The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 53, 4 (2016): 501–531 SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/Melbourne DOI: 10.1177/0019464616662143 Exchanging words and things: Vernacularisation of political economy in nineteenth-century Bengal Iman Mitra Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India There have been quite a few signiicant studies on the relationship between political economy as a discipline and the modes of colonial governmentality in India, emphasising the contradic- tions that were perceived to exist between the universality of the discipline and the irreducible concreteness of local conditions. In this article, I shall try to argue that a nuanced study of these contradictions would require exploring the modalities of vernacularisation of the economic discipline in the colony. The central focus of this article will be at three Bengali textbooks of political economy, mostly inspired by the famous Irish educationist Richard Whately’s textbook for children. A close reading of these books will demonstrate how a modality of translation was operative in the second half of the nineteenth century where the equivalence between ‘illustra- tions’ from the original and translated texts produced curious displacements and deined the ver- nacular domain on the basis of an exchange-based sociality grounded in the notion of the family. Keywords: Colonial pedagogy, translation, political economy, textbooks, vernacularisation On 27 January 1902, by a resolution in the Home Department, the Government of India decided to appoint a commission for making enquiry into the condition and prospects of the universities established in British India. 1 Apart from preparing an oficial history of university education in India and laying down its constitutional structure, the seven-member commission headed by Thomas Raleigh, member of the 1 Report of the Indian Universities Commission, p. 1. Acknowledgements: I would like thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have improved the article? to a great extent. This article is a part of my PhD thesis and I thank the Indian Council for Social Science Research for their support and encouragement. I am greatly indebted to my supervisors Bodhisattva Kar and Vivekananda Mukherjee for their guidance. The faculty and the staff at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Jadavpur University have been extremely generous in their support. I thank Debarati Bagchi, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Shubhasree Bhattacharya, Swati Chatterjee, Priyankar Dey, Rupsa Ray, Ranabir Samaddar and Ankur Tamuliphukan for their valuable comments and help. at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta on November 30, 2016 ier.sagepub.com Downloaded from