After Culture

Abstract

Political economy in India has lost its earlier dynamism; can the insights of recent culture-centred perspectives help revive it? This speculative paper outlines a research agenda that might do this by focusing on two important but under-researched themes in the history of the Indian present: the shift in the dominant economic ideology from development to adjustment, and the growth and differentiation of the middle classes. The ideology of development helped to create and sustain a strongly synergistic relationship between the developmental state, a small but significant middle class, and the nation. As development-ideology declined (because of the effects of development, and because dominant fractions of the middle class drifted away from it), this relationship broke down. The emergence of new middle-class audiences with different orientations, and transnationally dominant ideologies of globalization and structural adjustment results in a new conjuncture. Investigating this conjuncture may help us understand not only our recent past, but perhaps also our immediate future.