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The anthropology of neoliberal India: An introduction

Daniel Münster and Christian Strümpell
Contributions to Indian Sociology 2014 48: 1
DOI: 10.1177/0069966713502419

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 The anthropology of neoliberal India:
An introduction

Daniel Münster and Christian Strümpell

I
Introduction
This special issue brings together ethnographic accounts exploring
local and regional effects of transformations in India that social scien-
tists have described under the heading of ‘neoliberalism’ (Alternative
Survey Group 2007; Oza 2006; Patnaik 2007). Chief among these
transformations in India are the economic restructuring processes after
1991 when the Government of India launched far-reaching policies of
economic liberalisation, arguably under the pressure of global financial
institutions. Acknowledging this significant turning point, we aim to
highlight, however, the variegation with which neoliberal ideas, poli-
cies and technologies are dispersed and experienced among different
segments of the population. In doing so, the authors of this special issue
pursue an ethnographically informed ‘grounding’ of large neoliberal
transformations. In Michael Burawoy’s terms, such grounding is about
‘extending out from the micro-processes to macro forces, from the
space–time rhythms of the site to the geographical and historical context
of the field’ (2000a: 27).

Daniel Münster is at the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies,
Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany. Email: daniel.muenster@asia-europe.
uni-heidelberg.de
Christian Strümpell is at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg,
Germany. Email: struempell@uni-heidelberg.de

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SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/0069966713502419

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2 / Daniel Münster and Christian Strümpell

The ethnographies assembled here focus on Dalits in the outskirts of

a globalising textile city (Carswell and De Neve), workers in declining
public sector industries (Subramanian), adivasis in a public sector steel
town (Strümpell), and the trajectory of neoliberal policies after 1945 that
culminated in India’s first foreign trade zone, a role model for today’s
special economic zones (SEZs), in 1965 (Neveling). These sites and
trajectories showcase the unevenness of neoliberal transformations
in India across different spaces, times and groups of the population.
Hence, we ask in the light of this diversity, what is distinctly ‘neoliberal’
about India’s past and present condition? We will particularly scrutinise
the untimely coincidence of neoliberal practices and processes with
postcolonial capitalism/Nehruvian developmentalism.
This particular phenomenon concerns us here because the historical
and regional variations in experiences with economic liberalisation, of
which the ethnographic and ethno-historical accounts in this issue speak,
render assumptions of a neoliberal hegemony in contemporary India
doubtful. Instead of reasserting standard narratives of neoliberalism
as a sweeping rollback of the state and as a sudden reform heralding a
new hegemonic system, the Introduction assesses the overall utility of
‘neoliberalism’ as a descriptive and analytical term. We aim to show
that neoliberalism may, in certain constellations, indeed provide a useful
basis for comparative ethnographies of the global present, by drawing
attention to the lived experiences with an ideology used worldwide to
restructure patterns of capitalist accumulation. The notion of neolib-
eralism further speaks of widespread sentiments of epochal changes
with the end of the era of ‘embedded’ (Harvey 2005), ‘post-colonial’
(Sanyal 2007) or ‘developmental’ capitalism (Chatterjee 2008). In
India, however, this needs careful assessment because contemporary
transformations may not always constitute such a great rupture from
a historical or macroeconomic point of view. Yet, from the point of
view of lived experience, ‘neoliberalism’ may indeed capture a sense
of departure from a Nehruvian model of postcolonialism. The pre-
paratory ground to be covered in this Introduction points out major
anthropological approaches to neoliberalism, followed by a discussion
of two central topics of special concern to our contributors: (a) the state
and political technologies; and (b) social inequalities of class, gender,
ethnicity and caste.

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 The anthropology of neoliberal India / 3

II
Neoliberalism and anthropology
Neoliberalism has emerged in social anthropology as a central ‘explanatory
trope’ (Kipnis 2007), a buzzword, and as a ‘master concept’ (Kingfisher
and Maskovsky 2008) informing many ethnographies concerned with the
world’s contemporary condition. Not unlike previous master concepts such
as ‘(post)modernity’, ‘postcolonialism’, ‘postsocialism’ or ‘globalisation’,
‘neoliberalism’ may seem to be prone to reification and essentialisation.
Attention to both empirical variation and alternative strains of analysis
often becomes inadequate when concepts turn ‘meta-narratives’ (Englund
and Leach 2000) for the description of the present condition. For many
anthropologists, ‘neoliberalism’ shares the allure of other meta-narratives,
such as the competitor terms mentioned earlier. It supports the linking up
of ethnographic detail to wider transnational contexts, but also shares the
danger of such narratives in shortcutting questions of scale as well as the
‘risks involved in producing “social theory” that is disembedded from
ethnographic practice’ (ibid.: 245).
Broadly speaking, anthropological approaches may be divided as
follows. Firstly, those that locate ‘neoliberalism’ in the realm of global
political economy and regard it as an economic doctrine, a project for the
(re)formation of global capitalism and for the reconstitution of upper-class
power. Secondly, a large camp of anthropologists argues for broadening
the term and including new technologies of rule beyond the economic.
In the anthropology of India, such a Foucaultian understanding of ‘neo-
liberalism as discourse’ (Springer 2012) has been particularly influential
in the political anthropology of the state.
In political–economic anthropology, ‘neoliberal’, as an adjective to
global capitalism, refers for many to a return, a ‘second coming’, of 19th
century laissez-faire capitalism and, at the same time, to an entirely new
historical formation: ‘an age that is revolutionary and is also an ongoing
chapter in the story of capital’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 45). The
sense of rupture, the often-invoked radical newness of neoliberalism, has
been subject to debate. Critics in anthropology, in dialogue with global
history and macrosociology, stress long-term cycles of capital accumula-
tion (for example, Arrighi 1994) and have questioned the very existence
of a truly global post-independence/post-war Keynesian regime which

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could then be swept aside by a new regime (cf. Baca 2004; Ortner 20111).
The viability of this strand of research, represented in this special issue
in the article by Neveling, shows how even the seemingly uniform and
all-powerful Nehruvian state, often invoked in anthropology as the radi-
cal other of post-1991 India, already included significant and powerful
institutional arrangements that may well be labelled neoliberal.2 Such
criticism resembles earlier questionings of the notion of newness in rela-
tion to globalisation. In this context, Balachandran and Subrahmanian
(2005) have, for example, pointed out the extensive historiography on
Indian Ocean trade and highlighted centuries of South Asia’s integration
into global circuits of trade and finance. For neoliberalism, similar cases
would necessarily have to be made.
As the contributions to this issue by Carswell and De Neve as well as
by Subramanian show, the importance of a neoliberal ‘threshold’ around
the year 1991 remains an open question from an ethnographic perspec-
tive. This perspective may entail economic research at local and regional
scales, such as the textile and garment clusters emerging in Tiruppur in
the 1970s (Carswell and De Neve, this issue), as well as challenges to
vernacular interpretations of the contemporary condition that come to the
fore once a detailed analysis of the ‘neoliberal’ fate of large-scale state-
owned cooperations of the Nehruvian era is employed (Subramanian, this
issue). Most economic anthropologists are aware of a universal logic of
capital accumulation. Yet they insist that actual modalities of surplus ex-
traction have always been socially and culturally ‘embedded’ (Hann and
Hart 2009: 9). The experiences and social arrangements with neoliberal
capitalism are significantly uneven across India.
The ethnographic and historical cases presented here demonstrate fur-
ther how neoliberal capitalism has been felt quite unevenly across time,
regions, sectors, castes and classes, and that capitalist relations have altered
existing social formations, at best, rather than swept them away. They look
at neoliberal industrialisation and caste relations in the Tiruppur garment
belt from the 1970s to the present (Carswell and De Neve, this issue);
1
Sherry Ortner. 2011. ‘On Neoliberalism.’ Anthropology of This Century 1 (1). Available
at http://aotcpress.com/articles/neoliberalism/. Accessed on 22 July 2011.
2
Patrick Neveling. 2006. ‘Spirits of Capitalism and the De-alienation of Workers:
A Historical Perspective on the Mauritian Garment Industry.’ Available at www.scm.uni-
halle.de/gsscm/die_graduiertenschule/online_papers/2006/mauritian_garment_industry/.
Accessed on 11 November 2011.

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 The anthropology of neoliberal India / 5

the fate of a former state-owned telecommunications company since the

1980s (Subramanian, this issue); the struggles of unionised labour and
displaced people in and around the Rourkela Steel Plant since the 1950s
(Strümpell, this issue) and the formation of early neoliberal pressure groups
and developmental projects after 1947 (Neveling, this issue).
Some articles in this issue indicate that we should not dismiss the
rupture of contemporary changes entirely. The development of a glob-
ally integrated garment industry around Tiruppur would have barely been
possible without the recent advances in transport and communication
technology, and as Carswell and De Neve show, this development opened
up hitherto inaccessible avenues for escaping from earlier forms of caste
dependency and discrimination for quite a significant number of Dalits
around Tiruppur. In order to frame these developments and level them
against the sceptics, we look at those theories that identify neoliberalism
as a new era.
In anthropological theory, ‘transformationalists’ (Held and McGrew
2003) or ‘radicals’ (Burawoy 2000b) emphasise the epochal changes
accompanying neoliberal capitalism. To them, technological advances
have taken the financialisation of capitalism—the continuing shift in
focus from production to consumption and, recently, to speculation—
to an unprecedented level. The ‘second coming’ of the utopian market
civilisation—India’s ‘informational capitalism’ (Philip 2009)—has en-
tirely new qualities to it: flexible, digital, transnational and encompassing
more spheres of life than ever before. Mobility, security, ethnicity, heritage,
water, carbon-storing capacities of forests and ‘fair’ trade relations have
become incorporated into market relations.
But, most importantly, what seems to be new about neoliberalism are
advances in the global institutionalisation of finance, trade regulation and
governance. Hence, many anthropologists study neoliberal transforma-
tions in the workings of the so-called Bretton Woods institutions such as
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Trade Organization (WTO) (Goldman 2006; Sridhar 2008). Inside these
organisations, economists of the ‘Chicago School of Economics’ with
their strong free-market ideology have had continuous influence (Stiglitz
2002). Economic crisis as well as pressure from these organisations forced
(or persuaded) many developing countries into reshaping their ‘develop-
ment regimes’ (Ludden 1992) according to neoliberal principles: from ‘wel-
fare’ and ‘planning’ to ‘empowerment’ and ‘market competition’. In India,

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Corbridge and Harriss argue that in 1991, the new Government of India
‘was quickly persuaded by the international financial institutions, and
economic liberals in the Indian establishment, to treat a crisis of liquidity
as a crisis of solvency (or even of development)’ (2003: 120).
As the quote indicates, it would be a mistake to perceive India’s eco-
nomic liberalisation after 1991 exclusively in terms of external pressure
from World Bank and WTO. As Shalini Randeria (2007) argues, many
states of the Global South, especially stronger ones like India, in the face
of strong popular opposition engage in a kind of ‘cunning’ game of pass-
ing the blame for unpopular policy measures to international institutions.
The long-standing interests of international financial–legal institutions
in dismantling India’s allegedly highly regulated markets and the strong
public sector were, in fact, shared by national elites eager to gain from
structural adjustments (Guha 2007; Neveling, this issue; Subramanian,
this issue). The policy changes that reshaped parts of Indian economy
thus appear to have been neither necessary nor external to the private and
corporate interests of India’s postcolonial capitalist classes (Corbridge
and Harriss 2003: 120). Neveling (this issue) documents the long history
of interaction of the Indian state with the World Bank and of early ex-
periments with export processing zones, nowadays called SEZs, that are
often mistaken as emblems of neoliberal reforms after 1991. This strong
agency of states, corporate and political elites in all historical eras points
to the first thematic focus of this Introduction, namely, neoliberalism as
a form of statecraft.

III
Neoliberalism, governmentality and the state
Aihwa Ong has recently suggested to move anthropological understand-
ings of neoliberalism beyond what she calls ‘neoliberalism with a big “N”,
or descriptions that unwittingly metaphorize neoliberalism as an economic
tsunami that attacks national space, conceived of as an inert receptacle for
market-driven forces and effects’ (2007: 4). Instead, neoliberalism (with a
small ‘n’) may be understood as a migratory set of practices that together
constitute a ‘technology of governing “free subjects” that co-exists with
other political rationalities’ (ibid.). She takes inspiration from Foucault-
ian governmentality studies that understand neoliberalism as a mode of
‘governing through freedom’ (Dean 1999; Rose 1999, 2006). In the case

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 The anthropology of neoliberal India / 7

of India, this framework of ‘neoliberal governmentality’ (Corbridge et al.

2005; Gupta and Sharma 2006; Sharma 2008) looks at the simultaneous
shrinking of direct state intervention (for example, in agrarian subsidies)
and the emergence of technologies for remaking postcolonial citizen–
subjects into fully empowered (Sharma 2011), responsibilised (Burchell
1996) and entrepreneurial (Mankekar 2011) neoliberal subjects. Aradhana
Sharma, for example, investigates changing subjectivities through a
‘diffusion’ of the key concepts of neoliberal development orthodoxy
like ‘empowerment’, ‘decentralisation’, ‘participation’ and even ‘civil
society’ (2008: xvii).
The understanding of ‘neoliberalism as discourse’ (Springer 2012) also
entails attention to new technologies of rule that constitute ‘assemblages’
(Collier and Ong 2005) of knowledge and practice for the management of
populations. These ‘mobile technologies’ have lasting effects on local sub-
jectivities and concepts of personhood. They are designed ‘to shape desires
and act on actions, setting conditions so that people would behave as they
ought’ (Li 2007: 231). According to Ong, among the political principles
of neoliberal governance is the production of ‘exceptions’: ‘exceptions
to neoliberalism’ and ‘neoliberal exceptions’ (2006: 1–27).
Ong conceptualises the notion of ‘exception’ as an ‘extraordinary
departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as exclude’
(2006: 5). Neoliberal principles then spread unevenly, as they are often
introduced as exceptions in those political constellations where market-
driven calculations are not (yet) hegemonic: as SEZs, as gated communities
and as other arrangements. Ultimately, these arrangements are ‘separating
some groups for special attention, carving out special zones that overlap,
but do not coincide, with the national terrain’ (Ong 2007: 6). However,
for the case of India, Jamie Cross (2010) has argued that labour regimes
in SEZs—Ong’s most important image for her argument—are rather un-
exceptional and instead merely legalise (exploitative) informal relations
prevalent among the overwhelming majority of the rural/urban workforce
(cf. De Neve 2005). Neveling (this issue) takes this further and shows
that these allegedly exceptional spaces were already part and parcel of the
Nehruvian development regime, thus questioning the common periodisa-
tion and the exceptionality of neoliberal capitalism.
But Ong’s argument should not be dismissed entirely. She also speaks
of ‘exceptions to neoliberalism’ that find more resonance among the
authors of this issue. This concerns the unevenness of neoliberalism and

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8 / Daniel Münster and Christian Strümpell

the very fact that capitalist hegemony should not be taken as an analytic
starting point for studying everyday life, but rather as something to be
demonstrated ethnographically. If one leaves south India’s ‘showrooms’
of informational capitalism, such as the Chennai–Bangalore Expressway,
and ventures into the hinterland, one is bound to encounter a variety of
rural ‘local capitalisms’ (Harriss-White 2003) and other economic forms
that hardly deserve the adjective ‘neoliberal’. The linkages and encounters
between neoliberal modes of economy, politics and subjectivity and its
alleged ‘Other’—like public sector labour or subsistence agriculture—
seem to suggest that the Indian situation might usefully be portrayed as
‘cohabition and contestation among multiple economic forms’ (Gibson-
Graham 2006: xxi). In this spirit, Münster and Münster (2012) describe the
south Indian district of Wayanad as an exceptional zone of cohabitation of
speculative agriculture, farmers in crisis and desperate adivasi assertions
for land in a landscape of wild animal attacks and booming middle-class
tourism, while Carswell and De Neve (this issue) investigate the persis-
tence of caste-based labour bondage in the Tiruppur textile cluster.
In such a context, it seems opportune to move our ethnographic under-
standing of contemporary transformations not only beyond the economic
and across the alleged ‘temporal divide’ (of pre- and post-1991), but also
beyond the singular narrative of the ‘retreat of the state’. The legacy of
the strong and far-reaching Nehruvian state was not wiped away with
the ‘market-friendly reforms’ after 1991. Instead, the ways that the state
was ‘remade’ vary widely with the ‘sector, level, and branch of the state’
under consideration (Gupta and Sharma 2006: 280). Assumptions of an
unequivocal cutting of public expenditure that are often invoked to sub-
stantiate the claim of state retreat seem especially awkward against the
background of the militarisation of large swaths of the country in central
India. But the state is also highly visible in a proliferation of social sector
interventions over the past 10 years. These include state-level midday
meal schemes, subsidised rice for below poverty line (BPL) families, but
also the state’s variegated responses to the ongoing suicide crisis among
Indian cash-crop farmers (see Münster 2012). On a much larger scale,
recent welfare programmes include the National Rural Employment
Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the General Debt Waiver of Agricultural
Loans, which have an increasingly huge impact on many rural people
across India. Do these massive state interventions constitute exceptions
to the process of neoliberalisation, are they part of a new Polanyian

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 The anthropology of neoliberal India / 9

‘double movement’ (Harriss 2011; cf. Polanyi 2001 [1944]), or are they
rather, as Chatterjee (2008) and others argue, attempts at mitigating the
most negative impact of neoliberal transformations on India’s poor and
rural populations?

IV
Neoliberalism and social inequalities
This brings us to the second wider focus of research on neoliberalism
that the contributors to this special issue share: its relation to social in-
equalities of class, gender, ethnicity and caste. Geographer David Harvey
argues that in most, if not all cases, the prime motive behind the adoption
of neoliberal policies is the restoration or formation of class inequality.
This stands, of course, in stark contrast to the publicly declared benign
goals of securing the ‘freedom’ and well-being of all citizens by freeing
market and trade from state intervention. The disparity between the ideol-
ogy of ‘neoliberalism’ and the practice of ‘neoliberalisation’, as Harvey
(2005: 79) calls it, puts citizens’ loyalty to governments at risk and thus
endangers the political stability of neoliberalising states. To contain op-
position, neoliberal states might resort to force or persuasion, the latter
often in form of nationalist sentiments. For India, the coincidence of the
emergence of Hindu nationalism as a dominant political agenda around
the time of the neoliberal reforms in 1991 (cf. Corbridge and Harriss
2003) may be interpreted as supporting Harvey’s argument. Processes
of neoliberalisation—i.e. of forming a new class inequality or restor-
ing an older inequality, and of organising consent as well as repressing
resistance—proceed in uneven ways and are contingent on the longer
historical developments of social structures, cultural values and political
institutions, in particular, neoliberalising nation-states.
Pursuing ethnographically grounded analyses of such long-term trajec-
tories in the light of neoliberalisation in India, the articles in this special
issue show how class power is formed and contested among Dalit industrial
workers in Tamil Nadu (Carswell and De Neve), how opposition of labour
unions and displaced people movements in Odisha is raised and repressed
(Strümpell), how neoliberalising state ministries seek to downsize public
sector workforces (Subramanian), or how very basic principles of neolib-
eral states such as public–private partnership institutions and zones with
unbridled surplus generation were established long ago (Neveling).

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The scholarship on class in India is unanimous that after independence,

a coalition of capitalists, rich farmers and elite bureaucrats shared political
power because none of these classes were in a position to exercise hege-
mony on their own (Bardhan 1984; Kaviraj 1989). The dismantlement of
crucial cornerstones of the Nehruvian developmental state affected this
coalition of dominant classes in three major ways (Chatterjee 2008). First,
opening up the economy to private capital also opened up access to new
corporate sectors for the bourgeoisie. Second, lifting the licence regime
triggered competition between state governments for national and inter-
national investment. Third, corporate capital has gained a ‘moral–political
sway’ over the bureaucratic–managerial class and the urban middle classes,
and especially the latter tend to view the developmental state nowadays
with disdain (ibid.: 56f ).
Partha Chatterjee further argues that under neoliberalism, the he-
gemony of corporate capital remains confined to ‘civil society’, that
is, the urban middle class and the elites, whose members are not only
formally citizens like everyone else but also behave in a ‘civil’ way—
for example, utilising the formal workings of the law—and are treated
as such by the state. In contrast to civil society, the majority of rural
Indians and the urban poor form a ‘political society’ because, according
to Chatterjee (2004: 53–78), their relation to the state is less strongly
defined by the legal framework of civil rights and more by politically
negotiated arrangements.
This coexistence of distinct socio-political formations differentiates
Indian politics—and by extension, popular politics in ‘most of the world’
(Chatterjee 2004)—from the ‘West’. But this coexistence in itself does
not mark a break with India’s pre-liberalised past; rather, the relationship
between civil and political society has changed significantly. Since 1991,
as Kalyan Sanyal has put it, the ‘accumulation economy’ of corporate
capital—and also ‘civil society’ at large, under its moral–political sway—
expands ever rapidly by means of ‘primitive accumulation’ at the cost
of the ‘need economy’ of the poor (2007: 254–62). In India and other
contemporary post-colonies, the economic growth triggered by corporate
capital is largely jobless with the effect that the dispossessed remain
excluded. This means that, ultimately, modernist European narratives
of ‘transition’ from one pattern of accumulation to another lose their
validity in such contexts. The ‘need economy’ nevertheless continues to
exist. It is kept alive by the welfare policies of postcolonial states that

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 The anthropology of neoliberal India / 11

still retain strong interventionist welfare measures. They do so in order

to comply with global ‘good governance’ demand (Chatterjee 2008: 55)
but, first and foremost, out of fear that the dispossessed might otherwise
turn into ‘dangerous classes’ and threaten political stability (ibid.: 62).
It is in this context, both Sanyal (2007: 254) and Chatterjee (2008: 62)
argue, that the recent proliferation of social sector interventions in India
has to be interpreted as measures enabling unabated growth of corporate
capital.
At a general level, this model seems to confirm Harvey’s thesis that
trajectories of neoliberalisation, in particular nation-states, are historically
contingent. At another level, however, the dichotomous model of civil
and political society prevents a more nuanced analysis of the manifold
social inequalities involved in the reproduction and transformation
of social orders under neoliberalism (cf. Baviskar and Sundar 2008;
Benda-Beckmann et al. 2009; Eckert 2006; Eckert et al. 2012). As Mihir
Shah (2008) has pointed out, these processes have to be understood
with reference to a concept of ‘class’ that does not detach itself from the
dynamic entanglements that class has with other axes of power, such
as nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender and caste. The link between
the rise of the new middle classes after economic liberalisation and the
consolidation of Hindu nationalism in the political arena has already
been established earlier. In particular, conflicts around caste have taken
on violent dimensions in several parts of the country in recent years
(Bayly 1999). Also, adivasis’ struggle for regional self-determination
aimed to thereby protect themselves against the dispossession of land
unleashed by the state and corporate capital (Padel and Das 2010; Shah
2008). Furthermore, upward class mobility of certain castes has fuelled
communal violence in Gujarat (Shani 2007), but not in Tamil Nadu
(cf. Chari 2004; De Neve 2006).
Similarly, in this issue, Carswell and De Neve show the complexities of
overlapping class and caste relations in the booming Tamil textile industry.
Whereas in village industries, caste relations remain based on hierarchy
and dependency, but in the nearby urban factories they are experienced
as voluntary contractual relationships promoting separation and competi-
tion. Strümpell (this issue) investigates how claims of ethnic autochthony
early on became crucial for access to the public sector working class in
Rourkela, Odisha, and how this shaped the politics of labour as well as
local resistance against dispossession around the Rourkela Steel Plant

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12 / Daniel Münster and Christian Strümpell

before and after economic liberalisation. And Subramanian discusses the

‘liberalisation’ of the telecommunication sector from the vantage points
of managers, engineers and workers of a public-sector company, tracing
their conflicting interests as well as the complex web of power relations
that links them to the state ministries. Thus, in considering changing
social inequalities under neoliberalism, this special issue moves beyond
the dichotomy of hegemony and resistance that is implicit in the bipolar
distinction of ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’. Rather, the authors
in this issue move towards unravelling the complex processes of social
inclusion and exclusion and of the formation and restoration of class
power in India.

V
The making and unmaking of neoliberal India
In his call for a ‘grounding’ of contemporary neoliberal globalisation,
Michael Burawoy confronted sceptics and radicals alike. Both are bound
to produce accounts—of global changes as well as continuities—that
imprint themselves on local levels. This ultimately bereaves their analysis
of any contextual and historical depth (2000b: 343). He also confronts
a third approach to globalisation, which he calls ‘perspectivalism’. It is
shared by anthropologists who, after the Writing Culture debate, have
turned into ‘radicals’ criticising earlier anthropological dichotomies of
‘us’ and ‘them’. But as they are ‘sceptical’ of the production of anthro-
pological knowledge, these ethnographers often restrict themselves to
narcissistic ‘navel gazing’. In order to overcome superficial top-down
accounts of sceptics and radicals or perspectivalists’ withdrawals,
Burawoy advocates the grounding of neoliberal globalisation through
local ethnographic descriptions that highlight the processes with which
capitalism is locally ‘upheld and reproduced, or is challenged and trans-
formed’ (ibid.: 344).
An anthropological grounding of the study of neoliberal India may
also take inspiration from Edward P. Thomson’s (1966) social history of
capitalist transformation. In his work, he reminds us that we should not
conceive of the English working class—or any other historical class
formation—as a product of an external force, such as the ‘industrial
revolution’ or ‘neoliberal capitalism’, ‘working upon some nondescript

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 The anthropology of neoliberal India / 13

undifferentiated raw material of humanity’ (ibid.: 194). The English work-

ing class did not just ‘rise like the sun at an appointed time’, but ‘was
present at its own making’ (ibid.: 9). This line of argument applies also to
India’s Dalit workers in garment factories producing for a global market
(see Carswell and De Neve, this issue), its cash-crop farmers, its workers
in former state monopoly companies (see Subramanian, this issue) and its
displaced adivasis (see Strümpell, this issue), as well as to the early days
of India’s SEZs (see Neveling, this issue).

Acknowledgements
This special issue is the outcome of a workshop organised by the editors at the Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology, 24–26 September 2009, and funded by the research group
Law against the State, or The Juridification of Protest, headed by Julia Eckert. We wish to
express our gratitude to Julia Eckert for her intellectual and practical support in organising
the workshop. This Introduction has benefited tremendously from critical readings and
helpful comments by Julia Eckert, John Harriss, Geert De Neve and, in particular, Patrick
Neveling, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

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