ABSTRACT
The economic restructuring of the 1990s has arguably brought about significant changes in the values that organise politico-economic and everyday life in India. One of the most visible changes is the moral weight placed on market competitiveness – at one level signalled by the state’s own efforts at achieving global economic success. The second is the encouragement of homo-economicus, or the self-reliant and productive individual agent as the preferred subject of modern India. This paper explores the connections and the disconnections between an amplified ideology of market competitiveness and the emergence of homo-economicus. It argues that competitiveness and its other – cooperation – as organising values of everyday economic life have combined in new and unexpected ways in the differential emphasis placed on them by economic actors in the last 15 years. Mapping the rearrangement of the moral landscape allows for an investigation of how the success of state-initiated economic reforms is ensured and the ways in which these state-driven initiatives are perceived and negotiated at the local level.
