The Making Of Land And The Making Of India

What is land and how is it made? In this path-breaking study of sites in western, eastern, and southern India, Nikita Sud argues that land is not simply the solid surface of the earth. It is best understood as a materially and conceptually dynamic realm, intimately tied to the social. As such, land transitions across porous registers of territory, property, authority, the sacred, history and memory, and contested access and exclusion. While states, markets, and politics in post-liberalization India try to make land suitable for 'growth' and 'development', the relationship between the soil and institutions is never straightforward. A state attempting to order a layered topography is frequently stretched into shadowy domains of informality and unsanctioned practices. A market may be advanced, but remains precariously embedded in sociality. Politics could challenge the land-making of the state and markets. It may also effect compromises. Attempts at constructing a durable landed order thus reveal our own (dis)orders. In attempting to 'make' the land, Sud's intriguing study shows how the land simultaneously 'makes' us.

What is land and how is it made? In this path-breaking study of sites in western, eastern, and southern India, Nikita Sud argues that land is not simply the solid surface of the earth. It is best understood as a materially and conceptually dynamic realm, intimately tied to the social

Now revised and updated to encompass developments through the end of the twentieth century, this balanced and highly readable work provides a revealing perspective on India's complex history and society.

In 1941, after decades of struggling to hold on to the remainder of their aboriginal home, the Hualapai Indians finally took their case to the Supreme Courtand won. The Hualapai case was the culminating event in a legal and intellectual revolution that transformed Indian law and ushered in a new way of writing Indian history that provided legal grounds for native land claims. But "Making Indian Law "is about more than a legal decision. It s the story of Hualapai activists, and eventually sympathetic lawyers, who challenged both the Santa Fe Railroad and the U.S. government to a courtroom showdown over the meaning of Indian property rightsand the Indian past. At the heart of the Hualapai campaign to save the reservation was documenting the history of Hualapai land use. "Making Indian Law" showcases the central role that the Hualapai and their lawyers played in formulating new understandings of native people, their property, and their past. To this day, the impact of the Hualapai decision is felt wherever and whenever indigenous land claims are litigated throughout the world."

The story of The Making of India begins in the seventeenth century, when a small seafaring island, one tenth the size of the Indian subcontinent, dispatched sailing ships over 11,000 miles on a five-month trading journey in search of new opportunities. In the end they helped build a new nation. The sheer audacity and scale of such an endeavor, the courage and enterprise, have no parallel in world history. This book is the first to assess in a single volume almost all aspects of Britain's remarkable contribution in providing India with its lasting institutional and physical infrastructure, which continues to underpin the world's largest democracy in the twenty-first century.

Land ownership in India has always been a risky proposition. The hitherto unfettered power of acquisition and the refusal of the Parliament to recognize the right to own property as a fundamental one, had emboldened the state to stake claim on any land it saw fit. However, in the years 2012-2014, the Government of India embarked on an exercise to not just amend but to rewrite the law on acquisition. This process saw the radical polarization of public opinion into two sharp sides -those who saw acquisition as a necessary tool to India's development (given the absence of other mechanisms guaranteeing clear title), and those who were sharply opposed to an archaic relic that defied the rule of law. This book attempts to explain the rationale employed behind each and every provision by the then Minister and his Principle Aide who helped draft the law. The book is a firsthand account of the challenges faced and the factors that drove the decisions in regulating the State's approach to a resource that is arguably the most important in a land deficit people surplus nation.

Describes the variety of India's land and people, its cities and villages, agriculture, industry and transportation, the problems of development, and its animal life.