What explains patterns of persistent variation in contemporary state capacity across In- dia? Having laid out the puzzle of uneven and persistent gaps in public compliance, in this section I will set out how understanding precolonial patterns of state formation can help to account for a divergence in state capacity by the onset of the colonial era.
State Legacies of Precolonial States
In the early historical and sociological literature, there is a tendency to view India as state- less until foreign arrival. Marx (1972: 35) for example wrote of how “Hindustan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul, or the Briton” was “dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages” and colonial administrators and authors like Henry Maine described India as a sea of village communities, each a separate “little republic” (Dumont 1980: 158-9; Maine 1871: lec- ture IV). This view of India as recurring from village to empire to village, is also found in
twentieth century political sociology, with Barrington Moore describing Indian society as “like the starfish whom fishermen used to shred angrily into bits, after which each fragment would grow into a new starfish” (Moore 1966: 458)14.
Yet the British East India Company did not encounter India as a sea of villages, but rather as a set of hardening states which it had to defeat sequentially during more than one century of warfare. The New Cambridge History of India classifies Indian regimes of the eighteenth century into three categories: (i) successor provinces of the Mughal Empire, such as Awadh, Bengal, and Hyderabad, in which a Mughal regional governor and his of- ficials adopted the territory as their personal landed domains; (ii) “antique” micro-polities such as the Rajputs and the Tamil poligars, i.e. local kingdoms and principalities with limited fiscal or regulatory authority, and (iii) new and expanding “warrior states” on the Mughal periphery - notably Mysore, the Marathas, and Travancore - which were centraliz- ing, proto-bureaucratic regimes with extensive military apparatuses, and which challenged both Mughal and European claims to supremacy over the subcontinent (Ramusack 2004). Such polities were not static but undergoing very substantial processes of political ratio- nalization: the increasing centralization of political authority, professionalization of the military and civil services, and the deepening and widening of the tax base (Stein 1984).
Countering the colonial narrative of India’s past as one of “stagnation” or decline, re- cent histories of the subcontinent in the eighteenth century have drawn attention to the rapid defensive modernization of these regional states, leading Burton Stein to conclude that “centralization was the signature of regimes of eighteenth century India” (Stein 1984: 391; Bayly 1983; Gordon 2007). Challenger regimes in particular adopted European mili- tary tactics, developed salaried bureaucracies, and engaged in territorial expansion. While former Mughal provinces such as Awadh and Bengal were quick to cede to European suzeraignty, challenger regimes did not. The Mysore Empire for example fought four wars against the East India Company between 1767 and 1799, the Marathas fought three wars
14The implication was that from these isolated communities, no durable progress could be made. As Marx
had continued, these “idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism,” for “they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies” (Marx 1972: 40).
Figure 1.8: India’s Eighteenth-Century Regimes.
from 1775 to 1818, and Travancore fought, and defeated, the Dutch East India Company in 1741.
How did these precolonial regimes durably reshape local institutions such that their legacy persisted through the colonial and post-independence era? First such regimes estab- lished a stock of “infrastructural power” at the local level in order to mobilize revenue and manpower. As the fiscal demands upon Indian precolonial states expanded - Bayly (1983) estimates that between 1600 and 1800 Mysore “upped its nominal tax revenue from under 10 per cent of the gross produce to about 40 per cent under Tipu Sultan in 1790s” – states encountered greater local resistance, eliminating by force local chieftaincies and appoint- ing their own tax collectors to collect revenues, as well as police officers to maintain order. This necessitated the expansion of bureaucratic capacity, in the form of a vast army of civil servants and a documentary system to keep track of land cadastres and rights. As Gordon notes of the precolonial Maratha state:
“Based on the kamavisdar’s on-the-ground surveys, the body of information flowing from the district to the Peshwa’s clerks at Pune dramatically increased in volume and specialization. The once-a-year accounting gave way to shorter and shorter periods. Six-months accounts were replaced by one-month accounts for the larger and more stable places (like Sironj and Bhilsa), reaching a peak intensity of daily accounts and treasury receipts from several hundred villages.” (Gordon 1993: 141)
If at the height of the British Empire, the pattern of land taxation across the subcontinent (shown in Figure 1.6) still mirrored the territorial reach of India’s extant eighteenth-century powers, the Maratha Confederacy and the Mysore Empire, it is because the East India Com- pany inherited the state apparatus that they built. As Robb (2002: 114-5) remarks, under the East India Company the precolonial “pattern of administration, and many other fea- tures of the state, were continued.” Outside of Bengal, “Indian institutions, practices and personnel were to form the basis upon which administration was founded” and “distinc- tive provincial patterns in their administrative, revenue and judicial practices resulted in a variability which reduced the degree of centralized administrative authority that could be achieved over all of British India” (Stein 1996: 207, 242). It could hardly have been oth- erwise: a trading company with so few administrative staff could not possibly develop its own fiscal and administrative institutions rather than manage the structures in place. Even at the height of the British Empire in 1872, a mere one thousand members of the Indian Civil Service nominally ruled a population of 240m. Thus, as Robb (2002) continues:
“Many of the same titles and offices persisted, as did many of the alliances with local mer- cantile power, much of the emphasis upon armed force, and much of the reliance on personal ties and interests among the ruling elites, both European and Indian. The high officers of the Company, and its historians, presented the establishment of its rule increasingly as a decisive break... In its everyday affairs, however, it was necessarily and often deliberately gradual and partial in its innovations. Both Mughal and British empires intruded on and weakened local and regional entities, but did not replace them.” (Robb 2002: 115).
Second, precolonial states established the legitimacy of public authority, that is, an “ac- ceptance by people of the need to bring their behavior into line with the dictates of an external authority” (Tyler 1990: 25). In part this occurred through coercion, or the threat of it, as states not only taxed and enlisted, but also surveilled and enforced; Rao (1944: 291) reports how the Mysore Kingdom developed a system of “domestic intelligence” that
“penetrated into the inmost recesses of every private dwelling throughout the kingdom,” and Fullarton similarly remarks on how the state operated a network of “spies and intel- ligencers in every corner.” Yet in part it was generated through genuine commitment to shared political order, over and above the loyalties of the village or the tribe, by making the state the natural locus of political authority.
Such “traditional” legitimation (Weber 1968) is very different from the legitimacy stud- ied in much of the literature in political theory, law, and political psychology, which focuses for example on procedural legitimacy, or the process by which decisions are reached. The procedural justice scholarship for example argues that citizens will comply with the out- comes of decision-making processes that are seen to be fair, even if they disagree with or face material losses from the specific policy recommendations that it generates (Tyler 1990; Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Esaiasson and Ottervik 2014). Deliberative democracy theorists argue that “results are made legitimate by being the results of the procedure” and that “democratic discussion, deliberation, and decision-making under certain conditions are what make the outcomes legitimate for each person” (Christiano 1996; 35). Yet peo- ple comply with the law not simply because they are stakeholders in a formal democratic decision-making process, but because historical institutions have established a compliance consensus through monitoring and sanction, and because affective solidarities have been generated by shared experience and collective memory. Such “second-order” judgments regarding “beliefs regarding the beliefs of others” or pre-existing understandings of how others are likely to behave, are just as important as first-order preferences in determining group behavior (Aumann and Dreze 2005, Herrmann and Theni 2009).
Effects of Precolonial States
A consequence is that evidence of past historical legacies is widespread. In addition to the case of Travancore, cited earlier, important precolonial boundary effects are found within the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra. The federal state of Karnataka, for exam- ple, is not only known as the home of Bangalore and the Indian IT industry, but also as one of the better governed states in the country, with “a civil service that is more compact,
Figure 1.9: Households Reporting Assault and Northern Precolonial Boundary in Kar- nataka. Source: University of Maryland Human Development Survey (Desai et al., 2006). efficient and responsive than in most other states” (Rao, 2005)15. In a rating of implemen- tation of sanitation provision across the 423 largest Indian towns and cities, the Karnataka sample (24 cities) came highest outside of the Delhi national union territory and the states of the northeast16, and a survey of public goods delivery across “health, education, bus transport, and subsidised distribution” at the turn of the millennium placed “Karnataka in the top decile of India’s states” (Paul et al. 2004). It is plausible that Karnataka, known as ‘New Mysore’ until 1973, has drawn on the loyalties, organization, and bureaucratic infrastructure generated by the Mysore Empire, the key challenger to British hegemony in eighteenth-century southern India. Yet what makes this argument perhaps more com- pelling is that Karnataka’s impressive record of state-level governance also masks a deep
15In a country with weak fiscal compliance, the state of Karnataka raises 9.8 per cent of gross state product
in taxation, the highest level in India. Annual interest payments on debt are just 1.8 per cent of state GDP, the lowest among Indian states (Raju 2012). Karnataka also leads in bureaucratic innovation and in particular, given its status as the home of the Indian IT sector, in e-governance. In a bid to reach the bulk of Indians whose only electronic device is a cellular phone, in 2013 the Karnataka state government piloted in three cities (Bangalore, Hubli and Mysore) a new “m-goveranance” program: combining services such as utility bill payment, traffic and information services into a single custom mobile phone application (CIOL, 2013).
16Mysore City, former capital of the erstwhile Mysore Kingdom, was second in the country overall (Na-
internal divide, between the state’s northern and its southern districts, that perfectly maps the northern limit of the eighteenth-century Mysore Empire, even though this border has not existed since the Anglo-Mysore wars of 1781-1799, over two centuries ago (Figure 1.9). In a survey conducted in 2005 by the University of Maryland, while respondents in south- ern Karnataka expressed above-average confidence in local government to ‘deliver public projects’, respondents in northern Karnataka were among the lowest decile of all India (De- sai et al. 2006). Excluding the city of Bangalore, crime data from the 1980s shows twice as many reported kidnappings in northern Karnataka than in the south17, and the same Uni- versity of Maryland survey revealed 24 per cent of households in northern Karnataka report being victim of a theft, while the average among southern Karnataka districts was just 2 per cent. Both northern and southern Karnataka are inhabited by the same Kannadiga peoples, and most districts along the border separating the two were subject to direct rule under the British Empire, as part of the Bombay Presidency18.