The Other Agrarian Urbanisation: Urbanism in the Village

Abstract

This article considers a range of early twentieth-century projects in which rural space was made subject to an ensemble of institutional forms and practices grounded in emergent urban paradigms. The projects in rural reconstruction I consider here seized on village space and the minds and souls of villagers as their terrain of operation. Rural reconstruction entailed the production of intimate knowledge of the rural population, the development of affective modes of engagement with them, and investments of governmental power not only in state institutions but in more abstract concepts like the ‘rural community’. Many projects were largely propagandistic; their concrete effects were minimal. But rural reconstruction brought urban logics, objects, and institutional forms directly into village milieus in ways that continue to shape how India’s urban and rural areas are conceptualised and operate in relation to one another. If urbanism in India today is deeply enmeshed in agrarian processes, then this article attempts to reverse the gaze by asking how expert knowledge directed towards managing rural change in twentieth-century India depended crucially on emergent urban paradigms.