Farmer discontent in periurban Bangalore: The utopia of agricultural modernization, neoliberal developmentalism and the 21st century global city

Today’s agricultural production in periurban Bangalore is structured by deteriorating ecological conditions and lack of enabling economic environment. Many farmers live in precarity even as market logic has become hegemonic given the dominance of input and capital-intensive cash crop production, a situation exacerbated by the threat of government-driven land acquisition. In my honors thesis, I argue that epistemological assumptions regarding agricultural modernization and neoliberal developmentalism that undergird this mode of production have come to largely structure the operation of institutional frameworks and individual subjectivities. However, these “external” influences are never fully totalizable and by invoking notions of assemblage and hybridity, I contend that Bangalore’s metropolitan area serves as a “site” of ongoing contestation, allowing for a critical assessment of India’s current development trajectory more broadly