A Landscape “Difficult to Describe”: The Model Village and the Capital City

Abstract In mid-twentieth-century Punjab, grassroots development projects sought to modernize the countryside by decentralizing power to villages. The capital city Chandigarh, built in the same period, seems to represent the opposite: a national symbol of a newly independent India’s centralized power. Yet, this article argues, rural and urban were reciprocal and volatile counterparts. Through the work of M.S. Randhawa, it reorients analysis of Chandigarh to reveal how the materiality of landscape itself was a medium for territorial planning, indelibly linking—and managing the distinctions between—city and countryside. A botanist and civil servant, Randhawa used landscape to realize modernizing agendas and to constrain social change in projects from model villages and a “bioaesthetic” plan for the city to new land-grant universities that ushered in the Green Revolution’s industrialized agriculture. His work offers a revisionist history of development’s practitioners and periodization. It shows how an uneven fabric of late-colonial rural uplift shaped the contours of postcolonial, state-directed agrarian transformation. Following the civil servant in the landscape, this article calls for the grounding of abstract theories like development and state formation in histories of their local inflections.