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The Post-colonial State – Sudipta Kaviraj

Posted: 19/01/2009 by Aditya Nigam in Empire, History, Modernity, Nation-state, Postcolonial,State, Sudipta Kaviraj, Theory Tags: European state, Guizot, Nation-state, Postcolonial

4The Post-colonial State: The special case of India

By Sudipta Kaviraj

No story of the European state can be complete if it does not take into account its successes/effectsoutside Europe. Francois Guizot’s classic history of the European state requires a supplement:[1] he tellshalf the story. His magisterial account presents the picture of the state inside Europe’s own history. Butthe story of the European state has an equally significant counterpart, a history that happens outside.Outside Europe the modern state succeeded in two senses – first as an instrument, and second, as anidea.

First, the organisation of European societies produced by the modern state was an essential factor inEurope’s ability to bring the rest of the world under its colonial control. Here the state functioned as animmense and unprecedented enhancement of the European societies’ capacity for collective action – inraising military resources, producing the economic resources which under-girded its military success,focusing on clearly defined stratagems of control and conquest. In fact, when other people began toreflect on the reasons for this astonishing success of Europe, they often settled on this as its intangiblebut indispensable instrument. By extending Tocqueville insights, it can be argued that traditional, pre-modern forms of political authority were utterly inadequate in dealing with the power of the modernEuropean state. It could be restrained and eventually effectively opposed only through a movementthat organised the power of entire populations against the colonial state in the form of nationalmobilisations. But it succeeded a second time as an idea. Successful nationalist movements, after de-colonisation, enthusiastically accepted the idea of a modern society centred upon the state’s sovereignty– a principle of social construction entirely different from traditional ones. Except for a few oddindividuals like Gandhi and Tagore, nationalists did not object to the presence of the modern state, onlyto its being in the European’s control. . With independence, they did not wish, except in a few cases likeGandhi, to ‘abolish’ the state, but to use it for their own purposes. Eventually, in the gigantictransformations of third world societies which have followed on de-colonisation, for good or for worse,

were driven through by using the power of this modern instrumentality of the state. In the absence ofother forces – like the bourgeoisie or the proletariat- that played such an important role in Europeansocial transformations – it was the state which almost entirely arrogated to itself the power ofproposing, directing and effecting large scale change. There might be great debates about judgingwhat the state has done; but there is no doubt that it has been the most powerful collective agency. Thatis why the state is central to the story of non-Western modernity, and colonialism is central to the storyof the state.

This paper is not about the post-colonial state in general; only the historically specific form it assumedin India. It is thus necessary to spell out what can be generalised from the Indian case, and whatcannot. First, although India is a single country, its numerical significance is obvious: what happens toits people political is the collective experience of about one-third of the non-Western world. Second, asthere is little dispute today about the desirability of democratic forms of government, the Indian case isparticularly important. It is one of the most successful cases of democracy outside of Europe. But the‘success’ of democracy is an ambiguous idea, capable of a minimal and expansive interpretation. Thenarrow, and minimalist reading of the success of democracy is simply the continuance of a competitiveelectoral system of government: if this system of government continues, it is generally acclaimed as a‘success’ of democracy. But, again in Tocqueville, there is a suggestion about a different reading ofdemocracy’s success – which is not just a continuation of a system of government, but the capacity ofthis government to produce egalitarian effects in society. In India, democracy has been a great successin both these senses. First, in a highly diverse society, divided by religion, castes, classes, languages thedemocratic system has functioned without interruption and without popular apathy for nearly sixdecades now. Second, and more significantly, this institutional continuation of democracy hasproduced in this period a fundamental social transformation which is in some respects startlinglydifferent from the European social processes. The story of Indian democracy is of more general interestfor a third reason as well. If democratic institutions spread and achieve success in the non-Europeanworld, the institutions would produce social results depending on the forms of sociability available ineach historical context. In such cases of future successful democracy, it is likely that non-Europeansocieties might follow a trajectory closer to India’s than to modern Europe’s.

This paper offers a brief sketch of the post-colonial state in India. It interprets post-colonial to mean notthe trivial fact that this state has emerged after the colonial regime departed. It takes it in the strongersense to mean that some of its characteristic features could not have arisen without the particularcolonial history that went before. I also believe, unlike some opther political scientists, that politicalchange in modern India cannot be studied fruitfully – except in the long term historical perspective. Tounderstand the unfolding story of politics and the state today, it is thus essential to start with thecoming of colonial authority.

Modernity in India, and perhaps also in other European colonies, was largely a political affair. Allcommentators on European modernity point out the significant, if not originary role thattransformations of the production and economic processes played in the making of Europeanmodernity. I wish to suggest that in India by contrast the causal powers of economic changes were farmore limited. The type of capitalist development that eventually took place in colonial India wasdetermined to a large extent by political imperatives of state control. Modernity came to India by thepolitical route, indeed through the introduction of a new activity called ‘politics’. Indeed, the activitywas so new that in many vernaculars it is still colloquially referred to by the English-derived word

‘politics’, rather than by an orthogenetic term. This new activity of ‘politics’ assumed primarily threedifferent forms in successive stages of modern Indian history. Initially, it entered with the establishmentof new institutions of colonial rule, eventually crystallizing into a colonial state/regime – which,sociologically, politics was done by British rulers and Indian elites who had transactions with them. Inthe second phase, its scope was extended through the popular nationalist movement from the 1920swhen Indian more generally took part in this as a large, encompassing transformative activity.Although most Indian were affected by this form of politics, their participation and capacity to behaveas actors depended on class and education. Nationalist politics was more the politics of the widereducated elites, much less of the ordinary Indian peasant. Curiously, even after indepdnendence, thisstructure of politics continued unchanged. Since the seventies, in another serious transformation, thebusiness of politics became much more expansive, and lower caste and lower class politicians broughtin the concerted pressures of their ordinary constitutents into the life of the state.

What were the central processes in this transformation? Why has politics of a discursive, representative,democratic character succeeded in India?

The basic argument of this paper is controversial, but fairly simple. There can be no doubt that in thelast two hundred years Indian society has undergone a most fundamental transformation. The centralpoint of this change, in my view, is the transformation of a society in which ‘imperative co-ordination’,to use Weber’s inelegant but useful phrase, was achieved through a religious system based on caste,with comparatively little role of the state, has been turned over to an order which is controlled by thestate – its institutions, its laws, its resources, its functionaries and its place in the ordinary people’simagination. In pre-modern times, control over the state was relatively marginal to the narratives ofsignificant social change. The most significant upheavals in early Indian history were not dynastic orregime changes, but the challenges to the religious organisation of society through reform movementsof Buddhism and Jainism against ritualistic Brahminism in ancient India, rise of the bhakti cults againstHindu orthodoxy in the middle ages. By contrast, from the middle of the nineteenth century the state’srole has been absolutely central in the passage of social change. The colonial state ended in 1947, butthe new way of organising social life through ‘politics’, making the society state-centred, has not merelycontinued, but expanded its jurisdiction over all aspects of social life. The European state thus stilldominates modern Indian life in those two senses. The institutional apparatuses introduced into Indiansociety by British colonial power have not been dismantled, but massively extended. Secondly, the ideaof that to be modern is to live through the state, to organise society through this central institution ofpower, has had a great vindication –ironically through the demise of colonial power itself.

Following this main idea, I shall present my argument in three parts: first part will offer a brief outlineof the arrangement of social power in traditional (pre-colonial) India[2], the second will describe thechanges brought in by colonialism and the Indians’ transaction with its initiatives, and the final sectionwill analyse what has happened to this state after independence – by its becoming a ‘nation-state’, andthe manner in which principles of democracy have been interpreted by social forces in India.

1

Colonial power came to an Indian society which already had an intricate and long-standing politicalorganisation. At the time when colonial power began to exert serious influence, power in Indian societywas structured in a peculiar form. Much of Northern and central India had been under an Islamic

empire for nearly six centuries.[3] Yet the presence of Islam in India was special. In most other societies,a conquering Islamic power had converted and transformed indigenous social practices and religiousdoctrine. In India the irresistible military power of Islamic dynasties learnt to coexist with theimmovable social structure of the Hindu caste system. Indian society, thus, had a dual structure ofpower, composed on strange crossing of Hindu and Islamic principles. From very early times, ‘Hindu’society[4] (an anachronistic description of a collection of different forms united by a single sociologicalorder[5]) had a fairly explicit and intricate arrangement of social power structured in terms of castes.Caste is a peculiar structure of social power which tends to circumscribe the jurisdiction of politicalauthority. To understand the changes that the modern state brought into Indian society, it is necessaryto picture the functioning of caste society. Caste, as is generally known, has two forms – the formal,ritualistic structure of the four varnas, and the effective sociological structure of much more numerousjatis. Sociological analysts usually give less importance to the formal varna structure, but it is significantfor one central reason. It shows that at the centre of the caste order is a scheme of an asymmetric

hierarchy, which separated the goods that ordinary people could seek and value in mundane life, andsegregated group according to these The underlying theory behind the caste order implied that theprimary values/goods of human life were ritual status/ religious prestige, political power to rule oversociety, and the economic power to control wealth.[6] The central logic of the varna version of the castesystem was to separate the social groups which exercised monopolistic control over each of thesehuman goods. The social order of castes separated the search for social prestige and cognitive powers,political and military supremacy and commercial wealth. This also meant that, unlike aristocraticsocieties of pre-modern Europe, political pre-eminence, economic wealth and cultural prestige did notcoincide in a single social elite. Occupational separation by birth meant that social groups lived in threetypes of relations to each other: segmentation, interdependence and hierarchy. Occupationally dividedsocial groups could not seek the same goods; and therefore, it reduced, if not entirely excluded,competition for wealth and power.[7] Secondly, the caste order was based on a generally recognisedsocial constitution, an authoritative allocation of social roles, rewards and therefore life-trajectorieswhich governed conduct in minute details. Significantly, this authoritative allocation did not originatefrom political authority. Political rulers could not alter the rules of this social constitution, but wereexpected to uphold and administer its ‘immutable’ norms, and crucially, were themselves subject to itssegmentally relevant rules.[8] Consequently, in this social world, the power of political rulers waslimited to ‘executive’ functions: ie, to protect the social constitution, punish infringements, and return itto its order of normalcy. In this sense, the political rulers did not have the ‘legislative’ authority toreconstitute this order, except in marginal ways. The idea of modern sovereignty therefore did notapply to the power of the political authority in this society.[9]

However, an obvious objection at this stage of the argument can be: is this not an excessively Hinduview of political power? Since large parts of Indian society were securely governed by Islamic rulerssince the eleventh century, does this model apply to those areas as well? One of the most interestinghistorical questions about India’s political past is about the precise relation Islamic imperial power hadwith the predominantly Hindu society over which it exercised control. Although Islamic religiousdoctrine was fundamentally different from Hinduism (e.g., about idolatry, monotheism, egalitarianismetc.), in sociological terms (i.e., the relation between political authority and the social constitution) Islamin India observed very similar principles, and tacitly accepted the restrictions caste society placed on the‘legislative’ functions of rulers.[10] Thus, the coming of Islam was highly significant in other ways, butnot in terms of the fundamental structure of the relation between political power and social order. Itrequired a state of a very different sort, animated by very different intellectual principles of self-

organisation and endowed with new types of cognitive-statistical appliances, to alter this stable socialconstitution and replace it with a new one. The modern state is, by definition, the state which, becauseof its self-interpretation in terms of the principle of sovereignty, considered this invasive transformationof society possible.

2

Although the colonial system of states meant a subordination of other societies to some metropolitanEuropean powers, the actual transactions of colonialism were exteremely diverse. First, the Europeanstates themselves came from vastly different cultural and institutional contexts, and the differencesbetween European states reflected themselves in the system of political power they brought into thecolonial territories. Secondly, much depended on exactly when a territory was brought under Europeancontrol. Third, European powers followed entirely different projects in different colonies, and thoughexperience of colonial rule in one part of the world informed decisions about another, British rule inAfrica, for instance, was very different from what it was in India. Finally, the exact nature of colonialrule depended not merely on what the colonial power was ideologically intent on doing, orinstrumentally capable of achieving, but also the manner in which the colonized society deployed itsown cultural and political resources. Focusing on India therefore gives us a single story out of manydiverse ones of European colonial rule, and because of the strange intimacy that developed betweenIndia and Britain, it might portray European colonial domination in general in a misleadinglybenevolent light. Not all groups in colonized countries responded to the arrival of European power andculture with the initial enthusiasm of the modern Indian elites. The sharing of at least abstract commonpolitical principles between the colonial rulers and the nationalist elite to produce an effectiveframework of political conflict was also rather unusual, as much as the negotiated nature of theultimate withdrawal of British power.

The state established by British colonialism was precisely an historical force of this kind. Dominionestablished by British power, even though its immediate instrument was a commercial company,occurred in an intellectual context which presupposed sovereignty as a definitional quality of state-power. Thus, when the British eventually turned India into a crown colony, the colonial state assumedthe rights of state sovereignty as these were understood in European discourses of the nineteenthcentury. Interestingly, however, British colonial power did not enter India in the shape of stateauthority: nor was the initial conflict about establishment of control in the form of a struggle betweentwo states – the declining Mughal empire and the British crown. It is the peculiar constitution of society,and the relative externality of the state to the orders of caste practice which allowed this to happen. Bythe first half of the nineteenth century, British organisations already controlled much of commercialactivity, military power, quasi-political administrative apparatuses and had a substantial influence oncultural life in several parts of India. When they finally decided to end the fiction of Mughal rule afterthe rebellion of 1857, Mughal authority was already purely nominal. But this first, and rather peculiarstage in the establishment of British power, stretching over a century, is critical for an understanding ofthe special dynamics of British colonialism in India. In this stage, we must try to sketch out the contoursof advancing colonial power, rather than describe the structure of the ‘colonial state’. British Power,established initially through control over channels and instruments of commerce and revenue-collection, and at the second step, through the introduction of modern cultural apparatuses, slowlyturned into a state of the modern kind – though, its actual institutions were quite different fromEuropean models of the nineteenth century.[11]The most significant implication of this is that Indian

opinion was always internally deeply divided about colonial rule. Older aristocracies which lost theirpower to the British and their supporters were understandably hostile to the gradual entrenchment ofBritish power. Similarly, traditional holders of social authority and prestige, like Brahmin conservatives,often looked at the new influences with hostility. Recent historial research has strongly underlined thefact that the British could establish their control over a large and diverse territory like India, partlybecause they went along with historical trends that had already started in India in the eighteenthcentury, and for this reason, they also drew substantial support from indigenous groups. Importantsections of Indian society, like powerful commercial interests, aspirant political groups, and relativelymodern elites produce by new educational institutions strongly supported the establishment of Britishpower. Eventually, this allowed British rule in India to become an interesting arrangement of powerwhich was administered by large groups of Indian elites who collaborated with British authority andran the colony under British supervision.[12]

Viewed in the historical long term, the colonial state altered Indian society in two different ways.Establishment of a new kind of state, with formal legal claims to sovereignty, was itself a majortransformative project, which against the logic of the limitation of political authority in the segmentarycaste civilisation. It established and familiarized the idea that the apparatuses of the state, especially itslegislative organs, in British or Indian hands, could, in principle, judge social institutions critically, andformally alter them. Some of the most fateful and long lasting effects were not introduced throughpolitical policies narrowly defined, but through more indirect cultural changes it induced through itsadministrative habits.[13] These administrative procedures, like the great statistical enterprises of thecolonial regimes, though not political in themselves, nonetheless caused fundamental changes in socialidentities and their preparation for a new kind of politics. Surprisingly, the colonial administrationchanged identities by implanting cognitive practices which objectified communities, changing themfrom an earlier fuzzy or underspecified form to a modern enumerated one. Processes of enumeration ofthe social world, like mapping and census, irreversibly altered social ontology by giving groups a newkind of agentive political identity.[14] This was not political agency in itself, but a precondition for thedevelopment of a political universe in which political agency could be imparted to large impersonalgroups – like castes or religious communities.

However, the colonial state was subject to contradictory impulses. It certainly set in motion largeinformation-gathering processes under the rationalist belief that in order to rule that large, complexsociety the state and its officials had to know it well. But this impulse of cognitive appropriation was notpart of a state-directed agenda of wholesale social reform. The colonial state was surprisingly cautiousabout unnecessary interference in everyday social life. One strand of colonial administrative thinkingadvocated a state of deliberate inactivity, which did not meddle in social affairs which colonial rulersdid not understand fully, and which might unwittingly create disaffection. Even in case of a barbaricpractice like sati – the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands – the initialresponse of the colonial regime was fairly cautious. Only the righteous indignation of the nativereformers eventually pushed it into legislation banning the practice.[15] Apart from cultural scruples,the colonial state also mistrusted over-expansion of its activities on purely prudential grounds. Britishpolicy oscillated between a reforming impulse, which wanted to restructure Indian society, on rationallines, and an impulse of restraint, which wanted to leave social affairs of Indians alone.[16] The self-limitation of the colonial state, justified at various times by arguments of financial prudence or cultural

relativism, allowed a wide space for the development of a distinctive elite associational politics in 19th

century India. This ability to form associations, exercise group solidarity, pursue their economicinterests, transact business with the colonial state, gave the modern Indian elite the confidence todevelop larger projects of self-government, and led to the growth of Indian nationalism.

Ironically, the specific ideological culture in which the British colonial state operated played a part inthe eventual growth of nationalist arguments in India. Interestingly, the time of the greatest expansionand power of British colonialism in India was coincided with the time when principles of modernliberalism were being established in British political arguments. The Indian empire thus witnessed allthe internal contradictions of an imperialism which also sought to subscribe to liberal doctrine[17] Inthe nineteenth century, liberal political theorists were arguing passionately against the substantialremnants of despotic power from the early stages of sovereignty, and advocating dramatic expansionof citizens’ freedom. Such principles sat uneasily with the demands of the expanding empire,particularly after the mid-nineteenth century. Educated Indians, now well versed in the theoreticalarguments of liberalism and the practical extensions of suffrage, were quick to convert to liberaldoctrine and demand their instant extension to India. Liberal imperialism produced a peculiardynamics through the exchanges between Indian and the British authors on the question of politicalmorals. Indian intellectuals quickly realized that the best form of injustice was the injusticeadministered by liberals. The philosophical anthropology and procedural universalism of liberaldoctrines required that political principles of liberty and equality should be declared in a universalform. Liberalism enunciated its principles in an abstract, impersonal and universal form; but oftenavoided realising them in practice. This was done in one of two usual ways – both unwittingly givingopportunity to nationalists for developing compelling counter-arguments. In some contexts, theuniversal principles were simply ignored in practice, which made it easy for nationalists to accuse theBritish of dishonesty, and embarrass the administration by comparing the principles with actualpractice. In others contexts, theorists like John Stuart Mill tried to produce a more serious intellectualargument using a stage theory of history, of the kind common to Scottish enlightenment thinkers.[18]His writings counselled an indefinite postponement of enjoyment of liberal rights by Indians. On thegrounds that although liberal institutions were, in the abstract, best for all mankind, they were notsuitable for most of human societies until they had attained a required stage of civilisation.[19]Thisingenious argument saved the abstract universality of liberal ideals, but justified imperial rule for anindefinite future. Yet this particular ideological configuration contributed to an extent to thesurprisingly amicable nature of the colonial conflict in India. The intellectual form of the argumentsacknowledged that denial of self-government was not right in principle, and could not be continuedindefinitely. It also created a subtle sense of defensiveness, if not guilt, in the ideological defence of theempire. Indian nationalists appealed to the same principles in their critique of British imperialgovernment in India. This sharing of principles at a very abstract level contributed to the slow butsteady sequence of constitutional shifts, which eventually led to the transfer of power to Indians in 1947.

[The modern Indian elite did not show any signs of support to the abortive uprising against British rulein 1857, because of their extreme distaste for traditional forms of despotic government. The new elitewished to emulate European precedents by setting up a nation-state with representative, if not fullydemocratic institutions. To the nationalists themselves the existence of an Indian nation, who wouldcollectively oppose British authority, had the certainty of an axiom. But in fact, the process of theconstruction of an Indian national identity was far more complex. The ‘idea’ of India in the name ofwhich the national movement spoke with such passion in the twentieth century was an invention, not a‘discovery’ as Jawaharlal Nehru had claimed. For a truly historical understanding of the process by

which groups of disparate people, separated by boundaries of religion, caste, language, culture came toimagine themselves to be ‘Indians’ it is necessary to disaggregate the conventional teleologicalnarratives of Indian nationalism in two ways. The parts of India where the British established theirdomination securely were subjected to the social logic of modernity, and their inhabitants, at least theelites, immediately experienced an unprecedented access of new types of wealth and institutionalpower. In the short term, this generated an intense sense of regional pride, particularly pronouncedamong the Bengalis, the first beneficiaries of a sub-imperial eminence from their association withBritish power. However, this did not contribute to any common sense of Indianness or a sense of Indiannational pride: rather, it made the Bengalis and similarly placed elites elsewhere acutely conscious oftheir preciousness, and accentuated their sense of distance from other, less modern, groups. The comingof print introduced cultural processes which produced standardized vernacular languages, and with thegrowth of vernaculars followed an intensification regional patriotism. It was common in the earlynineteenth century to find poetry celebrating this historical good fortune, and giving thanks for thishappy turn of events to Britannia rather than to Mother India. From the middle of the century howeverthis happy mood of cultural acquiescence to colonial modernity starts changing into attitudes morecritical of British power. Unless these regional patriotisms were transcended, the emergence of an‘Indian’ nationalism was impossible. If these trends of cultural modernization had continued, thetrajectory of Indian history would have been quite different. But from the mid-nineteenth century thispredominant cultural pattern of regional patriotism and implicit mutual separation changed in a newdirection, representing a second stage in the formation of modern perceptions of identity. It is best tocharacterize this culture as anti-colonialist: the major argument turned into a different kind ofcelebration of modern subjectivity. The dignity of the modern subject was seen in enjoying politicalrights of citizenship, made impossible by the legal frame of British colonial rule. In parallel, the dignityof the collective subject of a people was similarly seen to lie in its desire its for its own state and itsrealisation. Within fifty years, the general climate of opinion and political imagination changedunrecognisably: from a celebration of the god fortune which brought Indians into contact with themodernizing British empire, leading intellectuals switched to a very different celebration of theprinciples of self-rule. This form of consciousness still suffered from a major indecision: its negativepoint – opposition to British rule- was clear, but its more positive complement – who were the peoplewho would thus oppose the British – was much less so. The Bengali writer, BankimchandraChattopadhyay – whose novels played a significant role in this transformation of political imagination,and in the transcendence of a regional by an Indian patriotism – was still unclear about the ‘people’ onwhose behalf he was developing his visions of freedom. At various points of his development, thiscrucial ‘we’ seemed to be the Bengalis, or the Hindus, or all Indians. It was only by the end of thenineteenth century that the final step towards the creation of a nationalist consciousness was taken. Bythe turn of the century, in some ways, the intellectual horizon of Indian thinking had changedfundamentally and irreversibly. The central question of political life was, by now, opposition to Britishrule and eventually attainment of freedom; and secondly, the question of identity seemed settled infavour of an Indian nationalism.

Not surprisingly, even in this relatively ‘mature’ stage, after the turn of the century, Indian nationalismexhibited several distinct strands. Four distinct lines of thought could be easily distinguished–exclusivist conceptions of nationalism which believed that the nation-state could only be based onreligious communities of (i)Hindus and (ii)Muslims communities, (iii)pluralistic conceptions ofIndianness based on traditional ideals of religious tolerance advocated primarily by Gandhi, [21] and

(iv)modernist nationalism based on ideas of liberal citizenship and distributive justice.[22] All thesestrands wanted to seize control of the state from British rulers, but to go on to do different things withit.

There was also a significant conflict between two forms of the nationalist imagination of an ‘Indian’identity on which future state would be based – which could be designated as homogenizing andpluralist. Curiously, some of the traditionalists among the Congress leadership drew upon Europeanprecedents of nation-building to claim that the new nation-state could not be viable without ahomogenizing vision of Indianness around a single language (Hindi), single religion (Hinduism) and asingle culture.[23] All the pedagogic powers of the new state should be directed, in their view, towardsproducing a nationalist sentiment of this kind. This view was successfully contested by a radicallydifferent vision of Indianness which saw diversity as a resource, rather than a weakness; and whichargued in favour of a federal constitution that accommodated the traditional conventions of regionalautonomy and division of political authority. Being an Indian was viewed as a second-order identitythat did not cancel out regional cultural identities of Bengalis or Tamils, but subsumed them within astructure that encouraged enriching exchanges between them. The constitution, meticulously discussedover two years, eventually accepted the second view of Indian identity and translated that into theanimating principle of the legal structure.[24]

The new nation-state started with a pluralist conception of the democratic state; but in any historicalview of Indian politics, it is essential, against the nationalist celebration of this beginning, to rememberthe brief, but intense period of several months during India’s partition when state authority andcivilised behaviour utterly collapsed, when the British authorities, who had ruled India with suchconfidence for more than a century, and their aspiring Indian successors lost control over the escalatingorgies of violence. The partition process released dark forces of hatred and communal violence with aloss of several million lives. At an early stage, Indians were reminded that institutions of politicalmodernity and the undisturbed enjoyment of order and civility were fragile and reversibleachievements. It was a stark and terrible lesson in the consequences of state failure. [25]

3

The defining structures of the Indian nation-state after 1947 were produced by a combination ofstructural pressures and conjunctural openings. The state after independence had a double, and insome ways, contradictory inheritance. It was a successor to both the British colonial state and themovement of Indian nationalism. To combine the two sets of attributes – ideals, institutions, aspirations- that emerged from these contradictory legacies was not an easy task. Broadly, the legal institutionsand coercive apparatuses of the state remained similar to the last stage of colonial rule – to thedisappointment of those who expected a radical overhaul of the state. During its nationalist agitations,Congress had identified education, the police and the bureaucracy as the three pillars of colonialdomination, and made repeated promises to introduce radical changes in their functioning. In theevent, when they assumed power, especially after the panic of the partition, they left these threeapparatuses of persuasion and control entirely unreformed. On one point, however, a majortransformation took place – though its full effects became apparent only after a certain historicalinterval. From the early decades of the twentieth century, British authorities had cautiously introducedpartial representative institutions.[26] Despite apprehensions about widespread illiteracy, the new stateintroduced universal franchise in a single dramatic move of inclusion.[27] The ideological discourse of

nationalism had also created vast popular expectations from the state once it was taken over by theCongress, in sharp contrast with the rather limited objectives of the colonial state. Apart from theconventional responsibilities of the state in law and order, it was expected to play an enormous role inthe ill-defined and constantly expanding field of ‘development’. Thus the state that took over fromcolonial rule partly continued its legacy, partly undertook hugely expansive new responsibilities.

The entire story of the state for the half-century after independence can be seen in terms of twoapparently contradictory trends. In an apparent paradox, the history of Indian politics saw thesimultaneous strengthening of two tendencies that can be schematically regarded as the logic ofbureaucracy and the logic of democracy. The antecedents of both these trends could be found in thehistory of colonial rule : the gradual domination of the society by modern state institutions whichbrought significant social practices under its surveillance, supervision and control, and the equally slowand cautious introduction of practices of representation – so that this increasing control could be seennot as imposition of external rules of discipline, but impositions of rules and demands generated by thesociety itself. Both trends became more extensive and powerful after independence.

Under British rule, extension of bureaucracy was mainly sanctioned by a rhetoric of state efficiency;under nationalist leadership, this was substituted by the rhetoric of ‘development’. For entirelyfortuitous reasons, at the time of the state’s foundation, Nehru came to enjoy an extraordinary degreeof freedom in shaping its basic policies. The death of Gandhi and Patel, who had very differentideological inclinations, left the conservative sections of the Congress without effective leadership.Unopposed temporarily, Nehru imparted to this state a developmentalist and mildly redistributiveideology. According to this ideological vision, the state was seen as the primary instrument ofdevelopment with extensive responsibilities in the direct management of production and redistribution.In part, this was because the massive industrialisation programme that India undertook afterindependence could not be financed or managed by private capital; in part, because private capitalistdevelopment was expected to increase income inequality, while state-managed development couldsimultaneously contribute to redistribution of wealth. Eventually, this led to a massive expansion of thebureaucracy without a corresponding change in its culture. Rapid over-extension of the bureaucracyintensified its inefficiency, reduced observance of procedures and produced large zones of corruptionand malpractice. Eventually this led to a paradox of the over-extended state – it was expected tosupervise all aspects of activity – from the management of the army, to running the administration tothe provision of schools and hospitals. Its vast reach and responsibility resulted in a reduction of thereliability of delivery of social services. The state in contemporary India became ubiquitous, but alsouniversally unreliable. But over the hald century of its existence, subtle changes took place in thedevelopmental state itself; its structures and practices changed imperceptibly. Initially, during theNehru years, the state was seen primarily as an engine of production, specially active in the productionof essential industrial capacities and infrastructure. But the ideological justification of this constantlyexpanding state machinery was in terms of arguments of distributive justice. If the state managedheavy industries, the argument went, existing inequalities of income would not increase; and it wouldalso act against the concentration of resources in a few private hands – classical Marxist arguments forsocialist politics. In the first two decades after independence, state institutions with the responsibility ofestablishing and running heavy industries performed with reasonable efficiency. They helped setupand run a considerable heavy industrial base driven by the current economic theory of self-reliance andimport-substituting industrialization. By the early seventies, a certain change in the character of stateenterprises was discernible, and in their nexus with political authority. ‘The state sector’, as it came to be

called in India, came to control vast economic resources – through its gigantic, interconnected networksof financing, employment, contracts associated with both productive and welfare activities of the stateenterprises. Nehru’s government accorded to these enterprises a relative decisional and managerialautonomy to ensure technical correctness of decision-making. With the vast increase of their resources,political leaders and ministries began from the eighties to impose more direct control on theiroperations. By the mid-seventies, these enterprises and the state machinery in general had changedtheir character significantly. The government leadership under Indira Gandhi slowly abandoned itsaspiration of serious direction to the economy through directive state planning. Instead of being seen assegments of an internally coherent policy of development planning, these enterprises sank into a logicof uncontrolled bureaucratisation, sinking deeper into inefficiency. Anxiety over inefficiency mademanagements more dependent on support of political leaders for survival. The price they extracted forthis support was indirect access to the use of these resources for political ends. The huge economicbureaucracy of the developmental state increasingly had nothing to do with actual redistributiveobjectives, but became utterly dependent on a disingenuous use of that rhetoric. The sizeable economicsurplus under the state’s control came to be used for illegitimate purposes by elected politicians whodeveloped a vested interest in defending this large, over-stretched, inefficient state.

The other undeniable historical process in political life was the logic of democracy: but the lines of its

movement were at times surprisingly different from European democracy in the 19th century. First,unlike the gradual, incremental development of the suffrge in most European states, democracy wasintroduced to India is a single grandly dramatic gesture of political inclusion. Although the colonialadministration had slowly introduced representative institutions from early twentieth century, theelectorate at the last election under colonial administration was about 14 % of the adult population. Theconstitution adopted in 1950 installed universal adult suffrage in a country that was 70% illiterate. Thenew entrants into the arena of politics thus instantly outnumbered social elites already entrenched inrepresentative institutions. This was likely to result in a conflict over representation, entrant groupscontesting the claim of elite politicians to ‘represent’ the entire nation – an eventually that did happen,but after a lapse of time. The probable reason for this was that traditional habits of deference towardssocially dominant groups, upper caste and classes, decline slowly, over a period of time. For about twodecades, although the poor and the disprivileged in Indian society had the formal right to vote, theyactually left the arena of institutional politics entirely in the hands of the social elites. Paradoxically, theinstitutions of democratic government seemed to function with impeccably formal propriety preciselybecause levels of participation were low, and popular expectation from democratic government werelimited. The usual problems of electoral politics – resources allocation on the basis of electoral pressure,which makes long-term decisions particularly difficult – did not affect Indian democratic governmentin the Nehru years. It was clear by the seventies that ordinary voters, especially the urban poor and thelower castes in the countryside, had learnt strategic use of the vote. They made greater demands on thepolitical system, and politicians from these groups began to emerge first into state governments, andlater into national government. This somewhat delayed but decisive entry of the common people intothe life of the state utterly transformed its character. Politics came to be in the vernacular in two senses.Literally, much of political discourse began to be in the vernacular, in contrast to the first decades whenEnglish was the mandatory language of politics; but, more significantly, politics came to be shapedafter the seventies by a kind of conceptual vernacular as well, used by politicians who did not have theconventional education through the medium of English and whose political imagination was notdetermined by their knowledge of European historical precedents. The political leaders who had

devised the democratic constitution had expected democracy to have wider social effects; but theirexpectations followed the familiar trajectories of European democracy. Introduction of moderndemocracy in Europe made the stark inequalities of class of nineteenth century capitalist societyincreasingly unsustainable. Radical leaders like Nehru had therefore expected that as ordinary Indiansacquired democratic consciousness, they would case to identify themselves through categories of thetraditional caste hierarchy, and demand great economic equality. Democratic institutions will thuslead, in the long term, to modernist movements for reduction of poverty. But what happened throughhalf a century of democratic politics defied and confounded such expectations. Democracy certainly ledto vast revolutionary effects in the Indian context as well – but that historic change resembledTocqueville’s revolution more than Marx’s. Democratic politics produced a fundamental transformationof Indian society – but not in terms of class. Unlike Europe the logic of democracy has not led togreater equality of income, but a real redistribution of dignity. The deep European influence on India’sintellectuals made them subtly predisposed, irrespective of ideology, to underestimate the socialpresence of caste. Both liberals and socialists, who dominated the discourse of India’s political world inthe early decades, expected that traditional forms of belonging and behaviour would disappear underthe twin pressure of the economic logic of industrialization and the political logic of electoraldemocracy. Historically the unfolding of modernity has proved enormously more complex. The mostcomprehensive defining principle of India’s social life before the coming of modern influences wasundeniably the caste order. That order determined the individuals’ life chances, and the principles thatgoverned the relation between the collective bodies of castes in the social system. The long term effectsof economic modernity of this social structure has been more straightforward. In all parts of India,despite regional variations, the expansion of economic modernity – urbanization and industrialdevelopment – has led to a decline of caste observances in daily life. Hindu rules forbiddingintermixture at marriage, social intercourse, commensality have lost their former ability to constrainindividual behaviour and private lives. Ironically, however, in the public arenas of political life, casteseems to have become much more powerful, defying modernist expectations. Caste affiliations have notbroken down or faded in political life under the impact of electoral politics; the order of caste life hassimply adapted to the operation of parliamentary democracy to produce large caste-based electoralcoalitions. Paradoxically, the historical demand of this form of caste politics is not the end of caste-identity, but a democratic recognition of equality among caste groups – a state of affairs unthinkableaccording to the traditional grammar of caste behaviour. An anomalous accompaniment of thisdevelopment is the peculiar translation of the language of rights in contemporary Indian culture. InIndian society, despite pressures of modernity, the process of sociological individuation has not gonevery far. Consequently, although the universe of discourse is ringing with unceasing demands forrecognition of rights, rarely have these advocated the rights of atomistic liberal individuals. In a worldmade of very different principles of sociability – of castes, regions, communities – the strident newlanguage of rights has sought to establish primarily rights of contending groups. Most major radicaldemands in Indian politics are not for group equality rather than income inequality betweenindividuals – leading to a strange fading from the discourse of one of the poorest societies of the worldof a politics centred on poverty.

It is not surprising that elite groups, who have most to lose from the assertion of demands of lowercastes, have given large-scale support to a counter-move through a new kind of politics of religiouscommunities. Hindu nationalist parties were relatively unsuccessful electorally in the period ofCongress hegemony. But in a climate of intensifying lower-caste assertion, their insinuation against theCongress policies of muddled secularism – that it discriminated against the Hindus in return for secure

voting support from the Muslim minority – attracted substantial upper-caste backing. Assisted by aninflammatory rhetoric, centred on an old mosque allegedly built on a destroyed temple in the sixteenthcentury, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party made dramatic electoral gains in the elections inthe 1990s to emerge finally as the largest single party in parliament, and ruling India for the last fiveyears with the support of volatile coalitions. But what is remarkable in this contest is that the BJP hassought to fashion a response to the politics of lower caste groups by appeal to the emotions of anotherform of community. Communitarianism in Indian politics takes complex and at times extremelyunpleasant forms.

But democracy is a complex ideal which appeals equally to two types of political principles : it claims itslegitimacy on one side, from the pursuit of conflict through established, transparent procedures, whichensure that no group loses out finally and irreversibly, so that they continue to follow their objectivesthrough the recursive electoral contests. On the other hand, it appeals to the principles of participationin both its deliberative and expressive forms. The politics of community assertion in India has created apotential conflict between these two principles of participation and proceduralism. Political partiesrepresenting large communities with a strong sense of grievance have often regarded procedures ofliberal government as unjustified obstacles in their pursuit of justice. Procedures are sometimesthreatened by the politics of intense participation.

Another peculiarity of the story of modern politics in India is the simultaneous power of democracy andbureaucracy. Although theoretically bureaucracy and democracy, the increased power and reach ofthe state seems to conflict, in principle, with democratic demands against it, this apparent paradox isnot difficult to explain. Democratic participation has increased ordinary people’s expectations aboutconditions and quality of life. In a society in which does not generate enough wealth to enable groupsin society to pursue their institutional aims, all demands for amelioration – for hospitals, schools, roads– are directed at the state, which is the only possible source for creation of collective goods. Thus the riseof democracy has reinforced the tendency towards the extension of the bureaucratic state.

For understanding of what Europe has done to the history of other cultures over the long term, theIndian story is significant for two reasons. A common pessimistic argument asserts that the ‘export’ ofthe state, with bounded territories and modern institutions of governance, to other parts of the worldthrough European colonialism has largely failed. In fact, it has forced people to live their lives,unsuccessfully, under uncomprehended frameworks leading to increased tensions and expandedviolence. Eventually, the argument runs, such historical experiments have failed leading to commonexperiences of state collapse. The Indian case encourages a more optimistic conclusion: it shows that acountry comprising nearly a fifth of the world’s population has successfully mastered the techniques ofestablishing the modern state and, despite widespread illiteracy learnt to work the principles ofdemocracy in their own way. Despite the complex demands on its ideological and material resourcesIndia has not seen a collapse of its institutional structure leading to a breakdown of minimal socialorder. Interestingly, although its state has been evidently overstretched, it has managed to avoidcomplete bankruptcy and failure to provide basic services. India has avoided the threat of a ‘statecollapse’ in both the economic and more fundamental political forms.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of the Indian story has been the relative success of democracy. Therehave long been arguments in political theory that have asserted economic or cultural conditions for thesuccess of democratic government. Either a certain level of prior economic growth, or an underlying

cultural common sense which accords equal value to individuals have been regarded as necessarupreconditions for the success of democratic institutions. The relative success of Indian democracy defiesboth arguments. In the politics of one of the poorest countries of the world, with a traditional orderbased on the pure principle of hierarchy, democracy has been for half a century a universallyuncontested ideal. But ‘success of democracy’ in India can mean two different things. In much ofWestern journalism, and a part of academic analysis as well success of democracy simply means theuninterrupted continuance of electoral politics. Actually, however, the ‘success’ of Indian democracyought to be viewed in Tocqueville’s terms – as the historical development of a social force that hastransformed fundamental social relations of everyday lives. It is true that the historical outcomes, thepolitical trajectories of this story of democracy have been quite different from the great Europeanstories of democratic transformation. But that is hardly suprirising. Democratic institutions operate onthe basis of template of the specific sociability available in each society. If democracy achieves successin other non-European societies in future, their trajectories are likely to resemble the Indian narrativerather than the European ones. It is impossible to predict the exact direction this narrative of politicaltransformation of a hierarchical society might take; but, despite the fact that it has happened in relativehistorical silence, without the dramatic violence that accompanied the American or French revolutions,it will rank as a story of one of the great transformations of modern history.

[1] F. Guizot, History of Civilisation in Europe, Translated and edited by L. Seidentop, Penguin,Harmondsworth,

[2] It is important to strike a note of complexity here. Recent historical research has suggested that theradical break in Indian history was not the establishment of colonial power. Certain changes in the

economic and political structures of power in Indian society were already under way in the 18th

century. The British could establish their regime in India precisely because they went with these trends.Thus the break between the colonial and the pre-colonial has to be seen in a considerably more complexfashion than earlier, primarily nationalist historiography suggested.

[3] See C A Bayly, Indian Society and British Empire, CUP, 1989. For a different argument, and basedon a different regional perspective, Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown, and S Subrahmanyam andOthers,

[4] Charcaterising this entire society as Hindu is both misleading and anachronistic. It is misleading inthe sense that it makes it appear that this society had a self-consciousness of being a single unit, whichit clearly did not have. Secondly, Hindu is paradoxically inescapable anachronistic appellation. Thesegroups did not have a common name for themselves, though they had an unspoken awareness thatthey had a common religious character, when compared to other religions like Islam. On the questionof appellations, see D. Lorenzen, ‘Who invented Hinduism?’, Comaprative Studies in Society andHistory, 2000.

[5] Al Biruni the great Islamic scholar despaired of discovering any doctrinal singleness in the Hindusects, but decided, brilliantly, that they key to their unity lay in a sociological order of Brahminism. AlBiruni’s India.

[6] The ideology of the caste system is concerned with a meticulous enumeration of the possible andlegitimate grounds on which one individual could be given precedence over another. One of the slokasof the Manusmrt, the canonical text specifying caste conduct states:

[7] This principle ruled out competition for these goods, except among members of the same caste. Butthe caste system was consistent, if nothing else. By territorial segmentation, it sough to reduce evenintra-caste competitiveness.

[8] The Manusnrti, the most wellknown and widely used reference for social rules, for instance, ladidown detailed rules for the coduct of each major caste, including those of the ruler. The text does not setup and advisory relation with the rulers, as in the case of early modern European texts of avice forprinces; it speaks in a tone of assured authority.

[9] Several modern historians have observed this peculiarity of political power in traditional India, andconsequently, argued against the casual extension of an unqualified concept of the state. In recenthistoriography, authors have borrowed the idea of a ‘segmentary state’ from political anthropologydealing with Africa. Bernard Cohn made the initial suggestive borrowing, and it has been continuedwith slight modification by Burton Stein. My argument is not about segmentation of territorialjurisdiction, but limitation of political authority over social functions. But this argument supplementsthe other. See Burton Stein, ‘State formation revisited’, Modern Asian Studies,

[10] There can be two different arguments about this question. The first, more common, asserts thepeculiarity of South Asian Islam, and points to the coexistence of Islamic imperial power with castesociety, and lack of wholesale covnversion as evidence that Indian Islam should be treated as a separatereligious formation. Accepatnce of the social order of caste would then be seen as a special feature ofSouth Asian Islamic culture. But it is also possible to argue that this kind of relation between politicalauthority and a ‘scoail constituion’ is more common. Some historians have argued that there existed avery similar relation between an Islamic ‘social constitution’ and a predominantly ‘exeutive’ politicalauthority in Middle Esatern Islamic empires as well. In that case, this should be seen as a generalfeature of Hindu, Islamic and generally of agrarian, religious, premodern societies. See, for the secondview, K.A. Nizami,

[11] It is necessary to recognise that although the colonial state in India was a formal part of theimperial political institutions, its actual governing institutions and principles were quite different fromthe ones in Britain. Historians have pointed out that many experimental measures were first tried out inthe colonies, and then brought back to the metropolitan system. More generally, too colonial governingexperience at times had a serious influence on internal political rule. See, for example, Sudipta Sen, ‘TheColonial frontiers of the Georgian state’ Journal of Historical Sociology, Blackwells,

[12] For the new historical arguments suggesting this ‘indigenous’ force in favour of British success, seeC A Bayly, Indian Society, David Washbrook, MAS, 1988, and in A Porter (ed) Burton Stein, ‘Stateformation reconsidered’, MAS, Parallel arguments are advanced in Sanjay Subrahmanyam(ed)

[13] Recently, much work has been done on how the information order of colonial India was created,and how it underpinned colonial administration. See, for instance, D. Irschik, University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, 199, and C A Bayly, Empire and Information, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1998.

[14] I have discussed this in greater detail in ‘The imaginary institution of India’ in Gyanendra Pandeyand Partha Chatterjee (eds) Subaltern Studies, vol VII, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1994. Cf alsoArjun Appadurai, ‘Number in the colonial imagination’ in Orientalism and the Post-colonialPredicament, Pennsylvania University Press, Philadelphia, 1996.

[15] For a detailed account of the intellectual debates around sati, see Lata Mani, ContentiousTraditions: The debate on sati in colonial India, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998.

[16] British utilitanrians had a particularly close association with the making and administering ofcolonial policies. Both James and John Stuart Mill worked at the India Office; and utilitarian doctrineshad extensive influence on policy making in general. Indeed, some of the more radical andcontroversial suggestions of utilitarianism, which could not be tried out in Britain because of oppositionfrom others, could be tested in India, and on the evidence of their success, brought back to themetropolitan society.

For the influence of utilitarianism in colonial policy, see Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India,

[17] For an excellent general treatment of this particular dilemma of liberal theory, see Uday SinghMehta, Liberalism and Empire, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997. For the ideology of theBritish Empire, David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, 2000.

[18] Mills’ arguments about India can be found in his On Liberty, introduction, especially pp 73Considerations of Representative Government, chapters XVI and XVII. His detailed comments on Indiangovernment are collected in Writings on India, Collected Works of J S Mill, XXX, edited by John MRobson, Martin Moir and Zawahir Moir, Routledge, London, 1990.

[19] One of the most famous cases of such arguments in J S Mill are in On Liberty, chapter and OnRepresentative Government

[20] I have presented an argument about these changes in greater detail in ‘ The imaginary institutionof India’, in Gyan Pandey and Partha Chatterjee (eds), Subaltern Studies, Volume 7, Oxford UniversityPress, Delhi, 1994.

[21] For an excellent discussion about the contexts from which Gandhi’s thought emerged, see BhikhuParekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1994, and the more conciseGandhi, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.

[22] The best representative of this modernist strand is Jawaharlal Nehru. For his ideas aboutnationalism and its intellectual origins, see Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, Volume I, JonathanCape, London, 1981. Gopal’s subsequent volumes, II and III, tend to ignore intellectual arguments in itstreatment of the post-independence part of Nehru’s life. For an excellent presentation of a ‘Nehruvian’argument in the current context see Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, Hamish Hamilton, London,1997, chapter 4: ‘Who is an Indian?’. The ideas and ideals of the poet, Rabindranath Tagore, are alsohighly significant in the evolution of a ‘modernist’ nationalism, though he was more critical of severalaspects of capitalist modernity in the West than Nehru. The best example of his ideas about ‘who is anIndian?’ is in his famous novel, Gora, translated by S. Mukherjee, Orient Longman, Delhi,1996.

[23] These arguments raged in nationalist discussions from the thirties, but they were formulated withgreat precision and purposefulness in the debates of the Constituent Assembly of India from 1946 toNovember 1949. These debates are analysed in Granville Austin, India’s Constitution: The Cornerstoneof A Nation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964. I have analysed some of these arguments in ‘Modernityand Politics in India’, Daedalus, Winter, 2000.

[24] Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution, chapter.

[25] The political aspects of the partition of India had been a conventional subject for historians.Recently, a new history of the partition has started to emerge which focus on narratives of women andsuffering individuals, attempting to unearth the darker sides of that history which got lost in theanalysis of politics of large groups. See, in particular, Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, C.Hurst, London, 2000, and Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, forthcoming.

[26] Major institutional changes were introduced several times in the first half of the twentieth century.The Morley-Minto reforms of 192 began the processes of institutional change; further changes in thestructure of government with government by Indian parties in the provincial legislatures wereintroduced by the Government of India Act of 1935. The first elective governments took office in 1937.This act formed the main legal template for certain parts of the constitution adopted in 1950.

[27] Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution analyses the discussions about universal suffrage. Moredetailed treatment can be found in B. Shiva Rao (ed) , The Making of the Indian Constitution, I.I.P.A.,four volumes, Delhi, 1964.

Commentsnotrelevantnow says:06/08/2011 at 10:57 PM

Please let me know if this article has been published anywhere. I noticed that some references are abit dated (Iike the G Pandey reference in n.25).

thank you,NRN

Aditya Nigam says:07/08/2011 at 12:50 PM

Yes, it has been published recently in one of the three vol set published by Permanent Black in2010. Perhaps it is in the volume entitled ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’

notrelevantnow says:23/08/2011 at 11:07 PM

thank you for letting me know!

Democracy and Development in India – Dr. Krishna Menon (www.socialsciences.in)| LSR Political Science says:

31/08/2011 at 11:03 AM

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