Economic & Political Weekly EPW MARCH 17, 2018 vol lIiI no 11 33 book reviewS A Casualised Ethnography of the Jamshedpur Working Class Karthik Rao-Cavale Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India by Andrew Sanchez, Routledge, Oxon, UK; New York, 2016; pp xxi + 185, `795. A ndrew Sanchez’s Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India is a contribution to a growing literature that uses his- torical ethnography to trace the shifts in highly localised patterns of accumu- lation and class formation in neo-liberal India. The book focuses on the industrial workforce of Jamshedpur—a city freque- ntly portrayed as an island of peace and order, industriousness, and prosperity, in the midst of the general chaos, ineffi- ciency, and poverty that characterise the surrounding countryside—in the tribal- dominated state of Jharkhand. Against this broadly self-congratulatory rhetoric, Sanchez’s book attempts to highlight the constitutive role of criminality and corr- uption in the political economy of Jam- shedpur and thereby offer a more critical perspective on the social relations that underwrite capitalist accumulation. Corruption Begets Class Sanchez’s theoretical agenda is quite ambitious: he attempts to demonstrate that “systemic corruption” offers an “empirically well-substantiated model of how modern capitalism works” (p 152). His hypothesis is that Entrepreneurial relations of corruption and criminality not only create classes of actors that benefit from one another’s transgression of the law, they also create a class of people that are dispossessed by these processes and articulate a critical consciousness through systemic corruption discourses. (p 147) According to this argument, the corrupt nexus of industrial capital (that is, the Tatas), local politicians, trade unionists, and gangsters, is a constitutive aspect of a new regime of accumulation that has resulted in a dramatic process of casualisation of the Jamshedpur working class. Interrogating the ways in which members of this “dispossessed” class of workers understand their present circ- umstances, Sanchez also asserts that their invocation of “systemic corruption” in many instances reflects a critical consciousness against the very mecha- nisms by which they are dispossessed. Put more directly, “the practice of syste- mic corruption makes and expresses class power, while talking about these processes makes and expresses class consciousness” (p 105). Over the course of six chapters, Sanchez narrates the history of the Jamshedpur working class and the transformations it has experienced in recent decades, inter- spersed with lengthy ethnographic vig- nettes and reviews of theoretical debates on the trajectory of Indian capitalism. Some of the most interesting descriptive accounts relate to the time he spent at the cab and cowl division of the Tata Motors plant, studying interactions bet- ween workers at different levels of the labour hierarchy. The book also includes accounts of criminal enterprises outside the factory gates, as well as some asp- ects of neighbourhood life and trade union politics. However, the rationale behind the arrangement of the different parts of Sanchez’s work is oftentimes difficult to discern. The history of indus- trial development and class conflict in the city is divided between Chapters 1 and 4, while Chapters 2 and 3 describe informal and criminal enterprises that are, if anything, a consequence of the failure of collective action described in Chapter 4. Chapters 5 and 6 stand some- what separate from the rest of the book; they describe the everyday interactions between blue-collar workers, as well as those between managers and the wor- king classes. It is unfortunate that these accounts are provided in the final chapters of the book, because of which they do not inform the broader study of class struggles in Jamshedpur. Divergent Approach Sanchez’s review of theoretical work leaves much to be desired. His review of theoretical debates, for instance, merely repeats some of E P Thompson’s polem- ics against Louis Althusser, and the pole- mics of Sumit Sarkar, Rajnarayan Chanda- varkar, and Vivek Chibber against Sub- altern Studies. However, while Sanchez claims an affinity to the conceptua- lisation of class contained in Thompson’s (1978) work and sharply denounces the “postmodern turn,” he does not explicitly state the epistemological and methodo- logical implications of Thompsonian class analysis. As it is, I strongly suspect that his approach might have more in common with postmodernist and subal- ternist theorising than he is willing to acknowledge. For one, Sanchez’s account of class formation is grounded not in po- litical struggle (there are few instances of overt political struggle in the empiri- cal material he presents), but rather in a discourse of systemic corruption. Sec- ond, the distinction he draws between the elite beneficiaries of corruption and the dispossessed masses corresponds quite nicely to the naive elite/subaltern dichotomy of the early volumes of Subal- tern Studies. Meanwhile, Sanchez never quite explains how we might reconcile his argument with Thompson’s dictum, offered in the context of 18th-century England, that the phenomenon of “old corruption” should be treated “not as a direct organ of any class or interest, but as a secondary political formation, a purchasing-point from which other kinds of economic and social power were gained or enhanced” (Thompson 1978: 141). The book’s historical account also suffers from certain drawbacks. Sanchez relies almost entirely on a handful of secondary published sources but ignores several scholarly histories on Jamshedpur’s