Producing India

From Colonial Economy to National Space

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by Manu Goswami

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published May 2004, 400 pages, paper

ISBN 0226305090

When did categories such as a national space and economy acquire self-evident meaning and a global reach? Why do nationalist movements demand a territorial fix between a particular space, economy, culture, and people?

Producing India mounts a challenge to the entrenched practice of methodological nationalism that has accorded an exaggerated privilege to the nation-state as a dominant unit of historical and political analysis. Manu Goswami locates the origins and contradictions of Indian nationalism in the convergence of the lived experience of colonial space, the expansive logic of capital, and interstate dynamics. Building on and critically extending subaltern and postcolonial perspectives, her study shows how nineteenth-century conceptions of India as a bounded national space and economy bequeathed an enduring tension between a universalistic political economy of nationhood and a nativist project that continues to haunt the present moment.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Geographies of State Transformation: The Production of Colonial State Space
2. Envisioning the Colonial Economy
3. Mobile Incarceration: Travels in Colonial State Space
4. Colonial Pedagogical Consolidation
5. Space, Time, and Sovereignty in Puranic-Itihas
6. India as Bharat: A Territorial Nativist Vision of Nationhood, 1860-1880
7. The Political Economy of Nationhood
8. Territorial Nativism: Swadeshi and Swaraj
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Review

In Producing India Manu Goswami traces the sociocultural, political, economic, and global transformations that made possible nationalist imaginings of India as a bounded national space and economy between 1858 and 1920. Goswami reveals the ways in which the idea of India as a nation-state grew out of the colonial experience and the processes of global economic restructuring. By locating the political and economic contexts behind the idea of India as a nation-state, Goswami offers an innovative and subtle understanding of the birth of Indian nationalism. She also examines the contradictory character of Indian nationalism, which has emphasized both a universalistic conception of national development and a particularistic, specifically Hindu understanding of nationhood. This tension, Goswami suggests, continues to shape Indian politics. Producing India offers a creative and sharp analysis of the development of Indian nationalism as understood by a wide range of contemporary Indians as well as later historians. Goswami combines her superb historical research with an assured and original critique of the theoretical and historical assumptions regarding Indian nationalism.

Partha Chatterjee, professor of Anthropology, Columibia University, writes, “Producing India offers an incisive analysis of the imagining of India as a territorially productive space. This was, as Manu Goswami shows, a complex and sophisticated intellectual enterprise involving the colonial state as well as the Indian nationalist elite. It was also a crucial material transformation, turning the idea of ‘India’ into a naturalized category of everyday common sense. Using the material of Swadeshi nationalism, Indian political economy, geography textbooks, and much else, Goswami has achieved a stunning synthesis of recent research in the field of modern South Asia.”