Philanthropy and the Development of Modern India

Abstract

Abstract Through their philanthropy, Indian elites have played an influential role in the country’s development in the twentieth century. Presenting an innovative history of postcolonial development, the book plots elites’ formulations and formations of modernity and its entanglement with the national question. In an unusual move that reads more familiar forms of modernization from the second half of the twentieth century alongside earlier ideas of nationalist reform, it interrogates the influence of anti-colonial nationalism in India on contemporary development. It also brings into relief the longer historical trajectory of popular development ideas such as ‘self-care’ and ‘responsibility’. The book covers the differences and shifts in elites’ imaginaries of development across a range of sites—self, community, science and technology, and civil society. It concludes that as elites privileged their imaginaries of development over others, they have come to assume a pedagogic role for themselves as they justify their development choices and its exclusions: in the name of nation.