Power and Influence in India: Bosses, Lords and Captains

The importance of individual politicians and leadership in South Asian politics is easily visible in the functioning of political parties and movements, as well as in media coverage. Yet there is a noticeable paucity of academic work on the subject. This volume, a collection of articles documenting the leadership styles of individual politicians in the region, seeks to address this lack.

By exploring such aspects of leadership as symbolic action, rhetorical usage, moral conviction, alliance-building, and modes of distribution, the articles illustrate the opportunities and constraints experienced by the politically ambitious. The spectrum of leadership strategies thus uncovered leads the editors to propose a tripartite arrangement of leader-types most commonly seen in the region: boss, lord and captain. In so doing the volume is able to provide important insight into the nature of South Asian democracies and electoral politics, and explain the relative stability of the body politic of what is a very large and complex socio-economic region.

Pamela Price is Professor of South Asian History, Department of Archæology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo. She has written on both the colonial and post-colonial periods in Indian history. The author of Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (1996), her other interests include state-level politics and rural political culture in India.
Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asian Studies, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is the author of Poetics of Village Politics. The Making of West Bengal's Rural Communism (2003), and books in Norwegian on Indian history and the history of development aid.