Science and Agrarian Environments in South Asia

• In Event: Growing Crops in Difficult Places: Struggles to Produce in Human Landscapes

Abstract

The paper explores the imbrications and juxtapositions of time and temporality with agrarian environments in India. It does so through the movement and fortification of Bt cotton seed as an object as well as a concept across two social worlds, in a village and a seed company in India.
The presentation begins with the question, what is a good seed? Instead of reading the seed as lively matter, the paper weaves how different communities inscribe meaning on the seed through practices and evaluations of time (Bourdieu: 1980; Bennett: 2010). I argue that in the village, Durgadaitya, there are three intersecting temporalities--- of the market, rhythms of the environment, and the Bt seed itself--- that never allow for the goodness of the seed to be realized. In Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd., on the other hand, the breeders and biotechnologists have different understandings of “goodness” although they are both based on the notions of time (extended time versus erased time).
Through this totem of the good seed, the paper then makes a connection between agriculture and environment that has historically been separated in India due to colonial revenue policies (Guha and Gadgil: 1992; Rangan: 2012; Amrith: 2013). It argues that there is a fundamental difference in the way the relation between agriculture and the environment is forged in the village and the seed company. In the village, it’s a fissure from the past; in the seed company, it’s a rift from the future. And, time-reckoning and its tools become seats of power that allow for certain stories to remain and several to get submerged in the heterotopia of agrarian environments.

Author

• Ashawari Chaudhuri, Massachusetts Institute of Technology