CHS Lecture - CLEMENS SIX: "Rural engineering: Patterns of re-ordering the countryside in decolonising India and Malaysia"

Lecture series of the Centre for Historical Studies.

Clemens Six: Rural engineering: Patterns of re-ordering the countryside in decolonising India and Malaysia

Abstract

In an interview in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault predicated that, from the 18th century on, modern government rationality has essentially been a form of urban planning. This paper takes this argument as a starting point to discuss the formation of rural engineering, i.e., the state-led efforts to design new men and new social orders outside the cities through plans, during decolonisation in Asia. Based on the comparative study of India after Partition (1947) and British-Malaya during the counter-insurgency war (1948-1960), the argument is that we can understand the manifestations of rural engineering particularly in the 1950s less as a consequence of colonial inheritance or international change but as the result of how decolonisation unfolded including its patterns of violence, social conflict, and migration.