REVIEW ARTICLE Agriculture and the economies of cultivation in India Navyug Gill Anand Pandian, Crooked stalks: Cultivating virtue in South India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, pp. 325, ISBN 978-0-8223-4531-2 (paperback). Vinay Gidwani, Capital, interrupted: Agrarian development and the politics of work in India. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. 336, ISBN 978-0-8166-4959-4 (paperback). The agrarian question in South Asia is the prob- lem of agriculture itself. How to situate agricul- tural production within an analytic that attends to disparate processes of social, economic, and political transformation? This problem is am- plified by a double inheritance. On the one hand, agriculture has been a persistent object of historical inquiry for colonial administrators, reformist and nationalist leaders, and post-in- dependence scholars alike. On the other hand, it remains an abstract proposition that sustains centuries of theoretical formulations that are central to the concept of modernity. Such com- peting influences of history and theory consti- tute the vexed terrain on which contemporary investigations of agriculture must take place. What does it mean to investigate the problem of agriculture today? Two recent monographs that venture re- wardingly into this durable field are Anand Pandian’s Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (2009) and Vinay Gidwani’s Capi- tal, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (2008). The two works at first glance seem to hold much in common. Each centers on a particular rural community in postcolonial India, the Piramalai Kallar caste in the Cumbum Valley of southern Tamil coun- try (Pandian), and the Lewa Patel caste in the Matar Taluka sub-district of central Gujarat (Gidwani). Both are the result of fieldwork con- ducted from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, draw heavily on vernacular terms (Tamil and Guja- rati, respectively), and are revisions of doctoral dissertations. Both are also densely researched ethnographies that incorporate insights and techniques from philosophy, literature, and his- tory. And both have a two-word title in which one term troubles the linearity of the other. “Stalks” is prefigured by “crooked” while “capi- tal” is qualified by “interruption.” Pandian’s narrative is structured around a unique conceptualization of cultivation, as, at once, the moral “developmental horizons” that shape the outlook of an individual, the different “practical techniques” used to achieve a moral life, and the “material labor” performed in or- der to transform the world (Crooked stalks, Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 59 (2011): 107–111 doi:10.3167/fcl.2011.590109