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The Cornell-Syracuse Title VI National Resource Center consortium announces a workshop on "Indian Cotton: Biology and Utility; Meanings and Histories." This event is scheduled to begin at 5pm on the evening of Friday, 29 April, and to run from 9 am to 5 pm on Saturday, 30 April 2005.

Indigenous to the South Asian subcontinent, cotton has carried especially powerful meanings -- political, economic, symbolic and aesthetic. Varieties, yields, cost of cotton were of significance to the British imperial project in India. Symbolic politics around self-reliance and self-rule featured cotton during the anti-colonial struggle. Independent India now has more acreage under cotton than any other country, yet yields are among the lowest in the world and quality is so uneven that imports command much of the domestic market. Farmer suicides have been rhetorically linked to cotton cultivation as affected by globalization and technical change. Reverse “biopiracy” of cotton genes from Monsanto by villagers has been both hailed as the act of an indigenous “Robin Hood” and denounced as a slippery slope of biological chaos and genetic roulette. Cotton was the first transgenic crop approved for cultivation in India, and the most contested. Some agronomists suggest abandoning cotton on grounds of sustainable development – returns are low, indebtednesshigh, the toll on soil and water and people difficult to support. Yet home-spun cotton was of central symbolic importance to Gandhi's satyagraha, to understandings of colonial rule and resistance; some who wage rhetorical battles around globalization today deliberately appropriate the cotton imagery of the Independence movement. Once woven into cloth – dyed, printed, embroidered -- cotton plays significant roles in art and identity of specific communities, as well as commerce. It is hard to imagine an India without cotton.

By putting cotton itself -- as plant, wealth, cloth and artistic medium -- at the center of an interdisciplinary conversation we aim to discover suggestive cross-currents of discourse and practice; agriculture and aesthetics; rural and global. Participants will address the symbolic power and politics of cotton in the twenty-first century as well as colonial pasts and imperial enterprise. Besides faculty and graduate students from the consortium institutions, three invited scholars will approach the topic of Indian Cotton from different disciplinary perspectives.

Consortium Participants

From Cornell: Alaka Basu (Sociology and South Asia); Richard Bownas (Government); (Saurabh Dube (History); Farhana Ibrahim (Anthropology); Banoo Parpia (Human Ecology); Ronald Herring (Government); Devparna Roy (Development Sociology); Milton Zaitlin, Plant Pathology

From Syracuse: Shobha K. Bhatia (Civil and Environmental Engineering); Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Women's Studies and Humanities); Ann Grodzins Gold (Anthropology/Religious Studies); Jennifer Smith (Civil Engineering); Susan Wadley (Anthropology); Corri Zoli (English Textual Studies)

Invited Speakers

Sumit Guha, Professor of History, Rutgers University will address the ways Indian farmers beginning in the middle decades of the 19th century responded to British colonial rulers' efforts to change or "improve" Indian cottons.

Priti Ramamurthy, Professor of Women's Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, will speak on multiple gendered issues in the production of cotton in her lecture titled "Cotton Body Politics and Inter-generationality in Andhra Pradesh."

Glenn Davis Stone, Professor of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis has written on connections between the widely publicized wave of farmer suicides and cotton biotechnology in South India. He will address as well farmers' decision-making processes, how they differ between genetically modified cotton and conventional, between cotton and other crops, between prosperous and marginal farmers, and the emergence of regional cotton favorites – on almost totally non-agronomic grounds.

Sponsored by The South Asia Program;The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies; International Programs in The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; The Polson Institute for Global Development; Department of Development Sociology; Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development; Workshop on Development, Governance and Nature; and Department of Government, Cornell University and by The South Asia Center, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
© 2005 The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies