Provincializing Progress: Developmentalism and Anti-Imperialism in Colonial India

Marwah, Inder S.

doi:10.1086/704190

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Development that relies on capitalism is by its very nature, sustained by ‘domination and imperialism’ (Marwah, 2019: 498). Developmentality, write Srinivasan and Kasturirangan (2016: 125) is a model ‘centred around consumption fuelled economic growth and surplus accumulation, has depended on the intensive exploitation of people and nature, thereby adversely impacting societies and ecologies throughout the planet.’ Capitalism relies on the systemic exploitation of sociopolitical differences and hierarchies between people, and notably, also the difference in geographic spatialisms, particularly maximising the urban/rural binary for profit (Potts, 2019).…”

Section: Site and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A pilgrimage of camels’: Dairy capitalism, nomadic pastoralism, and subnational Hindutva statism in Rajasthan

Narayanan

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hindu nationalists and NGOs proffer camel dairying as an employment strategy for Rajasthan's nomadic pastoralists, akin to the commodification of bovine milk for poverty alleviation in India. Commercial dairying however is inconsistent with pastoralist ethics though it is consistent with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's broader agenda to consolidate Hindutva at the national and subnational levels in India, and with developmentalism that regards animals as capital. In an original contribution bringing together pastoralist studies and critical animal geographies, this paper introduces species to the ‘conjugated oppressions’ in agrarian economies, currently composing caste, tribes, and class, through the suturing of (dairy) capitalism and right-wing ultranationalism. Focussing the camels and the Raika herders in the subregions of Jaisalmer, and Sirohi, home to India's only camel sanctuary, the paper delineates how the camel is entrapped in the coalescing and conflicts of dairy-based development and Hindutva nationalism. Interconnected oppressions upon the camels and herders are conceptualised and enacted through the control and appropriation of rangelands, understood as yatra or pilgrimage by the pastoralists. However, the camel is also enmeshed in the older violent histories of domestication, raising difficult questions about how nomadic and camel sovereignties may be imagined, together. Arguing that dairy capitalism will discipline the nomads and camels while strengthening Hindutva in Rajasthan, the paper draws on pastoralist worldviews as a starting point to re-imagine human–animal relations, based on an ethic of de-commodification.

show abstract

Section: Site and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A pilgrimage of camels’: Dairy capitalism, nomadic pastoralism, and subnational Hindutva statism in Rajasthan

Narayanan

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…They join longstanding critiques in literary studies (Said 1978;Spivak 1999), history (Chakrabarty 2000), philosophy (Dussel 1980;Mignolo 2011), and postcolonial theory (Nandy 1994;Chatterjee 1986) demonstrating how Euro-American theory secures its "positional superiority" (Said 1978, 7) by portraying the west as the pinnacle of a fixed process of historical evolution. More or less deterministic theorizations of social progress shape the conjectural histories of Smith, Ferguson, Robertson, and Kames (Pitts 2005;Sebastiani 2008;Meek 1976), those of their more critical continental counterparts, such as Lahontan, Turgot, Rousseau, and Diderot (Muthu 2003;Israel 2006), Kant's, Herder's, and Hegel's philosophical histories (Marwah 2021;Church 2022), eighteenth-and nineteenth-century liberalism-most notoriously, in the Mills and Tocqueville (Pitts 2005;Mehta 1999)-and conservatism (O'Neill 2016), Marx's historical materialism (Chakrabarty 2000;Anderson 2010), and twentieth-century modernization theory (McCarthy 2009). For all their variations, these developmentalisms consistently depict European modernity as the endpoint of a singular, universal course of progress.…”

Section: The Dilemma Of Developmentalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this political imaginary, nationalism was neither reactive nor restricted to the confines of the subcontinent. It was, rather, the spark for global metamorphoses ranging from the world-historical transition beyond European hegemony envisioned by Ghose (Marwah 2019), to Krishna Varma's Pan-Asian Parliament and "alliance of England's oppressed" (Fischer-Tiné 2014; Ramnath 2011), to M.N. Roy's Indo-communist revolutionism (Manjapra 2010).…”

Section: Conscious Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Marwah¹

2023

Perspect. polit.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines how Indian anticolonialists drew on Darwinism and evolutionary theory to resist British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from The Bengalee (and beyond), I show how Indian nationalists marshaled evolutionist schemas to contest stage-based accounts of social advancement rationalizing despotic rule in India. I argue that Darwinian evolutionism enabled anticolonialists to respond to a particular decolonial dilemma—that of developmentalism, the unilinear notion of historical time justifying India’s political subjection. While Darwinism’s social application is commonly understood to sustain imperialism, I demonstrate that it served, in the colonial context, to deconstruct historicist tropes portraying India as politically immature. Drawing on evolutionism, nationalists contested the presumptions of imperialist discourse and reconceptualized progress in novel, anticolonial terms. Darwin’s travel to India thus exposes a distinctive decolonial quandary, the syncretic Indian anticolonial response to it, and the intractability of the contradictions facing decolonizing movements globally.

show abstract

“…Among these, developmentalism has served as a recurrent example of an intractably Eurocentric conceptual field that derives from a range of Western, post-Enlightenment political vocabularies. Rather than accept that developmental thought is prima facie Eurocentric given these historical entanglements, I join recent work examining anticolonial developmental discourses in their more specific political and intellectual contexts (Marwah 2019; Sultan 2020).…”

Section: What Is Decolonizing Political Theory?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Development in Decolonization: Walter Rodney, Third World Developmentalism, and “Decolonizing Political Theory”

Temin

2022

Am Polit Sci Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Developmentalism is the idea that progress entails the temporal movement of societies along a universal trajectory. Prevailing accounts conceptualize Eurocentric developmental discourses as ideological weapons of imperial domination, specifically because they defer colonial claims to popular self-rule. Rejecting the idea that these historical entanglements exhaust the meanings of developmental thought, this article sheds light on anticolonial debates over developmentalism. Turning to Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney, it reconstructs what I call “popular anticolonial developmentalism,” as a way of construing popular legitimation in actual contexts of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. From the premise that capitalist-imperialism “deflected” the historical motion of colonized societies, popular anticolonial developmentalism places the agencies of progressive transformation with democratically empowered popular subjects. Shifting the lens of “decolonizing political theory” from epistemic critique to worldly anticolonialism shows how developmentalism became a primary idiom for contesting and reimagining anticolonial futures. In turn, anticolonial practices reshaped developmentalism’s very conceptual parameters.

show abstract

Provincializing Progress: Developmentalism and Anti-Imperialism in Colonial India

Cited by 19 publications

References 22 publications

‘A pilgrimage of camels’: Dairy capitalism, nomadic pastoralism, and subnational Hindutva statism in Rajasthan

‘A pilgrimage of camels’: Dairy capitalism, nomadic pastoralism, and subnational Hindutva statism in Rajasthan

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Development in Decolonization: Walter Rodney, Third World Developmentalism, and “Decolonizing Political Theory”

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About