Compounding aspirations: grounding hegemonic processes in India's rural transformations

ABSTRACT

This article introduces compounding aspirations as a key concept for interrogating complex and contradictory rural transformations in India. We argue that compounding aspirations are central to the conjunctural grounding of hegemonic processes of neoliberalisation in lived experience. Taking such aspirations as constitutive elements to hegemonic processes, we question prevailing perspectives on rural transformations in India as we speak to emerging interest in critical agrarian studies to transcend dichotomous views of consent and coercion. We illustrate this argument with select empirical cases from India, focusing in particular on adverse incorporation in corporate agriculture in rural Karnataka.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article propose d’appliquer le concept « d’aspirations composées » à l’analyse des transformations complexes et contradictoires qui ont cours dans le monde rural en Inde. Nous argumentons que l’addition et la combinaison des aspirations joue un rôle primordial dans la concrétisation conjoncturelle de l’hégémonie néolibérale dans l’expérience vécue. Nous considérons ces aspirations comme des éléments constitutifs des processus hégémoniques et nous remettons en question les perspectives dominantes concernant les transformations rurales en Inde. Nous rendons ainsi compte de l’utilisation croissante des perspectives critiques pour transcender les conceptions dichotomiques du consentement et de la contrainte dans les études agraires. Nous illustrons notre argument à l’aide de cas empiriques choisis en Inde, et en particulier l’intégration défavorable de zones rurales du Karnataka dans l’agriculture commerciale.

KEYWORDS:

• Aspirations
• India
• hegemony
• dispossession
• rural transformation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, Martha Snodgrass and the anonymous reviewers for constructive input to this article.

Notes on contributors

Jostein Jakobsen is a research fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on agrarian change in India, food regime analysis, “meatification” and the Naxalite movement in India, set within broad interests in political ecology and critical agrarian studies. He has published in Globalizations, Journal of Peasant Studies, Geoforum and Forum for Development Studies.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, and coordinator of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. His work on politics and democracy in India focuses on land dispossession, land use and popular movements. His most recent books include Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India (Anthem Press, 2018) and the co-edited volume Indian Democracy: Origins, Contestations, Trajectories (Pluto Press, 2019).

Notes

1 We concur with the assessments that in India, “neoliberal capitalism has been felt quite unevenly across time, regions, sectors, castes and classes” (Münster and Strümpell 2014, 4). Nonetheless, we argue that the notion of compounding aspirations can assist us in tackling head-on hegemonic processes.

2 Applied in the Indian context it illustrates how the country's neoliberalisation proceeds as a contradictory, uneven and incomplete hegemonic process (Nielsen and Nilsen 2015). This enables us to avoid reifying “neoliberal capitalism”’ as an externally imposed, unitary phenomenon, while simultaneously recognising that capital does indeed exert its “logic” on rural India.

3 Levien's argument is articulated in other publications such as Agarwal and Levien (2019).

4 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT). Available at http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home (accessed 6 September 2019).

5 A pseudonym.