This book studies patronage in South Asia to get a better understanding of the vernacular workings of this potent political form in the region. Since patronage is intertwined with social, political, historical and economic moorings it can be best studied with a multidisciplinary lens. The book handles patronage as a historically emergent and culturally embedded institution, the logic of which must be worked out from the socio-historical ground up. In India patronage thrives not despite, alongside, or in place of—but through and as a conduit for—state governance, not as a vestigial survival of pre-modern politics, but as a vital political form in itself. Studies in the book focus on the persistent norms of conduct and communication, forms of economic and ritual exchange, and mutual expectations, which distinguish patronage patterns in South Asian countries from those observed anywhere else.



With South Asian states rapidly rising as major, but often ostensibly troubled, players on the global political arena, this volume will offer crucial insights to academic and lay readers looking for a better understanding of vernacular politics in the region, as well as in many other parts of the world.

Introduction

Anastasia Piliavsky

Part I: The Idea of Patronage in South Asia

1. The Political Economy of Patronage, Preeminence and the State in Chennai

Mattison Mines

2. The Temporal and the Spiritual, and the So-called Patron–client Relation in the Governance of Inner Asia and Tibet

D. Seyfort Ruegg



3. Remnants of Patronage and the Making of Tamil Valaiyar Pasts

Diane Mines

4. Patronage and State-making in Early Modern Empires in India and Britain

Sumit Guha



Part II: Democracy as Patronage

5. The Paradox of Patronage and the People’s Sovereignty

David Gilmartin

6. India’s Demotic Democracy and Its ‘Depravities’ in the Ethnographic Longue Durée Anastasia Piliavsky

7. ‘Vote Banking’ as Politics in Mumbai

Lisa Björkman

8. Political Fixers in India’s Patronage Democracy

Ward Berenschot

9. Patronage and Autonomy in India’s Deepening Democracy

Pamela Price, with Dusi Srinivas

10. Police and Legal Patronage in Northern India

Beatrice Jauregui

11. Patronage Politics in Post-Independence India

Steven I. Wilkinson



Part III: Prospects and Disappointments

12. Kingship without Kings in Northern India

Lucia Michelutti

13. The Political Bully in Bangladesh

Arild Engelsen Ruud

14. The Dark Side of Patronage in the Pakistani Punjab

Nicolas Martin

15. Patronage and Printing Innovation in Fifteenth-century Tibet

Hildegard Diemberger

16. The Im(morality) of Mediation and Patronage in South India and the Gulf

Filippo Osella



Contributors

Bibliography

Index

"Focuses on the persistent norms of conduct and communication, forms of economic and ritual exchange, and mutual expectations, which distinguish patronage patterns in South Asian countries from those observed anywhere else"--