Longing for an Elsewhere: Mysore and the Making of India's Developmental State

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, the book argues that these origins are anchored in the preoccupation of colonized Indian elites with emulating the industrial modernity of Europe and the United States and seeking civilizational recognition for attaining progress. 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 ideas and endeavours of the princely state of Mysore for achieving development during its period of British indirect rule (1881-1947).

Historians and social scientists have tended to overlook semiautonomous polities in colonial India like Mysore that were neither fully colonized nor independent. The Mysore state elite took advantage of their political semiautonomy afforded by British indirect rule to initiate a range of development schemes. Drawing on underexplored archival evidence, the book shows that the elite adopted a creative amalgam of diverse strands of European thought within a colonized milieu to forge practices of state development in colonial India. Analyzing the institutional dynamics of three elite-led state projects in Mysore, Gowda 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. A focus on the operation of this cultural logic allows us to arrive at a cultural theory of the developmental state. Gowda also examines an important episode of dissent against a development scheme in Mysore, underscoring the paramount value of epistemic introspection and democratic deliberation in state planning. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book draws from debates in sociology, history, and anthropology.