DIALOGUES-Fourth Critical Studies -Local Modes

Abstract

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork done in a participatory, decentralised governmental watershed development project in Kalahandi, Odisha, Eastern India, it is argued that the last two and half decades have seen the growth of what I call the Mission mode of state-craft in which work of the government increasingly happens through the various Missions as opposed to the traditional way of doing government through the various line departments. This has involved a shift towards, what I call the ‘quotidian logistics’ of state-fabrication over the last two to three decades, as opposed to what I term as the ‘symbolic logistics’ operational in the immediate aftermath of decolonisation. This has involved a growing shift of focus from ‘physical’ to ‘social’ technologies of state-craft. I analyse such a shift through five key axes.

Crafting the state in the mission mode has seen the governmental apparatus reaching deep into hitherto marginal rural areas and population groups through Missions such as the various state and district level Watershed Development Missions. This has involved the creation of new institutional assemblages such as village-level watershed development committees that allow for state dispersal and the incorporation of civil society organisations into the ambits of the state. These moves have resulted in increasing sightings of the state, and in dramatically increasing the number of villagers that come in direct contact with the governmental apparatus. I argue that in terms of regimes governing the logic of statecraft the emergence of the Mission mode of doing government through this shift from the symbolic logistics of state-fabrication to the quotidian one has involved a shift from what I call a ‘regime of visibility’ to a ‘regime of tactility’. I argue that talking about the state in this way helps us in keeping the focus on the state (as opposed to politics), and helps us in narrativising the state without necessarily slipping into narratives and theories of power.

Bionote

Currently Sailen Routray is based out of Bangalore and works as a Faculty Fellow at the Azim Premji University, but he still calls Bhubaneswar home. He has studied English Literature and Social Work in Bhubaneswar and Bombay, and is enrolled as a doctoral student in Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore. His doctoral research is located at the intersections of anthropology of development and anthropology of the everyday state. He likes to dabble in cooking and translation, and has an emergent interest in political theory, doing social sciences in the Indian languages, and the ‘history of the present’ of Odisha.