Liquidity, the makings of India's emerging economic body Liquidité : la fabrique du corps économique émergent de l'Inde

Abstract

Under Narendra Modi's premiership, India's economy is rapidly being ‘dematerialized’ towards a digital economy: ‘faceless, paperless, cashless’ in his words. At first glance, it captures the quintessence of free laissez-faire market reforms, but I argue there is more to Modi's project of liquidity. This paper re-reads the re-engineering of India's economy, arguing that this idea of liquidity is what holds together in conflicting tension the polarities for de-regulated free laissez-faire market reforms with a re-sacralized and protectionist nationalism. Grounded in the stories of local builders working the ‘spatial fix’, the multi-sited ethnography recovers how money is more than some medium of exchange or vessel for abstract value. It is itself constitutive of shared dispositions, meanings, understandings, a vernacular, all in service towards a conceived ideal commons. Reframing our understanding of modern money thus, the paper therefore argues that Modi's monetarist reforms are an assertion for a different kind of collective existence – a re-sacralized socio-spatial project wherein membership demands the reconfiguration of self and of relations, as these builders experience first-hand. The economy is never just about economics; it is inherently political and indelibly personal.