Paper, public works and politics: tracing archives of corruption in 1940s-1950s Uttar Pradesh, India
Paper, public works and politics: tracing archives of corruption in 1940s-1950s Uttar Pradesh, India
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纸张、公共工程和政治：追踪 20 世纪 40 年代至 1950 年代印度北方邦的腐败档案
DOI：
10.1080/09584935.2017.1292214
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
1.4
通讯作者：
Gould W
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gould W
在摆脱围绕“腐败”对发展和民主进程的成本和收益的旧的线性叙述时，社会科学家倾向于在他们关于全球南方现象的工作中淡化时间性。然而，历史研究提供了一种不同的细微差别，围绕腐败在政治和行政话语中变得重要的时刻。详细和比较地审查有关腐败的档案，对日常国家的运作提出了不同的问题。它还为探索公民身份的性质、印度的民族归属以及腐败行为如何对无权者造成不均衡的影响提供了替代手段。本文以20世纪40年代末和50年代初印度人口最多的北方邦的公共工程部为例，探讨了档案如何向早期后殖民“腐败”话语传达多重和偶然的意义。这些档案将这一现象作为这一时期更大政治进程的工具或象征性资源。这可能会挑战我们对一些更大的问题的看法，这些问题围绕着早期后殖民国家，印度在这一时期的公民/政治社会的性质，国家归属感的想法以及印度和巴基斯坦之间的关系。
In moving away from older linear narratives around the costs and benefits of ‘corruption’ to development and democratic processes, social scientists have tended to downplay temporality in their work on the phenomenon in the global South. Historical research, however, offers a different kind of nuance around moments in which corruption becomes important in political and administrative discourse. Examining archives on corruption in detail and comparatively poses different questions about the operation of the everyday state. It also provides alternative means for exploring the nature of citizenship, national belonging in India and how the disempowered are often unevenly affected by corrupt acts. Using two case studies in the Public Works Department during state transition in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, this article examines how archives convey multiple and contingent meanings to early postcolonial discourses of ‘corruption’. Such archives present the phenomenon as a vehicle or symbolic resource for larger political processes over the period. This potentially challenges our perspective on some of the larger questions surrounding the early postcolonial state, the nature of civil/political society in that period for India, ideas of national belonging and the relationship between India and Pakistan.