Technologies of peasant production and reproduction: The post-colonial state and cold war empire in Comilla, East Pakistan, 1960–70

In December 1959, the newly-constituted Pakistan Academy of Rural Development received permission to create a ‘laboratory’, that is, to conduct experiments in rural development upon peasants in Comilla, East Pakistan. This paper explores the enmeshing of post-colonial state formation and Cold War American development practices through an examination of how the Academy’s built environments, everyday practices and discourses were shaped by agricultural and contraceptive technologies. It examines how the Academy transformed a Gandhian ashram into a display and distribution centre for these technologies, and how technologies informed the Academy’s discourses on peasant religiosity and shaped peasant understandings of state and empire.