Longing for an Elsewhere: Mysore and the Making of India's Developmental State (Modern South Asia)

Longing for an Elsewhere is about the colonial ancestry of India's contemporary embrace of economic development.Unlike existing scholarship that traces the emergence of the developmental state to the mid-twentieth century process of decolonization, the book argues that these origins are anchored in the preoccupation of colonized Indian elites with emulating the industrial modernity of Europe and the United States and seeking civilizational recognition for attaining progress.Beyond re-periodizing the birth of development discourse, the book argues that culture actively shapes a putatively economic process such as development.Specifically, it examines the chief cultural factors that guided the ideas and endeavours of the princely state of Mysore for achieving development during its period of British indirect rule (1881-1947). Historians and social scientists have tended to overlook semiautonomous polities in colonial India like Mysore that were neither fully colonized nor independent.The