This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe--with its many forms of livelihood--were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh.
Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya...