Browsing by Author "Ramaswamy, Sumathi"

My dissertation, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Culture in Interwar Bombay, proposes that the history of economic nationalism in India and the spread of middle-class patriotic consumer culture is a gendered history. In 1930, an unprecedented number of middle-class Hindu women took to the streets of Bombay, now Mumbai, to participate in the Civil Disobedience movement under the leadership of M.K. Gandhi. Their task was to promote swadeshi: a form of political consumerism centered around the boycott of foreign goods and preference for homespun cloth and indigenous products. At the same time, urban women residing in this cosmopolitan city were deeply entrenched in the globally proliferating consumerism of the interwar years. In the face of a critical moral demand to alter their consumer habits to demonstrate their patriotism, women found themselves navigating the contested demands of a desire for a modern urban lifestyle and their commitment towards the nationalist cause, rooted in the homegrown and homespun.Urban and middle-class women’s recalcitrance in giving up their consumer lifestyle emboldened local businesses and merchants to offer indigenous alternatives to popular and global consumer goods. Ultimately, this enabled domestic capital and industries to gain significant market share in Bombay, the principal commercial center of the British Empire outside of London, and to transform it into a swadeshi bazaar. My dissertation thus demonstrates the centrality of women’s nationalist work in shaping market relations and the making of a consumer politics that defined both Indian nationalism and the wider anti-colonial movements of the interwar world. Recent studies point to (another) nationalist turn in contemporary India that inflects the forms of economic globalization embraced by the country’s middle classes today. The evidence from swadeshi Bombay reveals that contemporary consumer politics have much deeper historical roots, dating back to the interwar years, and sprouted in the city that was the commercial and financial hub of British India. Narrated across four thematically organized chapters, this dissertation follows a group of female volunteers known as desh sevikas, or “servants (sevikas) of the nation (desh).” While a substantial section of Indian historiography, including but not limited to the early Subaltern Studies collective, has centered the peasant in the vast Indian countryside as the protagonist of colonial history, this project “disobediently” turns to the “consuming” category of middle-class, upper-caste, urban (and Hindu) women as gendered citizens of British India’s urbs prima, “first city.” Sparsely mentioned in official record, the sevika more frequently appears in a range of image sources such as documentary photos, print advertisements, and political caricatures. The composite figure of the sevika thus lies at the intersection of the history of women and gender, consumerism, and anticolonial movements and invites methodological approaches from visual culture studies. My project deploys the sevika as a heuristic figure to tap into the multiple identities assumed by Bombay women—as city dwellers, as anticolonial workers, and as self-fashioned modern consumers. In doing so, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City locates urban women albeit those belonging to a specific class and caste as political-economic actors. It traces the many modes in which they practice their disobedience towards the British colonial state as well as traditional gendered norms, while remaining caught within the sobering limits of their caste and class.

My dissertation examines the roles assumed by actors closely associated with the textile business community within developmental endeavors shaping urban, industrial and rural worlds of late colonial and postcolonial western India. My historical account begins with the early twentieth century and spans across the first three decades following independence in 1947. The mercantile predecessors of these business actors have been studied in South Asian and imperial historiography as “portfolio capitalists” who were immensely significant in brokering key political and economic transitions of the early-modern and early-colonial eras. In locating a different generation of such “merchants” in the critical decades of waning imperialism and ascendant nationalism, I bring to focus the specific ways in which such commercial actors—who had by then diversified into industrial activities—straddled the apparently disparate worlds of big business, national community-making and state-directed developmentalism. In doing so, my work reveals how such “men of capital” re-invented their relevance in a new postcolonial regime—that was sliding towards a characteristic dirigisme—by actively participating in emergent global discourses borne of decolonisation, an ongoing Cold War and a thriving international field of developmentalism marked by particular propositions of socio-economic reform and technological intervention.

My research thus opens up for scrutiny a new field of interventions initiated by business actors in western Indian places like Gujarat, that supplemented and at times even competed with the newly consolidating postcolonial state’s conception of “development” and “public good.” More specifically, this field of interventions encompassed forms of (legal) associational life, such as public charitable trusts, high-technological interventions in the form of communication satellites and broadcasting media experiments, and ideas and techniques of governing industrial as well as rural-agricultural production based on the emerging sciences of managerialism, human resources and efficiency. I show how much of this new field of operations was made possible by the intricate networking of western Indian business actors with globally mobile experts whose opinions were becoming increasingly important to the newly formed states. My research uncovers this triangulation of business, state, and global expertise by reading together existing state and institutional archival records with relatively unexplored sources like personal accounts of business entrepreneurs, labor union leaders, enterprising farmers, popular science fiction writers, filmmakers and televisual media producers.

As my research courses through these various projects, from broadcasting technologies to small scale industrial automation ambitions, I show how the simultaneous narratives of the triumphant business visionary and the actual failures of the projects on ground were co-constitutive, if not inherent to this very mode of intervention/expertise. Moreover, I reveal how these projects, despite their seeming intentions of democratic reform, participatory development and charity, more than often exacerbated the extant social antagonisms in their regions of operation, and institutionalized new structures of power and sites of regulation in the aftermath of their failures.

On a broader stroke, the dissertation offers to revise our received understanding of the postcolonial experience as partitioned between an earlier state-directed developmentalism and a more recent putatively “neo-liberal” private sector-dominated setup. It argues instead that the groundwork for claiming particular kinds of sovereignty by corporate actors within regimes of political and economic governance was laid quite early on in the late colonial and early postcolonial period through socio-economic imaginaries and practices of development which remained fundamentally marked by seepages between arenas of state and business.

This dissertation explores the colonization of wildlife in nineteenth and early twentieth century British India. It discusses hunting and colonial policies on wildlife to explore the political, social and cultural concerns that influenced British interactions with Indian wildlife, with their compatriots and with natives. Hunting, I argue was deeply implicated in the exercise of power in all these interactions. British policies on wildlife in the nineteenth century favored a neat categorization of wild animals as "vermin and "game." By the beginning of the twentieth century however, with decreasing numbers of carnivores and native opposition, the perceived complementarily between game preservation and vermin extermination was shattered. While the colonial administration continued both these policies, they also actively sought to formulate policies to protect all animals in areas designated as sanctuaries and national parks. Colonial hunting as it emerged from the late nineteenth century reflects the changing nature of the colonial state and a new imperial ideology of dominance. I also argue racial differences between the colonialists and colonized were articulated in the domain of hunting. While hunting represented domination of nature and natives, the "colonial hunt" also came to signify a paternal benevolent British rule. The importance given to hunting and to the notion of fair play in their hunting served to "identify" the moral and physical superiority of British rulers. The new ideology of paternalism was realized in the figure of the hunter-officer, the Sahib who in hunting dangerous carnivores was seen to act as a protector of the native. The changing nature of the colonial state and creation of racial differences also had a profound impact on colonial society which became increasingly self conscious of its own identity and image. Given the metropolitan engagement with social Darwinism and their location on the fringes of civilization as it were, colonialists became the center of metropolitan preoccupation with racial contamination. The emphasis on fair play, I argue reflects the efforts of the colonial elite to enforce a model code of conduct on its members and reassure an anxious metropole of the racial distance with the native. Policing behavior of their own, through categories like fair play was therefore essential to the agenda of creating racial differences. Due to a perceived connection between hunting, power and privilege, hunting also played an important role in social relations in colonial society. As hunting came to be regulated by laws by late nineteenth century, it often became the focal point of tensions in class and power within the colonial elite on the question of access to animals.