Knowledge/Power in (Post)Colonial India 1870–1920: Indian Political Economy as Counter-Knowledge and the Transformation of the Colonial Order

Abstract

Abstract In the late 19th and early 20th centuries South Asian intellectuals began to develop a specifically Indian political economy – ostensibly grounded in Indigenous interests, values, norms, knowledge systems, and practices – as a response to the failure of the British colonial government to bring ‘moral and material improvement’ to the subcontinent. The article examines the relationship between colonial knowledge/power and the anti-hegemonic project of an Indian political economy, which claims to assert ‘Indigenous’ knowledge as counter-knowledge, but continues to share the same discursive space as orthodox political economy. The contribution explores how the alterity and indigeneity of Indian political economy was justfied and discusses the power relations in which the legitimacy of this alterity was enmeshed. Finally, the article analyses the limits set to the emancipatory impetus of such an ‘indigenous, postcolonial critique’.