What is land and how is it made? In this penetrating new study of sites in western, eastern and southern India, Nikita Sud argues persuasively that land is not simply the solid surface of the earth. It is best understood as a materially and conceptually dynamic realm, intimately tied to the social. As such, land transitions across porous registers of territory, property, authority, the sacred, history and memory, and contested access and exclusion. While states,
markets and politics in post-liberalisation India try to make land suitable for 'growth' and 'development', Sud reveals that the...