Austerity in the Dark Ages

Abstract

It is said, Sir, that poverty is the mother of invention — so is indolence the mother of imposture.1 Sociologist Dipankar Gupta perceptively summarizes that the period after India’s Independence was widely considered to be a move out of the ‘Dark Ages’ and ‘into the light’.2 This was most significantly a discoursal shift. For most of the twentieth century scholarship on India dwelled upon why India had not, and perhaps could not, industrialize. Now that India has definitively industrialized, and is celebrated as such, it is worth revisiting the inspirations for this scholarship and questioning the assumptions made in the construction of this discourse and consequent counter-discourse. In this chapter I shall deal specifically with binary oppositions. This polarization should not be interpreted as a lack of complexity of analysis, but rather indicates a purposeful strategy curated by key actors in order to maximize their gains in a global social imaginary. This polarization of discourse and counter-discourse has its roots in the extremeness of ideas about India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.