Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for India and South Asia at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India and a coeditor of Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, both also published by Duke University Press. He is also a coeditor of The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, and Caste and Outcast.

Acknowledgments ix
Part One. Introduction
1. Poverty as Biopolitics 3
2. The State and the Politics of Poverty 41
Part Two. Corruption
3. Corruption, Politics, and the Imagined State 75
4. Narratives of Corruption 111
Part Three. Inscription
5. "Let the Train Run on Paper": Bureaucratic Writing as State Practice 141
6. Literacy, Bureaucratic Domination, and Democracy 191
Part Four. Governmentality
7. Population and Neoliberal Governmentality 237
Epilogue 279
Notes 295
References Cited 329
Index 355

Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for India and South Asia at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India and a coeditor of Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, both also published by Duke University Press. He is also a coeditor of The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, and Caste and Outcast.