Karventha Kuppusamy

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023–2024 Academic Year

Agrarian Developmentalism and Ecological Crisis in South India: Writing Situated Histories of the Green Revolution

Kuppusamy's fieldwork will explore the contemporary history of agrarian and ecological crises in India. The site for his case study is the rural region of western Tamil Nadu. A vast expanse of drylands with a few feeble rivers and sparse rainfall, this region is an unlikely site for economic dynamism. Yet, from the 1960s onwards, the Green Revolution brought rapid agricultural growth, aiding in the creation of economically confident and socially dominant agrarian communities who were able to effectively lobby the state in securing favorable government measures. This story of agrarian developmentalism and the formation of regional power structures in the Coimbatore countryside is now in crisis, complicated by the planetary crisis of climate change as well as socio-economic processes internal to the region, such as local labor shortages. This summer, Kuppusamy will examine sources to write social and ecological histories of agrarian developmentalism enacted over the control of water, land, and political power in postcolonial India.

Karventha Kuppusamy, Department of History

Kuppusamy works on the social history of agrarian South India in the 19th and 20th centuries. His work tackles the process of agrarian expansion, and the concomitant effects of the gendered forging and consolidation of “dominant” caste identity in the dry ecological regions of the Coimbatore district in western Tamil Nadu. He is also interested in exploring how agrarian actors envision multiple often non-agrarian futures at a time of widespread agrarian and environmental crisis. Before coming to Stanford his MPhil thesis at the University of Hong Kong explored cattle-developmentalism in twentieth century India in which he examined the shared history of sacred and secular framing of India’s cattle economy. His wider interests include the history of capitalism, science, and environment in modern India. Outside academic work, he translates non-fiction from English to Tamil.

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