Report of the Rural Modernities Workshop

Report of the Rural Modernities Workshop, February 5, 2011

- Atreyee Majumder (Yale, Anthropolology)
- Uday Chandra (Yale, Political Science)
- Shaila Seshia Galvin (Yale, Anthropology)

The Workshop on Rural Modernities in Contemporary India was envisaged as a workshop that would bring perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities together, on the theme of how the rich and diverse scholarship on modernity in India speak to the constitution, forms, and expressions of rurality in contemporary India. We took our cues from scholarship on ‘regional’ or ‘multiple’ modernities that has suggested a logic of coevalness rather than diffusion in the production and spread of modernities. In India, modernization did not mean the disappearance of caste or the end of agrarian politics, but the transformation of older social and political categories vis-à-vis the new idioms of democracy and development. Just as postcolonial Indian cities grapple with the demands of modernity in slums, middle-class localities, congested roads, and bazaars, the countryside too deals with the sociocultural and politico-economic implications of new agricultural technologies, democratic institutions, widespread ecological transformations, and new educational and cultural mores. To the end of exploring questions about a contemporary rural modernity, we organized the workshop around (1) Theorizing Rurality and Modernity in India; (2) Vernacular Modernities and the Rural Public Sphere; (3) Neoliberal Modernities and the Political Economy of Contemporary Rural India.

Prof. K. Sivaramakrishnan and Prof. Inderpal Grewal made introductory comments to the workshop participants and discussants. Prof. Sivaramakrishnan praised the workshop organizers for their enthusiasm, and highlighted the relevance of the concept of “rural modernities” in understanding multiple spheres of life in contemporary India. Prof. Grewal’s literary invocation of Raymond Williams’ country-city dyad made for an energetic start for conversations.

The first session brought together three papers theorizing three very different dimensions of rurality and modernity. Karuna Mantena (Yale, Political Science) presented a paper “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjectures” spoke of the pluralist critique of state sovereignty and the critique of centralized sovereignty in the thought of M.K. Gandhi and Radhakamal Mukherjee. Kushanava Choudhury’s (Critical Writing Program, University of Pennsylvania) paper “Company States” drew a genealogy of states in which the contemporary was seen as shrinking in size and role, contracting out its sovereignty in forms like Special Economic Zones. Uday Chandra’s (Yale, Political Science) paper “The Rural Modernity of Tribal Rebellions: Historical and Comparative Perspectives from Eastern India” on the striking continuities between colonial and contemporary formations of “tribal” social protest in Jharkhand. Discussant Tariq Thachil (Yale, Political Science) enriched the discussion offering insights about the need to keep continuities and ruptures in mind while making historical comparisons, and that state structures have hardly shrunken in their foray into the neoliberal era, even though they have taken on new roles in keeping with the mandates of the political and economic dimensions of globalization.

The second session brought together rurality’s articulation in public spheres – some contemporary, some historical. Bernard Bate’s (Yale, Anthropology) paper was about the emergence of political oratory in the making of Tamil nationalism. Madhuri Karak (CUNY, Anthropology) presented a paper titled “The Politics of Articulation in Post-Colonial Activism: The Case of A Primitive? Resource Frontier” that discussed the discursive dimensions of the tribal activism of the Dongria Kondh as their lands become the object of industrial ambitions of the mining company POSCO. Shaila Seshia Galvin (Yale, Anthropology) presented a paper titled “Uttarakhand at the Exhibition: Organic Agriculture and Rural Modernities in Post-Reform India” speaking of the phenomenon of trade fairs that emphasized the ‘organic’ character of Uttarkhand’s rurality. Discussant Blake Wentworth (Yale, South Asia Studies) brought out issues of historicizing vernacular modernities beyond the colonial event of modernity, and of interrogating the category of the vernacular itself.

In the third session, papers brought out dimensions of commodity production and trade that propel rural spaces into avenues of modernity. Aniket Aga (Yale, Anthropology) spoke on an ‘epistemic rurality’ that was contained in the circulation and discourse surrounding the Genetically Modified Brinjal in his paper “BT Brinjal: Of Modern Objects and Rural Modernities”. Debarati Sen (American University, Anthropology) presented a paper titled “Fair Trade vs. Swaccha Vy?p?r: Emerging Rural Modernities and Transnational Justice Regimes in India” around fair trade imperatives and their appropriation by women plantation laborers. Durba Chattaraj (Critical Writing Program, University of Pennsylvania) presented insights from her fieldwork in West Bengal – on the reinvention of middle-men as entrepreneurs who organize the sari trade in her paper “Rural Outsourcing: Sari Embroidery in Southern Bengal”. Aradhana Sharma’s comments on the papers crucially pointed out the politics of middle-ness that emerged as a key theme in the papers.

Eminent political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj, in his closing remarks, urged students and young scholars to take on the task of pushing existing theoretical categories, and developing new conceptual vocabularies using the richness of of ethnographic and historical insights. He was especially appreciative of Kushanava’s formulation of a new kind of state-formation which, while provoking debate and disagreement, made an intrepid attempt with the concept of ‘company states’ to reformulate existing theoretical arrangements available to talk about states.

These themes and questions remain potent and alive among our intellectual fraternity at Yale. We hope that the participants from outside Yale will carry them forth in their intellectual enterprises too. We are constituting a panel of papers on the basis of the insights gathered from the February Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies 2011. We hope to gather around the theme of rural modernities, in future meetings of scholarly work on South Asian Studies, anthropology, and the broader social sciences. We remain especially grateful to the tireless support of Kasturi Gupta, Program Manager, South Asian Studies Council, and Marie Silvestri, also at the South Asian Studies Council. We thank Prof. K. Sivaramakrishnan for his support and intellectual encouragement in thinking of formulations of rural modernity. We thank the South Asian Studies Council at Yale, the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Political Science at Yale for their kind support.