Amidst extensive peripheral urbanization in India, this paper focuses on the city of Gurgaon and describes how the forms and processes of sub/urbanism not only exceed the confines of the city but a...

Primitive accumulation and historical inevitability

Cities in a world of villages: agrarian urbanism and the making of India’s urbanizing frontiers

Meena Kandasamy’s 2014 novel The Gypsy Goddess offers a highly reflexive narration of the Kilvenmani massacre: the brutal repression of agricultural labourers on strike in South India, December 1968. The novel does not provide a linear account of the events, but rather interrogates the very act of representing such historical reality in fictional form. Accordingly, Kandasamy’s text articulates a non-synchronous aesthetic whereby the chronological order of things is replaced by a stratigraphic process: the novelist is reimagined as a digger excavating overlapping grounds of history and reassembling them in a metafictional, multidimensional narrative composition. The anti-chronological aesthetic adopted by Kandasamy, however, does not end up in a postmodern fragmentation of the story of Kilvenmani. On the contrary, the novelist’s play with time emerges as a mirroring of objective conditions of peripheral capitalism in the narrative dialectic of story and history.

The Author as Digger: The Gypsy Goddess and the Strata of History

This chapter focuses on the different kinds of encounter of the circuits of global capital with world of the third. We show through ‘case studies’ how the workings of global capital over world of the third engender processes of the original accumulation of capital—of expropriation, theft, and plunder—in the name of the development of the third world subject. The force and violence of original accumulation is backed up by processes of hegemonization (through adoption, adaptation, assimilation, and appropriation) and seemingly benign pro-poor interventions by the World Bank through NGOs within the world of the third. Lastly, the consequence of the foreclosures of class and world of the third on nature and on the environmental movement is also flagged. Development works in this complex process of coercion and hegemony as the delusional veil. 

Primitive accumulation and historical inevitability

Citations

Cities in a world of villages: agrarian urbanism and the making of India’s urbanizing frontiers

The Author as Digger: The Gypsy Goddess and the Strata of History

World of the Third: Encounters with the Hegemonic

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