ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how civil society in Chennai, India, aspires to bypass the influence of the state and post-political forms of urban governance by positioning itself outside of the city. It is posited that what the author terms ‘farming as urban heritage’ is one of the dominant tropes in Indian urban civil society’s imaginations of alternative forms of urban governance. This is seen in Chennai, a city that accommodates strong aspirational undercurrents of alternative urban living crystalizing around ‘organic’ food and a return to ancestral farming lifestyles. It is argued in this chapter that farming, aside from showcasing a collective local heritage and a holistic environmental awareness, represents a decisive breakaway from unsustainable urban lifestyles. Through participating in farming and its contingent ways of living, urban-educated elites circulate their own vision of governance that revolves around grassroots pedagogies and egalitarian, peer-to-peer food chains. The chapter claims that such non-institutionalized ‘return-to-the-land’ networks propagate and give shape to alternative forms of governance, bypassing conventional forms of post-political knowledge dissipation. It holds that if the post-political is to be used as a form of analytics, then such disparate yet widely entangled networks of knowledge circulation should be considered a component of urban civil society. At the same time, the chapter acknowledges that such attempts by civil society to evade state influence remain incomplete.
