Doctoral Dissertation Research: Developing Mysore: Modernizing Elite and the Politics of Translating Institutions

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My research explores the endeavors of the Indian state of Mysore to "develop" its agrarian society into a "modern" industrial one during 1881-1947. Marxist, Weberian, rational-choice and world polity perspectives on state formation have emphasized, respectively, the importance of the logic of economic development, the processes of rationalization, the self-interest maximizing motives of state actors and the dynamic of institutional emulation. Drawing on Bruno Latour's work in the sociology of technology, I argue that state formation is an inherently contingent process since the stability of the state's technologies is interlinked with a diverse array of social forces. Using early modern Mysore as my case, I will illustrate the multiple levels of translation involved in Mysore's experiments with development and modernization. Different models of development are translated in the political imagination of the state elite. Translation of another order becomes evident when we examine the development projects' influence on social practices. My choice of research data is necessarily eclectic. It includes the writings and speeches of major statesmen and the proceedings of the Mysore Representative Assembly. Autobiographies and biographies of prominent public figures, newspapers and journals of that period also constitute important data. The broader impacts of this study lie in its contribution to the academic scholarship on state formation, alternate modernities and development studies, its theoretical value of the methodology of technology studies in interpreting state formation, its contribution to the growing scholarship on alternate modernities that focuses on the engagement of nonwestern countries with modernity in order to undo the Eurocentric bias of social scientific scholarship on modernity.