Agrarian Modernity and Development in India

Agrarian Modernity and Development in India
Author: Shibsankar Jena
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-11-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527552896

The social science discourse on the power of modernity and its everyday negotiation with tradition and locality in India has been a matter of continuous debate and discussion among academicians since the colonial era. By taking agriculture as a special field of investigation, this book describes the condition of ‘modernity’ in the agrarian social system of contemporary India. Farming is not only an economic activity, but also a personality formation where ‘status’ plays a significant role in Indian society. Taking ‘culture’, and ‘social status’ as the two important variables in the local ‘agriculture as performance’, this book develops a sociology of knowledge approach towards agrarian modernity and development in postcolonial India.

The Great Agrarian Conquest

The Great Agrarian Conquest
Author: Neeladri Bhattacharya
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2019-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438477414

This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.

Capital, Interrupted

Capital, Interrupted
Author: Vinay K. Gidwani
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 365
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1452913714

The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels’ intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide. With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not a frame of economic organization based on the smooth, consistent operation of a series of laws, but rather an assemblage of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, Gidwani points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism, raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies’ critique of Marx and capitalism, and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured together in ways that can equally impair and enable profit and accumulation. Both theoretically astute and empirically informed, Capital, Interrupted unsettles encrusted understandings of staple concepts within the human sciences such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism. Vinay Gidwani is associate professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota.

India's Agrarian Structure, Economic Policies, and Sustainable Development

India's Agrarian Structure, Economic Policies, and Sustainable Development
Author: V. S. Vyas
Publisher: Academic Foundation
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2003
Genre: Agriculture
ISBN: 9788171883233

Presenting Professor V. S. Vyas's approach to the major national and global challenges facing Indian agriculture, this book makes available his research and writing on how policy interventions, technological changes, and institutional developments are impacting the economy of those directly dependent on it for their livelihood.

India's Persistent Dilemma

India's Persistent Dilemma
Author: F. Tomasson Jannuzi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 042972344X

This book shows that the failure of successive Indian governments to effect meaningful agrarian reforms has led to a political economy in rural India that is shaped, as it was prior to independence, largely by the interests of an elite minority of landholders. .

Postcolonial Developments

Postcolonial Developments
Author: Akhil Gupta
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822322139

This definitive study explores what the postcolonial condition has meant to rural people in the Third World. Based on fieldwork done in the village of Alipur in rural north India from the early 1980s through the 1990s, POSTCOLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS challenges the dichotomy of "developed" and "underdevelopoed", and offers a new model for future ethnographic scholarship. 15 photos.

From Tradition to Modernity

From Tradition to Modernity
Author: S.K. Khutiala
Publisher: Abhinav Publications
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2003-06
Genre:
ISBN: 817017158X

India is undergoing accelerated change with industrialisation as a goal widely shared by India’s planners. Domestic industry is being partially replaced by a more efficient factory system and clearly India has committed herself to modernisation. To understand the phenomenon of modernisation and its social consequences, we need dialectic of social knowledge concerning the phenomenon and its impact on people. The research of this book is intended to be a contribution to such knowledge. Specifically, this is a study of industrial workers in two privately owned factories in North India. These two factories are located in small towns and draw a large share of their labour force from surrounding rural areas and villages. To measure the impact of industrial employment, the sample of industrial workers is compared to a controlled sample of agricultural workers. Our basic goal in attempting to understand the process of modernisation was to explore (a) the underlying reasons why men shift from farm to factory work, and (b) the subsequent changes, which come about in their attitudes and values.