A Measure of Value: Life and Labor in South Asia

Meghna Chaudhuri, Boston College

In 1956, India, a primarily agrarian country, nationalized life insurance. Given the miniscule share of the market in life insurance, this move has been seen primarily as part of the quasi- socialist imperatives of the early postcolonial state – ideologically charged, but materially irrelevant. Yet, this narrative of the postcolonial developmental state that then tracks what it sees as a broader attack on private capital as the causal linkage to U.S.-led financial interventions in the 1970s cannot account for the supposed material irrelevance of life insurance being nationalized per its own logic.   This paper will reframe the temporality and ideological content of early postcolonial developmentalism in India. Life insurance in this context occupied not only the symbolic, but crucially, also the financial agenda of developmentalism. It securitized individuated lives to forge an ideologically forceful and materially constituted construction of collective national community. I will argue that rural and urban laboring bodies were key to the conception of territorializing national development through insurance as a public good. Human life had economic value, and analogized with property it held the magic of expanding far beyond its own bodily materiality even as the qualities of the body pressed differentiation into the very production of a generalized abstraction – its “health” measured through social indicators of caste and gender as much as by medical histories of disease. Yet, this attempt to grasp value in the realm of production at the level of “life” as both laboring bodies and abstract labor was not made possible by the contradictions of decolonization against the hegemonic organization of global capital. Rather, the condition of possibility for life insurance as an engine of state-led development was the emergence of a doctrine of agrarian improvement going back to the 1870s.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 126. Economic Value in the Post-Colonial State: Egypt, India, and China