Histories of Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 9780691205243.
How did economic conservatism emerge in postcolonial societies? How did it interface with popular anti-colonial mobilization? And what impact did it have on developmental visions? These questions, among others, are at the heart of Aditya Balasubramanian’s excellent Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India. Focusing on the Swatantra Party—its major political leaders, the intellectual genesis of its critiques of Nehruvian development, and the social forces which propped it up—Balasubramanian charts out the advent and circulation of ideas of free economy and Indian libertarianism. In doing so, he argues that an “a situated or ‘emplaced’ perspective” which grounds itself in analysis of local social formations instead of the global flow of ideas and capital can help historians discover how neoliberal ideas and practices emerged during the Cold War (12).
Balasubramanian’s work is innovative on several accounts. Treating the Swatantra Party seriously despite its lackluster electoral performance, he traces its roots in various Indian states across different scales and communities and its ultimate impact on Indian democracy and economic thought. In doing so he uses sources from across various archives and in a variety of different languages. Part I begins with a magisterial chapter summarizing changes in Indian political economy following independence, a synthesis of an eye-watering amount of content that will make the book a must-read for those who want a balanced but critical reading of Nehruvian development. The book then traces the emergence of inchoate notions of a free economy within a web of libertarian associations and periodicals in Western and South India, focusing on Ranchoddas Lotvala and his daughter Kusum, the founders of the Libertarian Socialist Institute. Tracing the Lotvalas’ evolving anticommunism in the context of the Cold War and their growing aversion to statism, subsequent chapters in part 2 trace a variety of different leaders who, while interacting with the Lotvalas and figures around them, went on to help found the Swatantra Party. Chapter 4, which highlights prominent Swatantra figures from three different caste communities from Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, and Bombay, is a stand-out chapter, with Balasubramanian demonstrating how the constituencies of anticommunist libertarianism in India embraced different and often contradictory conceptions of a free economy based on their lived experiences and socio-economic backgrounds. The book ends with an examination of the Swatantra Party’s attempts to shape the public, perfect Indian democracy, and construct the ideal middle-class citizen by blending “pedagogy and polemics” as well as by “mobilizing the masses around economic grievances” (266).
Balasubramanian’s attentiveness to a unique blend of political economy, intellectual history, and constructed cultural norms helps his work to avoid the reductiveness of other histories of economic discourses and practices in post-independent India. He treats his historical actors with tremendous care, excavating their internal lives and worlds while grounding his analysis of their ideas in their material conditions and social milieu. What could have easily been a fairly standard history of a political party and its major figures becomes a much larger and more impactful work meditating on the significance of conservative economic thought in a postcolonial setting.
Balasubramanian’s focus on the Swatantra Party as a means of demonstrating the importance of an “emplaced” perspective of neoliberalism provides for a fascinating look at what has often been dismissed as a relatively short-lived and narrow-minded opposition party. He convincingly demonstrates that the party was much more; still, this argument may have benefited from going beyond Swatantra or its immediate environs. It have been interesting, for example, to see how the Swatantra Party’s critiques of Congress and the Indian state dovetailed with other early oppositional parties. The Praja Socialist Party, which for much of the 1950s formed a consistent opponent to the Congress government, was just as motivated by anti-communism and anti-statism, albeit supported by a radically different constellation of social forces. Situating the Swatantra Party within this larger political ecosystem would have also had the benefit of understanding its conservatism as possibly an outgrowth of other regional trends. Balasubramanian very convincingly shows how American influence did not by any means dictate Swatantra policy or understanding of what a free economy would look like; his protagonists corresponded and studied with American thinkers but still needed to translate these ideas and concepts to audiences and contexts back home.
This is a powerful argument. But I wonder to what extent these thinkers were in conversation with conservative forces a little closer to home. Various Indian liberals and anti-communist figures attempted to forge closer relations with erstwhile anti-communist allies in Asia, especially after India’s conflict with China in 1962. For as much as we often associate the origins of neoliberalism in European interwar economic thought, Balasubramanian points to potentially more disparate genealogies. Looking at how the Swatantra Party may have tapped into regional visions of a free economy as expressed in Taiwan, Malaya, Japan, and elsewhere—defined by the same constituent desires for prioritizing market forces, private property, and patriarchal family structures—would have strengthened that argument. Thinking through alternative international anti-communist networks that Balasubramanian’s major historical actors, such as C. Rajagopalachari, would have participated in would have also helped to clarify the contradictions at the heart of the Swatantra Party: its hopes for cultivating a culture of healthy democracy and economic empowerment on one hand and its leaders’ clear blindness to caste, gender, and mass politics at large.
These are relatively minor critiques for what is an astonishingly original piece of work. Balasubramanian’s book is not only a major contribution to our understanding of Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian political and economic trends in India, but also the role of conservativism in shaping post-colonial politics. It will be of great interest to historians of South Asia, the Global South, and the Cold War more generally.
Yasser Ali Nasser
University of Tennessee, Knoxville