Breaks the Arrogance of the Market

A Conversation on Cooperation in Colonial Odia Public Sphere

Abstract

‘Breaks the Arrogance of the Market’: A Short Conversation on Cooperation in Colonial Odia Public Sphere

The colonial civil society in the town of Cuttack in the closing years of the nineteenth-century initiated a cooperation movement which aimed to protect the interest of urban consumers vis-à-vis the unbridled profit-making impulse of the market. Madhusudan Das, a wealthy lawyer and entrepreneur, was the prime mover behind the initiative. His principal interlocutor was Gourishankar Ray, the founder editor of the Utkal Dipika, the most prominent weekly in the town. This short paper offers an outline of the urban initiative for consumer cooperation and analyzes the conversations and discourses it generated in the local press. It reads this urban initiative as a project of cultural translation: the local civil society, quite self-consciously, sought to translate the Victorian metropolitan discourse on cooperation into Odia. A study of it contributes to a finer understanding of the formations of colonial modernity in the region.