CHAPTER 6

1. W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1941.

2. See Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown (1924) and Middletown in Transition(1937). Both published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., New York.

3. Ferdinand Tõnnies, Community and Society, edited and translated by Charles P. Loomis, New York, Harper Torchboom, 1957.

4. In 1964, when this author went to the United States, he was offered a stay in a village for about a month prior to moving to the university campus. It was a welcome proposition, but when he arrived in the village, he felt completely frustrated. The so-called village had a population of around 40,000 people (only a few thousand less than the population of the capital city of Mewar state–Udaipur in Rajasthan. There was no agriculture, no hutments; each house was pucca, and had cars, people worked in urban jobs. The village had banks, colleges, and a railway station, nothing comparable to an Indian village.

5. Published in Rural Sociology, 20, June 1955, pp. 111–23.

6. To select a definition in terms of its popularity, exhibited in the frequency of its use.

7. Pol means a colony with a compound and with a big gate as entrance. Now some people call such settlements a ‘gated colony’.

8. Traditional Neighbourhood in a Modern City; New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, 1974.

9. Robert Redfield, The Little Community. University of Chicago Press, 1956.

10. MacIver & Page, 1955, p. 9.

11. Of course, this does not mean that her links are severed with the parental family. The nature of her association with that family, and consequently, her involvement in day-to-day chores, change. She becomes a visitor with special rights and privileges. The daughter-in-law becomes a full member and assumes responsibility attendant to her status.

12. A word is transformed into a concept–that is conceived as such–when a specific meaning is attached to it and is used only in that sense in technical writing. Since sociology deals with things social, our concepts are drawn from day-to-day parlance. That is why we have special difficulty in transforming any word into a concept. The word family, for example, is used very loosely, but as a sociological concept, it has a specific definition. So is the case with caste—another word that is used in so many senses by the common man.

13. NGO stands for non-governmental organization.

14. Max Weber, ‘Legitimate Order and Types of Authority’ reprinted in Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory (two volumes in one), edited by Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts, New York, The Free Press. 1961 (quote from p. 235)

15. Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure. p. 195.

16. In April 2010, a Hindi film was released on this very theme. Titled as Get Educated Paathshala, the film focuses on the money-making motives of the owners of private schools. The phenomenon of capitation fees—concealed bribe or consideration money taken by private schools to grant admission to students because of limited number of seats or because of poor academic record of the candidate seeking admission—was highlighted.

17. 17. Published in South Asian Studies, 3(2), 1968, pp. 40–53. It is reproduced in Atal’s Building a Nation: Essays on India, New Delhi, Abhinav Publications. 1981. Second Edition of it as Paperback is published by Diamond Pocket Books, New Delhi, 2004, Ch. 2.

18. In India, private school are called public schools to distinguish them from government-run schools.

19. The book is titled Management and the Worker. It was published in 1939 by the Harvard University Press. A part of this book is reprinted under the title, The Organization of the Primary Working Group. in Theories of Society edited by Parsons, Shils, Naegele, and Pits, and published by The Free Press, New York in 1965. Readers are advised to review this essay.

20. An anthropological study of a restaurant by William Foote Whyte also underlines this point. Treating the restaurant as a social system, Whyte tried to minimize such situations of interaction among restaurant workers that were giving rise to frequent conflicts and affecting the business.

21. See Harry Cohen’s The Demonics of Bureaucracy, The Iowa State University Press, 1965.

22. See Peter M. Blau’s The Dynamics of Bureaucracy, University of Chicago Press, 1963, Revised edition.

23. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Leisure Class, New York, Vanguard Press, 1928.

24. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1938.

25. Daniel Warnotte, ‘Bureaucratie et Fonctionnarisme’, Revuede l’Institut de Sociologie, 1937, 17, p. 245.

26. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change. New York, New Republic, 1935, p. 50ff.

27. As said earlier, the common perception of bureaucracy is that it creates hurdles, and is thus inefficient. On 4 June 2009, many Indian newspapers reported findings of a survey carried out by Hong Kong based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd (PERC). It sought the opinion of 1,274 expatriates working in 12 Asian countries about the efficiency of the official bureaucracies of those countries. On that scale, the Indian bureaucracy was reported to be the least efficient. The Report says that ‘The bureaucrats in the country were a power centre in their own right at both the national and state levels, and were extremely resistant to reforms.’ While this perception was challenged by many, it was also hinted that the bureaucratic norms that govern Indian bureaucracy were the creation of the British Raj, and were meant to overpower their subjects and not to facilitate their work. The point is not about what the actual situation is, but about the perception of bureaucracy.

28. Peter was himself a teacher, and it is quite likely that this episode relates to him and thus, might have given him the stimulus to propound his theory.

29. C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, London, John Murray, 1958.

30. Commenting on the Speech of the President of India before the Parliament after the installation of the new Government in 2009, Mail Today (of 5 June 2009) said in its editorial: ‘The government realizes where its real stumbling block is–the bureaucracy ....Governance is one of the target areas listed in the President’s address, and probably drafted by a bureaucrat–are suitably vague. Reform structures in the higher echelons of government, increased decentralization, inclusion of women and youth in governance, process reform and public accountability.’

31. Those interested in the life of a bureaucrat—a committed and honest one—should read an interesting novelette by Suchita Malik: Indian Memsahib, New Delhi, Rupa & Co., 2009.

32. See S. S. Gill, The Pathology of Corruption, New Delhi, Harper Collins, 2000. Written by a distinguished civil servants, this book unravels many aspects of corruption as seen by the insider. The reader is also recommended to see two books by T. S. R. Subramanian who retired as cabinet secretary—the highest post in the Indian Civil Service. The books are: Journeys through Babudom and Netaland and GovernMint in India. Both published by Rupa & Co in 2004 and 2009, respectively. S. R. Subramanian’s book is anecdotal, combining wit with irony. It incisively pieces together the gradual decay in public administration in post-British India. The growing subservience of the bureaucracy to the political system unravels, step by step. A self-serving elite is formed that is preoccupied with its vested interests.The voice of the common man goes unheard. The author bases his book on his rich repertoire of experience. The sequel is a stock-taking on 60 years of governance since independence. It beautifully portrays the manner in which the entire administration, with infrastructure and its development programmes, becomes the terrain for serving the personal and political interests of the leaders. As an insider, he provides a story that is generally not known to those who interact with the bureaucracy as outsiders. Interestingly, both authors provide illustrative material of how the bureaucracy develops its pathologies and becomes somewhat dysfunctional.

33. Oscar Lewis, Village Life in Northern India, University of Illinois, 1958, pp. 194–95.

34. For the phenomenon of ephemeral alliances in Indian villages, See Yogesh Atal, The Changing Frontiers of Caste, 1979 (second edition), pp. 155–75.

35. It is also an example of what Etzioni called a product of epigenesis.

36. Formed in 1977 with the initiative of Jaya Prakash Narain.

37. For a detailed account of this, see: Sunil Kumar, Communalism and Secularism in Indian Politics: Study of BJP, Jaipur, Rawat Publications, 2001, Ch. 2.

38. In the Special issue of India Today on ‘The Decade that Changed the World’, (14 December 2009),Shiv Visvanathan wrote the article on Social Networking with the title ‘Clicking to Connect’, pp.72–74.

39. Though a large number, yet very small compared to the total of India’s population of more than one billion.