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William J. Glover, "Reformatting Agrararian Life: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
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Will Glover
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew, chapter six. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
- [00:31]
Marshall Poe
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:09]
Origno
Welcome everyone to today's episode of New Books Network. I'm Origno, your host. I'm a PhD candidate at Michigan and I work on early colonial British Empire sovereignty and law. And today we have as guest Will Glover for our interview. Welcome, Will.
- [02:28]
Will Glover
Thank you. Hi everybody.
- [02:30]
Origno
Hi. So Will Glover is a professor in History at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Wilvers interests include South Asian, colonial and post colonial urban and cultural history, social theory, and the material culture of built environments. His work explores the implication of built environments, knowledge cultures, and urban processes in colonial South Asia. Gyawe's current research is directed towards understanding how socioeconomic concepts and spatial practices deployed under the rubric of urbanism have intersected with and helped shape physical designs for the proper organization of social life, particularly those designs that have explicitly problematized differences between rural and urban milieus. His first book, Making Lahore Modern, investigated the traditions that shaped colonial Lahore. In particular, he focuses on the conviction that both British and Indian actors who implemented urbanization came to share that the material fabric of the city could lead to social and moral improvement. This belief in the power of the physical environment to shape individual and collective sentiments, Glover argued, links the colonial history of Lahore to 19th century urbanization around the world. His most recent book, Reformatting Agrarian Life, which we'll discuss today, explores the migration of urban concepts into the agrarian spaces of colonial North India. And on that note again, once again, tamafoam. Okay, well, yeah, so thanks Will for writing this. Really fascinating and like it was a pleasure to read. It's also so much to learn from the way you write. So we'll start with our first kind of introductory question to say how would you describe your intellect journey from Making Lahore Modern to Reformatting a Gladiator life? Did you see this book being published while you wrote your first monograph? Or did the current book kind of emerge from different frameworks and context? I want to briefly touch upon that. I was while reading I found Object Lesson appearing in both books in ways and wondering when I went back to the definition in your first book, it almost seemed like you were thinking about some of these things. So I just want you to tell us a little bit.
- [04:51]
Will Glover
Yeah, no, thanks very much and thanks especially. Thank you for inviting me to join the podcast. It's a great privilege. It makes me nervous, but it's a great privilege to be asked and I know your work and I know you well, so it's a pleasure to have a conversation with you as well. You're right. Object Lessons appears in both books and the idea that I attached to a kind of a 19th century modernist idea that a proper arrangement of space could produce salutary effects in a population that interacts with that space almost unconsciously, somatically, that I feel like that is a connection between these two books. I Also in my first book on Lahore, briefly looked at the countryside beyond the city. I even looked at canal colonies, which forms a whole chapter in this new book. And in some of the kind of criminal tribe settlement colonies, mostly to get at a kind of sensibility about geometry as providing a key to unlocking a kind of power. I, I, I, I'm sure there are thousands of similarities between the first book and the second one, but I really set out to write a very different kind of book. And I actually spent a lot of time retraining myself. I studied in graduate school. You know, I was a consumer of theories of modernity and urban modernity and Baudelaire and Haussmanization of Paris and all of that. I was just immersed in literature on the city. And I knew that the city had a surrounding. I knew that the city had a hinterland. And of course, urban historians are constantly told to take that into account, that the city doesn't just stop at the border at the municipal limits, but that there's a world outside of the city that impacts how the city operates, success, its fortunes, its famines and so forth. So I thought, well, what is this thing outside the city? Amita Bhaviskar, who's a sociologist, anthropologist in Delhi, probably as she has often done in the past, was the one who provoked me most by saying something like, hey, I enjoyed making Lahore modern, but the city exists in a context. Where's that context? And so I sort of took her up on that. And there are other ways, though, that this new project, this new book, were percolating for a long, long time in me and my background and what I had been interested in. I mean, I sort of grew up in a rural context. I mentioned in the introduction to the book that my, or maybe in the acknowledgments that my grandfather was a farmer and I used to love to go to the farm when I was younger. And I realized from a fairly early age that farming wasn't this kind of rustic occupation. I mean, he was so modern. He was so up to date. He had such cool gadgets. He had the first Polaroid camera that printed an instant picture. I just thought that was amazing. And that was just a clue. There were so many things that he acquired and had interest in that were really, really up to date. And he also, you know, our summer reveries were always interrupted by having to go to town, having to go to the grain dealer, having to go talk to the extension agents and so forth. So I knew that there was this kind of rural modernity. Going on at the same time that urban modernity that I was interested in study was happening. So I guess this book was a long. A long fermenting question inside my mind as to how do you pull those two together? Is it too much to write about? And I thought, okay, well, I'll write an agrarian history. So I started reading as much agrarian history as I could. Works that I completely ignored in graduate school. I had this feeling that it's already covered by somebody else. That's why I never read Gandhi in graduate school. Somebody else has, well, covered him. I'll look at stuff that's not so well covered. Of course, I regretted that when I started to teach. And every second question from students was about Gandhi. So sometimes you have to go back and reread things that you skipped. And that was pretty much what I was doing in the initial phases of this project. In the end, I realized that I'm still an urban historian and that's why I call it an urban history. But this book is an urban history from the countryside. I'm looking at urbanism as it left the city and settled out into agrarian space. So, yeah, probably if you slice the book, the two books together on any page, you'll see my mammatic structures everywhere. I think that's just a. Scholars are.
- [10:28]
Origno
You know, Joe, for sure. And to have kind of lived in between the two books is also kind of. It's intriguing. And on that note, I was wondering, for the novice and professional history enthusiast, could you tell us a little bit about how you navigate different sources first, but also rereading and living through familiar sources in a way to produce uniquely unfamiliar histories?
- [10:57]
Will Glover
Yeah, I think my method as the historian in terms of the kind of potpourri of sources that I admit into my process comes from something I read. And I'll probably get it wrong because it was so long ago. It was a period of my life when I was reading a lot of Michel Foucault's work. And I don't know if he said this or if I just remember that he said this in something he wrote. But it's an idea that I actually cite in this new book. And one little passage, I won't reproduce that for you here, but he says, if you're interested in a topic, don't just look for things that are. That are denominated by that topic. That topic will appear, you know, even in absence. And a whole lot of other discourse that's not directly about the topic. So let's just say agrarian life. I'm Looking for urbanism in agrarian sources. But what I'm doing is casting a very wide net anywhere where urban, urbanism, city comes up and what I will pull that out and read it in the context in which it appears. Because that gives me one more kind of point on a map as I'm assembling my sources. And I think what Foucault called these were surfaces of emergence. That is, he's looking for a surface that in my case would be the interconnection between urban and rural spaces. But it's formed by all these discourses that intersect with that surface in different ways. The thing that holds them together is the object, the urban and rural interconnectivities. But there is no single archive for that. Right. That's just a topic that emerges through discourse, through intersecting inquiries, styles of naming things and so forth. So I've always felt that that was a good research strategy to not limit yourself to a particular kind of file or particular, even ethnographic context, but to allow all kinds of things into your purview and then look to see where they connect up without intending to necessarily. Yeah, so that's part of it. And then rereading familiar sources over the years. I think that that goes back to my first response to your first question about having lived for a long time with the question of, you know, the modernity of the rural in a way. And then going back to a very impressive. Lovely. Probably if I had it to do all over again, I would have been an agrarian historian. I really love the literature in that genre and that discipline going back to that and finding suddenly things that are meaningful to me in it that I didn't notice the first time I read them. So yes, that is important to go back and reread things.
- [14:27]
Origno
Thank you that. Thank you for that fascinating answer. And I wish people, I wish this was a video interview. People could see the visualization of the surface level. Yeah, I thought, I wish this was. This was something so that people could. Because, I mean, I can see the way in which you live the book. It's just on a different note, Amitabh, you mentioned in a post, she describes this book as follows, this new book is important at a whole new level as it prizes out and sweeps away deep seated ideas about the rural and the urban as being distinctly different. Rural India, especially Punjab, will never look the same again. I wanted to ask for the audience, what is unique about rural Punjab in India, for the uninitiated, which prompted you to blur the boundaries.
- [15:19]
Will Glover
That's a very interesting Question. And it's a very nice quote from Amita. Yeah. So in India, by which I mean the territory designated by that term prior to 1947. So Punjab is a state in western India that in 1947 was kind of split in half. Half of it went to India, half of it went to the new state of West Pakistan. And in both contexts, Punjab is sort of stereotypically the breadbasket of India. I just saw this fascinating map recently online somewhere. It was a relief map, a topographic relief map that you could buy for $39 or something of India. And it showed just how unique and unusual the Indus Valley and its connection with the Jamuna Ganga Doab, how uniquely fertile and flat and rich those two areas are. And Punjab sits squarely at the intersection of those two big drainages. So the idea was that if this quintessentially agrarian province, this breadbasket of India that's known for high rates of agricultural production, a lot of agricultural wealth, wheat and sugar cane, it's always just been seen as a fundamentally agricultural area. And the people, too. You know, the stereotypical Punjabi is rustic and jovial and connected to the village and his. His buffalo, you know, in a way that we see in other parts of India as well, but certainly very strong in Punjab. So the idea was that if I could show how urbanized that agrarian space was, then people could draw, you know, kind of connect the dots to the parts of country that they're more interested in. And of course, you know, I. Since I wrote my first book on Lahore and I've spent most of my research in Punjab, I was. That's. That's the real answer. I'm familiar with it. We're often told, you know, like, well, how can you just focus on one. One province? You know, And I think that I'm just going to guess. I don't know this for sure, but I would imagine Punjab has about the same population as France or something. You know, these. This is a big important region and a big, important. Yeah, you know, India, definitely. Yeah.
- [18:14]
Origno
I mean, we can all see through the humility that you're kind. It's great. I mean, there's so many things that we'll talk about. We'll see how kind of it's unique and your argument shapes through the uniqueness of the region. I want to touch upon a little bit about some of the things that you've kind of discussed in grad seminars and that also appears in the book. Out of several names, the influence of Timothy Mitchell and Raymond Williams seemed to remain etched in the pages, in many ways, how have they influenced your work within and beyond the pages of Reformatting a Gradient Life?
- [18:53]
Will Glover
That's interesting. Well, certainly Raymond Williams placed the question in my mouth, you know, what's the relationship between the countryside and the city? And that book by that same title? And his analysis, of course, is over a much longer Duray. And it's really based on literary. It's a literary history of the ways in which the relationship, the connection between the countryside and the city has been figured over time for a very, very long time in India. And so that's what I wanted to do with a tiny subset of his skill set. I wanted to do something similar to that. And I've just long admired him as a intellectual, as a writer. And also. I don't know if you've ever read that book in the beginning. Yeah, you have, because you probably took that seminar with me. He talks about, you know, growing up in the. In the countryside and looking at the lights of the city at night, standing outside his farmhouse. And, you know, while he is really interested in the kind of dichotomy between the city and the countryside, he says right up front, most spaces are a combination of the two, you know, and yet we act as though they're very, very different. So that would reemerge as a sort of a guiding light in my work on this book. Timothy Mitch, I think, is. You know, he's brilliant. He has a very interesting idea about the state. He says the state's not a single thing. It's a claim. And it constantly works to ask us to accept it as a single thing, but it fails all along the way. He makes an appearance, in part because I used his concept, or I liked his concept of reformatting. And that's the first. I think it's the first word in the subtitle. No, it's called. Yeah, it's the first word of the title, Reformatting Agrarian Life. And I cite from his book, there's a little quote at the beginning of a chapter, the beginning of the introduction, maybe even where he says that states work to reformat. It's not simply that they're describing things more accurately. They're reformatting things when they go about these sort of Foucautian strategies of naming and delimitating and mapping and, you know, describing and all the rest of it. So, yeah, so, I mean, both of those people are really just like inspirations in a way. I think the theoretical and historiographic apparatus of the book moves quickly away from them. But they're. They're like my potpourri evidence strategy. You know, if somebody's saying something useful, use it. There's no extra money for being pure. Just go ahead and use what works. And I think they work really well for me.
- [22:06]
Origno
Thank you. Thank you for the answer. On a similar note, then, this project of formatting or reformatting of a graded life, and you. You write in. In a place as this project being a Schmittian one, where rationalization, connectivity and consolidation were the new spatial orders behind reformatting of agrarian Punjab. Could you tell us a little bit about this? Definitely. This is theoretical understanding of a new order that you read to Schmidt.
- [22:39]
Will Glover
Yeah, yeah. I think that the concept of the order does kind of come from Schmidt and others who've talked about a spatial order, which is a term that I use in this book. And Schmidt says something to the effect that, you know, I love. He has a quote, something to the effect that, you know, spatial orders are installed by subsequent regimes. And he has this image of a man, I think he uses that gender, you know, standing, you know, sort of pinned in by new. New landscapes and arrangements of things, you know, and if you. If you look at the state reformattings and private reformattings of spatial territory in the Punjab, including agrarian and urban, you will see a lot of commonalities emerge. And one is a kind of unforgettable privileging of the square, the geometrical shape of the square. So fields are square, towns are square, blocks are square, the grid is there. And of course, we have long and interesting history on the efficacy and authority of gridded space as a settlement strategy that goes way back in time. You know, we could even say Mohenjo Daro. You know, some people will say, well, it's a sort of a gridded city. And to me, that it was not just, you know, something that they relied on because they imagined themselves as being like the Romans, you know, who also used gridded towns, but rather the grid makes it really quickly evident when something's out of place. A grid is comprised of geometric shapes of the equal area. And so you can compare between things very easily. People can remember how many grids they have. They might not remember how many fields they have in a very diverse array of geometric fields, some small, some big, and also when the urban. Well, so I'm kind of jumping ahead, but I look at this most closely in the planning of the Canal colonies in Punjab, which was a really dry but potentially rich area out in western Punjab that had not been much developed prior to the late 19th century. And in addition to building a very huge agrarian landscape out there based on perennial canals and the repotting of what was previously fairly dried up land, they also built. And we all know the story of the Punjab Canal colonies as a story of agrarian transformation. Niladhari Bhattacharya, another of my heroes, a historian in Delhi. His book is called the Great Agrarian Transformation. And it's not just the canal colonies, but that plays a big role in his story. They also planned, in a period of 20 or 30 years, 50 new towns. I mean, that is a massive urban project to build 50 new towns. And they're all gridded. You know, they come up with just a handful of types that they could build. All of them deploy this grid. It's a regime of squares in Aniladri Bhattacharya's formulation. So, yeah, so that I think I've wandered from your question a bit, but I think that the spatial order, I was looking to see if I could characterize what it is, and it is one that, as is evident in the way I've described how I think the grid works, privileges geometry as an ordering strategy that privileges interconnection, legibility, clarity and so forth. And I mean, that's a fairly standard. That's not surprising probably to most readers or to me even. But what is, I think, quite delightful is if you really look closely, you can see it being reproduced at so many scales and in so many different kinds of environments that it's just there, you know, and it's still with us.
- [27:37]
Marshall Poe
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- [28:39]
Origno
Absolutely. For the, for the audience, I just want to say that the. The grids appear on page 80 in the book and it appears all over. But it's fascinating to see what this reordering emerges in schematics and diagrams. This book is also a project of co constitution of the urban and the rural. And again, you're right. What changed over time was the idea that village and city were independent of one another and infrastructures of connection fashioned instead. Relations of co constitution. What is this project of co Constitution?
- [29:19]
Will Glover
Yeah, so it really does. The predicate is an important one, and that is that prior to the changes that I'm describing in this book, I argue, many people have argued that the city and the village were completely separate from one another, had nothing to do with one another, unimportant to one another completely. But by and large, you know, and I cite Gandhi, you can cite a hundred other people saying, you know, the real India lives in her villages, not in her cities and so forth. So it's an idea that lasts a long time, and you can still hear it, you know, in public discourse in India and Pakistan. So my claim is that by about 1920, 1930, you could still say that the real India lives in her villages and the Indian city is not the Indian village and so forth. You could still say it, people still do say it, but it no longer made the same kind of sense as it once did. Because by that time we've had 30, 40, 50 years of these reformatting projects out in the countryside, where urban practice, urban logic, urban form migrate out into the countryside. And so by the 1930s, certainly by the 1950s, you can't really be taken seriously if you're talking about fundamental aspects of human settlement in India without saying that there's a connection between the city and the village. And basically, my book is trying to tell that story. So we get, for example, in the 1950s, terms like Ruben, right, R U R B A N, which is a combination of rural and urban. Hundreds of articles with the title Verban something, something, you know, going on. We see by the 1940s and 1950s, in schools of planning, the schools of architecture, students like walking en masse out into the countryside outside of the cities, where they're studying nearby in peripheral villages to look for evidence telltale Evidence that modernity or modernism or urbanism is making its influences felt in the village. Right. So this idea that the city depends on the countryside and the countryside depends on the city, that they co constitute that they're. That they're interdependent, that's the simplest form of relationship that people probably generally accept. Co constituting is slightly different. Co constituting means that they produce each other, that the one is the effect of the other and it doesn't exist without it. Right. And I think that I try to find that idea about co constitution in as many different utterances as I can. They are thickest from about the 1930s on up. But the story that makes that the inevitable way of thinking now about the city and countryside, the story of how we got to that, is not a straight line. It's a crooked trail to get from the city and the village have nothing to do with one another too. You can't talk about them separate from one another. But I do think that happens. I think I've demonstrated in the book. I think it could be demonstrated in other ways. Something that I began to really feel strongly about by the end of writing that book. But I've laid it out for folks and now it's up to them to go and critique and build on it and improve on it.
- [33:21]
Origno
I'm sure that's going to be the effect of the book. Do you describe these very. In such candid manner yet? When I read the book, I see the urban keep attempting to leave the city and then the village repeatedly creeping into the streets of the city and keeps happening. And this is. It's fascinating to come across these phenomenon. How and why does this happen? Why does the urban keep leaving the city? And why are these mushroom towns coming up in the canal colonies? And they're like. And they're not quite open, but they're there.
- [34:01]
Will Glover
Yeah. I mean, so this is about the present, really. What you just said will make perfect sense to anyone who's traveled through contemporary India. It doesn't matter. Punjab. Anywhere in the state. You will hear it on the lips of policy folks and in every local newspaper. This idea that there's the villages in the city, there's villagers in the city, and also conversely, that there's all these new kinds of urban agglomerations taking place along highways and in places that are not customarily what we think of as cities. And I sort of talk about this a bit in some of my other publications and a little bit in the introduction to this new book that I think starting around 2018 or so, when people started really combing over the results of the 2011 census, which is still, I think, the most recent one we have. That was the first time that rural population grew quicker than. I mean, that urban population grew more quickly than rural population, at the rate anyway. And India, as most people will know, is still 65% rural, I think something like that. 65, 30, 60, 40. And nevertheless, the rate of growth of urban population was on fire in 2011. And. And part of the reason for that was a. Was a census artifact, and that is that the federal government describes these little pockets of urbanism out in the countryside as urban. And it's based on demographic criteria primarily. But many state governments, for various reasons, still call those places rural. And that makes a difference what you call the space. It makes a difference in what kinds of government grants you're eligible to apply for. It makes a difference in the sort of regime of governance that an area is subjected to. So there's all of these urban spaces in the countryside. Now. This was seen as a great discovery, you know, at the time. And people. I mean, there's a huge literature on this now. And the name for those little urban places out in the countryside are census towns. And census towns were, you know, I think, far and away the most vigorous, showed the most vigorous growth since the last census. So people got really interested in that. And there's been a lot of really good scholarship on it. My. My gambit was to say, oh, but this has been going on much longer than that. You know, the classic historian's argument. Right. It's sometimes cheeky, but I could already tell, you know, by the time that scholarship came out. And incidentally, I was a fellow traveler. I mean, I think in the last 10 years, I've been to more conferences with, you know, anthropologists and urban planners than I have been with historians, because I wanted to travel with them around this idea of an agrarian urbanism. And they mean something slightly different from it than I do. But I think I'm kind of helping by giving a sort of prehistory of the census town at some level. But mine's also got a strong intellectual historical component that's not as focused towards policy and so forth. Yeah, definitely.
- [37:45]
Origno
Definitely going into the specifics of the book a little bit. I'm wondering here. You mentioned this is the first chapter. How does a famine commission report, which is supposed to help people live. And this goes. This is the undercurrent of it, like something that's supposed to help people live, suddenly transforms into controlling the manner in which resources are circulated and controlling, the manner in which people live and live or die. And there's this sentiment that kind of the undercurrent of the book. How does this play out?
- [38:18]
Will Glover
Yeah, so, I mean, I didn't start there. I didn't start with the Famine Commission report, which. The one that I think is very pivotal to this history is the 1888. Is it 1880? 18. See, I knew I would forget some details. At any rate, those of you who are interested in famine will know which one I'm referring to. It really came about as a result of a shifting sensibility about the responsibilities of governance that the government. This is something Foucault points to much earlier in Europe when he writes about governmentality and that the government needs to take care of the welfare of its citizens. And the famines of the 19th century were brutal. They were devastating. Millions of people died. And it was just, it was a huge stain on the colonial government that they oversaw all this and didn't seem to be able to do much to help it. So what I think that report did, I see that report as kind of starting this process away from moving from city and village have nothing to do with one another to their co constitution. I really think it's a major moment in that history because it doesn't say how are we going to stop famine. It's very clear famines are going to occur. It says that. So famines are going to take place. We can't stop that from happening, but we could be better at predicting it and at taking measures once famine has begun to alleviate the crisis. So prediction depended on accurate information, which they found they had none about agrarian processes. Believe it or not, as much recording and revenue settlement as had gone on by then, the, the, the data was not statistically relevant. It was, it was, it was poor. And so they. One of the big things they called for in that report was to improve knowledge, and particularly statistical knowledge on the countryside. So that set off a whole set of projects around how do you develop more accurate knowledge? And then the second thing was, okay, that will help us predict it, but what do we do to alleviate the problems when famine actually does come? Because it's going to. And there they made a very fateful decision to rely on the market as a way to make sure that grain would get to people who needed it. There were people, there were dissenting members of the Famine Commission who said, no, no, no, we must build storage facilities everywhere, you know, in a regular dispersed pattern so that, you know, people will have grain if we do have famine. And you know, the consensus, not the consensus, but the majority opinion of the Famine commission was that no indeed that's old fashioned, that doesn't reveal an understanding of this new thing called the economics of agriculture. And in fact, because grain is compressible, it's easy to move around, the railways are being constructed. It'd be much better if we just send grain from areas that have surplus to areas that need it during times of famine. That's a much more efficient and much more in keeping with a changing idea about what agriculture actually was constituted by. If previously agriculture was a kind of game of surpluses and deficits tied to local spaces of production by the 1880s, and this is I think essential for the story of how the rural and the urban get drawn together in discourse by the 1880s, agriculture is something that's based on processes that are not bound any longer to particular local spots, but that are mobilizable, that you can move things around. And the other component of that is that. How do I want to say this? Yeah, I mean I'll just leave it there. So the report of 1880 implemented a lot of strategies that I would say inadvertently, haphazardly, occasionally with intention, changed the way agriculture was understood by the state and how it was to be managed. It re situated the management of agriculture in an urban interface in grain markets and rail stations and depots and international markets. It applied a new epistemological frame over how you value agriculture and agricultural land. It read the market into estimates of, you know, crop standing, crop yields. If they stopped counting how much grain was being grown and they started looking at what a field rented for, you know, so that was a huge change and I think it kind of, it started the clock on this coalescence of the two spaces.
- [44:09]
Origno
Definitely on the topic of non particularity of agriculture and this management of agriculture, we see knowledge and pedagogy and then propaganda and publicity play out in the two chapters. Talk about. So I want you to touch a little briefly on knowledge and publicity actually create the boundary and then there is propaganda publicity which is where the rural uplift program kind of start to do the co constitution. Can you touch a little bit about that? Because then I want to draw parallels and ask the limits of this. The project that you describe in the Gurgaon uplift. It just seems like right from the contemporary situation, but it's not there. So I won't touch upon the Gurgaon uplift after.
- [45:02]
Will Glover
But.
- [45:04]
Origno
Can you tell us a little bit?
- [45:06]
Will Glover
Yeah. So I think Propaganda. So the claim in the book is that once this reformatting of the countryside gets underway, part of the desire is to make big agriculture more profitable. And part of the desire also is to make the life of an agriculturalist a higher standard of living. Right? And that was as much a moral claim as anything else. And of course, agriculturalists are fairly recalcitrant bunch. They're not impressed by extinction agents and people coming out to tell them to dig straighter manure pits and, you know, put mosquito nets over their bedding and so forth. So rather than, and I think this connects to a theory of power in this book, rather than just forcing people to do all of the kinds of village reformatting, the village uplift projects that were being proposed by the 1920s and 30s, rather than forcing it, the idea was to sort of change the villagers mind and habit and try to make them themselves feel the need. And in fact the operating term was instilling felt needs in the cultivator. So it was somatic. They wanted the body of the cultivator was supposed to be involved in this project of improvement. And it was just such a huge scale project to reform agrarian population and a place as big and complicated as India that there were very few projects that actually did much. But there was a huge amount of propaganda thrown at it. And you know, there were so many books written about, you know, ostensibly to villagers about how to live better lives, you know, how to. How to manage your money better, how to stay safer, how to keep your house cleaner and so forth. But those were largely, you know, scripts for little plays that would be held in villages or posters that got stuck on village walls and so forth. And so that it doesn't matter to me so much that this vision of a reordered, reformatted agrarian world with all of its urban qualities. It's not a problem for me personally that that never really happens very fully, at least for. Not for a long, long time. What I'm interested in is how many people thought that was a good idea. And so the propaganda part of it signals that I'm not talking only about actually realized plans. I'm also talking about a kind of ideologies and their manner of mobilization that I do think was hugely widespread by the 1930s.
- [48:11]
Origno
Absolutely. On the distribution of the sensible and the rupture that this kind of order brings in. I wondered the way you read Gandhi almost, I thought you could have. There was a conservative interpretation, like take on Gandhi. It almost was there. And then you gave the agency to the people and Said that you understand the use people made of an altered partition of the sensible to disrupt the dominant aesthetic and usher in politics. So was that. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [48:50]
Will Glover
Yeah, so that's coming from Jacques Rancier's work on, I think it may be called the aesthetics of politics. And he uses this disarmingly simple phrase of the distribution of the sensible. And really what I'm talking about in much of this book is that by the sensible he means everything. What we feel, sense, see, live within and among and around, and also what we think of it, what we say about it, who's authorized to speak about it, and so forth. I love that concept of the sensible is something that can be distributed and redistributed. So that seemed useful to me. And let's see, how does that go? Yeah. So for Rancier, he says aesthetics is to do with the distribution of the sensible, but not politics. Politics is what use is made of that distribution. And particularly politics emerges the moment that a certain distribution is ruptured. Right, so you've got an old village with beaten down houses and filthy streets. The new distribution of the sensible is edge draining down all the roads, tarmac in the village square, houses, cattle kept not in the house any longer and so forth. So that's a new distribution of the sensible. Gandhi wanted all those things, as did my colonial protagonist. They wanted the straight streets, they wanted the clean cows, they wanted education for the women and so forth. They don't hold the same politics, but they valued the same aesthetics. The difference between them is that the politics are not defined by the aesthetics. The politics are defined by how both reacted to this rupture from the older one to the newer one. And that was my point about rupture, distribution of sensible space. And then also how do we square the circle where we've got anything from extremely sort of fascist state spokespeople talking about the need to reform villages. And here's how it should look to Gandhi and Gandhians saying we need to reform villages and here's how it would look. And they're very, very similar. Like how do you account for that? So where's the politics? And you're mistaken if you think the politics inheres in the way the thing looks. It inheres in the way people respond to the change in the look. That's my understanding of Rantier and that's how I was trying to use him.
- [51:53]
Origno
Thank you. Thank you for that fantastic definition. Final two questions. One is about your cover, the image that you use. And I wonder the matte finish cover page, or if I got that correct, of Darodewar by Hamza bin Faisal. What prompted you to choose this art and how is it? How do you interpret it?
- [52:16]
Will Glover
I mean, most authors will say, you know, I mean, so the publisher decides all of that, right? But if you're lucky, you know, you can suggest an image. And I'm. I mean, my favorite thing in the world is design. And, you know, I was an architect before I became a historian and I have my tastes and so forth. And I was trying to get out ahead of the publisher by suggesting some good images before they settled on one that they came up with that I would have probably found intolerable. And I was just, I mean, I literally just scrolling through, looking for images that I thought would work. And I knew that their, what their interests would be, that is, you'd need some blank space so that they could put the title. Couldn't be too busy. I didn't want to just do something that looked like a, you know, a modernization in the rural area. And I came across this young artist from Lahore, Hamza bin Faisal, and he did a whole series of paintings. This is actually, it's actually a painting. It looks like a photograph. And he was trained in the miniature painting techniques at the National College of Arts and Lahore, which is one of the institutions where that is still a big and going enterprise for artists. And I saw it somewhere online and I thought, well, I like the idea that there's a grid, there's a. There's a ventilator window, there's a wire. You know, it's talking a little bit about a kind of modernization, I suppose. And if I can, if you see that in juxtaposition of the title agrarian, maybe you'll think that's happening out in the village. It's probably a city scene that he's painted. But Hamza was very sweet and I wrote him, and I just wrote him out of the blue and say, I would love to use this image or propose it to my publisher. And he said, yeah, that'd be cool. I'd love to have my art on a book and so forth. That series is called Daro di Var, which I guess a rough translation would be in every nook and cranny, kind of. So it's about looking closely and seeing connections between things. And I think that also sort of went with my spirit of writing in this book. So I'm very grateful to Hamza. I. I have never met him in person, but next time I'm in Lahore. I'm definitely going to look him up.
- [54:51]
Origno
Thank you for telling us the story. That is fascinating. And before we leave, I'd like to ask you about your future projects, where you. Where you're going from, from this book. And. And that's the bit.
- [55:04]
Will Glover
Thank you. I'm a blank mind. I finished this book last year and became chair of the History Department, which colonizes my entire free time. Right now I'm enjoying it. It's an interesting problem space, but it's not given me very much time to work on my book. But I'm in Chicago right now. I normally live in Ann Arbor. On the drive over here late last night, I was speaking with my partner and sketching an idea for a book that I'm thinking of right now under the title of Landscape Effects. I want to do something that plays with the truism, I guess, that depending on what scale you look at, different things come out. And the scale of the landscape is something I'm interested in. And I'm thinking of maybe a chapter on deforestation, maybe a chapter on dams. Those are obvious things. But also maybe a chapter on heat in the city, the way in which people try to stay cool in Indian cities. Maybe a chapter on tourism, which markets and transacts in landscapes. I've been very influenced by Dilip Dikunha's beautifully illustrated book called the Invention of Rivers. So there's something in that that I want to play with more. I have to learn again from scratch, I think, to do this. Although, you know, landscapes are things that I've been thinking about, like my grandpa, for a long, long time. So we'll see where that goes. It's literally. That's the initial. You've just heard the initial description of the project. No one has ever heard it anywhere else.
- [56:52]
Origno
It's out there in public, but fascinating. We all look forward to that. Takes you a best of luck with, with everything. And thank you so much for joining us.
- [57:02]
Will Glover
Thank you, Rigna. I really appreciate.