Abstract
The weight of thought on India is so immense that even Atlas would sag. A deafening chorus on austerity in India deafens the ears as nineteenth-century British colonial officers standing shoulder-to-shoulder with twentieth-century scholars, mendicant spiritualists and twenty-first-century CEOs all jostle for their voices to be heard and acknowledged as definitive. My task in this book has not been to add to this motley ensemble, but instead to give earnest thought to those who now appear the loudest — namely, actors with stakes in India on the world stage. The aim of this book has been to explore the discourses and counter-discourses about India that have waxed and waned from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Two discourses on Indian austerity, and specifically an Indian work ethic, have most obviously made their way into the contemporary global social imaginary — namely, indolence and innovation. I have tried to show that behind these shifts in discourse are the mobilities of globals underpinning India’s knowledge economy now in the limelight as an indicator of India’s future renaissance.
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Notes
For Kamdar, India’s ‘imagining of the future’ is wholly tied to communities of globals in the US and powerful community organizations of professionals such as the AIA. This relationship was founded on the ‘strong philosophical currents’ that ‘flowed back and forth between the two countries, currents that significantly affected the political futures of both nations’. It is a relationship solidified by the ‘impressive number of India’s top business and political leaders, who have studied, lived or worked in the United States’. See M. Kamdar (2008) Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World (New York: Scribner), pp. 25–8.
Sanyal makes clear it is globals who have initiated an ‘entrepreneurial explosion’ and an ‘open cultural attitude’ that precipitate this second renaissance: ‘Moreover, the country also now had a large and successful global Diaspora that provided the country with international linkages that it had not enjoyed since the days of the ancient spice trade’. See S. Sanyal (2008) The Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company Incorporated), p. 3.
S. Yao (2002) Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise (London: RoutledgeCurzon).
M. B. Singer (1972) When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (New York: Praeger), p. 12.
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© 2013 Thomas Birtchnell
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Birtchnell, T. (2013). India: From Indolence to Innovation. In: Indovation. Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027412_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027412_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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