Abstract

In mid-twentieth-century Punjab, grassroots development projects sought to modernize the countryside by decentralizing power to villages. The capital city Chandigarh, built in the same period, seems to represent the opposite: a national symbol of a newly independent India’s centralized power. Yet, this article argues, rural and urban were reciprocal and volatile counterparts. Through the work of M.S. Randhawa, it reorients analysis of Chandigarh to reveal how the materiality of landscape itself was a medium for territorial planning, indelibly linking—and managing the distinctions between—city and countryside. A botanist and civil servant, Randhawa used landscape to realize modernizing agendas and to constrain social change in projects from model villages and a “bioaesthetic” plan for the city to new land-grant universities that ushered in the Green Revolution’s industrialized agriculture. His work offers a revisionist history of development’s practitioners and periodization. It shows how an uneven fabric of late-colonial rural uplift shaped the contours of postcolonial, state-directed agrarian transformation. Following the civil servant in the landscape, this article calls for the grounding of abstract theories like development and state formation in histories of their local inflections.

摘要

在 20 世纪中叶的旁遮普邦，基层发展项目试图通过将权力下放给村庄来实现农村现代化。建于同一时期的首都昌迪加尔似乎代表着相反的一面：一个新独立的印度中央集权的国家象征。然而，本文认为，农村和城市是互惠的、易变的对应物。通过 MS Randhawa 的工作，它重新定位了昌迪加尔的分析，以揭示景观本身的物质性如何成为领土规划的媒介，不可磨灭地联系和管理城市与乡村之间的区别。植物学家和公务员，Randhawa 利用景观来实现现代化议程，并在从示范村和城市“生物美学”计划到引领绿色革命工业化农业的新土地授予大学的项目中限制社会变革。他的作品提供了发展实践者和分期的修正主义历史。它展示了晚期殖民地农村隆起的不均匀结构如何塑造了后殖民地、国家主导的土地转型的轮廓。跟随景观中的公务员，本文呼吁将抽象理论（如发展和国家形成）建立在其地方性变化的历史中。它展示了晚期殖民地农村隆起的不均匀结构如何塑造了后殖民地、国家主导的土地转型的轮廓。跟随景观中的公务员，本文呼吁将抽象理论（如发展和国家形成）建立在其地方性变化的历史中。它展示了晚期殖民地农村隆起的不均匀结构如何塑造了后殖民地、国家主导的土地转型的轮廓。跟随景观中的公务员，本文呼吁将抽象理论（如发展和国家形成）建立在其地方性变化的历史中。