Laura Bear Examines the Place of Friendship in Bureaucratic Practice on the Hooghly River

The South Asian Studies Council welcomes Laura Bear, of the London School of Economics, to the Fall Colloquium Series. Dr.Bear will deliver a talk, titled: “Making a River of Gold: Publicity, Friendship and Public-Private Partnerships on the Hooghly”.

September 26, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue.

In her talk, Dr.Bear observes that unlike patronage or corruption, the place of friendship in bureaucratic practice has been little explored. This reflects a wider ‘romance of friendship’ within capitalism. This suggests that friendship is a zone of authentic, individual relations outside the market or that it supports trust and the generation of prosperity through market exchange. This paper uses an ethnography of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and informal labor on the Hooghly river to show how friendships generate public-private partnerships during liberalization in India. As the public good is redefined as decentralized speculative planning that creates prosperity through collaborations with the private sector, both officials and businessmen turn to the pursuit of jogajog kora. This is the creation of useful friendships that allow individuals to accumulate power around them. This influence is conceived of as a limitless mathematical process of adding and adding again in a mixture of idioms of accountancy and affect.

On the Hooghly these relationships make the state and market ‘work’ but they are founded on and generate economic and political exclusions. In addition they create mutuality between individuals, but are forged through intimidation and the invocation of higher powers. They are also surrounded by the unpredictable, arbitrary threat of withdrawal as they are not permanent ties. There are also limits on to whom one extends friendship. A hierarchical distinction is created between those who are less equal to whom sympathy and patronage rather than friendship is offered. Most significantly, these relations are built with and sustain
secrets, and thereby generate opacity in public life. This paper uses these practices to reflect on the wide and growing significance of a parallel world of secrets, complicity and publicity to the bureaucracies of state capitalism in India and elsewhere. It also reflects on the new
forms of financing of public infrastructure in India, the forms of entrepreneurial society (as opposed to political society) these produce, and their effects on waterscapes.

Laura Bear holds a PhD in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan. She is a specialist on India and ethnographies of the state, labor, temporality, globalization and neo-liberalism.  Her first book, Lines of the Nation is based on research in a railway company town, Kharagpur, particularly among Anglo-Indian workers and their families. This book recasts the history of the Indian railways showing their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory.

Building on her research interests in temporality, neo-liberalism and globalization she is the co-director with Stephan Feuchtwang of the ESRC funded research network, “Conflicts in Time: rethinking contemporary globalization.”