The Decolonization of Development: Rural Development in India Before and After 1947

Abstract

This chapter examines the continuities and discontinuities in development thinking and development practice in India across the caesura of formal independence. Specifically, the chapter analyzes development approaches initiated by British and Indian administrators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were continued after 1947, and their adaptation to the political, economic, and symbolic needs of independent India. It does so by studying the ways in which the new Indian state reacted to food shortages and to problems identified in the rural and agricultural sector. Here the self-perception of the state as a development agency becomes particularly visible. At the same time the analysis of rural development approaches provides insight into the influence of colonial and transnational development approaches and their revision under changing political and economic circumstances—from empire to nation state, from decolonization to the Cold War—and with Indian as well as non-Indian actors involved.