Narratives of corruption

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 citizens have with the state.