Despite the overwhelming evidence of elite global collusion hiding and advancing corrupt financial interests in the recent Pandora Papers leak, no ministers resigned, no governments were toppled, and no revolutions were triggered. Why? Sudhir Chella Rajan's book A Social Theory of Corruption: Notes from the Indian Subcontinent helps us understand why people continue to trust governments and worship celebrities even when they know them to be dishonest, if not corrupt. For Rajan, the reason lies in our incapacity to perceive “extensive and yet deeply selective networks,” many of which “coalesce into ‘customs’ that are bred and maintained in bloodlines” (p. 5).
Corruption, Rajan tells us, is “the disproportionate and duplicitous sustenance of groups who manage to retain control of vast resources and profit from the everyday ways of society at large, often with the cynical or beguiled support of the public” (p. 13). Drawing from a decidedly early modern Christian notion of corruption as evolutionary decadence, Rajan studies distinctive elite social structures to explain corruption on the Indian subcontinent. Yet, the focus in the subcontinent is to “point to sociopolitical patterns one might discover in almost any place with a deep and rich history” (p. 13).
Based on an avowedly Gramscian framing, the book offers a highly portable model to study corruption. Split between two parts—“Positions” and “Tales”—his study spans the formation of Harrapan elites in 2600 BCE to the contemporary world. However, reading this book to find specific examples of corruption would be a disappointing exercise: the book is not about corruption per se, but how “elite networks”—Rajan's shorthand for concentric interlocking structures that build legal, religious, mercantile, symbolic, and territorial alliances—“reinforce very particular personal bodily routines [that] metamorphose into longer-term social structures” (p. 268). Rajan's interest lies in denaturing our everyday lives to expose deep-seated hierarchies that condition our responses. Rejecting prevalent modes of interpreting corruption—corruption as a biographical pathology—Rajan, like his predecessors Pandora and Arendt, throws open the interiorities of everyday evil and its connections with the hierarchies we identify as civilization and tradition.
The recent academic consensus on corruption as an economic dysfunction has paralleled an era of global liberalization and integration. Often treated as bribery, corruption in this scholarship is both “the effect and cause of incomplete, uneven, or ineffective economic liberalization,”Footnote 1 where states are judged by their ability to promote capitalism. However, as recent history testifies, corruption as a symptom of failed Westernization has stoked revivalist nativism or advanced assimilationist correctives to capitalism in the non-West. Both tendencies deepen inequality and skew access to justice, the dangerous consequences of which are witnessed today from the Philippines to Afghanistan.
Following Michael Johnston's pioneering characterization of corruption as “syndrome,” A Social Theory of Corruption challenges this literature. Rajan betters Johnston's critique by displacing the centrality of wealth acquisition in his analysis of corruption. Examining non-monetary modes of acquiring disproportionate power, Rajan studies ancient Hindu religious and political institutions to show how human coercion and consent were established through corporeal routines.
For example, in his discussion of Harappan archaeological evidence, Rajan avers that authority was “exercised through the well-adapted routines of everyday life, especially the production of standardized objects and patterned structures in well-ordered cities” (p. 143). In this “ascetic habitus,” corruption was “the unravelling of a set of justifications for maintaining disciplinary strategies” (p. 147). Similarly, Rajan's description of Vedic corruption is premised on Brahmanism's control over “extraordinary knowledge” staged around the ritual of yajna (sacrifice), “the core activity for maintaining cosmic order . . . the route to immortality for humans” (p. 167). The Vedic syndrome of corruption lay in its ability to discipline bodies into pure and impure categories resulting in the tight regulation of labor and the establishment of patriarchy and slavery, the twin foundations of caste. In his powerful chapter “Dharma Yuga,” Rajan not only offers an in-depth analysis of the Dharmasutras, he also discusses the emergence of the astika (orthodox) and nastika (heterodox) corporeal countercultures that challenged caste totalization.
A Social Theory of Corruption is packed with provocative observations and profound commentaries. The range of sources and methods used to develop a sophisticated and erudite reading of premodern South Asia is impressive. Rajan's hypothesis is convincing, except that it is unclear what makes some control acceptable and others not. Moreover, how does one think against and outside this totalizing “justificatory dispositif” (p. 276) and account for historical change, let alone improvement? With the diagnosis of corruption as syndrome, the omission of any analysis of “revivified capitalism” and its particularly South Asian fetishization of bureaucracy and surveillance is surprising.Footnote 2 After all, corruption not only signals disruption, it also triggers regimes of unbridled neuro-corporeal control.
Perhaps no “social theory” of corruption syndrome could adequately explain the history of human autonomy. If histories anticipate human behavior, they also provide a road map for future contestations.
A Social Theory of Corruption will appeal to scholars with interests in South Asian intellectual history, sociology, philosophy, and religion. The conjunctions between corporeality, comportment, and corruption gesture toward the exciting possibilities of this field for students of political theory outside the Western canon. This book is an innovative contribution to studying longue durée histories of the region through the very specific but also expansive phenomenon of corruption.
