The Fate of Our Corruption

The fate of our corruption: An introductory note

Naveeda Khan

This special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology began life as the best collaborative ventures do, as a conversation in a panel, this one for the 2012 South Asia Studies Conference at Wisconsin, Madison. The theme of the conference was corruption and the paper presenters on the panel sought to explore how corruption was constitutive of the everyday. We were, and remain, convinced that corruption is not just a structural blip in the social to be stamped out by greater surveillance and more effective policies. We maintain that there is something to the fact that even as so many of our interlocutors decry corruption for the suffering it imposes on their lives, they also feel that it is an obdurate element of the world, one with its own time and place. But our claims first call out for the need to specify what we mean by corruption. Rather than privilege the popular understanding of corruption as the abuse of power for personal benefit, we take more seriously the dictionary meaning of it as forms of debasement, a lowering from a state of excellence into depravity or the impairment of judgement and integrity.

The reason for moving away from the more common understanding of corruption is because that understanding, increasingly prevalent in global discourses on governance and clearly important as a rhetorical device, leeches the word of its many nuances that may resonate with people’s myriad experiences of it. In contrast, thinking of corruption as debase-ment draws our attention to prior or even desired states of excellence, the tumble from grace and the likelihood of us befalling such fates. The

Contributions to Indian Sociology 49, 3 (2015): 287–304SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/0069966715593820

Naveeda Khan is at the Anthropology Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Email: [email protected]

at JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY on July 14, 2016cis.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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Contributions to Indian Sociology 49, 3 (2015): 287–304

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title of this special issue, ‘The fate of our corruption’, draws heavily on the idea of our own or proximate presence to acts of corruption and their workings in our lives.

In this introductory article, I explore the significance of thinking of corruption as debasement by showing the possible relation of corrup-tion to the aging of bodies and the rise and fall of cultures, that is, to the biological and physical qualities of the world. While I introduce the articles gathered in this special issue individually, I leave a discussion of their shared contributions to the article by Charles Hallisey. My more limited goal is to draw out corruption’s undergirding by temporality and the everyday. Here temporality is not limited to historical chronology, instead encompassing the multiplicity of time scales that run through us. And the everyday is both the notion of the ordinary beset by the threat of scepticism in relation to oneself and to others that has been explored by Veena Das in her writings (see Das 1998) and a temporality with a diurnal rhythm. In other words, corruption does not simply exist and endure as a constant presence within the everyday but, with the everyday, it must also come to an end at day’s end and arise anew as a threat or possibility at the start of a new day.

Let me begin with a vignette from my own life to present corruption’s differential intrusion into the lives of the young and the old as opposed to those in their busy middle years. This is to serve as a springboard to thinking about corruption’s transection by forces and elements in the world, before turning to the specific elements of physicality, temporality, decline and everydayness in their interrelatedness.

IAges of corruption

When I turned 12 or maybe 13, we suddenly packed our house in the posh Paribagh compound that was provided by the Bangladesh Tobacco Company (BTC) for its employees. We crammed the furniture of a palatial two-storied house into a small bachelor pad in a then far-flung suburb of Dhaka that my uncle had passed on to my mother before he immigrated to the United States, perhaps illegally as he, as a Pakistani, no longer had any right to property in the newly formed nation state of Bangladesh. And we started a new life, with my father no longer employed by BTC and attempting a second career as a businessman. My mother would cry



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secretly. When we came upon her crying, she would reassure us that all was well, that our father, who had been until that point the managing director of tobacco sales, was an honest man and that he had resigned his job with his head held high amidst charges of corruption against his subordinates, those whom he managed. I did not fully comprehend what it meant to be the child of an honest man but pulled that tearful avowal as protection around myself as I continued to attend school with old friends, many of whose parents still worked for the BTC. As I grew older I watched my father cut an incongruous figure as a businessman with a doctorate in soil science, drawn repeatedly to crazy schemes that embroiled us in spirals of indebtedness to the point at which we risked even the bachelor pad that provided us refuge from the world. It was at this point that I had my first truly disloyal thought. It was that honesty enabled and was drawn to corruption (or vice versa, see Das in this issue), that my father may have been and continues to be an honest man, but he enabled many to privately benefit in their employment, in jobs that he gave to them or they begged off him. He saw what they were doing but could (would?) not see.1

Meanwhile, we have all gotten older. Now my aged parents are retired to a small flat in another far-flung suburb of Dhaka in which even securing basic services such as gas for the stove requires personal connections to the relevant ministry. My mother no longer extols my father’s honesty but decries his foolishness in not being able to secure such connections as they roll in gas cylinders to use for their cooking.

1 Is there then a resonance between this ‘seeing but not seeing’ within acts of corruption and the ‘public secret’, which Michael Taussig (1999) describes as ‘knowing what not to know’. In the case of the latter, any amount of exposure or truth telling, ‘saying it as one sees it’, only further embeds secrecy, rather than any particular secret, within the social, as its sacred core. This image of the social as built on secrecy, with corruption and the demand for accountability and transparency being but a play of veiling and unveiling, is continued in Rosalind Morris (2004). One of her central questions is: what are the ways in which the power of secrecy is, itself, secreted back into the logic of transparency? (ibid.: 227). See also Poole and Renique (2003) in which they explore how the neoliberal state in Peru is put in an impossible situation of both maintaining transparency as the highest virtue in governance but also selling of public services and institutions to private interests that are by definition ‘opaque’, which is very different from the sacred/secret in Morris’s writing. A comparison of Morris with Poole and Renique raises questions about the importance of region or national specificity in articulating the difference between types of corruptions. Dan Smith (2007) argues strongly for such specificity although, as Akhil Gupta (1995) points out, it may be less the nation state that is at stake as the specific composition and workings of the state apparatus.




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These moments from my life in Bangladesh keep returning to me with great insistency as I task myself to think about corruption. And in mulling over them, I see many elements of what the last two decades of scholarly writings on corruption have helped identify as its conditions of possibility and modes of entanglement. There is the multinational corporation in a postcolonial country producing a situation of marked inequality fecund for illicit desires (Smith 2007); there is a big man who grows in stature as he grants employment opportunities to those in his kinship and patron-age network (Smith 2007; Zinn 2005); and there is the scapegoating of individuals as misappropriation looms, deflecting attention from bigger structural problems (Haller and Shore 2005).

But in the midst of this mulling how is one to explain the quality of incipience of corruption, specifically how it erupts into being in each situation?2 It may be presumed to be an obdurate element of transactions and infrastructures but when it appears, it always seems to surprise, catch-ing one off guard. And, as scholars have noted, one only sees it at work from the corner of one’s eyes, the object of study disappearing as soon as one turns to look at it directly (Haller and Shore 2005).3 It should not surprise then that like hauntings in the shadows, corruption also raises demands for transparency, for more light to be cast in every corner of existence, for greater publicity (see Ibrahim, this issue).4

2 I draw this idea of incipience from Bill Connolly (2008) in which he distinguishes emergent or incipient causality from efficient causality to account for tendencies that have teleological arches without determinate causes and effects. In attributing incipience to corruption, I wish to draw attention to the fact that the doing of corruption is neither entirely contingent nor purely structural but evolves through a combination of inevitability, strategy and performativity, with the possibility of success or failure for all parties concerned. We get this quality of incipience in each of the encounters recounted in Akhil Gupta’s (1995) now classic essay on corruption.

3 In an interesting move, authors Haller and Shore (2005) compare the charge of corruption to witchcraft accusation. They attempt this parallel in order to claim that allegations of corruption may be utilised to better explore structural cleavages and tensions within the wider society. However, I would be more specific than that. Drawing on Veena Das’s (1998) re-reading of witchcraft accusations amongst the Azande, I would claim that corruption accusations both enable the expression of scepticism within intimate relations and produce a situation in which there is a (temporary) loss of shared criteria (see also Khan 2012). I develop these thoughts in my conclusion. There is a difference between a (corrupt) action and alleged corruption (that too done in retrospect) occluded within Haller and Shore.

4 Morris (2004) provides a useful genealogy of the political discourse of transparency within Thailand. She states that this discourse arises precisely at the moment when class





Crucial within this field of incipience is the figure of a child who comes into consciousness of the imperfections of the adults around her at the same time as of the existence of villainy in the world, with corruption experienced as foul play. The leaky eyes of the adult point to yet another set of ripple effects of disappointments created by the bubbling up of corruption within everyday life. And then the shift to old age, when the press of corruption is still there but now blurred into the vaguer, growing indecipherability of the world and the incomprehensibility of oneself and others within it.

I provide this vignette not only to point out how destructive the charge of corruption may be to inter-linked lives or to its effects over time (see Maunaguru, this issue) but to the fact that the perception of corruption seems to be inextricably linked to the biological axis of life courses. One experiences corruption differently from when one is a child, a labouring adult or in one’s dotage. Corruption waxes and wanes over the course of one’s life. Just as studying the perception of corruption can provide a window into the postcolonial histories and social mores of a place, or into wider shifts in capitalist arrangements and neoliberal discourse and practice, studying it can also provide insight into the changing nature of what it is to be a person and a biological being, at one and the same time.

I acknowledge that corruption is not a stable object of study. Too many different practices with different understandings may have been forced under a single misnomer. And setting out to study it may imply and import judgement into one’s field of study (Smith 2007). It is not my desire to naturalise it by tying the perception of it to the biological life course. Rather, it is to point to the fact that just as the framing of corrup-tion may be thought of as historically specific, making the perception of it constructed, so is this perception transected by the biological. This may

falls out of analysis: ‘wherever the discussion of social inequality was once explained by reference to the structural inequalities inherent in the sakdina system or capitalism, it has been replaced by a rhetoric of transparency and corruption’ (ibid.: 227). She also makes the interesting point that while transparency emerges as a substitute for class analysis, it comes to be desired in its own rights in contexts requiring translation or mediation between peoples and institutions from vastly different backgrounds as a condition of globalisation (ibid.: 226–27). A further question to pursue is how the discourses of corruption and transparency, which have proliferated with the rise of anti-corruption initiatives the world over, dovetail specifically with neoliberalism. See Bedirhanoglu (2007).




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make one’s biological make up historical but it does not deny its substan-tive capacities to inflect the experience of corruption.5

Here are two further ways to approach this proposition, that is, the salience of the biological for the study of corruption. Tim Ingold (1991) makes the remarkable observation that although the biological sciences and anthropology have conveniently divided up the human into organ-ism and person to better enable them to colonise each as their individual domains of expertise, the organism-person has to be thought of as emerg-ing together in relationship to its environment. Indeed, he writes, ‘the boundary between organism and environment is an emergent property of a developmental process that cuts across it; hence the development of the organism is also the development of an environment for that organism’ (ibid.: 368–69). Those aspects of personhood that we deem as cultural, such as language and morality, emerge within the development of the hu-man organism with its environment, making these aspects biological. At the same time, organism-person comes into being ‘as the crystallization of a total process of social life’ (ibid.: 363).6

While this formulation goes a long way to break us out of the culture–nature dichotomy, it does something very specific with respect to the salience of the biological for the experience of corruption. It suggests

5 Here I wish to draw attention to Malabou (2008) in which she states the relationship of brain to history, or shall we say biology to culture and society, by saying that the ‘brain is history’ (ibid.: 4). In other words, the plasticity of the brain or its capacity to take form makes it such that its development is telling of both a wider historical context and individual experiences. Further on she says that brain plasticity gives a margin for improvisation over genetic necessity. ‘Today it is no longer chance versus necessity, but chance, necessity, and plasticity—which is neither the one nor the other’ (ibid.: 8). Malabou allows me to claim that one’s make up is historically contingent and biological at one and the same time, with each bearing the impress of the other.

6 Ingold’s idea of the mutual implication of the developmental or biological and the social may be exemplified by one of the examples that he provides:

Walking is considered an innate skill. Yet it is not as if one can ever observe an infant’s development in isolation from others to empirically support this claim. In reality, every infant is born surrounded by walkers. And s/he is born on a terrain that lends itself to, even requires, bipedal locomotion. These are constants in a child’s environment. Consequently, who is to say whether it is the tendency of our upright posture or of the environment of being surrounded by walkers that makes walking an inevitability for a child (barring any disabilities). Surely it is both (1991: 370).





how taking the organism-person’s developmental process, or what I have been calling the biological axis of one’s life course, into consideration may shake us off the increasingly pervasive sense of abounding corrup-tion in the world. It requires of us to ask how the perception of corrup-tion enters into the consciousness of a child, during one’s productive years, and as the scandal of aging looms. It makes corruption not only a product of state apparatus, political discourses, emergent economic structures and societal arrangements but also a matter of attention, with modes of attending, intensities of attentiveness, fluctuations of attention and the strains involved in over-attending becoming part of the story of corruption’s hold on a people and of their capacities to both materialise it and to face it down.

There is a second approach to this proposition of the salience of the biological to the study of corruption. If we deem the first as re-approaching corruption through its embodiment, in this second we re-approach cor-ruption through temporality. Sigmund Kracauer (1966) suggests that our approach to viewing events in history begins with the mistaken perception that these events are somehow synchronous with one another, allowing us to make claims of causal connections or co-emergence among them. However, he warns, events may fall into the same period but be of differ-ent ages, provenances and ends. In his own words: ‘any historical period must therefore be imagined as a mixture of events which emerge at dif-ferent moments of their own times’ (ibid.: 68). Or further ahead, ‘since simultaneous events are more often than not intrinsically asynchronous, it makes no sense indeed to conceive of the historical process as a homogenous flow’ (ibid.).

If we think of the developing or biological body as inhabiting its own time and corruption its own, their juxtaposition in the present cannot be presumed to be synchronous. This requires that we take the distinct temporalities of the body and of events of corruption into consideration to productively explore their points of convergence. This may be taken as another way to state what I suggested earlier, that is, there are still ques-tions to be asked about when the body begins to attend to the perception of corruption and what strains or, in Catherine Malabou’s (2008) term, forms are imposed by corruption on the body. But bringing temporality into the mix also allows us to exploit the possible conjuncture or lack of it between the body and corruption. This seems a productive point of entry to explore




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their mutual fragility, that is, their vulnerability to time.7 Thus, although Ingold’s exposition of the organism-person within its own environment allows me to posit the importance of biological development alongside the socio-political, Kracauer’s thinking on time is equally essential in suggesting that the field of operation of the organism-person–environment is transected by other form-giving forces on different scales.

IIThe era of decline

The claim that culture is biological gets a very different exposition when located within the history of Western philosophical thought. The early 20th century thinker Oswald Spengler is usually (dis)credited for introducing the idea that cultures be thought of as organic forms that emerge, flourish and decline. As he writes:

I see in place of that empty figment of one linear history…the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its own life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passion, its own life, will and feeling, its own death… (1944 [1918]: 21, quoted in Cavell 1988: 256).

The reasons usually given for condemning Spengler in his time include his naturalising of culture, otherwise understood as humanity’s greatest achievement and sign of triumph over nature, and his expression of a gloom-ridden prognosis of its inevitable decline, which flew against the emergent feelings of unbounded optimism about human progress. However, further insights from his writing require us to take pause before continuing to condemn him at least in our present. He was not proclaiming the end of civilisation, which he took to be the final expres-sion of culture and its externalisation as an inorganic thing. In fact, he had a rather cheerful picture of the waxing and waning of cultures and

7 Here I draw upon the notion of ‘fragility’ provided by William Connolly (2013: 10) as ‘growing gaps and dislocations between the demands neoliberalism makes upon several human activities and non human fields and the capacities of both to meet them’.





their crystallisations as civilisations.8 Furthermore, his interest in pars-ing out this picture seemed to have been to introduce relativity into the universalising claims of Western thought:

It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it—insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity, the conviction that his ‘unshakable’ truths and ‘eternal’ views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of look-ing beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history (Spengler 1944 [1918]: 23).

And instead of an apocalyptic tone, he seemed to have striven for a stoic, one might say even Nietzschean, bearing towards the possibility of the passing of one’s form of life:

We cannot help it if we were born as men of the early winter of a full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture…Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it (ibid.: 44).

If previously I asked us to consider bringing the perception of corruption closer to biology, taking the life course of humans as an instance of the bio-logical, my interest in presenting Spengler’s thought is to provide another way to bring corruption closer to biology, by taking seriously Spengler’s notion of entireties of culture as biological forms. In the first instance, the perception of corruption is scaled down to an individual body, with culture and biology mutually implicated in the body. In this instance, the percep-tion of corruption is scaled up to the time of a culture and its historical span, implicating corruption in a long temporal, can we say civilisational

8 I see world history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms (Spengler 1944: 22).




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or physical, duree? Here I am taking seriously Spengler’s further notion that civilisations are the detritus of cultures and consequently given to the physical forces besetting the inorganic, with corruption understood both as moral decline and physical decay (see Khan, this issue).

My attempt to open up the famous Spenglerian tone to broader con-sideration than one of doom-saying is to allow us to take seriously a distinct register of critique within contemporary discourses on corruption that has not received the scholarly attention that it deserves. Here I refer to grumblings and complaining among people about how they have to suffer corruption, which quickly move to implicating themselves (Smith 2007) and then just as quickly move to implicating the era, taken as one of decline and degeneracy. This was evident in my own fieldwork among the rural and riparian poor in Bangladesh who accuse their local leaders of corruption but in the same breath, criticise their own constitutions for being drawn to such leaders and to the kharap deen kaal (bad days/immoral present) for putting them in this situation of moral ambiguity. These discourses sometimes approach the apocalyptic, for instance, at one point during my research at a particularly perilous moment in Ban-gladesh’s politics and economy (its last elections), led some to speak of the signs of Qiyamot or the end of the world (Khan n.d.). But more often than not, these discourses of the decline of the times have a feel of the slow decline or the infinitude of the dark era, such as in contemporary discourses of the kalyug (the age of downfall) in India today (Betlem 2015; Pinney 1999).

There are scholarly reservations towards this register of critique of corruption. Sumathi Ramaswamy (2004: 1–18) and Marilyn Ivy (1995) both show the extent to which the bemoaning of a past and collective sense of loss is as much a part of modernity as the upspring of optimism for human progress. Christopher Pinney (1999) shows how discourses of the kalyug in Madhya Pradesh, India, which is saturated with a sense of loss of an idyllic village past, is more often than not enunciated by those in positions of traditional authority who are in effect bemoaning the loss of a vast reserve of labour to industrial capitalism. Within corruption studies more specifically, scholars have pointed to the fact that neoliberal anti-corruption initiatives, which more often take on state cronyism or individual politicians than focus attention on the larger structural forces at work beyond the local and the national, all too quickly find support amidst what is called ‘morality based popular concerns’ within a polity





(Bedirhanoglu 2007). This register is repeatedly charged with being ahistorical, of evacuating history from the present.

While keeping in mind these reservations towards this register of critique, of corruption as emblematic of civilisational decline or social decay, let me for now attend to the charge of this register being ahistorical. Can one say with Spengler that the capacity to look upon one’s culture from outside it, to see it as waning or in crisis, admits of a fealty to the historical as it harbours the recognition that the culture ‘lives in a histori-cal world and is therefore involved in the common destiny of mortality’ (1944 [1918]: 41)? For this to happen, one has to first subscribe to the idea of culture as biological/organic and its externalisation as civilisation, as physical/inorganic makes this perspective perhaps less history in the sense of human/world history and more natural history.9

Or perhaps the concern of this register of critique is not to be historical at all but what Bhrigupati Singh (2015), drawing on Nietzsche, delineates as the suprahistorical within our present, a temporality that is not constrained by contingency, causality or chronology but is instead committed to a different strata of movement and relevance. Here I am strongly reminded of Chester Starr’s (1966) claim that historians wrongly accuse ancient Greeks of being ahistorical because they fail to understand that while many Greek thinkers wrote histories in the conventional sense of the word, as linear narratives in which change occurs through the sheer accumulation of events, there was simultaneously a commitment within Greek thought to philosophical time as distinct from historical time. In other words, recourse to the notion of a time as prior or eternal in which distinctions between past and present were not relevant was important to the doing of philosophy in a way unappreciated by later historians. While this raises the question of why or how such a notion of time would be important for doing philosophy, I simply want to underline that the line of moral critique that views corruption as emblematic of decay is not exhausted by being deemed ahistorical. As Starr suggests, there may be philosophical stakes within it. There is yet work to be done to understand the particular twist of the philosophical and the temporal, and even the physical, that animates such modes of viewing the world, and that concerns itself less with analysing how the present has come to be and prognosticating the

9 See Hanssen (2000) for an account of how history and natural history are essential to each other.




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future and more with how to live respectably and reasonably under its conditions (see Betlem 2015).

IIICorruption in the everyday

In this article I have tried to show how the perception of corruption is inflected by the biological life course of humans and by the perceived mortality of cultures and civilisations rendered as physical objects prone to decay within the landscape of history. I have also tried to show how corruption leaves its mark on bodies and on the moral imagination. In other words, we have productively proliferated points of view on corruption, but the difficulty of rendering the everyday in relation to it remains. As Veena Das writes, ‘everyday life, however, is a notoriously difficult concept to research at the empirical level for it asks us to render visible not what is hidden but what is right before our eyes’ (this issue: 323).

Consider, in conclusion, Cavell (1988) in which he deepens some of the thoughts I have presented thus far in my discussion of Ingold and Spengler, by suggesting the specific temporality that the everyday brings to this discussion. In the article, Cavell shows that for Wittgenstein, cul-ture had to be thought of in terms of its vertical dimensions, as one form of life above others, than in its horizontal dimension, as one form of life alongside others (see also Das 1998). In other words, culture for Wittgen-stein implies the absorption of the natural within it, such that it attends equally to ‘the specific strength and scale of the human body and of the human sense and of the human voice’ as to ‘the romance of the hand and its opposable thumb…and of the upright posture and of the eyes set for heaven’ (Cavell 1988: 255). Here is a noteworthy parallel between this formulation and that of Ingold provided earlier, of the organism-person evolving and evolving its environment with itself.

Further on, Cavell notes, ‘both Wittgenstein and Spengler write of a loss of human orientation and spirit that is internal to human language and culture, not an invasion of them’ (1988: 258) and that this loss or ‘“decline” is about the normal, say the internal, death and life of cul-tures’ (ibid.: 256). But while Wittgenstein grants Spengler his position on cultures tending to decline and death, and even takes on his tonality, Cavell claims that Wittgenstein provides a crucial relativising of Spengler. Wittgenstein considers the loss of culture or, in his words, the repudiation





of shared criteria not as something in the distant but inevitable horizon but as a daily risk:

I will characterize a difference [between Wittgenstein and Spengler] by saying that Wittgenstein in the Investigation diurnalizes Spengler’s vision of the destiny toward exhausted forms, toward nomadism, toward the loss of culture, or say of home, or say community; he depicts our everyday encounters with philosophy, say with our ideals, as brushes with skepticism, wherein the ancient task of philosophy, to awaken us, or say bring us to our senses, takes the form of returning us to the everyday, the ordinary, every day, diurnally (Cavell 1988: 262).

In other words, while corruption can take us to the depths of the corrup-tion of our bodies and to the heights of the rise and decline of cultures, the everyday does not refute the possibility of such multiple corruptions. Instead, the everyday renders corruption in a less hypothetical mode, locating it within the diurnal rhythms of days and nights, making such high dramas elements of the everyday and as such, something that we have to deal with ordinarily.

Let me conclude with a few questions to continue these lines of thought: can we take the perception of corruption as a trace of scepticism within human inter-relations? Can the constant refrain that the era is one of corruption be simultaneously a dry-eyed realisation of the limits of human relations, the expression of widespread scepticism towards the world and the provocation to philosophise within the everyday? Does our continued thinking on corruption and the daily provocation to think the era stand to challenge or even check exhaustion? I am inclined to say yes to the questions and to put my faith in the following articles for returning us to the everyday.

In his discussion (this issue), Charles Hallisey discusses the articles gathered in the issue as a way to think about ethics. As he rightly points out, ‘whenever corruption begins to be discussed, talk about ethics is never far behind’ (ibid.: 305). While he finds many ethical issues at stake in each of these articles, he underlines that they do not offer a sovereign position or a clear judgement on this object of study called corruption. Rather, they deliberately traverse the field of ambiguity of what is it that we are talking about when we talk of corruption, with the slippage between the words ‘venality’ as in open to bribery and ‘veniality’ as in forgivable providing




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Hallisey with the most vivid characterisation of the ambiguity courted by the articles. So instead of right and wrong being clear from the outset, ‘what initially was perceived as wrong ends up seeming excusable and vice versa’ (ibid.: 306). And from this position of ambiguity, he ambitiously draws from it the art of what he variously calls ‘the conditions of possibil-ity for the moral person’ or ‘the contours of subjectivity’, using them to re-read a story from the Divyavadana, a collection of Buddhist narratives in Sanskrit, to show among other things that we are never confronted by an action alone when considering its ethicality but also by its milieu.

Veena Das’s article (this issue) presents an important conundrum about corruption, that it is simultaneously banalised within everyday life and actions and condemned. In other words, people justify their actions as undertaken under the obligation of, say, kinship or community norms while condemning similar actions by others. In seeking to understand how such contradictory impulses can be understood within the social, she turns first to a 1907 novel by Premchand titled Namak ka Daroga (The Salt Inspector) and then her ethnographic fieldwork in poor neighbour-hoods in Delhi, specifically her interactions with one of her informants, Sanjeev Gupta. In her depictions of specific scenes and utterances from within the novel and her interview transcripts, she asks that we attend not to the seeming evidence of corruption in them, that we withstand the lure of judgement and instead attend to the echoes of words and the swirl of emotions that they come with. It is through the navigating of this environment of words, the milieus with which ethical actions come into being in Hallisey’s conceptualisation, that she shows how corruption or the evidently corrupt and honest are, in her words, enmeshed ‘in a web of relations’ (Das, this issue: 340). The corrupt man needs an honest man to do his dealings and the honest man needs the right place to be honest. Thus rather than see contradictory impulses within the social as a lack of self-reflexivity or as cynicism, Das asks us to consider that they might be expressions of the aspiration to an honest life infused by the awareness that life itself corrupts. Here we are treated to the nearness of corruption to us in the very act of changing in and out of a uniform.

Amrita Ibrahim sets out to study the phenomenon of crime news shows and their massive popularity in the Indian private media sector. In her article (this issue), we are treated to the incredibly lush and ever-growing topography of crime news shows that vary from realist formats in which the host functions as a detective forensically disinterring elements of a





story, to melodramatic re-enactments of crimes with the host, sometimes an actor, framing the enactments with dramatic cues. In the two shows that she examines in her article, their names alert us to their desired ef-fects on their audience, with Vardaat (or Event) attempting to present just what happened, the facts of the case, and Sansani (or Tingling Sensation) attempting to attend to the feeling of unease that some stories evoke in us. Her attention to the sensorial effects of words recalls Das’s attention to the echoes of words and the swirls of emotions around them. In an interesting move, Ibrahim calls the very sensation of sansani a form ‘that activates a field of ambivalence through which the domestic is rendered a site of unease, suspicion and doubt’ (this issue: 348). Sansani is the sensation proper to the web of relations that make crime within families so hard to think. In her article, Ibrahim follows the contours of the moral conundrum faced by news reporters and show producers when they realise that some of what they feel obligated to broadcast, either because of their commit-ment to information or to sell a product, stands to corrupt the family, seen as the bastion of protection from bad influences. Yet, these very families are also the sites of criminal acts and therefore the object of scrutiny and inquiry. Their ambivalent positioning vis-à-vis the family manifests in showing crimes within families as instances of moral corruption due to the debasement of individuals. While pungent in their excoriating of in-dividual fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and in-laws, such news shows end up hinting at but never being able to express the rottenness of the family structure itself. Here we see at play the theme of the nearness of corruption to us in its place in the domestic.

Sidharthan Maunaguru’s interlocutors, the Tamil Sri Lankans in his article’s title (this issue), are charged with financial misconduct relating to the possible siphoning of charity monies donated to their temples to fund the activities of the UK banned group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), back home. The community and especially the temple trust leaders see the charge for what it is, a charge of moral corruption such that old affiliations with the LTTE are seen as having existential holds upon selves, denying the possibility of disaffiliation and independent action. While the temple trusts have to open themselves to external investigation, the leaders argue that the British government misunderstands the rubrics under which charity is given. Drawing on an enduring logic of temple trusts, they argue that any monies accreting to temples are not temple monies or monies of their administrators but that of the deity for whom




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the temples were created. Amman, the deity in this case, acts as the social auditor of monies collected in her name such that monies cannot be misap-propriated nor misused, while the collection and distribution processes are under her care. If there is an existential hold upon temple administrators, community leaders or even the temple devotees, it is not of their past po-litical affiliations or terrorist urgings but the hold of Amman upon them, her commands delivered to them through intuitions and dreams. While finally discharged of any wrongdoing, the temple trust leaders and their constituencies are nonetheless led to thinking about possible corruption in their midst. They see this in the ways in which the meaning of charitable giving has changed from being a ritual obligation to one given to expi-ate the guilt felt by immigrants at having escaped the violence of war in Sri Lanka unlike others of their kin and associates. This element of guilt introduces the possibility of moral corruption into gift-giving with new concern arising amongst Maunaguru’s interlocutors that Amman may be vulnerable to this corruption in so far as she is part of the network by which gifts of charity flow into and out of the temple trusts. Here we see corruption as debasement occurring within the changing understandings and motivations for charity.

The final article, my own, brings together the meaning of corruption as debasement with another meaning of corruption often eclipsed, which is that of decay. It does so by pursuing the question of the milieu of the river. While visual and filmic representations of rivers within South Asia are usually seen as offering mirror images of human interiority and conflicts therein, the article makes the claim that rivers manifest milieus and these milieus may be seen to constitute the voice of rivers. As such, even the most crafted use of rivers within films cannot help but express the milieu of rivers within that of films. What this allows me to claim is the nearness, in the way that Hallisey brings together venality and veniality and Das corruption and honesty in their respective articles, of the milieus of rivers and those of humans, such that one embeds the other and is embedded within the other. This conceptualisation allows us to get beyond the obstacle of environmental determinism or that of human constructionism, to say that as rivers decay, likewise human natures, relations and gestures become debased. Analysing three classic Bengali films—Titash Ekti Nodir Naam (A River Named Titash,1973) by Ritwik Ghatak, Padma Nodir Majhi (The Fishermen of Padma, 1993) by Gautam Ghosh and Chitra Nodir Parey (Beside the Chitra River, 1999)





by Tanvir Mokammel—each of which speaks of rivers in present-day Bangladesh, I explore how each tracks this nearness of the decay of river with the debasement of sociality. While I speculate that these films pro-vide, perhaps in a condensed mythical mode, how human sociality is at risk in the context of climate change, I show how this decay/debasement has specific ramifications for the Hindu minority of riverine Bangladesh, where the erosive acts of the river exist alongside the active forgetting of this community and its claims upon this place.

These then are our reflections on corruption as an element in the world, involving different forms of debasement as venality, crime, financial mis-conduct and decay but also stirring us to think about corruption’s possible link to the temporal rhythms of the world, the ambiguities it produces as further productive of ethics and of its attraction to honesty and that of honesty to it. In every case, it is very close to us, its proximity often the source of misgiving and suffering but paradoxically also a certain expression and even satisfaction of desires. Recall the words of the father in Premchand’s novel quoted by Das: ‘The top-income is like a flowing source of water—it always quenches one’s thirst’ (this issue: 325).

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