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Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India
This definitive study brings together recent critiques of development and work in postcolonial studies to explore what the postcolonial condition has meant to rural people in the Third World. Focusing on local-level agricultural practices in India since the “green revolution” of the 1960s, Akhil Gupta challenges the dichotomy of “developed” and “underdeveloped,” as well as the notion of a monolithic postcolonial condition. In so doing, he advances discussions of modernity in the Third World and offers a new model for future ethnographic scholarship.
Based on fieldwork done in the village of Alipur in rural north India from the early 1980s through the 1990s, Postcolonial Developments examines development itself as a post–World War II sociopolitical ideological formation, critiques related policies, and explores the various uses of the concept of the “indigenous” in several discursive contexts. Gupta begins with an analysis of the connections and conflicts between the world food economy, transnational capital, and technological innovations in wheat production. He then examines narratives of village politics in Alipur to show how certain discourses influenced governmental policies on the green revolution. Drawing links between village life, national trends, and global forces, Gupta concludes with a discussion of the implications of environmentalism as exemplified by the Rio Earth Summit and an examination of how global environmental treaties may detrimentally affect the lives of subaltern peoples.
With a series of subtle observations on rural politics, nationalism, gender, modernization, and difference, this innovative study capitalizes on many different anthropology, sociology, comparative politics, cultural geography, ecology, political science, agricultural economics, and history.
Based on fieldwork done in the village of Alipur in rural north India from the early 1980s through the 1990s, Postcolonial Developments examines development itself as a post–World War II sociopolitical ideological formation, critiques related policies, and explores the various uses of the concept of the “indigenous” in several discursive contexts. Gupta begins with an analysis of the connections and conflicts between the world food economy, transnational capital, and technological innovations in wheat production. He then examines narratives of village politics in Alipur to show how certain discourses influenced governmental policies on the green revolution. Drawing links between village life, national trends, and global forces, Gupta concludes with a discussion of the implications of environmentalism as exemplified by the Rio Earth Summit and an examination of how global environmental treaties may detrimentally affect the lives of subaltern peoples.
With a series of subtle observations on rural politics, nationalism, gender, modernization, and difference, this innovative study capitalizes on many different anthropology, sociology, comparative politics, cultural geography, ecology, political science, agricultural economics, and history.
- GenresIndiaAnthropology
432 pages, Paperback
First published June 29, 1998
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February 17, 2026
This book was one of the first ethnographies to come out at a time when the discursive attack on development as a ‘western propaganda’ was slowly weakening with critiques that a)such a view ignores the agency of development ‘subjects’ as being mere passive agents and b) that discourse does not always translate into practice and ethnographic research gives the best insight into how these negotiations, refractions and flows of knowledge take place. It was nice to read the text in full, especially with knowledge and agrarian transition as one of my key interests.
The first two chapters are focused on a review of understanding the concept of postcolonial development (does it just signify a different period of development or does it have a different meaning altogether and if so what should we think of continuities and breaks), how agriculture is often the main driver and also then an overview on the responses to it by peasant politics in 70s and 80s India. The next three chapters are more tightly focused on providing an ethnographic account of Alipur and its agriculturists - mainly by looking at how their hybrid understandings of farming and ecology after the introduction of HYV seeds during green revolution and the parallel changes in rural economies that caused a crisis in reproduction. Gupta argues that these hybridities and messiness that can not be neatly argued as either ‘indigenous’ or fully ‘modern’ marks the condition of ‘postcoloniality’ - a promise of modernisation that fell short but people have their different ways and attempts to grasp with the loose ends of it. Methodologically, this is a very inspiring ethnography that strikes the perfect balance between emic and etic to make an original contribution that does not smoothens field realities for analytical clarity and instead makes it the centerpoint of the thesis. A classic indeed - makes sense why it still remains widely quoted.
One recurring thought I had while reading the book was how some of the findings, when they were more specific (like hybridity in knowledges) was kinda dated. In my field experiences, I could recognise more older farmers speaking about farming practices the way he described it and how they were still growing food crops for household food security. But with younger farmers, there was less of this ‘hybridity’ and more reliance on externalised knowledge including vocabulary that was mostly imported. It made me reflect on how the description of ‘hybridity’ essentially locked them into a temporal stasis where ‘modernity’ and ‘indigeneity’ almost always cancelled out each other, so we don’t have to either worry too much about either totalizing impacts of modernisation or be too joyous in celebrating ‘resistance’ against the modernity. In the longue duree, the weights and shifts between them may keep shifting and balancing. Meera Nanda wrote a great critique about how this postcolonial tendency to embrace contradictions may obscure how it can platform populist tendencies (both left and right). This proved to be more omniscient in 2013 Muzzafarnagar riots when BKU was instrumental in organising communal riots and helped in BJP getting a stronghold (See R Ramkumar 2018 for more on these riots and his own criticism on Gupta's theorisation of identity-making in BKU).However, later they also defected from majoritarian nationalism to form broad-based coalitions in anti-farm law agitations.
Overall, I still think that Gupta’s original work does hold many important ideas but it is important to also review how it fared out when many variables it assumed to be fixed began to move.
The first two chapters are focused on a review of understanding the concept of postcolonial development (does it just signify a different period of development or does it have a different meaning altogether and if so what should we think of continuities and breaks), how agriculture is often the main driver and also then an overview on the responses to it by peasant politics in 70s and 80s India. The next three chapters are more tightly focused on providing an ethnographic account of Alipur and its agriculturists - mainly by looking at how their hybrid understandings of farming and ecology after the introduction of HYV seeds during green revolution and the parallel changes in rural economies that caused a crisis in reproduction. Gupta argues that these hybridities and messiness that can not be neatly argued as either ‘indigenous’ or fully ‘modern’ marks the condition of ‘postcoloniality’ - a promise of modernisation that fell short but people have their different ways and attempts to grasp with the loose ends of it. Methodologically, this is a very inspiring ethnography that strikes the perfect balance between emic and etic to make an original contribution that does not smoothens field realities for analytical clarity and instead makes it the centerpoint of the thesis. A classic indeed - makes sense why it still remains widely quoted.
One recurring thought I had while reading the book was how some of the findings, when they were more specific (like hybridity in knowledges) was kinda dated. In my field experiences, I could recognise more older farmers speaking about farming practices the way he described it and how they were still growing food crops for household food security. But with younger farmers, there was less of this ‘hybridity’ and more reliance on externalised knowledge including vocabulary that was mostly imported. It made me reflect on how the description of ‘hybridity’ essentially locked them into a temporal stasis where ‘modernity’ and ‘indigeneity’ almost always cancelled out each other, so we don’t have to either worry too much about either totalizing impacts of modernisation or be too joyous in celebrating ‘resistance’ against the modernity. In the longue duree, the weights and shifts between them may keep shifting and balancing. Meera Nanda wrote a great critique about how this postcolonial tendency to embrace contradictions may obscure how it can platform populist tendencies (both left and right). This proved to be more omniscient in 2013 Muzzafarnagar riots when BKU was instrumental in organising communal riots and helped in BJP getting a stronghold (See R Ramkumar 2018 for more on these riots and his own criticism on Gupta's theorisation of identity-making in BKU).However, later they also defected from majoritarian nationalism to form broad-based coalitions in anti-farm law agitations.
Overall, I still think that Gupta’s original work does hold many important ideas but it is important to also review how it fared out when many variables it assumed to be fixed began to move.
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