ABSTRACT
As late as June 1991, India was described as ‘the most self-sufficient non-communist country in the world’.1 Considering that India was open to most other influences in the world, this isolation from the international economy must be regarded as quite remarkable at a first glance. It had, however, its origins in the late nineteenth century’s economic criticism of colonial exploitation. Ideologically, the free market had few proponents among Indian nationalist elites and instead the regulation of the market by political forces was regarded as essential. This market-resistance had a number of sources: patriarchal and traditional Indian models of authority; Gandhi’s thoughts about swadeshi (literally: of the country by itself)2; patriotism in relation to the homeland and its products, Nehru’s and the Indian left’s socialist views; the fear of foreign competition among Indian corporations and their hopes for protectionist politics; and, perhaps most importantly, the awareness that colonialism had succeeded as a result of trade in the form of the East India Company rather than through armed invasion (Khilnani 2002).
