ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the links between cultures of ‘corruption’ and official perceptions of public morality across administrative spheres in Uttar Pradesh. In the Introduction, we explored the common premise that ‘corruption’ is an unavoidable or even a necessary part of political transactions in a whole array of different contexts worldwide, in politics, government or business. According to this popular view, transgression of rules is an inevitable consequence of organisational behaviour, or even a dynamic of human nature and genetically determined selfinterest. These representations of ‘corruption’ often highlight positive as well as negative outcomes of its transactional nature: corruption as a means of increasing the efficiency of obstructive bureaucratic procedures (i.e. ‘speed money’), or ‘rule’ bending to redistribute resources and profits sometimes in a more socially equitable way.1 However, they do not help us to explain how and why political reactions to ‘corruption’ changed over time, or how what was considered to be ‘permissible’ in public behaviour connected to, or reinforced social and political hierarchies. Research has been done on how the phenomenon is bound up in the production of class, caste, religious and gender inequalities.2 However, less well-explored is how far its social and political effects can be tolerated within the rules framework of a public administration on the one hand, and by the general public on the other. This brings us to definitions, labelling and popular responses, particularly in everyday interactions between subjects/citizens and the state. Once the historian starts to look more closely at permissible behaviour at the boundaries of the state, the changing moral norms of civil servants and policemen, and public expectations of those norms emerge as key themes.
