New Questions Concerning Land in Modern India

Modern nation-states rest on foundations of territorial sovereignty. And nothing is more central to this sovereignty than land in all its dimensions: practical and symbolic value, property, heritage, resource, and environment. But land is not merely a constitutive element of nation-states in recent history. It is also generative of affective and communitarian ties that bind people into ethnic identities or corporate groups, and it can be the emotive basis of all manner of struggles and conflicts in society, about how the past is to be remembered and how the future is to be fashioned by the use of land.
This conference explores some of the topics and concerns raised by land in modern India. There is a rich body of scholarship on what is often thought of as the land question in India. This work is dominated by a consideration of an ancillary problem, often known as the peasant question. We are certainly interested in returning to that theme. For agrarian India is currently racked by many critical conflicts. Maoists in eastern and central India, insurgencies in northeastern India and Kashmir, and the struggle over agrarian instability more generally in some of the most fertile and agriculturally advanced regions of western and southern India have shaped recent rural unrest around questions concerning land. Farmer suicides and controversy over transgenic varieties in crops have made agriculture, one of the central connections to land in India, fraught with uncertainty – about livelihood and science.
But we are also interested in many other themes that are associated more newly with the land question in India. This includes massive rights-based approaches to rural development through guarantees of employment, and possibly food (a right to food law is currently being debated in national policy circles). It also includes the implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, the most ambitious attempt to secure the claim of poor adivasi and dalit rural communities to a livelihood from land in forest areas across India. We want to consider how these rights-based approaches to development in land are to be understood against a history of colonial land management and postcolonial land reforms.
Similarly, there are many interesting questions arising from legal concerns with land. For instance the principle of eminent domain, that informed colonial land acquisition law, which remains in force even as a new law wends its way slowly through the Indian Parliament. With the spate of projects, especially since 1991, to create vast new infrastructure for economic development – roads, power generation, special economic zones for manufacturing clusters and townships – and the spread of gated communities of new residential development beyond cities and towns bursting with urban growth, land acquisition has become a very contentious subject. For the first time in fifty years it is receiving sustained policy, scholarly, and legal-philosophical attention as one of the key new aspects of debates on the land question.
Beyond the political economy and legal questions about land, we are also interested in the cultural economy of land in India. Heritage conservation and nature conservation are but two streams of affective connection to land that have generated a range of activity to zone, manage, and restore land to uses seen as part of a national tradition or planetary preservation. Competing histories of natural bounty and lived landscape are being written and now increasingly sought to be preserved in land and the built environment, or land and its undisturbed qualities. We want to examine these attachments to land, in cities, countryside, forests, mountains, and sacred sites of pilgrimage. Questions of landscape and memory, worship and sequestration, forms of intentional community and varieties of social exclusion that are evident in affective ties to land will also be part of our work. And we will approach these questions not only through social-scientific or policy concerns, but also through the perspectives of humanistic study and art.