Paper short abstract:

This paper examines public discourses of ‘corruption’ during 1940s/50s India’s food rationing/controls. It explores the public mediation of scandals in black marketing and how representations of the ‘public’ and ‘state’ were informed by scandal, and uncertainties about citizenship and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will examine how public discourses of 'corruption' were transformed in the 1940s and 1950s as a result of the specific circumstances of wartime/post-war food rationing and controls. Building on recent work on the ambiguous boundaries of citizenship and the ambivalent meanings of 'independence' in 1947-8, the paper will look at how corruption was both managed and publicised during the 'crisis' moments of the mid 1940s - controls on food and civil supplies, rationing and refugee rehabilitation. The contextual framework of analysis will be based around public and official notions of corruption, as manifested in the significant anti-corruption reports of 1938, 1947-8 and 1964, and field interviews with low level civil servants and police officers. Food Control and refugee rehabilitation officers epitomised the fragile nexus between the local state, the changing economy and UP public expectations about the new independent state. In this connection, the paper will look at how the press and local political leadership were used to mediate scandals surrounding black marketing and licensing in relation to these servants of the state. It will further examine how these scandals were linked to the state insecurities surrounding refugees and Pakistan. In particular, it will argue that representations of the 'public' and the 'state' were informed by the ambiguous publicity surrounding the idea of corruption, and the uncertain definitions of citizenship attached to the displaced and dispossessed.