UCLA

This dissertation is a linguistic anthropological study of developmental governance in the densely multilingual Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, India. Widely lauded as India’s newest leader in “inclusive growth,” Himachal Pradesh has witnessed rapid transformations over the last thirty years that have propelled it to the top of the human development indices in India, particularly for having achieved gender- and caste-balanced outcomes in education, health, and poverty alleviation. As official indicators have risen, however, rural livelihoods in the state have become increasingly threatened by declining agricultural productivity, vast unemployment, and climatic instability. Despite these growing forms of economic and environmental precarity, Himachal continues to be framed as an exceptional developmental success both by scholars and ordinary citizens alike. This dissertation engages such paradoxical claims of developmental success amidst longstanding and growing forms of inequity in the region by asking: how is Himachal’s exceptionalism made and maintained? That is, how do state and non-state development workers produce, interpret, and transform the meanings of poverty and prosperity in everyday life, and to what effects?

Drawing on twenty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork across state and non-state development institutions in District Kangra, I argue that Himachal’s exceptionalism is not the result of the benevolence of state welfare programs or the successful implementation of its policies, but of the sustained efforts of development workers who produce, interpret, and erase signs of poverty and prosperity in their everyday interactions with citizens. I refer to these processes as semiotic labor, and trace how particular ways of speaking become ideologically tied to forms of institutional personae, expertise, and authority, thereby shaping how the meanings of welfare policy’s categories and criteria are enacted through bureaucratic and democratic decision-making processes. I demonstrate that semiotic labor is central to the everyday production of rural prosperity in Himachal, as it renders legitimate forms of access and exclusion from welfare and democratic politics. By tracing the semiotic logics through which poverty and prosperity, deservingness and dependency, and agency and responsibility gain their meanings in context, this dissertation underscores how everyday communicative practices become integral to the constitution and consequences of the developmental state in India and beyond.