Devoted to development: Moral progress, ethical work, and divine favor in south India

The article presents rural citizens in postcolonial India as subjects of development: individuals who must submit themselves to an order of power identifying their own nature as a problem, and demanding that they work to develop themselves in order to overcome the limits of this nature. I discuss three dimensions of such subjection to development: development as a normative order of moral imperatives, as a domain of ethical engagement with oneself, and as a relation to others — state officials, teachers, missionaries, and even deities — with whom the ultimate responsibility for one's progress is invested. Focusing on the colonial experience and postcolonial condition of a particular south Indian community classified as a `criminal tribe' in the early 20th century, I confront toil as virtue with toil as fate, juxtaposing the moral horizons of state intervention with the cosmological orientations of ordinary cultivators.