UC Berkeley

In “Writing on the Land,” I look to literature in order to uncover visions of community, production, and human-nonhuman relation that emerged as alternatives to agrarian development in late colonial and early postcolonial South Asia, with a focus on Bengal. Reading works from Rabindranath Tagore, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Neel Mukherjee, and Mahasweta Devi that engage with various inflection points in the Bengali countryside between 1920 and 1980, I demonstrate that literary texts have the capacity not just to illustrate the specific instances of human and nonhuman resistance that haunted agrarian development in this period, but also to draw forth the often-radical critiques of capitalist modernity that inhere in the agrarian realm more broadly, as well as to articulate the possibilities that dwell embryonically in such critiques. The texts that I examine articulate these critiques and possibilities by way of form. Through the interweaving of their own literary forms with their representations of various sociopolitical and temporal forms, these texts defamiliarize and interrupt the ways in which the British colonial state and Indian postcolonial nation-state attempted to transform agrarian life and agricultural production in the mid-twentieth century. In turn, these texts articulate alternative understandings of progress, growth, and society; of metabolism, the human body, and the nation; of debt, labor, and peasant revolt; of death, the commons, and political action. “Writing on the Land” thus extends current work on literature and form by illustrating the way in which human entanglements with nonhuman beings and processes can both shape and derange our formal categories. It also challenges and augments conventional understandings of colonial and postcolonial development in South Asia: alongside famines and exploitation, technological revolutions and radical redistributions of land, a story emerges of the many other agrarian futures that this tumult made possible and foreclosed.