SITUATION AND SYMBOL: A RITUAL IDENTITY AND MODE OF EXPRESSION UNDER BOURGEOIS CULTURAL APPROPRIATION (WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WARLI ART)

RANJIT HOSKOTE

This paper takes as the object of study, a tribal society with a primitive agrarian economic base and a sacral, ritual art which flows from its perceived existential situation. This society is studied at a point in its history when it finds itself sited on the margins of an expanding capitalist economy, allied with a social formation in transition from feudalism to a version of bourgeois identity. At this point, the tribal society is subjected to severe strain — its economy is subordinated to that of the conquistador nation-state; as is its culture. In the process, the cultural component is reified, appropriated into the so-called national culture; whilst the actual humans, who are the repository and agents of that culture, are systematically destroyed by the resource, and the labour-hungry apparatus of the nation-state. Such a society under repression is that of the Warli tribes of the west coast.

Ranjit Hoskote is a well-known art critic. He is currently Junior Assistant Editor of the Times of India, Mumbai. He has written extensively on contemporary issues and is also an acclaimed poet.

Introduction This paper takes as the object of its study, a tribal society supported by a primitive agrarian economic base, a sacred culture, and ritual art. It is to this ritual art that we will devote particular attention: it flows from a heightened perception of, and sense of encounter with, the existential situation of the tribals. It follows that this ritual art embodies, even enshrines, a particular understanding of the relations between humanity and the environment. The society described above, is studied at a point in its history when it comes to be located on the margins of an expanding capitalist economy, which is allied with a social formation loosely aggregated from a coalition 80 Ranjit Hoskote of elements subsuming the semi-feudal, at one end, and the bourgeois manque, at the other. Through the apparatus of the post-colonial nation-state, the elite governing this social formation is engaged in the construction of a ' 'national'' identity; its reference parameters for this construction vary from the imagined past of four thousand years ago, to the mode of life associated with the more prominent First World elite. The former parameter is natural to a reversionist politics intent on harnessing the obscurantist tendencies latent in a culture that is still predominantly feudal; the latter is under­ standable in a comprador ruling class heavily dependent on the linkages of neo-colonialism. At this juncture, a tribal society on the fringe of such a system is subjected to severe strain — its economy and ecology are mutilated, subordinated to the demands of the interest groups which operate the nationally organised industrial network. Simultaneously, its culture is reified into an entity without human moorings, and appropriated into the so-called "national culture". This dual process of brutalisation ensures the systematic destruc­ tion of the actual humans who are the repository and agents of the tribal culture that is such an important exhibit in the pageants often sponsored by the Indian state to further its own glory. Such a society under repression is that of the Warli tribes of the west coast. Through a study of their unenviable position in the dubious dynamic of development, we may arrive at a clearer view of the unequal combat between two kinds of social constructions of identity — the first, a corpus grown over a long period into tradition; the second a telescoped, Jerry-built attempt at instant, hence superficial, con­ solidation.

The Notion of Culture As an operational definition, we will adopt the thesis that culture is the social structure of meaning — subsuming a variety of understandings, discovery procedures, and a residuum of effective information concerning entities and relations among them. In effect, it may be said to represent the totality of correspondences between phenomenon and significance, that are widely accepted as such by a given collective body. The immediate manifestations of culture would be the symbols, practices and codes through which the accepted version of reality is articulated. This being so, the processes and rites of their culture are the Urgrund from which the Warlis derive their notion of a place in the cosmos, their relations with one another, with other groups, and with natural forces, that is, their sense of meaningful being. The identity of the members of the tribe is predicated upon this cultural corpus, and is necessarily a communally held Situation and Symbol 81 identity, collective and programmatic. The Heideggerian Geworfenheit, the existential sense of having been thrown into the world, is here resolved, not on an individual basis, but through a series of shared creation myths, regeneration myths, and myths of explication. Following from Marx's (1978) formulation that the social being condi­ tions social consciousness, we ought first, to place the symbolic and expres­ sive aspect of culture in the context of the economy in which it is brought about; and further, both culture and economy must be examined in relation to the ecological surroundings in which they are embedded. Shaped by edaphic, climatic, and physiographic factors, the forces of production act with the social relations of production to create certain conditions influenc­ ing the form a culture may take; in turn, the culture releases resonances that may affect the evolution of these relations and forces, and also the ecological matrix. This multiple interaction is clearly reflected in the Warli pattern of activity.

The Warlis Along with other tribes like the Dhodias, Dublas, and Katkaris, the Warlis inhabit the Thane district of Maharashtra. Their major demographic concen­ tration is in the talukas of Dahanu and Talaseri; racially, they are a survival from the pre-Aryan epoch. However, as will become evident, their articula­ tion of ethnic identity has very little to do with racial consciousness; rather, it emerges from mediations among the opposed cultures of opposed groups. Warli agriculture is now founded upon the plough, but it has barely outgrown the earlier slash-and-burn cultivation still practised on the hill-slopes. Paddy, the main crop, is harvested once annually; no fertilisers are used, except the ashes of dried leaves and cowdung, to prepare the ground for sowing. The subsistence-level harvest generates no surplus for the next year, and an average holding of two to three acres per family of five does nothing to encourage prosperity. The summer months render other occupations im­ perative, and an overwhelming majority of the Warlis are classified as landless labourers, easy prey to the exploitation widely practised by landlords and contractors. Illiteracy and disease are endemic. The scenario could not have been particularly removed from this one, in earlier times, except, perhaps, in terms of the magnitude. The Warlis have always been at the receiving end of history: they record an ancient migration under pressure from invasion, the vagaries of weather and forest, the threatening gestures of shadowy, superiordinate authority structures. Accordingly, it can be seen that Warli culture was absorbent enough of influences in the historical past: in its rosters, we may discern echoes of a 82 Ranjit Hoskote bitter war between the chthonic cults of the dark Mother Goddess, and the fair, patriarchal deities of the Aryan invaders. The landscape is one of rival gods, alternately cooperating and clashing; the corridors of myth are lined with memories, curse and counter-curse reverberating through the droughts and famines which descend from the heavens. At some stage, however, this culture seems to have embarked upon a codification into a relatively closed structure, bound strictly in terms of the discourses of organisation germane to a comparable level of socio-economic attainment; sympathetic magic; rites of fertility, wholeness, and/or commun­ ion with the elements and spirits. We may hazard the conjecture that this retreat into the communal self evolved as an outcome of the depredations to which the Warlis were subjected under the successive regimes of the Portuguese, the Marathas, and the British, from circa 1500 AD to 1947 AD. Although the depredations continue under the benevolent aegis of the Republic of India, the cultural response has been modulated differently in recent years, and is not susceptible of inclusion under the rubric of "retreat''.

Warli Art in its Cultural Context Associated intimately with the complex of rite and hymn, is a pictorial mode of expression — which is the mysterium tremendum made visible; the actual, created receptacle into which the community puts its effort, and from which it draws its self-hood. Through this mode are ritually re-stressed, the subtle connections between humanity and the cosmos, as adumbrated by traditional insight. The year is calibrated by events that bring into focus the energies of this symbiosis — the festivals of sowing, rain, harvest, the worship of gods and guardians, the marriage. The events are each accompa­ nied by their pictorial dimension, which provides a sacramental order to the communal life, embedding it in the life of the universe, affirming its ties with the natural cycles of growth, and of rejuvenation. An excursus into the specificities of Warli art would be pertinent at this point. Materially, the pigments are rice-paste, turmeric, and geru: which provide, respectively, the predominant white linearities, and the touches of yellow and red. The pictographs are never framed, but painted directly on the earth-coloured walls of Warli huts, often in the darkest recesses. The diagrams are meant, in Pupul Jaykar's phrase, to "promote fertility, to propitiate the dead, to fulfill the demands of the ghost-spirits who permeate the dream world of the tribal. By painting the picture and including the object desired, the result is achieved and the spirit is satisfied" (Jaykar, 1989:137). Both forms and magical belief systems are of Neolithic descent and exhibit affinities with the geometricised, white-outlined sacred pictures of the rock Situation and Symbol 83 painters of Central India, as well as with the rock paintings treasured as consecrated among the Hopi and the Navajo tribes of southern North America. The iconography comprises a vista of severely geometric figures, stylised trees and vegetation, the presence of gods, and a profusion of animals, all strung together in moving patterns possessed of an undulating rhythm. Space is conceived of as two-dimensional; no part of the picture area is permitted to remain except when blank zones are a component of the design. A vital pantheism pervades the Warli imagination, investing almost any object with the reverence appropriate to the locus of a god. Anthropomorphic and theriomophic, the Warli gods constitute a colourful pantheon enacting a complex mythology; in the marriage of humanity and heaven, the passage of the community corresponds to the passage of the deities, who preside over earthly fortunes, and participate in them at the same time. Nature is recog­ nised for the multiple actor it is: every divinity has both a fecund and a ferocious aspect, embodies an activating principle. Narandev, the Rain God; Hirva, the Green God of the hunters; Vaghadeva, the Tiger God; Kansari, the Corn Goddess, are as ready with the boon as with the malediction: much propitiation, properly conducted with precise ceremony, is required to preserve their benevolent disposition. Of the intricate mythic architecture and archetypal symbolisms of Warli art, we will, for our present purposes, concern ourselves, with only two elements: the chauk, or square, with its correlate, the ubiquitous circle; and the goddess of fertility and vegetation, Palghata. To take the chauk first: it is the square at the centre of the Warli painting, which holds in place a scintillating array of emblems. Its function is that of protecting the deity within, and of keeping out, as well as providing a focus to, the terrain without. Psychologically as well as spatially, one chauk is of special signifi­ cance: for it is an incarnation of that archetype of wholeness to which C.G. Jung has accorded the name of mandala. The chauk is described by Yashodhara Dalmia as "a skeleton of parallel lines drawn to enclose a square space...the chauk represents the cosmos, the hut, as well as itself, a square of concentrated energy" (Dalmia, 1989: 197). To this description, we may append Jung's analysis of the mandala arche­ type: ...the 'protective circle'...has the obvious purpose of drawing a sulcus primigenius, a magical furrow around the centre...or sacred precinct, of the innermost personality, in order to prevent an 'outflowing' or to guard by apotropaic means against distracting influences from outside. Magical practices are nothing but projections of psychic events, which 84 Ranjit Hoskote then exert a counter-influence on the psyche and put a kind of spell upon the personality. Through the ritual action, attention and interest are led back to the inner, sacred precinct, which is the source and goal of the psyche and contains the unity of life and consciousness. The unity once possessed has been lost, and must now be found again (Jung, 1982). This extended excerpt expresses, in nuce, the principle of Warli ritual painting. It remains for us to establish how this idiom has evolved in a dialectical relation with environmental pressures, and what bearing it has upon the question of the Warli identity. It is sufficiently certain, from the foregoing exegesis, that the community bases its identity upon properties that must be protected from inimical forces; this already implies a pre-de- termined life threaded with reiterated rites of protection — Jung's "apor- tropaic means''. Such a life, and the identity with which it is linked, preclude the restless quest for fresh pastures, or the extension of the known: signifi­ cantly for this argument, the hero myth of the questor is unknown in Warli myth; it abounds in the collective memories of societies with a history of transcontinental migration (as, for instance, Brahminical society, with its Aryan mythic base). We may now pass on to Palghata, the Vegetation Goddess, who domi­ nates the nuptial rites, and is curiously depicted as a limbless icon, or as a pot springing with plants, or — in an extremely archaic version — as a sculpture shaped into the upper and lower sexual organs of the female. This is the Earth Mother, the nourishing, tumescent principle whose aura has survived millennia of patriarchal Aryan religion. The personification of plenitude, Palghata is the giver of abundance; in her corporeal depiction, her limbs are formed from the harrows of the earliest agriculture. Projected upon her, are the desires, often desperate, of a society gradually being pushed into destitution, and which — even when the forests overran its land — did not know the security of a surplus economy. Fascinating as they are in their own right, the mythology and iconography that inform Warli pictorial practice must be perceived as organic, and important parts of a world-view which has emerged from a knowledge, keenly felt and enunciated, of self, being-with-others, and territory. This is the knowledge which functions, in Warli society, as the fundamental meas­ ure and ground of identity — and it is conditioned by isolation, by depriva­ tion, and by an ever-decreasing proximity with the enchanted realm of the gods. These are the boundary determinants which precipitate the awareness of Kansari, who can send corn as generously as she can send aridity; of the inviolable square and the encompassing circle. These are the assurances of Situation and Symbol 85 cyclic continuity, signifiers of safety and suspended sentence — supranatu- ral guarantees essential in a monsoonal economy often punctuated by failures of the cycle owing to uncontrollable natural causes. These very supranatural guarantees impart a stability and comfort to the psyche of the tribal, who sees himself as inseparable from the community. They underpin the collective identity, enabling it to incorporate itself with the environment — and in so doing, to establish an order of reality of its own, held up like a shield against external threat. The chauk of Warli imagery is, for the observer, the most exact metaphor of the Warli identity that has been made visible.

Impact of External Influences Over the previous century and the present one, the relatively closed system and order of reality demonstrated by the culture of the Warlis, have been increasingly challenged by a system and order whose premises are diamet­ rically opposed, and hostile to the assumptions of the tribal world-view. This is the incipient capitalism originally imported by the British Empire, which is now entrenching itself as the dominant paradigm. To the unindividuated tribe-member, it counter-proposes the bourgeois individual, capable, to a degree, of private inter-subjective activity in the domain of civil society. To the teleology of a community regulated towards harmony, is opposed the strategy of competitive organisation, riding across the fragmented functioning of the market; to the ritually unified collective which allows for a cosmic existential dimension, is opposed the vast, impersonal collective-hierarchic, faceless, rendering all its members fettered and inferior to itself. In the processes of tribal magic, the human may not be an individual, but he has an identity sited in his participant status; in the processes of modern capitalism, the human is granted a formal individuality, but is forced to surrender it to a whole of which he is only a servant, dispensable, a thing of flux. At the macrocosmic plane, the circular conception of phenomena — death, birth, time — falls before an unfamiliar linearity of direction, with a new finality, and the concomitant, divergent possibilities of urgency and aimlessness. The attack of the capitalist order, through its protean instrument, the state, affects the tribal margins along many fronts. This attack has an impressive lineage: the expansion of a settled or settling civilisation into tribal lands is an anciently documented movement in India. The Aryan incursion for lebensraum, into the Eastern Ganga region, circa 900 BC, involved pitched battles with tribal chieftains, as did the grandiose Ashvamedha sacrificial 86 Ranjit Hoskote programme of the Satpatha Brahmana. The Mahabharata itihasa also records similar instances of expansionism, as in the episode of the Khan- dava-vana and its clearing by fire, by Krishna and the Pandavas. In each case, the tribals were pushed back, further and further into the less arable tracts where they are now to be found. In our own times, the capitalist state organises its markets and resources through a re-territorialisation that assists the various interest groups differentially represented in the acts of the political apparatus. As Nicos Poulantzas (1980) has pointed out, the spatial matrix of the nation-state has, inscribed within it, the seeds of a totalitarian levelling of identities and modes of expressions; we may add, identities and modes of expression alien to those of the elite of the region which, by controlling the nation-state's legal-political organism, is the supreme bene­ ficiary of the country's developmental effort. The discovery procedure that characterises the Warlis may be described as Verstehen, a synthesising comprehension, an intuitive exploration of the world. The dominant capitalist discovery procedure, which is also that of the nation-state, may be spoken of as Wissenschqft, exact science harnessed to technology of an analytical, exploitative variety that probes nature only to "wrest her secrets from her" — in Sir Francis Bacon's notorious and nauseating phrase. Confronted by this Wissenschaft, Warli magic fails to work; its apotropaic spells collapse before the triumphant march of physical agency and sterile rationality. The Warli identity is no match for a sophisti­ cated mechanism which presses consent and force through legislation and brutality, into service in equal measure, to attain its own ends. Personified by the coalition of politician, policeman, collector, and contractor, the state at the district level not only assaults the forests, but also dishouses the tribals through the crudest forms of intimidation and coercion. The Warlis, like tribals elsewhere, are being deprived of the forests which are their natural backcloth, the source of their livelihood, the core of their identity and existence. The alienation of the tribals from the forests dates back to 1841, when the British administration banned the cutting of timber in Thane district; as the putative Bombay-Thane railway line required sleepers, it was obvious that the tribals had to be prohibited from taking away firewood and basic building material so badly needed elsewhere. This praiseworthy preoccupation with the conservation of forests still exercises independent India's district admini­ stration and forestry officials. In the early 1950s, the National Commission on Agriculture published a statement which compels attention for its com­ pound of urban contempt and capitalist acumen: "Restrictions would have to be imposed on the rights and privileges of the tribals in the collection of Situation and Symbol 87 forest produce, such as fuelwood and small timber, where lack of such restrictions may damage the forest'' (Centre for Education and Documen­ tation [C.E.D.]). What the report tactfully omits to say, is that the forests have been destroyed, not by the tribals, but by the mindless felling unleashed by urban inroaders. The same report dismisses jhum, or shifting tribal agriculture, as a "psychological urge" —quite ignoring the fact that the tribals of the subcontinent, dispossessed by non-tribal landowners and money-lenders, are landless and simply have no permanent holdings on which to practise settled cultivation. In Dahanu and Talaseri, the Warlis are terrorised by police violence, subjugated through the sordid instruments of rape, alcohol abuse, and the non-materialisation of "upliftment" projects like a promised dairy and social forestry programmes. Tribals are often charged with the illegal felling of trees: their role in which operation is often no more than that of poorly paid labourers; the felling is far more expertly managed by such experienced agencies as the Forest Range Office, in collusion with rapacious timber-mer­ chants (C.E.D.). Warli labour is forced to migrate to the cities in search of work, which is not easily come by: an activist working in the Dahanu area has rightly characterised these unfortunate beings as "vagrant" rather than migrant labour (C.E.D.). In the absence of employment opportunities, War­ lis drudge away their lives in brick-kilns, salt-pans, and illicit breweries. Education and primary health facilities remain non-existent; at the same time, the older structure of certainty, the social structure of meaning has collapsed, leaving the Warlis in a condition of, we use the Durkheimian term cautiously, anomie. More sharply, we may state the problem in Marxian terms, as arising from the condition of being alienated from the cosmos once perceived as one's natural home — from the modes of production and expression once perceived as organic to one's life, inseparable from oneself. On the cultural plane, the invasion of the bourgeois order implies the appropriation of the Warli's art even as he paints it, the conquest of the wellspring of his identity. Warli art is sought to be gathered up into the broader canvas of the "national culture", a spurious frame which is being built up by the dominant regional elite, to provide the impression of a cohesive population living by shared values, in which frame, even straight contradictions are sought to be subsumed under the umbrella of "unity in diversity". The bourgeois identity of "Indianness", nurtured as an instru­ ment of resistance during colonial times, is now a weapon of dominance, useful to the state as a homogenising, controlling device. In this new and utterly superficial construction of identity, which is far more a political gimmick than a social process, Warli art — like many other 88 Ranjit Hoskote tribal traditions — has been divorced from its context, neutralised of its origins, and shaped into a commodity. Not only are the tribals repressed in an inhuman fashion, but, ironically, their mode of expression is paraded as an almost sui generis attribute of the country — as if it were the fruit of the trees, rather than the product of the experiential fabric of a living people and their spiritual strength. In the very act of displaying the art of the Warlis, which is the receptacle of their identity, the state annihilates that identity, by negating and trampling over its true, contextual significance. Simultaneously, the tribals are sought to be eradicated. The preference for the product without history, the result without evidence of toil presented for the discerning taste of the consumer, is a deep-seated one in the bourgeois consciousness, conditioned, as it is, by impersonal production. In India, this preference translates as Kashmir with peaks and house-boats but without hunger and unemployment; Orissa with Konark but without Kalahandi; and Warli wall hangings without Warli labourers. Moreover, a class of favoured artisans is shored up, who are reduced both as humans and as artists, further aggravating the economic differentiation of an already centrifugalised community. Without trapping ourselves in a Tonnesian bind of romanticised Gemeinschaft vs. Gesselschaft, it is never­ theless possible to infer a scheme of vitiation here.

Changes in Art and other Domains The very symbols and motifs of Warli art have altered or shifted in emphasis, since the first contact of the tribals with the juggernaut of capitalist expan­ sion. The Corn Goddess has receded, in favour of the Tiger God, whose striped body also occasionally embodies the fearsome locomotive that galloped across Thane one day in the mid-nineteenth century, to the terror of the Warlis. Were these alterations of theme and form a free development, we would not deem it unfortunate. But it is more commonly a decorative mass production of motifs that replaces the old ritual pictographs; and sometimes, when the artist is in the process of coping slowly with an upheaval of epochal magnitude, we have an account of despair. In a relatively recent painting, an old Warli woman has portrayed a domain far removed from the harmonics of the sacred idiom: the forest has been cleared, trees lie felled, huts have been set up. Man is far larger in scale than before, but he is everywhere in chains: oxen drag him to the fields, roof-rafters pin him down, separate houses isolate him from his fellows. The anguish is telling, and one cannot remain unmoved by this elegy on the fall of the old gods. Situation and Symbol 89 With the new-found interest in their art, the Warlis have now become the victims of other, insidious kinds of exploitation. The very notion of ethnicity is one of these, with its latest basis in Coomaraswamy's conception of the hereditary Oriental artisan, and allied romanticised ideals. The often well- intentioned attempt to ' 'save'' Warli culture has only resulted in the freezing of it into a stasis, which is immensely inconducive of the growth and amplification of ideas. Indeed, it abets the formulaic reiteration of what is commercially viable in the handicrafts export market. The case of the Warli artist, Jivya Soma Mahse, is notorious in this respect — he, as well as some of his atelier, as it were, have now become accomplished churners of the chauk and other "popular designs" — debased, prostituted, the diagrams of identity are reduced to precisely that. Without the substratum of rites of regeneration and continuity, the iconography of tribal art becomes empty of meaning, serves only to adorn. The power of the symbol is dissipated among consumers to whom it is of no import; this act of dissipation is itself symbolic of the manner in which the vitality of a people is repeatedly sapped. On the other hand, we may pose another array of questions. We may, at this point, well question the desire to preserve the ethnic identity of a tribal group. Has this not legitimised the projected banishment of these groups from the basic progressive measures that do accrue from capitalist technol­ ogy — the education and primary health facilities alluded to earlier? How far, and how usefully, can we take the objective of ridding ourselves of technology? Surely we need not eliminate its benefits in eliminating its potential for dehumanisation? Whilst discussing an appropriate technology which is controlled locally, by the community, we may also question the insulated concept of preserving ethnicity without any kind of intervention whatsoever: this would involve the perpetuation of the very definite inequal­ ities which do prevail in tribal societies. Among the Warlis, we have to confront the drastic power of the bhagat, the shaman-like priest and medi­ cine man, whose episodic ordinance of a witch-hunt is aimed as much at weakening the Mother Goddess cults, as at enforcing the subjugation of women. Linked intimately with the issue of ethnicity is that of participation. We return to this central problem of political practice — are tribal groups to be preserved in whatever' 'pristine'' forms they remain in — as on reservations — or are they to be included in the political and economic intercourse of the nation-state as equals? This species of participation would necessarily require a delinking from the inherited culture, or its ossified rendition, as it were. For, in the participatory context, the inherited culture can only appear as an instrument of bondage decreeing a certain limited way of life, rather 90 Ranjit Hoskote than as a chosen channel of liberation and self-expression. Thrust from cyclical into fluid linear time, the Warlis might have to consider reshaping an identity in the light of fresh historical experience: given our contemporary conditions, this is at best likely to be a haphazard, atomistic undertaking. This brings us to a consideration of the degree to which the tribals are able to participate in the ongoing debates on their future. The unequivocal manner in which policy decisions concerning the tribal population exclude the tribals themselves from exercising any agency over their fortunes, argues a dangerously myopic and paternalistic outlook. The tribals have already been exiled from a traditional culture which accorded them a participant status in nature and society. In our inability to arrive at any successful, equitable modus vivendi with the tribals, we seem, again, to be denying them that participant status which is theirs by right in a democratic polity, an order of reality which, at least theoretically, provides for the inclusion of individu­ als and groups in a certain systemic wholeness, guaranteeing them the right to assemble their lives and their identities through the exercise of choice.

REFERENCES

Centre for Education and Files on the Kashtakari Sangathana and the Warlis of Documentation Dahanu. Dalmia, Yashodhara The Painted World of the Warlis, New Delhi: Lalit Kala 1989 Academy. Jaykar, Pupul The Earth Mother, New Delhi: Penguin Books. 1989 Jung, Carl Gustaf Psychology and the East (trans.) by R.C.F. Hull, London: 1982 Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl and "Feurbach. Opposition of the Matrialist Outlooks", a Freidrich Engels new publication of Chapter 1 of the German Ideology, 1978 Moscow: Progress Publishers, 25-32. Poulantzas, Nicos State, Power and Socialism, (trans.) by Patriac Caniver, 1980 London: New Left Books/Verso.

The Indian Journal of Social Work, Vol LVII, No. 1, January 1996