Shaila Seshia
Advisors: Michael Dove and Helen Siu

State of Nature: Agriculture, Development and the Making of Organic Uttaranchal

On 9 November, 2000, Uttaranchal became the newest state of the Indian Union. Although young and at the margins of the Indian polity, the state government actively strategised to develop organic agriculture as a key component of its rural development strategy. Such a policy appears somewhat counter-intuitive given that narratives and strategies of agricultural development in India have typically been defined by ideals of technical modernisation-biotechnology. Architects of the policy claim that agriculture in Uttaranchal is 'organic by default', and emphasize the persistence of indigenous traditions and seed varieties. Yet, the strategy itself is far from a return to, or embrace of, traditional and subsistence agriculture. Instead, the state government's vision of 'Organic Uttaranchal' emphasizes high-value low-volume production, and taps a growing domestic and international market in organic food.

This dissertation will explore the conjunction of a commercially-oriented development strategy with the formation of regional identity in the promotion and practice oforganic agriculture in Uttaranchal. It seeks to analyse the seemingly paradoxical way in which the Organic Uttaranchal project fuses a discourse that valorises locality, tradition and the indegeneity with an explicitly commercial and globally ambitious agriculture production and marketing strategy. Particular attention will be paid to how, in this process, the region emerges as a site of identity formation and as an institutional nexus which mediates local agricultural practices with growing international trade in organic food. Through ethnographic research I will study how local farmers, whose agriculture the state claims is 'organic by default', juggle their own farming practices with institutionally defined organic production methods and how such practices, and the agricultural products that are their result, invoke and are in turn invoked by socially and historically constructed expressions of regional identity. Exploring these multi-faceted productions of 'Organic Uttaranchal' may therefore highlight the tensions and paradoxes forged through locally situated yet globally ambitious processes of identity formation and institutional practice.

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