MANUFACTURING CONSENT 93
which the colonial state attempted to 'manufacture consent3, Bhattacharya draws attention to the enormous constraints within which that state operated. During the second world war, the difficulties of forcing India to serve wider imperial purposes while sustaining itself and the Raj were thrown more than ever into sharp relief. The business of placating different groups of collaborators, with competing interests, at a time of economic hardship and political uncertainty was complex and tricky. For instance, as Bhattacharya shows, industrialists were none too happy with the Raj's wartime policy of cosying up to communists and mollycoddling labour 'agitators9 in the hope that they might drum up support for 'the war effort3. It was also proving increasingly difficult to shield the landlords - whose support had been assiduously cultivated since 1857 - from public wrath at a time of requisitioning, rationing and widespread starvation. Achieving and sustaining a balance between the threat of force and the rewards of collaboration had never been easy in India's imperial context. Bhattacharya shows how the war upset this precarious balance irrevocably, and in so doing he helps us to understand why the British quit India when they did.
Bhattacharya also provides fascinating new insights into the nature of Indian 'collaboration' with the Raj. By drawing attention to the large and expensive measures designed to keep 'collaborators' quiescent during the war, B^hattacharya underlines just how fluid and partial were the partnerships on which British control rested. A very substantial part of the state's propaganda initiatives were directed at its own servants and employees - perhaps the most obvious collaborators of all - a fact which exposes the fragility of the Raj's base of loyal support. The fact that the Government felt it necessary to bribe its servants with free and subsidised food and rations all through the war, at a time of tremendous food scarcity, indicates that maintaining these relations was a key priority for the Raj. It also indicates that British policy-makers were well aware that these relationships rested, despite protestations of 'salt' and maai-baap^ on pragmatic assessments by 'loyalists' about their present and future interests. Bhattacharya shows, moreover, that the Raj's Indian officials were able to exercise a considerable degree of discretion in interpreting policy and in determining which parts would be implemented and how. He-thus repeatedly draws our attention to the fact that the colonial state was not a monolith, that its policies were always partial and flawed, refracted through the prism of local official (usually Indian) agendas and concerns.