Life Beyond Land: Aspirations, Ambivalence, and the Double Life of Development

The introduction frames the context and events that inform the central theme of the book. It also raises the theoretical questions regarding contradictory trends in populist politics. The declaration of incommensurability between money and land is, the chapter claims, an index of villagers’ desires and aspirations, which remain largely unacknowledged in the dominant political representations of rural Indian villages as purely agricultural and populated by farmers, peasants, cultivators, or laborers. It argues that Landownership is a pause, a distance and a vantage point from which the world and the totalizing narratives of development and modernity make sense enabling them to imagine themselves as subjects of mobility and aspiration.