Liquidity, the makings of India's emerging economic body

Under Narendra Modi's premiership, India's economy is rapidly being ‘dematerialized’ towards a digital economy: ‘faceless, paperless, cashless’ in his words. At first glance, it captures the quintessence of free laissez‐faire market reforms, but I argue there is more to Modi's project of liquidity. This paper re‐reads the re‐engineering of India's economy, arguing that this idea of liquidity is what holds together in conflicting tension the polarities for de‐regulated free laissez‐faire market reforms with a re‐sacralized and protectionist nationalism. Grounded in the stories of local builders working the ‘spatial fix’, the multi‐sited ethnography recovers how money is more than some medium of exchange or vessel for abstract value. It is itself constitutive of shared dispositions, meanings, understandings, a vernacular, all in service towards a conceived ideal commons. Reframing our understanding of modern money thus, the paper therefore argues that Modi's monetarist reforms are an assertion for a different kind of collective existence – a re‐sacralized socio‐spatial project wherein membership demands the reconfiguration of self and of relations, as these builders experience first‐hand. The economy is never just about economics; it is inherently political and indelibly personal.