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‘Not Suspended in Mid-Air’: Critical Reflections on Subaltern Encounters with the Indian State

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Social Movements in the Global South

Part of the book series: Rethinking International Development Series ((RID))

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Abstract

Relations between subaltern groups and the state have received substantial attention in recent scholarly work on India’s changing political economy.1 Here, I seek to focus on the arguments made in recent work by Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss. In contrast to perspectives which posit the state as existing for subaltern groups only as a negative source of oppression, and conceive of oppositional politics as deriving from cultures of subaltern otherness, Corbridge and Harriss maintain that the institutions, practices and discourses of the Indian state are at the heart of emancipatory politics in India today (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000; Fuller and Harriss, 2001; Corbridge et al., 2005).

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Authors
  1. Alf Gunvald Nilsen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nottingham, UK

    Sara C. Motta (Lecturer in Politics and Political Economy) (Lecturer in Politics and Political Economy)

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway

    Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Postdoctoral Fellow) (Postdoctoral Fellow)

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© 2011 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Nilsen, A.G. (2011). ‘Not Suspended in Mid-Air’: Critical Reflections on Subaltern Encounters with the Indian State. In: Motta, S.C., Nilsen, A.G. (eds) Social Movements in the Global South. Rethinking International Development Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230302044_5

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