Book Reviews: Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India
Abstract
BOOK REVIEWS83 Reviewed by: A.H. Somjee Simon Fraser University, Department of Political Science, Burnaby, B.C V5A 1S6, Canada. Akhil Gupta. 1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pp. 409. Paperback: $21.95; ISBN 0-8223-2183-1. Cloth: $64.95; ISBN 0-8223-2213-7. Based on fieldwork in a north Indian village, Gupta provides a critical view of what does "the postcolonial condition" entail for villagers in north India. The book "explores the complex and conflicted formation of development institutions, ideologies, and practices in local, regional, national, and global spaces" (p.ix). He draws upon the literature in development, anthropology, subaltern studies, post- colonial theory, and other fields, but does not apply them uncritically. For instance, in terms of development and modernization literature, he argues how underdevelopment has become as much a form of identity as a material condition. He investigates how allochronistic positioning of Third world nation-states has impacted the particular forms of the postcolonial condition. Throughout the book he argues how it is the acute self-awareness of a temporal lag and spatial marginality which constitutes the experience of moder- nity as "postcolonial" in a country like India. He points out how development dis- courses have not