Revisiting Raag Darbari After Fifty Years: A Conference Report
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Kasturi Datta,Pankaj Kumar Jha |
| DOI | 10.1177/0019556118820388 |
| Subject Matter | Notes |
Note
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
65(1) 236–242 , 2019
© 2019 IIPA
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0019556118820388
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1 Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Hindu College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India.
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Motilal Nehru College, University of Delhi,
Delhi, India.
Corresponding author:
Kasturi Datta, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Hindu College, University of
Delhi, Delhi, India.
E-mail: kasdat@gmail.com
Revisiting Raag Darbari
After Fifty Years:
A Conference Report
Kasturi Datta1
Pankaj Kumar Jha2
Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari is currently in its fiftieth year.1 A widely read
fiction in Hindi literature, Raag Darbari, is also considered one of the finest
satirical texts on the political ethnography of rural India. Set in the backdrop of an
imaginary village, Shivpalganj in Uttar Pradesh, in the late 1960s, the novel was
perhaps the first critique on the developmental state, its bureaucracy and the
democratic institutions of the country, served with black humour and irony. The
Department of Political Science, University of Delhi organised a unique 2-day
international conference entitled Polity as Fiction, Fiction as Reality: 50 years of
Raag Darbari on 29 and 30 January 2018. This conference provided a unique
interdiscipli nary platform for an amalgamation of ideas, critical engagement and a
review of multiple issues by academicians and scholars across social sciences
and humanitie s (including economics, political science, social policy, geography,
sociology, tribal studies, media studies and literature), experienced bureaucrats
and civil society representatives who also attended the conference.
Vision and Objective
Some of the key questions around which the conference revolved were as
follows: where are we today in our understanding of administration and politics,
five decades after the publication of Raag Darbari? Have we managed to get local
institutions to deliver welfare? Do we have a handle on dealing with corruption?
How are the constitution and state institutions regarded and their promises upheld?
What tools can we deploy to analyse the new forms of local politics? The con-
vener of the conference, Professor Satyajit Singh clarified, ‘This gathering was an
attempt at reviewing existing administrative theories and literature on policy and
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