Drawing from the insights of post-structuralism, the essay questions the ontology of underdevelopment existing prior to its representation and locates the idea of development within discourse. Since language constructs reality within a signifying system, the problem of underdevelopment is a product of particular cultural experiences and is not innocent of power. By weaving objective narratives of evolution and progress, development discourse successfully masquerades its relativism and creates a universal system of scientific knowledge. The essay also engages with postcolonial theory and argues that like the Orient and its savagery, the Third World and its poverty were invented to exercise discipline and control in non-Western territories. Understood thus, development can be a synonym for a civilizing mission. The development expert here appears not as a disinterested change agent but an ideologically driven disciplinarian, and it is for this reason that the emancipatory promise of development is highly suspect. © 2011 SAGE Publications.

Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

CIVILIZATION

developing world

language

POST-COLONIALISM

poverty

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

theoretical study

UNDERDEVELOPMENT

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Does development exist outside representation

Journal of Developing Societies

The paper highlights the complex relationship between development and language and argues that poverty as a condition of underdevelopment is materialized in representation. Instead of limiting the scope of the topic to the rhetorical aspects of development thought, it is proposed that development language produces a specific reality of poverty while writing about it. Using a post-structuralist framework and drawing from various Planning Commission reports on poverty lines, the paper goes on to implicate these reports in the production of authoritative knowledge and the elision of the poor. Through the identification of the cut-off line, which distinguishes the poor from the non-poor, these reports control our ways of knowing and suspend our ability to imagine poverty in any non-institutional manner. Such representation not only omits poor’s everyday experience and converts poverty as experience to poverty as knowledge, but also predicates its objectivity on such elision. The paper also highlights the slippages and contradictions in these reports, and shows how in the seeming inevitability of poverty knowledge, people find innovative ways to appropriate and disrupt it. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Social Semiotics

The development language: BPL category and the poverty discourse in contemporary India

This paper is about the making of culture, its problematic relation with national and global discourses on development, but more than anything else, the shifting nature of what we call culture and the place of development in it. It offers a critique of both the modernist framework, which sees culture as development's other as well as the post-development tendency to exaggerate local cultures as the space of genuine development. Instead, it makes a case for approaching culture as a site of conformity and contestation and where development realities are produced, thus making development a temporal and discursive construct. The questions that guide this paper are whether culture exists as a fixed essence on which development works in an antagonistic relationship or development constructs culture in a complementary alliance, and whether culture is a homogeneous space of belonging or a slippery site where multiple meanings and truths scramble for legitimacy. These questions are answered by drawing from, and expanding on, existing cultural development literature, as well as by engaging with two environmental movements from India. © 2017 Association of Global South Studies, Inc.

Journal of Global South Studies

The making of culture in contemporary Indian environmental movements

Does development exist outside representation?

International Journal of Current Research in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences

Anti-ulcer activity of Medicinal Herbs - A Review

MedPulse International Journal of Anatomy

Study of thyrocervical trunk in adult cadavers

Journal of British Studies

Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home. Chicago, London, and New Delhi: University of Chicago Press and Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. x+259. $18.00 (cloth).

Third World Quarterly

Orientalism and African Development Studies: the ‘reductive repetition’ motif in theories of African underdevelopment

Journal	Journal of Developing Societies
ISSN	0169796X
Open Access	No