• ISBN13: 9789389850192
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: N/A
• Publisher: Ratna Sagar
• Publisher Imprint: PrimusBook
• Publication Date: December 16, 2020
• Pages: 400
• Original Price: INR 375.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 500 grams

Nowhere on Earth is the relationship between man and land more complicated and seemingly as intractable as in South Asia. India alone, with some 1. 37 billion people, most of whom work The land for a living, has known famine and scarcity on a scale unknown elsewhere. This has mocked humanity, threatened world peace and urged need to investigate causes and remedies. Chapters in this volume look at issues of land, tenure, and peasant from a variety of different disciplines—history, anthropology, economics, Geography, political Science, sociology. They furnish fresh insights on discrete localities and problems. Each is by a specialist who deals with intricate ways in which land and Lord and labour have been combined and changed. Poverty and scarcity are not the same. Abolishing poverty by economic development alone, without coming to grips with conflicts, can beg the question and end in futility. Contributors emphasises the fallacy of thinking that, with just a little more money, fertilizer or know-how (often coming from an alien environment), problems of land tenure and distribution can be resolved. Socio-economic engineering, however well intentioned, is prone to end in frustration and failure, quite oblivious of how or why.

Robert Eric Frykenberg is Emeritus Professor of History and South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison. His publications include Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (1965); India: Today’s World in Focus (1968); European History in World Perspective (1974); and Christianity in India: Beginnings to the Present (2008, 2010). Frykenberg has edited Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (1969; revd edn in paperback 2020); Delhi Through the Ages: Essays on Urban History, Culture, and Society (1986; revd edn in paperback 1993); Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication Since 1500, With Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism (2003); and co-edited with Judith M. Brown, Christians, Cultural Interactions and India’s Religious Traditions (2002).