New Books In Intellectual History

Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India: Tracing the Pre-history of Green and White Revolutions (Springer 2024) traces the contours of the symbiotic relationship between crop cultivation and cattle rearing in India by reading against the grain of several official accounts from the late colonial period to the 1980s. It also skillfully unpacks the multiple cultural expressions that revolve around cattle in India and the wider subcontinent to show how this domestic animal has greatly impacted political discourses in South Asia from colonial times, into the postcolonial period. The author begins by demonstrating the dependence between the nomadic cattle breeder and the settled cultivator, at the nexus of land-livestock-agriculture, as indicated in the writings of Sir Albert Howard, who espoused some of the most sophisticated ideas on integration, holism, and mixed farming in an era when agricultural research was marked by increasing specialisation and compartmentalization.  The book springbo