Book review: Urban Development in the State Karnataka, India: Policies, Actors and Outcomes by Harry A. Mengers. (Saarbrucken: Verlagen fur Entwicklungspolitik Saarbrucken GmbH, Nijmegen Studies in Development and Cultural Change 27, 1997).
✍ Scribed by Carole Rakodi
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 49 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0954-1748
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
principles set out in the ®rst part, of a reciprocal anthropology' in which ( particularly subaltern) subjects are able to present themselves in their own terms. These reveal the interplay of negotiations between sacred cosmologies and practical struggle; the suering of injustice and the de®ant gaze' of Dalit women's self-assertion.
The questions that the book raises are clearly important ones. It provides an impressive review of social scholarship on contemporary India, and broader philosophical and anthropological debates. What emerges, however, is a rather uneasy dialogue. It is hard to urge a new kind of discourse while the arguments must be framed within the old one. Many insights are suggestive. The potential of moving from Hindu cosmologies as an object of anthropological interest relativised by an outside analytical frame, for instance, to presenting a sociological analysis that works from within a Hindu epistemology that The explanation of the seen is the unseen', is an exciting one. Similarly indicative is the comparison of Western approaches to reason and rationality' and Indian notions of reasonableness' in terms of what is appropriate, tolerable and moderate. But it is hard to embody this in a theoretical discussion in which the dominant framing of India as other' threatens constantly to capsize the project of turning the critical gaze from India outwards. Thus the insistence on India's internal diversity, for example, sits uneasily with assertions about `the ordinary Indian'. With the exception of two chapters discussing the perspectives of urban Dalit women, there is rather little ethnographic engagement. Even in the second part of the book, there is quite heavy reliance on secondary sources with discussion of issues taking priority over immediate engagement in contexts. The book provides an impressive manifesto for a new kind of project. It may only be through the doing of it, and the new way of seeing that its insights into a particular context reveal, that the dominant frame may be broken and something really new emerge.