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Overview
Based on fieldwork done in the village of Alipur in rural north India from the early 1980s through the 1990s, Postcolonial Developments examines development itself as a post–World War II sociopolitical ideological formation, critiques related policies, and explores the various uses of the concept of the “indigenous” in several discursive contexts. Gupta begins with an analysis of the connections and conflicts between the world food economy, transnational capital, and technological innovations in wheat production. He then examines narratives of village politics in Alipur to show how certain discourses influenced governmental policies on the green revolution. Drawing links between village life, national trends, and global forces, Gupta concludes with a discussion of the implications of environmentalism as exemplified by the Rio Earth Summit and an examination of how global environmental treaties may detrimentally affect the lives of subaltern peoples.
With a series of subtle observations on rural politics, nationalism, gender, modernization, and difference, this innovative study capitalizes on many different disciplines: anthropology, sociology, comparative politics, cultural geography, ecology, political science, agricultural economics, and history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822399759 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/20/1998 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Lexile: | 1450L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Akhil Gupta is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.
Read an Excerpt
Postcolonial Developments
Agriculture in the Making of Modern India
By Akhil Gupta
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9975-9
CHAPTER 1
Agrarian Populism in the Development of a Modern Nation
* * *
In this chapter I attempt to delineate what the "postcolonial condition" means for some rural subjects of a "modern" nation-state. Taking Appadurai's insight that there are other histories and modalities of being modern than the one that has characterized "the West" (1991), I endeavor to investigate ethnographically what such "alternative modernities" might consist of by considering the role of development discourses in postcolonial India. To assert that modernity takes different forms, given the specificities of particular historical situations, would perhaps be accurate enough but would remain at the level of a truism. One needs to ask, What makes for a specifically postcolonial experience of modernity? And how is that experience shaped by conjunctural relations of inequality that crisscross global, national, regional, and local levels to form particular fields of power?
I argue that the postcolonial period in India is characterized by the distinctive character of the relationship between modernity and development. "Development" has served as the chief legitimating function of ruling regimes and as the most important "reason of state" in independent India. This is quite ironic, for developmentalism, in its evolutionary assumptions, in its essentialization of differences, in its presumption of homogeneity within areas considered essentially different, and in its narratives of progress, shares a great deal with colonial, and specifically Orientalist, discourses. Rather than argue that "development" becomes a means to recolonize the Third World, I demonstrate that it enters a series of relationships that institute a new form of government rationality. I borrow the notion of governmentality from Foucault (1991) and extend it to refer to those novel institutional modes for the global regulation of populations, bodies, and things, of which development is a primary example (see also Scott 1995).
Here, I analyze the development of agriculture as a critical link in the forging of a "modern" nation. Global discourses of development and international food regimes play a central role in shaping the evolution of national policies and agricultural practices at the local level. One of the most important ways in which discourses of development have affected the everyday lives of villagers in North India is through populist politics, policies, and programs. Populism not only has been the medium in which the discourses and practices of development are conveyed to villagers but has also provided one of the critical axes along which oppositional groups have organized support for their actions. The failure of development forms the rallying cry for oppositional groups to coalesce. Accordingly, I pay attention both to governmental and oppositional populisms and to their changing relationship over time. If postcolonial modernity is defined by the centrality of "development," then populism, especially agrarian populism, is its most important feature.
Because I have attempted to bring together an unusually ambitious set of scholarly literatures in making the argument here, a word about method is necessary. I have positioned historical changes in national agricultural policy within the broader framework of the global food economy and international discourses of development. Since the latter are intended mainly for contextual purposes, I have resorted to the secondary literature to explain the specificities of populist policies and their reception in India. My explanation of populism concentrates equally on state policies and regional movements. Here, I have used the writings of those who formulated policy, newspaper accounts, and the secondary literature. Finally, to interpret what populist policies meant to rural folk in western Uttar Pradesh, my ethnographic fieldwork proved invaluable. In what follows, therefore, I use a combination of methods derived from anthropology, sociology, policy analysis, and political geography to address the intimate connections between what are sometimes represented, I believe erroneously, as discrete levels of analysis— global, national, regional, and local.
I begin this chapter by attempting to locate the central role played by agriculture in the development of a modern nation. I first analyze development as a modernist discourse and next look at the role of agriculture in colonial and nationalist ideas of "progress" in India during the late nineteenth century and in the two decades immediately preceding independence. These connections between agriculture and modernity were to be transformed by the institutionalization of development and by the structure of the world food economy in the era that followed the Second World War. Postcolonial discourses of development in India reflected a tension between "industry-first" and "agriculture-first" strategies, which was eventually defused by a famine that led to a crisis of sovereignty and the green revolution.
The origins of agrarian populism lay in this crisis of sovereignty, which is the subject of the second section. The green revolution was instituted during the tenure of Indira Gandhi as prime minister, and it was at that very time that she turned to populist programs. To understand why that happened, I first briefly examine the theoretical literature on populism to see the links posited between populism and "underdevelopment." Next, I investigate what it was about Indira Gandhi's rhetoric and policies that qualified them as populist. The section ends with a consideration of how populism was "received" by its audience and what enabled it to succeed among the poor and dispossessed.
The third section concerns the deployment of populism by oppositional groups based in the class of well-to-do owner-cultivators. The first part briefly sketches a history of the most important populist peasant party in North India, the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD). After the demise of the BKD in 1987, a new group called the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) took over and organized a series of successful protests. I closely examine the populist ideology and tactics of the BKU , both the features which have made it so successful and those which have limited its appeal. Because development has played such a central role in the legitimation strategies of postcolonial regimes, the failure to implement development has proved to be an effective strategy for antigovernmental mobilization. Indira Gandhi's own populism relied on an attack on previous regimes for failing to make the fruits of development available to the poor. The BKU, therefore, took the rhetoric of the crisis of development from the ruling Indira Congress and turned it against the regime, making corruption and the government's antirural policies its two main planks. TheBKU's success resulted from a clever combination of specific complaints with a broader critique of the industry-first, urban-based vision of a modern nation being pursued by successive governments.
The last section of the chapter situates the struggle over agrarian populism in India in the broader context of changes in the global food economy in the seventies and eighties. Populist struggles within the country took a different turn with the imposition of a structural adjustment program, the signing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the advent of a new kind of plant biotechnology rooted in genetic engineering, and the entry of food-sector multinationals. I consider the reaction of well-to-do peasants to these transformations in greater detail in Chapter 5. This chapter ends by noting that the terrain on which populist struggles in the agricultural sector were based has irrevocably shifted as a result of the transformations in the world food economy in the two decades since the early seventies. A particular strategy of development, in which agricultural subsidies played a central role to ensure national food self-sufficiency is being replaced by an export-oriented, "market-friendly" direction. Because such a path overtly deviates from the history of the "developed" countries, it has thrown into question the possibility of achieving modernity through mimicry. Is it any wonder then that development itself is increasingly being questioned as a desirable goal?
The Place of Agriculture in a Modern Nation
To speak of modernity is less to invoke an empirical referent than a self-representation of the West. In this self-representation, consciously built on a difference with another (the "Orient," the "rest"), the West emerges as the "model, the prototype and the measure of social progress" (Hall 1992:313). As Hall (1992:277) points out, "the 'West' is an historical, not a geographical, construct." In speaking of "the West," I refer to the effects of hegemonic representations of the Western self rather than its subjugated traditions. Therefore I do not use the term to refer simply to a geographic space but to a particular historical conjugation of place, power, and knowledge. The "modern," the celebration of Western progress, civilization, rationality, and development, came to be instituted as a global phenomenon through colonialism and through multiple and diverse modes of governance and domination in the postcolonial world (Hall 1992). After the formal demise of colonialism, one of the chief mechanisms by which this self-representation has been promulgated has been through the discursive formation known as "development" (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995). Development is a discourse that rehearses, in a virtually unchanged form, the chief premises of the self-representation of modernity: the belief in teleological narratives; the idea that "progress" occurs along a single path; the conviction that "Western," industrial countries have already arrived at the telos (although it would be more accurate to say that they were always already there); and, finally, the notion that it is nation-states, configured according to a particular logic of territorial exclusion and certain concepts of sovereignty, that constitute the basis of analysis and action. "Development," in other words, is Orientalism transformed into a science for action in the contemporary world.
This self-representation of modernity, as promulgated by the models, doctrines, policies, programs, institutions, and discourses of development, is an inescapable feature of everyday life in contemporary northern India, as in many other parts of the world. To live in the village that I have called Alipur is to confront in many different contexts, shapes, and forms the self-representation of modernity through the discourses, institutions, and practices of "development." When I speak of alternative forms of modernity, I refer in this minimal way to an experience of being, in which the self-representation of modernity is a pervasive and omnipresent fact. At the same time, as will be amply clear in what follows, it does not mean that people in rural India lead, or aspire to lead, "Western" lives.
What, then, does it mean to say that there are other ways of being modern? To the extent that teleological views of history, a belief in progress, a conviction of one's own backwardness compared with the "West," and a naturalization of the spatial imperatives of the nation-state operate to configure the self-understandings of postcolonial subjects, they are indeed profoundly within the space and spell of "the modern." But it is also clear that the state of being modern is not a homogeneous experience, not just across the world, but within the political and geographic space of the nation-state. So what accounts for the difference of "the modern" in India? Clearly, one of the differences lies in the fact that the properties of "the modern" adumbrated above underspecify its contents. Employing a teleological narrative of history, for example, says almost nothing of its contents. This was evident in the deep conflicts between colonial and nationalist interpretations of the past, both of which were committed to teleological narratives.
There is, however, another factor which to my mind is far more critical. What makes Indian modernity different is that the fact of difference itself is a constitutive moment that structures the experience of modernity. In other words, what makes the experience of modernity different in India is that, within experience, the self-representation of modernity is never absent. It is found not as an "absent presence" in the way that "the rest" is to conceptions of "European" identity but as an active presence, as present-to-itself. For this reason, the attempt to locate "India" precisely in the narratives of modernity—premodern, antimodern, just plain modern, or postmodern—is doomed to failure if it refuses to recognize its own complicity with the self-representation of modernity. To search for premodern or antimodern critiques of "development," therefore, as many prominent intellectuals are currently doing, is to occupy a space of opposition created by modernity's representation of itself. This is not to deny the importance of articulating alternatives to "development." To the contrary, it is to argue that the search for alternatives can begin only by rigorously acknowledging the impossibility of transcendence. Modernity's representation of itself is a social fact in the villages of northern India, and not "merely" an analytic choice available to the scholar. That most social science continues to employ modernity's self-representation as well is a separate, if related, question.
The particular form in which self-representations of modernity are deployed most frequently in the Third world is through development discourse. The symptoms of "underdevelopment" are clearly revealed through its agricultural sector. If a high proportion of the net domestic product is dependent on agriculture and if a large proportion of its labor force is employed on farms, then the nation-state is pronounced to be afflicted with the malady of "underdevelopment" (Varshney 1995:200). For this reason, the development of agriculture is an index of the health of the nation. The normalized narratives of development constructed from the "stylized" facts of a few nation-states reveal that agricultural surpluses, extracted by taxation and savings, form the basis on which industrial expansion takes place. Food self-sufficiency, as we shall see, becomes a crucial geopolitical issue. For all these reasons, the agricultural sector is absolutely central to the development of a "modern" nation-state.
In the rest of this chapter, I argue that one cannot understand the project of "developing" the agricultural sector in India without seeing how populism shapes its ideological climate, institutional structures, and the daily practices of different rural subjects. Development practices are crucially shaped by different appropriations of populist policies and the struggles that ensue from those. Understandings of development are largely dependent on the standardized use of certain kinds of aggregate statistics: national income, employment, trade, output, population, and so on. Although no doubt valuable for some purposes, such statistics do not always reveal what the experience of everyday life means for people in a particular "development regime."
"Development" as a modernist discourse
Development has thus become one of those words—like security or democracy—which apparently requires no definition, for everyone knows, instinctively, what it is. It is what "we" have.—Kate Manzo, "Modernist Discourse and the Crisis of Development Theory"
Even an archaeologist of "development discourse" would pause to wonder at the remarkable consequences of the apparatus that was put into place at Bretton Woods in 1944, when the world Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were created (Mason and Asher 1973:11–35; Meier 1984:10–23; Lumsdaine 1993). A regime of development took over where formal colonial rule came to an end. As newly independent nations joined the table at the United Nations (UN), they were put into a prefabricated slot, namely, that of "underdeveloped nations" (Pletsch 1981). Through a small and standardized list of selected indices—gross national product (GNP), savings, investment, population density, production, input/output ratios, and balance of payments—operating on an already chosen division of "sectors"—agriculture, industry, infrastructure, transportation, and energy—countries were deemed to be suffering from the malady of underdevelopment (Escobar 1995:3–4, 23–24). The power of development discourse is evident in the declaration, on President Kennedy's suggestion, of the 1960s as the United Nations "Development Decade" (Lumsdaine 1993:47). A full history of the rise and proliferation of the development apparatus remains to be written. My intention here is to focus on one very specific aspect of this story. I donot, therefore, intend to summarize theories of development but merely to pick up on a few, less-noted aspects that critics of development have pointed out.
The particular aspect of development that I wish to explore becomes evident when we ask who is being referred to when Manzo states that "development" has become a self-evident concept, so that "everyone knows, instinctively, what it is." In other words, what is being proposed here is the formation of a certain kind of subject. This subject position is well captured in the memorable words of Ivan Illich, commenting on the extraordinary effects of the Bretton Woods institutions: "Scarcely twenty years were enough to make two billion people define themselves as underdeveloped." Development discourse makes people subjects in both senses that Foucault emphasizes: subjected to someone else by a relationship of control and dependence, and tied to one's own identity through self-knowledge (1983:212). "Developed" and "underdeveloped" are not just terms that indicate the position of nation-states in an objective matrix defined by quantitative indicators, as the formal operations of the development apparatus—exemplified by the tables of the World Bank's annual reports—would have us believe. They are also, and to my mind far more importantly, forms of identity in the postcolonial world. To be "underdeveloped" is to be a national community that is inferior, backward, subordinate, deficient in capital and resources, an inadequate member of the international order, and (by extension) a shabby imitation of the "developed."
(Continues...)
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