Financial untouchability: a polysemic narrative of digital financial inclusion in Modi’s India

ABSTRACT

India’s post-GFC digital financial inclusion project has been conveyed by an officially constructed polysemic narrative that connotes three distinctive semantic fields: (a) post-colonial Indian developmental policies; (b) post-GFC financialising neoliberal financial inclusion programmes; and (c) traditional Hindu religious values of money and wealth. By assembling a semiological conceptual toolbox from the works of Barthes, Eco, and Ricouer we analyse this specific phenomenon of polysemy in India’s financial inclusion narrative. Based on our findings we develop an argument for a connotative approach to economic discourses as a possible alternative to metonymic understanding of the relationship between language and things in studying markets, economy, and neoliberal policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial inclusion
• narratives
• semiology
• India
• digital financialization

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank International Centre for Advanced Studies at Erfurt University for facilitating this research and Daniel Seabra Lopes, Sandra Faustino, and Inês Faria, from Lisbon School of Economics and Management, who organised the workshop ‘Tales of Transformation: The politics, morals and technologies of contemporary finance’ where the first draft of this paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 see the World Bank's Financial Inclusion website Available at: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/financialinclusion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ismail Ertürk

Ismail Ertürk is Senior Lecturer in Banking at Alliance Manchester Business School, the University of Manchester. His research interests include financialisation, financial innovation, corporate governance, and cultural economy. He co-edited Financialisation at Work (2008) and Routledge companion to banking regulation and reform (2017) from Routledge, Central Banking at a Crossroads – Europe and Beyond (2014) from Anthem Press and co-authored After the Great Complacence (2011) from OUP.

Indradeep Ghosh

Indradeep Ghosh is Executive Director at Dvara Research in Chennai, India. He has a PhD from MIT, an MA from Cambridge University, and a BA from St. Stephen’s College, all in Economics. Indradeep started his research career publishing papers in international macroeconomics, but after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, he has strayed far from his training and begun to think about a wide range of questions spanning both heterodox approaches to economic theory as well as critical theoretic approaches emanating from the other social sciences and the humanities. He has published critical and interdisciplinary papers in Quarterly Journal of Speech and Journal of Contemporary Thought. After returning to India in 2015, Indradeep’s work has increasingly focused on the Indian economy, and he is researching urban transformation, financial inclusion and state capacity.

Kadambari Shah

Kadambari Shah is a Senior Associate at IDFC Institute, public policy/development focused think tank based in Mumbai. Her research focuses broadly on issues related to urbanisation and state capacity in India. In addition to policy, she is also interested in macroeconomics and interdisciplinary economics, particularly in the relationship between literature and economics. Kadambari has a postgraduate degree in Economics and Finance from the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics (MDAE), affiliated to the University of Mumbai. She has a BA from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai majoring in Economics and Literature, with a minor in Anthropology. Kadambari was on the editorial board of several scholarly journals and has presented research papers at international and domestic conferences on development issues ranging from economic growth versus development to the role of race and gender in electoral politics.