Land Is Like Gold: (In)commensurability and the Politics of Land

Abstract

This chapter examines how local discourses and narratives about land and development connect property as things and property as relationships. “Land is our mother; it cannot be bought and sold,” “Land is like gold, it is good even if weeds grow on it,” “We are the proprietors,” “Cash vanishes, land remains,” “We (the landed) are more civilized and developed than the landless.” These statements and the local political contexts of their emergence together provide landowning villagers with rhetorical strategies to imagine, talk about, and take positions regarding their relationships with the state, the political regime, and the landless lower caste.