Land, women and techno-pastoral development in southern Karnataka, India

Techno-pastoral desires are statist aspirations for orderly, hierarchical landscapes where land, beasts and nature are managed through technical expertise to generate profits. Women and land, I argue, occupy particular places in Indian techno-pastoral imaginaries as the nation-state recalibrates profits that can be harvested from the regenerative capacities of life itself. Through a case study of southern Karnataka, where the megapolis of Bangalore is located, I show that working class women and agricultural land have a shared genealogy in the region's bio-economic development. I study three historical moments where population and food production have vexed state authorities: the South Indian famine of 1875–1876 that left more than 20% of the population dead; the early 20th century efforts at building the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam, and state-sponsored birth control clinics in the 1930s; and the 1950s–1960s population control programmes and Green Revolution interventions. The growing literature on bio-economies focuses on pharmaceutical industries; clinical trials; and commodification of organs, tissues and cells; however, by working with surrogate mothers incorporated not as labourers but with their wombs coded as land, this study attempted to map the long histories of bio-economies, spanning land and living tissue, in and around Bangalore. I argue that rather than bio-economies, the term ‘necro-economies’ might be more useful for describing how land and women are incorporated into techno-pastoral desires.