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The Great Tradition Globalizes: Reflections on Two Studies of ‘The Industrial Leaders’ of Madras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2003

John Harriss
John Harriss
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Abstract

The title of the paper alludes to Milton Singer's book When A Great Tradition Modernizes: an anthropological approach to Indian civilization, and particularly to Part IV of the book. This has the title ‘Modernization and Traditionalization’ and includes a long essay called ‘Industrial Leadership, the Hindu Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism-described in a review by Richard Park at the time as ‘the capstone’ of the book as a whole.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , May 2003 , pp. 327 - 362
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Acknowledgements: I have been fortunate to have been helped by many friends and colleagues in the writing of this paper. I am grateful to V. K. Natraj, the Director, and to K. Nagaraj, M. S. S. Pandian and Padmini Swaminathan at the Madras Institute of Development Studies for their hospitality and kindness whilst I did research in Chennai in 2000. My friend and colleague Chris Fuller in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE has encouraged this work from the start and has made substantial comments on several versions of this paper, while I also want to thank George Rosen, David Rudner and Raminder Kaur for their commentaries on the final draft. I am further deeply grateful to Chakravarti Ram-Prasad at the University of Lancaster for his insightful comments both as a scholar and as a ‘subject’. The paper is substantially different as a result of Ram's interventions. All these friends have led me to correct some errors of fact and of understanding. Those that remain are of course my responsibility alone. I also thank Jonathan Spencer, Thomas Blom Hansen and Filippo Osella for comments made during the meeting of the South Asian Anthropologists' Group at the University of Edinburgh in September 2000, and Mary Hancock, the discussant, and Joanne Waghorne, Indira Peterson and Ginette Ishimatsu, fellow panellists on ‘From Madras to Chennai: The City That Milton Singer Never Saw’, at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago 2001. Research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).