The Making of Land and the Making of India

Description

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.

About the Author

Nikita Sud teaches development studies at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

Table of contents

Preface 
Introduction 
Chapter 1. Land, in the making 
Chapter 2. Land-making and state-making 
Chapter 3. Taking land to market 
Chapter 4. Grounding the market 
Chapter 5. Making the political 
Chapter 6. Doing P(p)olitics 
Conclusion. Indistinction, entwining, making and re-making 
References