Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity

Abstract

vividly contrast with the uncertainty of those who were rendered landless. Laduram used his Congress party connections to broker land, amass farmland elsewhere, buy farmhouses and residential plots, and begin building a four-storey student hostel above the village market. Chitramal, a forty-yearold bullock cart driver and a Dalit, sold his land for $42,000, divided the sum between six brothers, and felt cheated as he was then dependent entirely on his bullock cart for survival and was deeply in debt. Small farmers like Mahesh bought less fertile land elsewhere with the compensation money. A huge gulf of necessary educational qualifications kept his sons from taking the knowledge economy jobs that the SEZ provided. Mahesh and his family’s next generation were thus driven to a rural hinterland to unproductive land and scarce off-farm income-generating opportunities. Levien ends with the prediction that land wars that have marred the landscape of Indian polity are only going to continue; and, rather than obstructing the path to development, they are the only checks on dispossession without development. ‘‘So long as dispossession without development remains a prominent feature of Indian capitalism, ‘land wars’ will be a prominent feature of Indian democracy’’ (p. 216). This book is a welcome and much-needed divergence from the success stories of poverty reduction in rural India that the World Bank and development economists churn out. With the vast disparity between the aspirations of development and the lack of objective means to attain it that Levien suggests, one could predict more violent reactions in the countryside by the dispossessed and demoralized youth who attach themselves to right-wing radicalism and other ideologies of violence that might grant them a sense of control of their lives. We can hope that Levien’s book will equip the reader with the morale to search for alternatives in the meanwhile. Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity, by Patrick Lopez-Aguado. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 226 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520288591.