Kenneth Bo Nielsen - Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Kenneth Bo Nielsen 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

This book has grown out of my PhD research on the Singur movement, a project on which I embarked in late 2006 while working at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) in Oslo. At SUM, special thanks go to Kristi Anne Stlen, Bente Herstad, Desmond McNeill, Kristoffer Ring, Gitte Egenberg and to the members of Dan Baniks research group on Poverty and Development. SUMs Research School, coordinated by Maren Aase, also provided an excellent venue for testing out new ideas.

Since this book has been a long time in the making, the list of people who have contributed to it directly or indirectly has grown very long, too long, alas, to reproduce here in full. Most of the chapters have been presented in draft form at conferences in Melbourne, Troms, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen, rhus, Amsterdam, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Uppsala, Stockholm, Lund, Zrich, Helsinki, Yale and Nottingham. I am grateful to the many conference organizers, commentators and participants who have offered valuable input and feedback along the way. I want to thank in particular Salim Lakha, Pradeep Taneja, Axel Borchgrevink, Mahesh Rangarajan, Rohan DSouza, Anthony DCosta, Achin Chakraborty, Uwe Skoda, G. Krishna Reddy, Dag Erik Berg, Srila Roy and Lars Eklund for giving me the opportunity to present aspects of my work at these venues. The discussion of caste benefited from a critical exchange involving Uday Chandra, Praskanva Sinharay, Sarbani Bandyopadhyay, Dwaipayan Sen, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Partha Chatterjee and many others. I am also grateful to Manuela Ciotti, Kristian Bjrkdal, Tanja Winther, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Harold Wilhite, Patrik Oskarsson, Michael Levien, Heather P. Bedi, M. Rajshekhar, Gordon Woodman, Sarasij Majumder and Anand Vaidya for input that has in crucial ways changed the ways in which I have looked at different aspects of the Singur movement over time.

In Oslo, the unique Oslo South Asia Symposium has provided a tremendously stimulating environment in which to present and discuss work in progress. Whenever my analyses of the Singur material developed in too outlandish a manner, the South Asia Symposium was there to remind me of the virtues of remaining committed to the devil in the ethnographic detail. Thanks especially to sympers Pamela Price, Claus Peter Zoller, Ute Hsken, Francesca R. Jensenius, Annika Wetlesen, Guro Aandahl, Kathinka Frystad, Lars Martin Fosse, Guro Samuelsen, Moumita Sen, Karina Standal, Jostein Jakobsen, Anne Waldrop and Ruth Schmidt; to my PhD supervisors, Arild Engelsen Ruud and Susanne Brandtstdter; and to Lucia Michelutti and Sirpa Tenhunen. Lars Tore Flten, Geir Heierstad and Alf Gunvald Nilsen helped make the task easier by meeting up for coffee at the right moments and by providing encouragement and critical academic input.

Thanks also to Stig Toft Madsen for introducing me to South Asia studies in the first place and for being my mentor over the past many years; to Dayabati Roy for her generous help, friendship and assistance in Kolkata; to Parthasarathi Banerjee for his kindness; to my field assistant and co-researcher Prabir Neogi for his dedicated work and perseverance; and to the team at Anthem Press for working overtime to finalize the book with me. To my hosts, friends and interlocutors in Singur a warm thanks for opening your homes to me and letting me hang around for such a long time. You will be forever in my heart. Hilde, Thomas, Mathias and Maggie, the most important people in my life this is for you.