IMPERIALISM AND AGRARIAN TRANSITION IN SOUTH ASIA

Description

This edited volume seeks to redress the present marginalization of studies on agrarian transition in India. Issues of money lending, tenancy, class relations in agrarian production, continuous fragmentation of land holdings and the root causes of the persistent agrarian crisis that witnessed a scholarly debate in the 1960s, inform the chapters included in this book. The book focuses on themes such as agrarian policy, agrarian movements, transformation of peasant communities and finally impact of the penetration of capital on adivasi (tribal) society. The chapters of the book display a diverse range of scholarship, of theoretical and analytical forays to understand the crisis in agrarian production in India.

Kumar Sanjay Singh is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Swami Shraddhanand College, University of Delhi. He has taught for over 31 years. His writings are mostly on marginal studies and human rights. His articles have been published in the journals and publications of National Human Rights Commission and Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Social Science Probing, Seminar, Mainstream and several newspapers have carried his writings. Kumar Sanjay Singh was awarded the Shastri Indo-Canadian Fellowship for a project on migration headed by Prof. Margret Walton Roberts. He has guided a project on Puiya Script of Thingnam Sanjeeb for Victoria and Albert Museum.

Kusum Lata is an independent researcher. During the conference, from which the papers of this book are drawn, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Ghaziabad. She holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and an M.Phil from the Delhi School of Economics. She has previously taught at Jamia Millia Islamia and the University of Delhi, with nearly nine years of teaching experience. Her research interests lie in Marxist political economy.

Fraser Sugden is a human geographer who has written extensively on shifting class, gender and generational relations in agriculture, and their interaction with contemporary environmental, political and economic stresses. He has conducted intensive rural fieldwork across South and East Asia, with a focus on Nepal and the Eastern Gangetic Plains, and was based in this region for a decade before joining the University of Birmingham. He maintains a commitment to interdisciplinary action research with strong engagement and partnership with civil society and organizations working at the grassroots.