Manufacturing village identity and its village: The view from nineteenth-century Andhra

I will begin with some descriptions of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century village boundary dispute resolutions, and of the problems that locals and East India Company officials claimed to have faced at the time. This will lead to an outline of the limited colonial control over the resulting (and unforeseen) politics of the disputes (Part I). In fact, disputants were able to take this early bureaucratic context-and the wranglings that took place therein-and reshape it in such a way that it became a new space for articulating and establishing 'villager' identities (Part II). Lastly, examples from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boundary issues in Andhra will demonstrate how the village and village identity (as historical products of the earlier disputes) had by then ceased to play significant parts in the discussions surrounding the clarification of the lines to be drawn between villages (Part III). The very absence of those identity politics in later debates strengthens the argument that the formation of the village and of a village identity were historical phenomena of a century earlier, and by this time lacking in their earlier contingent politics.