Open lecture: The making of land and the making of India

Open lecture with Nikita Sud, Associate Professor of Development Studies, University of Oxford.

Abstract

Land varies materially and in meaning.In my field sites in western, eastern and southern India, it occupies and transitions across registers of territory, property, the sacred, history, memory, authority, property, and contested access and exclusion. This land is ‘unfixed’. Attempts are being made to re-fix this land to contemporary agendas of growth and development. Yet, in a socio-natural perspective of human-nature co-production, permeable institutions continue making permeable land. Thus, property intersects with claims of access, sacrality, territory, authority and more. And a spilled over state of informality and shadowy authority, a highly embedded market of sociality and relationality, and politics that challenges and is incorporated within the unfixed trajectories of land remain the (dis)order of the day. Tracing the fraught trajectory of unfixed land shines a light on India from the ground up.

Contact

Mattias Borg Rasmussen


Practicalities

Open to all.
Limited seating.