This chapter is about how panchayats, institutions of rural local government in India, cope with conflicting organisational requirements. These requirements arise from the need to harmonise the organisation's internal processes with constraints imposed by the other organisations involved in rural development projects and the electoral necessity of satisfying popular aspirations. Using ethnographic methods like participant observations and unstructured interviews we analyse implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in three districts of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Our study reveals that conflicting organisational requirements and stakeholder interests necessitate deviations from prescribed procedures. In such a situation a panchayat's success depends on its ability to camouflage deviations by formulation and enforcement of informal rules with the active support of different stakeholders. The present three-tier panchayats in West Bengal came into existence in 1978.

During its prolonged and uninterrupted existence, it has been entrusted with the responsibility of providing all services required by the rural citizens (Robinson, 2005). This not only makes it an important institution for rural citizens but also imparts considerable political importance to it. It is acknowledged that winning the panchayat elections is the first step towards forming a government at the state level (Chakrabarti, 2016). While a panchayat's political importance makes it prone to perils of partisan politics (Kundu, 2009), inadequate fiscal decentralisation makes it dependent on external funding agencies (Robinson, 2005). Thus, panchayats not only have to deal with their internal processes formulated by the Panchayati Raj Department, but have to abide by funding agencies’ guidelines. Moreover, the presence of different political combinations at different tiers of panchayat and dynamics of politician-bureaucracy relationship make partisan politics integral to their functioning.

The MGNREGA, with a dual focus on providing guaranteed employment and creating rural assets, is the flagship rural development initiative of the Indian government. While the financial liability of the MGNREGA is shared by the union and state governments in 75:25 ratio, panchayats are responsible for identifying works, framing projects, selecting beneficiaries, executing projects and paying wages. However, panchayats have to perform the above functions after complying with the guidelines issued by the union and state governments (MoRD, 2008). The MGNREGA's relationship with rural livelihood also makes it a politically important programme.

The onset of Durga Puja, a popular religious festival among the Bengalis celebrated during four days in the lunar month of Ashwin (September-October), transforms the city of Kolkata, West Bengal into a grand, if ephemeral, spectacle. The festival weaves around twin narratives of Goddess Durga, consort of Shiva: the popular narrative of the dutiful daughter and benevolent mother visiting her maternal home with her four children (Ganesh, Kartik, Saraswati and Lakshmi) and the mythical story of Durga's fierce form as the ten-armed, victorious demon-slayer. Distinctive to Kolkata, protimas (or images of deities) of Durga and her family are worshipped with much ceremony in the thousands of pandals (make-shift structures usually made of bamboo and coloured cloth) that occupy public spaces across the city. The festival constitutes a cornerstone of Bengali socio-cultural life: an annual event that is welcomed in anticipation and excitement. At the end of the festival, reflecting the ethos of the cyclicality of life, these protimas are immersed in the river Hooghly that flows through Kolkata.

In this chapter, I look behind the scenes of this large-scale dramaturgy to catch a glimpse of the lives of the mritshilpis, or the clay sculptors, who sculpt the protimas that occupy centre-stage for popular consumption during these annual religious festivals. Despite the centrality of these images in arguably the most significant popular culture event of Bengali life, and proliferation of accounts on Durga Puja (for example, Ghosh, 2000; Guha-Thakurta, 2014; McDermott, 2010; Nicholas, 2013), there is a dearth of research on the social world of the mritshilpis. An examination of the ‘ordinary accounts of ordinary adventures’ stands to better explain the social world in which we live (Bourdieu et al.,1999, 624). As I will elaborate in the following sections, mritshilpis’ practices constitute an institutional context with its own particularities and cultural specificities characterised by seasonal work around religious festivals and high uncertainty in terms of orders, flow of labour and raw materials. During peak season, more than half the workforce in an artisanal studio would be constituted of temporary and casual workers. Nevertheless, this occupational practice constitutes one of the oldest, proliferating trades in West Bengal distinguished by an unbroken hereditary tradition (Guha-Thakurta, 2015).

In The Invisible Man, Thomas Ellison's narrator contends that he is ‘invisible’ and argues that his invisibility is not because of a physical condition but is the result of others refusing to see him. It is a refusal to acknowledge humanity (Nussbaum, 1999). In the novel, the narrator also contends that he has purposefully remained invisible to society as a mark of protest. Similar invisibility, though in a different context, has been portrayed by the protagonist in Mahasweta Devi's Bashai Tudu (1990) who is always killed in police encounters and yet Tudu never dies. Tudu is invisible. Ellison's narrator is a homeless black American. Tudu is a tribal. The Invisible Man and Bashai Tudu are stories of individuals. What happens when invisibility refers to the disposition of state and the affected are a group of vulnerable people? How does state structure invisibility against its own citizen? And finally, how do vulnerable people respond?

The idea of invisibility is widely discussed in social sciences. Robinson (2000) contends that there are two kinds of invisibility – invisibility of those who are on the margin and of those who are in the centre of cultural and political power. She argues that non-dominant individuals and groups are ‘hidden from history’ i.e., excluded from the narratives of history. The powerful enjoy the invisibility behind the mask of universality (Robinson, 2000), similar to the person sitting inside the light emitting central tower of the Panopticon or Bentham's idea of a jail. For the vulnerable, invisibility is both a cause and effect of social and political exclusion (Phelan, 1993). This chapter is about the homeless who are on the margins and are socio-politically excluded.

Invisibility is physical and non-physical absence. The latter may be either absence in idea or absence of stimuli, such as the silence or even absence in the ability to experience. Sen (1999) interprets physical absence as missing. He contends that discrimination against women in South Asia is responsible for low women to men ratio. Even though biology favours women, the ratio is not in their favour.

Markets, today represent not just arenas of exchange but a way of life that organises activities based on values assigned (explicitly or implicitly) by the market (Sandel, 2012). In the veneer of economic objectivity and value neutrality, market-based values continue to displace other values that emphasise different sensitivities and alternate normative forms of organising society. The ecological destruction resulting from the deepening of ‘market societies’ is tangible and increasingly indisputable. And so are the inequalities that appear to be the natural (and perhaps celebrated) outcomes in such societies. While the glaring and pernicious effects have been alarmingly met with indifference and an inertial bias for the status quo, it has also been met with organisations that seek to challenge what is increasingly apparent as a dangerous way of life.

In this chapter, we study organisations seeking to promote social change that forces them to engage with markets, even while they resist the dominant principles characterising the markets in which they work are based. Despite subscribing to visions of development that are clearly inconsistent with those promoted by dominant discourses of market-based development, these organisations have no option but to engage with markets. In doing so, they often have to reject mainstream measures of success and constantly strive to challenge the market structures even as they continue to operate in them and perhaps even depend on them to achieve their goals. Conventional frames of understanding organisations may lead us to unfavourable views of such organisations, in comparison with others who might be operating in the same spaces, with greater alignment with dominant market logics. However, we argue this would be severely underestimating the work such organisations do. Instead, they reflect more on the measures used and the horizons privileged by these measures than the societal and ecological value created by such organisations.

While we do not think that such contestations are limited to only these, the organisations we focus on this chapter are Dastkar Andhra (DA) and its sister organisations: Selco Solar Limited (Formerly, the Solar Electric Light Company, India), Decentralised Cotton Yarn Trust (DCYT) and Pratham Books. The Oxford Dictionary defines contestation as ‘the action or process of disputing or arguing’.

When violence occurs, and nothing happens to those responsible for the violence, what is the nature of society that we create and live in? When the sanctity of human life is cast aside, questions are raised about the credibility and legitimacy of democratic institutions. Life is mobilised by the ruling elites of the state as a political and communicative play to reproduce their power over society. The state is characterised by the site of a durbar where the politics of subservient courtiers structures administrative action. The durbar becomes the centripetal locus of action and other claims of justice are cast aside. The possibility of dissent against the durbar becomes difficult in the wake of organisational dynamics, which marginalise ethical acts of dissent.

We examine these questions of life, death, state, police, riots, violence, investigations and justice in the context of Gujarat. In February 2002, as a part of right wing mobilisation for building a temple in Ayodhya at a site where a mosque had been demolished by rioting mobs in 1992, a few activists were returning from Ayodhya to Gujarat (Jaffrelot, 2012). A train compartment in which they were travelling was burnt leading to the loss of fifty nine lives (Dhattiwala and Biggs, 2012). Following this incident, there were large-scale violent riots in Gujarat directed against Muslims leading to the loss of nearly 2,000 lives (Jaffrelot, 2012). There was widespread sentiment that not only had the state of Gujarat not done enough to prevent the riots but might even have been complicit in the violence directed against Muslims (Noorani, 2004). Dhattiwala and Biggs (2012) argue that the state of Gujarat administratively retaliated against those police officers who tried to uphold law and order by not allowing riots or mass violence to occur, while facilitating the advancement of careers of those police officers who turned a blind eye towards the riots.

Amidst claims of inducement, coercion and intimidation of witnesses in the investigations of riots cases, the Supreme Court of India intervened to constitute a SIT to investigate the riots cases (Mitta, 2014). In this chapter, we explore the politics of the SIT, which was articulated as an alternative organisational space within the state.

We arrive in an auto-rickshaw; on its three wheels it is far more capable of plying the single narrow road in Chharanagar than a car. It is our first visit and we end up missing the library altogether, instead getting off at a railway crossing at the end of the road, from where we are escorted backwards on foot. We are later told that years ago, renowned writer-activist Mahasweta Devi and noted literary critic and activist G. N. Devy had stood at the same railway crossing when they came to meet the Chharas – a criminalised tribal community that lives in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. That particular meeting had heralded the possibility of a different future for the community.

We sit in the library, and over the next two days hear from the Chharas about their history, their circumstances and their recent efforts to change those circumstances. We are taken around Chharanagar as well: while there is only a single road, there are many narrow lanes, accessible only to feet and bicycles, where an entire community lives. Discouraging as the sights of the community's living conditions are, however, it is not in their poverty that the tragedy of their plight lies – such poverty is quite common in this country. What really ails the Chhara community is their powerlessness, their inability to change their plight because the label of ‘born criminals’ given to them by the British a century ago has stuck on even generations after independence, carrying with it all the social stigma and oppression that it carried then and perhaps more. The stigma denies most opportunities even to those few Chharas who possess some economic capital; for the large majority born without wealth, it is the ocean that separates them from the aspiring youth of modern India.

Our aim in this chapter is to describe the story of the Chharas as they have told it to us, as well as analyse their situation, and their attempts to change it, through theories of power. Specifically, we employ Clegg's (1989) framework of the circuits of power that comprises three different circuits – the episodic, the dispositional and the facilitative – that operate in an interconnected manner to create distributions of power.

This chapter provides a case study of an alternative organisation – the Swaraj University, which not only critiques the neoliberal turn in modern Higher Education (HE) but also interrogates its colonial legacies, as part of the wider call towards decolonisation of education.

Understanding alternative organisations requires alternative ways of thinking of and about organisations. If the alternative organisation challenges modernity (modern industrial production system, standardisation, ‘scientific’ knowledge etc.) and colonialism, are the standard, always available, modern (and also its late or post- epochs and conditions, which are indexed in particular conceptions of modernity but not necessarily its rejection), ‘Western’, and colonising forms of organisational theorisation adequate? Can modern and colonising Organisation Theory (see Ibarra-Colado, 2006 for more) provide us with an adequate analytic of organisations that are premised in the rejection of modernity? In many ways, this chapter is not only an outline of an alternative organisation that is premised in the rejection of modernity and its assemblages (mainly modern capitalism, now neoliberal capitalism and colonialism), but also an outline of the limitations of Organisation Studies, which Burrell (1996) had correctly called NATO. The chapter helps in the mobilisation of alternate theoretical resources that are non- Western, decolonial and locally embedded.

The chapter is laid out as follows. In the following section, I trace the rise of global neoliberal university. In the next section, I outline key features of organisational practices and rehearse the existing critiques of such a set-up. The subsequent section provides an introduction to the Swaraj University. It discusses the philosophical ideas of anti-colonial thinkers such as Gandhi that undergirds the foundation and functioning of Swaraj University as an alternative organisation and describes its organising practices in contrast to that of modern neoliberal university. The final section provides a brief discussion on the ways in which Swaraj University presents an alternative to HE institutions, as well as a call for alternate non-Western theorisation of organisations, drawing on Ibarra-Colado's (2006) naming of ‘epistemic coloniality’ in and of organisations and Organisation Studies.

The global rise of the neoliberal university

Across the globe, there has been exorbitant rise in fees and increasing student debt in HE.

Introduction

In the last twenty five years of neoliberal governance, India has witnessed a dramatic shift to privatisation and corporatisation. The new regime of governance has allowed accumulation of wealth for a few with an accompanying rise in inequity at an unprecedented scale. In this neoliberal era, discourse of management is exalted and allows a significant symbolic capital to accrue to managers. Such a discourse fosters conditions for managementality, or the the mentalities and rationalities of management, to determine subject positions that are economically and culturally privileged. While most people struggle for their survival, neoliberalism creates the condition for a small elite to become entrepreneurial, prudential and active to exploit the opportunities offered by corporatisation in a socially uneven India. As Neruda perceptively observed, the corporate-state nexus commodifies and sells everything to the highest bidder leaving the majority of the Indian population in a state of abject poverty. In such times of abundance for a few and deprivation for the vast majority, the question of alternative organisations becomes particularly relevant in India.

Our ideas of alternative organisations in this book are inspired by critical traditions in social and management theory to imagine a different world in which there are emphases on human emancipation, equity and justice. We believe academic writings create counter-discourses that may lead to conditions of what Neruda describes, ‘The day is coming when we will liberate’. Such conditions often hinge on the creation and dissemination of alternative imaginations that are repressed by dominant management discourses under neoliberalism.

Ideology is an essential feature of any society, and stable social systems draw upon it to cultivate beliefs in their legitimacy and to suppress contradictory beliefs (Eagleton, 1991; Habermas, 1976). However, marketing theory has paid limited attention to the role of ideology in the functioning of markets (exceptions include Kozinets and Handelman, 2004; Thompson and Arsel, 2004). This oversight is surprising because market-based exchanges and consumption as essential features of capitalism build on supporting ideologies for their acceptance (O'Reilly, 2006; Sklair, 1994). Similarly, oppositional social movements within capitalism use counter-ideologies to countervail and oppose the dominant system (Beuchler, 2000; Touraine, 1981). Marketing theory has under-examined the role of social movements in shaping alternative institutions that challenge market-based offerings. We offer a corrective to these lacunae by presenting insights into a healthcare initiative that is shaped by a workers’ movement impelled by Marxist- Leninist ideology.

In this chapter, we examine Shaheed Hospital at Dalli Rajhara in the central Indian state of Chattisgarh. Shaheed Hospital (SH) was set up in 1983 and offers low-cost healthcare to subaltern consumers living in the region. This chapter helps understand how a counter-ideology and social movement are necessary for the creation of alternatives to market-based offerings. SH further helps us refine our understanding of how a counter-ideology is used to challenge prevailing marketbased norms and to denaturalise existing social relations. A health facility also materialised the counter-ideology of Marxism-Leninism and created a broader participation that was necessary for the movement in its early years. Paradoxically, SH also reflects the limitations of an isolated alternative institution, whose survival became dependent on a few heroic individuals as the social movement and ideology that created it declined.

In the following section, we examine the theoretical ideas of ideology and social movement. We follow this review with the presentation of the findings on SH. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the theoretical ramifications of our study.

Ideology and social movements

Ideology

Drawing from Eagleton (1991) we describe ideology as ideas, which can be false and deceptive, that arise out of the material structure of society.

In this interpretation of the term, we do not attribute ideology to any one particular group or a class of actors. Instead, we interpret ideology as the systemic necessity of a particular socio-economic order.