Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how elite experts deploy "depoliticized" technical knowledge to manage agricultural populations in India's Flue-Cured Virginia tobacco sector across colonial and neoliberal periods.

Paper long abstract

My paper examines how elite experts deploy "depoliticized" technical knowledge to manage agricultural populations in India's Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco sector. Through historical and ethnographic analysis spanning from colonial administration (1942) to contemporary neoliberal development (2015-2017), it traces how epistemic hierarchies rooted in claims to rationality and scientific expertise function as mechanisms of social stratification and political control. A 1942 townhall meeting during the "Grow More Food" campaign reveals colonial officials dismissing tobacco farmers as "mad people" and deploying threats of land confiscation when cultivators refuse expert directives to abandon cash crops in the face of impending famine.

This mechanism—of depoliticization through technocratic discourse—has persisted across time. Contemporary fieldwork demonstrates how state and corporate experts continue to pathologize farmers’ resistance as backwardness rather than recognizing it as legitimate political action, rendering farmers' agency itself the problem requiring expert intervention. And yet, the analysis reveals a more complex dynamic still: tobacco cultivators strategically navigate these epistemic hierarchies, forming calculated alliances with corporate entities like the India Leaf Tobacco Development Corporation to successfully resist state mandates. Both state actors and corporate elites function as competing sources of paternalistic governance, vying for farmer allegiance to advance their respective developmental agendas. Under neoliberalism, this triangulation has intensified as the regulatory state withdraws from direct market participation while maintaining its claim to technical expertise, leaving farmers increasingly vulnerable to corporate monopolies. The paper thus illuminates how elite control of "apolitical" agricultural expertise serves to reproduce hierarchies while obscuring the fundamentally political nature of development interventions.