In contemporary India work for wages expands substantially as a mode of subsistence, while ‘labour’ at the same time, suffers a dramatic depreciation as a political force and as a target of state policy. This is a reversal of an earlier, little understood process that originated in the late colonial period but fully unfolded only in the years of Nehruvian rule. The six essays of this volume reconstruct this now marginalized political history of an ...
Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa, c. 1780-1914
