Narratives of corruption: Anthropological and fictional accounts of the Indian state

Abstract

In this article I attempt to analyze stories about corruption for what they might reveal about the Indian state. By triangulating my own fieldwork data, a prize-winning novel written by an official of the Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) state government, and the accounts of corruption by one of the major social anthropologists of India, F.G. Bailey, I claim that narratives of corruption, and the actions of bureaucrats and agencies in relation to those narratives, are fundamental to the constitution of the state in contemporary India. I argue that the success of policies geared to providing basic needs to the poor depend on changing these narratives and thereby altering the affective relations that poor..