Longing for an Elsewhere: Mysore and the Making of India's Developmental State (Modern South Asia)

Longing for an Elsewhere is about the colonial ancestry of India's contemporary embrace of economic development. Unlike existing social science scholarship, which traces the emergence of the developmental state to the process of decolonization seen in the mid-twentieth century, it argues that its origins extend further back in time and are anchored in the preoccupation of local colonial elites in emulating the industrialization in Europe and the United States.

Chandan Gowda is Professor and Dean, School of Liberal Arts, Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru. After completing his PhD at the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he took up the position of Associate Professor of Sociology at the National Law School of India, Bengaluru and later served as Professor of Sociology at Azim Premji University, Bengalur, and Ramakrishna Hegde Chair Professor of Decentralization and Development at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. His areas of research include social theory, cultural and political sociology, Indian intellectual history, and modern Kannada literature and cinema.