From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907Author(s): Manu GoswamiSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 609-636Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/179304 .

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From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907 MANU GOSWAMI

University of Chicago

THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NATIONALISM

Our present historical moment is marked by a complex interlocking between processes of globalization and the proliferation of nationalisms. Contemporary processes of globalization have attenuated the institutional capacities of nation- states to regulate their national economies1 and challenged the spatial correspondence between nation, state, economy, culture, and people that has long defined the nation-state.2 The inherited hyphenization of nation and state, forged during the late-nineteenth century, now appears "less as an icon of con- juncture than an index of disjuncture."3 The increasing visibility of the strains in the union between nation and state has been matched by a remarkable burst in analyses of nationalism and the nation-state. In particular, the territorial bases of nationhood has emerged as a major theme in studies of nationalism. This essay seeks to extend and broaden this line of enquiry through an analysis of the historical production of a national space and economy in late nineteenth century colonial India. My discussion of the nationalization of conceptions of economy and territory at once engages with and departs from received approaches to national territory.

The importance of territorial boundaries in the formation of nationalism and the nation-state has long been recognized in the vast literature on nationalism.4

This essay owes a great deal to the critical reflections of Arjun Appadurai, Neil Brenner, Moishe Postone and William H. Sewell. I would also like to thank Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Laitin, Gary Herrigel and Susanne Rudolph who read this manuscript with characteristic acuity and insight. The editors of CSSH and two anonymous reviewers provided many helpful comments and suggestions. A version of this paper was presented at the CASPIC-MacArthur conference held at the Universi- ty of Chicago, on Nov 5-6, 1996. This research was made possible by a CASPIC-MacArthur grant for 1995-96.

1 See Harvey (1989), Held (1990, 1995), Hirsch (1995), Sassen (1991, 1996). 2 See Agnew (1994), Appadurai (1996, 1997), Gupta and Ferguson (1992), Malkii (1992),

Robertson (1992). 3 Appadurai (1996:39). 4 Hobsbawm (1990), Gellner (1983, 1994), Nair (1977), Seton-Watson (1977), Smith (1979).

0010-4175/98/4293-2403 $9.50 ? 1998 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

609



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Recent studies of nationalism have especially emphasized the territoriality of national imaginings. It is argued, for instance, that the formation of nationalism entails the organization of political and cultural identities on a national territorial scale.5 Related to this, many authors have stressed the role of cartographic representations of national boundaries in forging an identity between nation and people and the various ways in which national boundaries help establish difference from without and identity within an imagined national community.6 De- spite differences in conceptual orientation and interpretation, common to these diverse analyses of nationalism is a focus on the discursive effects and meaning of national territory. These works have deepened our understanding of the representational practices which help establish an identity between a particular place and people. However, I shall suggest that this approach to national territoriality is characterized by two significant deficiencies.

First, analyses of nationalism have reflected a one-sided focus on the circulation and effects of representations (such as maps and print-media) of national territory. This schema ignores the social processes through which a spatially bounded, self-enclosed national whole is constituted. It also neglects the wider social content of national territoriality. By conceptualizing national territory as a discursive formation, recent works leave aside the question of how and why nationalist movements routinely claim a spatial correspondence between people, economy, and culture. This essay shall explore this set of issues through a specific focus on the late-nineteenth-century constitution of notions of a national economy and territory in colonial India. Through a detailed analysis of the nationalist argument against colonialism and the swadeshi (indigenous manufactures) movement, I shall direct attention to the progressive naturalization of the tie among nation, economy, and territory. I shall stress both the comparative dimensions of this process and its particularistic manifestations in colonial India.

Second, and most crucially, studies of national territoriality have failed to sit- uate the formation of particular national spaces within the historical geography of capitalist expansion and the consolidation of the inter-state system. Lost in this perspective is a recognition of the ways transnational flows and relations shape the formation of national territoriality. This neglect, which has been apt- ly described as "methodological nationalism", is part and parcel of a broader nation-state centric bias within the social sciences.7 Recent works by social the- orists have argued that the conflation of nation-state and society is an en- trenched legacy of late-nineteenth-century sociological and philosophical paradigms.8 According to these works, social-scientific analyses have tended to

5 Mann (1984, 1993), Sahlins (1978), Weber (1976). 6 Anderson (1991), Malkii (1992), Winichakul (1994). 7 Smith (1979:91) employs the term methodological nationalism to refer to widely held nation-

al territorial definitions of society. 8 Agnew (1994), Amasson (1990), Giddens (1990), Taylor (1994), Wallerstein (1991).



SWADESHI TO SWARAJ IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA 6ii

take the existence of a spatially bounded national society and territory for grant- ed and have focused on institutions and social relations internal to that society.

In order to avoid the trap of "methodological nationalism," studies of nationalism need to examine the transnational context within and against which particular national spaces and nationalisms were constituted. This methodological injunction has particular force for analyses of late-nineteenth-century nationalism that were forged in an era of unprecedented colonial territorial and capitalist expansion. This essay suggests that the historical emergence, self- understanding, and trajectory of institutional nationalism in colonial India was inseparably tied to colonial spatial practices and capitalist expansion. Specifi- cally, I argue that the first sustained articulations of nationalism in colonial South Asia crystallized around the notion of a territorially delimited economic collective, a national economy during the 1870s and 1880s. I stress the close links between the colonial production of India as a spatially delimited entity and the formation of national imaginings of India as a national economic space. The notion of a spatially determinate national economy represented the point of departure for nationalist critiques of colonialism. It laid the foundation for the nationalist project of development and shaped the self-definition of the post- colonial developmental state. Nationalists yoked together the demand for swaraj (self-rule, independence) with the developmental ideology of swadeshi (indigenous manufactures). This welding of swadeshi and swaraj embodied the contradictory character of nationalism. On the one hand, nationalism sought participation in the universalist promise of national development. On the other hand, it simultaneously expressed unease with modernity in a territorially grounded nativist particularism. In what follows, I shall highlight the ways this contradictory orientation permeated the nationalist project.

This essay is organized as follows. The first section briefly lays out the broad historical-geographical field within and against which anti-colonial nationalism emerged. I shall identify and describe the ways in which colonial spatial practices engendered nationalist imaginings of India as a bounded national and economic space. The second section elaborates the nationalist argument against colonialism with reference to the emergent conception of a territorially delimited national economy. For the purposes of this essay, I shall draw selectively upon exemplary nationalist writings and practices from the period from 1870 to 1907. The concluding section examines the dynamic interchange between the nationalist demand for swaraj and the swadeshi movement, paying particular attention to the spatial presuppositions of national developmental ideology.

SPATIALIZATION AND NATIONALIZATION: FROM COLONIAL

TO NATIONAL SPACE

The nationalist movement did not contain within itself the principle of its emergence and organization. Specifically, nationalist imaginings of India as a spa-



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tially delimited national economic space emerged at the precise historical juncture after 1858 in which the colonial state and an increasingly globalized, imperial economy were simultaneously consolidated. I shall briefly discuss below the ways in which colonial socio-spatial practices spawned nationalist imaginings of economy, territory, and culture.

During the last third of the nineteenth century, the institutional structure of the colonial state was expanded on an unprecedented scale. The post-1858 colonial state was the architect of distinctively modem forms of social, economic, and territorial closure.9 The progressive territorial "encaging" of social relations within a geographically delimited state structure was effected in and through a myriad of practices.10 These included the constitution and regulation of a centralized monetary system; the institution of territorially uniform and standard taxation, tariff and custom policies; the institution of a massive infrastructural web of railways and communication technologies; the classification and hierarchical ordering of administrative-territorial units; the development of census and survey agencies that systematically surveyed, mapped and mea- sured both land and people; the production of built environments and architec- tural forms that made visible the presence of the colonial state; and complex bureaucracies oriented towards the collection and assessment of land revenue. Territorial consolidation involved the monopolization of powers of rule by a single, central authority and the creation of an externally bounded economic, juridical, and political space. The deepening of the structural powers of the state was integrally linked to broader shifts in the global, imperial economy. There were determinate links between the post- 1858 restructuring of the colonial state and the accelerated integration of colonial South Asia into the world economy dominated by metropolitan British capital.

Within the geographic terrain that would later become India, the colonial production of space12 entailed practices that both bound indigenous society within a territorialized particularity and universalized social relations. On the one hand, there was an unprecedented territorial centralization of social relations with the formation of, for instance, an internally unified market, a spatially centralized monetary system, and an integrated administrative structure.'3 In this context, historically novel representational forms emerged. These included the socio-encyclopedic annual Moral and Material Progress reports published by the India office in London; colonial departmental records that contained month-

9 The rebellion of 1857-58 marked a violent interruption in colonial history. Colonial India passed from the control of the East India Company to the crown. With the Government of India Act and Victoria's proclamation of 1858, "India" was formally incorporated into the British empire.

10 The term "encaging" is derived from Mann (1993:61). 1 Bagchi (1972,1976, 1982), Bose (1990), Farnie (1979), Chaudhari (1968, 1978), de Cecco

(1974), Habib (1985), Thorner (1950,1962), Latham (1978), Lehmann (1965), Saul (1960), Wash- brook (1990).

12 See Lefebvre (1974-91) for the term "production of space." For excellent discussions of Lefebvre's work, see Brenner (1997), Harvey (1989).

13 Bagchi (1976), Hurd (1975, 1983).



SWADESHI TO SWARAJ IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA 613

ly statistics on population, prices, property values, bank assets, circulation of money, industrial output, railway traffic, imports and exports on a local, provincial and all-India basis; and statistics and census reports based spatially on the territorial reach of the colonial state within India.'4 These representational forms at once expressed and helped shape emergent conceptions of a bounded territorial whole.

On the other hand, the bounded economic and territorial whole of colonial India was inserted within the deterritorializing dynamic of the world market. As social historians have shown, indigenous social groups were incorporated into the universalized social relations entailed in commodity production for the world market.15 The production of a territorially bounded economic space was embedded within the global division of labour centered in emergent metropolitan Britain. The spatial reorganization of production was manifest, for instance, in the transformation of colonial South Asia into a territorial unit for the production of raw materials (tea, wheat, oil seeds, cotton, jute, opium) and as a massive captive market for British manufactures. By the mid-nineteenth century, colonial South Asia became the single largest market for British cotton goods. In 1860, it absorbed 31 percent and, by the close of the nineteenth century 50 percent of Lancashire cotton textiles.16

Colonial socio-spatial restructuring was part of the late-nineteenth-century formation of a global space. The production of a global space was rooted in the geographical widening and deepening of the world market, colonial territorial expansion, the institution of communication and infrastructural technologies, and the consolidation of an inter-state system. Henri Lefebvre has powerfully characterized the specific form of this global space as at once "global, hierarchical, and fragmented."17 This crucial insight about the complex and multi- form character of global space has substantial implications for understanding the formation and changing relations between colonial, national, and global space.

During the late nineteenth century, globalization and nationalist particularization proceeded in tandem; it was an age simultaneously of high imperialism and nationalism.18 Colonial territorial expansion and the widening of capitalist relations transformed the world in powerfully enduring ways. On the one hand, it was the source of unprecedented homogenization: an emergent world market, an interlinked network of infrastructural and communication technologies

14 The colonial regimen of numbers and records is a growing focus of the revisionist historiog- raphy of this period. See Appadurai (1993), Cohn (1990), Ludden (1993,1995), Pant (1987).

15 See Amin (1982), Bose (1993), Chakrabarty (1989), Haretty (1977), Guha (1963, 1985), Mukherjee (1985), Prakash (1990).

16 Chapman (1972, 52). Also see Chaudhari (1968), Farie (1979), Haretty (1972), Jenks (1963).

17 Lefebvre (1978 [1991]:282). 18 See Arrighi (1994), Hobsbawm (1989), Magdoff (1978), Mann (1993), Wallerstein (1972),

Wolf (1982). By 1878, European nation-states claimed 67 percent of the world territory; by 1914, this figure had risen to 85 percent. See Magdoff (1978:35).



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and socioeconomic and cultural interconnectedness. On the other hand, there was a complementary trend towards fragmentation: the formation of spatially bounded states, the rise of nationalist struggles within metropolitan Europe and its colonies and the intensification of uneven geographical development. The constitution of mutually exclusive, spatially enclosed states was consubstantial with the transnationalization of social relations.

It was during this period that the contradictions of colonial versus national space became increasingly evident. The consolidation of the inter-state system as a nation-state system, the generalization of the doctrine of self- determination, and the progressive naturalization of the tie between nation and state dynamically reconfigured the discursive terrain of national imaginings. The demand for an autonomous economy, culture, history, and the like could no longer be thought of, much less realized, outside the demand for national self-determination. Nationalisms had to confront either existing state structures and seek their transformation or aspire to their own sovereign national states. In either instance, the spatial correspondence between a people, economy, culture, territory, and state constituted the institutionalized ideal and horizon for legitimate collective struggle. In the specific case of late-nineteenth-century South Asia, colonial spatial restructuring entailed a transformation in not merely economic conditions but the formation of categorical identities and conceptions of territory, economy, and culture. The deepening of the infrastructural and territorial capacities of the colonial state transformed the field of subjec- tivity because it offered new resources, practices, and disciplines for the forging of a novel political self. The colonial production of space-the constitution of rigidly marked external and internal boundaries, the formation of a territorially defined internal market, and the institution of novel communication and infrastructural technologies-made possible emergent territorially grounded conceptions of a national economy, culture, and identity. The territorialization of social relations fostered the appearance of a circumscribed space wherein a homogenous collectivity, an autochthonous people, or a nationality dwelt. The territorial consolidation of the colonial state at once congealed colonial power and triggered an unintended process of nationalization. The nationalist critique of colonialism, which I shall elaborate below, had its experiential basis in colonial socio-spatial practices.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NATIONHOOD, 1870s-1880s

During the period from 1850 to 1860, the infrastructural expansion of the colonial state and its increasingly invasive thrust had met with a growing surge of critical petitions, demonstrations and associations that opposed colonial socio- spatial practices. There were protests against excessive land revenue charges, the recurrence of famines, regressive urban and municipal taxation, discrimi- natory tariffs for British-made commodities, and the controversial morphology of public projects such as railways that were oriented towards the needs of the




British imperial economy.19 But these efforts were localized and disparate, un- hitched to a larger nationalist movement.

The broad contours of what was to remain the dominant nationalist argument against colonialism emerged during the 1870s and 1880s. It was driven by the claim of a common, territorially defined economic collective. Within institutional nationalism, the canonical bearers of the emergent political economy of nationhood were members of a middle-class intelligentsia, most notably Dad- abhai Naoroji (1825-1917), Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909) and Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901).20 Despite differences in interpretation and em- phases, these early nationalists shared a common object of analysis. They focused on the accelerated "impoverishment" of the nation, its territorial integration within a global world-system dominated by British capital; and they sought to specify analytically and historicize the production of a "dependent colonial economy."21 This term, first employed by Ranade, referred to the structural lo- cation of colonial India in the emergent global division of labor. India, he argued, had been transformed into a "plantation, growing raw produce to be shipped by British Agents in British ships, to be worked into Fabrics by British skill and capital, and to be re-exported to the Dependency by British merchants to their corresponding British firms."22 Nationalists raged against the economic "drain" of the nation (as elaborated by Naoroji) and colonial economic practices of "ruralization" and "deindustrialization" (as analyzed by Ranade).23 Yet they were also convinced of the universalist promise of development and thus began the quest for a historical account of the current predicament.

Common to the work of these early nationalists was a critique of the abstraction and ahistoricism of classical economic theory. A recurrent refrain was the incommensurability of extant economic theories and the socioeconomic condition of India. As a colonial economy, India was an historically distinct configuration where, as Dadabhai Naoroji argued, the "so-called natural laws of economy" were not operative. 24 In fact, India exemplified the "pitiless per- version of economic laws by the bleeding to which it is subjected." 25 By directing attention to the production of a colonial economy, Ranade denaturalized the notion of a territorial division of labor: "The orthodox economists assign to the backward torrid regions of Asia the duty of producing raw materials and claim, for the advanced European temperate zone countries, the work of transport and manufactures, as a division of labor in production, which is fraught with the highest advantage to all and is, we are told, a providential dispensation against which it would be foolish to rebel."26 Nationalists evaluated the postu-

19 See Mehrotra (1971). 20 For detailed descriptive histories of these nationalists, see Ambirajan (1968), Chandra (1972),

Dasgupta (1993), Ganguli (1977), Singh (1975), Spengler (1971), Mukherjee (1972). 21 Naoroji (1871 [1962]:192), Ranade (1880-1990:84). 22 Ranade (1893 [1990]:411). 23 Naoroji (1871 [1962]); Ranade (1892 [1990]:340). 24 Ibid., 191. 25 Ibid. 26 Ranade (1896:79-80).



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lates of classical economic theory with reference to colonial policies and stressed the gap between theory and practice. According to Ranade, the disjuncture of theory and practice obtained "not in one, but all points, not in one place or country, but all over the world, ... [it] distinguishes contemporary history."27 The doctrine of free trade, for instance, was identified as a self-serving modality of British imperial domination that glossed over the steeply hierarchical structure of the imperial division of labor. The persistently mercantilist policies of the metropolitan were seen as a practical refutation of free trade and laissez-faire ideologies.28 Lala Murlidhar captured the tenor of this broader nationalist critique in his 1891 address to the Indian National Congress (the institutional form of nationalism):

I know that it was pure philanthropy which flooded India with English-made goods, and surely, if slowly, killed out every indigenous industry-pure philanthropy which, to facilitate this, repealed the import duties and flung away three crores of revenue which the rich paid, and to balance this wicked sacrifice raised the Salt tax, which the poor pay... .the phantasm of free trade drains us .... Free Trade, fair play between nations, how I hate the sham! What fair play in trade can there be between impoverished India and the bloated capitalist England? ....No doubt it is all in accordance with high economic science, but, my friends, remember this-this, too, is starving your brethren.29

Against the abstractions of classical economic theory, nationalists sought a con-

ceptual framework that was at once explicitly historicist and nationalist. They summoned the analytical and normative categories of a specifically national developmentalist model to ground their critique of colonial rule and classical political economy. In this regard, they were, I shall suggest below, part of a broader transnational formation.

It is important to note that the conceptual discovery of an internally dynamic, spatially bounded national economy was a broader nineteenth-century phe- nomenon. The conceptual elaboration of the economy as a distinct sphere of social relations had begun during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. As Susan Buck-Morss argues, this endeavor was inseparable from the emergence of capitalism: "The economy, when it was discovered, was already capitalist, so the description of one entailed the description of the other."30 The conception of the economy as an autonomous sphere imbued classical economic the-

ory. Here I want to direct attention to one crucial shift in the history of the conceptual category of the economy. During the late nineteenth century, the conception of the economy acquired a highly specific spatial referent.31 The

27 Ranade (1892 [1990]:326). 28 For an elaboration of the argument that colonial South Asia marked the limits of the free trade

and laissez-faire regime see Hobsbawm (1987:148), Gallagher and Robinson (1953), Taylor (1994:128), Haretty (1972).

29 Indian National Congress Papers, vol. 1 (1885-1900), 121, National Archives of India [Here- after, NAI].

30 Buck-Morss (1995:439). Also see Polanyi (1957:11-30). 31 Agnew (1994:66-67), Bloom (1941), Mann (1993:299), Neff (1990:20-25).




economy was deemed coincident with the spatial boundaries of the modem territorial state. Friedrich List's work, Das Nationale System der Politischen Oekonomie (1841) exemplified the rise of historicist and nationalist schools of political economy.32 This work became a foundational text for anti-colonial nationalists in South Asia. List's theoretical framework shaped the work of M. G. Ranade (1842 [1901]), G. V. Gokhale (1866 [1915]), and G. V. Joshi (1851 [1911]), as well as later works by the prominent swadeshi leaders and acade- mics Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887 [1949]) and Radhakamal Mukherjee (1889 [1968]). Nationalists mobilized List's notion of a national economy as an ideal against which they evaluated the hierarchies of the imperial division of labor and colonial economic practices. List's project, driven by a commitment to Ger- man national unification, was a response to the economic and political challenge posed by Britain's world hegemony. In this respect, his reformulation of classical political economy was anchored in political concerns and structural conditions that were remarkably similar to those of nationalists within colonial South Asia.

List's work marked a historically significant departure from the core spatial assumptions of classical economic paradigms. Classical political economy conceived the division of labor and markets as abstract configurations with no specific spatial extension. In contrast, the central organizing category of List's framework was the putatively self-enclosed nation. The spatially bounded nation was regarded as the sovereign subject of economic development. List in- dicted classical economic theory for its "rootless (bodenlosem) cosmopolitanism" and its exclusive focus on denationalized, profit maximizing individu- als.33 List's analytical strategy was one of unmasking: The regime of free trade was dismissed as a direct expression of British national economic interest; and classical economic theory's stress on cosmopolitanism was regarded as a ploy to retain Britain's economic and imperial hegemony. Classical economic theory, in List's view, ignored the fact that "between each individual and entire humanity stands the Nation".34 According to List, the "economy of the people (Volksoekonomie)" developed into the national economy (Nationaloekonomie) under specific historical-geographical conditions.35 At a certain historical threshold, which is conceived in both descriptive and normative terms, the Na- tionaloekonomie becomes spatially isomorphic with the Volksoekonomie.36 This "true conception and real character of Nationaloekonomie had eluded the- orists because "for the distinct and definite term Nation men had everywhere substituted the general and vague term for society (Gesellschaft). "37 The na-

32 List (1841 [1910]) and the English translation List (1841[1910]). Also see Sporzluk's analysis (1988)of List and Marx.

33 List (1841 [1966]:174). For the precise German terms, see List (1841 [1910]:267). 34 Ibid. The German terms are from List (1841 [1910]:268). 35 Ibid., 196. The German terms are from List (1841 [1910]:290). 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid, 195. The German terms are from List (1841 [1910]:291).



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tion was a particular historical-geographical form of the broader term for society. According to this formulation, the specificity of the nation lay in the spatial isomorphism between the nation and national economy. Both the posited territorial isomorphism of economy and nation and the fusion of the territorial state with capital became defining themes of anti-colonial nationalism.38

List's developmental schema held up a normative vision of a self-sufficient national economy protected by tariffs and custom barriers from the world market. His reformulation of the core spatial assumptions of classical economic theory powerfully expresses the naturalization of the modern territorial state. The idea that society was spatially bounded within particular state structures assumed a self-evident status in late-nineteenth-century sociological and philosophical paradigms as well as in emergent nationalist discourse.39 In the late nineteenth century, the modern vision of the social world as constituted by dif- ferentiated spheres (culture/economy/politics) underwent a novel process of territorialization. This imagination of the social world was increasingly natu- ralized and nationalized.

The constitution of a territorial state-centered conception of society and economy was grounded historically in the tension between the territorialization of social relations within sharply delineated, mutually exclusive spatial units and the deterritorializing thrust of capital expansion. As noted earlier, the constitution of a global space was rooted in the formation of a world market; the consolidation of an inter-state system through inter-imperial rivalry; and a dense, interlocking network of socioeconomic and cultural flows. Processes of global restructuring were paralleled by a reciprocal expansion of struggles to constitute autonomous national societies and economies. Territorial states such as Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Russia, when confronted with the world-territorial and economic hegemony of imperial Britain, adopt- ed roughly in tandem neo-mercantilist strategies towards securing a state- protected, national economic space.40 The growing similarity during the second half of the nineteenth century between state institutional structures throughout the inter-state system underscores the historical and structural bases of this process.4' The profound resonance of List's developmental ideology in a range of European-metropolitan, peripheral42 (Japan, China, Korea) and colonial (South Asia) contexts needs to be situated within the global force field of the late-nineteenth-century era.

In colonial India, nationalists attempted to navigate between what they in-

38 See Marx's (1844-45 [1975]:265-90) critique of List's nation-state centrism. 39 Recent works have drawn attention to the links between the development of the social sci-

ences and the nation-state centrism of dominant sociological theories. See Arasson (1990), Ag- new (1994), Giddens (1990), Wallerstein (1991).

40 See Arrighi (1994), Mann (1993), Tilly (1975, 1990), Hobsbawm (1989, 1990), Wallerstein (1972).

41 See Hobsbawm (1989), Mann (1993), Tilly (1975, 1990). 42 See Henderson (1983:26) for the influence of List in Japan and China.




dicted as the abstraction of classical political economy and the excessive ma- terialism of colonial economic policies. Ranade, the chief exponent of List, an- nounced this broad problematic in his influential essay entitled, Indian Politi- cal Economy.43 This task required a framework that grasped the specificity of a "dependent colonial economy" and inscribed at its conceptual core the universal principle of nationality. Classical economic theory had, he argued, systematically privileged "individual interests": It was too "economistic."44 Its central assumption of self-interested, disembodied monads "ought to give way or at least be subordinated to the higher interests and aspirations (of a people) if political economy is to be anything more than schoolmen's metaphysics."45 How, according to Ranade, was the individualism of classical economic theory to be breached? Particularistic, individual interests had to be subsumed and rationalized with reference to the larger national whole or the nation as general interest. The project of bringing back the excised normative dimension within classical economic theory took the form of an idealizing, nationalist political economy. Akin to List, Ranade absolutized the nation as the singular subject-object of political economy: "Individual interests are not the center round which the Theory should revolve ... the true center is the Body Politic of which that Individual is a member, and that Collective Defense and Well- Being, Social Education and Discipline ... must be the center, if the Theory is not to be merely Utopian."46 According to this formulation, political economy should be rendered pragmatic. It ought to explicitly enable the universal func- tion of national development. A proclamation of the Indian National Congress stated that "the industrial movement is flowing deep, fraught with national ideals....Our industries need protection. But this government will not grant them protection ... the time has come when the scattered national impulses must be focused into an organic and organized whole for the promotion of our industries."47 The nationalist rethinking of classical economic theory was driven by the structuring motif of collective national ownership. The national economy was conceived as the collective sacred property of the imagined national community.

Emblematic of this spatialized conception of a common economic collective was Dadabhai Naoroji's quasi-mercantilist formulation that the nation was being drained. In 1871, Naoroji provided the first estimates of India's national income.48 His calculations were based in part on an extended critique of official statistical records (particularly the annual Moral and Material Progress reports). His figures tore apart official claims of material progress in an era beset with recurrent, devastating famines (from the late 1860s to 1900 the toll from famines was approximately 15 million),49 an exponential rise in rural indebt-

43 Ranade (1893 [1990]:322-50). 44 Ibid., 337. 45 Ranade (1881 [1990]:149-50). 46 Ranade (1893 [1990]:336). 47 Indian National Congress Papers, vol. 11 (1902), 44-45, NAI. 48 Naoroji (1871 [1962]:283). 49 These calculations were first done by Dutt (1900:188).



620 MANU GOSWAMI

edness, widening regional disparities, and "deepening impoverishment."50 Naoroji's protracted quarrel with the colonial regime over the accuracy of official statistics led him to develop and empirically research his theory of the annual "bleeding drain" of the nation. He estimated that the annual drain of the national income approximated 2,000 million pounds sterling.

According to Naoroji, the drain of wealth to Britain included unrequited exports that belied the officially published export surpluses, remittances of colonial official salaries to England and the cost of the military establishment, the debt incurred on capital investments in public works, and the purchase of manufactures in Britain.51 Frankly regarded within colonial discourse as the cost of "civilized government," these annual "home charges" soared from 1875 to 1885 with the precipitous drop in world silver prices, the slump of agricultural prices, and devastating famines.52 The scale of the perversely named "home charges" was simply phenomenal. As Giovanni Arrighi notes, "No territorialist rule... ever before forcibly extracted in so short a time so much tribute-in labor power, in natural resources, and in means of payment-as the British state did in the Indian sub-continent in the course of the late nineteenth century."53 During the first thirteen years of the colonial state's formal assumption of rule in 1858, ac- cumulated revenue increased by 33 million to 55 million pounds a year, while the deficits from 1866 to 1870 alone, grew to 11.5 million pounds.54 Although its largest deficit during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was with the United States (50 million) and continental Europe (45 million), Britain's largest surplus was with colonial India (60 million).55 This surplus was based on the ex-

port of primary products and the importation of manufactured goods required in the institution of the extensive communication and infrastructural complex within colonial India. Naoroji's work sought to establish this structure of British domination based upon the recycling of extracted tribute which was pivotal to the reproduction of metropolitan financial and military hegemony.56

Naoroji's analysis of the drain presupposed the existence of a spatially delimited national economy. His representations of a national economy took the form of an elaborate statistical and historical analysis of the drain from 1787 to 1865. This analysis underpinned the collective-origin myth of nationalism. In his most famous work, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1871), Naoroji remarked:

English capitalists do not merely lend, but with their capital they themselves invade the country. The produce of the capital is mostly eaten up by their own countrymen, and, after that, they carry away the rest in the shape of profits and dividends. The people of In-

50 Naoroji (1871 [1962]:190). 51 Ibid. 52 De Cecco (1972), Jenks (1963), Saul (1960). 53 Arrighi (1994:54). 54 Jenks (1963:224). 55 Ingham (1984:123). 56 The large surpluses in the colonial Indian balance of payments was the source of the expan-

sion of Britain's global capital accumulation regime and London's ascendance as the center of world finance. See Arrighi (1994), Bairoch (1993), Barrat-Brown (1974:133-6), Crouzet (1982:370), de Cecco (1984:29-38), Ingham (1984), Saul (1960:188-94).




dia do not derive the same benefit... The guaranteed railways not only ate up every- thing in this manner, but compelled India to make up the guaranteed interest also from her produce.57

Nationalists articulated colonialism's threat from the perspective of a territorially delimited economic collective. The deterritorialization of the national economy was seen as the product of foreign intrusion, the encroachment of "alien" capital. In other words, the economy was understood as having ex- ceeded its proper national-spatial boundaries and had to be re-territorialized. The drain theory was popularized in vernacular texts and newspapers, circulated by British and continental socialists, and soon became one of the most famous indictments of colonialism of the late nineteenth century.58 Karl Marx ob- served that:

"what they (the British) take from them (Indians) annually in the form of rents, dividends for railways, pensions of military and civil service men ... without any equiva- lent return and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within In- dia-speaking only of the value of commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually to send over to England-amounts to more than the total sum of the income of 60 million agricultural and industrial labourers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance!"59

The politically radical implications of the drain theory were not lost on the colonial regime. Nationalists were chided, in officially commissioned rebuttals, for attempting to deploy frameworks inadequate to what they deemed as the particularistic specificity of India. A turn-of-the-century official memorandum addressed to the provincial heads of the colonial territorial state expresses con- tinued anxiety over the nationalist analysis of the drain (long after its initial formulation) and the colonial regime's investment in nativist particularization. Di- rected against the "literate middle classes engaged in seditiously propagating nationalist views," the memorandum opens with a reference to their "intellec- tual activities in the domain of history and economics."60 It claimed:

that lessons drawn from the history of the West are misapplied to the present circumstances of India; the broad generalizations of European writers on political science are stated without mention of their important reservations; and natives, left without proper guidance, are led to believe that what is appropriate in the case of Switzerland and Italy must necessarily be good for India. In the region of economics the most mischievous doctrine is that which is based on the theory that India is drained of her wealth by her connexion with Great Britain. This belief is honestly held by growing numbers... .The Governor General in Council believes that the prevalence of this idea has done incalcu- lable mischief, and it behooves every officer of Government, and in particular those con-

57 Naoroji (1871 [1962]:201-2). 58 Naoroji corresponded and worked with British socialist leader W.H. Hyndman for twenty

years as well as with Karl Kautsky. See Naoroji Papers, Private Collection, NAI. For more detailed analyses of the "drain debate," see Dasgupta (1993), Ganguli (1965), Mclane (1963), Mukherjee (1972).

59 Marx (1962:304). Also see Marx's (1975) analysis of the drain in Capital, vol. 111, ch. 35. 60 Home Proceedings (Political A), March 1908, 42, NAI.



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nected with education, to study the arguments put forward in support of it and to seize upon every opportunity of exposing their fallacy.61

The popularization of the drain thesis indicates the way the notion of India as a national entity was rendered self-evident. Nationalists articulated the specifically modem project of societal unification (the unification of a culture, history and territory) with reference to the spatial scale and structural form of the colonial state. Historically novel was both the consuming focus with societal unification and the spatial scale of its articulation. The nationalist criticism of colonialism hinged upon a territorialized conception of an Indian economy, culture and history. At issue for nationalists was the spatial non-correspondence between the imagined nation's political and economic structure. In this Listian- inspired argument, the spatial coincidence among nation, state, and economy was viewed as a normative ideal. This framing of nationalism's critique of colonialism exemplifies the way colonial space was appropriated and reconfigured as national space.

The nationalist claim of a unified and spatially delimited culture, history, and economy was also a self-conscious challenge to the colonial thesis of the "im-

possibility of India." This thesis maintained that the heterogeneity of indigenous society was non-transcendable and could not be translated into a unified nation. A succinct formulation of this thesis was the claim by John Strachey (the Financial Secretary during the 1880s): This is the first and most essential thing to learn about India-that there is no, and never was an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.... That men of the Punjab, Bengal, the United Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel they belong to one great nation, is impossible.62

The nationalist counter-response structured debates, during the late 1880s, within the Indian National Congress (INC). In 1890, Pherozeshah Mehta ex- claimed:

Indeed, so far as the historical argument is concerned, we (the INC) have been success- ful in turning the tables upon our adversaries. We have shown that it is they who defy the lessons of history and modernity when they talk of waiting to make a beginning till the masses of the people are fully equipped with all the virtues and all the qualifications which adorn the citizens of Utopia, in fact till a millennium has set in, when we should hardly require such institutions at all.63

It is important to recall that the Indian National Congress, formally established in 1885, was a product of the tentative and limited experiments with self- government from the late 1870s onwards. The dominant addressee of institutional nationalism, the colonial state, conditioned its self-understanding and

61 Ibid., 44 62 Strachey (1888:5-7). 63 Indian National Congress Papers, vol. 1 (1890), 109, NAI.




presentation. The very particularities, for instance, which supposedly rendered natives incapable of representing themselves were formulated within the terms of the denied universality of nationhood. In an address to the Indian National Congress, M.V. Bhide noted:

I know that there are among our critics ... who proclaim with an air of superior wisdom that India is but a geographical expression and that there is no Indian nation as such, but only a congerie of races and creeds, who have no cohesion in them... here in this gath- ering we have representatives from the most distant provinces, Bengal, Assam, Punjab, North Western provinces, Rajputana ... but the watchword of these congressmen is In- dia, Indians first, Hindus, Muhammadans, Parsees, Christian, Punjabees ... afterwards ... the aggregate of those that are residents of one territory ... urged by like impulses to secure like rights and to be relieved of like burdens.64

As noted earlier, the late-nineteenth-century colonial production of India as a bounded, coherent entity marked an epochal shift. India became both the unified object of colonial spatial and economic regulation and the basis for emergent nationalist imaginings. The above-cited passage attests to nationalist con- structions of India as coextensive with the spatial boundaries of the colonial state. Furthermore, these boundaries were associated with a homogenous collectivity defined in economic, historical, and cultural terms and identified as a nation. The notion of a spatially bounded nation was the basis for the consolidation of such related notions as an Indian history, an Indian economy, an In- dian people, and the like. Nationalism at once claimed and sought to establish an identity between people, nation, territory, history, culture, and economy.

Grounded in social categories of the universal (nation, economy, state), nationalism couched its very claims to autonomy in a recognizably standard rhetoric. The nativism of such statements as "western institutions and ideas are tainted at the root" did not negate the overarching programmatic of development, of Indian industrialism. India could achieve what Satish Chandra Mukherjee in his 1901 essay on national development called a "modernized, but ethical life."65 The basic premise was that the elimination of the colonial state would enable the realization of a stable and an organic national whole. Na- tionalism sought the guarantee of modernity in the reconstituted particularism of the nation.

TERRITORIAL NATIVISM: SWADESHI AND SWARAJ, 1880 TO 1907

This emergent nationalist vision shaped, in a relation of reciprocal determination, the swadeshi movement of indigenous manufactures. The latter represented the first systematic campaign in colonial India to enlist the masses within the elite structure and organization of institutional nationalism. The swadeshi movement assumed its radical, mass form only after 1905, following the con-

64 Ibid. (1895), 173. 65 Dawn, Mukherjee (1900), 94, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML).



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tested spatial partitioning of Bengal.66 But the first swadeshi associations, jour- nals, industrial melas (exhibitions), and key features of the movement's repertoire were forged during the late nineteenth century.

The broad socio-aesthetic complex of the movement's repertoire included the reconstitution of social taste from Manchester cloth to coarse handloom, the boycott of foreign commodities in marketplaces; the social ostracism of consumers of foreign goods, the valorization of indigenous handicrafts as the material symbol of historical continuity with the past glory of the nation, and the social scrutiny of consumption practices as indicators of authenticity and pa- triotism. In 1871, Naoroji had argued, "We may laugh at this attempt (singing of songs to preach the discarding of foreign goods) as a futile attempt to shut out English machine made, cheaper goods against handmade dearer ones. But little do we think what this movement is likely to grow into, and what new phases it may take in time."67 In 1907, swadeshi was officially incorporated within the conceptual and ideological framework of the Indian National Congress in the avowed objective of a swadeshi swaraj (national state/government).68

Among the most popular and influential swadeshi texts was Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar's (1869-1912) work, Desher Katha (Story of the Nation), written in 1904. It summarized the work of M. G. Ranade and D. Naoroji in a popular idiom and warned in its concluding chapter against the colonial state's "hypnotic conquest of the mind."69 The colonial state proscribed the text in 1910, but by then it had sold over 15,000 copies, informed swadeshi street plays and folk songs, and had assumed the status of mandatory reading for an entire generation of swadeshi activists.

Swadeshi practices indicate how persuasively, almost with the transparency of the self-evident, the conception of a common economic collective was popularized. As discussed earlier, the notion of a spatially discrete national economy had the status of a rational transparency within institutional nationalism. The social collective of Bharat (the dominant indigenous term for India) was the template on which popular swadeshi repertoires were forged. By the turn of the century, this vision of the nation was radicalized and consolidated. The swadeshi movement accomplished the fusion of the abstract notion of a common economic collective with the particularized vision of the social body as specifically Hindu (for a discussion of nationalist imaginings of colonial India

66 For detailed accounts of the Swadeshi movement during this period, see Bayly (1986), Guha (1992), Sarkar (1973), Majumdar (1966), Mukherjee (1908).

67 Naoroji (1871 [1962]:207). 68 The specific resolution on swadeshi issued by the Indian National Congress called upon the

"people of the country to labor for its success, by making earnest efforts to promote the growth of indigenous industries and to stimulate the production of indigenous articles by giving them prefer- ence over imported commodities even at some sacrifice." See Indian National Congress Papers, vol. II (1906), 85, NAI.

69 Deuskar (1904:ch. 10). A key work in nationalist economic history, Desher Katha included chapters on the plight of the peasantry, the decline of indigenous artisans, colonial practices of deindustrialization, and a powerful concluding chapter on colonial hegemony.




as Bharat and their long-term implications for Hindu-Muslim relations, see Goswami [1998], especially chs. 8-12). Swadeshi practices such as the boycott of foreign products and the fostering of indigenous capital sought to secure the autonomy of the imagined national space of Bharat. This imagined national space was sacralized and feminized as a Hindu deity. By the turn of the century, Bharat Mata (Mother India) became an ubiquitous figurative presence: songs, novels, political writings, visual, iconic representations and collective practices testify to the progressive Hinduization and feminization of the body politic. Commodities produced within the sacred space of Bharat Mata were en- dowed with a fetish value. Conceived as lying outside the orbit of everyday exchange, home manufactures were invested with a transcendental national sig- nificance.70 In particular, handlooms became the concrete, material symbols of the imagined simplicity and purity of rural life, of folklore, of a distinctive In- dian tradition, of forms of life regarded as outside the modern colonial era. Swadeshi both exalted an absolute space of national belonging and expressed a mythical sense of historical time, mythic national origins, and permanence. The particularized space of Bharat was conceived as the pure container of a national culture, history, and economy.

Swadeshi mapped unto the universality of national imaginings the compet- ing universality of religious discourse. Swadeshi folk songs index the ways in which the colonial state and the world market came to be felt as a palpable, concrete presence in everyday social practices. The following popular song from the 1870s is exemplary:

The weaver and the blacksmith are crying day and night. They cannot find their food by plying their trade. Even threads and needles come from distant shores. Even match-sticks are not produced in the country. Whether in dressing themselves or producing their domestic utensils or even in lighting their oil-lamps ... In nothing are the people independent of the foreign master ... Swarms of locust from a distant island coming to these shores have eaten up all its solid grains leaving only the chaff for the starving children of the soil.71

These songs were distinguished by their sacralized and feminized construction of the nation:

We may be poor, we may be small, But we are a nation of seven crores (seventy million).... Defend your homes, protect your shops, Don't let the grain from our barns be looted abroad. We will eat our own coarse grain and wear the rough, home-spun cloth, What do we care for lavender and imported trinkets?

70 See Bayly (1986:285-328) and Sarkar (1973). 71 This popular swadeshi song was composed by Babu Manmohan Bose in the late 1870s. See

Pal (1932:257).



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Foreigners drain away our mother's (Bharat Mata's) milk, Will we simply stand and watch?72

The swadeshi imaginary was shot through with the slide from nation to Hin- du deity. The highly ritualized performances accompanying vows to the nation exemplify the way that the notion of a common economic collective was rendered both palpable and fundamentally Hindu. These vows were enacted by ceremonial bathing in the Ganges, the donning of native cloth, then the tying of symbolic braids or rakhis (which traditionally signified kinship relations among Hindus) to signal the unbroken unity of the national collective forged through the consumption of native goods.73 The bodies of individual nationals became instantiations, as it were, of the body politic of Bharat Mata. A common aspect of everyday practices was the interpenetration of swadeshi themes and religious practices, particularly in annual Hindu Ramlila processions. Colo- nial district officials in the United Provinces during this period kept a stringent check on what were described as "clear innovations" in religious practices which were driven by a "more or less deliberate attempt to foster seditious and disloyal feelings."74 Several Ramlila processions, for instance, juxtaposed Hin- du deities with figures and pictures representing Rani of Jhansi (associated with the 1857 rebellion), Bharat Mata, Lokmanya Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose, and other swadeshi figures. Figures of Bharat Mata were, in several cases, placed on a platform and paraded through the streets of major towns accompanied by shouts of Bharat Mata Ki Jai (hail to mother India).75

The specifically Hindu iconography of national imaginings was expressed, as well, in the coins circulated in various provinces that were used as legal ten- der in swadeshi shops and enterprises, as ornaments, as "charm lockets for success," prizes within swadeshi schools, and national badges of honour.76 The front of some of these coins were inscribed with the words "Swadeshi Nishka," a figure of Lakshmi (the Hindu goddess of wealth) and the inscription Tat-sat Bharat (That is true, India). The year according to the Hindu calendar was recorded on the back of the coins (Kali Yuga, 5006).77 Moreover, Hindu caste prohibitions and rituals were employed against those violating the socioeconomic sanctity of the nation. Methods of ostracism associated with the abroga- tion of jati (loosely, caste) injunctions were deployed against consumers of British commodities.78 Conflicting, multiple solidarities based on caste, reli- gion, regional differences and so forth, were progressively and violently subli- mated under the unifying rubric of an Indian nationality. Swadeshi's vision of a territorially fixed national economic collective was integrally linked, then, to a cultural and political project of producing a homogenous and singular nationality.

72 Quoted in Bayly (1986:327). 73 For a detailed account, see Bayly (1986:311-2). 74 Home Proceedings (Political), August 1909, no. 14, NAI. 75 Ibid. 76 Home Proceedings (Political), August 1908, no. 8, NAI. 77 Ibid. 78 Guha (1992:69-120).




Swadeshi was a paradigmatic instance of a totalizing territorial nativism. In his presidential address to the Indian National Congress, Surendra Nath Baner- jee asserted, "We must be swadeshi in all things, swadeshi in our thoughts ... in our educational methods and industrial development."79 This vision challenged a purely economic reading of the swadeshi movement which was defined as "not merely an economic or a social or a political movement; but an all em- bracing movement co-extensive with the entire circle of our national life, one in which are centered the many-sided activities of our growing community."80 Often expressed within the categories of high Brahminism, the motif of a national epiphany dominated swadeshi discourse. In 1907, Bipan Chandra Pal, a major figure of the Swadeshi movement argued: The first thing in Vedantic culture is Nithiavastha Vichara Vivaha, "mine and not mine," the self and the not self. .. .The very first thing in the culture of the ideal of Swaraj [self- rule] is discrimination between the national self and that which is not the national self. The idea of Swaraj has been revealed to us only recently and why? Because for over a 100 years we never looked upon the British government as Pararashtra as a foreign government".81

It would be erroneous to conceive swadeshi's nativism as an atavistic up- surge of a reified tradition in the face of modernization. Rather, nationalism's nativist particularism must be situated within a broader understanding of the perceived decentering dynamic of capitalist expansion. The deterritorializing thrust of capitalism spawned nationalist territorial closure and strategies of reterritorialization. While the swadeshi movement was particularist without (that is, in relation to the colonial state and the world market), it understood itself as universalist within the national space of Bharat. It was believed that within an absolute and sovereign space of nationness inequalities and differences would eventually disappear. Pitched against what Pal identified as the "inva- sion of British capital" and what Ranade saw as the "foreign merchants hand that now trafficks direct with our producers in the remotest villages," the movement sought to establish an autonomous, spatially fixed national economic complex.82

The spatial fetishism of swadeshi, manifest in the desire to constitute a sovereign space of nationness, only makes sense with reference to the perceived deterritorializing dynamic of colonial socioeconomic practices. The search for an authentic national community and an absolute space of nationness (Bharat Mata) became more intense with the increasing relativization of particularistic communities and space. If processes of commodification entailed the historically novel individualization of social subjects as market participants, the swadeshi movement sought to reconstitute social subjects as concrete nationals. If the world market embodied the ultimate power of deterritorialization

79 Quoted in Mukherjee (1908:203). 80 Ibid. 81 Home Proceedings (Public), December (1907), 282, NAI. 82 Ibid., 274; Ranade (1890 [1990]:273).



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which undermined every fixed social identity, swadeshi practices sought to reterritorialize identities that had allegedly become disembedded from the imagined national whole. In this view, individual identities and practices should be lodged within the imagined national space of Bharat. What such a construction enabled was the conception of capitalism as an "outside" that impinged upon rather than constituted and shaped from within. Yet the historical emergence and formation of swadeshi attests to the way this alleged 'outside' con- structed and constituted a putatively self-enclosed, sacral "inside."

The attempted regulation of a national economic sphere was produced within and against the deterritorializing boundlessness of the world market. As Bi- pan Chandra Pal remarked:

Protection, with a view to controlling foreign markets, is absolutely impossible under present circumstances. But we can, by regulating consumption, have some sort of protection for our indigenous arts of industries; and the regulation of consumption is the economic principle that underlies the national boycott movement."83

The crucial point here concerns the way the nationalist project attempted to do- mesticate the temporal dynamic of capital. In order to combat the hegemony of British capital, nationalists proposed the protection and delimitation of indigenous capital within a national space. Condensed in Surendranath Banerjee's rhetorical question was a core ideological impulse of swadeshi: "If protection by legislative enactment is impossible, may we not, by fiat of the national will, af- ford industries such protection as may lie in our powers?"84 The close relation- ality between the nationalist movement and indigenous capital has, of course, been the subject of much historical scholarship.85 The swadeshi movement

spurred the establishment, for instance, of the Tata Industrial Steel Company (TISCO) in 1907, the Bank of India and Canara Bank in 1906, the Bank of Ba- roda and Punjab and Sind Bank in 1908, and the Central Bank of India in 1911. Despite Gandhi's later conceptually radical reformulation, swadeshi was a movement for the nationalization of capital, not its abolition.

Nationalism's aggressively developmentalist vision had profoundly statist implications. Within late-nineteenth-century nationalist discourse, the uncon- tested Other of development was "barbarism." For instance, Bipan Chandra Pal declared that there could be no "going back to barbarism ... that will not aid national growth."86 Institutional nationalism sought to secure for the anticipated Indian nation-state a niche in the world-historical dynamic of capitalist industrialization. This developmental logic, a product of the hierarchical world order of capital, privileged the moder form of the developmental national state. Only a centralized, developmental state was considered adequate to the

83 Home Proceedings (Public), December (1907), 259, NAI. 84 Indian National Congress Papers, vol. 11 (1902), 12, NAI. 85 Chatterjee (1986), Mclane (1963), Misra (1978), Sarkar (1983, 1985). 86 Home Proceedings (Public), December (1907), 250, NAI.




task of regulating and directing the national economy and realizing the development of the national whole. The demand for an autonomous national state that would fulfill the universally legitimate promise of development was made by the Indian National Congress on the basis of "a universal humanity" and the concrete existence of a territorially delimited common economic collective.87 As stressed by Ranade, the anticipated sovereign state was conceived as the "national organ for taking care of national needs."88 The broad nationalist argument was strikingly akin to later Gerschenkronian formulations of late development. Pal argued that given the nation's "late entry into the field of world competition," an interventionist state directly entering the sphere of production as mobilizer and manager of national resources could alone lay the foundation for national development.89

The key constituents of the post-colonial state's industrialization strategy- import substitution, mixed economy, and the privilege accorded to capital- intensive industries-were already present, in embryonic form, in the work of these early nationalists. In an 1890 address that inaugurated the institution of indigenous industrial enterprises, Ranade declared as a "civic virtue" the attempt to "organize labor and capital by co-operation, and import freely foreign skill and machinery, till we learn our lessons properly and need no help... .This is the civic virtue we have to learn, and according as we learn it or spurn it we shall win or lose in the contest. I feel certain that it will soon become the creed of the whole nation and ensure the permanent triumph of the moder spirit in the ancient land."90 Nationalists thus identified a calibrated process of temporal displacement (protection of infant industries, long-term state investments in infrastructure) and spatial consolidation (the production of a national economic space) as the principal modalities for securing economic growth. This developmental regime sought, in David Harvey's terms, to establish a national "spatial fix" to the ruthless and unstable dynamic of capitalism.91 However, this Listian-influenced developmental paradigm ran up against a seemingly intran- sigent paradox. National economies and developmental national states are deeply dependent upon the world market and capital and technology flows that are paradigmatic transgressors of established boundaries. The swadeshi movement exemplifies the conflicts that beset nationalist attempts to forge an absolute space of economic sovereignty.

The vision of an autonomous polity approximated List's dream of a self- sufficient, national-territorial economy. Consider the Listian overtones of Bi- pan Chandra Pal's conceptual welding of swaraj (self-rule) and swadeshi.

What shall we do the moment we have swaraj ? We shall do what every nation or almost every nation- has done under the circumstances under which we live now. We shall im-

87 Ibid., 19:267. 88 Ranade (1893 [1990]:344). 89 For an elaboration of this argument, see Pal's speeches in Home Proceedings (Public), De-

cember (1907), 298, NAI. 90 Ranade (1890 [1990]:277-8). 91 Harvey (1982).



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pose a heavy prohibitive protective tariff upon every inch of textile fabric that comes from Manchester. We shall impose a protective prohibitive tariff upon every blade of knife that comes from Leeds and Sheffield.92

Pal argued that a "reconstructed Indian economy" would follow the "Indian ge- nius and tradition" that "industrial development would follow the course indi- cated by our past historical tradition, draw inspiration and strength for guidance from our own Indian past."93 This argument echoed a broader nationalist faith in the possibility of forging a unique and pacific path of industrialization.

Of particular importance, in this regard, was Radhakamal Mukherjee's influential delineation of an autonomous Indian developmental trajectory: Our economic structure is as modem as that of the West, and it will pursue a line of evo- lution not towards the so-called modem or Western industrialism, but towards a fuller and more determinate Indian economic order... .In the interests not only of Indian culture but also of Universal Humanity, India must have her own industrial life and destiny....The synthetic vision of India will be the sorely needed corrective of the rigid, analytical, mechano-centric standpoint (of western industrialism).94

There was a fundamental tension in nationalist imaginings as the productivist economic strategies advanced threatened to undermine the assumed "synthetic" and organic character of India. On the one hand, nationalism pitted the assumed "synthetic" organic unity of the Indian social collective against the "analytical, mechano-centric" character of Western society.95 This fissure parallels the well- known binarism between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft-the traditional, or- ganically linked community versus the alienated society characterized by the dissolution of all organic links. On the other hand, nationalism sought capitalism without Gesellschaft, industrial development without the attendant structural tensions. Though critical of what Romesh Dutt analyzed as the "age of imperialism, the unending struggle for material interest, for conquests, annexations, extension of markets", nationalists grounded the possibility of swaraj in the Listian dream of a self-enclosed economy.96 This welding of swaraj with swadeshi was the ideological core of late-nineteenth-century nationalism.

The sovereignty of the future nation-state, as envisioned by nationalists, hinged upon its capacity as a developmental vehicle for the nation. The devel- opmentalism of late-nineteenth-century nationalist discourse presaged both the conceptual framework of the Indian National Congress party's 1945 election manifesto and the planning ideologies of the post-colonial national state during the 1950s and 1960s.97 The contemporary post-colonial nation-state bases its legitimacy on both democratic representativeness and the orchestration of a ra-

92 Home Proceedings (Public), December (1907), 273, NAI. 93 Ibid., 270. 94 Mukherjee (1915:462-3). 95 Ibid. 96 Dutt (1897:23). 97 The INC election manifesto of 1945 stated, "The most vital and urgent of India's problems is

how to remove the curse of poverty and raise the standard of the masses.... The state must own or control key and basic industries and services, mineral resources, railways, waterways, shipping, and other means of public transport. Currency and exchange, banking and insurance, must be reg- ulated in the national interest." Quoted in Zaidi (1985:79-91).




tional plan of development. This doubled legitimacy, a product of the nationalist argument against colonialism, has had profoundly contradictory and unstable implications. The imperative of developing the social collective, regarded as an undifferentiated whole, and the productivist agenda of state developmental agencies has entailed the marginalization of subaltern social groups and classes. However, the popularization of swadeshi practices evinced in a range of social, environmental, and subaltern movements has also set limits from below on state developmental schemes.98

In our current historical moment, the increasingly apparent challenges posed by globalization to the present Indian nation-state and national economy have re-enforced territorially grounded assertions of nationalism tied to an exclu- sionary and violent Hindutva (Hindu Nationalist) ideology. Contemporary processes of globalization have also spurred a resurgence of popular practices and social movements that oppose transnational capital and self-consciously in- voke the inherited vision of a popular and sovereign national economic collective. The dual imperative of swadeshi and swaraj, forged in the late nineteenth century, continues to shape ongoing debates about the political economy of nationhood.

CONCLUSION: NATION, ECONOMY AND TERRITORY IN ANALYSES

OF NATIONALISM

This essay has tracked the intimate links between the colonial production of a spatially delimited entity, India, and the emergence of nationalism. I have argued that the progressive nationalization of conceptions of economy, territory, and culture was tied to colonial territorial and capitalist expansion. It was against the perceived deterritorializing dynamic of colonial spatial and economic practices that nationalists sought to forge an absolute, sovereign space of national autonomy. By locating the nationalist welding of swadeshi and swaraj in these broader processes, I have sought to underscore the close links between nationalization and globalization. The deterritorializing dynamics of colonial practices and the reterritorializing strategies of nationalist practices were intrinsically interrelated moments.

Finally, I have analyzed the historical co-constitution of notions of a national economy, territory, and culture. It was during the late nineteenth century that a specifically national meaning was assigned to territory, economy, and culture. The historical conjunction between the notion of a national economy and a national space suggests the limits of approaches that view cultural, economic and political nationalisms as fundamentally contrastive and mutually exclusive. I want to suggest here the problematic character of a priori classifications of nationalism as either cultural, economic, or political. This classificatory typology informs both general theories of nationalism and specific analyses of Indian nationalism. By stressing the co-production of these categories, this essay has

98 See Rudolph and Rudolph (1987), Omvedt (1993).



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sought to contest theories that refer unself-consciously to a national economy, culture, and territory. In my view, studies of nationalism should place in the

foreground the historicity of these categories and specify their interrelatedness.

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Documents

From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907