Contents
Acknowledgements xiii
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction: The Great Agrarian Conquest 1
I. Governing the rural
1 Masculine paternalism and colonial
Governance 16
Colonial Riders 16
Styles of Governance 21
The Fear of Ambiguity 26
The New Paternalism 34
Reason and the Imagination 40
The Return of the Despot 46
Paternal Violence 51
II. The agrarian imaginary
2 How villages were found 64
How Estate becomes Village 70
Recording the Interior 74
The Cartographic Truth 85
Bounding Sovereignty 93
Agrarian Spaces, Village Structures 97
Respatialising the Rural 104
3 In search of tenures 109
Mapping Tenures 112
The Logic of Classification 115
Temporalising Space and Spatialising Time 126
The Prison-house of Categories 131
Landscaping Village Communities 135
The Limits of Classification 140
Empowering the Village Brotherhood 142
4 The power of categories 152
Ethnographic Truth and the Question of Rights 153
Translating Categories 157
Rights vs Practice 170
Fixity, Security, and Legal Order 175
The Production of Categories 180
5 Codifying custom 183
From Text to Practice 186
Of Informants and Sovereigns 193
The Enquiry 198
The Impossible Task of Preservation 203
Tradition, Reason, and Time 208
Custom and Power 212
The Discourse of Custom 216
III. From code to practice
6 Remembered pasts 221
Dabwali Dhab 222
The Remembered Past 228
The Time of Reciprocity 239
Through the Native Voice 243
7 Beyond the code 253
The Myth of Patrilineal Descent 255
The Politics of Adoption 262
Against Gifts 268
The Will of the Dead 272
The Rights of Chastity 274
The Community and the Individual 280
Who was the Outsider? 285
The Commodity Economy and the Language of Rights 291
8 Fear of the fragment 295
Fear of the Fragment 296
Times that Bind 298
Two Histories of Partition 301
Modernity and the Culture of Joint-holdings 310
The Market and the Ambiguities of Law 317
When Negotiations Fail 320
The Logic of Scatter 327
IV. From the "primitive" to the modern
9 Colonising the commons 339
Nomads of the Bar 342
Tirni and the Politics of Settlement 348
The Unpublished Maps 356
The Fraudulent Line 362
Regulating Rights 367
Regenerating Grasslands: From Practice to Science 377
10 The promise of modernity, antinomies of development 385
Canals and the Science of Empire 389
A Regime of Squares 398
Enclosing the Fields 403
A New Language of Claims 410
Promise and Betrayal 416
Antinomies of Development 424
Two Paths of Agrarian Conquest 435
Epilogue: The Last Ride 442
Glossary 459
Bibliography 466
Index 511