Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the intersection of local caste politics with everyday state practices and finds that it reproduces dominance and exclusion, creates policy-practice gaps but also opens up spaces for confrontation, assertion and the reconstitution of politics, practices & state-society boundaries.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork with lower level state functionaries of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Programme, in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India, revealed that the dominant Maratha caste used kinship, caste and political networks to colonise field level ICDS positions and capture state benefits and resources. Further, dominant caste ICDS field workers used everyday programme/state practices to perform ritual superiority, producing the Scheduled Castes/Dalits as 'polluted', 'untouchable' subjects and excluding them from programme services.

However, in a departure from much writing on the politically mediated state, I present two case studies of Dalit resistance to Maratha domination in the ICDS. Such resistance is led by Dalit state functionaries who confront Maratha attempts to control their labour and reproduce the material and cultural basis of Maratha caste power, by invoking the rules and structures of Weberian bureaucracy. Maratha attempts to blurr the state-society boundary by reproducing caste power as state power are challenged by Dalits through recourse to the idea of an impersonal and rational state.

In sum, this paper contributes to the anthropology of bureaucracy by focusing on the understudied role of state functionaries in everyday practices of the local state and highlights that (1) state functionaries use state practices to perform caste, exercising dominance and contesting subordination (2) such contestations produce competing imaginaries of state, and (3) intersections of state practices with the local political order do not only challenge the notion of the Weberian state but may work to uphold it as well.