Ethnography of Worldly Farmers (Review of Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments)

By Tatsuro Fujikura

In the farming village that Akhil Gupta describes in his Postcolonial Developments, the farmers use apparently non-Western notions, such as 'heat', 'wetness', and 'wind', to describe their agricultural practices. At the same time, the same farmers are avid users of such modern inputs as chemical fertilizers. In other words, the farmers whom Gupta describes are not unlike many farmers in contemporary Nepal. Part of what Gupta tries to do, and succeeds through his ethnographic description of a village in Uttar Pradesh, is to show that most farmers in South Asia and other 'developing countries' cannot simply be categorized either as 'modern' or 'non-modern'.

The mainstream development ideologues and the romantic environmentalists, in their different ways, tend to view such farmers as lagging behind in the ladder of 'modernization', or as representing an alternative ('indigenous') way of life outside modernity. Arguing against those views, Gupta maintains that what are often called 'traditional' or 'indigenous knowledge' ought to be reconceptualized as representing "culturally constituted recipes for dealing with the varying conditions and exigencies encountered in farming activities" in the present - in the particular condition of modernity that those farmers are engaged in. The ethnographic part of the book, which includes lengthy excerpts from interviews with farmers on various aspects of their agricultural practices, shows the villagers' actions as at once more complex and more sensible than the overarching pictures that some modernist or anti-modernist writers tend to present.

Gupta's aim, however, is not only to provide ethnographic descriptions, but to make a further and far-reaching theoretical point. Gupta argues that the "distinctiveness" of the situation he describes is that it lacks any "higher-order unity" that is able to coherently explain all the seemingly contradictory statements and actions observed in the field. I personally think it is not necessary to debate here the merits of his version of 'post-colonial theory'. (The book, by the way, includes useful summaries of the literature on post-colonial, ecological and cultural theories.) Rather, I would point out that Gupta's post-modernist claim of fundamental incoherence seem to be contradicted by his own analyses of political economy at the village, national, and global levels.

For those analyses, Gupta utilizes such notions as 'class' and 'structural positions' that seem, indeed to explain much of the phenomena that he describes. Indeed, I would argue that one of the very strength of this book is the authors very clear and informative (albeit sometimes disjointed) discussions on the dynamics of political economy from local, national to global levels. Gupta covers such wide ranging topics as technological, socio- economic and environmental changes brought about by the 'Green Revolution', populist policies of the Indian government under Indira Gandhi, various peasant movements, global political economy of food-grains after the Second World War, discourses and politics of environmentalism, 'sustainable development' and the Rio Earth Summit, and protests and resistance in India against multinational seed companies and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

In his discussion of the village political economy, Gupta also provides analytic- descriptions that tend to corroborate earlier insights on the transformations in rural South Asia. One example is the notion, advanced by Adrian Mayor among others, of the shift in the nature of local leadership in the post-Independence India from patronage to brokerage. Outcome of this shift is that "Village leaders no longer cultivated clients chiefly through the use of their own property - by leasing it to tenants, by employing an unchanging group of laborers and so forth (that is, by acting as a patron) but rather by facilitating the delivery of state programs and services (that is, by acting as a broker)." Another, related example involves the utility of the twin concepts of entitlement and enfranchisement proposed by Arjun Appadurai. Appadurai argued that changing dynamics in rural South Asia involved "a change which gives poorer persons a wider voice in the conduct of public life [i.e., enfranchisement], but fewer claims upon subsistence in local economic system [i.e., entitlement]." Gupta finds this process accompanying the decline of patronage and increasing proletarianization in the village he describes.

Possible shortcomings of the book include that it is too long (over 400 pages) and literally too heavy to carry around. More serious perhaps is the total lack of village women's or children's perspectives in the book. The descriptions of the village politics and agriculture derive almost totally from the author's interviews with male household heads. This lack severely limits the level of ethnographic complexity that the book is able to attain.

However, the book contains enough insights and information about the conditions of agrarian life in northern India, seen from the village, national, and global contexts that makes this book extremely useful for those of us who want to understand better the conditions of rural life in Nepal or elsewhere, especially by providing us with regional, comparative and global perspectives.