The Making of Land and the Making of India

The Making of Land and the Making of India

Author: Nikita Sud

Publisher:

Published: 2021-02-04

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780190130206

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What is land and how is it made? In this path-breaking study of sites in western, eastern, and southern India, Nikita Sud argues that land is not simply the solid surface of the earth. It is best understood as a materially and conceptually dynamic realm, intimately tied to the social


The Making of Land and the Making of India

The Making of Land and the Making of India

Author: Nikita Sud

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 019099262X

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What is land and how is it made? In this path-breaking study of sites in western, eastern, and southern India, Nikita Sud argues that land is not simply the solid surface of the earth. It is best understood as a materially and conceptually dynamic realm, intimately tied to the social. As such, land transitions across porous registers of territory, property, authority, the sacred, history and memory, and contested access and exclusion. While states, markets, and politics in post-liberalization India try to make land suitable for 'growth' and 'development', the relationship between the soil and institutions is never straightforward. A state attempting to order a layered topography is frequently stretched into shadowy domains of informality and unsanctioned practices. A market may be advanced, but remains precariously embedded in sociality. Politics could challenge the land-making of the state and markets. It may also effect compromises. Attempts at constructing a durable landed order thus reveal our own (dis)orders. In attempting to 'make' the land, Sud's intriguing study shows how the land simultaneously 'makes' us.


Land of seven rivers

Land of seven rivers

Author: Sanjeev Sanyal

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2012-11-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 8184756712

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DID THE GREAT FLOOD OF INDIAN LEGEND ACTUALLY HAPPEN? WHY DID THE BUDDHA WALK TO SARNATH TO GIVE HIS FIRST SERMON? HOW DID THE EUROPEANS MAP INDIA? The history of any country begins with its geography. With sparkling wit and intelligence, Sanjeev Sanyal sets off to explore India and look at how the country’s history was shaped by, among other things, its rivers, mountains and cities. Traversing remote mountain passes, visiting ancient archaeological sites, crossing rivers in shaky boats and immersing himself in old records and manuscripts, he considers questions about Indian history that we rarely ask: Why do Indians call their country Bharat? How did the British build the railways across the subcontinent? Why was the world’s highest mountain named after George Everest? Moving from the geological beginnings of the subcontinent to present-day Gurgaon, Land of the Seven Rivers is riveting, wry and full of surprises. It is the most entertaining history of India you will ever read.


India

India

Author: Bobbie Kalman

Publisher: Crabtree Publishing Company

Published: 2009-08

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 9780778792857

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Describes the variety of India's land and people, its cities and villages, agriculture, industry and transportation, the problems of development, and its animal life.


Law and the Economy in Colonial India

Law and the Economy in Colonial India

Author: Tirthankar Roy

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-20

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 022638764X

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By accessibly recounting and analyzing the unique experience of institutions in colonial Indiawhich were influenced heavily by both British Common Law and indigenous Indian practices and traditionsLaw and the Economy in Colonial India sheds new light on what exactly fosters the types of institutions that have been key to economic development throughout world history more generally. The culmination and years of research, the book goes through a range of examples, including textiles, opium, tea, indigo, tenancy, credit, and land mortgage, to show how economic laws in colonial India were shaped neither by imported European ideas about how colonies should be ruled nor indigenous institutions, but by the practice of producing and trading. The book is an essential addition to Indian history and to some of the most fundamental questions in economic history."


Unsettling Utopia

Unsettling Utopia

Author: Jessica Namakkal

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0231552297

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After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today. Unsettling Utopia presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.


Midnight's Borders

Midnight's Borders

Author: Suchitra Vijayan

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1612198597

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A Booklist "Top 10 History Book of 2022" The first true people's history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world's largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world's biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people--especially those living in disputed border regions. Suchitra Vijayan traveled India's vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. In this stunning work of narrative reportage--featuring over 40 original photographs--we hear from those whose stories are never told: from children playing a cricket match in no-man's-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country we've long been missing.


Shareholder Cities

Shareholder Cities

Author: Sai Balakrishnan

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-10-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0812296303

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Economic corridors—ambitious infrastructural development projects that newly liberalizing countries in Asia and Africa are undertaking—are dramatically redefining the shape of urbanization. Spanning multiple cities and croplands, these corridors connect metropolises via high-speed superhighways in an effort to make certain strategic regions attractive destinations for private investment. As policy makers search for decentralized and market-oriented means for the transfer of land from agrarian constituencies to infrastructural promoters and urban developers, the reallocation of property control is erupting into volatile land-based social conflicts. In Shareholder Cities, Sai Balakrishnan argues that some of India's most decisive conflicts over its urban future will unfold in the regions along the new economic corridors where electorally strong agrarian propertied classes directly encounter financially powerful incoming urban firms. Balakrishnan focuses on the first economic corridor, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, and the construction of three new cities along it. The book derives its title from a current mode of resolving agrarian-urban conflicts in which agrarian landowners are being transformed into shareholders in the corridor cities, and the distributional implications of these new land transformations. Shifting the focus of the study of India's contemporary urbanization away from megacities to these in-between corridor regions, Balakrishnan explores the production of uneven urban development that unsettles older histories of agrarian capitalism and the emergence of agrarian propertied classes as protagonists in the making of urban real estate markets. Shareholder Cities highlights the possibilities for a democratic politics of inclusion in which agrarian-urban encounters can create opportunities for previously excluded groups to stake new claims for themselves in the corridor regions.