Developing histories of Indian development

Menon, Nikhil

doi:10.1111/hic3.12689

History Compass

2021

DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12689

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Developing histories of Indian development

Nikhil Menon

Abstract: This essay offers a tour of historical scholarship produced in the last two decades on economic development in early independent India. It is a sub‐field that for reasons of archival access and renewed interest is growing, like historical works on independent India more generally. Surveying this landscape, it appears that there are some analytical channels that seem to be exhausting themselves after having long pressed forward, and others that are mining rich seams and new terrain. Broadly speaking, these deve… Show more

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Cited by 2 publications

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“…7 7 For an excellent recent review of this literature see: Nikhil Menon, “Developing Histories of Indian Development,” History Compass , 24 August (2021), https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12689. Also see Nikhil Menon, Planning Democracy: Modern India's Quest for Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Arun Mohan Sukumar, Midnight's Machines: A Political History of Technology in India (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2020).…”

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India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s

Shani

2022

History Compass

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The last decade and a half saw what we can call a historical turn in the study of India's democracy. By drawing on some of these new works and on archival materials, this article offers a new way of thinking about the rooting and workings of democracy in India and its endurance. The article explores how India and Indians produced a concrete and convincing notion of a shared functioning purpose, a common good, for their deeply plural society, while allowing a meaningful space for the conflicts and inherent contradictions that underlay their democracy. I suggest that the persistence of these conflicts was important for the resilience of India's democracy. I examine three interrelated processes that with independence contributed to this outcome: the nature of the constitution and its making; the first election and the preparation for them between 1947 and 1952; and the articulation of the principle of state resource distribution and its development projects. The conclusion reflects on the significance of the historical turn to our understanding of post-independence India.

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India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s

Shani

2022

History Compass

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Pedagogies of Development, Conceptions of Efficiency: Modern Managerialism in Industrial Ahmedabad, 1950s–1960s

Wani¹

2023

Enterp. Soc.

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This paper aims to trace the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in the post-independence period in India during the 1950s and 1960s. It tracks the discipline’s formative interests in the management of industrial labor, the views of its major proponents, and the processes through which the discipline sought generalized relevance within the postcolonial regime. It also discusses the intersection of managerial concerns with the globally emergent discourses on development and industrial reform and follows the eventual institutionalization of the discipline as an educational concern through the setting up of management schools. In doing so, the paper examines the modes and rationales through which managerialism established its own normative vocabulary and deployed it for assessing not just the objectives of industrial capital but also the newly consolidating postcolonial state and its developmental ambitions. This circulation of management ideas is analyzed by following the experiments that were conducted in the industrial enterprises of Ahmedabad by a group of textile industrialists, UN developmental pedagogues, and Ford Foundation consultants. Even when, in most cases, such studies on management did not succeed in achieving their ascribed goals, the paper demonstrates how managerialism maintained its relevance by parallelly turning its focus onto the postcolonial state and its developmental activities. Broadly, the paper argues that management in the mid-twentieth century functioned as a solution in search of a problem. It eventually acquired prominence by tautologically reading institutions and various aspects of the society as organizations that needed the prescription of management to resolve their operations.

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Developing histories of Indian development

Cited by 2 publications

References 35 publications

India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s

India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s

Pedagogies of Development, Conceptions of Efficiency: Modern Managerialism in Industrial Ahmedabad, 1950s–1960s

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