It is impossible to think about India as a nation without thinking about the poverty of its people. Once the idea of a unified Indian nation was articulated in the second half of the nineteenth century, the poverty of the Indian people that resulted from exploitative colonial rule became a defining frame of nationalist economic thought and policies. Following independence from British rule in 1947, poverty or low living standards informed normative ideas around centrally planned economic development. Even as the Nehruvian socialist model was eventually abandoned in 1991 in favour of market-oriented economic policies, the focus on economic growth continued to be framed in the context of Indian living standards, which remained low by the end of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, the poverty of India framing has ceded ground to frames of ‘relative prosperity’ that the Indian middle classes’ experience. Nonetheless, poverty and inequality continue to frame economic discourses of the nation.

The shifts in the framing of India as a nation parallel the changing measure of the nation. The framing of the nation by successive generations of Indians reflects the various stages of economic nationalism in India since the 1860s. Thus, ‘India’ is envisioned in subtly different ways as the early investigations into the negative impact of colonial rule spurred economic and political activism, which in turn became a struggle to secure control over the narratives and policies shaping the economic lives of Indians.