Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India

364 Pages·2008·1.85 MB·English

by  Vinay Gidwani

Capital, Interrupted
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Capital, Interrupted
Agrarian Development and
the Politics of Work in India
Vinay Gidwani
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Portions of chapter 3 were previously published in “The Unbearable Modernity
of ‘Development’? An Essay on Canal Irrigation and Development Planning in
Western India,” Progress in Planning 58, no. 1 (2002): 1–80. Portions of chapter 4
previously appeared in “The Cultural Logic of Work: Explaining Labor
Deployment and Piece-Rate Contracts in Matar Taluka, Gujarat, Parts I and II,”
Journal of Development Studies 38, no. 2 (2002): 57–108. Portions of chapter 5
previously appeared in “Limits to Capital: Questions of Provenance and Politics,”
Antipode 36, no. 3 (2004): 527–42. Portions of the Afterword were previously
published in “I Offer You This, Commodity,” in Politics and Practice in Economic
Geography, ed. Adam Tickell, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, and Trevor Barnes
(London: Sage Publications, 2007).
Photographs were taken by Vinay Gidwani.
Maps were created by Sula Sarkar.
Copyright 2008 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gidwani, Vinay K., 1965 –
Capital, interrupted : agrarian development and the politics of work in India /
Vinay Gidwani.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-4958-7 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-4959-4
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Agriculture — Economic aspects — India — Gujarat. 2. Capitalism —
India — Gujarat — History. 3. Patidars — Social conditions. 4. Patidars —
Economic conditions. 5. Capitalism — Philosophy. I. Title.
HD2075.G8G53 2008
338.10954'75 — dc22 2008005822
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Krishin and Sunanda, you were extraordinary.
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Contents
Introduction: Sutures ix
ONE
Waste 1
TWO
Birth 32
THREE
Machine 68
FOUR
Distinction 138
FIVE
Interruption 184
Afterword: Aporia 233
Acknowledgments 247
Notes 255
Index 327
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INTRODUCTION
Sutures
In 1960, near the start of his academic career, Stuart Hall published an
article with the intriguing title “The Supply of Demand.” Extending
the ideas of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams,1 Hall presaged
the concerns that he was to elaborate in a more famous 1989 article,
“The Meaning of New Times,” which many orthodox Marxists read as
Hall’s public defection from Marx to Foucault and for which he was
severely upbraided in journals such as Capital and Class, New Left Review,
New Socialist, New Statesman, and Feminist Review.2 “The Meaning of
New Times” was read as a disavowal of left politics. It was not. It candidly
repeated, now in response to a modifi ed historical conjuncture cemented
ideologically by Thatcherism, an unremittingly political question: Did
the Left possess the acuity to both recognize the transformations taking
place under the “new capitalism”—particularly the positive appraisals of
capitalist change by diverse working classes, combined with the gravita-
tion of the English working class toward Thatcherite conservatism in
the 1980s—and adapt its thinking to the political demands of the time?
Hall’s fear was that a doctrinaire Left, wedded to an expressive theory of
history and ideology,3 would simply watch from the sidelines as a politi-
cally retrograde articulation of economy with other elements of society
eroded “the traditional cultural and political loyalties upon which the
left based itself.”4 The departure of Margaret Thatcher and the defeat of
John Major by Tony Blair’s New Labor were in no m anner a repudiation
of Hall’s diagnosis. If anything, the Right-leaning economic and social
policies of New Labor in Britain and the so-called New Democrats in
ix