Introduction: Revisiting Community Development

On 2 October 1952, marking Gandhi's fourth birth anniversary after his assassination in 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of postcolonial India, launched the Community Development (CD) Programs. Dedicating the programs to Gandhi's memory allowed Nehru to claim symbolic legitimacy for them. At the same time, this centerpiece of Nehruvian policy in the Indian countryside was heavily interventionist, billed as “the method ... through which the [state] seeks to bring about social and economic transformation in India's villages” (Government of India 1952). In its heyday, CD preoccupied the Planning Commission, was linked to the office of the Prime Minister, had a ministry dedicated to it, and formed part of the domain of action of the rapidly proliferating state and other development agencies. Fifteen pilot projects, each covering 300 villages, were launched in all the major states. Planning documents of the day register high enthusiasm and optimism for these programs. However, by the mid-1960s, barely a decade after the fanfare of its launch, the tone of planners toward CD turned first despairing and then oppositional. They called for abandonment of its ambitious aim of the total development of Indian villages in favor of more focused interventions to achieve a rapid increase in food-grain production.

The CD programs, and indeed the CD era, occupy a curious position in authoritative accounts and analyses of Indian development and agrarian political economy. Following the broad consensus that postcolonial development had ‘continuity’ with late colonial policies,Footnote ¹ they are seldom deemed worthy of detailed examination in their own right. They are seen as having little significance in discussions of the “historical experience of Indian planning” (Bose Reference Bose, Cooper and Packard1997), or of the development of capitalism in India (Patnaik Reference Patnaik1990). The CD programs are dismissed as “empty rhetoric” (Byres Reference Byres1998: 42) or as “lacking political seriousness” (Rao Reference Rao and Byres1998: 134, n. 4). Their perceived lack of decisive force to change the countryside underlies Chatterjee's (1998) formulation of the “passive revolution” of early postcolonial planning, and their failure to break through the entrenched power of rural ruling castes and classes is noted in Frankel Reference Frankel(1978). CD programs are missing also in accounts of the emergence of state and oppositional forms of populism (Gupta Reference Gupta, Cooper and Packard1997; Reference Gupta1998).

The relegation of this period to the margins in the contemporary literature has had consequences for our understanding of the postcolonial state, development planning and policy, and agrarian populism in India. In this paper I show that the continuity in rural development policy was not only or even most significantly with colonial state policy, but rather with a number of “model village experiments” carried out by agents located outside of and sometimes in opposition to the colonial state. Development planning and policy (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee and Byres1998), as well as the roles, powers, and capacities of the “developmentalist” (Chibber Reference Chibber2003) or “social transformation” (Khan Reference Khan, Tungodden, Stern and Kolstad2004) states themselves have been studied as if they were determined exclusively by relations of force in ‘national’ politics.Footnote ² I will show here that the influences and pressures bearing on policy and planning well exceeded the nation-space. And, shifting focus from the ‘failure’ of early postcolonial policy in relation to its desired outcomes, I show that these policies had a constitutive effect on agrarian social relations and populist politics.

Through CD planning documents we can trace a lineage to model village experiments carried out by late-colonial bureaucrats, to Gandhian rural reconstruction initiatives, and to American missionary programs from the early twentieth century. In turn, documents pertaining to these experiments indicate frequent and intimate intersections with transnational flows of power, ideas, interests, and expertise in rural development. Many agencies involved in rural development before 1947—such as the Rockefeller Foundation, NGOs, and experts trained in the agriculture departments of American universities and government—remained influential in CD programs. Through a reading of these, I will assert the need to move away from a stress on the continuity between the colonial and postcolonial states toward examining continuity and change in transnational development regimes as they relate to rural India.Footnote ³ I argue that the periodization of the history of development as part of a national history is inadequate, and that it needs to be located on another register, that of transnational regimes.

Second, I examine what CD can tell us about the constitution of the forms, functions, and capacities of the postcolonial state. Relations of force in the countryside, and their articulations with the state, put outer limits on the domain of policy, as implied in the “passive revolution” formulation. As Byres Reference Byres(1988) has shown, agrarian capitalists had power to set the broad contours of policy on issues of subsidies, support prices, and so on, and to limit the success of development interventions. But class and other social relations located within national contexts do not explain the specific content of CD programs, or how the state came to assume a set of functions with respect to rural communities and their development. I show how transnational flows shaped the planning function of the state—that is, its ability to formulate, implement, and evaluate plans.

Third, what effects did CD have on rural subjectivity and agrarian politics in India? I will argue that both ‘community’ and ‘class’ framings of agrarian politics need to take into account the role of transnational flows—of money, agricultural inputs, and, for our purposes here, ideas of institutional design—in creating new politics of community and class. For Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee(1993), “community” is the polar opposite of the state, an un-colonized and inviolable space of subalterneity, and “an unresolved contradiction of modernity.”Footnote ⁴ Abandoning the community/state and subaltern/modern binaries, I explore how transnationally produced CD programs made the encompassment of community central to the accumulation and legitimation strategies of the postcolonial state, and how its entrenchment in the countryside made the state interior to the logic of domination, hegemony, and resistance in rural India. I also argue that CD programs were important in class formation in the countryside in two distinct and contradictory ways: on one hand, they entrenched rural elites into positions of political leadership, provided them platforms for class-based association, and shaped their interactions with the state, but, on the other, they also influenced mobilizations of the rural poor. Following Guha Reference Guha(1983), who limited his inquiry into subaltern conditions to the period 1783–1900,Footnote ⁵ I examine the CD programs and their transnational lineages as modes for the transformations of community. The interactions between India's ‘rural community’ and ‘agricultural classes’ with a transnational development regime—a complex that included the state, American missionaries, bilateral and international development agencies, international foundations and NGOs, and institutions of expertise—shaped the terrain and the idioms of subaltern and agrarian politics over time.

By tracing the lineages of the CD programs, I argue that forms of power located outside the nation-space played key roles in shaping India's postcolonial state and agrarian politics. I raise questions regarding the appropriate spatial frames in which to study Indian development, and the relations between spatial planes. As Goswami Reference Goswami(2004) has argued, such an inquiry has been limited by “methodological nationalism,” that is, the tendency to assume the existence of “the nation” as a privileged spatial frame rather than to explain its production in a dynamic relation with various global fields. However, such global fields, I will show, are wider and more varied than her notions of inter-state relations and global restructuring. Forms of expert knowledge, embodied and carried transnationally by ‘civil society’ agents, shaped the roles and functions of the nation-state with respect to development. Similarly, while agreeing with Robinson Reference Robinson(2004) that the study of state-forms has been inhibited by “embedded nation-state centrism” (that is, the tendency to study states ‘naturally’ as nation-states), I will show through my analysis of CD that this is not a problem specific to the contemporary “age of globalization”: states ruling over national spaces have always drawn on transnational regimes, a relation in need of a more rigorous account.Footnote ⁶

Bringing forms of power external to the nation into explanations of national development allows me to enter other debates. Petras Reference Petras(1997) and Hearn Reference Hearn(2001) have argued that modes of power formed outside national frames—by the World Bank or bilateral aid agencies, for example—are “imposed” through coercive relations on national units, and are instruments of contemporary imperialism. This does not explain how politics within national frames intersect with these external forms of power.Footnote ⁷ Studies of the power of international development (e.g., Escobar Reference Escobar1995; Ferguson Reference Ferguson1994; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2002) have gone a long way in establishing both how such power is constituted and its “instrument effects.” Ferguson Reference Ferguson(1994) famously has described international development as an “anti-politics machine.” However, these accounts of the unidirectional flow of development's power occlude analysis of nationalist, populist, and subaltern invocations of development in making claims and rights-demands. I use CD to show how different spatial levels (local, national, international) are connected by transnational flows of developmental power, and how these transnational flows produce new political possibilities, rather than ‘de-politicization,’ in their sites of application.

The paper is organized as follows: In the next section, I outline how the colonial state, its nationalist opponents, and philanthropists and missionaries each became interested in rural communities. Against this backdrop, I then trace three lineages of CD, namely the Gurgaon Rural Uplift Experiments of the late-colonial Punjab bureaucrat Francis Brayne, the Gandhian model village experiments, and the Marthandam Rural Development Centre (MRDC) started by the American missionary Spencer Hatch and the YMCA. I trace how these different projects channeled transnational ideas and models of rural development to Indian villages. I sketch how, in the postcolonial period, elements of these experiments consolidated into a hegemonic formation, a transnational regime of community development. Next, I outline the effects of transnational regimes on the entrenchment of the developmentalist state in the countryside, and consequently on agrarian politics.Footnote ⁸ I conclude by suggesting new directions in the history of Indian development, and some reconsiderations of the transnationality concept.

Community, State and Transnationality: A Pre-History

From the late nineteenth century, Indian villages began to figure, for quite different reasons, as objects of interest and intervention in the agenda of colonialists, cosmopolitan capitalists, nationalists, American philanthropists, and reformist missionaries.

For the colonial state, its relations with rural communities were crucial to its strategies of entrenchment in the countryside.Footnote ⁹ Influential writers of the mid-nineteenth century such as Henry Maine and John Stuart Mill recommended making India's “village republics,” imagined as “autonomous communities,” the units of administration (Cowen and Shenton Reference Cowen and Shenton1996: 51–53; Ludden Reference Ludden and Dirks1992).Footnote ¹⁰ The colonial state in Punjab held that community institutions, controlled by large land owners, were definitive features of the political terrain of Mughal India, and granted them the power to mobilize unpaid labor to clear the Shah Nahr canal system. This reduced the state's own costs in financially tight times (Gilmartin Reference Gilmartin and Madsen1999). In Tamil Nadu, the Public Works Department invented the system of “traditional community management” called “kudimaramat” (village repair and maintenance of irrigation works; see Mosse Reference Mosse1999: 310; Reference Mosse, Nelson and Wright1995). State power, which depended on the investiture of power in community, was delegated to village headmen, in Madras from 1819, in Bombay from 1869, in Bengal from 1870, and in the United Provinces from 1889. By the 1920s, provincial institutes were training panchayat (village council) leaders in rural government to better align them with state objectives (Strickland Reference Strickland and Blunt1938b). The emergent state made communities internal to its logic, encompassing dominant groups within them into its functions and local organization, which in turn confirmed and enhanced their power.

In addition to these imperatives of administrative expediency, the poverty of rural communities figured prominently in justifications of the colonial presence. Arnold notes the “discourses of deficiency” circulating from the late eighteenth century in colonial writings, against which was posed the capacity of the English to enhance agricultural production and rural prosperity. This was an important underpinning of British assertions of moral superiority, of “their self-determined obligations to improve India, and hence their entitlement to rule over it” (Arnold Reference Arnold2005: 509). Moral discourses framed interventions in rural community, such as efforts to make private landed property the basis for a progressive agrarian capitalism (Guha Reference Guha1983). Over the next century, the rural population became objects of state interest in relation to agriculture, irrigation, and livestock. The insertion of India into global commodity chains and its identification with “the tropics” also informed colonial interests in rural India. Commercial plants from similar climatic conditions, such as cotton and tea, were introduced, linking Indian agricultural production to world demand (Arnold Reference Arnold1996).

Following instabilities in the world cotton supply due to the American Civil War, the Manchester Cotton Growers' Association urged the colonial state to form a Department of Agriculture (Royal Commission on Agriculture 1928: 15; Allan Reference Allan and Blunt1938: 137), indicating that development interventions in rural India were connected to the dynamics of an increasingly cosmopolitan capitalism. As rural Indians migrated to new plantations in Fiji, Mauritius, and the Caribbean it became necessary, from the perspective of labor productivity, to prevent them from carrying infectious diseases such as hookworm. Thus health and hygiene in rural India became a topic of interest (Kavadi Reference Kavadi1999).

Enthusiasm for capitalist development and the evangelical push for social reform, equating the well being of the subject population with the stability of British rule, were well established by the late nineteenth century. In his report on the “Material and Moral Progress of India” (such reports were required by Whitehall from 1870 onward) Hunter, a senior bureaucrat, argued, “no government has a right to exist that does not exist in the interests of the governed. The test for British rule in India is not what it has done for ourselves but what it has done for the Indian people” (quoted in Khilnani Reference Khilnani1997: 67–68). Taking famines as an index of rural poverty and of the robustness of agriculture, and therefore of the effective discharge of the “responsibility” of rule, commissions of inquiry also recommended the formation of the Agriculture Department, which was established in 1866 (Royal Commission on Agriculture 1928: 15).

The colonies figured prominently in European debates on social policy, with which Indian debates were in conversation, as evident in Albert Howard's The Development of Indian Agriculture (Reference Howard and Howard1927), and Strickland's Review of Rural Welfare Activities in India Reference Strickland(1932). Works such as Francis Brayne's The Indian and the English Village Reference Brayne(1933) put rural development in India in a comparative framework. The Agricultural Journal of India, launched by the Imperial Agricultural Research (Pusa) Institute in 1906, published findings of official commissions of inquiry, rural economic and sociological theory, and debates on policy. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries new institutions were created concerned with forestry, fisheries, irrigation, cooperatives, credit, livestock, dairy and animal husbandry, and specific crops such as cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco. The Pusa Institute hosted agricultural scientists from abroad to work in rural India. These colonial institutions linked rural India with transnational development expertise.

Nationalists, too, were interested in rural communities and their poverty. Western models, complete with yeoman farmers, were influential among them, as were various shades of socialism. They were influenced by European ideas of improvement, and by its emerging “associational culture”: the Servants of India Society drew inspiration from the Red Cross, as others did from the Boy Scouts and Guides (Watt Reference Watt2005: 32–36). Though influential writers place Gandhi outside of “the West” (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee and Guha1984; Nandy Reference Nandy2000), his project of national renewal through community reconstruction drew heavily on this associational tendency that was emerging worldwide. In 1906, Gandhi visited the Union of Ethical Societies (Parel Reference Parel1997: 34, n. 49), and model communities in England that were based on the writings of Tolstoy and Ruskin. As Bhana Reference Bhana(1975) notes, Ruskin's Unto this Last Reference Ruskin(1862) inspired Gandhi's Phoenix Farm in Natal,Footnote ¹¹ and Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You Reference Tolstoy(1953), which championed non-violence, communal living, and peasant wisdom, became the basis for his next experimental commune, the Tolstoy Farm.Footnote ¹² To achieve self-sufficiency in his communes, Gandhi gained ideas for small-scale leatherworks and bakeries from a Trappist monastery near Durban. The German naturopaths Kuhne and Just, and the British vegetarian Henry Salt, informed the health and food regimes in the communes.Footnote ¹³ Gandhi started his first model community in India in 1916 in Champaran in Bihar while assisting peasant protests against settler-colonialist indigo planters.Footnote ¹⁴ These experiments, which I examine later as a lineage of CD, became centers for community projects and the comprehensive village welfare schemes of the 1920s and 1930s (Thomson Reference Thomson1993: 104). Gandhi started other communes at Kochrab and Sabarmati near Ahmedabad in Gujarat between 1915 and 1917, and in Wardha and Sewagram in the Central Provinces in the 1930s. These experiments, organically linked to anti-colonial politics, became another channel for transnational flows.

In the context of changing relations between rulers and ruled, the poor became objects of reform, discipline, and organized charity in Europe and America (Reference Alan.Kidd 2002; Friedman and MacGarvie Reference Friedman and MacGarvie2003). In America, over the “Progressive Era” between 1870 and 1920, a “professionalized philanthropy” took shape, which pursued a program of robust capitalism, active democracy, private initiative, social service, and Christian virtue epitomizing the “American way of life” (Watt Reference Watt2005: 30; Rosenberg Reference Rosenberg, Friedman and MacGarvie2003).Footnote ¹⁵ While the role of the American state in Indian rural development remained limited until the 1950s, American Christian missionaries and philanthropic foundations were interacting intimately with colonial and nationalist agents of Indian rural development from the early twentieth century. Powerful new actors such as the Rockefeller Foundation aimed to promote “Christian ethics and civilisation on a global basis” (Kavadi Reference Kavadi1999: 13). For American missionaries, India's poverty was an indictment of British colonialism and a call to Christian Service.Footnote ¹⁶ The Methodist missionary Sam Higginbottom set up the Allahabad Institute for research and training in agricultural and veterinary sciences and technology, funded by a consortium of American churches headquartered in New York.Footnote ¹⁷ The Institute's staff was mostly trained in American universities, and its students were regularly sent there for further studies. American Quakers started an experimental rural community in Barapali in Orissa in 1934.Footnote ¹⁸ The American YMCA missionary Spencer Hatch started the MRDC in the princely state of Travancore (now Kerala) in 1924.Footnote ¹⁹ The Rockefeller Foundation funded the establishment of the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, recognizing that the British Empire had more direct control over the tropics than did the United States, and paid for the training of imperial health officials. The Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa was set up with funds from the American philanthropist Henry Phipps. These philanthropic organizations and missionaries were experienced in working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Extension Services in the American Midwest and among the newly emancipated poor African Americans in the south, and were trained in the agricultural sciences and in community development in U.S. universities. They linked Indian villages with American rural development expertise both through their own programs and by training other agents in the agricultural sciences, including Gandhian activists and functionaries of the princely states.

The outlines of a “transnational development regime” with respect to rural India are visible from the late nineteenth century. But while colonial and nationalist logics were the key elements of this regime, there were other entities and logics shaping the regime that were outside of the colonizer/colonized relationship. Developing rural India and “improving” the lives of the rural poor now figured in multiple, potentially contending agendas. Transnational flows of ideas, expertise, funds, personnel, and operating and legitimating principles began to form an institutional matrix within which programs and methods of rural development were produced. These included model village experiments such as Brayne's Gurgaon Project, the YMCA's Marthandam project, and various Gandhian initiatives.

Transnational Flows, Early Experiments, and the Establishment of CD as a Condition of Rule

The chief question occupying Brayne, Gandhi, and Hatch—three very differently located agents—was this: when the rural poor themselves suffered a set of deficiencies, how then to solve the problem of rural poverty? For Brayne, the rural poor lacked a conception of better standards of living, had no “ambition” for it, nor awareness that improvement was possible. They lacked habits of thrift and hard work, were dull, apathetic, mentally inactive, ignorant, and inarticulate, and unable to form opinion or preferences or plan any course of action (1937: 141–42).Footnote ²⁰ Gandhi Reference Gandhi(1936) recognized that the village community he had idealized as “the bedrock of our ancient civilization” did not exist, and that peasants were by themselves not capable of creating it because of their appalling ignorance and poverty. Community practices of oppression of “Harijans” by Hindus were brutal. Villages had no sanitation and public health was poor. For Hatch, poverty—evident in the lack of food, incomes, health, and education—existed because colonialism had destroyed pre-existing patterns of self-help, but had failed to change rural mentalities and to involve people in its programs. Intermediaries siphoned off a considerable part of rural incomes, and multiple governmental officials and agencies involved in rural development confused the poor. Lack of assets and dependence on the weather stood in the way of year-round work. These perceived deficiencies led to a foundational similarity between these three projects: they deferred agency of the poor in programs of rural development, and erected a hierarchy of other agents to act in their interests.

Because the poor “always ape those who are … socially superior or more wealthy and therefore know better” (Brayne Reference Brayne1937: 18), Brayne argued it was up to government and “rural leaders” to implant ambition for a better life among them and to increase forms of association to pursue it. He confined leadership to those with power in the countryside: government officials, “jagirdars and zaildars, the rural gentry and bigger landlords, ilaqedars, inamdars, safedposhes, lambardars, patwaris, ex-military men, school masters, and ... school mistresses too” (ibid.: 14). Brayne urged them to start “village improvement” committees, based on England's Rural Community Councils, whose members included government agents, delegates from village organizations, and “paying members who contribute special sums for special privileges” (ibid.: 181–83).

Gandhian “village workers” were expected to fight caste oppression, introduce programs for better sanitation, health, hygiene, and education, and disseminate knowledge of current affairs. These enlightened activists could come from any social class if they had qualities of sympathy and sacrifice for the poor, spirituality, and exemplary simple living. Gandhian leadership was open to landlords and capitalists, since under his concept of trusteeship both had the potential to “surrender their gains for the service of the masses” (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1934). But they could not take this for granted. Because the wealthy lived on the labor of the poor, they had duties towards them; if they failed in these duties they risked looting and violence.Footnote ²¹

Hatch, too, saw leaders as necessary to create the desire for a higher standard of living, and to mobilize village labor for collective tasks, since “the poorest as a class are least able to do anything to help themselves or have leaders of their own ... [and] like the masses everywhere, they crave leaders to venerate and follow” (1934: 24). For him, however, anyone could be trained to be a leader. The MRDC opposed caste-based discrimination, and actively sought candidates from underprivileged backgrounds for leadership training. Based on the U.S. Extension Services model, leaders were expected to set examples of progressive activities, adopting institutional and technological innovations. MRDC's cadre of community workers interacted with villagers as “expert counselors and fellow workers” to stimulate “unorganized cooperation” (Hatch Reference Hatch1932: 26–27). They identified, enlisted, and trained local leaders to create multi-purpose cooperatives and associations for community service. Brayne's leaders were modeled on the English gentry, Gandhi's on Tolstoy, and Hatch's on the United States Department of Agriculture's professionals. All three were influenced by the theme of “self-help,” developed by the English reformer Samuel Smiles Reference Smiles(1888), who argued that “improving” the person was the key to development.

Concepts of leadership and the choice of multipurpose cooperatives and associations in rural poverty reduction bear traces of transnational ideas and institutions. The colonial state itself promoted European cooperative models.Footnote ²² The Gurgaon Project created fee-based cooperatives for credit and for producing and marketing poultry and dairy products, women's associations to provide training in traditional domestic roles, and cooperation for public works, including soil and water conservation, and flood control measures (Brayne Reference Brayne1929: 88). Gandhian self-sufficiency, too, stressed the role of cooperatives and borrowed from transnational influences. Gandhi told a visiting Danish delegation, “if the people of Denmark would serve us, let them teach us their life-giving industry of co-operative dairy and cattle-breeding” (Reference Gandhi1927). Toyohiko Kagawa, who had pioneered cooperatives in Japan, visited Gandhi in Sewagram, and advised him on insurance, producer services, marketing, credit, mutual aid, and consumer cooperatives.Footnote ²³ The eminent Gandhian economist Kumarappa Reference Kumarappa(1953) outlined a blueprint for a new economy based on multi-purpose cooperative societies to produce, buy, and sell dairy products, vegetables, cereals, cattle and goats, to organize collective soil conservation and manure production, to construct irrigation channels and roads, and to teach villagers about their rights and obligations. The MRDC introduced a Denmark-inspired credit cooperative, and copied the Filipino YMCA horticultural experiments to improve the food quality of the poor. Its cooperatives produced and marketed a range of agricultural products, beedis, baskets, pottery, coir, and so forth. Collective institutions provided dispute arbitration, relief activities following floods and famines, and library services. These village experiments thus linked rural India to the transnational cooperative movement.Footnote ²⁴

Diary and poultry, which figured prominently in income-enhancing programs, provided further points of contact with transnational trends. In Gurgaon, fee-based cattle breeding societies carried out “drink more milk” and “buy pure milk and ghee” campaigns to expand their markets, based on the English Council model (Brayne Reference Brayne1937: 94). The MRDC promoted the health of cows and other livestock to improve livelihoods, and introduced Jersey cows, the Karachi bull, and the Surat goat. It attempted to replicate Chinese experiments with egg marketing cooperatives, selling directly to urban markets, eliminating intermediaries, and increasing incomes, and crossed foreign breeds with country hens to increase the size of birds and eggs. Gandhian cow-protection societies, founded in 1928, popularly seen as indication of his Hindu leanings, were very much a part of the widespread interest in cattle-breeding and stock improvement. They aimed to “carry out extensive experimentation in ways to increase the milk yield of cows, to improve cattle rearing and breeding techniques, and to systematize the tanning of hides and the hygienic disposal of carcasses on a sound economic basis” (Thomson Reference Thomson1993: 153). These community experiments thus connected questions of incomes and livelihoods in rural India with transnational veterinary sciences and livestock management practices.

Because these programs were for but not from “the masses,” cadres of altruistic but professional development workers, located at the cusp of community and the outside world, had to make them intelligible to the poor, to generate enthusiasm and participation, and to embed them in village life. Brayne set up stalls in village fairs, using the magic lantern and the gramophone, and distributed illustrated booklets of moral stories. Gandhian activists were involved in “mass contact” programs, and in setting examples through their own behavior. Gandhi urged them to enter into “every detail of village life,” discover and improve village handicrafts, introduce improved practices of sanitation and hygiene, and involve themselves in building model villages with collective planning, common grazing lands, cooperatives and village industries, schools, and vocational training. MRDC programs included literacy and adult education, with plans for an American-style farm press. Emily Gilchrist, a YMCA activist and Hatch's wife, experimented with local dance and theatre forms to popularize the programs, and introduced volleyball to create spaces of sociality and conviviality.Footnote ²⁵ These examples indicate both the expansion of the domain of interest of the development worker, and the modes through which developmental power interacted with the village, which were to continue in postcolonial planning.

While Brayne and Gandhi both argued for a minimal state, their experiments were ambiguous regarding what its roles should be. For Brayne, some state roles were temporary, until the time that local elites and their collective organizations were ready to undertake them (1937: 70). Other roles were more permanent, such as generating and disseminating knowledge of agricultural and breeding sciences and technology (ibid.: 81). But some roles were fundamental: “to plan, teach, train, organise and supervise,” and to “set about laying the only genuine foundations of permanent civilisation in the shape of women's education, training and culture, and of village organisation” (ibid.: 25). Gandhi Reference Gandhi(1946a; Reference Gandhi1946b) followed Tolstoy in opposing “people's power” (lok shakti) to “state power” (raj shakti), but he approved of the role of state institutions in averting famine, finding alternative foods, and promoting efficient husbanding of available food resources; in supplying cotton, seeds, tools, and credit; in providing instruction and assistance in establishing cooperative societies; in manufacturing and marketing a number of goods through small-scale industrial units, and in providing new education: admittedly an extensive list. Though he connected khadi to self-help and self-rule, Gandhi advocated the formation of a ministry of village industries to set incentives for khadi production. In this regard, the MRDC was more consistent: suspicious of dependence on the state, and with its expressed preference for a minimal state, it had a limited agenda of state action, such as working with the agricultural department to demonstrate new farm implements, in providing instruction in apiary, basket making, and carpentry, and in providing rural development training to officials of the Travancore state.

These experiments maintained extensive relations with nongovernmental organizations. Brayne's Gurgaon Project worked with the Red Cross for health campaigns, and marshaled the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides for propaganda work and to mobilize collective labor. Red Cross representatives had a seat on his rural community councils. The MRDC coordinated joint action with the Rockefeller foundation in rural health and hygiene campaigns.Footnote ²⁶ Gandhian experiments collaborated with NGOs and associations that had emerged in India from the late nineteenth century as offshoots of the nationalist movement, such as the Deccan Agricultural Association (Watt Reference Watt2005), and with the Poona Seva Sadan and the Servants of India Society, which carried out propaganda for better agriculture, health, and female education (Strickland Reference Strickland and Blunt1938b: 382–85). These early experiments established the role of NGOs in rural development.

Community projects inserted Indian villages into transnational circuits of development policy and expertise. Brayne attempted to transplant conservative ideas on rural policy from England to Gurgaon. The MRDC used schools to launch American-style extension programs, organizing farmers' cooperatives for agricultural demonstration work.Footnote ²⁷ Hatch toured the Tuskegee Institute and other institutions serving southern rural African Americans to gather further ideas for demonstration and extension work in India. Increasingly accepted as representing India's poor, Gandhi was consulted by international policy makers, such as the American birth control proponent Margaret Sanger who visited him in 1934 (Sanger 1938: 470–71). African American reformers who visited Gandhian communes linked them with their own movements for emancipation.Footnote ²⁸ Gandhi saw his communes as part of “an international fellowship” (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1928), and hosted volunteers from Europe, America, and Japan (Jack Reference Jack1956).

To be sure, community experiments covered a miniscule number of villages in India. They did not achieve desired results even in those, let alone transform rural India as a whole. Some experiments, like Brayne's, sank without a trace within a few years of the departure of the main players (Wallach Reference Wallach1996). But they were deeply significant for establishing rural development as a condition of rule, and the moral obligations of those from “advanced civilizations” to the Indian poor.Footnote ²⁹ Community Development, as both a model of the good life and a road map for getting there, emerged out of a wider field of power that cannot be contained in colonial and national framings, drawing as it did on European, American, and comparative development experiences and expertise. This wider field constituted a “transnational development regime in the making.” It was transnational in that it comprised actors and agendas generating flows of power cutting across national boundaries. Elements of a regime included an interconnected network of institutions, which generated governing principles, rules, and regulations for administration, management, and organization, in this case of the relation of rural people to each other, to resources, to markets, and to the state and other development agents. But what was lacking, in terms of consolidating these elements and tendencies into a regime, were logics of power.

Colonial rule, anti-colonial resistance, Christian missionaries, and American philanthropy each had a different interest in developing Indian villages. But at the same time, each was inadequate on its own: the colonial state had considerable power but decreasing legitimacy; nationalists increasingly enfolded rural India into their projects but lacked, as yet, state power; the American state had increasing power and expertise but no logic of rule over rural India; and missionaries, interested in spreading their faith through exemplary service, had limited program coverage. While these experiments provided the logics, modes, and templates for community development, there was, as yet, no state form that was committed to “national development,” and that would generalize these experiments into national policy. That came with the installation of the postcolonial state.

Changes and Continuity in Development Regimes

Postcolonial planning had continuity with these experiments at a variety of levels. In terms of personnel, V. T. Krishnamachari, the Diwan of the Baroda state trained by Hatch, became a member of the Planning Commission, and a personal adviser to Nehru. S. K. Dey, trained in the Etawah experiment, became a member of the Planning Commission. Douglas Ensminger arrived in India as an official of the United States Economic and Technical Evaluation Agency (precursor to USAID), and working later as Representative of the Ford Foundation in India he helped shape CD policy. Gandhians became members of the Planning Commission, and many of their local organizations participated in the CD programs.

Some ideas and personnel from the Indian experiments circulated transnationally. Colonial officers returning to home countries set up and sought employment in overseas development departments in government, and development studies departments in universities.Footnote ³⁰ Darling assisted the Indian Planning Commission in evaluating cooperatives, and emerged as an international expert on them. Hatch took his Marthandam model to the Colorado River Indian Tribes project, and to rural areas around Mexico City. Howard, who had written on Indian agriculture, was appointed the Imperial Economic Botanist in the West Indies. The method of composting he had developed in Indore was widely introduced there and in Africa. Thus, specifically Indian experiences became part of the general global expertise on rural development.

At the same time, the transnational context of development underwent profound changes in the context of what Goswami calls “geo-political restructuring” (2004). Nationalist movements forced decolonization and formed postcolonial states, creating new logics of rule and thus of development within “national” political spaces. Internationally, the Cold War framed relations between these new sovereignties and the centers of global power and the politics of development.Footnote ³¹ Contests for hegemony on a global scale, and the restructuring of world polity through the entry of new states, were key factors behind the internationalization of development. The British Colonial Development Act of 1929 already had established agencies for international development. The Agence Francais de Developpment, founded in 1941 by de Gaulle, likewise laid the basis for future involvement. States were important but not the only actors in international development. After Truman's famous inaugural speech (credited widely with launching the “age of developmentalism”), American universities with agricultural sciences expertise offered help to the U.S. government for its Point 4 programs, consolidating the role of the academy as part of the “soft power” backing American assertions of hegemony worldwide.Footnote ³² American bilateral development assistance became very influential through the role of USAID, which consolidated an American expertise in development (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2002). Internationally oriented NGOs established in “the West” became important interlocutors in policy debates. The Bretton Woods and United Nations-affiliated organizations vastly increased both expertise and the institutional power; new nation-states, including India, were among their founding members.

Another fundamental difference between late-colonial and postcolonial development regimes emerged with changes in state form and logics of rule. The state form was postcolonial precisely in the sense that institutions of democracy and redistribution mediated its relationship with the people, especially the poor (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2004). For Nehru and other members of the National Planning Committee (the precursor to the Planning Commission), since poverty made colonial rule illegitimate, poverty reduction had to be a central legitimating principle of the nation-state. The chief task of postcolonial planning was to create the institutional conditions for growth and its redistribution to achieve this objective (Nehru Reference Nehru1946). This new relation between state and people authorized the recombination of elements of previous experiments and their generalization into national policy for community development. What had started in the domain of charity and welfare now became an instrument for accumulation, redistribution, and thus the legitimization of postcolonial political settlements.

Social transformation of the countryside through “community development” was the mandate of a complex of nodal agencies. The overall charge for these programs was vested in the Planning Commission, which worked in close coordination with the National Extension Services and the Ministry for Community Development. Nehru was aware that professional expertise was lacking in India, and, reluctant to appear dependent on the recently dethroned British, he approached American governmental and nongovernmental agencies for assistance.Footnote ³³ American experts aimed to create an “effective conjunction” between modern institutional organization, technical and scientific knowledge, and the “potential capacities of the masses of the villages” (Taylor Reference Taylor1965: 169). This institutional ensemble specific to CD programs was located in a wider matrix of institutions for development. The Colombo Plan launched in the 1950s was another source of funds and expertise. UNICEF collaborated with the FAO, the WHO, and the health department of the Indian government in rural maternal and child health and nutrition programs. The World Bank, which had formed the Economic Development Institute with the support of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, established its presence in Indian development from the mid-1950s.Footnote ³⁴

To dismiss early postcolonial policy and planning as merely continuous with the late colonial period obscures crucial elements of the development process in India. First, the continuity, as I have shown, was not so much with the late-colonial state as with experiments conducted during that period by a variety of agents, each of them a channel for transnational flows. Rural India was already established as a site of transnational development action. Second, such a perspective obscures changes that took place in the apparatus of international development after 1945, when ideas and intentions consolidated into institutional forms. And third, it fails to recognize the specificity of the postcolonial state and its relation with “the people,” which was central to the transnational regime of rural development in India. I now turn to analyzing how the CD programs, whose lineages lay in previous experiments, and which were sustained by increasingly intimate relations with a transnational regime, affected state-society relations, even as the programs failed to achieve their objectives.

Community Development: From Model Village Experiments to Failed Policy

The lineages of CD in the community experiments (acknowledged in Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya1953, Dube Reference Dube1958, and Dayal Reference Dayal1960) informed ideas of “peasant” and “community,” with corresponding forms of intervention. CD planners, some of whom were themselves participants in these experiments, held that “the peasant's life is not cut into segments in the way the Government's activities are apt to be” (Government of India 1952: 223). The programs were “not only concerned with material objectives” but also with “developing the human being ... stimulating his interest in social and community activities and inducing him to go in for a larger degree of social organization” (Government of India 1957: 13). Ensminger, the Ford Foundation man in CD planning, adopted a Gandhian position that Indian villages were not inert: “their sleeping exterior was but a shield of self-defense against intruders from outside,” their proverbial factions a “manifestation of the vitality that was running amuck in the absence of a constructive outlet” (1962: 1–2).Footnote ³⁵ Indian planners and transnational CD experts aimed to tap this vitality and guide and orient it to national ends.

On one hand, such formulations opened several aspects of “the peasant's life” to transnational development interventions. On the other, some central facts of rural life were closed from such interventions, reflecting the “outer boundaries” of the domain of intervention of policy, beyond which lay “politics.” Planners were aware of deep disparities within rural communities, but following both from its lineages in previous experiments and from contemporary international thinking, CD did not advocate using state power to radically alter rural power relations. In that, it was avowedly “apolitical,” appealing to humanism, national interest, and expertise for authority.Footnote ³⁶ Structural reasons for inequality and poverty remained outside the power of CD, which merely provided an institutional framework for decreasing them. For planners, the success of CD programs depended on ensuring that benefits were spread evenly, and economic disparities between individuals and groups were decreased; indeed “if the benefits of any program are shared by the people of one or a few classes while the people of other classes are deprived of those benefits then that program falls short of being called a CD program” (Dayal Reference Dayal1960: 4–5). This tension between the awareness of conflicts, schisms, and factions in the village community, and the attribution of a range of “common interests” to it, did not so much express an ignorance of the conditions of rural India, but was in fact a compromise with such conditions, and produced a new sort of “rurality.”

The administration of CD programs re-territorialized rural India. A “unit” over which a project was implemented was approximately 300 villages, covering 450–500 square miles, with a population of about 200,000. Each unit was divided into three blocks, each with 100 villages, further divided into “development blocks” of five villages, each served by one village-level worker (VLW). Each project unit was assigned a Project Executive Officer, a Development Officer at the district level, and a Development Committee headed by the Chief Ministers at the provincial level. At the national level, the Planning Commission itself functioned as the Central Committee for the Community Development Program. Rural India as a territory-population configuration was thus reorganized to become amenable to CD. The “village” was encompassed in a web of state agencies, and thus into circuits of state power, recalling the “instrument-effect” of bureaucratic-institutional penetration identified by Ferguson (1994). With the Indo-American Economic and Technical Co-operation Agency and the Ford Foundation supporting training, implementation, and evaluation of CD programs, the “village” was, through state mediation, articulated with the post-war transnational development regime, which took as it objects peasants and their relations with each other, resources, and the state.

Despite pronouncements in the First Plan Document that CD would not succeed “unless the millions of small farmers in the country accept its objective, share in its making, regard it as their own, and are prepared to make the sacrifices necessary for implementing it” (Government of India 1952: 231), the agency of “the people themselves” in improving their own condition remained deferred because experts continued to perceive them as lacking know-how. It was up to VLWs to create an “urge in the heart of the masses for development and improvement,” to help them define “felt needs,” and to enable “the small man” to pursue them. As the agents of CD, VLWs' roles were extensive: to facilitate the formation of village organizations, to mobilize cooperation for soil conservation, to develop water supplies, livestock, and forestry, to improve marketing, education, and health, to initiate community activities, and to mobilize unutilized or underutilized labor and natural resources (Dayal Reference Dayal1960: 7). The VLW was a transnationally produced entity: modeled in some measure on the Gandhian constructive worker, the USDA extension agent, and even the medical corpsman of the U.S. Army.Footnote ³⁷ While these activities were continuous with previous experiments, new concerns were added to CD such as housing, employment, and social welfare. What was also new was the national scale of application, and the much denser network of institutions involved in planning, implementation, and evaluation of programs. In its aims to change the “conduct of conduct” of the rural poor, and its use of the imperative of poverty alleviation to erect an extensive and growing apparatus, CD was an instance of early postcolonial governmentality.

Enthusiasm and a deep populism with regard to rural populations pervaded the early years of this “state-led revolution in the countryside,” and transnational agents were not immune to it. The report of the Ford Foundation-funded Jamuna-par Punarnirman Project gushed, “yes the peasant is our hero; and we cannot forget that his wife is our heroine.” Project leaders hoped to interact with the peasant with “friendship, love and humility” (Allahabad Agricultural Institute 1954: 6–9). But villages and villagers that would make CD successful did not exist, and there were early premonitions that efforts to create such villages and villagers would fail. The Progress Report for 1954–1955 noted that CD programs had fallen behind projections. Anil Shah, a Block Development Officer in Gujarat, was frustrated at the lack of progress: “when will these people understand their own self-interest?” (Reference Shah1955: 28).

It was difficult for the poor to be enthused about CD when it was biased against them and in favor of landowners. The evaluations of 1954 reported this trend across India. In Bihar: “the benefits ... were not equally distributed and the labouring groups seem to have benefited the least” (Government of India 1954: 78). In Bombay province, CD was mostly concerned with organizing “multi-purpose cooperatives” and distributing new seed varieties and fertilizers that benefited only a small number of “progressive cultivators” (ibid.: 78–79). Indeed, the VLW was reported to “confine his interests to only a few cultivators” (ibid.: 81). Oppressed-caste harijans were denied access to the wells dug as a part of CD projects (ibid.: 81). Cultivators, not surprisingly, were most enthusiastic about the projects (ibid.: 82). Even in villages of relative success, as in Madhya Pradesh, “when asked which families the project would help most, the respondents generally felt that the project would be of most help to the cultivators as a class and of least help to the labourers and non-agriculturalists” (ibid.: 86). In Madras state, “the project did not reach agricultural labourers and non-agriculturalists ... [and] did not hold out any prospect of improvement in the lot of the cobbler families” (ibid.: 88). In Uttar Pradesh, “because of the emphasis of the program on agriculture, the association of the VLW with the cultivators, and the fact that these are also better informed,” cultivators benefited disproportionately (ibid.: 100). In West Bengal, the VLW's contacts were “generally confined to the landowners and his activities also were generally for the benefit of this class” who were able to capture the wells dug in the program (ibid.: 102).

By 1956, evaluation documents were clearly pessimistic. CD had stressed forty-one objectives, but less than 1 percent of the project villages had covered more than twenty-five items in their plans, while 25 percent of villages had covered between fifteen and twenty-four items. The most successful programs were adoptions of improved agricultural practices, (such as better seeds, irrigation, land reclamation, soil conservation, and consolidation of holdings), which were undertaken in 95 percent of the villages evaluated; and the construction of roads, wells, schools, culverts, and drains, undertaken in nearly 78 percent. Cottage industries, central to the rural employment generation component of the CD plans, were pursued in only 17.5 percent of the villages. “Social development” programs remained at the bottom of the table in terms of coverage. Though CD's proponents had claimed that its concerns were with more than “material objectives,” primary education and adult literacy initiatives had very limited success. Cooperatives, too, had a very low coverage. Plan documents themselves admitted that CD implementation favored those with more land, whose power in the localities allowed some and not other CD objectives to be pursued. Rich farmers' interests in production facilities and physical amenities proved more powerful than their interests in collective institutions in the “social field.” Entrenched relations of power in the localities thus frustrated programs designed by transnational agents.

Proximity to the VLW was another crucial variable in determining distribution of benefits. Villages where the VLW was based—invariably upper-caste villages that could offer better hospitality and facilities—had a larger share of the benefits, which declined with the distance from such villages. The power of gram panchayats (councils for clusters of five villages) remained concentrated in the VLW's base villages. Dube Reference Dube(1958) noted that dominant caste Rajput villages benefited more from CD projects than subordinate caste Tyagi villages. CD interventions were, inevitably, class- and caste-biased from the outset. They depended upon landed classes and upper castes, and in turn became another basis for the consolidation of their power in the countryside. The flow of resources, and the logic of these flows, became internal to strategies of reproducing social and economic power within villages.

Planning documents despaired that programs to reduce inequality were in fact exacerbating it. The 1954 report notes, “as regards the benefits of the program for the economically handicapped classes and the extent of the bridging of the distance between the better off and worse off sections of rural society, PEOs' [Program Evaluation Officers] reports did not give room for optimism” (Government of India 1954: 72). Planners were concerned that “while some people are undoubtedly benefiting from the development program and improving their economic and social conditions, they usually belong to those sections in the village who are already somewhat better off than their fellow villagers” (Government of India 1957: 18). Cooperatives, where they were established, “functioned only for procuring credit, purchasing tractors or creating seed pools, and thus only those who had some capital to invest in such projects benefited from them. In fact, the dominant castes took over the management of many cooperatives and so reinforced their powers of patronage” (Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot2003: 46).

Planners responded to such intimations of failure with a thorough administrative reorganization of CD. Overall funding was reduced, as were VLWs' roles, while the number of villages in their remit doubled.Footnote ³⁸ From the Third Five-Year Plan the focus of CD programs narrowed; they became vehicles “for achieving the targets of agricultural production, on the basis of the widest possible participation by local communities” (Government of India 1960: 183). When, on the recommendations of the Balwant Rai Mehta Report of 1957, a spate of Panchayati Raj legislation was passed, planners advocated linking different levels of local government with corresponding rungs of the CD apparatus (Vaidyanathan Reference Vaidyanathan and Sathyamurthy1995), orienting their functions towards increasing agricultural growth (Government of India 1956: 185).

These important changes in CD's orientation came from its inability to rapidly increase food production, which, in the context of increasingly unstable international food aid flows and world grain markets, raised political fears of “loss of sovereignty” and legitimacy (Gupta Reference Gupta1998). The political crisis looming behind the slow growth and food shortages —that is, the failure both of accumulation and legitimization functions of the postcolonial state—created tensions within the regime. Indian experts were moving toward economism and productivity increases at the cost of social development, while the Ford Foundation argued that these goals were not incompatible with CD's original aims. For Ensminger developing the “social field” and creating “integrated, socially cohesive village societies” was necessary for agricultural growth and nation building (Reference Ensminger1962). Admittedly “the people” had fallen short of doing what CD required of them, but instead of abandoning the goal of transforming them into “self-reliant, responsive citizens capable and willing to participate effectively ... in ... building ... the new nation,” he proposed to generate new enthusiasm for it through youth and women's groups (ibid.: 6). Ensminger insisted that VLWs could enhance productivity by increasing demonstrations of scientific agriculture and the use of new seed varieties, establishing groups to discuss new farming methods, helping panchayats prepare production plans, and mobilizing collective institutions and voluntary labor (ibid.: 19). This would orient villages toward national productivity goals.

Indian planners urged bolder departures. Ghildyal Reference Ghildyal(1966) argued for abandoning once and for all CD's model of the “self-sufficient” village republics outlined in Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, his essay of 1908 (in Parel Reference Parel1997) to which the Gandhians involved in CD claimed lineage. For Ghildyal, new technological and scientific advances rendered them obsolete for agricultural growth. The “village” itself came in for criticism; it was “at best a part-community” (1966: 27). Village autonomy in planning and implementing had re-enforced the very inequalities that CD aimed to reduce. “Participation” had allowed landlords to mobilize landless laborers to do unpaid work for them. Panchayat institutions, rather than developing leadership and citizenship, were vehicles of factionalism, and they lacked sufficient knowledge to make plans consistent with national production objectives. CD had compromised growth and national food self-sufficiency. “As such, the explicit or implicit pursuit of self-sufficient village republics should now be rejected” (Ghildyal Reference Ghildyal1966: 27). Rapid transformation of the countryside, rather than CD's gradualism, was necessary, even if it would cause “marginal farmers to be emotionally uprooted from the soil and trained as a skilled industrial workforce” (ibid.: 21). Ghildyal cited Malaysia, where a “naïve” notion of community had been abandoned in favor of “enlightened self-interest,” and farmers capable of advancing production were linked with expert state assistance (ibid.: 20).Footnote ³⁹ CD institutions now became vehicles for imparting training on farm management, investment, and planning, and for rich farmers to channel their demands for remunerative prices for farm output, and credit and input subsidies. The VLWs' new roles were aligned with new productivist imperatives: to speed up the adoption of innovations, popularize agro-processing, and improve coordination between the villages and state-sector banks. CD still included “social” concerns such as health and citizenship education when these had a bearing on productivity and scarcity concerns. For example, panchayati institutions were used to promote “family planning.”

The intersection of four factors explains the abandonment of the CD model: First, CD's gradualist approach to agrarian transformation posed limits to accumulation. Second, the “starvation deaths” of the early 1960s threatened the legitimacy of the postcolonial state, measured at its most basic in terms of the cheap availability of food in a poor country. Third, the crisis of legitimacy was politically expressed in the drubbings received by the ruling Congress Party in state and national elections in the early 1960s. And finally, crucial changes in the transnational elements of the development regime both made the continuation of the CD model difficult and a new model possible. International food aid flows became unstable during the mid-1960s, as famines in the Soviet Union opened more lucrative markets for American grain surpluses, jeopardizing food aid programs. Further, support for rapid agricultural growth increased among Indian planners and within international organizations and institutions of expertise, such as the FAO, international crop science institutions, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

CD and Power Relations in the Countryside

CD covered more of rural India than had previous experiments, but not the whole of the countryside. Moreover, it “failed.” But CD became a constitutive element of subsequent rural politics and the agrarian political economy. Even though it ceded to the green revolution its position as the flagship of state development intervention in the countryside, elements of it remain identifiable in the Garibi Hatao (eradicate poverty) policies, rural employment programs, and basic human needs planning in the 1970s and 1980s. There are also traces of the CD agenda in recent legislation, such as in the Forest Act of 1990, the Notification on Joint Forest Management, and the 1993 constitutional amendment transferring power to elected institutions of local government. But it was not only on subsequent state projects that CD left its imprint; as I will show, CD had the effect not of de-politicizing, but rather profoundly politicizing rural social relations.

Through CD, the power of the state and of the transnational development regime reticulated through the countryside. It brought the village and its inhabitants into intimate contact with ministries, administrative units, service delivery agencies, training institutes, agricultural colleges, and the like. Engaged with every level of this state apparatus were transnational entities such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and a variety of “voluntary agencies.” Aiming to shape the aspirations, needs, and actions of “the people,” CD generated a wide range of knowledge about them—their relations, their activities, and their well being, and measurements of their literacy, health, nutrition, income, and so forth—and made rural India legible and intelligible to the planner.Footnote ⁴⁰ The boundaries between the international, the national, and the community virtually collapsed in the figure of the VLW—trained by Ford experts, representing the developmentalist state, and aiming to merge wholly with the village. Planning objectives, and the institutional architecture erected to achieve them, however, did not arrive at a political terra nullius. Because CD did not challenge the pre-existing inequalities in rural India, it failed to subordinate other relations and rationalities of power in the countryside to its own logic.

State-level bureaucrats, who had sustained interaction with CD, were recruited heavily from the provincial middle classes. Many maintained links with villages, and were channels through which relations of power in rural society entered the institutions of the state. Their gender, class, and caste positions identified them closely with dominant rural groups, through family and caste networks, marriage, and their own stakes in rural landed property. Such “natural affinity,” in a passive sense, led to their acceptance of existing elites as “natural leaders,” to their own partiality towards those aspects of CD that were oriented towards productivity growth and therefore would benefit their class, and to their contempt and distance from the subordinate-caste rural poor to whose improvement CD was explicitly committed. The 1954 evaluation mentions that no landless laborer was asked to try any of the innovations in the surveyed villages (Government of India 1954: 73). More actively, CD staff supported the flow of program resources to “caste-brothers,” and used the wide-ranging points of state intervention in rural life as a correspondingly wide-ranging set of opportunities to use their official power for personal gains. In these ways, CD as a mode of state entrenchment was deeply implicated in hegemonic processes in the countryside. The landed rich were able to consolidate their power via CD's emphasis on village leadership, panchayats, and infrastructure construction.Footnote ⁴¹

The vision of a conflict-free community under the natural leadership of the landed classes, whose history stretches from the early experiments discussed before to the CD program, became an organizing logic of populist agrarian politics in the 1940s and 1950s. This line was championed by Charan Singh, a prominent “farmer” politician in north India representing “rural interests.”Footnote ⁴² Singh resuscitated Gandhi's theory of trusteeship and also his emphasis on decentralized development based on cooperatives. As I have shown, the emerging class of progressive peasant-proprietors captured these institutions in their bid to enhance their own power. It is worth considering how elsewhere, too, the emergence of the “capitalist farmer” identified in the “mode of production debate” (Patnaik Reference Patnaik1990) was conditioned by these new sources of class power in the countryside.

It was not only dominant groups who drew on CD's language and institutional matrix; so, too, did movements of the rural poor. “Blocks” of five villages were the organizational basis for collective action during the Chipko movement. Its chief intellectual, Bahuguna Reference Bahuguna(1968), challenged the legitimacy of state-led development primarily in terms of the non-delivery of the forty-one listed CD objectives.Footnote ⁴³ Likewise, the Liberation Theology-influenced Kerala Fishworkers' Movement had as early as 1958 taken the aims and methods of the CD projects as their template for organization. Its model villages, multi-purpose cooperative organizations, and the catalytic role of activists were all in line with CD. For the first two decades of the movement, until 1976, activists' efforts were precisely aimed at gaining access to education, health care, and housing, and creating effective institutions for participation. CD projects also informed the emergence of popular agendas of equity and social justice. The work of movements in these contexts was to translate CD's notion of “needs” into a new agenda of rights. The core organizations associated with the movements had initially participated in CD programs, establishing cooperatives, youth groups, women's groups, housing societies, recreational facilities, and so forth.Footnote ⁴⁴ CD aimed to create the demand for inputs, and it was precisely these demands that animated the “new farmers” movements of the 1980s and 1990s (see Brass Reference Brass1995).

CD became the chief mode for the dispersal of the power of development into the capillaries of the rural body politic in early postcolonial India. CD emphasized the welfare, needs, and capacities of villagers; the production of an array of intimate knowledge about them so that development interventions could be fine-tuned; the investment of governmental power not only in the state but also in non-state institutions including—and especially—the community; and the creation of institutions to orient and frame the “conduct of conduct” such that individual, village, and state objectives were in alignment. All of these recall Foucauldian analytics of power and knowledge (Agrawal Reference Agrawal2005: 27–64), governmentality (Gordon Reference Gordon, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991), and pastoral power (Foucault Reference Foucault1979). At the same time, CD owed much to post-war assertions of American soft power. It was a key element of the national project of development, and in turn it animated strategies to maintain and change relations of power in the countryside. It invoked Gramscian analyses of global (Gill Reference Gill2003) and national hegemony (Chatterjee 1993), hegemonic formations (Mouffe Reference Mouffe, Nelson and Grossberg1988), and hegemony processes (Patnaik Reference Patnaik1988; Roseberry Reference Roseberry, Joseph and Nugent1994). I have shown that it is both possible and necessary to explore the complementarity between the analytics of governmentality and hegemony. It would be just as inadequate to study CD as (to follow current trends reluctantly) “developmentality” without situating it within the changing, unstable, and wider relations of power as it would be to study it as a subset of hegemonic power without attending to changes in the practices, conduct, and rationalities that hegemonic projects produce in their subjects.

Conclusion: Transnational Regimes and Indian Development

I have provided here an account of a transnational rural development regime that took shape over the period from 1900 through 1965. Over this period rural poverty and its eradication, as well as the rural economy and its productivity, became salient concerns for those holding or seeking power. Experiments aimed at achieving these objectives drew on emergent forms of expertise, which consolidated into institutions such as international agencies, universities, governmental departments, and independent bodies. During the post-war “age of developmentalism” this rather diffuse and loosely connected set of interests and institutions became a more coherent complex of power: a regime. I have also provided an account of the deeply politicizing effects of this regime, even though it was deemed to have failed. Based on this account, in closing, I raise certain issues for further research, and sketch out some tentative lines of inquiry.

The first issue concerns the relatively new field of the history of development. The path-breaking works of Cooper Reference Cooper, Cooper and Packard(1999) and Ludden Reference Ludden and Dirks(1992), among others, have established the late colonial period and its struggles over legitimacy and accumulation as the context in which development first arose as a form of power. But my account shows that development exceeded the relation between colonizer and colonized: American agents were involved from fairly early on in Indian development. Also, development was much more than a state project. Transnational forms of power—of universities, experts, foundations, philanthropists, missionaries, voluntary associations, what is today widely recognized in development discourse as ‘civil society’—were involved in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of development from the outset. The rule of development in national settings relied in large measure on this transnational regime. Consequently, it makes little sense to talk of the continuity in development policy from the colonial to early-postcolonial period (and, by implication, to work with such a periodization), or indeed to write histories of national development, unless we also provide a historical account of the emergence of, and continuities and changes in, transnational development regimes.

My account also challenges the supposedly radical position that claims community and developmental modernity are in irreconcilable conflict. The incommensurability between state and community has assumed facticity in the writings of the partisans of “community” who locate it outside of modernity. I have shown that the transnational development regime that began to emerge from the early twentieth century aimed to create new communities, and to connect them with the state in new ways. “Community” and “state,” far from being mutually exclusive, became mutual conditions of possibility: the state makes certain forms of community possible, just as incorporating the community becomes a key mode of exercising state power. Rather than a natural preserve of the traditional, community became a central category in development policy, modern populist politics, and social movements as each made claims to represent “village India.” Some aspects of “community” remained untouched by and antagonistic to the state and modernity. Equally certainly, other aspects of community became intimately linked with transnational development regimes. Therefore, instead of conceiving community as a vestigial form of social organization struggling to survive modernity's relentless march, we must explain the persistence of community in development policy, and the productions of community by policy frames.

The lineages of CD also render inadequate accounts of policy as expressions of class power at the level of the state. The institutional forms generated by CD programs, such as cooperatives and the village-level worker, and the prescribed roles of the state, emerged from European and North American experiences of class realignments, and were transported by diverse transnational flows to rural India: they were not, in other words, the result of local or even national class struggles. These transnational flows, through the particular entrenchments of the state that they made possible, provided an important basis for constituting class power. The classic Marxist formulation of agrarian capitalism (e.g., Patnaik Reference Patnaik1990) only examines ownership and use of land as measures of class power. In places where CD programs were implemented—and recall that these were areas considered progressive in terms of productivity—it is impossible to see how it worked unless we understand the class-state articulations made possible by transnational CD interventions. They provided both the platform and the idiom for class-interested actions by rich farmers. This indicates that we need to broaden considerably the canvas on which we explore the constitution of class power, in particular its reliance on institutions and ideas of transnational regimes.

While Goswami's Reference Goswami(2004) notion of “geo-political re-structuring”—including the regulation of the world market and the gold standard, inter-imperial conflicts, and the rise of new infrastructure and modes of communication—points to the broad context in which transnational regimes such as the one I have described emerge, these do not explain the power and formation of regimes themselves. Formulations of developmental power as “apparatus” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1994; Escobar Reference Escobar1995) and as “dispositif” (Brigg Reference Brigg2001; Reference Brigg2002) are helpful but ultimately of limited use for studying transnational regimes, since they neglect the role of the state in the formation of those complexes of power, and see them primarily as impositions and constraints. My account makes it difficult to separate out ‘internal’ and ‘external’ actors, or ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ ones, and underscores the need to understand their particular configurations in actual development policy. Moreover, it challenges the conceptualization, so pervasive in these post-development writings, of development's power as “externally imposed.” As I have shown, the preference for productivism that became dominant in the 1960s was pushed by Indian planners and opposed by transnational actors, indicating a more complex interplay of power. We have seen how, later, elements of mainstream development informed agrarian (including subaltern) political mobilizations. We need, then, to rethink the power of development. As the present study of CD makes clear, we must move beyond an exclusive focus on coercion and imposition to examine how development's power intersects with multiple agendas of rule and resistance.

Finally, the history of CD that I have provided raises questions about the history of transnationality itself. An enduring myth of development has been that it was with the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the 1980s that developmentalist states ceded sovereignty to international agencies and ‘civil society’ in formulating and implementing projects and programs. Admittedly, the volume, speed, and sectoral and spatial spread of transnational flows increased exponentially in the later twentieth century. But the enduring power of CD across a century indicates not only the constitutive presence of transnationality from the beginnings of developmental modernity; it also shows that some early forms of transnational power had a sedimenting effect, such that they have become the very language and framework for imagining the rural, and projects for its transformation.