ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt at capturing an idea of Indian political modernity out of a range of material and social practices from everyday life in the factories deployed for carving stone. Dipesh Chakrabarty's readings of Marx's Capital have been critical in the author's understandings of the relations of production in the carving factories of western India. The chapter considers Chakrabarty's frameworks in arguing that the embodied orientations and social trajectories therein can never be fully subsumed by the universal logic of capital, pointing to an excess that capital needs but can never truly domesticate. This has involved me making relations with a network consisting of the current generation of Sompura temple architects, patrons, factory owners, technicians, contractors, supervisors and karigars in Gujarat and Rajasthan. The margins of contingency are noticeably less pronounced in the more recent factories that deploy CNC machinery for carving temple fragments, driven primarily by the economics of repetition and precision.
