Reassembling Provincial North India
This chapter weaves together historical geography and political ethnography, rendering provincial north India within an analytical reassembly. Drawing upon Chris Bayly’s Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (2012), along with other historians of South Asia, the chapter situates the north Indian province between empire and nation, contrasting the fluvial regime of colonial and postcolonial governments. It thus arrives at the question of flood-control embankments – and their frequent breaches – as an administrative allegory for the state in mid-Ganga plains of north India. It draws our focus to the role of embankments, as artefacts of administrative and engineering ‘solutions’ to a problem they only aggravated, established the character of state-society relations in the region, and forced a relentless wave of distress migration among the landless or small-landholding castes. The chapter argues that provincial India is dumped in a gulf and bypassed via the infrastructures of global modernity amplifying spatial, economic and infrastructural slippages, which underline the precarities of provincial life.