Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Sarah Ansari
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
Markus Daechsel (Royal Holloway)
- Location:
- Room 212
- Start time:
- 30 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel explores development policies in relation to the physical and political landscape of C20th South Asia. It provides a critical historical assessment by unpacking and contextualising 'development' projects that sought to transform space, society, people and nature before and after 1947.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the impact that development policies and politics have had on the physical and political environment - and on the people living in it - in different parts of late colonial and post-1947 South Asia. Imperial rule, post-colonial ambitions, nation-state building and so-called 'modernisation' drives have all left their mark—both materially and imaginatively—on the South Asian landscape. Pre-1947 planning rhetoric that stressed the need for greater 'efficiency' made way for a growing emphasis on 'development' in the recalibrated political environment that followed independence. From the rapid growth of metropolitan centres (planned as well as unplanned) and the knock-on demands made on their rural hinterlands, to attempts at drastically reconfiguring the countryside's topography (e.g. dams, canals, roads, electricity pylons …), the fabric of economic, political, social and cultural life for large numbers of South Asian people was repeatedly unpicked, rewoven and unpicked again by attempts to reshape the material framework within which they lived and operated. The papers making up this panel collectively offer a critical historical assessment of 'development' by reconsidering specific attempts to transform the intricate realities of space, society, people's lives and nature both before and after independence. Panel organisers: Dr Markus Daechsel (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Professor Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway,University of London).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper will try to explore the collaborative structures which ultimately led to the development of railways in Princely State of Bahawalpur.
Paper long abstract:
The Railways have been a physical embodiment of British supremacy in the Sub-Continent since their inception in the second half of nineteenth century. Owing to its extraordinary role in the colonization of the prized colony this technological marvel attracted many historians to write extensively on the subject. However the story of Railway development in Princely States is a little told in many of its dimensions. The case of Princely India was a bit different from that of British India where the construction of railroads was determined exclusively by the British while in Princely India the colonial government and railway promoters had to collaborate with technically sovereign rulers. Thus this paper, based on so far untapped body of historical sources, will attempt to open new lines of investigation and to stimulate the historiography of colonial technologies in the region making a case study of Railway development in the State of Bahawalpur. It will try to answer the basic question that how railways were used by the British as lines of penetration into internal affairs of the State.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the logic of the ideas and practices of 'scientific' agriculture introduced in British India over 1880s-1920s, by demonstrating how a productivist ethic critically transformed ways of understanding the categories of nature and culture, and their interrelationship.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at the emergence of a complex ensemble of institutions, ideas, and practices over a period of forty years (1880s-1920s) in British India, which produced 'agriculture' as an object of scientific knowledge and governance, by effecting new ways of understanding 'nature', 'culture' and their interrelationship. In tracing this vision, I take a close look at Famine Commission reports, J.A. Voelcker's Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, proceedings of national conferences discussing the problems and prospects of introducing scientific agriculture to Indian society, and a number of manuals outlining ways to improve the productivity of the soil, through scientific uses of manure, seeds, and agricultural implements. Across these textual sites, I show how a new ethic of productivity got designed, predicated on a re-cognition of elements of the world of nature, and the specific social forms of existence of 'Indian' people. Instances of this re-ordering would be a tremendous obsession with manure which led to understanding everything, including human bones, as potential manure, or a systematic framing of caste(s) in terms of different dispositions towards laboring. Finally, the paper looks at interactions between the Rice Research Institute in Orissa, and the local agrarian society to understand how these strategies worked at concrete and contingent fields. A critical unpacking of these early investments in the scientific improvement of agriculture, the paper argues, will help us understand their complex legacies, especially in the discourse of planning and development in postcolonial India.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the impact of 'development' rhetoric and planning in Sindh before and following independence, highlighting connections between post-war reconstruction and the early ‘improvement’ policies pursued in the Sindhi countryside after 1947.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the impact of 'development' rhetoric and planning in relation to the agricultural landscape of Sindh before and following independence. Taking as its starting point the involvement of one individual 'expert', Roger Thomas, who played a key role in shaping policy there in 1940s and 1950s, it highlights the extent to which planning for post-war reconstruction underpinned - indeed was directly translated into - initiatives to improve agricultural production in the province after 1947. Thomas, who was Advisor to the Government of Sind in Agriculture and Post-War Development from 1944 to 1952, chaired the Sind Farm Tenancy Legislation Committee (better known as the Hari Committee) in 1947-48, a role that allowed him to champion his long-held belief in the need to restructure economic relations in the Sindhi countryside (which was eventually translated into the 1950 Sindh Tenancy Act with mixed results). His similarly strong faith in the positive impact of technology, especially the tractor, together with the benefits of improved seeds and irrigation techniques, foreshadowed later arguments associated with the so-called 'green revolution' in the region. More broadly, by exploring the ways in which authorities in Sindh (and Pakistan more generally) approached the task of economic and in particular agricultural development in the first years of independence, we gain insights into the political challenges associated with the pursuit of 'development' during the transition from colonial rule to post-colonial South Asia.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers a history of electrification in early post-colonial Pakistan, bringing together ideological and discursive influences with evolving power structures on the ground.
Paper long abstract:
Electric power consumption in early post-colonial Pakistan was amongst the lowest in the world. Apart from some colonial-era plans for multi-purpose dam projects in East and West Pakistan - and an assortment of aging municipal coal or diesel generating sets - there was little viable electrical power infrastructure on the ground. At the same time, electrification was quickly gaining an unassailable (and often highly ideological) position at the top of the developmentalist to-do list around the world, with immediate implications for what the new citizens of Pakistan expected their government to achieve. My paper will explore how ideological expectations of nationalism, newly emerging discursive formations of development, international funding regimes and local and regional governmental requirements came together in a characteristically Pakistani experience of electrification between the late colonial period and (roughly) the first decade of independence.
Paper short abstract:
My paper argues that the initial Tibetan refugee settlements in south India, established in the 1960's and 70's, were intended as Nehruvian local models of small families and scientific and cooperative farming.
Paper long abstract:
In the late 1950's the conflict between Tibet and China and the subsequent Chinese takeover in Tibet resulted in the arrival of a large community of Tibetan refugees in north India. Starting in the early 1960's the Indian government began to settle the refugees in self-subsistent south Indian rural settlements. My paper argues that the settlements presented an opportunity for the Indian government to implement the Nehruvian development model for the modernization of rural India as most clearly envisioned in the government's Third Five Year Plan and bearing the hallmarks of collective farming, mechanized and scientific agriculture, and population control, and that he modern settlements were designed to provide good examples for the surrounding Indian community. Based on the camp registers and archival material from Lukzung Samdrupling, the first Tibetan refugee settlement in south India, the author traces the impact of cooperative, scientific and mechanized farming as well as population control in Lukzung Samdrupling. The data supports the conclusion that the settlement was implemented as part of a Nehruvian national development plan for rural India but also that in practice the refugees were able to balance their role as objects of development with their own agenda through the employment of various evasive strategies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the development of the industrial area in Kot Lakhpat in Lahore between 1963 and 1974, to show that employer and worker strategies, and not just the planners imagined ideals, decided the outcome of these developmental plans.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will focus on the development of a planned industrial area, specifically, on the space around Kot Lakhpat in the south of Lahore. Kot Lakhpat and its neighbour, the Township project, were supposed to entice local industrialists to set up shop and get government assistance in both, setting up their industries, and building worker housing nearby. This seemed like a great plan on paper, but the reality was that industrialists appeared to have used this as an excuse to shift sections of production to Kot Lakhpat and hire only temporary labour so as to limit the problem of an increasingly militant and well organised workforce.
Partially, the development of this area was seen as a necessity in order to deal with the chaos that Partition had left in its wake. Large parts of the Walled City had been destroyed in fires. The spaces of colonial nostalgia were pockmarked by makeshift shelters erected by refugees and their families. Frequently referred to as 'plague spots' the rhetoric that developed was that these areas needed to be moved to the boundaries of the city. However, the strategies used by workers in Kot Lakhpat included allying with workers in the north of Lahore and setting up unions across the industries in that area, in order to exert pressure on their industrial owners. The planners dream of seeing an orderly, legible and clean area that was subject to official control was not, therefore, something that could be realised.
Paper short abstract:
The paper interrogates India's transition from a colonial economy to its struggle for self-dependent national development and eventually emergence into a semi-imperialist economic and political power in the 21st century.
Paper long abstract:
The anti-colonial struggles in India that succeeded in making India an independent nation created a prominent place for India in the global arena. That prominence was further strengthened during the early phase of India's post-colonial development path that focussed on national sovereignty, self-sufficiency in agricultural development, import substitution in industrial development and non-alignment in foreign policy. Indian nationalism as an ideology was a central connecting thread between various components of the internal and external economic policies and strategies. For a food dependent nation, critically dependent on food aid from USA, to have achieved the goal of food self-sufficiency by the early 1970s was a remarkable achievement for any developing economy and raised India's international profile among Third World economies. By early 1980s, significant but as yet slow changes in Indian economic policies signalled a change of direction. This change marked a qualitative leap with the 1991 neo-liberal economic reforms. India achieved very impressive rates of economic growth in the last decade of the twentieth century and in the last few years of this century. This impressive growth transformed India into a prominent place in a newly emerging bloc of BRICS nations which have the characteristics of semi-imperialist powers.
This paper will chart this transition and will elaborate the concept of semi-imperialism and its relevance for examining India's place in the current international arena. The paper will also examine the linkages between Indian nationalism and its current semi-imperialism phase.