REGIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
Three Planes of Space
Examining Regions Theoretically in India
Sudipta Kaviraj
There are three ways of looking at the question of
regionality in India: “generalisation,” “fragmentation”
and “composition.” Generalisation means gathering
primary information from a determinate region, and
assuming that all parts of India possess identical or
similar characteristics. Fragmentation means believing
that, since the regions are so fundamentally real, nothing
existing beyond the regional level has any serious,
compelling historical reality. Composition asserts that
regions are historical and remain bound together
within one single frame of some kind: political,
economic or cultural.
Sudipta Kaviraj (sk2828@columbia.edu) teaches Indian Politics and
Intellectual History at Columbia University.
56
J
ust like the concept of the dog that does not bark, the
concept of a region does not exist on the material ground
of space. It is a concept and exists historically and, like any
other social concept, is subject to the basic rules of historicity.
It is always legitimate to ask when and why it came into exist-
ence, and what people were doing with it and to themselves in
devising a concept exactly like that.
To think fundamentally about something is a paradoxical
act—simple in some ways, hard in others—of thinking of our
categories, even the most elementary among them, as provi-
sional, fallible and corrigible. These three characterisations are
separate types of activities. To treat a concept as provisional—the
most profound task of historicisation—is to acknowledge, as an
a priori rule, that ideas, which we think through to describe,
analyse and evaluate social objects, are historical and may not
have existed at all times. This implies that they appeared at a
particular time, and will disappear presumably. But this also
imposes a responsibility on us to try and determine when and
why a concept emerged. Concepts can be fallible in many ways. It
could be that academics use a concept unproblematically,
which ordinary people do not either use, or use in a different
way. Corrigibility naturally stems out of this prior task. If we
find that either our concepts do not do their referential work,
or actors use others, there is a demand for correcting them.
Any historical study of social science or historical thinking will
discover quickly that much of the history of social science consists
precisely in this—how the categories through which analysts
see and examine their social objects have changed in history,
and with what consequences. Here, we are concerned mainly
with two concepts, namely India and its regions. I suspect that
India is in some ways the much more problematic concept, and
therefore more interesting to examine; but, historically speak-
ing, regions are no less challenging.
Concepts like “nation” and region are historical in two clear
senses. In the first sense, we can, the moment we expand the
temporal span of attention, see that these concepts are referen-
tially unstable/dynamic and have changed through historical
processes like state formation, economic change, cultural con-
figurations, etc. These are also historical in the second sense,
in that these are formed by contingent epistemic processes,
that is, through highly specific ways in which intellectuals
or social agents have epistemically formed these concepts by
actual, determinable epistemic/cognitive moves that we can
study. To think about them critically is to suspend the easy
belief that these are self-evidently clear, but ask what these
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are like: Are these real in the sense that they point to some
definable reality, and real in what ways? I shall start with the
reality of regions and in the end I shall add a few disorienting/
critical remarks about the always contentious idea of India.
How regions are formed, and how these formations changed
in history are among the central questions for understanding
Indian social reality, which, strangely, remains underexplored
in social science. Diversity is generally celebrated, or more
recently with the rise of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), deplored, but rarely studied with attentiveness.
Yet, one of the most fundamental truths about India is that it
is, in a manner of speaking, unlike itself. Its capacity for con-
founding generalisations is infinite, and the primary reason is
that whatever we say about “India,” it is always possible to find
a counterexample to contest it.
What we designate as India is such a large space that it is
reasonable from the start to expect that what it contains inside
would not be uniform whatever dimension we consider. We
should presume lack of uniformity or difference/diversity. As
there are several vectors of difference—religious identity,
natural geographic variety, language—each of these can in
principle yield a one-dimensional map of diversity. India is
so difficult to conceive precisely because of this diversity of
diversities, the different kinds of difference that constitute it.
Each of these elements of diversity—religion, language, caste—
yields a spatial map, and the idea of India at any time is a convex
product of such maps of single-element diversity superimposed
on one another. I think this form of profound complexity should
be the taken-for-granted starting point for any examination
of Indian politics, large or small. It is important to remind
ourselves that the effects of this structure of complexity have
to be read not merely when we study subjects that span across
India, like capitalism, or the state. It has to be deciphered
even in the smallest localities in the smallest pieces in which
capitalism and state exist in their infinitesimal incarnations
which are combined and composed to produce their large forms.
A Leftist Parable
Let me start with a leftist parable, an incident of leftist history
that first pushed me to think of this as a problem. In the late
1940s, the Communist Party of India (CPI) decided, in retro-
spect somewhat unwisely, to declare that the political inde-
pendence was false and, consequently, to challenge Jawaharlal
Nehru’s new government through military insurgency. That
policy went through two clear phases, separated by an inter-
esting line of difference. The communists did not undertake
any serious initiative without serious theoretical examination.
After theoretically deciding that the Nehru government was a
mere arm of not only the indigenous bourgeoisie, but also of
Western imperialism, they examined the social forces on
which their impending revolution was to be based. Initially,
under the leadership of B T Ranadive, a trade union leader
based in the great city of Bombay, they decided that the revolu-
tion was to follow the model of the Russian Revolution. The
proletariat—based in urban and industrial centres like Bombay
and Calcutta, and along the network of Indian Railways—
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REGIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
were the most revolutionary class in Indian society, and a
strike at the metropolitan cities would paralyse the country’s
capitalist economy and install a revolutionary government.
After nearly six months of strenuous efforts to trigger an urban
revolution, catalysed by a massive railway strike, they accepted
the failure of this policy and decided that, since India was
primarily an agricultural society, they should pin their hopes
on the radical peasantry as the leading revolutionary class,
and attempt a Chinese-style revolutionary uprising based in
the most remote agrarian regions. From their already existing
base among the radicalised peasantry in Telangana in Andhra
Pradesh, they wanted to launch a peasant revolution that
would gradually encircle the cities, and capture national power.
If we examine their theoretical analyses of Indian society
and its contradictions, we find a paradoxical picture. In effect,
there was a strange disconnect between their theory of society,
and the theory of revolution. Diversity was so overwhelmingly
apparent to any observer that analysts of Indian society could
not escape registering this undeniable fact. But, Marxists had
an advantage in being armed with a “theory” of diversity, with
some distinctive characteristics. Registration of evident dif-
ference in Indian thought tended to be a static spatial picture,
reflected in the nationalist idea that had become commonplace:
“unity in diversity.” This idea was also capable of internal com-
plexities and it could simply mean the adjacency of diversities
in the vast space of the subcontinent. But, the nationalist idea
emerging from the late 18th century was more sophisticated.
I have suggested elsewhere that the reading of François
Guizot’s history of the Western civilisation, which in turn
drew upon Hegel, but provided it with a special twist, played
a significant part in this enhancement. Guizot sought to re-
veal a logic of history running through the confusing diversity
of events of European history. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay in Ben-
gal strove in his sociological essays to discern a similar “logic
of history” in the long Indian past. He saw a tendency of out-
siders to approach India, drawn by her wealth and comforta-
ble agricultural plenty, which periodically brought in elements
discordant to the prior culture. But the “essence” of Indian
history, its peculiar genius, was to find a new coherence which
made these additional elements congruent again to a more
complex and richer form of civilisational unity. Not just spatial
diversity, this was a deeper “logic” of uniting the elements
without suppressing their individual character.
The deeply idealistic historical tone of this narrative was not
suited to the materially inclined communists. They seized
upon a tougher economically inflected notion of uneven and
combined development: Leon Trotsky’s concept drawn from
Karl Marx’s earlier reflections on making sense of the confus-
ing patterns of economic change in Europe under the impact
of capitalist growth. The theory of “uneven and combined
development” dispensed with two common presuppositions in
thinking about diversity in temporal terms: linearity and uni-
formity. First, it stressed that the impulse of capitalist develop-
ment transformed societies powerfully, but unevenly in spatial
terms: some parts changed more rapidly than others, thus
producing regional inequality where none existed before.
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REGIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
But, it also emphasised that the picture of inequality at any
point of time did not develop in a linear way by simply repli-
cating and accentuating the states of danced and backward
economic conditions in regions. There could be explosive
spurts of growth in areas that were backward in an earlier
stage. To use more colourful Hegelian tropes, even economic
history could develop through its wrong side. Clearly, this con-
stituted a remarkably sophisticated and forceful initial theory
to start thinking about the question of regional diversity in co-
lonial/postcolonial India.
Yet, in their actual theory of revolution on how to mobilise
ordinary people’s discontent to produce deep social transfor-
mation, they threw away this powerful analytical tool. For
the period that Ranadive’s group was in the leadership, they
insisted that the proletarian revolution was “the correct line”
for the Indian revolution. When that proved impossible, they
were equally convinced that this line was wrong, and they went
for a similar singular correct line modelled on the Chinese
Revolution. In retrospect, the search for a single correct line
contradicted the profound intuition in the idea of combined
and uneven development. Even after this experience, the
search for a correct line did not cease. The party continued to
search for a singular correct line for the Indian revolution in-
stead of recognising that if a political party sought justice and
liberation for ordinary people in India, this would have meant
justice against and liberation from quite dissimilar structures
of social oppression in different parts of the country. The
“correct line for West Bengal could not be the correct line for
neighbouring Bihar.” A revolution in India must be a coalition
of quite different revolutions in different regions.
This is a parable, but it reveals the difficulty and the signifi-
cance of coming to grips with the fundamental question of
regionality in thinking about India. For those like me who try
to understand politics and the state, this difficulty is acute.
An economist can add the per capita incomes of two adjoining
states and divide that sum by two. We cannot follow a proce-
dure that would even remotely be reasonable. I shall focus pri-
marily on forms of political regionality and its connection to
the making and unmaking of regions of other kinds—eco-
nomic and cultural regions.
Dual Ontology of Space
There are three ways, I shall suggest, of looking at the ques-
tion of regionality in India. These are three distinct analytical
operations, which could be named generalisation, fragmenta-
tion and composition. Generalisation means gathering primary
information from a determinate region, and assuming that all
parts of India possess identical or similar characteristics.
Conventionally, Bengali historians were generally, and in part
justifiably, accused of such procedures like taking too seriously
the idea that what Bengal thinks today India thinks tomorrow,
assuming presumably that their descriptions of India, though
not immediately accurate, will become true with a time lag.
Fragmentation means believing that, since the regions are so
fundamentally real, nothing existing beyond the regional level
has any serious, compelling historical reality. To turn this into
58
a forceful slogan: there is no India, only its regions/India does not
exist, only its regions/India is not real, only its regions.
As I do not find either of these ways of thinking persuasive,
so I am forced into a position in thinking about this question,
which I shall call composition and which does not deny the
fundamental reality of the region, but, instead of denying the
reality of India, it adds two further arguments. First, it asserts
that regions are historical; they are formed historically, and
thus get unformed or transformed in time. Second, the fact
that these regions remain bound together within one single
frame of some kind—political, economic or cultural—im-
parts some serious qualities to the regions and how they func-
tion. I shall offer an example from contemporary democratic
politics. We shall return to these ways of conceptualising space
and diversity later on.
Regionality
Regionality is created, or regions are formed by three separate
kinds of forces—political, economic and cultural—and regions
are also consequently of three kinds. These three kinds of
regionalities are produced by distinct kinds of logics, and
their boundaries are maintained in different ways. One form
of regionality also affects others, and the power of the state,
in particular, affects the two other types of region formation.
All three forces are communicative in the sense that they
produce a certain kind of currency exchanged between indi-
viduals and groups, and the circulation of these objects—of
political power, material goods and cultural artefacts—create
zones of common experience and intelligibility, which
have the historical effect of producing what we call regions.
These three kinds of regionalities might overlap, for under-
standable reasons.
Ernest Gellner’s analysis of the formation of nationalism is an
illustration of this kind of argument. States are sometimes pro-
duced by partially fortuitous circumstances—like victory in
wars—but once they stabilise, they strive to create a form of
cultural uniformity through state-driven processes of cultur-
al production, like common educational policies, common
syllabi, etc. Conversely, in some cases, if other historical cir-
cumstances produce a sense of cultural singularity among a
group of people, this kind of cultural identity then becomes a
basis for a demand for a separate state especially if fragments
of such a nation are distributed among a cluster of states. The
cases of Italy and Germany were so powerful imaginatively,
precisely because they endorsed a fable of a pre-existing nation
demanding and eventually realising a state of their own. His-
torically, the interaction and intersection between these three
processes of region formation is a fascinating field of study.
We can illustrate this with the example of West Bengal.
Bengal was a historically recognisable region in ancient India,
designated by a regional name in Sanskrit, Banga; though it is
important to retain a clear distinction between the principles
of coherence in spatial entities found in premodern and
modern history. Usually, in premodern cases, territorial entities
were defined by some kind of centre, defined culturally or
politically with lines radiating from that centre and weakening
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as they spread outwards; in modern times territories are typi-
cally bounded by spatially recognisable boundary lines. Thus,
there were no modern-style linear boundaries between neigh-
bouring regions like Anga, Kalinga, and Kamarupa, though
their differences were marked by clear frontiers and while
passing them one moved from one defined region to another.
But, it is not clear what held these territorialities together in
medieval times, before the rise of a definable regional vernacular.
In later medieval times, for instance, a powerful cultural for-
mation like the religious constellation of Gaudiya Vaishnavism
emerged, which has an interesting spatial history. It developed
from an undoubtedly Bengali centre in Navadvip, Chaitanya’s
birthplace and Bengal’s erstwhile capital, but as it spread
irresistibly in the next decades and centuries, it spread over a
much larger spatial area covering the whole of present-day
West Bengal and Bangladesh, Odisha, Manipur, and parts of
Assam and Bihar, with a powerful satellite in distant Vrindavan.
But, the interesting fact about this is the disconnection between
the religious and linguistic identity. From the history of the
Chaitanya movement, it is clear that by this time there was
existence of a linguistic identity of the Bengali language, and
Chaitanya himself and most of his major intellectual follow-
ers were Bengalis and composed many of their celebrated
texts in Bengali. At the same time, the orbit of Chaitanya’s re-
ligion encompassed several linguistic regions, with followers
from regions which spoke Bengali, Odia, Hindi, Manipuri, etc.
It is only with the rise of modern cultural institutions and
processes like printing, standardisation of scripts, and the har-
nessing of linguistic identity to state processes, that this
linguistic identity comes to have a political form and that
Bengaliness becomes a politically mobilisable force. From the
mid-19th century to the time of partition, Bengal developed a
forceful cultural identity around its emerging literature, but
the lines of religious division could be seen clearly in internal
debates about the predominantly Hindu nature of this cultiva-
tion, and disputations among Muslim intelligentsia about how
they could place themselves inside this cultural constellation.
Such implicit divisions are mobilised periodically, initially by
the British proposal for the partition of Bengal in 1905, and more
successfully during the creation of Pakistan. After partition, a
cultural identity linking the western and eastern parts of Bengal
still continues. But, it is clear that under conditions of political
modernity, states become the most causally dominant force of
regionality. Despite a vestigial and weakening presence of a
literary Bengali culture, the division of the linguistic community
into two separate and conflicting states overrides this identity.
The state acts as a container for economic processes, cutting
the dependence of the jute-producing eastern part of the prov-
ince on the western concentration of mills around Kolkata.
The fates of the pre-existing regionalities of Bengal and
Punjab demonstrate the dominance of the processes of political
region formation. Quite similarly, cultural processes have
marked the literary spheres of Punjabi and Urdu. Political and
economic boundaries shape, form and determine the nature of
social experience in such a profound fashion that literary and
cultural expression is easily subordinated to those boundaries.
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Literary expression in the two parts of Bengal continues to
draw upon the prior artistic heritage, but the experience it
gives voice to is decisively separated by the divergent experi-
ence of the two countries.
Premodern Regionality
As I study political power historically through the discipline
of historical sociology, the long-term processes of premodern
regionality is crucial for my understanding of power. A persis-
tent difficulty of the study of modernity is its unworried
one-sidedness. Modernists simply assume that modernity is
a fundamental transformation of the social world, which I
believe to be true, but inadequate for the real understanding
of historical change. An understanding of change—in a literal
sense—can never be successfully one-sided. However much
we know the consequences of a transformation, if we do not
know the character of the state of affairs from which the
change occurred, we cannot say we understand the nature of
that change. To state that Bengali literature changed after the
late 18th century is a correct statement, but it is historically
underdetermined. Not because Bengali literature did not
change fundamentally, because it did. It is underdetermined
because, if we do not understand what Bengali literature was
really like before this change, we can have a true abstract picture
that a change occurred, but not really a historically accurate
picture of how it changed, because that, minimally, requires a
two-sided picture of what the conditions were like before the
change happened, and after.
It is in this sense that much of our historical picture of
modernity and its change is cognitively unsatisfactory and
inadequate. That is why a correct—even thumb line—picture
of the premodern is not an embellishment, an optional
addition, but a constituent part of our understanding of the
modern. Of course, there are serious difficulties in this cogni-
tive enterprise: historians of modernity cannot simultaneously
become historians of the premodern. But, it is reasonable to
demand a short-term historical picture or a stylised structural
model of the premodern configuration for our understanding of
modernity to be credible. I do not study political power beyond
the late Mughal period, but this period is rich in chronicles
and historical evidence, which, however, are not always easy
to read historically. In the chronicles, it is easy to see these
territorialising or spatialising processes clearly.
Our argument might become clearer if we artificially use
three terms in a strict conceptual separation: territory, space
and place. By “territory” we shall designate the primordial,
most material form of existence, where it is mere extension
without boundaries, and without conceptual markers of use.
We shall use the term “space” to indicate some form of bounded
territorial entity in a third-person language, that is, in the
sense that most ordinary users of language will refer to that
territorial configuration by the generally accepted common
name. Awadh, or Bengal would be a marker like that, irrespec-
tive of whether it is politically or culturally seen as unified by
some criterion or not. So, it would not be an incoherent state-
ment to say that after the Vijayanagara empire fell, the Deccan
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remained disunited, because this states two things about that
territory: that there is a commonly intelligible territory—
space—that is generally known as the Deccan, or its vaguer
Sanskrit equivalent, dakshinatya; and, additionally, that this
space does not have any political form which covers all of it.
Similar statements can be made of other spaces like Bengal,
Kalinga, Awadh, Sindh, or even Hindustan or India. We can
then reserve the term “place” for a more intense experiential
sense of a place invested/throbbing with affect.
Several kinds of spatialities overlap in the Mughal domain.
In the Islamic world, the Mughal empire is clearly seen as part
of a cultural Persianate cosmopolis—with intense circulation
of individuals and groups, especially with military, intellectual
and cultural skills. The historical decline of the Persian empire,
or sectarian hardening of the state immediately led to a steady
flow of major figures of Persian letters into North India. But,
despite this vast cosmopolitan constellation, which was cultur-
ally defined, the Mughal empire shows interesting politically
defined subregional forms. In the last stages of the empire, several
ethnic groups drawn from definable regions in the surrounding
world—Mughals, Afghans, Turks—interact, at times as indi-
vidual nobles and at times as clan groups who can depend on
clan support in a world of insecurity. The empire works through
a complex organisation of four identifiable northern regions—
territories bordering on Iran, the central territory around
Delhi and Agra, and two other parts of the empire which
expand and contract depending on military fortunes—the
eastern part stretching into Bengal, Assam and Odisha, and
the southern empire in the Deccan where Aurangzeb spent
his last years fighting Shivaji and other southern sultanates.
Every time the imperial centre is weakened through uncertain-
ties of succession or ineffectual rule, these regions tend towards
informal or formal separation into independent kingdoms. The
eventual destruction of the Mughal empire occurs through an
intensification of this process. Although at times of succession
these distinct and more politically homogeneous and adminis-
tratively manageable regions tended to develop pretensions of
autonomy, rulers like Shah Jahan or Aurangzeb were able to
restore the stability of the centre. After Aurangzeb, this process of
reclamation of a revitalised centre failed precipitiously and, in
the story of Mughal decline, we can see the revival of these long-
term durable political regions submerged by the tides of impe-
rial power. Some commentators would trace these regionalities
back to the times of the Mahabharata, which also shows, if read
through relentless political reduction, the same identifiable logic
of durable regions and fragile empires. In the case of the Mughals,
after the death of Aurangzeb, two regions decidedly drifted away
through the formation of the Nawabi of Bengal through Alivardi
Khan and Murshid Quli Khan, and the almost instant secession
of the Deccan segment, the dominions of the Nizam-ul-Mulk.
Colonial Regionality
After the hiatus of half a century, British colonial power gradually
restored the imperial centre, though its spatial formation
was unusual, because the British were a maritime power. The
authority of the imperial centre was restored after two sweeping
60
movements from coastal bases in the east and the south. A
firm establishment of British power came after the final defeat
of the Marathas, the Sikhs and other serious contenders for
political dominion cancelled the separation and fragmentation
of political regions, and colonial rule brought in newer dynamics
of region formation. From economic research on Mughal and
British economies, it seems likely that before colonial rule, and
the emergence of an entirely new kind of imperial economy, Indi-
an society contained a range of common premodern economic
formations. Since economic transactions were primarily local,
a great variety of production economies existed on a local scale,
which exchanged goods through various levels of trade. The
colonial economy introduced an entirely new dimension to
economic life by first linking parts of the Indian economy to the
British imperial structure and indirectly to the world economy,
which in a real modern sense developed in the 19th century.
Parts of the Indian economy, particularly in the coastal
regions, reorientated their production responding to impulses
from the English centre of the colonial empire. Internally,
however, colonial power in the broader sense effected a fun-
damental transformation of economic structure, which has to
work as the starting point for an analysis of regionalities that
existed at the time of independence. Establishment of manu-
facturing industries in the colonial economy introduced a
new kind of regional differentiation based on relationships of
inequality and interdependence. Dependence of the coastal
economies on their agricultural hinterland for raw materials
and labour force created a new kind of unequal diversity with
sharp inequalities of incomes, opportunities and collective re-
gional power.
This kind of inequality between regions does not seem to
have existed in premodern times, which were characterised
by more equal forms of economic/productive diversity. Forms
of regionality which had deep political consequences stemmed
from this growth of regionally unequal industrialisation in
the colonial period, though the “colonial” period, of course,
varied a great deal between different parts of India. The
entire region of northern India came to be dominated by a
vast Bengali elite who had originated from western Bengal’s
relatively narrow base, but established their sub-imperial
dominance over an immense space from Shillong to Lahore.
Subsequently, after independence, these regions saw intense
dissatisfaction against Bengalis, sometimes explicitly in the
form of regional movements.
The gradual retraction of this sub-imperialist Bengali middle
class back into West Bengal partly contributed to the crisis
of the West Bengal economy after independence. But, in a
long historical view, it appears that premodern regionalities
were not always entirely erased by modernity. At times, these
were overwritten by new regional formations in all our three
spheres—economy, politics and culture—probably because
colonial power slowly brought in processes of the modern
state, which alter the relation between states and their popula-
tions, and, most significantly, turn the boundaries of states
into containers of all processes in ways that were not possible
in earlier stages of history.
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Postcolonial Regionality
Nehru’s thinking was deeply influenced by some aspects of
Marxist economic analysis, and if we read the planning docu-
ments to search for its economic ideal, the legacy of colonial
regionality looms very large. Regional inequality is a condition
that is directly targeted by locating new heavy industries pre-
cisely in the regions that are regarded as the most backward.
Development is equated rather uncritically with industrial and
urban development. To exaggerate, every tree felled and every
village swallowed by an expanding neighbouring city is a step
in the direction of this industrial image of development.
It is not entirely surprising that Nehru’s first serious political
challenge—which surprisingly questioned the electoral sover-
eignty of his Congress party—came from a historical effect of
the regional inequalities produced in the colonial era. The first
dramatic illustration of the force of this political sentiment
generated by unequal economic growth was, of course, the
agitation for Andhra Pradesh. It is clear that Nehru was caught
by surprise by the occurrence of these protests and their
intensity. The protests showed that there were deeper forces
in the political world that could not be translated easily into
the terms of electoral victory and defeat. Remarkably, this
redrew the map not merely of the Madras state, but of the
entire country. Interestingly, Nehru was averse to an early
conversion to a linguistic reorganisation of Indian federalism,
although this was a kind of implicit promise of the Congress
mobilisation. By organising its segments along linguistic lines
in the 1920s, the Congress delegitimised the administrative
spatial distribution of British India. Behind his aversion lay
an anxiety about accentuation of linguistic boundaries and
differences in the peoples’ political imagination. Despite
Nehru’s initial disinclination to concede linguistic states, he
had the statesmanlike vision to realise that this demanded
a general and not a local resolution; that unequal develop-
ment was not a problem specific to Madras, and should be
resolved nationally.
State-led Industrialisation
Reducing regional inequalities produced and exacerbated by
colonial economic processes was one of the major objectives of
Nehruvian planning. But, its successes were uneven, with
large unintended consequences. The Nehru government used
deliberate policy to locate large-scale industries in areas that
were mainly agricultural—like siting giant public sector steel
plants in Bihar, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh—with the expec-
tation that these will benefit from the conventional spread
effects of industrialisation. Some small-scale effects were
certainly produced for the local economy, but, at least in the
medium term, these industries did not have a dramatic effect
on the region in which they were located or immediately sur-
rounding it. Migration by the local poor to low-income occu-
pations in metropolitan cities did not cease. On a smaller
scale, it produced an effect quite similar to colonial industri-
alisation and professionalisation. Industrialisation in Bihar
produced an enormous opportunity for employment of the
large professional elites; for example, those with engineering
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degrees, in West Bengal who would otherwise have faced a
severe contraction of their prospects. These industries also
attracted highly skilled professionals from other regions as
well, particularly from Tamil Nadu and the South which began
to feel the effects of the initial wave of caste-based reservation
in the 1950s.
Instead of producing an industry-fuelled development of a
whole region that was given a new potential centre, this pro-
duced a crossflow of migration, of poorer labourers to West
Bengal and of higher-income professionals to these centres.
Location of single immense plants in the middle of agrarian
hinterlands did not lead to the expected results.
Disjunction between Political and Economic Regions
After independence, formation of regions did not cease with
the linguistic reorganisation of the federal structure in the
mid-1950s. It appears that the container effect of the state is far
more forceful at the level of the state itself rather than its
internal federal constituents. Any trade or economic exchange
between neighbouring nation states must go through the ela-
borate legal mechanism of international trade. Economic pro-
cesses inside India are not similarly subject to a containerising
effect of federal state boundaries. But, boundaries of economic
regions do not always coincide with political state boundaries
in two different ways. First, the growth of the capitalist economy
did not respect state boundaries, and in some cases clearly gave
rise to new economic regionalities. One of the most obvious
instances of such transformation is the creation of a relatively
industrialised zone in the western part of Uttar Pradesh (UP)
in the 1970s, probably partly fuelled by agricultural prosperity
associated with the green revolution wheat production.
The increasing distinctness of these regions created, by impli-
cation, another large primarily agrarian region consisting of
eastern UP and Bihar. In subsequent decades, the development
of industries in parts of Haryana adjacent to Delhi has in effect
created a zone of stratified industrialisation that stretches
from western UP to the eastern parts of Haryana across the
capital region of Delhi, which, in its peripheries, now houses a
vast sector of lower-level and low-technology industrial pro-
duction. What is remarkable is that this effectively economi-
cally unified region—with a network of common interests of
corporations, business groups and working people—has not
demanded a translation of this economic regionality into a
political form.
This is in sharp contrast to the relative success of two kinds
of breakages of unified political units on the argument that
there were internal economic enclaves that were consistently
neglected by the states of which they were a part. Several
cases have occurred where a section of a state has been carved
out and established as a separate political unit, on the basis of
ethnic identity. The breakup of Bombay into Maharashtra and
Gujarat was primary on the grounds of linguistic regionality,
and, subsequently, states like Mizoram and Arunachal
Pradesh were created by using the same logic. But, a combina-
tion of economic and ethic demands have always been more
effective. While the structure of the Indian federation
61
REGIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
acquired an appearance of permanence after the 1960s, suc-
cessful secessions into new states became possible in the case
of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh on the grounds
of economic backwardness. This is also true of the creation of
Telangana, although by the time the separation happened it
was ironical to treat the areas around Hyderabad as economi-
cally backward regions.
We must notice, however, a clear opposition between these
cases of creation of new states—a kind of political acknowl-
edgement of economic–cultural regionality—and the earlier
example of the industrial region straddling the three states
of Haryana, Delhi and western UP, which has not led to any
political demand. This suggests that purely economic region-
ality might not be politically effective. These interests might
be too indirect for political agents to discern, or this might
show that economic commonality of interest by itself is not suf-
ficient to work the creation of political regionality that requires
an additional force of cultural or linguistic cement of some kind
to turn this region in-itself into a region for-itself. We had seen
that early colonial modernity introduced a new logic of pro-
ducing regionalities through the disequalising character of in-
dustrial economic change. Regions which were even or equal
before were turned newly unequal by the establishment of
modern industries and, therefore, the forcible conversion of
their agrarian surroundings into raw-material and labour-sup-
plying hinterlands. It appears that the two major engines of eco-
nomic change—the state and market—have continued to drive
the force of disequalisation, with the market drawing unequal
resources into some developmental nodes, and the state allow-
ing the absorption and use of its revenues disproportionately
on some regions, creating new centres and, correspondingly,
new peripheries. This process primarily elicits a political re-
sponse that demands the secession of the backwards areas to
form their own states.
Liberalisation seems to have affected the template of region-
alities in some unprecedented ways. Policies of liberalisation
were preceded from the early 1980s in any case by a persis-
tent alteration in the character of planning. Clearly, after the
Third Five Year Plan, the central government abandoned its
ambition of setting serious macroeconomic objectives for the
entire economy. Planning turned increasingly into a statisti-
cal, stocktaking exercise after the fact. After liberalisation
policies were adopted in 1991, the state actively withdrew
from some areas of economic decision-making where it was
dominantly effective earlier. As a consequence, state govern-
ments were allowed a new kind of policy freedom through
which they would compete among themselves to attract
foreign direct investment (FDI) and other kinds of investment
by offering tax incentives and other forms of inducements
by infrastructure development. Some states, recently freed
of central supervision, performed more successfully—like
Gujarat under Narendra Modi or Andhra Pradesh under
Chandrababu Naidu. The cumulative effect of these develop-
ments can be a new accentuation of regional inequality, since
at least private capital investment is likely to be drawn
towards the new hubs.
62
It is possible to discern two speeds of development in differ-
ent clusters of states, which are misleadingly averaged out for
the entire country. But, the two speeds can be observed over
two groups of states that are not regionally clustered. There is a
clear division in the pace and nature of development between
these two groups. But, the spaces are too large, and too inter-
nally diverse in other terms to view this as a dynamic produc-
ing new regionalities, and this clearly raises a question that is
parallel to the classical Marxist debates about the two notions
of class: class in itself and class for itself. In a different language,
we can call these categories that are analytical and agentive.
When analysts can see similarities or a unifying logic unifying
a space, that yields an analytical purchase. But, when inhabit-
ants of a particular space come to view themselves as not
merely a collectivity with common interests, that self-identifi-
cation becomes agentive. Analytical and agentive descriptions
are quite different, simply because analytical descriptions need
not be agentive. How real are these analytical and agentive cat-
egories of regions? It is rather pointless to debate which one of
them is real, because they are both real in different ways.
Principles and Regionality
In concluding this discussion of the historical formation and
unformation of regionalities, several principles need to be re-
membered. First, regions are formed by different kinds of
causal processes, and these regions may not have overlapping
boundaries. In understanding regions—even with the narrower
focus of regional political economy—it is important to remem-
ber the region-forming powers of cultural and, particularly,
political forces. To study the unnamed region of incipient in-
dustrialisation that straddles UP, Delhi and Haryana, we must
understand that an economic region has a reality, with real
effects. But it lacks a cultural self-description, and its economic
processes are mediated by the bureaucratic decision-making
structures of three state governments, and these too are sub-
ject to the accidental qualities of electoral politics. But, even
economic exchange is helped by the fact that some version of
Hindi can be understood across the entire region.
Second, many of these regions have long histories which
continue to have effects in the present. Cultural and linguistic re-
gions, in particular, have long histories that create long chains
of memory. Economic regionalities have histories and memo-
ries of a different kind, usually starting with decisive events
from the colonial period. Some economic initiatives of the
state—like Nehru’s industrialisation plans—sought to coun-
teract the legacies of these histories. But, in other cases, where
economic change is primarily driven by markets, investment
and growth tend to increase around areas that are already devel-
oped, because markets tend to take advantage of facilities that
already exist rather than invest in new infrastructure. But,
the future of region formation cannot be just an inert extrap-
olation from pre-existing or present trends.
Third, it is because of this kind of complexity that the only
accurate way of thinking about the relation between these
regions and the idea of a supervening India is not through
generalisation or fragmentation, but by way of what I have
NOVEMBER 18, 2017 vol liI no 46 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

called composition. However, we have to add another metho-
dological dimension to this compositional analysis, which is
the peculiar sense in which a real India exists.
Is There a Real India?
It is a legitimate question, then, to ask. Where is India in this
picture? Clearly, we have two options of conceiving India if we
give a prior assent to the reality of regions in this fundamental
sense. Some analysts are misled by the legitimate emphasis on
the reality of regions in this picture to conclude that, if the re-
gions are real in this sense, it does not leave any room for India
to exist, or to be real in any significant sense. At best, India is a
kind of abstract container of these regions without any real
characteristics which require either separate description or
analysis. But, I do not agree with this argument, which I have
called fragmentation. I want to propose a third kind of space,
which we can only call India or Indian because it is impossible
to seriously locate these features elsewhere. In that case, our
second option, if we reject the idea of a mere container, is to
think of a second-order or a second-level reality called India.
I shall offer this argument through a political illustration, a
thought experiment. If we imagine that, for some reason, the
individual states of the Indian union become all independent
states, what would be their political character? I think it could
be surmised safely that a major number of these states would
succumb to irresistible pressures/forces of authoritarian rule.
Even in real terms, it could be stated safely that the quality of
democratic government was more palpable at the level of the
central government rather than the states. Many states in
India are dominated by either single parties that are organised
around individual leaders, or social groups that dominated
political life either through political parties or other organisa-
tions in a way that their domination could not be assailed. But,
such political leaders who often in reality governed their states
in distinctly undemocratic ways turned into stout defenders of
a strictly democratic treatment when they dealt with the cen-
tral government. In some historic instances, immensely pow-
erful political leaders of various states found it in their interest
to nominate a weak incumbent for the position of the Prime
Minister rather than one among themselves, for fear that this
individual would establish unassailable dominance.
This can be presented more abstractly in rational choice
terms. If there are several roughly equal political agents who
are totally dominant in their own regions, it would be rational
for them as political actors, if they have to coexist within the
framework of a common state structure, to demand that the
structure should be entirely democratic. This does not require
a change in their political disposition, but simply a lucid
appreciation of what lies in their rational interest. This is what
I indicate as second-order reality. This shows that the fact that
these rulers are part of the Indian federal state structure has
an overwhelming shaping influence on their decision-making
and political behaviour, but on a plane that is quite distinct
from the plane of state politics. The frame that is called India is
extremely effective and influential, but not at the level of their
actions in state politics. It would be false to think of India here
Economic & Political Weekly EPW NOVEMBER 18, 2017 vol liI no 46
REGIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
as a mere container of these regions. The only adequate de-
scription of the reality of India would be to conceive of it as a
separate second-order plane. It is in this sense that India is a
second-order reality, but emphatically a crucial part of the
structure of reality of our political world. Just as, if we ignore
the reality of regions, we get a skewed and misleading picture of
Indian politics, if we do not grasp this second-order reality of
India, we get a picture that is skewed from the other direction.
India as a Second-order Space
Let me now turn to the original conceptual model I advanced
about conceiving or picturing regionality, and restate my argu-
ment about the three levels of space or, more fashionably, the
first, second and third space. The first stratum or plane must be a
brute fact, material, unconceptualised space that is unmarked and
nameless. I am tempted to use allegorically Walter Benjamin’s
idea of an empty, homogeneous space. I must confess that I find
the idea of an empty, homogeneous time of modernity, so
admired by his followers, both striking and inscrutable. (It is
not inscrutable in itself. Of course there are calculations which
routinely use “empty homogenous” time; it is the assignation of
modernity that makes it inscrutable. It is hard to see why modern
people either would or necessary do use such a conception of
time, while premodern ideas were imaginatively diverse.)
However, an empty, homogeneous conception of space is
clearly conceivable and analytically useful. If I drive five miles
through the insane traffic of Delhi, and drive five miles through
the enchanting mountains of the Kumaons, in a sense, these are
comparable only as empty homogeneous space. But, my experi-
ence of driving and several other experiential attributes of
these two identical stretches of distance would be vastly
divergent. The first space, or the first level of space must be
territoriality in this sense; for our purposes, this space need
not be topographically featureless, that is, empty, but as long
as it is unmarked, unnamed and unbounded, that represents
in a sense a zero degree of space. Conceptions of regions are a
second-level conceptualisation of this space as something: as
Ayodhya, or Awadh, or UP. The primary point is that any human
activity with and relating to space will require some kind of
conceptualisation of this kind, including characterisation as
regions. But, if our earlier argument is correct, then we also
usually have a third space, or a third level of space conceptual-
ised as India. That level is the repository of the causal efficacy
of specific processes, which cannot be accurately grasped by sim-
ply a serial addition of regional spaces.
That is why India is not an illusion, or a fantasy, but a reality of a
second-order. What happens there is a distinctive order of hap-
penings. These cannot be reduced to what happens in the regions.
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