People's Car: Industrial India and the Riddles of Populism

People's Car explores one of the major movements for resisting the acquisition of land by the government in the interests of siting a Tata Motors car factory in Singur, India. The factory becomes the alibi for nuanced interrogations that are both material and theoretical on resistance, changing rural realities in globalizing India and the very nature and idea of land. It asks why such long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast paced industrialization. It argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is more than a simple agricultural plot to middle caste small and marginal landowners aspiring nonfarm futures. People's Car breaks new ground by ethnographically establishing the incommensurability between land and money. Such incommensurability or nonequivalence, the book shows, simultaneously drives protests against land acquisition and fuels the demands for non-farm jobs and industrialization, the crux of rural middle-caste aspirational politics. It questions the dominant trend of romanticizing rural life and associated anti-development protests that uses the clich d dichotomous tropes--rural Bharat vs. urban India.

The Tata factory was received with both excitement and long-drawn protests among the villagers whose agricultural land was acquired by the government through cash compensation. Although these protests culminated in relocation of the factory, such relocation, in turn, was followed by popular demonstrations in the same villages seeking to bring back the factory. These turn of events illustrate the general populace's deeply ambivalent relationship with industrialization, a topic that few studies on India and South Asia have grappled with.

Previous studies of industrialization have generally focused either on populist critiques of or demands for development. Rarely have studies examined both sides in a single analytical and ethnographic framework demonstrating how pro and anti-industrialization forces feed off each other.