Date:
Location:
"Architectural Strategies and Infrastructural Landscapes of the Green Revolution in India in the 1960s"
Speaker:
Ateya Khorakiwala, PhD Candidate, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Contact:
Shana Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
This talk addresses the shifting imaginaries of wheat, sovereignty, and infrastructure as they responded to the historical and political forces of famine and technocracy in India in the 1960s. In 1964, Chidambaram Subramaniam, the Minister of Agriculture, put forth a proposal to set up “a Foodgrains Corporation with the ultimate objective of securing a commanding position in the foodgrains trade.” The FCI, which built and managed long and short-term grain storage facilities, marked a technocratic turn in agricultural policy, with the goal of transforming not just the distribution, but also the production of food, leading to the agricultural shift that we now call the “Green Revolution.” Political stability had long depended on price stability in the wheat and foodgrains market, and under this new regime, silos and warehouses became part of a long-term strategy to achieve a sought after food security. How did architecture and infrastructure act as apparatuses with which to secure wheat and thus, the body? How did infrastructure manage the green revolution's emerging geographical unevenness? I use methodology from STS and political ecology to interrogate wheat in its different encounters with planned infrastructures: as seed, as intellectual property, as a commodity, and as a buffer from famine.
Biography:
Ateya Khorakiwala is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Her dissertation project considers India’s attempts at creating stable food-supply systems in the 1950s and 60s as well as the manifold ways in which this led to a biopolitical revolution augmenting food production. She is interested in how utilitarian architecture, such as warehouses, silos, and markets, instantiated a top-down biopolitics, by creating a bureaucracy of norms and standards with which to manage the distribution of food rations to citizens across the country. Earlier work has looked at the aesthetics of road construction research in India in the 1960s, and violence in photography in 1857. Her research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies. She holds a BArch from KRVIA, Mumbai, and an MSc in Architecture Studies from the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT.
