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Structural contingencies and untimely coincidences in the making of neoliberal India: The Kandla Free Trade Zone, 1965 −91 Patrick Neveling Contributions to Indian Sociology 2014 48: 17 DOI: 10.1177/0069966713502420

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Structural contingencies and untimely coincidences in the making of neoliberal India: The Kandla Free Trade Zone, 1965–91 Patrick Neveling This article introduces the concepts of untimely coincidences of modes of production and structural contingencies in global capitalism to the study of neoliberalism in India and beyond. I argue that these concepts are crucial to revive a historical anthropology, which shows that neoliberalism is one of several possible manifestations of capitalism, past and present. The analytical gain of such a revised view on neoliberalism is then exemplified by a historical–anthropological account of the development of India’s first special economic zone, the Kandla Foreign Trade Zone, from 1965 to the late 1980s. Based on these findings, I conclude my plea for conceptual changes in anthropology’s approach to periodising national and global histories of neoliberalism. Keywords: Capitalism, history, neoliberalism, export processing zone, development, India-USSR relations

I Introduction In the introduction to the influential Blackwell reader, The Anthropology of the State, the editors, Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (2006), call for anthropological attention to the workings of nation-states. In the neoliberal era, these mechanisms are crucial to the life and times of humans (ibid.: 11). Building on their ethnographic research in India, the Patrick Neveling is at the Historical Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]

Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43 SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/0069966713502420


18 / Patrick Neveling

authors claim that the Indian nation-state’s development regime radically changed in 1991 when the ‘Nehruvian import-substituting, socialist, autarchic model of development’ was replaced with a neoliberal model of development (ibid.: 3–4). Such clear-cut periodisations of national and global histories are widespread in anthropology. This article argues that they are highly problematic. I illustrate this by critiquing the epistemic foundation of anthropology’s most recent notion of radical rupture—neoliberalism—with reference to general anthropological works and to anthropological and other works on Indian neoliberalism. Alternatively, and with reference to Sanyal’s (2007) work on complex hegemony in early postcolonial India, I introduce the concepts of untimely coincidences of modes of production and structural contingencies in global capitalism. These are crucial to revive a historical anthropology, reminding us that neoliberalism is one of several possible manifestations of capitalism, past and present (Part II). The analytical gain of such a revised view on neoliberalism is exemplified by a historical–anthropological account of the development of India’s first special economic zone (SEZ)—the Kandla Foreign Trade Zone (KFTZ)—from 1965 to the late 1980s (Part III). Based on the findings of this analysis, I conclude my plea for conceptual changes in anthropology’s approach to periodising national and global histories of neoliberalism (Part IV).

II Radical rupture, gradual change or continuity: Assessing periodisations of (neoliberal) India In his analysis of capitalist development in postcolonial India, Sanyal (2007) periodises Indian (economic) history. Like Gupta and Sharma (2006), he identifies a shift in the early 1990s, but ‘things are still in flux’ (Sanyal 2007: 242). No Nehruvian state has been replaced by a neoliberal state in outright fashion. Sanyal’s interest in continuity has little to do with the ‘particularities of state reformation under neoliberalism’ that Sharma and Gupta have elsewhere identified in classical anthropological fashion as a reason for micro-scale similarities between the postcolonial Indian welfare-state and its neoliberal successor (2006: 277). Instead, an established ‘complex hegemony’, aligning pre-capitalist and capitalist elites since the 1940s, is only gradually losing power since the process of (neo-) liberalisation was started (Sanyal 2007: 242–51). Sanyal, in other words, Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43


The Kandla Free Trade Zone, 1965–91 / 19

employs the core findings of subaltern historians like Chatterjee (1993) to understand the structures of the present. In a recently published article discussing one of neoliberalism’s epiphenomena—the spread of SEZs—Jamie Cross proposes a third reading of the 1991 ‘tipping point’ (2010: 356) towards liberalisation in Indian economic history. His analysis of neoliberalism in India neither finds a radical rupture, like Sharma and Gupta, nor a gradual replacement of a preneoliberal order, like Sanyal. Instead, for Cross, significant features, such as precarious employment conditions, politico-economic constructions of space and a lack of rights-based citizenship, are only supposedly neoliberal but constitute rather long-established continuities in Indian society. These three positions—radical rupture, gradual change and continuity—ultimately converge in labelling the change in Indian government in 1991 as the ‘tipping point’ (Cross 2010: 356) towards a neoliberal India. But they differ in their assessment of continuity and discontinuity. In the following, I introduce a fourth notion. This builds on a historical anthropology concerned with continuities and discontinuities in the patterns of capitalist accumulation and their regulation by nation-states and international organisations. If we consider neoliberalism as one manifestation of these patterns and their regulation, the acceptance of 1991 as either a deus ex machina advent of neoliberalism in India, or its outright rejection is analytically pointless because social anthropology and other social sciences deal with the problem of periodising eras in the wrong way. No matter whether ‘modernisation’, ‘globalisation’, ‘post-Fordism’ or ‘neoliberalism’ are addressed in anthropology, such concepts are analytically validated by declaring that they have caused radical ruptures and new relations on all scales of socio-economic interaction. Critical voices in anthropology have identified this pattern as a desire for ‘newness’ (cf. Baca 2005; also Nash 1995; Neveling 2006,1 2010; Tsing 2000). Because of this desire, the said concepts acquire normative qualities, evidenced in the introduction of new sub-fields such as ‘the anthropology of neoliberalism’. All socio-economic relations are considered recently ‘neoliberalised’ and what was once a scientific concept with strong analytical potential, 1 Patrick Neveling. 2006. ‘Spirits of Capitalism and the De-alienation of Workers: A Historical Perspective on the Mauritian Garment Industry.’ SCM Working Paper Series. Available at http://www.academia.edu/435371/Spirits_of_Capitalism_and_the_Dealienation_of_Workers_a_Historical_Perspective_on_the_Mauritian_Garment_Industry. Last accessed on 3 September 2013.

Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



‘neoliberal capitalism’ is now a meta-discriptive container category that is applicable to any social phenomena. Building on this special issue’s focus on the variegations with which neoliberal ideas have been made operational (see Münster and Strümpell, this issue), I will outline both an empirical and theoretical agenda for periodising the making and unmaking of neoliberal India. This rests on a theoretically driven reading of historical sources, ranging from the official history of the Reserve Bank of India to several reports of the 1970s and the 1980s on the workings of India’s first SEZ in Kandla. This approach is informed by, albeit inverts, Münster and Strümpell’s reference to Burawoy’s demand for grounding the analysis of large-scale neoliberal transformations within an epistemological continuum that begins with ‘the space–time rhythms of the site’ and extends ‘to the geographical and historical context of the field’ (Burawoy 2000: 27, cited in Münster and Strümpell, this issue). Rather, I take the space–time rhythms of global capitalism as my point of departure. Such an inversion of the ‘classical’ anthropological focus adds a temporal dimension to the spatial and social variegations of neoliberalism recently emphasised by Brenner et al. (2010; also see Carswell and De Neve, this issue, for a case study that picks up on my suggestions) as one of several patterns of capitalist accumulation and regimes of regulation. This way, neoliberalism, Fordism, imperialism and so on are not portrayed as archetypical forms but as heuristic concepts that circumscribe what we might call, with reference to the works of Eric Wolf (1982), an untimely coincidence of different modes of production. In order to embed this approach in anthropology, it is necessary to revisit the axiomatic decisions that guide anthropology’s ongoing concern with neoliberalism and to point out the problems that these decisions create in the long run. Central to mainstream anthropological works on neoliberalism in general, and on neoliberal nation-states in particular, are two postulates. First, it is taken for granted that the global organisation of capitalist production and accumulation can be divided into a succession of cycles or eras. And second, it is taken for granted that there are institutions and practices, such as nation-states and international organisations, serving as central vehicles for bringing the latest such era about, that is, neoliberalism. In the following, I am going to question the analytical benefits of these two postulates and will show the severe limitations that accepting these postulates has caused in anthropological theory. Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



Loic Wacquant recently opened an anthropological debate on neoliberalism with these words: ‘It [neoliberalism] wishes to reform and refocus the state so as to actively foster and bolster the market as an on-going political creation’ (2012: 72). Wacquant argues that anthropologists have largely ignored this emphasis on the state. Instead, one camp has assessed neoliberalism building on an ‘economistic’ conception (ibid.: 68) that speaks of state withdrawal by deregulating and privatising domains that were once firmly within the state’s grip. Deregulation is portrayed as a result of an unequal balance of power among nation-states. The Reagan administration in the United States of America, for example, imposed state withdrawal on other nation-states’ developmental agenda in what has come to be called the Washington Consensus (ibid.). A second camp of researchers, according to Wacquant, focuses on governmentality and opposes the above approach as a ‘“neat” view of neoliberalism as a coherent if not monolithic whole’. Alternatively, this camp purports ‘a “messy” view of neoliberalism as a flowing and flexible conglomeration of calculative notions, strategies and technologies aimed at fashioning populations and people’ (ibid.: 69). Wacquant points out that this ‘messy view’ of neoliberalism lacks analytical rigour because the markers introduced are highly unspecific—the application of calculative technologies, for example, could be dated back to the first practices of double-entry bookkeeping in 1494 (ibid.: 72). This last point illustrates the problem of defining set eras in world history very well. If we are to accept that the present is a neoliberal era, then we wittingly accept an arrangement of successive eras. But capitalism is obviously too complex to be sliced into such neat temporal categories. So what are the alternatives? Hilgers (2012) proposes to view neoliberalism as a coherent political ‘utopia’ that turns into a plurality of neoliberalisms as it hits the ground running in individual states. This differentiation has a certain appeal as it considers the positioning of individual nation-states within the global imbalance of power. As the new developmental policies of the Washington Consensus were implemented across Africa, for example, different states had different preconditions and requirements. Hilgers’ approach, thus, helps us understand that beyond the role attributed to the state by what we may call economistic and governmentalist approaches in anthropology, there is a spatio-temporal dimension to the global proliferation of neoliberalism as a political project. Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



Seen in this light, the three takes on neoliberalism in India, outlined earlier, can produce important insights for furthering the paradigm guiding empirical research. Sharma and Gupta (2006: 4) understand states as ‘historical formations’ and highlight the importance of the Nehruvian state’s developmental policy for neoliberal India. For example, workers in call centres serving the needs of multinational corporations would not have been suitable employees had they not enjoyed free and comprehensive education under the pre-neoliberal regime. This again points to micro-level continuity. But for the macro level, Sharma and Gupta claim radical rupture (ibid.). The neoliberal Indian state has lost sovereignty in comparison with earlier historical formations because the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) effectively ‘operate and regulate the conduct of states, economies and people’ (ibid.: 9) and are ‘dictating policies to Third-World nationstates’ (ibid.: 24). In other words, both axiomatic decisions identified earlier apply here. Neoliberalism represents a new period in the history of global capitalism; it has spread qua core events that have caused radical rupture and has entered the Indian context qua core personae, in this case, international organisations that have the ability to radically alter the workings of the nation-state. Sanyal’s (2007) historical analysis is about gradual changes, not rupture, as mentioned earlier. He, therefore, considers the impact of international organisations and of internal political developments on Indian economic history prior to, and after, liberalisation. India’s postcolonial history sets off with a ‘passive revolution’ of the Indian bourgeoisie. Here, Sanyal builds on the works of the subaltern studies school. The anticolonial movement’s success was dependent on alliances with dominant classes of the pre-capitalist era (ibid.: 33). This meant that the postcolonial nation-state was based on a ‘complex hegemony’ (ibid.: 40). A ‘capital– pre-capital dualism’ (ibid.: 34) allowed for the coexistence of modern industries and ‘subsistence’ production. This promotion of ‘pre-capitalist modes of production’ limited primitive accumulation—or what Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession (ibid.: 40; see Strümpell, this issue, for a detailed study). Sanyal (2007), in other words, develops a model for understanding the coexistence of modes of production (for this, see also Harris-White 2003: 1–16; Neveling and Klien 2010: 33) that links well with research on changes in global and Indian developmental policies (for example, Ludden 2005). Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



I shall exemplify this with reference to the space–time rhythms of global capitalism and the way these produce untimely coincidences of modes of production. The following disgression into the debates over global terms of trade does not only illustrate this well but is also important for understanding why the case study on India’s first export processing zone (EPZ), set up in 1965, reveals important diversions from India’s attitude towards global terms of trade. A good example of India’s early postcolonial way of dealing with global terms of trade is given by Strümpell (this issue). One of the core sectors chosen by the postcolonial Indian state for developing the new nation was steel. In this industry, publicly and privately owned factories existed side by side. The aim was to liberate India from colonial dependencies on imports of steel, machinery for manufacturing, means of transport and many other commodities. These are the policies that Sharma and Gupta (2006) refer to when they speak of the Nehruvian state’s import-substitution policies. As other policies of the time, import substitution was not unique to India but a mainstay among postcolonial efforts to overcome the unequal exchanges dominating global trade. Such inequalities had been identified in the Prebisch–Singer thesis, a transcontinental collaborative effort involving the German economist Hans-Wolfgang Singer and the Argentinian economist, Rául Prebisch. The two scientists argued, on empirical grounds, that the former colonial powers gained large sums as they imported raw materials at low prices from former colonial territories, who then had to buy high-priced finished goods made from the same raw materials. This thesis would become highly influential in the economic policies of many postcolonial nations from the 1950s onwards (cf. Bair 2009; Neveling, forthcoming). That thesis, according to Sanyal, had a limited focus on ‘...quantitative variables such as income, consumption, saving, investment, and the growth rate of population’ (2007: 133). In other words, the plight of many postcolonial nations was reduced to a narrow range of external factors— their unfavourable positioning in global terms of trade. Important national and international aspects of capitalist accumulation, and the way this was sustained by national governments, international organisations and various other powerful actors, remained unnoticed. To Sanyal, it is particularly ‘the configuration of property and power relations’ that is central to the ‘mode of production, distribution, and ultilization of economic surplus’ (ibid.) in a given postcolonial economy. But rather than focusing on sequential Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



modes of production that would imply taking pre-capitalist and capitalist patterns of accumulation as definite temporal stages, Sanyal shows how postcolonial India’s complex hegemony rested on a combination of both patterns. Sanyal’s analysis of complex hegemony in early postcolonial India can be transfered to an analysis of neoliberal India if an analytical relation between the workings of capitalism and neoliberalism is established. Once we regard neoliberalism as one particular manifestation of capitalism that coexists with other such manifestations, we can utilise the strength of the economistic and the governmentalist approach that I have sketched and criticised earlier by aligning their conflicting emphasis on economic structure or governmental exigency in the notion of ‘structural contingency’ (Kalb 2012: 327). As I show in the following section, this answers the ‘...often irresponsibly shrugged off question of the precise relationship between capitalism/the capitalist world system and neoliberalism’ (ibid.: 319).

III (Not) making a neoliberal marketplace in peripheral India since 1965 As I said, depending on a nation-state’s position within the global capitalist system, the implementation of neoliberal policies might take different forms. On the one hand, there is contingency and, on the other hand, there is a structure. This makes ‘some histories more possible than others’ (Gledhill 2005). If we want to study neoliberal India, or more precisely, the workings of neoliberalism in capitalist India, we need to attend to the spatio-temporal variegations of neoliberalism brought about by structural contingencies that are inherent to capitalism. Neoliberalism is just one of many coexisting forms of capitalism and therefore, combinations of neoliberalism with other capitalist modes of production create, on a higher level of abstraction, variegations of capitalism. One such field of spatio-temporal variegation that has been central to theorisations of neoliberalism is that of free trade zones (FTZs), EPZs and SEZs (Cross 2010; Ong 2006; Sharma and Gupta 2006). The following section shows that the historical emergence and the development of the first such zone in India, established in 1965, is ideally suited to highlight the structural contingencies and the untimely coincidence of neoliberalism with other Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



capitalist modes of production that global capitalism brought about on the national level while the Nehruvian state was still operational. The section, therefore, fulfils one aim of this article: to show the untimely coincidence in modes of production in India on empirical grounds. The fact that such an untimely coincidence of neoliberal policies occured in a significant arena of national developmental policies substantiates further that speaking of micro-level establishments of neoliberalism prior to 1991 is insufficient and that neoliberal policies have not been implemented with a big bang in 1991. Instead, such policies have been operational on various scales long before. First, I shall situate Indian policies within developments in global capitalism. A recent study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) points out that more than 60 million workers in 130 nation-states are employed in 3,500 EPZs across the globe (cf. Boyenge 2007). Different nation-states use different denominations for what I intend to label EPZs. These range from ‘special economic zones’ to ‘free trade zones’, ‘foreign trade zones’ and so on. All such zones share a number of decisive policy measures such as the provisions of tax and customs-free manufacturing for a certain number of years, significant national investments in infrastructure and, usually, a statal or parastatal agency is established to run these zones. Given these similarities, the above-mentioned ILO study uses ‘export processing zone’ as the overarching denomination term and I shall follow this from now on. The sheer number of 3,500 EPZs in 2007 indicates that such zones are not a recent phenomenon. Developments in global capitalism of this scale can be expected to have a long history. And there is indeed a wellestablished body of anthropological studies on EPZs in countries such as Mexico, South Korea and Malaysia, showing that EPZs have existed since the 1960s at least (for example, Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Kim 1997; Ong 1987). Relating the global spread of EPZs to neoliberalism timing in anthropology, it has to be said that this spread was actively promoted by a number of supranational organisations long before the Washington Consensus, for example. In tracing this spread, we do not only find the usual suspects like the World Bank or the IMF. Both these organisations made setting up one or several EPZs a precondition for the many Structural Adjustment Programmes and Special Drawing Rights agreements that helped Third World nation-states during the 1980s’ debt crisis. But Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



from the late 1960s onwards, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) was the driving force for the promotion of EPZs as a tool for achieving capitalist development. This is striking because UNIDO was founded as one of the UN institutions promoting the case of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s. In the following, I will briefly delineate that case and show how this conflicted with the spread of EPZs on a policy level. By highlighting how UNIDO promoted the spread of EPZs nevertheless, I give an insight into the way that structural contingencies of capitalism are put into operation by conflicting policy recommendations coming from within a single supranational organisation. The Non-Aligned Movement was a coalition of 77 postcolonial states, including India. From as early as 1954, these nations sought to establish an alternative agenda to the Capitalist and Socialist Blocs dominating Cold War global development policies. One of the leading thinkers of this movement was the Latin American economist Raul Prebisch, whose surname forms part of the Prebisch–Singer thesis introduced earlier. Although items such as sovereignty over resources and limits to rights of multinational corporations were high on UNIDO’s agenda, one section in the organisation was the main driver in the global spread of EPZs throughout the 1970s and after. UNIDO’s export promotion division published a handbook on how to set up an EPZ as early as 1976, held numerous seminars where government employees from all over the world were trained in the establishment of EPZs and where internationally renowned economists gave speeches to support EPZs (cf. Neveling, forthcoming). Furthermore, UNIDO put significant funds into feasibility studies and construction work for the establishment of EPZs. In such zones, we find many of the phenomena identified as significant for the operation of neoliberal regimes: trade union activity is either illegal or severely restricted and, often, zones are under the authority of an agency that operates independently of government and is in charge of legal as well as policing matters. At the same time, foreign investors are offered tax and customs holidays along with other incentives as nation-states seek to establish sites for ‘world-market factories’ (Fröbel et al. 1981) to boost the economic performance of regions—and sometimes, whole nations. The EPZs are then exemplary for the structured contingencies in global capitalism as these neoliberal regimes were established long before neoliberalism became the defining ideology in global policymaking under the Washington Consensus. Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



Corresponding with this timing, the first Indian EPZ was founded in March 1965, next to Kandla port, in the ex-princely state of Kutch that formed part of the Gujarat state. Because of its strategically important location on the border to Pakistan, Kutch was declared a Chief Commissioner’s province on 1 June 1948. First, this meant that as an administrative unit, the region received special administrative and developmental assistance. Second, within the wider process of integration of princely states into the Indian nation-state, significant advantages were granted. The first reward for loyalty was the construction of Kandla port as a substitute for Karachi in the early 1950s. Indian Civil Service bureaucrats were sent to supervise regional administration. Such efforts for smooth integration were successful as there was little turmoil in the Kutch region compared with disputes over the integration of the larger Bombay region with other Gujarat state districts (Wood 1984: 75–76). In Gujarat, economic changes after 1947 were significant. In line with Sanyal’s (2007) account of a pre-capitalist–capitalist alliance operating nationwide and following the Nehruvian development agenda, ‘islands of modernisation’ were established in the wider Ahmedabad–Baroda region’s textile industry and in major cities. Still, a significant impact on early postcolonial growth rates was attributed to the development of Kandla port in the early 1950s (Karan 1964: 341–45). Of utmost concern to this article is the establishment and workings of the KFTZ, and particularly until 1991, when the liberalisation of India is said to have its ‘tipping point’ (Cross 2010: 356). The following presents an analytically driven narrative that will reveal how a neoliberal marketplace was established in Kandla since the formal inception of the KFTZ in 1965. The account I am developing is based on a range of historical sources. But, importantly, it is also an account of the absence of information on India’s first EPZ in the archives of those international organisations that facilitated the global spread of EPZs. Therefore, I am relying, first, on two late-1980s’ assessments of the KFTZ that were to set the agenda for the widening of the Indian EPZ regime in early 1990s. The first is a case study conducted in the late 1980s by M. Dattatreyulu, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), intended for policy advisory purposes (IIFT 1990). Secondly, I am referring to Rajiv Kumar’s authoritative monograph, entitled India’s Export Processing Zones, published in 1989 as a revised version of a working paper written Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



for the state-funded Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER). These works provide an insight into the critical evaluation of Nehruvian export-oriented policies of the 1980s. First, research on behalf of the ICRIER about the workings of the KFTZ and India’s second EPZ, the Santacruz Electronics Export Processing Zone established in Mumbai in 1973, was carried out in 1983 and sought to evaluate the efficiency of government measures to ‘increase foreign-exchange earnings and generate employment’. From 1986 onwards, ‘a thorough cost-benefit evaluation of the two zones’ was started (Kumar 1989: ix–x). These two foundational analyses for Kumar’s above-mentioned book provide strong illustrations that present-day neoliberal India was not established overnight but conformed to the development of neoliberalism on the global scale. This has been compared to the Russian doll, establishing ever additional layers (Mirowski 2009: 430), to capture how more and more associations were set up since 1947 that increasingly gained control of academic departments and research groups in international organisations, government bodies and private sector associations. The fact that in the 1980s, the IIFT had a central role in the evaluation of India’s EPZs is a good example of this. Set up in 1963, this institute is one of the early public–private partnership institutions in India that is typical of neoliberal policies these days. In this case, the 1967 annual report lists 17 board members ranging from the resident director of Tata Corporation to the editor of The Economic Times, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the secretary general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, to professors at the Department of Economics at the University of Mumbai, the chairman of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, the director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, a representative of the Ministry of Finance and the representatives of various export industries, among them the chairman of Hindustan Lever, Bombay (IIFT 1967: Inside Cover).2 Further, annual reports and correspondence with the technical assistance programme of the United Nations Development Programme underline how the IIFT took a leading role in promoting export-oriented development policies in India since the 1960s. Coming back to the image of the Russian doll, it can thus be said that with 2 The material presented on the IIFT can be found at the United Nations Archives and Records Management Division, New York, Box No. S-0175-0618, Folder TE 322/1 India (140-2).




the 1990 IIFT report on KFTZ, one neoliberal institution was evaluating another in India. But the global and national spread of EPZs as drivers of export-oriented development policies does reflect more than neoliberalism’s spread in institutions. The EPZs, as I said earlier, reflect broader trends in discourses and practices such as labour relations, patterns of accumulation and foreign exchange earning policies. It is particularly the latter policies that remain unnoticed in anthropological accounts of EPZs. While such accounts provide important groundwork on labour relations and other patterns of everyday interaction in individual zones, the broader picture of the zones’ role in national policies is often overlooked. As the foreign exchange earnings of India’s EPZs were central to Kumar’s analysis of Kandla (see Kumar 1989: ix–x), I take this as an opportunity to focus on these wider dimensions in the following discussion. The introductory remarks to the 1990 IIFT report are instructive for a historical anthropology of Indian EPZs as they show that the nation was a pioneer in the establishment of such neoliberal policies (Saxena 1990: ii): Among the developing countries India took the early initiative as far back as in 1965 to set up Kandla Free Trade Zone as an instrument of export promotion. By now India has six well-established free trade zones/export processing zones—five multi-product zones and one exclusive zone for electronics...Free Trade Zones have to display greater dynamism to earn foreign exchange taking advantage of the Government’s support measures including fiscal and monetary incentives for export. The Zones should aim for at least doubling their share from the present 2.5% to 5% of all-India exports by the end of the VIII plan. On its part, the Government may take a fresh look at the policy framework and incentive package to attract foreign investors and stimulate Zones’ exports. Plans for the zone date back to 1951 when emphasis was on supporting Kandla port and providing employment for refugees from Sindh—then housed in two new townships of Adipur and Gandhidham (IIFT 1990: 55–59). Gandhidham was built to house refugees from Pakistan and had no more than 100,000 inhabitants in 1990. In 1965, the zone was built 9.6 km north of the all-weather sheltered harbour port of Kandla and 6 km south of Gandhidham. Town and harbour had what we can comfortably Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



call an island status back in 1965. Both the zone and its surroundings were far away from other urban and production centres. Efforts to connect Gandhidham, KFTZ and Kandla harbour with the global economy suffered since Ahmedabad was 375 km away, although railroad links were built in the 1960s. But distances to Bombay and Delhi were 791 km and 1,100 km respectively, and as air traffic remained limited, the IIFT report complained in 1990 that at its ‘Silver Jubilee’, the zone still suffered from ‘its location in a backward area devoid of basic infrastructure’ (ibid.: 37). It was intended that KFTZ and its surroundings would be a melting pot of industrial development. If the zone was demarcated for the purpose of establishing a delimited tax and customs regime, all socio-economic continuities between the zone and its surroundings were welcome. The KFTZ was an island of modernisation of a different kind: port calls at Kandla harbour were too few, heavy draft steamers could not call at all, and storage and other facilities were poor. The KFTZ was dependent on Bombay harbour approximately 800 km away. A flight connection with Bombay was established only in the 1980s, phone calls had to be connected manually by operators in Gandhidham well into the 1980s and telex systems did not work as they should have. Because of scarce industrial infrastructure in the region, supplies, raw materials or semi-finished goods travelled long distances to KFTZ. Gandhidham’s urban infrastructure was poor, so qualified workers were not attracted to the region, let alone expatriates who had expertise in successfully operating other EPZs around the world where they worked as managers and technicians (IIFT 1990: 37–38). Further, limitations in making a ‘neoliberal’ market that attracted investors also lasted well into the 1980s and were attributed by the IIFT to a lack of promotion. The 1990 report claims, for example, that most South Indian entrepreneurs did not even know KFTZ existed and that among foreign investors, KFTZ had a bad reputation (IIFT 1990: 39). Another set of problems was said to be ‘excessive dependence of KFTZ on various Central Ministries and Departments’ regarding procedures and permits, on top of which came lack of credit availability and delayed customs handling (ibid.). Returning to the earlier quote, we find evidence that the IIFT and ICRIER’s late 1980s’ focus on export earnings was in sharp contrast with the 1960s’ threefold aim to develop ‘Kandla port as substitute for Karachi’, to establish ‘100 per cent export-oriented industries’ and to promote ‘Industrial development of the Kutch region’ (IIFT 1990: 14). In the 1980s, the main purpose of an FTZ was to earn foreign exchange. Importantly, Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



the IIFT report declares that transfers of technology, skills, employment generation and the development of peripheral regions were of minor importance to government policies (ibid.: 41). Similarly, Kumar (1989: 13–18) criticises the objectives of Indian EPZs, which were regularly changing and broadened beyond economic reason by the late 1980s. He also concludes that foreign exchange earnings should be a central criterion for assessing EPZ performance (ibid.: 184–85). By the late 1980s, then, the initial developmental aims for KFTZ had been amended. If we want to understand the changes in EPZ performance assessment, it is important to look at the challenges faced by the Indian developmental state and how these were reflected in KFTZ operations. Following the waiver of the gold clause for Indian rupees in 1966, and again in the early 1970s, the Indian state was on the verge of bankruptcy. Similar fiscal problems arose through the 1980s (cf. Ghosh 1999: 170). In the following, I illustrate briefly, how the state’s foreign exchange earnings problems are reflected in the historical development of KFTZ. Following Ghosh (1999), a closer look at the political economy of the Indian state prior to 1990 shows that the mixed economy of the Nehruvian era depended on a close relationship between state institutions and private sector stakeholders. The developmental regime, promoted by a group of industrialists who designed the Bombay plan of 1944, led to a modest diversification of industrial production. From 1950 to 1964, growth accelerated, while the entry of international investors was actively prevented. This growth was absorbed by a few upper-class entrepreneurs and confined to certain regions and sectors. The colonial rural–urban divide was hence aggravated. After 1964, increased state expenditure kept the economy going but created a foreign trade deficit and threatened the financing of imports crucial for the Indian state (ibid.: 168–69). Ghosh’s analysis links well with Sanyal’s notion of ‘complex hegemony’ as it adds to the capitalist aspect within the capitalist–pre-capitalist alliance—how protectionist economic policies safeguarded local capital from international competition. Establishing EPZs all over India would, of course, have had the opposite effect of safeguarding local capital from international competition. Therefore, it is no wonder that a single EPZ was operational in remote western India in 1965 and that there was a sharp taxonomic demarcation of economic transactions taking place under regulations for all of India’s economy, called the Domestic Tariff Area (DTA) and the FTZ. Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



Among the few historical sources available on the early years of Kandla, a paper presented at one UNIDO training workshop on FTZs in the early 1970s stands out (Singh 1974). This reveals that India actively sought advice on the promotion of KFTZ with one of the central international institutions driving the global spread of EPZs. On the other hand, UNIDO officials were extremely keen to commission and fund survey missions, feasibility studies and even support the construction of whole zones throughout the 1970s and the 1980s (Neveling, forthcoming). Interestingly, the historical record of UNIDO does not show any such consultancy and funding going to KFTZ. In line with this indication of very limited concern for networking at an international level among KFTZ officials, is the following. When UNIDO conducted the first-ever global survey on EPZ operations in 1970, the only reply received from Kandla came from a certain D.S. Shah, export manager of a KFTZbased pharmaceutical corporation called Cadilla Laboratories (see Shah 1971). Therefore, it is no wonder that in 1974, all KFTZ units were run by Indian businesses (ibid.: 37). The paper presented at the UNIDO workshop in 1974 portrayed the early years of KFTZ operations not as bleakly as the IIFT report of 1990. National investment for building the zone had been approximately `10 million; and 130 hectares of industrial estate with 185 plots and 16 industrial sheds, as well as railway siding, office buildings, sewers and drains, water and power supply had been developed. According to 1974 estimates, this was equivalent to the value of annual KFTZ exports in 1973 (Singh 1974)—not a bad business then. Given that employment, export earnings and the number of operational units rose sharply from 1975 to 1989, it is surprising that Kandla received a fiercely negative evaluation by the IIFT in 1990. From 1966 to 1975, the number of operational units remained constant at 23, employment grew from 70 to 650 and export earnings increased 29-fold from `0.75 million in 1966–67 to `21.92 million in 1975–76—though with the devaluation of the Indian rupee in the same period, real growth was significantly lower. The KFTZ statistics also indicate that businesses withstood the two global oil crises of 1973 and 1978–79 that otherwise had a strong impact on India’s economy. During the 1980s, growth within the FTZ was impressive. Employment grew by more than 500 per cent, with export value catching up at 400 per cent growth between the financial years 1981–82 and 1988–89 (see IIFT 1990: 23, for all Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



statistics above). So, why did the 1990 IIFT report portray KFTZ as a failure? As mentioned earlier, KFTZ was judged according to its success in generating foreign exchange earnings by exporting to the global market in 1990. If this retrospective evaluation is now considered as a historical document in its own right, the first step for an adequate analysis is to take into account how the changes in the workings of the global market affected KFTZ foreign exchange earnings in the period under consideration, that is, from 1965 to 1990. India’s position in the global market after independence was defined by uneven access to bilateral and multilateral trade and, hence, the nation struggled at times to obtain the commodities needed for successful economic development. Trade with industrially advanced countries provided crucial imports of technical equipment and machinery. But, as is discussed at length in contemporary scientific literature of the 1970s, such transactions could only be done in US dollar or British pound sterling (cf. Menon 1978: 734–38). These currencies were not readily available but had to be earned by way of selling Indian produce to, say, the UK or the US. As such exports were mainly in raw materials or agricultural produce, gains were limited. This is evidence of the applicability of the Prebisch–Singer thesis, outlined in the previous section, to the case of India. In other words, one can speak of limited Indian access to a range of currencies that could buy any commodity traded on the world market (I suggest calling these general purpose currencies and shall elaborate on this next). Countries that were willing to trade commodities like technical equipment and machinery with India on a rupee basis were those of the Socialist Bloc. However, this trade was influenced at times by socialist leaning policies of successive postcolonial Indian governments. Equally, countries of the Socialist Bloc held currencies that were not necessarily usable for general purposes. Therefore, certain commodities that India had to offer were more interesting to these countries than they were to the Capitalist Bloc. Hence, the world of trade was divided according to what a national currency could buy—some currencies could be used for general purposes and others only for limited purposes. For India, to an important extent, this was reflected in a spatial division of global trade. There was one sphere of exchange with the Capitalist Bloc and another with the Socialist Bloc. In the following I explain this in more detail based on the example of KFTZ’s positioning in these spheres of exchange in global trade. Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



Ideally, EPZs should help countries like India attract investors from industrially advanced countries, or enable the establishment of local industries that are competitive in the global market. In other words, EPZs acted as an important entry into the sphere where general purpose money circulated for countries that otherwise produced many commodities that could only be sold in the sphere where currencies with limited purpose circulated. Now, as the listed statistics show, the bulk of KFTZ’s growing exports had gone to the USSR since the early 1970s and this had been the reason for the boom years of KFTZ. Since the early 1980s, this was increasingly discussed as a problem in the two sources on which I have relied so far (cf. IIFT 1990; Kumar 1989). But although the impact of the trade with the USSR was crucial for the development of KFTZ, this is of little concern to present-day writings on Indian SEZs and their historical development. As I will show, the making of the KFTZ into a prospering neoliberal marketplace largely driven by India’s changing economic relations with the USSR is, nevertheless, an excellent example for the untimely coincidence of modes of production under capitalism. This coincidence can only be revealed if the analytical focus is turned to the entanglement of various scales of economic interaction and the way these produce structural contingencies that shape the historical trajectory of a given place—here, the KFTZ. India’s foreign trade accounting was actually using special terms that corresponded with the world trading system’s split into currencies of general and limited purpose before 1990. This was acknowledged in distinguishing between a ‘Rupee Payment Area’ (RPA) and a ‘General Currency Area’ (GCA). The KFTZ’s trade with the Eastern Bloc was carried out on a ‘Rupee Payment basis’ (IIFT 1990: 42). Hence, it happened in the RPA sphere of limited exchangeability, and was the opposite of what the Indian state had in mind when government money was spent on setting up KFTZ and when a wide range of new incentives were granted in the late 1970s and the 1980s (ibid.: 24–25). The roots of this unintended trade go back to the early developmental policies of the postcolonial Indian state. Since the 1950s, the USSR had supported the Indian state with weaponry and large-scale infrastructure for heavy industries. The extent of this support was vast and between 1954 and 1975, India held an 18 per cent share of all USSR credits to foreign nations. Imports could not be matched with Indian exports of equivalent value to the USSR. The Soviet Union granted credits ‘repayable in rupees Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



or exports over 12 years at 2.5%’ (Menon 1978: 744). Up to the 1960s, this was advantageous for India. The negative balance of trade with the USSR was offset by the fact that this was measured in non-convertible rupees. Technology, weapons and machinery could thus be obtained in the RPA and this reduced the burden on earning hard currency reserves and incomes in US dollar or British pound sterling. Also, trade with the Soviet Union was seen as an opportunity for Indian manufacturers to gain confidence from exporting goods to a foreign nation (ibid.: 745). But it soon became evident that transactions since the 1950s had not been aid but trade. Regulated by a ‘bilateral rupee payment agreement’, India owed a massive debt to the USSR. This was accounted for by the RBI that held four different accounts: ‘…a central clearing account, a special account in which were deposited credits extended as assistance to India, another similar account to which were credited debt repayments by India, and a current account’ (Balachandran 1998: 847). As mentioned, the balance between these accounts was in favour of the USSR (and other socialist countries) since the 1950s. This was further compounded by the devaluation of the Indian rupee in 1966. The USSR had insisted on a gold clause written into the agreement. This clause now tied the valuation of Indian rupees to the Bretton Woods system of gold standard-based currencies, although India was, to some degree, abandoning this system already with the devaluation of 1966 (ibid.: 852–55). This was an important issue in bilateral negotiations with the USSR in 1966 but not resolved to the benefit of India. Debt incurred with the USSR prior to 1966 had to be repaid with the equivalent of the pre-1966 gold standard-based rates throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, although the Indian rupee of the time was of much lesser value. In other words, to repay one rupee borrowed before 1966, now a multiple had to be gained in trade with the USSR. The 1966 devaluation and the continuity of gold standard-based debt burden repayable to the Soviet Union, then, added an important temporal layer to the existing spheres of exchange. This is rarely considered in present-day historical anthropology because authoritative accounts of India’s entry into a post-Bretton Woods era relate this, to a large degree, to the 1971 turn in US foreign and fiscal policies (cf. Gregory 1997). Particularly for the case of India, but also other non-aligned nations, this indicates an overemphasis on the US role in Bretton Woods regime. On an analytical level, this shortcoming corresponds with the overemphasis on the Washington Consensus as the watershed between a global Keynesian Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



and a global neoliberal development policy orientation that I have highlighted earlier. The problems caused by this lack of attention to historical developments do not end here, however. As I said, increasing trade with the USSR drove the KFTZ boom in the 1970s. In the 1950s, Nehru had been warned of possible diversions of Indian exports from the Eastern Bloc markets to the world market (Balachandran 1998: 845). In the case of KFTZ exports to the USSR, different problems emerged that had to do with India–USSR bilateral agreements. These agreements may not be central to the profound policy changes in the making of neoliberal India but, as the following will show, they were important to those involved in furthering the development of India’s EPZs in the 1980s, as debts incurred with the Soviet Union for building Nehru’s temples of modernity (see Strümpell, this issue) were repaid with exports from the KFTZ throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. The 1990 IIFT report states that the KFTZ was used ‘as a conduit to reach the USSR market particularly by some of the subsidiary units of multinational companies and NRI units (to make quick profits in a short period and to close down the operations in the Zone later)’ (IIFT 1990: 26). This option was obviously used on a ‘Switch-on and Switch-off basis’ (ibid.: 25), matching the pattern of ‘runaway shops’ in the highly flexible investment market of global EPZs (cf. Neveling, forthcoming). In Kandla, the downside was that in periods of boom, such state-facilitated flexibility was confined to changes in the balance sheets of the four RBI accounts for trading with the USSR (described earlier). Although the zone was fenced off and set apart from the national economy by the legal distinction between foreign trade zone laws and regulations and those applying to the DTA, the direction of export trade broke down these barriers on curreny grounds, as we have seen. The KFTZ pattern of trade with the USSR is best framed analytically by the concept of separate spheres of exchange that I have introduced earlier. This, and the contemporary distinction between a RPA and a GPA describing the access to such spheres of exchange, fits well with a classical anthropological model developed for the analysis of the economy of the Tiv in Western Africa. Paul Bohannan (1967) described how this group’s trade was based on spheres determined by different valuations of commodities and humans exchanged. In the ‘lowest’ sphere, goods for everyday use such as foodstuff circulated. In the ‘middle’ sphere, more Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



valuable goods such as farm animals or slaves circulated. In the ‘highest’ sphere, brides were exchanged. While Bohannan described certain means whereby conversion between these spheres could take place, he saw the impact of Western money in late colonial times as a groundbreaking leveller. Now, there was a universal means of exchange turning all goods into commodities and thereby breaking down the valuation that had guided the separation of spheres of exchange. This had to do with the fact that earlier forms of limited-purpose money were now replaced with general-purpose money. The India-USSR trade and the wider perspective of distinct spheres of exchange guiding the bilateral and multilateral exchange relations of a postcolonial nation-state like India show the limits of Bohannan’s suggestion. Modern currency regimes may be intended to serve universal purposes. But this remains an idealist ambition. Once we analyse actual exchange relations created by the global currency regime of the Bretton Woods era, it is evident that the structural contingencies inherent to capitalism have significant impact on global trade because some currencies can be used for universal purposes and other currencies can only be used for limited purpose. Ultimately, separate spheres of exchange emerge as uneven development in global capitalism attributes some modern currencies with limited purposes, as has been shown for the Indian rupee of the 1960s. In Kandla, the matter was even more complicated and played out as follows. The KFTZ companies were operating in typical EPZ sectors such as chemical and allied products, plastics, leather and other animal products, sports goods, readymade garments, hosiery and knitwear, artificial gems and so on (IIFT 1990: 27). These operations demanded for imports of machinery, raw materials and semi-finished goods that had to be paid for in British pound sterling, US dollar and other currencies that were convertible in the so-called GCA. But exports went to the RPA shared with the USSR on grounds of bilateral agreements. The actual boom years of the KFTZ saw this trade happening at an inflated price because debt services for pre-1966 USSR exports to boost development had to be made on the basis of the pre-1966 valuation of the Indian rupee, while that currency was of much lesser value in the 1970s and after. So, two spheres of exchange, one defined by a synchronic currency valuation and another defined by diachronic currency valuations, were interfering with the initially planned separation of spheres of exchange between a DTA Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



and the FTZ. The KFTZ export earnings from trade with the USSR then were of twofold limited convertability. For one, these exports produced gains in the ‘wrong’ sphere of exchange and thus appeared on the ‘wrong’ sheet in India’s foreign exchange accounts. Second, such exports were an anachronism hindering development in the 1970s as they went into debt services from an earlier era when USSR imports had been used for large-scale industrialisation projects, such as the steel plants of Nehruvian import-substitution policies. Ultimately, we then find an important inversion of Sharma and Gupta’s (2006) account of a neoliberal EPZ regime that benefits from the state-funded education of the Nehruvian state. In Kandla, a neoliberal EPZ regime had to repay the debts incurred during Nehruvian development policies. Authors in the late 1980s took a pragmatic view on this (for example, IIFT 1990: 60). Kumar explicitly addresses and soothes concerns of the Indian government of the time, stating that the debt services from KFTZ exports were, on the one hand, ‘a passing phenomenon and not a structural bottleneck’ for long-term EPZ growth, and on the other hand, ‘as valuable as exports to other countries’ as long as oil or defence equipment were purchased in return (1989: 89–90). But Kumar does not deny that in the late 1980s, importing goods from Indian EPZs could serve USSR interests for saving expenses in fully convertible Western currencies. This was the case when Western producers were ‘directed by the Soviet importer to an Indian firm’ that would then set up an EPZ unit importing Western semi-finished goods and exporting these, sometimes with little value addition, to the USSR (ibid.: 97). Adding to USSR benefits from the neoliberal regime in Kandla was also that in KFTZ, multinational corporations like Hindustan Ciba-Geigy or Hoechst & Sandoz set up subsidiaries in the 1980s. This way, these corporations could trade with the USSR even though that country was subject to Western embargoes for certain commodities (IIFT 1990: 61).

IV Conclusion Ultimately, the purpose of the preceding section was not to evaluate how detrimental KFTZ trade with the USSR was for the Indian national economy. Instead, the ambition was to learn from the development of KFTZ before 1991 about the untimely coincidence in modes of production Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



under capitalism and see how this might inform future works on neoliberal India. India’s EPZ regime was not invented as part of the supposed all-out liberalisation of the economy in 1991. Instead, India was actually the first Asian country to set up an EPZ regime—the KFTZ. But although the KFTZ was a prototype site for neoliberal flexible accumulation, it was impossible to establish a prospering neoliberal marketplace in remote western India in the mid-1960s. The seeds of neoliberal economic practice had nevertheless been planted in the mixed economy of the Indian postcolonial state. When the KFTZ then achieved considerable growth rates since the mid-1970s, access to the intended sphere of exchange—the GCA of Western markets—remained marginal. Instead, KFTZ became a market that bridged several spheres of exchange and allowed for converting what may otherwise have been inconvertible. Multinational companies traded with the Eastern Bloc via Kandla, benefiting from a bilateral trading agreement between India and the USSR on the one hand, and from the investment incentives of the Indian EPZ regime of the time on the other. This underlines the wider case made in this article. Anthropology’s ambition for presenting case studies that show the limits of master-narratives has been applied on rather uncommon scales, targeting a master-narrative in anthropology itself—that of sequential eras defined by radical ruptures in patterns of capitalist accumulation. To make this case, my focus has not been on a thick description of a particular local setting covering a limited period of time in the present or the very recent past. Rather, I have engaged with an extended period of time and assessed the history of the Indian state’s export promotion activities in relation to the global development of EPZs from the 1960s onwards. At the empirical level, this shows that it is rather unviable to distinguish a Nehruvian import-substituting state and neoliberal India as suggested by Sharma and Gupta (2006). It is highly problematic to identify two such historical (and sequential) formations of the Indian state. Instead, Sanyal’s (2007) historical method of carving out the gradual and differential changes in the postcolonial Indian state is suitable for this and other purposes. Cross’s (2010) account of neoliberalism as unexceptional and continuous with earlier socio-economic practices in India also has its shortcomings, as the heuristic separation of historical formations of a pre-neoliberal and a neoliberal Indian state is upheld. This is Cross’s axiomatic framework for pointing out that certain important issues have Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 17–43



not changed in a given local setting, such as an SEZ in Andhra Pradesh. What I have offered instead is an analysis of the structural framework that renders capitalist development uneven and makes it necessary to consider the untimely coincidences of modes of production. This allows for a focus on the variegations of neoliberalism that is not only social and spatial, as has recently been suggested (Brenner et al. 2010), but also temporal. Dating back the implementation of neoliberal policies in India does not mean that the Nehruvian state was not mainly focusing on very different developmental policies. The perspective proposed in this article allows us, instead, to locate neoliberalism on an appropriate analytical scale. Like earlier concepts, such as modernisation or globalisation, neoliberalism is a phenomenon of lower analytical range than capitalism—both in diachronic and synchronic terms. Neoliberalism is best studied as one of many capitalist modes of production that are manifest in untimely coincidences and subject to structural contingencies caused by intentionally uneven development policies. Anthropology has developed a range of models suitable for such analytical work. One of these models I have briefly put to test with the concept of separate spheres of exchange that is aptly suited to describe the difference in exchange qualities of modern currencies. This was reflected by contemporary terminologies of the 1970s, such as GCA and RPA. What we can see when such important anthropological concepts are applied in a historical perspective that accounts for developments beyond the ‘local’ scale are manifestations of the untimely coincidences of modes of production under capitalism, deriving from the structural contingencies inherent to the workings of global capitalism. Neoliberalism is only one such manifestation and should be treated as such.

Acknowledgements Findings in this article are based on a foundational research grant of 38 months awarded by Swiss National Science Foundation for a project entitled ‘A Global History of Export Processing Zones, 1947–2007’. The project included two months of archival and ethnographic research at the UNIDO in March and April 2010. I am greatly indebted to the UNIDO staff members who made access to the archives possible on an exceptional basis. An early version of this article was presented at the conference, ‘The Making of Neoliberal India’, held at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, in September 2009. I thank the participants of the workshop for their comments, and particularly Julia Eckert. This article has benefited from the comments of two unnamed reviewers and the excellent copy-editing by the entire CIS team. I am particularly indebted to the co-editors



The Kandla Free Trade Zone, 1965–91 / 41 of this special issue, Daniel Münster and Christian Strümpell, for their careful reading and comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

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