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The Everyday State and Society in Modem India. Edited by C. J. FULLER and VERONIQUE BENEI. London: C. Hurst, 2001. viii, 221 pp. £35.00 (cloth); £14.95 (paper).
Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment. Edited by GERALD JAMES LARSON. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. viii, 362 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
There was a time when the state occupied the center stage of political thinking, simply because political theory cannot but be preoccupied with the nature of codified power. In the recent past, however, we can discern three moments when the state disappeared from ideas of the political. The first moment occurred when the political-systems approach, which originated in the United States, displaced the state and its attendant concerns such as justice from the center stage of theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the second moment, that is, in the 1980s, theorists took seriously Michel Foucault's advice that we should commit regicide in order to understand the micropolitics of power in everyday life and began to look at the intricacies of everyday existence in civil society. By the late 1990s, the state had once again disappeared into the mists of political time mainly because it had been pluralized via notions of governance. Therefore, it was really in the 1970s that the state loomed large in the political perceptions of political theorists through and in a series of exciting debates.
But, has the state really been pluralized? Or decentered? Or hollowed out as theories of governance tell us? Does the idea of the state not continue to preoccupy conceptions of the political simply because it is a condensate of power, the roots of which lie in civil society? The editors of The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, certainly think so. In an excellent introduction, C. J. Fuller and John Harriss suggest that the idea of the state and the myth of its sublime qualities are still extant in modern India. The everyday structures and institutions of the state in most political and administrative contexts are now prosaically at the center of modern India's imagination (p. 26). But rather than see the modern Indian state in institutional or structural terms, the contributors to this volume concentrate on the...