at the public rituals of marriage. There seem to be no difference due to religion in the labour process. Where the workforce is too large to be organised by kinship, the degree of "cosmopolitanism" of their workforces cannot be explained in terms of the employer's religion.
Nevertheless, religious plurality does regulate the economy of Arni in subtle ways. Although to a lesser degree than in other parts of India, the upper caste Hindus and Jains own most of the physical fabric of the town and residential areas are structured by religion. This is not because religious patterns coincide with underlying segregating forces of wealth, (poverty) and education. Scheduled Castes and Christians do not differ materially from Jains in their access to college education; and, except for Jains and Protestants, a majority of every religious group had annual household incomes under Rs 24,000 in 1997. (133) So people of all religions are quite poor, and each religion has a wide income distribution with only a tiny minority of materially secure families. Nevertheless they do occupy urban space differently. Some Muslim businesses - cloth, sweets and hardware - are scattered through the commercial heart of town, but others, more exclusively Muslim - notably slaughter houses and recycling - are segregated together, well within town but on the edge of the central commercial hub. Scheduled Caste people live in wards quite separate from people of other castes. Their traders face open hostility to their occupation of physical roadside space for the smallest kind of trade in fruit and vegetables. Yet they are allowed into the "secular" territory of the state-run Municipal Market where they mingle with both low caste and Muslim traders of fish and meat and with the few higher caste women abandoned by their husbands, who have been forced into trade. Through its secular control over space and place, the local state can be used to gain entry to economic markets which are structured to exclude Scheduled Caste people. (134)
Religious groups do sometimes form distinct units for finance. Whereas Muslim businessmen borrow from private commercial banks, Jains have banks for the exclusive use of Jains. They also have privileged access to state-regulated banks. Scheduled Castes are rarely given any kind of access to such banks, and compensate by developing their own small but exclusive chit-funds - rotating credit associations.
As we saw generally in the introduction to this essay, so in Arni, religious plurality finds much of its expression in the economy through the interventions and neglects of the state. While the state gives relatively secure employment to uneducated Scheduled Caste sanitary workers, and to some educated Scheduled caste teachers and members of the police and armed forces, (135) Catholics, Protestants and Muslims have to face open competition. If they benefit at all from state concessions (as one small Catholic trader did, for example, with help for start-up capital), it is the result of patronage rather than formal state policy. While political parties are increasingly aligned by caste, and their funding is increasingly based on caste and religion, the failure of local political patrons to capture state resources needed to create the infrastructure appropriate to a town of Arni's size has created a political vacuum. It is significant that this has been filled by local Muslim magnates. Muslim subsciptions and loans have backed the creation of a Teachers' Training College, managed by an extended kin group, registered as aTrust. It suffered from a lack of legitimation, not on the part of local Hindu society (from which it recruits eager students from up to 40 km away) but on the part of the state. This is because the official rules of accreditation, based on standards indifferent to religion, had not been fully complied with - at least at the turn of the millennium.
Last but not least in this list of forms of social regulation based on religion, the "big religion" is important for the commodity markets in which Arni's minorities must accumulate their capital. We have argued elsewhere that it provides the overarching ideology consistent with corporatist forms of economic regulation, the more so the smaller the relative size of the minorities. (136) "We live on and off the Hindus and must continue to be friends" and "There is no communalism here. We in Arni are secularist" said Muslim traders in Arni, in 1994. "Being secularist" effectively means taking the regulative institutional practices of Hinduism.
Conclusions: Religious Plurality and the Economy
The plurality of religions in India is clearly the result of waves of conquest, of trade, of the evolution of religions in reaction to the "wild jungle growth" (137) of Hinduism, and finally of the particular concept of secularism adopted by the Indian state. While religious ideas deal with experiences that far transcend economic life, there is nonetheless a relationship between the plurality of religions and the economy, contrary to what the economic literature might lead one to suppose. The economy would not take the form it does were it not for the social organisation of religions, even though the effects are very mixed and the influence of religion varies greatly according to context.
Yet there has been virtually no research into the implications for economic activity of the fact that a plurality of religions exists. How far the way India's different religions promote or block accumulation has not been systematically studied. Nor has the way a plurality of religious authorities is used to discipline, divide and distract labour; nor whether, and if so how, religions supply justifications for economic processes which strip workers of property, or prevent them from acquiring it. Nor is enough known about the relations between the thousands of "particularistic groups" - sects and sub-castes - and the economy. Why scholars should have disregarded something so evident in daily social life is also not well understood. The reasons probably include the challenge religion poses both to formalist neo-classical economics and to the divison of labour in anthropology. The study of religion is seldom conducted on a comparative basis, (138) and the disciplines of sociology and anthropology have been defined in ways that have tended to marginalise or exclude the findings of research which has been carried out into specific religions; while the level at which we can usefully discuss religious plurality is rarely matched by enough ethnographic evidence. (139) For all these reasons our understanding of these relationships remains very limited (140).
Nevertheless, we must return to the questions raised at the end of the introduction to this essay, even if the answers we suggest are tentative. We asked (1) why religion has not dissolved as a force in the economy - why it has not been relegated to private life; (2) how far are the roles that religion, and the plurality of religions, play in the process of accumulation efficient; (3) how far the conditions of production in India may accentuate or even require, as much as be hindered by, a plurality of religions - not religions as "essence" nor as the "soul of soulless conditions" but religions as socially constituted in India. In what follows, we bring the case material to bear on these questions.
(1) There are several reasons why religion has not dissolved as a force in the economy.
Religion as an opiate: Myrdal maintained that, "it is completely contrary to scientific principles to follow the easy approach of explaining the peculiarities in attitudes, institutions and modes of living and working by reference to broad concepts of Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam". They were, he thought, "a function of poverty and low levels of living"; religion was simply the "emotional container of this way of life". (141) By this reasoning continued poverty is then enough to explain the continuation of its emotional container.
State encouragement: But this is far from adequate even as a materialist explanation of the persistence of religion. Religion also persists because the state has perversely encouraged it. India's religious is sustained by the state's distinctive secularism. With one big religion and several minorities, and with a state which is formally indifferent to religions, yet which is in fact unequally engaged with them, religious-political identities are then assumed by religions and their constituent communities. Nothing much stops relations between religious groups from being competitive, especially where economic resources and rents are concerned. Political relationships between "particularistic groups" vary from equal respect, to tolerance of inequality, religious nationalism and attempts at religious domination. Consequently, while the great bulk of state policy is framed in a universalist language entirely indifferent to religion (or to local power structures), its implementation is never indifferent. Even when not asserting itself through positive discrimination, policy will always etch itself out differentially across the religions - according to the specific context.
The collective preconditions for competition: The State's deficient regulation of markets also leaves religions to perform some of the roles which markets need. What are the non-rivalrous, yet non-class, collective requirements of capital? In the sphere of production, rent needs to be preserved and protected; access to finance and productive capital needs rationing; new entrants need to be excluded from markets and competition limited or even suppressed. Information relevant to judgments about transactions needs to circulate; rent-creating network-transactions must be generated and defended; collective representation is organised and distinctive forms of ownership and control of property is legitimated. All these tasks can be, and often are, performed for capital by religions, which also supply essential moral elements. Norms of fairness can be enforced on co-religionists and may be manipulated collectively against others. (142)
Authority in market exchange: We have noted the impact of divinely inspired personal and family law on property and firms. More generally, the moral authority which informs economic behaviour is itself non-economic, being supernatural in origin and binding on co-religionists. Of the Jain religion, for instance, it has been said "no aspect of life is unattended to, how to work, how to earn, how to live in a family, what and how to eat and wear - everything follows a clear-cut code of ethics." (143) ( Thanks to the coherence of religious authority and the continuity between family and business, the distinctions conventionally made between private and public need re-examination. (144) Religion also governs gender divisions in work and in social reproduction. The gender division of labour and the subordination of women are culturally justified by religious doctrine. (145) Wherever the links between home and work have been researched, the domestic sphere is usually an important key to the distribution of material resources, working through the use of kinship in work and in the control of women. Both in turn cannot be separated from religious observance. (146) Business reputation is also based in part on a family's reputation for piety. Information about reputation is as basic to market exchange as information about prices, supply and demand. Significant cultural and material resources are devoted to the creation and defence of reputation; the latter structures contacts, credit, investment, the partition of property and the transfers of resources across the generations. Further, female education (on the value of which the religions differ) affects accumulation, not only through its impact on reputation but also through the capacity of women to socialise their children to markets. The customs of each religion also provide the motive for, and significantly structure, demand for goods and services, particularly for food. The sites and seasons of festivals are as important to the pulse of the economy as are the agricultural seasons.
Security: Religions also compensate in practical ways for the costs of market engagement, reducing risk and providing security; though they do so to varying degrees. Forms of collective insurance based on religious affiliation may compensate for risk and accident; claimants are restricted; sometimes preference may be given to co-religionists in labour recruitment. Moreover when accountability is defined through religion, wider social obligations may be avoided. The "trader's dilemma" - how to accumulate while minimising social obligations - is solved. (147)
Religion's role in class formation: The last major reason why religions have not dissolved as a force in the economy is because they slow down class formation and are one of many institutions dividing the working class. In so doing, they protect rates of accumulation.
To sum up: the expectation that capitalist development would replace social regulation by religion with regulation by the state was not well founded. Religions did not need to organise "resistance"; they simply were able to supply the non-state, non-class institutions and functions needed by emerging capitalist markets and as a result have been strengthened, not dissolved.
(2) How far is the role played by India's plurality of religions in the contemporary economy conducive to efficiency?
Functional efficiency: Social institutions and organisations owing their origins to religious authority may persist because they routinise activity. Minorities are therefore assumed by some scholars to be "efficient" for an economy. (148) They are units of information. Their collective reputation reduces the transactions costs of contracts with outsiders and endows members with implicit collateral for credit. Trust replaces costlier forms of contractual enforcement. Inside such a group, a modern "calculative" trust which is based on competence and specialised knowledge may even start to co-exist with a trust based on shared identity. (149) The group is a cost-effective institution for the transmission of skills. Networked, repeated transactions are not only exclusive, they also minimise the costs and risks of contract-formation by means of adversarial bargaining. Modelling the minority in this specifically economic way reveals a purely economic rationality, though the point about a minority is that it is never a purely economic institution. Though the minority is a "group", it is a group defined by divine authority. Neither the origin of a "minority" nor its persistence is to be pre-supposed to be functional for efficiency. Besides there is no de-institutionalised alternative with which its efficiency can be compared. Change in its economic rationales may be provoked from within the economy but also can originate outside it.
Tesselation : As the division of labour deepens and new commodities and services proliferate, they are mapped onto subcastes and sects. The descriptive core of this essay shows that this process of fission is replicated through all the religions in India. (150) The Indian economy has become obstinately tesselated. (151) Even new commodities can be tainted by the sacred status of the products they displace or refine. In the tesselation of the economy, religion is objectified in sets of occupational groups with contested status rankings. Ranking is stigmatic. Trade and business however, are stigmatised, if at all, only by a tiny minority of the small proportion of the highest status groups in the population. For most of the population, trade is ranked high in status and hard to penetrate, accumulation is powerfully protected.
Competition and conflict: Religious alignments may be used as tools in economic competition. Across the borders of such groups may come the discrimination that confines minorities to certain "callings" (152) and the competitive relations that stimulate the system within. Transactions between people of different religion are still (often - although less than in the past) conducted according to different sets of rules, which may be significantly more exploitative and costly than those governing internal transactions.Competition between religious groups may flare into communal conflict, especially where three conditions are satisfied: if religious minorities are relatively large, economic relations with Hindus have become adversarial and the state has allowed religiously-aligned inequalities to be perpetuated or deepened. Before bigotry is accepted as being behind each riot, we need to be sure that communal violence is not economic competition by other means. (153) Communal violence has been seen by some scholars as one of the more savage of the many labour pains of an emerging pluralist industrial society. Yet at the same time, it reduces that society's competitive advantage through its role in the development of reputation. The way government handles majoritarian and minoritarian communalism cannot be dissociated from its handling of other aspects of governance, including the regulation of markets. Communal violence cannot but have adverse effects on investment, production and trade.
(3) How far do the conditions of production in India accentuate or even require religion and/or the plurality of religions?
Increased religiosity: In the first place it is a fact that liberalisation has been accompanied by a heightened religiosity in certain parts of society and certain spaces in India. The more difficult question is the extent to which the former has caused the latter. At the wealthiest heights of India's economy, there is some evidence for a "resurgence" in Hindu religiosity. John Harriss' recent re-survey of south Indian, high caste "industrial leaders" who had been studied in the sixties by Milton Singer found three remarkable developments: an upsurge of belief in god-men and miracles, a notable selective reworking of Vedantic scripture to assert the superiority of Hunduism, and ostentatious investment in the restoration of temples. (154) It is worth asking about the conditions that have led to these beliefs and practices and Harriss' ethnographic material is suggestive. Belief in god-men seems to cater for a craving for security and peace. The much discussed "crisis" of the family business, when large business families are being forced to employ professional managers was the one alluded to by these business leaders. (155) By the same token, miracles reconcile acts of accumulative success with spiritual health. The neo-Vedantic concepts of "work as worship" and "the performance of business without attachment" mean that its rewards can be accepted as of divine origin (156) and so divinely legitimated. The superiority of Hinduism is easily elided with Hindu nationalism at a time when India's position in the global economy reveals its weakness as a production site for world markets and its low level of integration into global financial circuits. (157) Gilding the roofs of temples, while it puts gold out of circulation, is a practice which reinforces the status of - and strengthens - the people worshipping in them (some of whom manage the temple property), at a time when family ties are alleged to be weakening. In this case, the "designer"-religiosity of the upper echelons of India's capitalist class seems to be justifying accumulation ex post. It seems to provide incentives for accumulation ex ante and it requires accumulation for such behaviour to be possible.
The economic role of the big religion: Could such religiosity be a response to the stresses and difficulties of adaptation to more competitive, rationalised and global markets? Since few scholars have yet considered a reasoned elimination of this possibility, Hindutva itself would be worth exploring as an attempt to impose the norms of the "big religion" on the nation's economy as a means of rationalising it for global competition. Sombart's "cosmopolitan towns" - in India - are never dead level. If many religions co-exist, there must be many public ethics, (158) presenting a problem for a complex socially regulated economy, especially one pitched forcefully into a global arena. The public sphere must then be regulated by one (or a combination) of four means : by the modern state; by the ethic of a victor; by a "lowest common moral denominator"; and/or by an ethical consensus or amalgam resulting from a struggle between religions. (159) If the state fails to impose a consistent regulative order, if it does not require - or is unable to get - markets to provide the revenue resources for generalised security against risk, accident and poverty, if the legitimacy of its inconsistent and unequal communal practice is not respected, then the task falls to other ethical bases for regulation.
The religions of India may have a large "lowest common moral denominator", but the degree of ethical consensus will depend on the numerical and economic strength of the religions in question - in the context of a given economic market or physical marketplace. Is Hindutva amenable to being interpreted as an attempt not only to create and defend as large a space as possible for Hindu accumulation but also to impose a more uniform ethical space on a tesselated economy? (160) If so, would that in turn require control over the norms of provision of the commodities and services of minorities? Under what conditions would social disciplining by the big religion have to be openly physically co-ercive, and under what conditions could it operate implicitly through threat? An imposition of "Hindu norms" would also require control over the "wild jungle growth" of Hinduism itself. To what extent does this help to explain the selective nature - and the political urgency - of the religiosity which we know as "Hindu fundamentalism", and which the BJP now calls "true secularism"? (161)
A case can be made, then, for seeing religion as not merely useful, but even necessary to India's economy. At the same time in some parts of India and for some sectors of the economy, slowly and with opposition class divisions are eroding the economic cohesion of religious groups. The case studies presented here reveal marked economic differentiation and segmentation, uneven access and exploitation within most of these groups. Alignments of occupation and caste/religion have also become blurred. The wage labour force is increasingly cosmopolitan. Labour migrates to work for (verbal) contracts that are no longer so festooned in non-economic obligations. Bondage is being reduced to patronage and patronage is being reduced to contract. The ownership of land is being opened up first to sale and purchase, and then to purchase by people previously forbidden - by custom if not by law - to buy it. The commodities, services and entertainments which signify modernity and "being civilised" are available (even if in counterfeit versions) to kinds of Indian citizen to whom they have until lately been forbidden fruit. The production and trade of some old and new commodities gives opportunities to new entrants from outside the religious groups that used to monopolise them.
So our overview of religious minorities produces the difficult conclusion that their sites and roles in the Indian economy are consistent both with the hypothesis of a gradual uneven dissolution of the structuring role of religion as well as with its opposite - that religious plurality is not being dissolved and is even being nourished. It is not possible to conclude that religious plurality acts as a block on growth. While the jury is still out on these large questions, liberalisation has already been seen to strengthen the competitive tensions between religions, the speed with which religious alignments can be defended and - in some regions - nurtured as a seedbed for fascistic communalism.
Notes
(132) Though competition is suppressed by caste-corporatist trade associations, see Basile and Harriss-White, 2000. Back
(133) Rs 24,000 was double the state's Poverty Line at the time.
(134) Dasgupta, 1992, in her study of informal trade in Calcutta finds much the same. In addition she finds "unions' or trade associations negotiating access to loans from state banks for those excluded from comerce by "ethnicity".
(135) This employment pattern is due in some small part to the policy of Reserved places - see chapter 7.Back
(136) Basile and Harriss-White, 2000.
(137) Panikkar, 1955, p.327.
(138) See Gellner, 2001, however for comparative essays on Hinduism and Buddhism in Nepal and Japan, though Gellner does not address the questions occupying us here of their roles in the contemporary economy. Back
(139) It is beyond the scope of this project to discover whether any interest, and if so what, stands to gain from this lack in scholarly knowledge.
(140) The new project at EFEO, Pondichery, on "Interpenetration des Ideaux Religieux et Mercantiles: Representations and Conceptualisations de la Prosperite chez les Marchands et les Industriels Indiens' seems likely to remedy some of this ignorance : lachaier@satyam.net.in
(141) Myrdal, 1968, p112 Back
(142) This is not to argue that the collective preconditions to competition cannot straddle groups defined by religion or by jati, sect or biradari. Nor is it to assert that limited territories of accountability cannot be found in nations with a unified religious culture. It is not to argue that the proliferation of castes and sects does not have a history to some extent independent of the economy. It is not to argue that muted competition and the protection of rents cannot result from other forces, most notably state regulation.
(143) Sharing this ethic with co-religionists strengthens religious merit; Jain, 2001.
(144) The accepted divisions of social institutions and space into productive and reproductive, public and private, foreground and background, even business and religion and their dichotomous gendering (private as female and public as male) all need questioning. Back
(145) Divine authority has two aspects, only one of which is handled in this chapter. This is divine sanction for particular behaviour e.g. the subordination of women. The other is the power of religious authorities - bishops, mullahs, priests, godmen etc. - which is exercised through control of ideas, education, social behaviour - and property.
(146) Even here, caste splits and unites people of different religion in quite specific ways. While Jain and Vaishnavite marwaris intermarry, as do Sikh and Hindu khatris, Christian and Hindu nadars do not intermarry even though they act as one economic group... (Pierre Lachaier, 2001, Pers. Comm).
(147) Evers, 1994, p.4-10. Back
(148) This theorisation stems from a critique of the "under-socialisation" of modern economics and its "over-socialised" dependence upon notions of generalised morality (Svedburg and Granovetter, 1992, pp.6- 19).
(149) See for example Dasgupta, 1992, pp.251-2, 295; de Glopper, 1972, pp. 319-20; INFRAS, 1993.
(150) Of course the creation of plurality within religions need not be determined by the economy. Back
(151) Satish Saberwal, following Marx, refers to it as India's social "cellularity" (1996, p.39, p6.5; in Corbridge and Harriss, 2000, p.36-7).
(152) Philip, 1984, p.38-9; Sombart, 1951, pp.238-248.
(153) Communal conflict is not a unique type of violence in India for violence has been structured along enemy lines of castes, between sects and even between denominations. Desai, 1984, gives examples of conflict between Sikh sects and intercaste rivalry. But religion is not scaled-up caste. While the way religions work scaled down at the micro level is very similar to that of caste, the macro politics of religion is different from the macro politics of caste, the former working indirectly through religious competition, the latter directly through positive discrimination. Back
(154) J. Harriss, forthcoming. Neo-Vedantic scripture consists of a package of the Upanishads, the Gita and the Brahma Sutra. Harriss cannot be sure of the scale of this resurgence because he is unable to distinguish what he suspects is the impact on Singer's emphasis on the early industrial leaders' practice of selective reworking of the essentials of Hinduism into a code of ethics, from a rationalist attitude to religion. The latter was still being influenced in the 1960s by Nehru's project of modernisation. Harriss also suspects that Singer was influenced in his interpretation of this "selective re-working" by the fundamentalist intellectual project of his colleague, Raghavan.
(155) Disquiet at informalising the labour force or replacing production relations legitimated by loyalty by ones of "trust" which actually involve new forms of discipline, is not expressed.
(156) A paradoxical relation of a spiritual exchange which is denied to have transactional elements. Back
(157) "India has not yet succeeded in seducing one major international corporation into using India as a global production platform" (P.S. Jha, 2001, Pers. Comm.). He reasons that this is due to fears about the security of investment. These are due in turn to investors' experience of extortion by politicians and administrators. We have shown here that competition between particularistic groups and factions, a competition which is related to the social organisation of religion plays a role in creating this insecurity.
(158) This creates conditions for the development of a low trust society every bit as much as for that of the tolerant one that is conventionally depicted (discussed critically in Hansen, 1996).
(159) The Yogasutra - 35 rules - of Acharya Hemachandra illuminate this point. Rule 5 advises Jains to adopt the common practices of the place in which they reside if they do not contradict Jain principles. Rule 6 asks Jains to refrain from criticism of higher authorities. Rule 22 requires Jains to act in accordance with the place and time (Jain, 2001).If religions were randomly and individually distributed then the social costs of finding a common moral space for capital, of negotiation or consensus, imposing an ethic or enforcing state regulation would be much higher than when religions collectively occupy social, economic and physical niches. Back
(160) If this is reworking and reinvention, it is a long and gradual process grounded in the failure of the state from the 1960s onwards and the assault on organised labour which began in the early 70s. It has been abetted by the private interest theories of states in the new political economy - and the flows of foreign aid that these theories have influenced. The rise of Hindutva is thoroughly "overdetermined", by a range of historical explanations, and does not need the faultline of the 1991 reforms to explain it.
(161) Hansen, 1996 b, p.608. Back