Accounts and studies of corruption in India since Independence have been primarily of three types: depictions of the actual transactions that take place among clients, politicians, and bureaucrats, notably in Stanley Kochanek's work; description of the hierarchy in the distribution of corrupt income, of which the landmark-and exemplary-work is that of Robert Wade; and analysis of the discursive aspects of corruption, how it is perceived by ordinary people as well as other participants. Documents from the personal, governmental, and intergovernmental files of one of northern India's leading politicians, Chaudhuri Charan Singh (also briefly prime minister of India in 1979), provide materials for another perspective on corruption and on the political system in which it is embedded. In the case to be discussed in the lecture, Professor Brass will illuminate the political interactions involved at all levels of the Indian political system in a single transaction. In this lecture, a chapter in his forthcoming biography of Charan Singh that will also comprise, in effect, a history of the politics of northern India from 1937 to 1987, Professor Brass is seeking to outline a framework for penetrating the workings of a political system that does not fall back on caricature designations such as "democracy," but focuses instead on what he calls the actual "state of play" in a political system at a particular time.

Paul Brass is emeritus professor (emeritus) of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington and Seattle. His most recent books are Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective: 2006) and The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (University of Washington Press, 2003). His current research interests are derived from his work on a multi-volume biography of a prominent north Indian politician and former prime minister, Charan Singh, whose central role in northern Indian politics provide a focus for a broader study of the politics of north India from 1937 to 1987.

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