University of Sussex
Browse
deHoopArora2017-MaterialMeaningsJHGPreprint.pdf (308.59 kB)

Material meanings: ‘waste’ as a performative category of land in colonial India

Download (308.59 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 07:55 authored by Evelien de Hoop, Saurabh AroraSaurabh Arora
Nearly seven decades after ‘decolonization’, policymaking in India continues to be haunted by colonial categories. Focusing on the category ‘wastelands’, which has been central to recent debates on India's biofuel policies, we study how it was heterogeneously constituted during the Permanent Settlement of land revenue in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial India. In particular, we trace how this category took on multiple meanings through its encounters with different human and nonhuman entities in disparate spatio-temporal settings. The entities encountered included not only ideas and moralities derived from theoretical notions such as Locke's ‘natural rights’, but also the soil and water on diverse lands, and the beings living or made to live on these lands. The multiple meanings of the category led to debates and controversies between colonial administrators regarding the ways in which the Permanent Settlement should be introduced and extended. By mapping these debates and controversies, we attempt to accomplish two things. First, we construct a narrative in which dominant colonial categories and associated rules do not possess unidirectional power to reformat colonized realities and practices. Second, we attempt to account for and recognize realities and practices that were marginalized or disregarded in the formulation of colonial administrative rules. Narratives such as ours, we hope, can help proliferate possibilities for enacting new decolonial and decolonizing practices of making, using and transforming meanings.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Journal of Historical Geography

ISSN

0305-7488

Publisher

Elsevier

Volume

55

Page range

82-92

Department affiliated with

  • SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability Centre Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-09-14

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-12-08

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-09-14

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC