Neoliberalism as Doxa in INdia 2003

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Rohit Chopra NEOLIBERALISM AS DOXA: BOURDIEUS THEORY OF THE STATE AND THE CONTEMPORARY INDIAN DISCOURSE ON GLOBALIZATION AND LIBERALIZATIONAbstractThis paper assesses, on the basis of key arguments from Pierre Bourdieus work, how and why a consensus about the positive effects of globalization and liberalization could have established itself as a dominant discourse across Indian social space. Describing the discourse that validates globalization and economic liberalization as a particular worldview, which he terms neoliberalism, Bourdieu describes how neoliberalism establishes itself as a doxa an unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were the objective truth across social space in its entirety, from the practices and perceptions of individuals to the practices and perceptions of the state and social groups. The full import of Bourdieus arguments about neoliberalism, however, can only be grasped with reference to Bourdieus theory of the state, and with reference to key concepts, such as doxa, habitus, eld and capital. This paper, accordingly, seeks to full two related objectives: to explicate Bourdieus theory of the state and his concepts of habitus, doxa, eld and capital, and to describe, on the basis of Bourdieus arguments, how neoliberalism as doxa could have colonized the discussion and perception in Indian social space about the effects of globalization and liberalization.

KeywordsBourdieu; doxa; globalization; India; neoliberalism; state; liberalizationCultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0950238032000083881

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Introduction: globalized India?

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decade after India has implemented a series of marketoriented economic reforms that pass under the name liberalization, it is still an open question whether Indias gradually increasing participation in a global economy has improved the condition of its people. At the very least, there are two different stories about the impact of liberalization and globalization in India. An article in Indias largest-circulation English newspaper asserts that business process outsourcing the practice of corporations headquartered in Western countries outsourcing business functions to centres in the Third World to save labour costs can strengthen the Indian economy by creating over a million jobs by 2008 (Dutta, 2002: 1). On the other hand, a recent report of the Planning Commissions Special Group on Job Creation points out that the number of jobs created in the post-liberalization decade of the 1990s was less than a third of the corresponding number in the decade preceding liberalization (Kang, 2002). The report predicts that, unless corrective measures are taken, the number of unemployed people will double in the next ve years, reaching a staggering 45 million. In the contemporary conversation on Indian economy, politics and society, it is usually the pro-globalization and pro-liberalization narrative that is afrmed as more credible than the opposing viewpoint. For instance, a newspaper article last year reported the peculiar phenomenon of one of Indias oldest left state governments, West Bengal, hiring consultants McKinsey & Co. to suggest a plan for labour reforms (The Times of India, 2002: 7). The government eventually decided to drop the plan, yet apparent in its decision to hire McKinsey & Co. a multinational consulting rm well-known for its pro-liberalization and proglobalization agenda was the belief that state labour policies could not resist the irreversible tide of liberalization for much longer. The view that liberalization and globalization must be recognized as simple facts prior to ideology is echoed by Sebastian Morris, the co-editor of India Infrastructure Report 2002, a document offering policy analysis and recommendations for the governance of commercial activity. Chiding the government for what he perceives as the conservatism of its macro-economic policymakers in not allowing the rupee to take a free fall against the dollar, Morris proclaims that this is not the time for ideological histrionics (Morris and Shekhar, 2002: 1). In the 2001 budget, then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha proposed labour reforms that would cut back the protection offered to the organized labour workforce.1 These recommendations have already generated much controversy, with trade unions claiming they are anti-labour. Yet policy-makers and those in government argue to the contrary. In an interview, Arun Jaitley, then Union Minister for Law, Justice and Company Affairs, stated, Labour reforms are not anti-poor and will create more jobs. And the sooner the unions clamouring for rights understand it, the better (Barman, 2001). Subir Gokarn, chief economist at the National CouncilORE THAN A

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of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), similarly backed the proposed reforms, saying, its clear that the government cannot hire anymore, so the private sector must be freed from its shackles (Barman, 2001). As these examples indicate, the arguments proffered by the pro-reform advocates in government, journalism and policy call in each case for waking-up-andsmelling-the-coffee, for recognizing hard facts about India in a changing world. The actions and rhetoric of numerous Indian state and non-state agencies seem to endorse globalization and liberalization as desirable transformative forces that will ultimately provide not only economic rewards, such as increased global competitiveness of Indian companies and healthier foreign exchange reserves, but also signicant social benets such as more job opportunities, higher salaries, greater consumer choice and a better quality of life. Indeed, across the most visible sectors of Indian society and the state, there appears to be emerging a consensus in limiting the terms of debate about socioeconomic issues to largely those positions, which already presuppose globalization and liberalization as enabling frameworks for positive change in the economy and in society at large. In this paper I assess, on the basis of key arguments from Pierre Bourdieus work, how and why this consensus about the positive effects of globalization and liberalization could have established itself as a dominant discourse across Indian social space. It is this very question that Bourdieu seeks to answer, albeit in the context of France and Europe, in the essays The myth of globalization and the European welfare state (1998a: 2945) and Neo-liberalism, the utopia (becoming a reality) of unlimited exploitation (1998b: 94105). Describing the discourse that validates globalization and economic liberalization as a particular worldview which he terms neoliberalism, Bourdieu in these essays describes how neoliberalism establishes itself as a doxa an unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were the objective truth across social space in its entirety, from the practices and perceptions of individuals (at the level of habitus) to the practices and perceptions of the state and social groups (at the level of elds). The full import of the arguments in the essays, however, can only be grasped with reference to Bourdieus theory of the state and with reference to key concepts, such as doxa, habitus, eld and capital, which Bourdieu explicates in greater detail across several works.3 This paper, accordingly, seeks to full two related objectives: to explicate Bourdieus theory of the state and his concepts of habitus, doxa, eld and capital, and to demonstrate, on the basis of Bourdieus arguments, how neoliberalism as doxa has colonized the discussion and perception in Indian social space about the effects of globalization and liberalization. In the rst section of the paper, I dene neoliberalism and explicate Bourdieus critique of neoliberalism to show what he means by neoliberalism as doxa. In the next section, I explain Bourdieus concepts of habitus, doxa, eld and capital. In the third section, I spell out Bourdieus theory of the state. Finally, on the basis of the concepts and arguments explained in earlier sections,

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I offer a descriptive sketch of the establishment of neoliberalism as doxa in Indian society.

NeoliberalismIn Poststructuralism, Marxism, and Neoliberalism, Michael Peters (2001) analyses the success story of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. He traces its rise from a theory of economic behaviour to its consolidation as a widely adopted framework of political, social, and economic governance at both the national and global level. The large-scale adoption of the neoliberal paradigm as a doctrine of governance has been paralleled by an ever-more strident selfafrmation of neoliberalism as a global social science able to explain all rational conduct, or even simply all behavior (2001: viii). Indeed, the success of neoliberalism as a mode of governance only be understood with reference to the fact that neoliberalism has managed to establish itself as a credible vision, at once universal and foundational, for describing social reality itself. As an economic theory, neoliberalism can be viewed as a selective reworking of the tenets of classical political economy (2001: 14). Nonetheless, neoliberalism preserves the central idea of classical economics that the free market is an essential prerequisite for the free society. Invoking a denition of freedom as individual freedom from state interference and freedom for the market, the commitment to neoliberalism is predicated, by denition, on a marked opposition to the idea of the welfare or protectionist state (2001: 1415). Neoliberalism assumes that economic behaviour can be understood in terms of the human attributes of rationality, individuality, and self-interest (2001: vii). However, neoliberalism also posits that all aspects of human social behaviour are motivated by these very characteristics. A model in which the social is redescribed in terms of the economic (2001: 15), neoliberalism operates as a theory of the social founded on a narrowly economistic notion of human behaviour, which it deems identical to human nature itself. As Peters points out, the doctrine of neoliberalism has been widely inuential in shaping national governmental policies in the West, especially in the last two decades.2 He details a range of government policies of the Thatcher and Regan eras, which collectively articulate the mandate of neoliberal government: economic liberalization or rationalization characterized by the abolition of subsidies and tariffs, oating the exchange rate, the freeing up on controls on foreign investment; the restructuring of the state sector, including corporatization and privatization of state trading departments and other assets, downsizing, contracting out, the attack on unions, and abolition of wage bargaining in favor of employment contracts; and, nally, the dismantling of the welfare state through commercialization, contracting


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out, targeting of services, and individual responsibilization for health, welfare, and education. (2001: 1819) Peters states that neoliberalism is not only enforced at the national level to ensure competitiveness in a global economy, but is similarly invested at the global level and in transnational organizations like the World Bank, IMF and WTO (2001: viii). Historically, neoliberalism has developed in the economically advanced countries of the West but is a force that less developed nation-states, such as in the Third World, have to negotiate in their dependence on the West and on institutions like the World Bank or the IMF (2001: viii). Bourdieus analysis of neoliberalism concurs with that of Peters, specically with regard to the economistic bias of neoliberal discourse. Bourdieu states that neoliberalism ascribes to a mathematical model of economic behaviour as synonymous with the nature of human sociality. In this model, it is taken for granted that maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are the ultimate and sole goal of human actions; or that economic forces cannot be resisted (1998a: 31). The neoliberal redenition of the social in terms of the economic is primarily in terms of the language of quantiability, calculability, cost-benet rationalization and business management techniques. The irreducibly social that does not translate into mathematical terms is accordingly discarded; a radical separation is made between the economic and the social, which is left to one side, abandoned to sociologists as a kind of reject (1998a: 31). The chaff of the social cannot pose any legitimate objections to neoliberalism, since it cannot be represented as a variable in the equation. Bourdieu argues further that neoliberal discourse views and presents itself as the scientic description of reality (1998b: 94). The assumptions underlying neoliberalism about the goal of human actions and about the possibility of describing the social in terms of the economic can be forgotten as assumptions qua assumptions, since neoliberalism claims the status of objective, scientic truth whose truth-value transcends history.4 Historically- or socially-constituted logic or rationality are not recognized by the neoliberal worldview as valid. From the perspective of the neoliberal vision, social reality can only be grasped by accepting the premises of neoliberal thought. What the program of neoliberalism does not acknowledge simply does not exist for it, since, by denition, it cannot exist in the neoliberal scheme. As Bourdieu states, neo-classical economics recognizes only individuals, whether it is dealing with companies, trade unions or families (1998b: 96). This is what allows neoliberal discourse to embark on a programme of methodical destruction of collectives (1998b: 956, original emphasis). Bourdieu argues that neoliberalism should be viewed as a political program, that is at once dehistoricized and desocialized (1998b: 95), and, one may infer, depoliticized as well. Neoliberalism is, hence, a political agenda predicated on a certain vision of the social world, one that legitimates a certain

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scientistic view of that world and deems as illegitimate opposing views about the world. Neoliberalism is founded on a particular principle of vision, but, if one takes its self-denition seriously, one must believe that it does not privilege any one point of view but merely presents the truth about things as they are. This is what Bourdieu terms neoliberalism as doxa (a term that I will shortly clarify), the self-denition and presentation of neoliberalism as a self-evident truth about the human and social, which is beyond question.5 The status of neoliberalism as doxa, Bourdieu tells us, is what gives the dominant discourse its strength (1998a: 29). According to Bourdieu, the doxa of neoliberalism as the self-evident truth about the social has been steadily prepared over decades in France and the UK by partisan groups of academics, mediapersons, businessmen, and others. Ordinary citizens and the media passively (1998a: 30) contribute to the entrenchment of neoliberalism as doxa, by accepting and repeating the claims of neoliberalism. As a result, in public discourse in these societies, an acceptance of the propositions of neoliberalism is seen as an inevitable recognition of the truth about the social world. The negative effects of the establishment of neoliberalism as a paradigm both for governance and for understanding the social are experienced in a plethora of ways in different societies. In France, Bourdieu tells us, the state has begun to abdicate its role as a guarantor and protector of social benets in the spheres of education, health and welfare (1998a: 34). In the name of globalization, European workers are told to work longer hours to make European countries competitive with those countries that offer no protection or benets for labour. In the UK and the USA, economic insecurity affects not just the working class but a middle class as well, with options for permanent jobs with benets being replaced by temporary and underpaid jobs (1998a: 37). In another sphere, the neoliberal vision is signicantly eroding the autonomy of the arts, bringing the pressures of the market to bear upon the production and consumption of literature and lm (1998s: 38). The near-monopolistic encroachment of neoliberalism on the terms of discussion about the social includes the colonization of language as well: corporate decisions to sack workers are described as bold social plans (1998a: 31) and the jargon of deregulation, downsizing and slimming masks the actual social consequences of such actions. According to Bourdieu, what the neoliberal worldview actually achieves is nothing other than the oldest dream of capitalism, the establishment of a framework for the accumulation and distribution of prot according to Darwinian principles. The worldview is similarly nothing other than a reincarnation of the oldest traditions of conservative thought, rejecting the very notion of the social in favour of an atomistic ction of individuals who are governed by the free market in the economic arena, and who are free agents in all their choices. Hence, according to the tenets of conservative thought, individuals have to bear responsibility for the situations in which they nd themselves. Bourdieu enumerates some of those whose interests the system of neoliberalism serves as


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shareholders, nancial operators, industrialists, conservative politicians or social democrats converted to the cosy capitulations of laissez faire, senior ofcials of the nance ministry (1998b: 96). Along with national and multinational corporations, and organizations such as the IMF or WTO, this is the powerful constituency that neoliberalism serves. This constituency, in turn, serves neoliberalism as its guardian, advocate and defender. I now turn to explicating some key concepts in Bourdieus work, towards theorizing how neoliberalism might manage to entrench itself in public discourse, whether in India or France, as the description of reality itself.

Key concepts: habitus, doxa, eld and capitalHabitus and doxa Bourdieu uses the term doxa as early as Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), in relation to his theorization of the habitus. The concept of the habitus may be understood as an explanation of the functioning social space at the micro-level, a description of the relationship between a particular type of environment (1977: 72) shared by a group of people and the practices of those who inhabit that shared space. Bourdieu asserts that there are structures that shape the character of particular shared environments. For example, in class societies, material conditions of existence (1977: 72) constitute the respective social spaces inhabited by different classes. Practice, an important term in Bourdieu, can be dened as those embodied activities and competencies that are learned and carried out by individuals in a social space. But this learning is not of the order of something that is consciously incorporated by an individual into their repertoire of responses, actions or reactions; neither, for that matter does this learning operate as an unconscious motivational basis for all practices. It would be more appropriate to say that these practices are acquired as a result of being integrated, acclimatized and shaped in a particular type of environment. These learned practices in turn enable individuals to negotiate interactions with other individuals in that social space. Bourdieu argues that the structures that typify social spaces give rise to dispositions in the members of a social space. Dispositions can be understood as inclinations towards certain responses, as the tendencies to make one choice over another and to privilege one action over another, that is, the tendencies to regularly engage in certain practices as compared with other practices. Bourdieus habitus is a system of such dispositions that endure across space and time. An individual may inhabit more than one habitus, and various habituses may overlap to some extent. However, any particular habitus is circumscribed by a groups homogeneity. Operating as a worldview a framework of cognitive

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apprehension, moral judgment, ethical commitments or aesthetic inclinations the habitus becomes the basis for enacting that worldview through practices. However, what makes a particular habitus distinct from another habitus, and what makes a habitus an objective basis for engendering certain dispositions and practices in all those who inhabit that habitus, is the fact that there is a range of practices and dispositions for any particular habitus, which corresponds to what is thinkable within that habitus. There is thus a limit to the possibilities allowed by the perceptual framework corresponding to any habitus. What sets this limit and lies beyond it, is what Bourdieu terms doxa. To question the doxa is an act essentially in the order of heresy, for it is to question the very basis on which not just particular practices or dispositions ultimately rest, but on which the very system that is the basis of all practices in a habitus ultimately rests. Hence, Bourdieu argues, for those who inhabit any particular habitus, what counts as liberal, radical, conservative or orthodox is all within the realm of the thinkable, that is, within the ambit of what does not challenge the doxa. The doxa may be viewed as akin to a substratum of presuppositions, and the acquired practices and dispositions within a habitus as reections, albeit unselfconscious, unarticulated or untheorized, of taken-for-granted deductions about reality itself. What is vital to note here is that the doxa is habitus-specic, thus, implying that what is doxa for inhabitants of one habitus need not necessarily be doxa for the inhabitants of another. This difference in doxa is what marks off one habitus as distinct from another. However, following from Bourdieus description of the relationship between habitus and structures the structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of class existence) produce habitus (1977: 72) it follows that there must be some general relationship between the doxa of particular habituses and these structures at large, provided the structures producing various habituses are the same. Hence, while what counts as doxa for one habitus may be substantially different from what counts as doxa in another habitus, the order of logic according to which the doxic is designated, or the type of practice that falls under doxa, will be common to various habituses. By extension, the more variable the structures in their impact across a society, the less likely is the occurrence of structural consistency across the doxa of various habituses. But if it were the same agency that shaped these habitus-producing structures across the breadth of a society, and if the basic paradigm or method for shaping these structures was the same for all inhabitants of that society, then each habitus would be imprinted by the same vision of what counts as doxa. This is Bourdieus essential argument regarding neoliberalism: it is an all-pervasive paradigm and method for shaping habitus-producing structures. As I will show later, Bourdieu posits that the state is the agency that grants the paradigm its all-pervasiveness, through the economic, cultural, or social policies that it advocates. Bourdieu argues that what occurs at the level of the habitus (practices) also occurs at the level of the state given certain conditions of structural homogeneity.


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Field and capital Bourdieu employs the notion of the eld to explain the functioning and composition of social space across a society, as opposed to his theorization of the habitus, which explains the functioning of social space in particular and homogeneous environments shared by groups of people. Social space can be understood as made up of different, and distinct (although often overlapping) elds, which correspond to different spheres of activity and practice, such as the cultural, economic, social, and political.6 A particular eld in a society can be viewed as an embodiment of the valuation of, exchange of, and struggle over the resources of the eld, between different groups of inhabitants in the society. But the power relations that structure a eld do not necessarily operate as an unequal distribution of resources, for each group of inhabitants can surely bring its own resources into the eld. Rather, the relations that structure a eld operate through the legislation of what kinds of resources count as a valid currency of exchange, that is, what kinds of resources translate as valid capital for the eld. Hence, in the cultural eld, while each group may bring its own set of cultural practices into the eld and each group may possess equal resources in this basic sense, how much capital each group possesses is decided by what counts as culture within that groups repertoire of resources. The criteria for what counts as culture is decreed by the dominant class in that eld, which is the class that possesses the most cultural capital, and whose interest that particular structure of the eld serves. Hence, any group seeking to improve its relative standing in social space, by aspiring to a position of greater power than it has had before, reinforces the denition of culture and hence the very structure that serves the dominant class interests. Secondly, what is negotiated and contested in the exchange of capital within a eld is not just those actions that would allow various classes to increase their capital, but equally importantly, the very stakes by which capital is dened at all, which Bourdieu terms nomos. Nomos is dened by Bourdieu in Pascalian Meditations as the irreducible, foundational, fundamental law (1997: 96) that structures a eld. Nomos may also be understood as the regulative principle that orders the functioning of a eld. Since it is the constitutive structure of a eld, it is not dependent on any forces within the eld. Therefore, it does not have to be explained in terms of these internal forces, nor can it be questioned from within the ambit of the eld. Yet the nomos is neither a transcendental eternal idea nor a principle of abstract logic. It is a historically shaped view that reects the interests of the groups that hold dominant positions in a eld. It is, in this sense, arbitrary because there is no necessary or intrinsic reason for one principle as opposed to another to orient the functioning of the eld. The nomos is what constitutes the doxa at the level of eld, since the nomos demarcates the limit to what is thinkable within the eld even as the nomos must itself remain outside the ken of the thinkable.7

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Thus, in the cultural eld, for example, what different groups challenge each other for is not just an increase in the amount of capital they possess, but the criteria by which something is considered genuine cultural capital, and for the right to dene that nomos. What this implies is that all groups who are participants in a eld share the assumption that increasing their capital requires participating in the game of exchange, negotiation and contestation that takes place in the eld. The participation in this game even by those classes against whom the dice is loaded, amounts to a reafrmation of the structure of the eld, that is, the reafrmation of those practices that serve a dominant class as the most authentic incarnation of that sphere of social activity. In other words, this amounts to a recognition of both the nomos and the doxa of the eld. Bourdieu, additionally, argues that value or capital in one eld does not necessarily translate into value in another eld. Nor, for that matter, can capital in any eld be understood in terms of its economic value, that is in terms of economic capital. This is a function of two related facts about the nature of elds: rst, elds are relatively autonomous from each other and, second, that the nomos the law that structures each eld and dictates the principle for the struggle over capital in that eld of various elds cannot be understood or represented in terms of any simple equation. There is no xed formula that could explain why one kind of capital translates (or fails to translate) into another kind of capital; there is no xed relationship between the various types of capital. The nomos of each eld is arbitrary, and can be understood appropriately only in terms of the history of a particular eld in a particular society. Nevertheless, certain kinds of capital are convertible into other kinds of capital, for example, economic capital can be converted into educational capital and educational capital into social capital. While there is no general equivalency between forms of capital, there are rates of exchange according to which one particular form of capital may be converted to another particular form of capital. The mode and mechanisms by which economic capital translates into social capital and the factors that determine this translation will vary from society to society. What emerges from this scenario is that, in a particular society, some kinds of capital may be more advantageous than others, in terms of their ability to convert into other kinds of capital. This creates a third form of struggle over capital: in addition to (a) volume of a given capital and (b) denition of what will be valued in a given eld (nomos), there is an attempt (c) to control the relative advantage of forms of capital in relation to one another, that is, the ease of transfer of capital from one eld to another. Now, any agency or force that can either impact the nomos of a eld or the relative advantage of one form of capital with regard to another can inuence the relative relations between elds in social space as a whole and the play of capital both within elds and across elds. For example, if a particular kind of educational capital becomes suddenly valuable in a society, but if that educational capital can only be acquired on guarantee of possession of a certain kind of


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cultural capital, then the demand for that kind of cultural capital will also suddenly increase. For Bourdieu, the state is precisely this kind of an agency, which, through policy, sets the exchange rate between different elds. The state even alters the nomos of specic elds because these elds will tend to adjust the stakes according to the advantages both within elds, and, through exchange, across elds. Late in his work, Bourdieu begins to think of this meta-valuation system as a kind of paradigm and views neoliberalism as just the sort of value system between elds, at once altering the elds and, at the same time, naturalizing the meta-value as the essential value for every sphere of sociality. As we will see now, the meaning of the state in Bourdieu can neither be reduced to an objective force over and above those that it governs, nor can it be understood simply as the collective embodiment of all those who fall under its purview.

Bourdieus theory of the stateBourdieu understands the state as the culmination of a process of concentration of different types of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural capital or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital) (1997: 41, original emphasis). As elds emerge historically, shaped by the play of capital within these elds, the states accumulation of the capital pertaining to that eld increases as well. With the state becoming the possessor of signicant amounts of different kinds of capital, it becomes the holder of a kind of metacapital (1997: 41) which guarantees authority over each of the particular species of capital as well as over the holders of capital in different elds (1997: 41). According to Bourdieu, the possession of this metacapital enables the state to exercise power over the different elds and over the different particular species of capital, and especially over the rates of conversion between them (1997: 401). Hence, the stakes for playing the game within or across elds, and inscribed within the nomos of each eld will be, in part, structured by the state. Now, if the state was to invoke the neoliberal paradigm as the grounds for the exercise of power in different elds and different species of capital, and if the state were to apply the neoliberal paradigm to every eld through its policies, it follows that the nomos of these elds would accordingly be shaped in the cast of that paradigm. And if the state were to choose the neoliberal paradigm as the basis and framework for deciding rates of exchange between all possible combinations of elds, then, too the nomos of each eld would be reshaped in a manner that would validate this very paradigm. In effect, in doing so, the state would adopt the neoliberal paradigm as the nomos for metacapital itself, as the very basis for its dealings with the subjects of the state. The exercise of metacapital or statist power is effected, partly at least, through what may be termed the objective aspects of the state, institutions that enforce and afrm the presence of the state, such as organs of the state (e.g. the

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judiciary), policy-making bodies (e.g. a federal/central government bank) or administrative bodies (e.g. a central tax department/revenue service). Yet these objective aspects of the state do not merely exist over and above the citizens of the state as constraints upon the actions and perceptions of citizens. Bourdieu points out that the state exists in two forms: in objective reality, in a form of a set of institutions such as rules, agencies, ofces etc., and also in peoples minds (1998a: 33). The heart of Bourdieus argument is as simple as it is profound. Any particular state can be described as the outcome of a shared history between state (or structures of government) and people, a shared history of state and people (sometimes perceived as state against people) can, in turn, be understood in terms of struggle over capital in different elds. Quite different than Althussers now familiar notion of interpellation because it is dynamic and actually allows for innovation Bourdieus proposition that the state exists in subjective form suggests, via the notions of inculcation in the habitus and position-taking in the eld, that the categories and structures of cognition and perception of the citizens of a state are historically constituted through a shared relationship between state and people. As Bourdieu puts it: The construction of the state is accompanied by the construction of a sort of common historical transcendental immanent to all its subjects. Through the framing it imposes upon practice, the state establishes and inculcates common forms and categories of perception and appreciation, social frameworks of perception or of understanding of memory, in short state forms of classication. It thereby creates the conditions for a kind of immediate orchestration of habitus which is the foundation of consensus over this set of shared evidences constitutive of (national) common sense. (1998c: 54, original emphasis) This understanding of the subjective form of state has several practical implications. First, that the people governed by a state are disposed, in the manner of those disposed within a habitus, to respond to the state, which is in reality the position-taking strategies of all of the people objectied. Players within each eld and across elds, engaged in the struggle over different types of capital, recognize the terms of each game but also recognize the fact that they are playing all games on terms that have been orchestrated by the state. In this recognition, they contribute to the afrmation of the nomos proposed by the state within and across elds. Just as the habitus is embodied within the inhabitants of that habitus in the form of dispositions, so is the state incorporated in its citizens. The state, in this manner, shapes structures of perception and cognition across the society that the state governs. This is what Bourdieu means by the phrase Minds of State (1998c: 52), suggesting that the state exists as much an entity outside of its citizens as it exists of the citizens. It is this incorporation within the state, which is shared by all the citizens of the state, and the incorporation of the state within


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the citizens, that would explain why citizens would be disposed to comply with the states endorsement of the new categories of perception proposed by the neoliberal paradigm. Secondly, the common historical transcendental (1998c: 54) that Bourdieu speaks of may be viewed as a common language that the state and people speak. While the particularity of such a common transcendental will depend on the particular history of a state, and while the state will dene the character of this transcendental to a greater extent than the people, this common transcendental will refer, even if obliquely, to the shared history of particular state and people. In other words, it is the particularity of the relationship that will be invoked in the struggle between state and the people for the accumulation of capital and for redening the nomos of any eld. For example, in one country, the struggle for accumulation of political capital (the struggle to make certain issues part of the agenda of governance) may historically have been founded on the platform of human rights. In other countries, the struggle for accumulation of political capital may invoke constitutional authority, whether or not that authority is ultimately grounded on the notion of human rights. In those countries or societies where the state, by virtue of its history, is committed to certain policies (such as welfare of citizens) that might pose as obstacles to the paradigm of neoliberalism, resistance to neoliberalism would be strongest. Bourdieu uses the term state tradition (1998a: 33) to describe the role of the state as guarantor of the welfare of its citizens and points out that where state tradition has historically been the strongest, resistance to neoliberal doctrine is correspondingly stronger. In societies where the state tradition has been historically weak, such as in the USA, the state is most manifest and visible as state in its policing function.8 Acknowledging that the state usually does not possess complete autonomy, Bourdieu argues, however, that the older the state and the greater the social advances it has incorporated, the more autonomous it is (1998a: 34). The neoliberal view of the state as described by Bourdieu, conforms closely to the kind of state where state tradition has been weak. Neoliberalism envisions a minimal role for the state, with regard to state responsibility for providing social benets for citizens or regulation of the economy, but, ironically, this minimal role sanctions the state to concentrate on its policing function. Paradoxically, even as the neoliberal paradigm seeks to liberate the state from the burden of guaranteeing the welfare of citizens, it seeks to diminish the autonomy of the state from the market, since, in the neoliberal paradigm, it is the spectre of the market that will dictate policy. What then, one might ask, accounts for the success of the neoliberal paradigm in societies such as France where state tradition has been strong and robust? Bourdieu argues that wherever neoliberalism has become the nomos of the state, an effort has been made to erase the history of the state. Bourdieu terms this desire of neoliberal ideology as involution (1998a: 34), a desire to regress the state to its incarnation at the earliest stages of its development wherein its

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role was characterized largely by its policing function and its economic power (1998a: 32). Neoliberal ideology, however, portrays these involutions as revolutions.9 This conservative revolution invokes the authority of progress, reason and science (economics in this case) (1998a: 35) to legitimize the involution, in the bargain characterizing genuine social achievements as the baggage of misguided and regressive thinking. The erasure of historicity and the denial of historicity in the understanding of reason and progress is a concomitant of the scienticity that neoliberal doctrine presents as its strength. The nomos of neoliberalism, then, relies fundamentally upon the assumption that social existence is neither historically constituted nor, for that matter, is it worthwhile to invoke historical precedent in understanding the present. The nomos, because it is a naturalized rule for valuation, cannot be questioned from within the eld governed by that nomos. Neoliberalism reduces all aspects of a historically constituted social reality to the mathematical equations of the free market, and the rejection of the residue that will not translate into these equations as the worthless residue of the social. The uniqueness and danger of neoliberalism is that its doxa is enforced by the transnational networks of globalization, albeit through the agency of neoliberal states. Hence, Bourdieu argues that perhaps the most devastating impact of neoliberalism has been to render ineffective all the collective institutions capable of standing up to the effects of the infernal machine (1998b: 102), foremost among which is the state itself. Embraced by the state as the paradigm for the generation of metacapital and various species of capital and implemented as the framework for determining rates of exchange between elds, this doxa is enforced, at another level, by the neoliberal state as the nomos of all elds. Neoliberalism operates as the doxa of a national habitus, restructuring elds and relations between elds; neoliberalism also reshapes the structures that structure different habituses within social space. At both the micro-level and the macro-level, neoliberalism establishes itself as a set of truths about the world and as a way of looking at the world. The supreme irony, of course, is that the message of neoliberalism, which demands a forgetting of the history of the relationship between state and people, is successfully adopted by the people of the state only because of the shared history of the state and people. Although dominantly forged by the state, the state-thought that once represented an amalgam of different visions now chooses to see the world only through the lens of neoliberalism.

The establishment of neoliberalism as doxa in Indian societyThe current discussion on Indian society reveals an engulfment by the terms of neoliberal discourse, akin to the scenario sketched by Bourdieu. As suggested by the examples cited earlier, the partisans of globalization and liberalization


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present it as a recognition of truth itself, as doxa. As I will illustrate in this section, the Indian state through embracing a neoliberal vision as the nomos for its educational and economic policies in the last decade, has altered the nomos of the educational, economic, and cultural elds as well as the exchange rates between them. However, there are important historical reasons, pertaining to the mode in which scientic and technical learning were understood in both colonial and independent India, that explain why the neoliberal worldview can now so readily be adopted by different segments of Indian society, most notably by its elite groups. The history of the reception of science and technology in India, for all its internal discontinuities, has over the better part of two centuries disposed the relatively privileged sectors of Indian society to accept the changes effected by neoliberalism in the nomos of educational, economic and cultural elds and the correspondingly altered rates of exchange between these elds. In this reading, I focus primarily on the history of the educational sphere in India. My description here centres on the doxa, nomos and workings of educational capital in India, and on economic and cultural capital to the extent that educational capital translates into these other types of capital. As Bourdieu argues, elds do possess relative autonomy from each other. Hence, it needs to be pointed out that cultural capital and economic capital in India will also be determined by other eld-specic factors. My objective in this section, however, is to outline, from the perspective of the educational eld, the naturalization of neoliberalism as the essential meta-value for every sphere of sociality in India, that is, to delineate the legitimation of neoliberalism as a culturally authoritative view across Indian social space. The rst use of Western technology in India was in topographic, statistical, and other surveys, that followed the British annexation of territories in the mideighteenth century (Baber, 1996: 137). Yet, it was only after 1835 that Indians were granted the opportunity to be scientic themselves, when the colonial administration extended its patronage to scientic education in the medium of English (1996: 138). Gyan Prakash, in his text, Another Reason (1999), argues that the decision to extend scientic learning to Indians embodied a paradox with powerful consequences for a manner of thinking national identity. On the one hand, the decision reafrmed the discourse of civilizational difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, which dened the European West as rational, enlightened and civilized and the non-West as primitive and irrational. On the other hand, it was an indirect admission by the British, that Indians were capable of rational scientic thought. Indians could thus stake a claim to a universal humanity and rationality via the medium of science, since science stood for universal and rational values.10 As Prakash argues, the British decision set in place a problem for Indian nationalism the reconciliation of ones universalism with the realities of subjugation under the colonial power. As a solution, a predominantly educated English-speaking Hindu elite, encompassing reformers, historians, writers and scientists, constructed a narrative of Indianness through a

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selective interpretation of Hindu scripture. In this reading, Hinduism was described as a universal scientic, religious, and cultural worldview, a Hindu science (1999: 9). However, if this science had manifested itself in all its fullness in an ancient time, Indian civilization had been reduced to backwardness because of the savagery inicted by waves of invaders and the economic exploitation caused by British rule. This recuperation of science as Hindu offered a basis to challenge the hegemony of Western claims over reason, since, the argument went, Hindu thought had been scientic since its very inception, predating by centuries the European Enlightenment (1999: 84). Scientic knowledge and learning in colonial India thus operated as an arena in which the supremacy of the West could be contested, yet this contestation meant accepting, to a signicant extent, the categories of classication proposed by the colonial state with regard to the scientic-technological educational eld. For, while the Indian elite, through making a case for a Hindu science, did not accept the self-denition of science as inherently Western in its origins or character, they did however accept the self-denition of science as synonymous with rationality and enlightenment. Translated into the terms of Bourdieus framework of the social, one can argue that the nomos of the scientic-technological educational eld science as the embodiment and goal of a rational, enlightened and socially progressive humanity as dened by the colonial British state was accepted by the Indian elite. What also needs to be highlighted here is that the nomos of the educational eld in colonial India was also shaped at the moment of its inception by a majoritarian Hindu, specically Brahmanical and uppercaste, middle class and above, educated, English-speaking discourse. The nomos of the nascent, not-yet-independent, Indian scientic-technological educational eld in its historical origin clearly represented and privileged the interests of certain social groups, those who formed the vanguard of the nationalist movement. Yet, inasmuch as science stood for the intrinsic cultural superiority of the British colonizers or European civilization, that proposition was expressly rejected by the Indian nationalist elite. Partha Chatterjees arguments, in The Nation and its Fragments (1993), can be read as a strong case for the total autonomy of an Indian cultural eld from the framework of state reason in the colonial era. Chatterjee argues that anticolonial nationalism visualizes an autonomous domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power (1993: 6). He describes this as a separation between a realm of cultural or spiritual values, an inner (1993: 6) domain where those colonized hold authority, and the domain of the outside (1993: 6), the sphere of economy and statecraft, of science and technology (1993: 6), where the West has vanquished the natives. Anti-colonial nationalism, accordingly, dened its task as one of wresting back control of the outer domain, while it could rest assured that its cultural identity was uncontaminated by the colonial encounter. Indeed, the Indian nationalist elite signicantly based their case for


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the right of Indians to govern themselves on economic grounds, arguing that British policies favoured European businessmen over Indians, that British rule had resulted in a systematic drain of wealth from India, and that Britain could not reconcile its interests as an imperial power with the economic well-being of Indian society. And for the nationalist elite, technology, as belonging to the outer domain, could be incorporated seamlessly into an Indian identity it could, in fact, be adopted as Indian since it did not threaten to violate the eternal core of that identity. Culture, of course, was rmly located within the inner domain. Hence, in the cultural eld that was protected from the reach of the colonial state, a nationalist Indian elite reserved the right to dene the nomos for themselves, rejecting the colonial state-thought that would have designated Indians as racially, and therefore culturally, inferior to the British. At the same time, however, science, recuperated and redened as Hindu, would have operated as a marker of both cultural authority and cultural authenticity within this eld. In other words, while the cultural eld would obviously not have been coextensive with the scientic-technological educational eld (since cultural capital would have depended on other markers of traditional privilege such as caste), educational capital of the scientic variant would have easily translated into cultural capital. Scientic educational capital in the pre-independence era would have also translated into economic capital, since the Indian nationalist elite agreed that industrial development would lead to economic progress the contestation with the colonial power in this regard was for the right for Indians to regulate the economic eld. In general agreement with Chatterjees conceptualization of the opposition between the inner and outer domain in the anticolonial historical phase, Prakash argues, however, that at the moment of independence, there was no fundamental opposition between the inner sphere of the nation and its outer life; the latter was the formers existence at another abstract level (1999: 202). In the Nehruvian vision of independent India, scientic and technological progress was dened as essential to realizing Indias unique modernity and destiny. A scientically developed and socially progressive India was visualized as an embodiment of a timeless Indian ethos.11 What is important to note here is that as the independent Indian nation-state crystallized as the agency that would now accumulate statist metacapital in place of the colonial state, it initiated and effected transformations and changes but also preserved continuities with the nomos of the cultural, educational and economic elds shaped in the colonial era. The key changes as well as continuities in the functioning of educational, cultural and economic capital in independent India can be viewed in terms of the following four factors. First, the fact that Indianness, as a kind of cultural and national capital, was closely linked with the project of national development. Secondly, the framing of this Nehruvian project in accordance with socialist goals. Third, the emphasis on a higher education in the medium of English as opposed to primary education, and, fourth, the value attached to an overseas

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education. I will now briey describe the consequences of these factors in shaping various elds in postcolonial Indian society. The educational policies of the independent Indian state greatly emphasized the role of science and technology in leading India on the path of development and progress.12 Only by replicating and emulating the scientic and technological achievements of the West, could India hope to gain parity with developed countries. Scientic progress would be the answer to illiteracy, to improved agricultural productivity, and to the development of an indigenous industry. The benets of these advances, it was also hoped and expected, would devolve into social equity. As Ashis Nandy argues, in independent India science was authorized as a reason of state (1988:1). Dams and laboratories were literally the temples of India (Visvanathan, 1997: 4), scientists were demigods and there was no better way to be patriotic than to be scientic. And, as the Report of the Second National Commission on Labour (2002) details, the Indian state invested heavily in setting up scientic and technological centres for higher education.13 Hence, a scientic and technological education, especially from the premier educational institutions, operated as a marker of talent and capability, ensured job opportunities and security and guaranteed social status in that an individual with such qualications was perceived as working in the service of the nation. Such an education directly guaranteed educational, cultural and economic capital. The educational capital provided by the acquisition of such qualications also translated quite easily into economic capital. It is almost a truism to state that this designation of the value of scientic or technological education has been taken up by Indian society in the postindependence era, especially by the economically privileged classes. A number of current indicators bear testimony to this including: the intense competition for seats in engineering and medical colleges, especially the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs); the steady mushrooming of private engineering and medical colleges with variable facilities and infrastructure; and the willingness of the lower-middle, middle- and upper-middle socioeconomic segments to spend large sums of money on private tuitions to prepare their children for entrance examinations to these institutions, and to admit their children to private engineering or medical colleges at considerable cost. A second way in which the educational policies of the Indian state have impacted the nomos of the educational eld is through the privileging of higher education over primary schooling. As Pamela Shurmer-Smith points out, India spends a minuscule amount on primary education as compared to its heavy investment in higher education (2000: 37). Also, since English is the medium of instruction in the premier educational institutes, and since English has been the language of commerce in independent India, uency in English is an essential prerequisite for obtaining a quality higher education in India. The Indian education system thus privileges those who can afford a private schooling in English, the afuent middle classes and above (2000: 36) who spend signicant sums of


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money toward providing such an education for their children. Fluency in English combined with a private education provides educational capital for further educational opportunities. Capital obtained from higher education translates into economic capital. Fluency in English in also translates into cultural capital and, to an extent, economic capital. The nomos of these elds has also been shaped by the value traditionally attached to an overseas education. As Pamela Shurmer-Smith has pointed out, from the colonial period onwards, the upper levels of metropolitan Indian society have been conscious of the importance of operating on an international scale as a means of preserving their impermeability to the classes below. Education has long been an important aspect of this and during the British Raj many upper-class families strove to educate their sons expensively in the most exclusive British boarding schools and universities. (2000: 36) While more recently this trend has shifted towards the United States, large numbers of students continue to go abroad for higher studies.14 An overseas education brings with it educational capital and economic capital, since such qualications put a candidate in a very strong position when competing for senior positions in national and international corporations in India (2000: 356). However, a signicant component of the value of an overseas education seems to be cultural. Historically recognized as a marker of privilege and of membership of an economic and cultural elite, an overseas education is a guarantor of much-sought after prestige (2000: 36). Shurmer-Smith remarks on her conversation with a few hundred youth at education fairs in India: for these Indians the overseas education was desirable because it was expensive and because it was overseas (2000: 36, original emphasis). An overseas education in independent India promises a kind of cultural capital that an education from even a top-quality Indian institute cannot provide. These complexities that shape the nomos of the educational eld in India may partially explain the phenomenon of brain drain, the migration, since the 1970s, of large numbers of qualied Indians from the nations premier educational institutes to the West for the purpose of higher studies and pursuing careers abroad. As Madhulika Khandelwal (1995) states, in the 1970s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service [in the US] was recording an astonishing and almost unprecedented rate of about 80 to 90 percent of working Indians as professionals (1995: 179). Khandelwal points out that since the 1970s, the Indian immigrant population in the US has considerably diversied. Yet, the majority of Indian immigrants to America continue to be professionals or students in professional elds. The migration of such Indians might be propelled by their desire to add cultural capital to their pool of educational and economic

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capital, through using their Indian qualications to acquire an additional qualication overseas. The gain in capital promised by migration to the US also reafrms the value of Indian scientic and technological qualications, since the high quality of education at Indian institutions places one in an extremely good position to garner a scholarship or fellowship for higher studies abroad. A pattern can be distilled from the arguments above, which allows one to grasp the character of the doxa of the educational eld in independent India and, to some extent, through the matrix of exchange, that of the economic and cultural elds as well.The educational (and relatedly, the economic, and cultural) elds have privileged economic elites, specically those who could afford private schooling in English, and a scientic or technological education. Yet, this privilege has been sanctioned and endorsed by the state in the name of the nation since scientic and technological education have been historically understood as leading to economic prosperity as well as social progress. The Indian elites, who have most beneted from this state understanding, share this state-thought and, in fact, have also shaped it in the course of the decades after independence. The demand for an overseas education may seem to contradict the Nehruvian imperative of national self-sufciency and progress. Yet, as Bourdieu has so convincingly shown, it is in the very nature of doxa, which is arbitrary (in the sense of not necessary), to conceal its possible contradictions by operating as a foundational discourse. Although the character of the educational eld has changed signicantly since its origin in the colonial era, the nomos of the eld continues to be characterized by a majoritarian discourse as at its founding moment. Generally speaking, what is common to both the discourses is the privileged access of certain already-privileged groups to education itself and the validation of their privilege in terms of an idea of service to the nation. The change in nomos or doxa that occurs when the Indian state adopts a neoliberal framework can be described as follows. On the one hand, it continues to promote the privilege-as-right of an Indian elite. On the other hand, it redenes the demands made by the nation on this elite. With globalization and liberalization, the socialist dimension of Nehrus investment in science and technology is abandoned, even as the rhetoric of national progress and development is preserved in the equation. The objectives are deemed worthwhile, even essential to justifying policy changes warranted by Indias participation in a globalized economy, but socialism as a method for realizing these objectives is rejected as a awed and archaic ideology. In the sphere of industry and business, the Indian state has initiated the process of privatizing state-owned assets and sectors. In the sphere of education, the emphasis is slowly but surely shifting towards the acquisition of skills needed to be competitive in a global economy. And, crucially, in the professional sphere, the Indian state now encourages its subjects to acquire global capital, whether by working in India or overseas. Thus, one nds that various Indian universities, including in Delhi and Bombay, are increasingly offering newly created courses in information


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technology, to feed a demand and to engender what, in the eyes of the Indian government and Indian business, is a win-win situation. The logic behind these decisions seems to be as follows: with more software and IT professionals, software exports overseas (especially to the US) will increase, strengthening Indias forex reserves. For students, a qualication in subjects such as IT offers a chance of a much desired career overseas (especially in the US), with the chance of earning a dollar income. The money such Indians might send home will additionally boost Indias forex reserves. The accompanying rhetoric, whether in business conferences or in the speeches of politicians, is saturated with references to making the most of the golden opportunities provided by globalization and making India a superpower in the twenty-rst century. Even as this rhetoric of development continues to be paid a token nod, the particular objectives that undergird the history of the educational eld in India are forgotten. In newly independent India, working in a scientic or technological capacity in India was enough to mark ones contribution to the nation and to social justice. This was the doxa of the educational or professional eld in its incarnation then. In globalized India, contributing to the inow of foreign exchange is seen as sufcient for realizing the dreams of national development and prosperity. This is the doxa of globalized India. Thanks to the neoliberal vision, certain key historical facts about the role of the state in the eld of education such as the reason for the states subsidizing of higher education to make it affordable for the largest number of Indians are erased and negated in the name of the truth about the global economy. Ironically, but not surprisingly, the elite sections of Indian society loudly protest any suggestions on the part of the government to privatize higher education. The governments emphasis on IT and computer-oriented education and the mushrooming of dozens of private educational institutions that offer several short-term diplomas in specic IT and computing skills, combined with the global demand for software exports, has meant that the exchange rates between educational, economic and cultural capital have also changed since liberalization. While considerably expensive for short-term courses, training at these institutes guarantees many of the opportunities hitherto available only to engineering graduates: a technological qualication and a job in the US. In addition to guaranteeing a dollar salary (signicant economic capital), these qualications, whether from government institutes or private institutes, also promise the prestige of an international career and the cultural capital that goes with it. The success of such institutes and the signicant numbers of diploma graduates who have managed to nd jobs in the US despite lacking the traditional qualications earlier required for the same also point to the struggle over the elds of educational, economic and cultural capital. A wider cross-section of Indian society is now staking its claim to both increasing their capital in these respective elds and to altering the nomos of the educational and economic elds. As Thomas Friedman states, in an article advocating the virtues of globalization,

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hundreds of thousands of young Indians mostly from lower-middle-class families, suddenly have social mobility, motor scooters and apartments after going to technical colleges and joining the Indian software and engineering rms providing back-room support and research for the worlds biggest rms thanks to globalization. (Friedman, 2002) Sunil Khilnani, in The Idea of India (1999), describing this globalized class of Indian professionals, typied today by the young software programmer or MBA, argues that this class is not constrained by the territorial frame of the nation state (1999: 148).15 As he puts it, for the members of this class, India is merely one stopping place in a global employment market (1999: 149). Yet, the Indian state, in justifying its adoption of pro-globalization and pro-liberalization policies applauds the professional choices of this very class as positive contributions to the Indian nation! This newly-formed elite group, which no doubt is substantially comprised of the older elite groups in addition to new entrants, and the Indian state thus appear to have embarked afresh on a shared history, one founded on a neoliberal view of the nation and the world. In sharing the categories of neoliberal thought, the elites of Indian society, at once, afrm and reinforce the neoliberal vision and policies of the Indian state. The Indian state, in turn, continues to sanction and promote the privilege of the newest incarnation of an Indian elite.

ConclusionI began writing this piece in the town of Ghaziabad in India, while back home during my summer break from graduate study at Emory University in the US. For me, the most obvious indicator in Ghaziabad as, I am sure, in other towns in India of the encroachment of neoliberalism on Indian social space was the existence of Internet cybercafes in close proximity to clusters of makeshift brick houses lacking electricity connections, and dime-a-dozen advertisements plastered all over buildings and lamp-posts, on numerous cable television channels, and in local news publications by institutes offering training in assorted programming and computing skills. A few months later, back in the USA, I read some articles on Indian websites about the golden jubilee celebrations in the USA of Nehrus greatest gift to his nation (Guha Ray, 2000), the Indian Institutes of Technology. As an article about the event pointed out, alumni Victor Menezes, Senior Vice-Chairman, CitiGroup, reminded IITians of the work that lies ahead in delivering on the brand that they have built (Bhatt, 2003). Professor Sanjay Dhande, Director, IIT-Kanpur, struck a chord when he said, We want the Nobel Prize. This is our only goal (Bhatt, 2003). Judging from the coverage of the event, what seemed to be conspicuously absent from the celebratory speeches


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of the high prole IIT alumni was any reection on the Nehruvian vision of independent India, thanks to which the IITs were founded at all. Amidst all the talk of entrepreneurship, business leadership and global branding, Nehrus hope no matter how nave it might have been that technological progress would lead to social equality, seems to have not even been considered worth acknowledging.

Notes1 These contentious reforms would enable sick companies to be sold or dumped with greater ease; will enable employers with less than 1,000 workers to sack workers without governmental consent (as opposed to the existing law which sets this gure at 100 employees); and will allow companies to hire contract labour without these companies having to make such employees permanent (Barman, 2001). In Bourdieus Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (1998c), Pascalian Meditations (1997), Language and Symbolic Power (1991) and Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977). Peters states, We might say that neoliberalism, historically, was at its strongest during the era of the transatlantic partnership between Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher during the decade of the 1980s, and its dominance began to wane in the 1990s (2001: 18). Though Peters describes the 1980s as the high noon of neoliberalism, it is debatable whether, from a global perspective, neoliberalism is on the decline. For example, India and China, two of the worlds largest economies, have implemented programs of economic initiatives to integrate with the global economy in the last decade. Adorno and Horkheimer point out that loss of memory is the transcendental condition of science. All objectication is forgetting. Quoted in Visvanathan (1997: 78). It is important to note here that the concept of doxa is signicantly different from the Marxist understanding of hegemony. Although a detailed comparison of the two notions is beyond the scope of this paper, some of these differences may be discerned in the context of Bourdieus understanding of the state, which is explicated later in the paper. However, for Bourdieu, this conceptualization of social space is not just a theoretical grid that explains social space in the present moment; the existence of distinct domains of social life has a real historical basis in the mode of development of Western societies since the middle ages (1991: 25). Bourdieu (1997) states once one has accepted the viewpoint that is constitutive of a eld, one can no longer take an external viewpoint on it. The nomos, a thesis that, because it is never put forward as such, cannot be contradicted since it has no antithesis. As a legitimate principle of division that can be applied to all fundamental aspects of existence, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the

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prescribed and the proscribed, it must remain unthought. Being the matrix of all the pertinent questions, it cannot produce the questions that could call it into question (1997: 97). Bourdieu points out that, as shown by Wacquant, this vision of a state devoted exclusively to its policing function is a long-standing dream of the dominant class (1998a: 32), since the policing function of the state is usually carried out with regard to socially disadvantaged groups and classes. It is a characteristic of all conservative revolutions, Bourdieu tells us, to present restorations as revolutions (1998a: 35). Michael Adas (1991) has argued that this is what distinguishes the introduction of Western science and technology in colonial India from colonial Senegal. French colonialism deemed the Senegalese racially, hence inherently, incapable of learning Western science. As Prakash argues, the state materialized the imagination of India as a prepolitical community (1999: 202). Shiv Visvanathan (1997) points out that in the fties it [science] was like a magic wand. No nation-state felt complete unless it had both a ag and a science policy document. One still remembers the romanticism of Nehrus vision of science. For Nehru, the tryst with destiny was a rezendvous with the modern industrial world and the future, he proclaimed, belongs to those who made friends with science (1997: 4). To cater to the growing needs of industries over the last fty years, the Government set up a large number of Industrial Training Institutes, all over the country. It also set up Indian Institutes of Technology, Management Institutes, and Engineering Colleges to train persons with higher management and technical skill. . . . The Government of India set up 48 national laboratories to undertake applied research in chemistry, physics, electronics, botany etc (Ministry of Labour, 2002: 14445). This year, India overtook China for the rst time as the leading source of international students in the USA. In 2002, 66,836 students from India enrolled in academic institutions in the USA, compared to 63,211 from India (United States Embassy, 2002). Khilnani argues that that this class has gradually been emerging since the 1970s in India, but points out that it has been sustained and been given substantial economic power by the arrival in India, especially after the liberalization began in 1991, of foreign capital and multinationals (1999: 148).

ReferencesAdas, Michael (1991) Scientic standards and colonial education in British India and French Senegal. In Teresa Meade and Mark Walker (eds) Science, Medicine and Cultural Imperialism. New York: St. Martins, 435. Baber, Zaheer (1996) The Science of Empire in India: Scientic Knowledge, Civilization and Colonial Rule in India. New York: State University of New York Press.


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