https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/world/asia/india-air-pollution-sickness.html

The New York Times reports the start of air pollution season in northern India and its drastic impacts this week in New Delhi and across the state. The primary cause is due to straw burning from leftover rice harvests by farmers, a process that releases particulate matter into the air. The air quality has become so bad that schools have gone online, and residents have been asked to work from home to prevent exposure. Air pollution killed more Indians than any other risk factor in 2019 and is only increasing. Though the political debate is heating up as India’s 2024 elections approach, it is important to reflect on the colonialist history behind these events in the first place.

This article reminded me of the agricultural reforms set when India was under British rule. The zamindar system established was meant to collect taxes from local landlords, but landlords took advantage by increasing taxes and forcing poor farmers to become tenants under them. The establishment of a cash crop-based economy was to the benefit of the British, making it more challenging to create an internal market. Each of these reforms disproportionally affected, and still impact, the large, rural, and poor population who primarily work in agriculture. As such, crop burning is tied to systems established centuries prior to today.

In today’s class, we highlighted some key authors from the past two weeks. Readings from Benedict Anderson and Dipesh Chakrabarty allowed us to engage at a higher level with their theories on modernity, whereas Robert Marks’ textbook introduction and conclusion later rounded out our understanding of the modern world.

Anderson challenges the contemporary notion of a nation by describing it as a construct. Removing the structure of a nation-state provides fluidity, increasing autonomy by withholding the bounds of a particular territory or language. Nations evolve with time as a product of culture; however, our understanding of this evolution as modernity has been held through a Eurocentric lens. As such, Chakrabarty urges us to consider multiple structures of modernity. In this way, there is the freedom to adapt or translate ideas across the world based on one’s own terms. Exploring history in this way allows us to deconstruct a Eurocentric worldview and understand how the hegemonic systems of today came about.