Description
Book SynopsisPeople's Car studies divergent populist responses to land acquisition for industries in rural India. It contends that landownership enables small landowners to aspire and look forward to social mobility in the non-farm sector, which are contingent upon industrialization. The protests against land acquisition, thus, have contradictory tendencies.
Trade ReviewAmid a glut of work on the urban global South, it is refreshing to read a book that strives to think the contemporary dynamics of development and agrarian change ethnographically. The book convincingly argues that the romanticized portrayals of either the communitarian peasant (commonplace in activist portrayals) or the irrational peasant (commonplace in policy circles and certain quarters of disciplinary economics) miss the point. Land, Majumder argues, is a vessel of personhood and unrequited desires. Attentive to the conflicted sentiments and desires of its peasant informants, the book refreshingly refuses to toe a clear ideological line. This well-crafted, clearly written book poses important questions of broad relevance to contemporary India and beyond. -- Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota
People’s Car offers an extraordinarily valuable take on a major movement against the acquisition of land for development, in the case of a Tata Motors car factory. The factory becomes the alibi for nuanced interrogations, both material and theoretical, of resistance, anthropology, economics, political economies, rural-scapes and the very nature and idea of land. -- Geeta Patel, University of Virginia
Sarasij Majumder’s new ethnography,
People’s Car, does what anthropology does best: he
shows (not tells) how populism
works... Anthropologists, South Asia scholars, and readers interested in class, labor, gender and village life will greatly benefit from Majumder’s attention to the rural not as object, but as process. * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *
Majumder’s book deserves to be read by everybody interested in the present of West Bengal as history; so that, above all, one may not mistake snake oils of the past for elixirs of the future.
---Indraneel Dasgupta, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, Economic and Political WeeklyTable of ContentsList of Abbreviations ix
A Timeline of the Events in Singur xi
Introduction. Life Beyond Land: Aspirations, Ambivalence, and the Double Life of Development 1
1. “We Are Chasis, Not Chasas”: Emergence of Land-Based Subjectivities 33
2. Land Is Like Gold: (In)commensurability and the Politics of Land 62
3. Land Is Like a Mother: The Contradictions of Village-Level Protests 100
4. “Peasants” Against Industrialization: Images of the Peasantry and Urban Activists’ Representations of the Rural 131
Conclusion: Value Versus Values? 153
Postscript: From a Defunct Factory to a “Crematorium” 167
Acknowledgments 171
Glossary 175
References 177
Index 193
Photographs follow page 14
