CRT214 | Rethinking The Countryside: Histories Of Food, Land, And Labour.

This course introduces students to major historical transformations that the South Asian countryside underwent with the emergence of capitalism. Histories of food production and the cultivation of modern taste palettes, struggles over land redistribution and resources, and the making of modern labour regimes are three broad rubrics through which the course will reconstruct the social, political, and the economic worlds of the modern countryside. The readings explore these themes by traversing the long arc of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries in South Asia, specifically India– across histories of colonialism, nationalism, postcolonial developmental practices, and the turn towards neoliberalism. The course also examines some of the key global intellectual debates on the political and social category of the “Peasant.” It covers a wide range of discussions on the theoretical location of the peasant in marxist analysis, histories of the many peasant led wars of the twentieth century, and the contested arguments in India regarding the relationship between the agricultural worker and the ‘peasant’.

In (nationalist) cultural imaginaries, the image of the ‘rural’ is often presented in an idyllic fashion, as the romanticized restful ‘other’ of the bustling modern industrial city. B.R Ambedkar has famously provided the most trenchant critique of such innocent renderings of the rural by calling the Indian village a ‘den of ignorance’ and ‘sink of localism.’ Meanwhile, in developmental narratives, the rural and the agrarian has been seen as as an economic phase that needs to be transitioned, a stepping stone forming a gradually receding backdrop for the modern urban economy. But what happens when this imagined ideal form of transition doesn’t take place? This course will probe the long history of the Indian countryside, the profound ways in which it has been restructured over the course of the last two centuries, and the intellectual debates that have shaped the analysis of the ‘rural.’ The readings will provide a grasp over complex questions involving inequality, hunger, land, nationalist politics over food, agrarian infrastructures, and labour informalit. This is designed as an interdisciplinary course. While primarily anchored in historical scholarship, the readings consistently weave in methodological and scholarly insights from anthropology and political science/theory.