Description

Longing for an Elsewhere is about the colonial ancestry of India's contemporary embrace of economic development. Unlike existing scholarship that traces the emergence of the developmental state to the mid-twentieth century process of decolonization, it argues that these origins are anchored in the preoccupation of local colonial elites with emulating industrialization in Europe and the United States. Beyond re-periodizing the birth of development discourse, the book argues that culture actively shapes a putatively economic process such as development. Specifically, it examines the chief cultural factors that guided the princely state of Mysore's endeavours for achieving development during its period of British indirect rule (1881-1947).

Historians and social scientists have tended to overlook semi-autonomous polities in colonial India like Mysore that were neither fully colonized nor independent. The Mysore state elite took advantage of their political semi-autonomy, afforded by British indirect rule, to initiate a range of development programs. Drawing on a wide breadth of under-explored archival evidence, the book shows that the elite used a creative amalgam of diverse strands of European thought and Indian culture to forge state development practice in colonial India.

Gowda analyzes the institutional dynamics of three elite-led state projects: the Bhadravati Iron Works, the Village Improvement Scheme, and the Block System of Irrigation. In doing so, he argues that the state's support for these projects can be explained by a belief in the inevitability of industrial modernity and a claim for recognition of Mysore's capacity for progress. Examining the operation of this cultural logic allows us to theorize the developmental state, a type of state often found in formerly colonized societies and deserving of independent analytical attention by social theorists. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book draws from debates in sociology, history, and anthropology.