Faraway futures: Life insurance and the human lifespan as a commercial time-horizon in colonial India

This article focuses on the processes, practices and discourses that led to the creation of the uneven and unstable market for life insurance from the 1880s to 1950 in India. It is particularly interested in the concrete ways in which commercial futures had to be lengthened to almost unthinkably long spans of time to make life insurance for Indians seem plausible and viable to both subscribers and companies. The lengthening of commercial futures to approximate better to the human lifespan was a complex and, in some ways, difficult process, heavily influenced by its location in a colonial setting where credible information on subscribers was scarce. This article argues that life insurance could overcome the shorter timescales of commercial life in colonial India only by placing very careful restrictions on who or what could be designated as a legitimate subscriber or insurance company. In effect, urban professionals became the de facto subjects of life insurance in colonial India. The peculiar tension of life insurance in colonial India was the extended futurity embedded in the financial form along with the lack of desire shown in the same futurity by many potential subscribers and smaller companies. This meant that the macro-historical processes of ‘taming chance’ or ‘disciplining the future’ in colonial India were effectively restricted to small pockets of the economy and society.