Bureaucrats and the limits of decolonial imagination in Gujarat, India

Abstract

Indian bureaucracy is widely criticised for corruption and inefficiency. How do bureaucrats themselves engage with this critique? This paper examines how three mid- to lower-level revenue officers in Gujarat reflect on the bureaucratic system they inhabit. While they recognise their lack of power to enact structural change, they envision structural change through personal change, particularly ethical self-cultivation rooted in religiously inflected ideals such as honesty (pramāṇikata) and compassion (karuṇā). For these bureaucrats, such alternative visions emerge from an epistemic dissonance inherent in the colonial-era bureaucratic structure: a ‘Western’ bureaucratic rationality that, in their view, fails to integrate personal responsibility, and an ethic of self-cultivation—blending religious ideals and humanism—that has become separated from contemporary state-society relations due to political polarisation. Rather than reducing these religiously inflected imaginaries to mere reproductions of Hindu nationalist ideology, this paper centres bureaucratic self-perception and reasoning to examine how they envision state-society relations. While aspirational and utopian, these imaginaries enable bureaucrats to articulate a form of religiously-inflected decoloniality that they recognise has been co-opted for electoral gains, yet remains, in their view, distinct from partisan politics and rooted in an ethical vision of governance that has, at its core, self-cultivation.