This is an excerpt from Chandan Gowda’s latest book Longing for an Elsewhere: Mysore and the Making of India’s Developmental State (Oxford University Press, 2026).§Global Visibility and Civilisational Recognition The Bhadravati Iron Works (BIW) was a precious symbolic asset for Mysore. State guests like Mahatma Gandhi, J.C. Bose, and several British officials were invited to visit the BIW. Official and popular books on Mysore unfailingly included photographs of the iron plant. The BIW products were prominently displayed at the annual state Dasara exhibition, which attracted more than half a million visitors. They were also displayed at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. The state’s official exhibition delegate wrote that the exhibition handbook had allotted ten pages for the Mysore exhibits and asked Mysoreans to feel gratified that their state had been well represented in an international forum. Regretting that visual illustrations did not accompany the hand book’s section on Mysore, as they would have provided persuasive evidence for the state’s progress, he strove to convey a visual sense for the exhibits from BIW: “A complete collection of the products of the Mysore Iron Works, consisting of specimens of wood used, the charcoal produced, the pyroligenous liquors, the grey acetate of lime, wood alcohol, tar, floatation oils and other distillates, have been displayed. The superiority of the Mysore char coal pig iron, which nearly approaches in quality the Swedish iron, is evident even to a casual glance of the bar shown, and some articles made from it have been displayed.”Even a casual glance of the displayed iron bar could prove its quality. Moreover, Mysore was second only to Sweden; it had fared well in the internationalized hierarchy of production standards. The Mysore state elite were clearly participants in the politics of civilizational recognition on the global stage, where hegemonic ideas of unilinear progress classified countries as either modern or backward. The colonial denial of recognition to the colonized societies was enacted in the presence of a global audience. Mysore’s initiatives toward achieving self-propelled progress, and thereby proving the falsity of the colonial myths, were potentially open to evaluation by this imagined global audience that subscribed to a universal measure of progressive conduct. Testifying to this dynamic of civilizational recognition, a local newspaper argued that the BIW functioned well contra negative predictions: Cover of ‘Longing for an Elsewhere: Mysore and the Making of India’s Developmental State’ by Chandan Gowda.“Then again, the very fact that Mysore is running so considerable an undertaking as this [BIW], and that in the face of great difficulties her Government has succeeded in carrying it through until it has become a paying proposition, is in itself an advertisement for things Mysorean. Nothing succeeds like success, and every iota of increased activity in a State or community is observed and noted in the outside world . . . Progress is essential: nothing stands still, and nations, States and communities must either advance or retrocede.” Exhibitions as Instruments of DevelopmentUnlike an industrial undertaking like the BIW, the Mysore state’s work in agriculture did not generate symbolic assets amenable to being flaunted outwardly in its quest for recognition for attaining progress. State guests were usually not taken to visit the experimental farm plots or shown modern agricultural implements and orderly arrangements of cattle and the like, nor did their photographs which were found in the Department of Agriculture (DOA)’s publications make their way to the tourist books, brochures and catalogs that the Mysore state published and circulated in colonial India and abroad. Photographs of the KRS Dam and Mysore Sugar Factory were found in these publications, for instance, but not those of sugarcane and paddy fields. The deep symbolic association of agricultural activity with tradition and backwardness did not make it amenable as visual evidence of progress in the Mysore state elite’s symbolic claims for recognition from a global audience. The head of the DOA in Mysore rued that the pioneer work of the agricultural departments in Mysore and elsewhere in colonial India had not been “properly recognised, largely because it [was] lacking in those spectacular elements which we are only too prone to look upon as a necessary accompaniment of progress.” However, the Mysore state relied on symbolic displays pertaining to scientific agriculture to persuade local farmers to appreciate and accept it as a superior farming method. In Walter Benjamin’s classic observation, the early industrial exhibitions and the subsequent world exhibitions in England and France offered spectacles of commodity-displays while hiding the social nature of their production. They were, for him, also a pre-eminent venue where “the crowds were conditioned to the principle of advertisements” (Buck-Morss 1989: 85). Exhibitions in Europe also showcased the virtues of modern science and technology, the achievements of modern industry and the continent’s imperial power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further, exhibitions like the Great Exhibition of 1851 upheld “an economic relationship that saw non-Western countries fulfilling the role of rural neighbours to their urban counterparts in the West” (Young 2009: 141). In contrast, the exhibitions organized by the state in Mysore served vastly differing ends. They were a means for the state elite to announce their keen embrace of development and their desire to lift local society out of backwardness. They helped affirm the value of modern technology for harnessing local resources and initiating industrial activities. The first Agricultural and Industrial exhibition held in Mysore in 1888 makes the contrasting exhibition rationale evident. This exhibition, the president of the Exhibition Committee explained, intended “to gauge the resources of the country,” “stimulate agricultural and industrial pursuits,” and facilitate the enhancement of the quality and value of manufactured products through creating “a healthy emulation” and increasing demand for them. Unlike in British India, where the agricultural and industrial exhibits were symbolic vehicles of colonial triumphalism, they appeared here as the means that the Mysore state itself embraced as essential for reshaping local society. And in contrast to the exhibitions proclaiming the need for economic self-reliance at the INC sessions in colonial India, which were suffused with anti-colonial sentiments, the ones in Mysore were rooted in a developmental paternalism and projected a symbiotic relationship between the state and its subjects in rebuilding a modern economy. In 1906, an Agricultural and Industrial exhibition was incorporated as a feature of the annual Dasara festival celebrations in Mysore. These exhibitions symbolically integrated a vision of industrial progress with the festive rituals in Mysore. A chief motivation behind the annual exhibitions was to make them serve as vehicles for educating local people into the virtues of modern society. Furthermore, these pedagogical aims operated alongside a visible claim for civilizational recognition of Mysore’s commitment to attaining industrial development. In his speech at the 1907 annual exhibition, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV underlined the pedagogic importance of exhibitions. While they could not be expected to have an immediate or radical impact on the agriculture and industries of Mysore, he was in “no doubt whatever of their educative value and of their far-reaching influence in the cause of progress,” since they held out an opportunity to know what was being produced, suggested new directions for the skills of craftsmen and shared information about new markets and sources of supply for distributors. Exhibitions also schooled local farmers in the methods of modern agriculture. After elaborating the great need for inculcating utilitarian thought-habits among farmers, the maharaja stressed the significance of exhibitions for achieving this need: “For this we need a whole chain of exhibitions, reaching from the village to the taluk and from the taluk to the district and culminating, I hope, in a Dasara Exhibition here, which will show year by year that the lesson is being learnt that only the best is good enough in Mysore and that each year’s best has got to be a little better than that of the year before.” The exhibitions, in this view, integrated people in villages, taluk, and district headquarters in a network of information relays about the improvements in production standards. In holding up an economic map of symbiotic relations between the different parts of Mysore, local interconnectedness was also envisioned on the plane of communications, endorsing thereby a new style of visualizing the future and orienting the polity toward it. Rewards were offered for the exhibits to encourage farmer participation. Lastly, each successive exhibition served as a barometer of progress in Mysore. Dewan Mirza Ismail’s remarks at the Arts and Industrial Exhibition in Bangalore in 1927 are illustrative: “In an industrially backward country like ours, exhibitions can play a very large part in the development of industries for exhibitions are the time-keepers of progress. They record our advancement in many departments of human activity.” In the European context, Benjamin observed that each successive exhibition had to outshine the previous one and bear visible testimony to national progress. Europe’s aspirations for progress, however, did not unfold within the time horizon of backwardness found in Mysore. At the Mysore Dasara Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition in 1927, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV stressed the exhibition’s role in displaying the increasing industrial self-reliance of India as well as in serving as a tool for advertisement, connecting the producer with the consumer in a country where newspapers, posters and the shop window did not play the major role they did in smaller countries with greater wealth. Since newspapers, posters, and shop windows had not evolved as the means of advertising in Mysore, the state elite upheld the exhibition as an essential tool of advertising and as an opportunity for showcasing Mysore as a modern economy.References:Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Young, Paul. 2009. Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Chandan Gowda is Professor and Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru.