Textualizing the agrarian: plots and forms in British India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay establishes interrelations between three apparently different kinds of texts on agrarian India produced in the nineteenth century. The first of these are government documents on agrarian governance, the second consists of analytical essays, on the conditions of peasantry and land legislation in nineteenth-century Bengal, authored by two eminent thinkers of that society, and the third is a novel on the intrigues of an agrarian society, set in Orissa. The essay argues that in their own ways, each of these types of texts played around, recast, and disrupted foundational imperial universals, like state, society, and property and the relationship between them. The essay mobilizes a conversation between different productions of universals in these texts. It concludes by reflecting upon these discursive strategies in the light of a debate on the difference between ‘literature’ and ‘history’ in late-nineteenth century Bengal. It suggests that Rabindranath Tagore’s framing, in this debate, of the ‘historical rasa’ can help us understand the transactions between ‘social theory’, ‘history’ and ‘literature’ in these texts on agrarian India.