Producing India

From Colonial Economy to National Space

Cloth $57.50 ISBN: 9780226305080 Published June 2004 Not for sale in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka

Paper $28.00 ISBN: 9780226305097 Published June 2004 Not for sale in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka

E-book $7.00 to $28.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226305103 Published July 2010 Not for sale in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka

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 formidable 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.

Elegantly conceived and judiciously argued, Producing India will be invaluable to students of history, political economy, geography, and Asian studies.

Review Quotes
Contents

"[Producing India] outlines the combined and uneven process of global capitalism that shaped the formation of national space in India. Manu Goswami problematizes not just the concept of the nation but also the social and economic processes that produced the the concept and gave it commonsensical fixity across disciplines. . . . This is an important work not just for scholars of South Asia but for everyone interested in the history of capitalist development."

"Goswami has written an important book; it is strong on the 'big picture,' and it reminds the readers of the connection between modern nation and capital."—Gyan Prakash, American Historical Review

"An engaging work of historical geography that raises issues of importance well beyond South Asia. . . . The book subtly develops the theme of the mutual structuring of the colonial space economy and discursive battles over Indian nationhood. The wider value of Goswami's work is that Producing India offers a profoundly geographical history with a strong and convincing account of how the story of nationalisms--whether past or present, of colonisers or colonised--should be told."—Glyn Williams, Geography

“Producing India is a superb piece of work by any standards. Manu Goswami brilliantly illuminates the contradictory forces of colonial occupation and capitalism that shaped the uneven development of Indian national space from 1857 to 1920. She speaks with authority to the particularities and intricacies of Indian historical geography. The fateful consequences for the attempt to construct an Indian national identity rooted in that uneven space are brought into sharp focus. The effect is to generate stunning insights into how national identity formation in space more generally relates to the universalizing claims of Western colonialism and a globalizing capitalism. The contemporary relevance of this study is obvious. It deserves the widest possible readership.”<David Harvey, City University of New York

“Producing India offers an incisive analysis of the imagining of India as a territorially defined 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.”<Partha Chatterjee, Director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

“Producing India historicizes the formulation of national ideas and sensibilities in a comparative context constituted by the nineteenth-century world economy. Goswami is one of the first scholars to lift Indian nationalism out of the framework of analysis that focuses solely on the Indian encounter with the British. This is an important book and a landmark study.”<David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania

“Producing India asks a new question of Indian history: how did colonial India come to be imagined and treated as a territorial entity? Goswami’s answer—remarkable both for its freshness and intelligence—will benefit debates on nationalism in India and elsewhere.”<Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

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

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Asian Studies: South Asia

Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography

History: Asian History | British History

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