The Making of Land
and
The Making of India
Nikita Sud has written a book of impressive range and originality, which explores the multidimensionality of land, and its many lives, through the actions of the state, market, and politics, but inflected also with the social relations of gender, caste, and religious identity. This is a provocative multi-sited work that not only asks us to interrogate our assumptions about the fixity of land, but also offers a way of thinking about the political economy of land in relation to the dynamics of the humannature interaction.
Niraja Gopal Jayal,
professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Rich with ethnographic detail and impassioned voices, The Making of Land and the Making of India reveals how and why our most precious resource, land, has also become our most vulnerable and volatile. Nikita Suds narrative captures the essence of the social life of land and the resolve for social and ecological justice through our renewed relations with land.
Michael Goldman,
associate professor of sociology, University of Minnesota, USA
The Making of Land is a brilliant book about an old theme: land and what it implies for broader social life, and vice versa. It spans a wide range of topics and disciplinary interests and theories, and its relevance is international. It is a very timely and hugely important book that must be read by academics and activists alike. Its a tour de force!
Saturnino M. Borras Jr.,
professor of agrarian studies, International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Netherlands
The Making of Land
and
The Making of India
Nikita Sud
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Oxford University Press 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
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ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-013020-6
ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-013020-2
ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-099262-0
ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-099262-X
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Printed in India by Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020
For Adil and Iman.
And for an India that is multicoloured.
Contents
Figures
Table
Some mornings I go for a run in Oxfords beautiful Port Meadow. I enjoy the fresh air, the sun and sky reflected in dew-drenched blades of grass, and dogs and their humans bounding around. Herds of cows and horses avoid me as much as I try to avoid them, and their droppings. Flocks of birds descend on a breakfast of berries, worms, and crustaceans that populate the local tributary of the river Thames. It is a beautiful time of day. I am often struck by the ever-changing look and feel of the meadow. The light varies over the year, as do the kinds of plants, birds, animals and even humans that mingle there. The landscape is no different. What is a largely dry, grassy space over the summer is more routinely squelchy as autumn approaches. I am no longer able to run diagonally across as the path has been partially submerged by a lake. The lake expands and contracts with the rain and the action of the river that flows alongside it. I adapt my route to the ebbs and flows of the water, and the inter-related wetness or dryness, sponginess, or firmness of the land. I am not just reacting to the changes in the land, and the wider environment. Despite my best efforts to sidestep fallen and rotting apples, and other plant and animal detritus, my feet routinely pound these into the soil. I marvel at the rich humus of the meadow: a product of microbial, plant, animal, human, mineral, and climatic action.
I go to the meadow to commune with nature in what is otherwise a bustling academic town. But where the natural of the meadow ends, and where the human begins is difficult to delineate. The meadow is grass, and the land that supports it. But it is also the humans and animals that criss-cross it and have impacted it over time. This intermingling has layers and layers, if we just care to look. A chance spotting of a World War memorial plaque leads me to read up on the meadow in recent history. I find that it served as a base for the Royal Flying Corp between 191619. Eleven planes crashed on or near the meadow during World War 1. For all I know, the pristine lake that develops across my jogging route in the winter months is formed of indentations at a crash site. The lake is largely rain-fed, but it may well contain ammonium that is released by the multiple City Council landfill dumping sites that have been reclaimed for greening over time. One side of the meadow is surrounded by houses occupied by people like me. But half a century ago, the same space hosted an iron factory and an automobile parts manufacturing unit. As these symbols of industrial modernity gave way to a more service sector-led economy populated by university staff, IT professionals, journalists, medics, biotechnologistsas represented by my neighbours, the housing that was sanctioned for them by the City Council, also came with a sanitization of the surroundings. The debris of industrial production, which had made its way to the site of the meadow, was buried or swept away. The result is my natural idyll.
The seeping of the human and institutional into the life of the meadow is an ongoing affair. A few years ago, the Save Port Meadow campaign took on the City Council and my employer Oxford University for erecting rather imposing graduate housing blocks on the southern edge of the land. One result of the campaign was a large meeting of academic staff who form the Congregation, or governing body of the university. Amidst acrimonious scenes we decided that the university must put in place measures to mitigate the effects of its building activity. This was one of the first meetings of Congregation that I attended as a newly appointed member of permanent academic staff. It has not been the last. As a person who regularly engages with global politics, I promised myself that I would be better attuned to the political and contested in my backyard.
There are many ways in which I can read the life of the meadow. I can see it as a natural getaway from the real, read human world. Alternatively, I can appreciate that the human infuses the natural. This would allow for the viewing of the meadow as made and remade by humans and their institutions, over time. My narration would go something like this: The meadow has variously been a playground of historical contestation over use rights for grazing; a dumping ground of industrial modernity; a space shaped by gentrification; and a crucible of enduring struggles between the authority of the university Gown versus the pushback of the Town. This is no doubt a compelling story. However, it is not the story I seek to tell.
